The Existential Risk of Technology: The Death of Our Humanity: Reclaiming Value, Intimacy, and Outrageous Love in the Digital Age: From Algorithmic Alienation to the Evolution of Intimacy

One Mountain Oral Essays Volume 18

The Existential Risk of Technology: The Death of Our Humanity: Reclaiming Value, Intimacy, and Outrageous Love in the Digital Age: From Algorithmic Alienation to the Evolution of Intimacy | One Mountain Many Paths Oral Essays Volume 18 | Dr. Marc Gafni

In this critical time between worlds, technology is shaping the future of our lives, both as individual human beings and collectively as a species. Technology has brought great blessings in multiple vectors, and those benefits are regularly sung in the public sphere. However, the notion that technology is value-neutral is simply not true. All technology is encoded with value, pseudo-value—or tragically, with anti-value. So technology also threatens us with risks to our very existence on this planet.

There are two forms of existential risk: the potential death of humanity—an extinction event—and the potential death of our humanity. One primary cause for the death of our humanity is what we are referring to as the emergent “tech plex,” an immersive digital temple disassociated from the Field of Value. At the heart of the tech plex is the “planetary stack” that currently wires the entire planet—the increasing interconnection of algorithmic and technological infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure that encircles the globe. The result is upgraded algorithms and downgraded humanity, which is one main cause for the potential death of our humanity.

Interconnectivity without Intimacy.

In order to avoid this form of existential risk, we must respond with a new Story of Value. This story must be rooted in First Principles and First Values, which are not mere social conventions that humans have invented but rather the inherent value structure of the Intimate Cosmos that humans discover and evolve.

All of Reality arises from the ground of what eastern wisdom called the Tao, the Way, and which we refer to as the Field of Value. The Field of Value is the ground of eternal value that is ever-evolving. The tech plex, as currently conceived, experiences itself as disassociated from the Tao, from the Field of Value.

In this book, we begin to articulate a new Story of Value. This new Story is a scientifically grounded, creative, and joyful response to the alienated tech plex that relocates us deep in the Field of Value that lies at the heart of the CosmoErotic Universe. We reconnect the immersive environment of technology with Evolution: The Love Story of Universe, whose plotline is the progressive deepening of intimacies, animated at all levels by the pulse of Outrageous Love.

Published by World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers. 

Book details:

Title: The Existential Risk of Technology: The Death of Our Humanity: Reclaiming Value, Intimacy, and Outrageous Love in the Digital Age: From Algorithmic Alienation to the Evolution of Intimacy
Author: Dr. Marc Gafni
Series: Oral Essay Series – Volume 18
Publisher: World Philosophy and Religion Press in conjunction with Integral Wisdom Publishers.
ISBN-13: 979-8888340226
Formats: Paperback, e-book, audiobook.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1 SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: “WE’RE GOING TO STEAL YOUR EXPERIENCE WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION”

  • First Principles and First Values Account for the Critiques of Natural Law and Perennial Philosophy
  • Mistaken Assumptions of Natural Law and Perennial Philosophy
  • Critiques by Postmodernity of Natural Law and Perennial Philosophy
  • Postmodernity’s Critique of Perennialism and Natural Law Is True but Partial, and It Ignores Responsibility to Any Larger Grand Narrative—Except the Success Story
  • The Nervous System of the Planet Is the Web, the Worldwide Virtual World
  • Google’s Business Model Is Surveillance Capitalism
  • Facebook Hijacks Your Attention, Takes Your Information and Targets You With Ads, Thereby Compromising the Free Movement of Economy and Governance
  • We Are Unaware of the Threat to Universal Human Rights
  • The Failure to Articulate the Case Against the Tech Plex Is Rooted in a Failure of First Principles and First Values
  • Surveillance Capitalism: We’re Going to Steal Your Experience Without Your Permission
  • The Six Declarations of Google
  • Instead of Solving Existential and Catastrophic Risk, Our Best Minds Are Caught in the Success Story
  • From Holdables to Wearables to Biometric Sensors
  • First Principles and First Values Refute Surveillance Capitalism
  • Exposing the Inner Structure in Which Human Experience Is Being Stolen
  • The Direct, First-Person Experience of Reality Coming Alive in Me

CHAPTER 2 DIAGNOSING THE TECH PLEX: FROM DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP TO DIGITAL INTIMACY, FROM SOCIAL SELF TO UNIQUE SELF, FROM SOCIAL HIVE TO UNIQUE SELF SYMPHONIES

  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Unique Self Is Under Attack by the Tech Plex
  • The Articulation of Unique Self Consciousness Is the Overriding Moral Imperative of This Generation
  • Separate Self, Social Self, True Self, and Unique Self
  • I Am Irreducibly Valuable As a Unique Emergent of the Whole
  • Your Unique Self Is Your Unique Response-Ability to Reality
  • Your Unique Self Has Irreducible Value
  • B.F. Skinner: The Human Being Is a Social Self
  • B.F. Skinner: Let’s Nullify the Autonomous Man, the Inner Man
  • Skinner’s Approach—Nullifying the Autonomous Man—Is the Basis of Social Media
  • C.S. Lewis vs. B.F. Skinner: The Abolition of Man, the Abolition of Human Society
  • However Misguided, Skinner Is Responding to Existential Risk and Critiquing Separate Self As the Source of Human Dignity
  • Skinner Did Not Have the Tools to Develop Technologies of Human Behavior
  • Alex Pentland, One of the Architects of the Web, Is a Direct Continuation of Skinner
  • Pentland: Data Science Is the New Physics Which Will Allow Us to Enact a New Vision of Society
  • The Founders of the Tech Plex Adopt the Vision of Skinner and Pentland
  • Social Media Is an Expression of Skinner’s Walden Two
  • We Need to Replace the Understanding of Natural Law With Evolving Perennialism, an Evolving Set of First Values and First Principles
  • The Tech Plex: We Are Organizing Society as Social Selves
  • True Self and Unique Self Are Ignored by the Tech Plex
  • Unseen, Pentland and Skinner Have Formed the Thinking of the Tech Plex, Which Arrogates to Itself the Right to Your Experience
  • Personal Data Is Currently Being Used by Machine Intelligence Algorithms to Compromise the Two Basic Identities of Democracy: the Voter and the Consumer
  • Under-The-Skin Surveillance Is the Next Step and Will Result in Digital Dictatorships
  • The Postmodern Deconstruction of Value Together With Surveillance Capitalism Results in the “Conditioners” Predicted by C.S. Lewis
  • We Need to Respond to Social Self With Unique Self
  • The Power and Profit Agenda Together With Utopianism, Sans First Principles and First Values
  • Imagine What Happens When a Dictatorship Owns Data
  • In the Absence of Unique Self, Social Self Became the Animating Energy of the Nervous System of the Planet
  • Our Job Is to Engage in a Reconstructive Project of Value so We Can Muster the Necessary Outrage Against the Tech Plex

CHAPTER 3 THE NEW EXISTENTIAL RISK: NOT THE DEATH OF HUMANITY BUT THE DEATH OF OUR HUMANITY—THE DEHUMANIZING CREEP OF MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

  • We’re Here to Tell the New Story
  • Existential Risk: The End of Humanity
  • Existential Risk Due to Rivalrous Conflict
  • We Need a New Story of Value Grounded in First Principles and First Values
  • Articulation of a Second Form of Existential Risk: The Death of Our Humanity
  • Living Within the Tao
  • It’s Not That We Become Bad Human Beings, but That We Cease Being Human
  • The Quality of Your Unique Voice Is Sacred
  • Evolutionary Love Code: You Are a Unique Self
  • Deep Inwardness Is Where We Create Meaning

CHAPTER 4 THE UNIQUE SELF RESPONSE TO THE EXISTENTIAL RISK OF THE TECH PLEX

  • The Human Being As a Unique Configuration of Evolutionary Love
  • Recoding the Algorithmic Structure of the Nervous System of the Planet
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Unique Voice, Prayer, and the Tech Plex
  • A Revolution of Self: Re-“Self”ing

CHAPTER 5 RE-SELFING THE HEART OF THE COSMOS: ACTIVATING UNIQUE SELF AND UNIQUE SELF SYMPHONIES

  • We Are a Band of Outrageous Lovers, Revolutionaries Who Are Evolving the Source Code of Culture
  • We Need a New Story of Value, Grounded in First Principles and First Values
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Unique Self Is the Inward Space of Uniquely Lived Experience From Which Meaning Is Discovered
  • The First Principles and First Values of Prayer

CHAPTER 6 GOD NEEDS YOUR SERVICE: THE GREAT DIVINE RISK, THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF UNIQUE SELF

  • The Choice Is Ours: We Can Either Destroy Ourselves or Become a Model for Life in the Galaxy
  • The Story of Humanity Is God’s Great Risk
  • Evolutionary Love Code: Your Unique Gift Addresses a Unique Need
  • First Principles and First Values of Cosmos: Three Primordial Perspectives

CHAPTER 7 FROM THE HUMILIATION OF NEED TO “YOUR NEED IS MY ALLUREMENT”

  • Setting Our Intention: Recoding the Source Code in Order to Be at Home in Reality
  • Our Deepest Experience of Love Points to The Experience of Cosmos With Itself
  • Evolutionary Love Code: If You Ask, You Must Surely Need—Your Need Is My Allurement
  • Cosmos Is a Love Story, and Love Always Responds to Genuine Need
  • In Prayer, God Says, “Your Need Is My Allurement”
  • The Practice: Prayer Is Always in Some Way Held and Heard and Responded to
  • “Your Need Is My Allurement” Restores the Dignity of Need and Eviscerates Shame
  • The Shame in Getting My Needs Met Can Be Healed in the Sexual
  • We Participate in the Allurement of Reality, and When That Allurement Is Broken We Have a Desperate Need

EPISODE 228: IF YOU ASK, YOU MUST SURELY NEED: YOUR NEED IS MY ALLUREMENT

  • Setting Our Intention: Humans Are Homo Imaginus
  • Homo amor Accesses His/Her Unique Outrageous Acts Of Love Through Imagination
  • Seeking Intimacy Is a Feature of Reality Evolving Through Us
  • Story: The Baal Shem Tov—“If You Ask, You Must Surely Need”
  • Your Need Is My Allurement

CHAPTER 8 THE TAO THAT CAN BE CODED IS NOT THE TAO: EVOLVING HUMANITY BEYOND ALGORITHMS

  • Telling a New Story Rooted in Eternal and Evolving Values
  • Evolutionary Love Code: To Think We Have Stepped Out of the Tao Is the Greatest Existential Risk of All
  • The Tao That Can Be Spoken Is Not the Tao
  • The Death of Our Humanity Begins When We Think We’ve Stepped Out of the Tao

CHAPTER 9 YOUR HOLY AND YOUR BROKEN ARE BOTH HALLELUJAH: BEING THE NEW HUMAN IN THE TAO

  • We Are a Unique Self Symphony, an Emergent Expression of the Tao
  • The Unique Self Symphony in Response to the Tech Plex
  • Imagine a Unique Self Facebook With 7.7 Billion Users Joining Together in Symphony
  • Evolutionary Love Code: The Eternal Tao Is the Evolving Tao
  • Love Is Both Eternal and It Evolves
  • The Tao Is the Realization of the Unquantifiable Value of a Human Being
  • There’s a Shattering in Everything That Reality Has Made—That’s How the Light Gets in
  • Reshimu: Traces of Transcendence

CHAPTER 10 EVOLUTION IS PERSONAL: A SCIENTIFIC TRUTH

  • We Are Evolution in Person
  • Re-reading Neurochemistry as an Expression of the Intimate Universe
  • In Prayer We Turn to the Infinity of Intimacy That Knows Our Name
  • The Internet Is the Shallows, the Clarified Heart-Mind Expresses Depth

CHAPTER 11 THE ARC OF THE INTIMATE UNIVERSE BENDS TOWARD EVOLUTIONARY UNIQUE SELF

  • Reality Moves Towards More Intimacy, Wholeness, Aliveness, Depth, Ecstasy, and Kindness
  • The Principles of Revolution: Telling the New Story
  • All of Reality Is Intimate, All the Way Up and All the Way Down
  • The Internet Must Be Recoded From “The Shallows” to Depth and Intimacy
  • Who Am I? The Separate-Self Narrative
  • Who Am I? The Social-Self Narrative
  • Who Am I? The Unique-Self Narrative
  • Social Self: Rats in the Maze of the Tech Plex
  • Unique Self as Part of a Symphony

CHAPTER 12 THE GOOD NEWS: HOMO AMOR, WE ARE ALL NEEDED

  • The Dangers of Inaccurate, Partial Stories
  • Reclaiming the Evangelical Spark That Has Been Hijacked
  • To Be an Evangelist Is to Be an Outrageous Lover
  • Outrageous Love: We’re Outraged
  • Evolutionary Love Code: For True Evangelism We Need Both Ecstatic States and Developmental Stages
  • In Every Great Tradition There’s an Intimate Incarnation of the Divine
  • Passover: Reclaiming the Broken Part
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About the Authors:

Dr. Marc GafniDr. Marc Gafni is a leading public intellectual and teacher impacting the source code of global culture.

Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist and passionate philosopher. He is known for his “source code teachings”, including Unique Self theory and the Five Selves, the Amorous Cosmos, A Politics of Evolutionary Love, A Return to Eros and Digital Intimacy.

He is author of twenty five books, of which the first ten have been published, including the award-winning Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment.

He holds his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, as well as Orthodox rabbinic ordination.

He teaches on the cutting edge of philosophy in the West, helping to evolve a new ‘dharma’ or meta-theory of Integral meaning that is helping to re-shape key pivoting points in global consciousness and culture, with the aim of participating in the articulation of what Dr. Gafni together with Dr. Zak Stein and colleagues are calling CosmoErotic Humanism.

At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is what Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein are calling ‘First Principles and First Values’, Anthro-Ontology and a “Universal Grammar of Value”.

This is the ground of a new shared universe story and a new narrative of identity for the new human and the new humanity. This is what they are calling the emergence from Homo sapiens to Homo Amor.

This shared story rooted in First Principles and First Values can then serve as the matrix for a global ethos for a global civilization.

Gafni is considered by many to be a kind of Einstein of Philosophy who is leading a team of thinkers articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

Dr. Gafni is the Co-Founder together with Ken Wilber and Sally Kempton of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion where he serves as its co-president. Together with Dr. Zak Stein, they are co-leading a team of thinkers, articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.

In 2014 Dr. Gafni co-initiated the Success 3.0 Summit and Rise Up movie, whose method and movement is to bring together key thought leaders and change-agents to collaboratively evolve a bold new Integral vision of Success, rooted in the entrepreneurial values of Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up, and Outrageous Love.

Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gafni has developed evolutionary and activist programs rooted in his commitment to what he has termed “participating in the evolution of love.” Together with author and social innovator Barbara Marx Hubbard, he is working on a series of new works revolving around Evolutionary Spirituality.

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Barbara Marx HubbardBarbara Marx Hubbard (born Barbara Marx; December 22, 1929–April 10, 2019) was an American futurist, author, and public speaker. She is credited with the Wheel of Co-Creation and together with Dr. Gafni, the Wheel of Co-Creation 2.0, as well as the concepts of the Synergy Engine and the “birthing” of humanity.

As co-founder and president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution and the chair, for the last five years of her life, of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, she posited that humanity was on the threshold of a quantum leap if newly emergent scientific, social, and spiritual capacities were integrated to address global crises.

She was the author of seven books on social and planetary evolution. In conjunction with the Shift Network, she co-produced the worldwide “Birth 2012” multimedia event. She was also the subject of a biography by author Neale Donald Walsch, The Mother of Invention: The Legacy of Barbara Marx Hubbard, and the Future of “YOU”. Deepak Chopra called her “the voice for conscious evolution.”

In 1984, she was symbolically nominated for the vice presidency of the United States. She also co-chaired a number of Soviet-American Citizen Summits, introducing a new concept called SYNCON, to foster synergistic convergence with opposing groups. In addition, she co-founded the World Future Society and the Association for Global New Thought.

Gafni is a leading public intellectual impacting the source code of global culture. He is also a forger of new trails in the evolution of intimacy and love. In his own self-description, “Like all of us I am a flawed human being, an imperfect vessel for the light, radically committed to constant healing, transformation, and the evolution of love.” He has led international spiritual movements and learning communities, as well as created and hosted for several seasons a popular national Israeli television program on culture, meaning, and spirit on Israel’s leading network. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gafni has developed educational programs, papers and content rooted in traditional wisdom and yet fully adapted to the needs of the contemporary world.

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