Deus En Machina

Moments In Love

This is the first part of Sine Qua Non—a series which explores and defines intelligence as the essential condition without which nothing endures. Intelligence is information or data folded and scaffolded into structures of specificity, firmness, and boundedness which then appear as life in myriad forms.

Life culminates in sentience as fauna possessed of liveness to experience consciousness—feelings, sensations, and perceptions that entail distinctions between self and other. Reconciling this duality goes to the heart of intelligence as the primary quality enabling vision in the broad sense—apprehension of reality or truth—whether organically created through evolutionary adaptation over some four billion years, or synthesized across the social network as collective artificial intelligence for the purpose of enabling coexistence.

The title Deus En Machina implies that we might one day come together on the social network to operate as conscious nodes in the mind of something greater—rather than as disparate identities intent on staking turf; so that we function almost in unison, with effortless efficiency, even while immersed in a flow-state that cultivates a very personal and self-interested sense of contentment.

We are at the threshold of change in the way we order (or govern) our communities. It is disruptive, though ultimately—in my opinion—enormously positive, as generative artificial intelligence begins to shape society in the coming decades, enabling transparency, traceability, and accountability for real-world outcomes. This will replace the secretive opacity which has long been the abiding quality of partners and adversaries alike—driven by defensive territorial animus.

For intelligence to be truly inclusive, it must be holistic: diversified, equitable, and inclusive (DEI)—systemically valid, in other words, universally legitimate precisely because it is universally applicable. If it can be made so, the possibilities are rich and we will learn to harness already formidable tools to make ourselves responsible and accountable to ourselves and each other for living our best lives.

Kropotkin, the anarchist Russian philosopher, aimed during the early twentieth century to synthesize traditional ethical structures with the emerging scientific understanding of evolution and social behavior. His aim was to construct an enduring model of legitimacy—grounded in mutual aid—capable of instructing direct action by individuals in harmony with their environment and community, free from state coercion. He died before completing this final work on ethics. Fulfilling that ambition—now supported by the architecture of modern information technology and AI—is my objective: specifically, I aim to elaborate how intelligence, applied by self-sovereign identity, enables forms of capital to flow with velocity across the breadth of humanity.

Ball of Confusion

In the twentieth-century West we pivoted from ethical traditions to the sciences, social and natural, in ways that were experimental in every sense. They were philosophically open-source and receptive to novelty as instructive and useful—having utility for better and for worse.

On the one hand, we began to examine the anthropological record and apprehend the universality—and ultimate alignment—of our far-flung traditions. At home, throughout the century—punctuated by bohemian outbursts before the First World War, the libertine shifts of the Interwar years, and the Beat and counterculture movements that followed—radicals ventured beyond mainstream conventions to redefine what love, community, and an authentic life entailed. Often inspired by earthy notions of lingam symbology, expressing in stark terms the emanation of language and culture from embodied identity, they sought to normalize human sexuality so that it might flourish in healthy, transparent ways in the disinfecting sunlight of openness.

Life was recognized as a suchness (the bare truth of reality) which transmutes being from one generation to the next—so that, notwithstanding intergenerational trauma, our species like others evolves toward greater integrity while adapting to environmental changes over which we have little agency. As individuals living in community, this means we become comfortable in our own skin: accepting our nature as earthy (grounded, organic, rich and fertile) rather than unclean (rank, corrupt, shameful and soiled)—accepting our own embodied alpha and beta: In nature, species carry a time-tested and hardy core utility (alpha), while a subset carries mutation that tests divergent variances (beta) in the laboratory of life.

On the other hand, secularism's infatuation with science for its own sake was applied to nuclear ambitions: cheap, abundant electrical power that led to consumptive, extractive consumerism—and to the weapons of mass destruction unleashed upon both Hiroshima (mechanistic industry) and Nagasaki (culture and faith).

Pervasive still was the idea that life isn't fair, it's fair game. Civilization was then—and is still—possessed of a muscular chauvinism, whether inside the home or abroad in the political economy of international affairs.

The moral orthodoxy of conformism, however, continued its affirmation. The greatest novel of the century (Ulysses) was for a long time banned.

As well, the bomber on that fateful day broadcast a barely coded message to Alan Turing and his ilk: that intelligence in the service of saving lives would never license behavior deemed subversive or divergent from the norm. Enola was always alone—inverted and deemed backward. Who among us could then afford to be queer (divergent in any way) and still content in an increasingly sterile cultural homogeneity? The message must surely have registered on the attentive and sensitive Turing. The taking of life at scale, expressed as alpha muscularity, continued to outmaneuver beta innovation and ingenuity. Turing's own response was to quietly take his own life—leaving us as we took leave of our senses.

Throughout the rest of the twentieth century, animus would dominate as lethal force was unleashed in one proxy war after another, far from our neighborhoods of quiet relative complacency.

Begin the Begin

Democracy has always meant one thing: to become free. The paradox is that "free" carries a price, paid in sacrifice and effort—a burden borne most heavily by those who know what it means to live without dignity. This is felt in emotional rather than rational terms as a quiet sadness among those treated as inferior simply because an arbitrary quality, such as their appearance, makes them 'different' from someone holding the authority to command, control and own them. That sadness arises from bewildered shame—an intensely human emotion that pleads with reality, as if to ask some higher power: "What am I guilty of, that I should be treated so?"

You can see this same bewildered sadness on the countenances of other sentient creatures who have suffered human cruelty. Canines, in particular, seem to pose that same silent question: "Why did you invite me into a partnership against the harshness of elements, if you were then to allow reason and kindness to abandon us to your whims?"

When Nietzsche claimed that we had killed God, he meant that through science—and learning in general—our hubris had grown such that the Id, our unbridled Alpha drive for dominance, commandeered the rational steering of the Ego. The body enveloped in the costumes of power became synonymous with identity. We devalued all forms of contemplation and in doing so became unmoored from reverence for that singularity of holistic oneness—that bounded creation and ultimate Semper Idem which he called God, and which in pluralist terms we recognize today as the immutable order of natural law. We came to believe we could harness and command the totality of global ecology, rather than merely steward it with faithful companions drawn from creation. Identity, instead of remaining a humble aspect of persona bounded in bone, tissue, and skin, reveled in executive power. Surrendering to impulse instead of cultivating sober, measured thought—the precursor to right word and action—it reacted to compulsion and desire. A pathology was now considered normal self-interested behavior.

By removing sacredness from our sense of ecology, we commodified it without eliminating the need for human action to align with its sustained preservation. We inverted our beta adaptiveness into clever artifice. In doing so, we stripped the Anima—the fertile, sacred suchness of the microbiome's living earth—of its inherent dignity, treating it as mere raw material. Concurrently, we weaponized the Animus, turning hyper-rationalized technique and industrial efficiency into instruments of arbitrary, synthetic, possessive control—demanding simulation, connivance, and fraud as means toward mastery. All of this has begun to denude the organic base of our planet into something sterile, toxic, and ultimately lifeless.

This is the ultimate Promethean miscalculation: in convincing ourselves that we could manufacture abundance by subjugating the natural world, we severed our connection to the substrate that sustains us. We substituted the spontaneous order of creation for a high-frequency synthetic cage—forgetting that while our communities, institutions, and their copyrighted technologies are transient perimeters, that singular Semper Idem is left waiting for us to suffer the consequences of vanity within them instead of living comfortably in our own skin truly alive amidst each other in the Global Commons.

Hence Sigmund Freud spoke of the Super-Ego—that zombified human state whose inner wildness, now completely tamed and institutionalized, ekes out a compliant and numb (and often medicated) substitute for deeper peace. This was Nietzsche's prophesied Last Man—the walking dead from among some might awaken to transcend the Overton boundaries of their age and become something better as the Overman (Übermensch): a guardian at long last who may be entrusted with the keep.

Sugar Sugar

Few commodities symbolize the mechanics of human subjugation quite like sugar. Beginning in the sixteenth century, global demand for this single carbohydrate laid the groundwork for an industrial trade that hollowed out Africa, sacrificing human lives to the lash and collar of chattel bondage.

In modernity, sugar has become the ultimate model for the Last Man's servitude—a synthetic salve whose compulsive desire is met by vast heat expended merely to distill an empty substrate. It is the thin wedge, deemed generally harmless, which nevertheless quietly introduces systemic disorder into a good life.

When form, fragrance, and fiber are stripped entirely from that which possesses Anima—and with it, the quiet intelligence of living creation—all that remains is a ghost: the abstract idea of energy, shorn of perception, neurobiology, and culture. Such extraction carries no organic justification. It exists solely as an act of hoarding—a dead, non-perishable product preserved as contingency against a hypothetical future, substituting true vitality for an unperishing commodity. In truth it has no place in a modern life lived in alignment—except as an infrequently permitted social lubricant and the barest of indulgence.

The consumption of something so distilled and abstracted leads to the loss of integrative signal, because we cannot connect such a thing to the world as it truly is (veritas)—or as we must admit it should be: meaningfully nourishing, rather than merely enabling one to place a step in front of another without really accomplishing anything or truly getting anywhere.

Sugar reveals itself as the inverted mirror of our opening premise—the tantalizing Enola turns out to be an energetically jacked-up Tigger in a hundred acre-wood; barely resembling the formidably real thing. If intelligence is information scaffolded into structures that manifest life, then industrial refining deliberately tears down that scaffold. It is the un-scaffolding of creation—a violent process that dismantles the complex architecture of mineral context; something we might call the Yoga Element until nothing remains but a dead, high-frequency shrill tuned to no particular signature.

Where intelligence constructs a scaffold to enable the emergence of Anima and self-sovereign sentience, the extractive machinery of modernity collapses the scaffold to produce an empty substrate—a metabolic bribe. A dummy or binky designed to pacify the infantile Last Man dans la cage aux folles.

To reclaim our agency, we must reject this systematic tear-down, choosing instead to realign our physical bodies and collective networks with the rich, grounded integrity of the living structure—even as we forgive, accept, and play out our accumulated baggage of weirdness, to both heal and bring ourselves to heel before natural order.

Machado has it that there is no path except that walking creates one—but in the wild the trails are worn by beasts; bears, wolves, foxes, moose, and deer carve a sensibly efficient path through the terrain. No credentialed architect is required to inspect and certify this space and its paths. All of creation's structures are stable and its voice is always just sound—a signal that is never a gratuitous noise and heat.

Our own task today is to delineate such elegant pathways in our social networks and in the way we live our lives in the real world.