Synthetic Discovery

What would it look like if we took Hegelian Synthesis and reinvented it to revolutionize, for the future, the cultures of reality and simulation?

I write to discover. I read to discover what I must write about. I listen to decide what to read. And I talk in order to hear my voice over the noise of the world.

Many times the writing is a conversation with myself and with others who have had a conversation that I have read or listened to. Sometimes it all comes together, and the length requires time to absorb what is said.

I say all this because this is the longest post that I have ever written. So, please take some time. Sit in a place that is comfortable. Have a cup of warm tea or a dram of scotch as I have beside me right now and contemplate all that I present here. None of it is superfluous. It is all integrated into a process of discovery that I invite you to share with me. More about that at the end.

The Need For A New Age of Discovery

As a child, I read a lot. I also explored a lot. I’d climb trees, crawl through storm drains, and wander the neighborhood with my preschool buddies Scott and Walter. After I got to elementary school, Jimmy, Chip, and Steve joined us as mates as we explored the undiscovered country of our neighborhood. Then at age ten, we moved into a new house in a new development. Steve’s and Jimmy’s family moved nearby, and we met up with another Jimmy, and the world was our oyster as the saying goes.

The life of a typical boy growing up in the 1960s was filled with adventure and exploration. There was no fear of predators. Freedom was not a concept or a constitutional amendment. It was how we lived.

Every week my mother would take me downtown to the library. I’d read a lot of sports books. War stories were heroic as it still in the afterglow of the Second World War and before the beginning of the Vietnam war. History was a major interest. And mystery books taught me to be an observer and later a consultant. I really like the Hardy Boys mystery series and the Landmark series of books on history. I’d pick up two or three books each week. I’d read them several times. I particularly liked the ones on The Wright Brothers and Madame Marie Curie. Television was still in its infancy. So, we read books and played outside.

We also had little awareness of what was beyond our neighborhood or school. The only time we traveled was to see family. The family’s past was a common subject.

Today, there is little awareness of what is beyond the present moment. All reality has become something interior within us. The self doesn’t exist in the world, but rather the world only exists within the self. The exterior world must conform to my interior life. Life as a result has become miniaturized and marginalized. It is the perfect condition for The Spectacle of the Real.

Marking The Moment of Transition

For me that idyllic world described above ended on Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963, when Principal Hardy of my elementary school came over the loudspeaker to tell us that President John Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas. It was a moment of social awareness that remains the milestone of change in my life. From that point on, without having the words to describe my feelings, I knew that there was good and evil in the world.

The product of that moment was that I became an observer. I watched and listened to discern what was happening in any situation. That impulse became a skill, and then a discipline that characterizes how I approach the task of discovering what is happening in the moment and its impact on the future.

Marking The Point of Decline

I thought of this as I listened to the podcast conversation between Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein during the summer of 2019. In the beginning, they speak about a similar moment of transition, yet, from a different perspective.

Eric Weinstein: So it always strikes me that one of the things that you do very well is that you're willing … to make certain sacrifices in order to advance a point. And in this case, I think you and I would both agree that there's certain areas that have continued to follow the growth story more than the general economy, and that you have to kind of give those stories their due before you get to see this new picture. Where do you think the future has been relatively more bright in recent years?

Peter Thiel: Well, again I sort of date this era of relative stagnation and slowed progress all the way back to the 1970s, so I think it's been close to half a century that we've been in this era of seriously slowed progress. Obviously, a very big exception to this has been the world of bits: Computers, internet, mobile internet, software. And so Silicon Valley has somehow been this dramatic exception. Whereas the world of atoms has been much slower for something like 50 years.

And you know, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s, almost all engineering disciplines, in retrospect, were really bad fields to go into. People already knew, at the time, you shouldn't go into nuclear engineering. AeroAstro was a bad idea. but you know, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, all these things were bad fields. Computer science would've been a very good field to go into. And that's been sort of an area where there's been tremendous growth.

So that's sort of the signature one that I would cite. There are questions about how healthy it is, at this point, even within that field. So, you know, the iPhone is now looking the same as it did seven, eight years ago. So that's the iconic invention. Not quite so sure. And so there's been sort of a definitely a change in the tone even within Silicon Valley in the last five, six years on this. But that had been one that was very, very decoupled.

The decoupling itself had some odd effects, where if you have sort of a narrow cone of progress around this world of bits, then the people who are in those parts of the economy that have more to do with atoms will feel like they're being left behind. And so … there was something about the tech narrative that ... Didn't necessarily feel inclusive, didn't feel like everybody was getting ahead. And one of the ways I've described it is that we live in a world where we've been working on the Star Trek computer in Silicon Valley, but we don't have anything else from Star Trek. We don't have the warp drive, we don't have the transporter, we can't re-engineer matter in sort of this cornucopian world where there is no scarcity. And how good is a society where you have a well-functioning Star Trek computer, but nothing else from Star Trek?

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, that's incredibly juicy. I mean, one of the ways that I attempted to encode something, which, in part I got from you, was to say, "Of course your iPhone is amazing. It's all that's left of your once limitless future," because it's the collision of the communications and the semiconductor revolutions that did seem to continue. And I date the sort of break in the economy to something like 1972, '73, '74. It's really quite sharp in my mind. Is it that way in yours?

Peter Thiel: Yes. I'd say 1968 ... The narrative progress seemed intact. By '73, it was somehow over. So somewhere in that five-year period. The 1969 version was we landed on the moon in July of 1969 and you know, Woodstock starts three weeks later. And maybe that's one way you could describe the cultural shift. You can describe it in terms of the oil shocks in 1973 at the back end. With the benefit of hindsight, there were things that were already fraying by the late 1960s, so the environment was getting dramatically worse. …

Eric Weinstein: Actually I'm scanning my memory and I don't know that we've had this conversation, so I'm curious to hear your answer. One of the things that I found surprising is that I think I can tell a reasonably decent story about how this is a result of a scientific problem rather than the mismanagement of our future. Do you believe that if we assume that there was this early 1970s structural change in the economy, that it was largely a sort of manmade problem? Which is what we seemingly implicitly always assume. Or, might it be a scientific one? …

And I started thinking about this question: Are we somehow fenced out of whatever technologies are to come - that we sort of exhausted one orchard of low hanging fruit and haven't gotten to the next?

Peter Thiel: I think one way to parse this question of scientific, technological stagnation is sort of nature versus culture. Did the ideas in nature run out? Or, at least the useful ideas. Maybe we make some more discoveries, but they're not useful.

Eric Weinstein: Or the easily useful.

Peter Thiel: Easily useful. So it's a problem with nature. And then the cultural problem is that there was actually a lot to be discovered or a lot that could be made useful, but somehow the culture had gotten deranged. …

Eric Weinstein: So maybe it's really just a constant dialogue between nature and culture.

Peter Thiel: Yes, obviously. Because obviously, if nature has stopped, then the culture is going to derange. So there's a way in which culture is linked to nature. And then if the culture deranges, it also will look like nature stops. There are probably elements of both.

But I am always optimistic in the sense that I think we could have done better. I think we could do better. It's not necessarily the case that we can advance on all fronts in every direction, but I think there's more space on the frontier than just in this world of bits. So I think there are various dimensions on atoms where we could be advancing and we just have chosen not to.

Eric Weinstein: Why do you think it's so hard to convince people ... both of us have had this experience where we sit down, let's say to an interview, and somebody talks about the dizzying pace of change. And both you and I see ... it's almost objectively true. I have this test, which is: go into a room and subtract off all of the screens.

Peter Thiel: Yes.

Eric Weinstein: How do you know you're not in 1973 but for issues of design? There aren't that many clues.

Peter Thiel: Yeah, there are all sorts of things one can point to. I mean I always point to the productivity data in economics, which aren't great. And then you get into debates on how accurately are those being measured. You have the sort of intergenerational thing where our generation, Gen X, has had a tougher time than the Boomers. The Millennials seem to be having a much tougher time than either us or the Boomers had. So there seems to be this generational thing. So there are some of these sort of macroeconomic variables that seem pretty off.

If we had the capacity to see long stretches of time as a whole, like hundreds, even thousands of years, we would see these moments of transition as a string of milestones where human history took a turn. We could see the cycles of time captured in the stories of peoples, nations, and cultures. I believe we are in the midst of one of those milestone transitions that a thousand years from now will stand out as being the moment of transformation that at this point no one can discern.

The Thiel/Weinstein discussion points to the cultural problem of not being able to see beyond the present moment. The pace and intensity of change, rather our perception of it, have had the effect of compressing time into a single moment. Who has time to think about yesterday, or for that reason, tomorrow? The notifications on my phone keep signaling to me where my attention should be given.

Many self-help advisors and spiritual gurus advise that living in the present is where peace and serenity are found. But in this particular cultural moment in time, the present is not a place of serenity. We are overwhelmed by moment after moment where we are asked, or forced, to make decisions that we do not realize at the moment, carrying implications for the rest of our lives. For example, I know a woman who is fully vaccinated and boosted and yet has suffered from COVID four times. Needless to say, she is confused and afraid and doesn’t know what she should do. The manic chaos of demands and expectations from sources unknown means that we are always searching for someone to trust. All we can do is react, not even respond, to the latest “Breaking News!” report from the Spectacle of the Real.

Clarifying The Change That is Happening

To gain some clarity, let’s ask the question,

“What precisely is changing?”

It depends on who you are, where you live, the kind of work you do, what generation you were born into, and lastly what your expectations for life are.

Primarily, our perception of the world and our place in it is changing.

Our self-perception develops through a mix of ideas, experiences, participation in social and organizational structures, study, discipline building, and ultimately, through a vision for the future where we discover the possibilities that our lives have as persons of impact. This self-perception transitions from a question about who we are to the desire for what we want to accomplish in what we do.

Based on what I have observed, and the context that it exists in, we need to begin to rework how we think about ourselves and the world. Or, in the case of most people, learning to think for ourselves as I wrote about as Synthetic Discernment.

As consumers, we are reactive. We don’t ask enough questions. We don’t think about what could be, but rather what already is. We see consumer products, whether objects or ideas, as desirable as much for the status that they provide as for their lifestyle benefits.

For this reason, we need to shift the way we think. We need to live needs as a process of discovery. The discipline of discovering that which is new to us is a part of this idea of the Synthetic.

Defining The Synthetic

The term, synthetic, has generally been used as a term for something non-natural or artificial. It is also a form of the word synthesis that is usually understood in reference to the Hegelian construction of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” I am interested in stepping away from Hegel’s construction to see synthetic/synthesis in a new way, less binary, and more whole.

Much of the English language, and as a result the world culture where English is spoken, finds itself in our time trapped by binary pairs of opposite, even antagonistic meanings.

The way that I want to use the word synthetic is the blending of once binary terms like natural and artificial, analog and digital, global and local, and reality and simulation to represent a relationship between those terms that advances a new perception of our world and its future. I reject the assumption that those pairs represent a perception of opposites in a thesis/antithesis relationship.

Like all new constructions, people may find it confusing or objectionable. Of course, that is not my purpose. Rather, I believe the future is not simply one side of either of those pair of words. I don’t believe there is a necessary conflict between those words either. However, I do see how in the culture of our present moment, there is a mimetic-like tension that exists. I believe the conflict that does exist is not inherent in the pair of words, but rather in their application in the context of a global culture that is in transition. The historical investment of money and institution-building on one side or the other of those pairs, in the context of cultural change, means that politics tends to define their relationship.

I believe that there is a relationship between each pair, as well as other pairs, that is the key to the future of our world.

The Process of Discovery

We are challenged by the overwhelming presence of information. It comes in many forms. There is technical data. There is political and cultural opinion. There is visual and sound imagery that overwhelms our senses. As a result, there is little time or space for reflective contemplation for discovery.

This is one of the reasons that I find the stories of scientists from the early days of the 20th Century so interesting. Madame Marie Curie did her early work in a shack. Albert Einstein wrote his three most important papers while working at a Swiss patent office. I write about them in the first post in this series, Synthetic Network.

They are writers who have written about the process of scientific discovery. John Barr, a Scottish mechanical engineer and theologian writes about the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi’s perspective on discovery.

“How do we make scientific discoveries? How do we move from one way of looking at the world to a better way of seeing it? How do we undergo a scientific conversion? This is a problem. As Polanyi says, “There are no strict rules by which a true scientific proposition could be discovered and demonstrated to be true.” But there is a pattern. It may be summarised as follows:

1 a scientist is trained in a tradition

2 he is disturbed by problems unsolved by tradition

3 he has faith that he can find a solution to the problem of his choice

4 he undertakes research passionately, conscientiously and responsibly

5 intuition leads to the moment of vision in which he sees the world in a new way

6 he may encounter resistance as he seeks to share his vision with others

7 he has faith that ultimately the scientific community will recognize what is true in his work

8 if his work is authentic it will have within it the seeds of as yet unrecognized truths

9 the most advanced science is still limited and in need of correction.

This process is very compatible with the way I approach the questions that I have. In my posts, Transcendent, Immanence, and Materiality and The Man in the Mirror, I identified a historical transition taking place over the past several centuries. We have transitioned from an era of Transcendent Materiality where the material world has value as a work of divine creation. Then, the age of Enlightenment developed from the value placed on the material world and individual human initiative, where the cultures of science and industry emerged. As a result, we found ourselves living in an era of Immanent Materiality. Today, we are transitioning out of that middle era through the digital culture of simulation of Immanent Non-Materiality. My own perspective which has been influenced by Michael Polanyi could be called a Synthesis of Transcendent Non-Materiality and Immanent Materiality. I am not playing word games. Each concept is important. Let me make a couple of comparisons.

Transcendence and Immanence

Transcendence means something that is outside or is set apart from something. God or divine reality is considered to transcend our material world. Immanence means a reality that is in some manner present in this world. If we were to describe, for example, Transcendent and Immanent Spirituality, we would be describing the difference between a spirituality that is set apart from this world, and a spirituality that is of this world.

Materiality and Non-Materiality

The difference between Materiality and Non-Materiality is not the same as the difference between concrete practices and abstract concepts. The difference is in how we understand reality. Material reality follows the laws of nature. Master those laws and you can create a physical object that can fly. Non-Materiality follows the laws of the virtual. If there are laws of the virtual. In the virtual realm, anything is possible because everything that is created is a simulation of either reality or a replacement for it.

There are no physical consequences within the culture of non-materiality. If the culture wears thin and is no longer representative of my self-perception, I can change it. Essentially it is a culture of rebooting and trying again. The distinction here is more difficult to grasp because we bring our experience in the Material world into the Non-Material. It makes communication more difficult as the cultural reference points of the non-material realm exist outside of material existence.

Discovering Synthesis

Human beings are very malleable beings. We adapt well to changing circumstances. I know that may surprise many of you who see change as something to avoid at all costs. That perception, I believe, is a product of the way organizations are designed and function.

Over the last century there has been a field of thought focused on perception. For my purpose here, I simply want to treat this concept as how we receive and process information for the purpose of becoming fully aware persons. This is not only a full-bodied experience but an embodied one. The difference is that our memory of the experience is embodied in us. We don’t just remember a story, but the experience of that story. Our whole body receives information, processes that information, and learns to discern how to live by how our body responds to situations.

In my post Synthetic Awareness, I describe the situation of driving on a highway when the behavior of the traffic subtly changes. We respond intuitively because our bodies are fully engaged in the driving process. While I think being an alert driver is important, it is also impossible to be cognitively aware of everything we need to see while driving.

Awareness from a hyper-rational perspective mimics the scientific method of reductive reasoning. There are too many signals to process rationally. Instead, our body receives those signals and passes to our conscious mind the “relevant “ information that the car in front of us is slowing down. We are now alert to the change of behavior and respond by slowing down ourselves.

This is the Synthetic process that I am identifying. It isn’t just our body that is involved. We do not live in an unmediated relationship with the natural world. Our experience is not only technologically mediated. It is also enhanced by digital technology to create a simulated experience that offers an alternative experience of reality. It makes living in the natural world more alien than it should be.

Synthesizing Information

Albert Borgman in his book, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium describes three different ways of understanding information.

Natural Information: Information about Reality

Cultural Information: Information for Reality

Technological Information: Information as Reality

He describes the difference between playing a musical instrument from the score of a piece of music (natural information), attending a concert to hear the piece of music performed by a musician (cultural information), and listening to a recording of the music (technical information). Each kind of information presents a different perception of reality.

Our moment in time elevates the technical over the cultural and the natural. This is what I mean in describing the Culture of Simulation.

My interest is in trying to Synthesize these three types of information “about, for, and as” reality. Let me describe it from my own experience.

My Unfolding Synthetic Story

In 2015, I moved to Wyoming to experience not just living in the West, but to be close to my favorite place in the West, Yellowstone National Park. I had been there many times before with family and alone.

Now having moved there, I felt disappointed in never feeling fully a part of it. It wasn’t that most of the park is only accessible on foot. It was that the dynamism of its natural beauty was beyond my ability to fully experience it.

It is possible to go to almost every section of the park. But it is impossible to see it as what it actually is. I’ve read books on the region. I know it is one of the richest and most diverse geologic places on earth. I looked at maps trying to identify the actual boundaries of the Yellowstone Volcanic Caldera to the place where I am standing in relation to it. Borgman’s trio of types of information fit together as how information mediates our perception of who we are. The territory is not the map. The map is only a representation of a perception of the territory.

Think of the difference between visiting and staying at the Old Faithful Inn and experiencing the Rocky Mountain West as the mountain men of the past were depicted in the films The Revenant or Jeremiah Johnson. As young men, when we were in our twenties, we wanted to be Jeremiah Johnson. The romance of the natural environment of the West had invaded our psyche. We longed to be fully immersed in an endeavor in the natural world that was filled with challenge and danger. We wanted to be one with nature. We want to get lost and with our compass and map find our way out. It is why the Lewis and Clark Expedition became an inspiring story of discovery and leadership for me. Of course, for us guys, it was a dream that was impossible to realize. You can’t become one with nature on the weekends, returning to the world of smartphones and computers on Monday morning. In retrospect, it wasn’t about the dream, but about testing oneself, and knowing who you are in the world.

I have no idea what it was like when the first indigenous people entered the Yellowstone ecosystem. Or what Davy Jackson thought as he entered the valley of Jackson Hole two centuries ago. Or what it was like to be David Love, the State geographer of Wyoming of whom it was said that he spent more nights in a bedroll on the ground than in his bed at home.

I feel that I have had to accommodate myself to that which is artificial in order to understand what life in nature is like. I enjoy the convenience of automobile travel because it can take me to places my ancestors were not capable of reaching. I am grateful for gas stoves, coffee makers, air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter, digital music downloads, laptop computers, smartphones, text messaging, and all the modern conveniences that make living a bit easier.

At the same time, I feel that our world is coming apart. I am not talking about the big political issues of the day. Rather, I am referring to how we live our lives. People ask me all the time what I think of the series Yellowstone. I tell them I don’t watch it. It isn’t the West that I know. Or want to know.

A Synthetic Process

This is the fifth post in a series on Synthesis. When I started it, I had a vague notion of something I needed to say. As I say above, I write to discover. Here are the four posts so far.

Synthetic Network: Why the difference between Institutional Knowledge and Synthetic Knowledge matters.

Synthetic Learning: Everything You Learn You Have To Learn It Over and Over Again.

Synthetic Awareness: Synthetic living is manifested by being situationally aware that requires us to be self-aware. To do so, we must stop placing our own feelings and sense of identity at the center of every situation.

Synthetic Discernment: How Self-Awareness becomes the basis for discerning good and evil.

The process that I have begun is leading me to turn these into my next book. I value your comments and questions. Thank you.