Elevating Consciousness - The Human Imperative (Part 1)
A path to solving the AI alignment problem
Recently, I met up with cherished mentors and friends over coffee. We had beautiful conversations, touching on parenting, education, game development, health, politics, economics, love, and more. Yet one topic loomed large: the double-edged sword of Artificial Super Intelligence. It holds both the promise of a peaceful existence and the peril of annihilation.
It evoked memories of a conversation I had with them years ago in Japan. My friend, M, a brilliant and prolific technologist, foretold a chilling future: a world where technology's relentless advance could empower a single individual to decimate society with a mere push of a 'big red button'.
Alarmingly, this dystopian scenario is inching closer and closer to reality; accelerated by AI, Quantum Computing, Robotics, and Gene Editing.
M’s haunting question was: “Can we trust every human on the planet to not push that button?” A cursory glance at Twitter (X) or 4chan forums can give you a clue as to the likely answer.
A nightmare scenario could look like many things, for human imagination is clever and unpredictable. Could a malicious actor develop a sophisticated propaganda campaign that triggers civil unrest, conflict, and ultimately nuclear war? Bio-engineer a highly communicable and deadly virus? Redirect an autonomous drone army? Wipe out critical global infrastructure in one fell swoop?
We discussed if it would be possible to truly prevent every single person on the planet from leveraging AI tools to wreak havoc on a mass scale. How could we go about doing that?
If we don’t get this right, nothing else matters, it’s game over.
In the Face of Doom, Focus on Solutions
My first response to this scenario was to admit that we will likely experience some level of destruction and turmoil. History teaches us that technological advances often precede societal upheaval. The Industrial Revolution, for instance, brought both progress and pain.
Humanity, unfortunately, tends to be reactive and slow in adapting to sweeping change. It took decades and many fatalities before seatbelts became mandatory in cars. We’ve had over 20 years of social media, and we still haven’t implemented any consistent guardrails to protect our children from depression or communities from genocide.
Our ignorance, hubris, and inaction today is setting us up for a great reckoning.
Yet, adversity can catalyze awakening, for pain is a powerful teacher. It can unite us under a shared purpose: to harness technology safely and in harmony with our values. At the heart of this mission, I believe, lies the elevation of human consciousness.
What is Consciousness?
Before figuring out how we can elevate human consciousness, we must first understand what it is. Despite many advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, consciousness is one of the most debated and least understood concepts in philosophy and science.
Broadly speaking, it's the state of being aware, perceiving, and experiencing our surroundings, thoughts, and emotions.
We experience altered states of consciousness in a number of ways, including: meditation, flow states, breath work, lucid dreaming, severe trauma, Near Death Experiences, chemicals (alcohol, cigarettes), psychedelics (psilocybin, DMT), tantra, and more. These experiences can make one question our ‘normal’ reality, often taking individuals down the path of spirituality and transcending a purely material existence.
There’s so much to explore in this fascinating and mind-boggling realm, and I will be delving deeper into this topic in future posts. For those curious, I recommend Scott Britton’s excellent Substack: Consciousness ∞ The Doorway to Human Evolution.
We Are All One
For now, what I want to focus on is the concept of Panpsychism and how we can leverage this theory for practical action. It is a philosophical perspective which describes consciousness as a universal property. That all of our physical reality is built upon a unified substrate of consciousness.
The Maharishi Effect posits a symbiotic relationship between individual and collective consciousness. As individual consciousness grows, so does collective consciousness, and vice versa.
Twenty peer reviewed studies and more than fifty demonstrations have found that when a relatively small proportion of a population practice Transcendental Meditation and its advanced programs there is a decrease in negative trends such as crime, violence and fatalities.
Our emotions and actions, positive or negative, have far-reaching effects, since everything, everywhere is intrinsically connected.
The cause of inner and outer conflicts, with which life on earth has for so long been plagued, lies not in the variety of life’s expressions, but in man’s failure to infuse that variety with the unity, the infinite correlation, which lies at the source of all diversity. This failure is in turn due to lack of knowledge.
The AI Connection
Why does this matter? AI is a neutral tool that can be used for good or ill. The true threat comes from the individual who wields this tool and their motivations. To halt the cycle of fear, shame, hate, envy, and violence, we must shift our collective consciousness upwards towards love, compassion, gratitude, and joy.
Elevated global consciousness can be our safeguard against AI misuse. We have the capability to cultivate this. As our power grows, so must our collective wisdom and sense of unity. Why harm another person when you’re ultimately just harming yourself?
The Scientific Backdrop
Skeptical? I was too.
Quantum mechanics and string theory is often regarded as the pinnacle of physics. Michio Kaku, the co-founder of Field String Theory, beautifully describes the universe as a symphony of vibrating strings. Our emotions and actions, positive or negative, ripple through this interconnected web at specific frequencies.
Our conscious thoughts don’t exist in a vacuum. Emerging research reveals they can profoundly shape our tangible reality:
The placebo effect demonstrates how belief can physically influence health outcomes.
Dr. Masaru Emoto's experiments with water reveals how words, intentions, and music can alter water's crystalline structure.
Even at the behavioral level, our mindset molds biases, heuristics, and habits. These patterns over the long term direct our actions and life trajectory in specific vectors. Today, this concept is popularized as manifestation or the law of attraction.
Like all truths, it’s best not to take someone else’s word for it, but to experience it for yourself. My personal exploration with meditation, flow states, and plant medicines has deepened my understanding of interconnectedness. These past few years, I have taken a scientific approach to see if this theoretical knowledge could be applied into our material reality.
The question I’m exploring: if our thoughts are so powerful, can they bend material reality to our will? I believe they do, and research backs this up.
My Hypothesis
We are all interconnected.
We are powerful: our actions, positive or negative, influence everyone in a reinforcing feedback loop.
By shifting human consciousness towards love, compassion, and gratitude, we can reduce destructive behavior.
When we achieve this, we reach a unitive state of peace and harmony, and nobody pushes the ‘big red button’.
How Do We Elevate Human Consciousness?
This question drives one of my primary life missions and has led me to co-found a nonprofit organization to work on a solution. In Part 2 of this series, I'll delve into actionable steps towards this goal.
For now, I believe starting small is the first and most important step. It begins with you, your family, your loved ones, and your community.
Let go of fear, shame, and judgement. (i.e. lower vibration emotions)
Be kind to yourself and others.
Radiate love and gratitude.
Foster forgiveness and acceptance.
Enrich your community with safety, connection, love, and joy.
Positivity is infectious, starting with one person, which propagates to their network, and on and on. The light you create ripples out harmoniously and infinitely throughout the universe. If we are all indeed just a complex collection of vibrating strings, let’s create a beautiful symphony. It starts with you.
What I’m Doing This Week
Gratitude
I’m grateful to be welcomed into community. To witness kinship, a desire to be better, growth, and cheerfulness through hardship.
Lesson Learned
The only true constant in the universe is change.
Listening to
Let It Be by The Beatles. For patience and surrender.
Watching
Invaluable neuroscience, advice, insights, and lifehacks. A must-watch for anyone who wants to improve their overall well-being and relationships.
Reading
New map of space precisely measures nearly 400,000 nearby galaxies
There are 100s of billions of stars in one galaxy, and 100s of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. All of that is only ~5% of the actual stuff the universe is made of (dark matter & energy).
If we do the math, what’s the probability that we’re alone?
Self-care
Meditation, volleyball, ocean, fasting, deep fascia work, stretching, hot baths, gardening
I just sub'd to Dr. Tara Swart's podcast after watching your recommended read. So much good there in terms of levels of awareness before application, what we pick up via gaining knowledge versus intuition vs intaking stress from other people's sweat or their general emotional energy. Wow! Thank you for not only a good read but continuing to share thought-provoking finds across the internet :)
so thought-provoking and insightful! excited to read part 2!