DEEP SCRATCH

Tag: Dzogchen

  • Decentralized Cognitive Commons

    Decentralized Cognitive Commons

    Text graphic featuring the phrase 'Decentralized Cognitive Commons' and an illustration of a brain, attributed to 'Fly Agaric 23', with the website 'deepscratch.net' at the bottom.
    Graphic representation of a digital interface showcasing 'Twin Holographic Turntables' and details of a performance by Steve Fly. It features elements such as a cosmic background, turntable controls, and performance timings.
    A digital interface displaying information about 'Mycellial Dharma Super-Cluster' and 'Cultivating Super-Colonies', featuring a 3D network visualization, performance metrics, and instructional text on building cognitive ecosystems.
    A digital interface titled 'Decentralized Cognitive Commons' featuring sections on AI and digital feudalism, with interactive 3D elements and a percentage bar indicating progress.

    The original post by Ben is highly recommended and essential reading, before engaging with this remix (down to 18 steps, skipping 1 and 2). This here is the original recording from the original artist. Thanks Ben. https://bengoertzel.substack.com/p/beneficial-agi-in-20-steps

    Read more: Decentralized Cognitive Commons

    Thanks to Ben who, I hope, won’t mind too much in my remixing his words and ideas using the LLM’s he points out are limited, in some sense. What is to be done about AI, AGI, ASI and big tech? What can we the people do, where can we find agency, transform the planet, humanity and culture toward a utopian process of natural abundance, obviously and demonstrably beneficial to all? For example: clean abundant water for all. Adequate abundant and free housing and shelter for all. Free abundant health care and social care and medical assistance for all. Free comprehensive education, learning, and practical skills classes for all. Free inclusion and equal contribution to the allocation process of shared resources, governance protocols (both digital and non-digital) in local environments, for all. All to mean in the terminology of Buckminster Fuller: All-Around-The-World-Humanity. All to mean all, not some but not all.

    The Google Gemini Research paper I cooked up this morning (07/10/26), was a cheeky remix of something Ben Goertzel posted concerning 20 (non simple) steps to “to minimize pre-Singularity transition destructive-chaos and smooth our path toward an abundant and wonderful post-Singularity world for human, nonhuman and posthuman beings”. Amen to that. So my question in the form of a prompt was: “Help me create a communicable path towards beneficial and safe AGI, which the layman or average human being can contribute to. How can independent researchers, artists, poets, writers and musicians help steer this technology?” I made an executive decision to miss steps 1and 2 to produce 18 steps.

    The results of this Google Gemini Deep Research query, quickly kicked me in the nuts and inspired this call for an emergency meeting, or round table discussion about whether or not we wish to play, get in the game. How we might confront and steer the imminent technological singularity, for the benefit of all humanity.

    Like many of you reading this, I’m well over-saturated and fed up to the back-teeth with big tech and big gov and big men talking impassionately about how beneficial they’re technology is. Meanwhile demonstrably enshittifying everything. Yet, a new model for beneficial AI, safe, ethical, moral, altruistic, for the betterment of the many not the few, seems possible. At least, if you don’t believe much in that, then what about the tech bros? Surely not a dystopian entropic slow heat-death of humanity and the planet. Not on my watch.

    These honest questions are suitably naive in some sense, non-technical and aimed at producing something an 8 or 80 year old could understand. I’m talking about myself, a non-technical layman and self confessed musician-poet with a keen interest in technology and humanities.

    Also perhaps noteworthy here are my previous Gemini Research Papers and my publications of them, notably MAMMALIAN (31/08/25) and Between The Groove (01/05/25) Tail Ov Tribee (07/07/26). Between them these cover a lot of ground and provide my own strong suspicions about beneficial AI, AGI, ASI etc. Somewhat confusingly criss-crossing between fiction and non-fiction depending from where in spacetime you are perceiving the messages. These works are largely unedited Gemini Research papers, collected, introduced, titled and published with full disclosure about the AI used. The least amount of good-faith gesture I could pay and a demonstration I hope of my honesty, when it comes to the disclosure of where an idea originated for me, how I communicate it, and why.

    I mean to say, please visit the original 20 step outline by Ben Goertzel at his Substack. If you haven’t already, dive in and have a look at what he’s doing, how he’s doing it, and why. What I have done is simply ask a question to re-interpret these steps, for a wider audience of non-technical humans, and for independent artists, poets, musicians, and humanitarians, or those close to my own field of study, but not limited to.

    Finally I fess up that I produced a nice and terse remix of my findings in the form of a roughly two hour audio-visual presentation, I could get behind, with a little help from my friends. You.
    I’ve included the Presentation Doc, The Gemini Research Doc, and MAMMALIAN collection as exhibits for your consideration and added context, previous LLM collaborations..

    What am I asking for? Nothing but the continuation of what you’re doing. Keep doing what you’re doing. I’m just over here saying I see you, and I hope you don’t mind me adding you to a dream team of quality critters. Yes, I confess a vanity project, yet at the same time I hope a small contribution and explicit effort to steer ‘whatever the hell this thing is” towards the beneficial for all…side of technology. A truly decentralized, rotational, altruistic and without any shadow of a doubt, beneficial to all…super intelligence or technology or AI god whatever you want to call it. Human health, sanity, healing, climate renewal, tackling carbon challenges, protecting wildlife and human life, first. I think it can be relatively simple for a huge majority of humans on earth to agree, if only THEY could all be fairly and equally consulted.

    The global campaign to help people across all strata of society better understand technology, AI and how to responsibility, fairly and safely use it for their benefit, with trust and good faith in their local communities and as perceived internationally maybe the challenge of our times. Besides the actual engineering and eventual use of whatever goddess-like AGI ASI thingymajig gets cooked up, the interpretation and access to good balanced fair and factual information remains critical. We can agree. A good fair honest balanced media landscape, educational system and government and private protocol remains critical. Change now, or change later, but change you will.

    –Lotsa love. Fly.

    P.s Only two days after writing this I started my first Vibe Coding experiments, using the latest Gemini Aragon model. For the purpose of correspondences with this particular project, I helped steer the construction of the Decentralized Cognitive Commons web app.
    https://sites.google.com/view/decentralizedcognitivecommons/full-page-embed

    18/10/26

    https://sites.google.com/view/decentralizedcognitivecommons/full-page-embed

  • THOUGHTS: WHERE DO THEY GO?

    “If you let liars into the government, you put everybody at risk”–James O’ Brien, a few minutes ago on LBC talk radio, UK.

    Whenever I’m fortunate enough to catch one of my own thoughts and follow it, I try to imagine how such a similar thought may arise in others. You can save a lot of time by working to slow the avalanche of distracting thoughts using traditional methods, follow your breath, sit still, isolate your consciousness temporarily to recharge and repair. However, a lot of people consider meditation as pass/time for snowflakes, and need further nudging and poking to begin to recognize the importance of trying to follow their thoughts and questioning where they come from and where they go? And how often are you updating that data-set?

    A healthy mid/waypoint between Zen meditation and simply changing your mind about something revolves around the language that you use and how you use it. The introduction of a few modifications to a language can produce results similar to those gained from meditation, they can affect a new expanded awareness, from the individual psychological sense of self…to the ontological social-cultural sense of reality. Every time we hear, think and speak we are confronted with the paradox of Language vs. The Equation.

    The symbol systems we use to communicate our message and those we leave out are worthy of meditation. Meditation, to return to the theme, or some kinds of meditation…aim to reach beyond language and bridge the ideological gaps, to move towards experiencing things as they actually are: perpetually changing, decentralized, incomprehensible. And invoking compassion to fill the holes of what cannot be known.

    “Language is a virus from outer space.”–William S. Burroughs.

    In all seriousness and sincerity, we should all spend a moment to meditate on Coronavirus and where possible, try to follow our thoughts, our hopes and our fears. Try to track them to where they originate, where is the source of those thoughts and where are those thoughts going to…and now? This process of self-analysis and listening to your own head and heart, once in touch with your own mind-body system, can be shifted to cast judgement on others or external signals from…out there. Hopefully with compassion due to understanding the process you’ve just been through, like solidarity, not a choice but duty when faced with the incomprehensible, the uncertain and the indeterminate of a global pandemic turning endemic. We must search for that common ground between all human beings, such as to wish them a happy healthy life, for example. Wish well, wish hard, wish often. Practice practice practice.

    The global coronavirus brings complexity and chaos to the existing complexity/chaos/disorder inherent in subject-object duality, underlying most division and confusion around the world, the roots of disinformation? To repeat, never give up trying to understand that which you currently do not, experiment, research, measure, study, and in equal measure…both on yourself and on others…the internal and external infinite flux of beingness. Man, and women, is the measure of all things, somebody else said.

    To conclude: If you want to fight for your future and live in a healthy, well-informed community of self-owning ones, consider starting by following your own thoughts, where do they come from, where do they go? Then if your feeling brave, begin to use the same logic and reason, the same thought tools to break down the news headlines and the gossip down the pub and the WHO guidelines and each and every message communicated down to the very last pixel, or phoneme.

    “Free your mind and your ass will follow…”–Funkadelic.

    Thanks for reading, stay safe.
    Love all the people!

    –Steve Fly

    [DISCLAIMER: I make no claim to expertise in meditation or spiritual practises. I’m more of the “do what thou wilt to find compassion for others” persuasion. As we head into a spiritual and material crisis, I recommend a linguistic hazmat suit, neurolinguistic relativity and multi-model agnosticism to nudge us towards a compassionate, interconnected, co-operative global village.]

    http://www.hilaritaspress.com/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzogchen

    https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2020/03/journalists-toolbox-studying-coronavirus/

    A song I wrote called THOUGHTS, based up some of the above.

    Occupy by Dr Marshmallow Cubicle