While this Manifesto focuses on some highly modern (post-modern? post-postmodern?) ideas, in some ways it's quite old-fashioned.
It reflects an approach to philosophy that was more common before 1950, before philosophy become so academic and formal.
My methodology here is much like that of Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Plato -- I'm presenting my overall understanding of life and the world, with a view toward practical guidance as well as conceptual understanding. Greatly inspired by the prior ideas of others, but also with a strong personal slant.
Robert Pirsig and Paul Feyerabend are two fairly recent philosophers who inspired me with their direct, "old fashioned" approach to philosophy -- writing simply rather than technically, and giving their holistic understanding rather than focusing on painstaking disection of micro-issues. I think we need more philosophy of their sort, which is one of the reasons I wrote this book.
Cosmism versus Academic Philosophy
Most of the "philosophy" done by professional philosophers today involves complex, abstract and refined approaches to deeply understanding particular aspects of the world, in a highly precise and intellectual way.
Cosmism does have this aspect -- but it's not the aspect I'm going to emphasize here. I will touch on abstract topics as necessary (especially in the first third of the text, in which I strive to articulate the deep conceptual foundations of Cosmism), but by and large I'll move past them fairly quickly to get on to more concrete stuff.
I'm going to mostly focus on Cosmism as a practical philosophy for living ... both now, and (especially) in the radically different future that we are creating with advanced science and technology.
Cosmism versus Religion
I have a lot of issues with the institution of "religion," but I have to give it one thing: unlike academic philosophy, it excels at providing people with practical guidance on how to approach their lives and themselves.
But none of the religions around today are going to be of much use as advanced technology unfolds. Heaven above and hell below are going to seem increasingly irrelevant as uploading, human-level AI, brain-computer interfaces and molecular assemblers unfold.
Cosmism is the practical philosophy I try to use to approach my own life and self -- and intend to use to face the very different situations that I may confront in the future -- and my point in writing this Manifesto is to share this practical philosophy with others, in a simple and explicit way.
Cosmism may seem an eccentric bundle of ideas right now -- but the relevance of the Cosmist perspective will become evident to more and more individuals as the next years, decades and centuries unfold.
Some Cosmist Principles
If my take on Cosmism could be fully summarized in a list of bullet points, I wouldn't write a whole manifesto about it -- I'd just write a few bullet points.
But, even so, it seems worthwhile to start with a few bullet points, just to whet your appetite for the more thorough and useful exposition to come.
Some of these bullets are rather abstract and may come across as gobbledygook. That is the risk of compressing things into bullet-point form. Read the full text of the Manifesto, think on it a bit, and hopefully you will see that all these things have simple, practical, everyday meanings.
The ten basic "Prisco Principles" I listed above are almost obvious to anyone of the "right" cast of mind. The principles I will list below are meatier, and not everyone who considers themselves a Cosmist will accept all of them! Maybe nobody except "early 21st century Ben Goertzel" accepts all of them!
There is no litmus test for Cosmism. These are no more and no less than some principles that are interesting and important to me, and seem close to the heart of Cosmism.
And so, without further ado, some Cosmist principles:
But, even so, it seems worthwhile to start with a few bullet points, just to whet your appetite for the more thorough and useful exposition to come.
Some of these bullets are rather abstract and may come across as gobbledygook. That is the risk of compressing things into bullet-point form. Read the full text of the Manifesto, think on it a bit, and hopefully you will see that all these things have simple, practical, everyday meanings.
The ten basic "Prisco Principles" I listed above are almost obvious to anyone of the "right" cast of mind. The principles I will list below are meatier, and not everyone who considers themselves a Cosmist will accept all of them! Maybe nobody except "early 21st century Ben Goertzel" accepts all of them!
There is no litmus test for Cosmism. These are no more and no less than some principles that are interesting and important to me, and seem close to the heart of Cosmism.
And so, without further ado, some Cosmist principles:
- Panpsychism: There is a meaningful sense in which everything that exists has a form of "awareness" -- or at least "proto-awareness", as some would have it. In Peirce's terms, "Matter is mind hide-bound with habit."
- The Universal Mind: Rhere is quite likely some meaningful sense in which the "universe as a whole" (an unclear concept!) has a form of awareness, though we humans likely cannot appreciate the nature of this awareness very thoroughly, any more than a bacterium can fully appreciate the nature of human awareness even as it resides in the human body
- Patternism: One often-useful way to model the universe is as a collection of patterns, wherein each entity that exists is recognized by some agent as a pattern in some other entity (or set of entities)
- Polyphonic reality: The notion of an "objective reality" is sometimes useful, but very often a more useful model of the universe is as a collection of overlapping, interpenetrating and intercreating subjective realities
- Tendency to Take Habits: The universe appears to possess the property that, when patterns exist, they tend to continue ... much more than would be expected in a hypothetical random universe
- Compassion is a critical principle of the universe, and is fundamentally an aspect of the Tendency to Take Habits (it's the spread of love and feeling from one mind to the next). Caring for other sentient beings (and if panpsychism is accepted, everything has a little bit of sentience!) is a critical aspect of evolving to the next levels beyond current human awareness and reality
- Feeling and displaying compassion is important to the inner health and balance of a mind, as well as to the health and balance of the portion of the universe that mind is embedded in
- Causation is not a fundamental aspect of the universe, but rather a tool used by minds to model portions of the universe
- Deliberative, reflective consciousness is the specific form of "universal awareness" that arises in certain complex systems capable of advanced cognition
- Goals are generally best understood, not as things that systems "have", but as tools for modeling what systems do. So, what goals a mind explicitly adopts is one question, but what goals the person is actually implicitly pursuing is often a more interesting question.
- "Free will" is not "free" in the sense that people often consider it to be, yet there is a meaningful sense of agency and "natural autonomy" attached to entities in the universe, going beyond scientific distinctions of randomness versus determinism
- Science is a powerful but limited tool: it is based on finite sets of finite-precision observations, and hence cannot be expected to explain the whole universe, at least not with out the help of auxiliary non-scientific assumptions.
- Mathematics is a powerful but limited tool: it helps explicate your assumptions but doesn't tell you what these assumptions should be
- Language is a powerful but limited tool: by its nature, consisting of finite combinations of tokens drawn from a finite alphabet, it may not be powerful enough to convey everything that exists in the mind of the communicator
- The human "self" is a cognitive construct lacking the sort of fundamental reality that it habitually ascribes to itself
- Society and culture provide us with most of what makes up our selves and our knowledge and our creativity -- but they also constrain us, often forcing a stultifying conformity. Ongoingly struggling with this dialectic is a critical aspect of the modern variant of the "self" construct.
- There is no ideal human society given the constraints and habits of human brains. But as technology develops further, along with it will come the means to avoid many of the "discontents" that have arisen with civilization
- Humans are more generally intelligent and more diversely and richly experience-capable than the animals from which they evolved; but it seems likely that we will create other sorts of minds whose intelligence and experience goes vastly beyond ours
- It seems likely that any real-world general intelligence is going to have some form of emotions. But the human emotions are particularly primitive and difficult to control, compared to the emotions that future minds are likely to have. Gaining greater control over emotions is an important step in moving toward transhuman stages of evolution.
- It is not necessary to abandon family, sex, money, work, raspberry-flavored dark chocolate and all the other rewarding aspects of human life in order to move effectively toward transhumanity. However, it is desirable to engage in these things reflectively, carefully making a conscious as well as unconscious balance between one's need to be human and one's need to transcend humanity
- Various tools like meditation and psychedelic drugs may be helpful in transcending habitual thought patterns, bringing novel insights, and palliating problems connected with the limitations of constructs like self, will and reflective awareness. But they do not fully liberate the human mind from the restrictions imposed by human brain architecture. Future technologies may have the power to do so.
- Whether the "laws" and nature of the universe can ever be comprehensively understood is unknown. But it seems wildly improbably that we humans are now anywhere remotely near a complete understanding
- Whether or not transhuman minds now exist in the universe, or have ever existed in the universe in the past, current evidence suggests it will be possible to create them -- in effect to build "gods"
- As well as building gods, it may be possible to become "gods." But this raises deep questions regarding how much, or how fast, a human mind can evolve without losing its fundamental sense of humanity or its individual identity
- As we set about transforming ourselves and our world using advanced technology, many basic values are worth keeping in mind. Three of the more critical ones are Joy, Growth and Choice ... interpreted not only as personal goals, but also as goals for other sentient beings and for the cosmos.
- When confronted with difficult situations in which the right path is unclear, a powerful approach is to obsolete the dilemma: use a change in technology or perspective to redefine the reality within which the dilemma exists. This may lead to new and different dilemmas, which is a natural aspect of the universe's growth process.
- Battles with the "enemies" of Cosmism are probably not the best path to achieve Cosmist goals. The universe is richly interconnected and "Us versus Them" is often more realistically considered as "We versus Us." Struggles, including violent ones, are part of the natural order and can't be violated entirely ... but there are often other ways, sometimes less obvious to the human mind; and part of the Cosmist quest is to find mutually beneficial ways of moving forward.
Pattern Space and the Big Questions
Now, the preliminaries done with, we begin our journey into the particulars of Cosmism.
I will begin at a very abstract level -- giving Cosmist answers to some of the good old Big Questions about life, the universe and everything. But if such philosophical explorations are not to your taste, don't worry -- this is a short work, so in just a few pages, we'll be on to sex, drugs, uploading, superhuman AI, the future of society and a bunch of other juicy specifics. This Manifesto actually started out dealing only with those more specific topics, but I found that in order to discuss them in a coherent and unified way, it was necessary to give some deeper conceptual foundations first.
Let's get started with some small issues like
Where do we live? What are we made of?
Is there some sort of underlying, universal Cosmos in which both our minds and our bodies, and the various things we see and experience, reside?
Is the physical world we move around in "real" in any absolute sense? Or is it "just" some sort of simulation -- could we be living in a video game written by an alien computer programmer? (perhaps an amateurish, botched job produced by a young programming student just learning his chops?)
Of course questions like these are useful more for stimulating thought than for attracting definitive and final answers. These are issues minds will likely be exploring for as long as minds exist.
One interesting way of addressing the Big Questions is to begin from the perspective that: we live in a world of patterns.
There are disorganized, teeming stimuli or entities of various sorts ... and then there are patterns organizing these entities.
A pattern, most generically, is something that brings simplicity to a complex collection of entities ... it's a "representation as something simpler"
The physical world presents itself to the mind, in large part, as a collection of patterns.
The mind presents itself to itself, in large part, as a collection of patterns.
One often-useful way to model the world we live and exist in is as a pattern space.
Of course, there is nothing "objective" about a pattern though ... whether a given entity is a pattern in some set of other entities is really a matter that's up to the perceiving mind.
In other words: a pattern is a representation as something simpler ... but who or what judges the simplicity?
The cosmos is a space of interrelating entities, and individual minds are distinguished in large part by which entities they perceive as simpler than others, which largely determines which entities it sees as being patterns in which others.
This may seem a very abstract perspective, but it actually sheds a lot of light on various situations we encounter in our practical lives. Approach the various things you encounter and experience, in the world and in yourself, as if they're patterns of organization -- because that is largely what they are.
Many of the difficulties we have in life arise from unconsciously assuming that various things we encounter have some fictitious sort of absolute reality, going beyond the reality of pattern space.
"Everything is pattern" is not a panacea for cosmic understanding -- I will introduce some further dimensions a little later -- but it's a powerful perspective.
I will begin at a very abstract level -- giving Cosmist answers to some of the good old Big Questions about life, the universe and everything. But if such philosophical explorations are not to your taste, don't worry -- this is a short work, so in just a few pages, we'll be on to sex, drugs, uploading, superhuman AI, the future of society and a bunch of other juicy specifics. This Manifesto actually started out dealing only with those more specific topics, but I found that in order to discuss them in a coherent and unified way, it was necessary to give some deeper conceptual foundations first.
Let's get started with some small issues like
Where do we live? What are we made of?
Is there some sort of underlying, universal Cosmos in which both our minds and our bodies, and the various things we see and experience, reside?
Is the physical world we move around in "real" in any absolute sense? Or is it "just" some sort of simulation -- could we be living in a video game written by an alien computer programmer? (perhaps an amateurish, botched job produced by a young programming student just learning his chops?)
Of course questions like these are useful more for stimulating thought than for attracting definitive and final answers. These are issues minds will likely be exploring for as long as minds exist.
One interesting way of addressing the Big Questions is to begin from the perspective that: we live in a world of patterns.
There are disorganized, teeming stimuli or entities of various sorts ... and then there are patterns organizing these entities.
A pattern, most generically, is something that brings simplicity to a complex collection of entities ... it's a "representation as something simpler"
The physical world presents itself to the mind, in large part, as a collection of patterns.
The mind presents itself to itself, in large part, as a collection of patterns.
One often-useful way to model the world we live and exist in is as a pattern space.
Of course, there is nothing "objective" about a pattern though ... whether a given entity is a pattern in some set of other entities is really a matter that's up to the perceiving mind.
In other words: a pattern is a representation as something simpler ... but who or what judges the simplicity?
The cosmos is a space of interrelating entities, and individual minds are distinguished in large part by which entities they perceive as simpler than others, which largely determines which entities it sees as being patterns in which others.
This may seem a very abstract perspective, but it actually sheds a lot of light on various situations we encounter in our practical lives. Approach the various things you encounter and experience, in the world and in yourself, as if they're patterns of organization -- because that is largely what they are.
Many of the difficulties we have in life arise from unconsciously assuming that various things we encounter have some fictitious sort of absolute reality, going beyond the reality of pattern space.
"Everything is pattern" is not a panacea for cosmic understanding -- I will introduce some further dimensions a little later -- but it's a powerful perspective.
The Tendency to Take Habits
David Hume was the first Western philosopher to point out really clearly what is now called the "problem of induction" -- i.e. how is it we can assume that, just because the sun has risen every morning for the last thousand (or million) days, it will do so again tomorrow?
We can say it will continue because we have an intuition that patterns tend to continue -- but then how do we know that patterns tend to continue? We know because in the past we have observed that patterns tend to continue. But then how do we know that this past observation, which is itself a sort of pattern, will tend to continue?
Charles Peirce used the term "the tendency to take habits" to refer to the assumption that, in the universe we live in, patterns do tend to continue.
An implication is that our ability to predict the future is predicated on our ability to identify patterns.
And, digging a little deeper -- remember that pattern, in the view I've suggested above, is defined in terms of an assumed simplicity measure. This suggests that: For a mind to operate effectively, it needs to assume a simplicity measure for which, in its experience, the tendency to take habits holds true ...
We have the largely happy circumstance of living in a world where there are simplifications apparent from considering the past and the future together. We take this for granted but it's an important observation: without that, experience would be a lot of noise....
We can say it will continue because we have an intuition that patterns tend to continue -- but then how do we know that patterns tend to continue? We know because in the past we have observed that patterns tend to continue. But then how do we know that this past observation, which is itself a sort of pattern, will tend to continue?
Charles Peirce used the term "the tendency to take habits" to refer to the assumption that, in the universe we live in, patterns do tend to continue.
An implication is that our ability to predict the future is predicated on our ability to identify patterns.
And, digging a little deeper -- remember that pattern, in the view I've suggested above, is defined in terms of an assumed simplicity measure. This suggests that: For a mind to operate effectively, it needs to assume a simplicity measure for which, in its experience, the tendency to take habits holds true ...
We have the largely happy circumstance of living in a world where there are simplifications apparent from considering the past and the future together. We take this for granted but it's an important observation: without that, experience would be a lot of noise....
First, Second, Third
Viewing the world as a system of patterns yields copious insights -- but patterns aren't the whole story.
Patterns are relationships of a particular sort: a pattern is a relationship between one entity and a set of others, where the first is judged to represent and simplify the others.
The American philosopher Charles Peirce placed the "universe as a web of patternment relationships" perspective in a broader context by introducing the basic philosophical categories called First, Second and Third.
First = pure, unprocessed Being
Second = reaction ... the raw feeling of one thing having impact on another
Third = relationship (the raw material for pattern: patternment is a particular, critical kind of relationship)
One can also push further than Peirce did, following other thinkers like Jung and Buckminster Fuller, and posit categories like
Fourth = synergy ... networks of relationships spawning new relationships
In this perspective the view of Cosmos as pattern-space is the perspective of Thirdness.
Isn't This Just a Bunch of Abstract Nonsense?
This sort of abstract categorization of Cosmos doesn't do much in itself ... but it provides a general perspective that can be useful for addressing concrete issues.
We will use this categorial perspective to approach the topics of awareness and consciousness ... which are critical to various issues that will confront us as technology develops, such as immortality, AI and uploading.
Philosophy pursued in the absence of practical issues tends to become verbal or intellectual gamesmanship.
Practical issues pursued in the absence of appropriate philosophy tend to lead to various sorts of confusion -- which can be fine; but given the sensitivity of the point in human history we're approaching, serious attempts at confusion-minimization seem indicated!
Patterns are relationships of a particular sort: a pattern is a relationship between one entity and a set of others, where the first is judged to represent and simplify the others.
The American philosopher Charles Peirce placed the "universe as a web of patternment relationships" perspective in a broader context by introducing the basic philosophical categories called First, Second and Third.
First = pure, unprocessed Being
Second = reaction ... the raw feeling of one thing having impact on another
Third = relationship (the raw material for pattern: patternment is a particular, critical kind of relationship)
One can also push further than Peirce did, following other thinkers like Jung and Buckminster Fuller, and posit categories like
Fourth = synergy ... networks of relationships spawning new relationships
In this perspective the view of Cosmos as pattern-space is the perspective of Thirdness.
Isn't This Just a Bunch of Abstract Nonsense?
This sort of abstract categorization of Cosmos doesn't do much in itself ... but it provides a general perspective that can be useful for addressing concrete issues.
We will use this categorial perspective to approach the topics of awareness and consciousness ... which are critical to various issues that will confront us as technology develops, such as immortality, AI and uploading.
Philosophy pursued in the absence of practical issues tends to become verbal or intellectual gamesmanship.
Practical issues pursued in the absence of appropriate philosophy tend to lead to various sorts of confusion -- which can be fine; but given the sensitivity of the point in human history we're approaching, serious attempts at confusion-minimization seem indicated!
Awareness is Everywhere
The idea that some form of "awareness" is everywhere, pervading everything, was considered obvious by the preponderance of pre-civilized cultures, and is now considered obvious by most practitioners of Buddhist meditation and many other wisdom traditions.
However, modern Western culture has led to a world-view in which most of the universe is viewed as somehow "dead" while only certain particular systems are viewed as having "awareness."
This new view of awareness has led to all manner of conceptual problems which philosophers enjoy debating. But, panpsychism -- the old view that acknowledges awareness everywhere -- remains the only view of awareness that is not plagued by complex contradictions ... as well as being an obvious truth to intelligences in appropriate states of consciousness.
Clearly, there are differences between the manifestations of awareness in a rock, a human, a society, an ecosystem and a universe -- and these differences are worth attention and study. But we mustn't lose track of the universality and commonality of awareness.
Awareness as First
In Peircean terms, "raw awareness" is First. Saying that everything is aware is saying that everything can be viewed from the perspective of First.
When we view things from the perspective of Thirdness, relationship, then the difference between humans and rocks seems dramatic and significant. We humans host far more complex pattern-networks than rocks.
Yet from the First perspective, we're all just sparks of raw awareness -- people, rocks, equations, aliens from the 9th dimension... whatever.
However, modern Western culture has led to a world-view in which most of the universe is viewed as somehow "dead" while only certain particular systems are viewed as having "awareness."
This new view of awareness has led to all manner of conceptual problems which philosophers enjoy debating. But, panpsychism -- the old view that acknowledges awareness everywhere -- remains the only view of awareness that is not plagued by complex contradictions ... as well as being an obvious truth to intelligences in appropriate states of consciousness.
Clearly, there are differences between the manifestations of awareness in a rock, a human, a society, an ecosystem and a universe -- and these differences are worth attention and study. But we mustn't lose track of the universality and commonality of awareness.
Awareness as First
In Peircean terms, "raw awareness" is First. Saying that everything is aware is saying that everything can be viewed from the perspective of First.
When we view things from the perspective of Thirdness, relationship, then the difference between humans and rocks seems dramatic and significant. We humans host far more complex pattern-networks than rocks.
Yet from the First perspective, we're all just sparks of raw awareness -- people, rocks, equations, aliens from the 9th dimension... whatever.
Universal Mind
If awareness is immanent in everything, is it not immanent in the cosmos as a whole, as well?
Have we then reconstructed "God" within Cosmism?
This is a trick question, of course. "God" means many things to many people.
Some might say that I have found a strange path to "God," by way of Cosmism. Others would disagree, considering these philosophical thoughts unrelated to God or religious truth.
One thing is clear: The nature of the awareness of the cosmos remains largely unknown to us measly humans. Just as, in many religions, the nature of the "mind of God" is considered beyond human ken.
We may feel we have a sense of it, in certain states of awareness -- but then how can we truly know if we are connecting with the awareness of the whole, or just the awareness of a region of the cosmos much larger and more powerful than ourselves, yet miniscule compared with the whole thing?
Fortunately we don't need to answer this question. It is enough to expand our boundaries, to connect with mind that goes beyond us and to become more than we could previously understand or imagine.
We may approach the awareness of the cosmos incrementally through our ongoing growth, whether or not we ever get there (or whether "getting there" means anything).
Have we then reconstructed "God" within Cosmism?
This is a trick question, of course. "God" means many things to many people.
Some might say that I have found a strange path to "God," by way of Cosmism. Others would disagree, considering these philosophical thoughts unrelated to God or religious truth.
One thing is clear: The nature of the awareness of the cosmos remains largely unknown to us measly humans. Just as, in many religions, the nature of the "mind of God" is considered beyond human ken.
We may feel we have a sense of it, in certain states of awareness -- but then how can we truly know if we are connecting with the awareness of the whole, or just the awareness of a region of the cosmos much larger and more powerful than ourselves, yet miniscule compared with the whole thing?
Fortunately we don't need to answer this question. It is enough to expand our boundaries, to connect with mind that goes beyond us and to become more than we could previously understand or imagine.
We may approach the awareness of the cosmos incrementally through our ongoing growth, whether or not we ever get there (or whether "getting there" means anything).
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