Sustainable Finance

Stefan Brunnhuber

The Third
Culture
The Impact of AI on Knowledge, Society
and Consciousness in the 21st Century
Sustainable Finance

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for Finance, Banking and Insurance WU Vienna, Vienna, Austria
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Stefan Brunnhuber

The Third Culture

The Impact of AI on Knowledge, Society and
Consciousness in the 21st Century
Stefan Brunnhuber
Trustee of the World Academy of Art and Science
Mittweida, Germany

ISSN 2522-8285 ISSN 2522-8293 (electronic)

Sustainable Finance
ISBN 978-3-031-48112-3 ISBN 978-3-031-48113-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48113-0

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I dedicate this book to
my wife
Stephanie.
I am grateful for her endless
compassion, love
commitment and spirit.
Preface

The traditional ‘two cultures’ view (S. P. Snow) distinguishes between the sciences
and the humanities. The sciences include physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics
and engineering. Their main interest is in exploring natural laws and applying them
to real-life problems. Meanwhile, the main goal of the humanities, including disci-
plines such as philosophy, history, linguistics and qualitative sociology and psy-
chology, is to interpret the world and attain a deeper understanding of our history,
cultural activities and psyche. The wisdoms that these two cultures offer—respec-
tively, explanation and understanding—are separated from each other, with little to
no interaction or mutual comprehension. However, over the past two decades, and
for the first time in human history, a new, third culture has appeared on the historical
battlefield. This new culture, rooted in new technologies, not only pursues its own
form of rationality but also supports advances in the original two cultures, which will
further loop back into society, doubling the world in digital form and eventually
deepening and expanding our individual and collective consciousness so that we can
see more and do better. Furthermore, research and development are destined to
become truly transdisciplinary, paving the way for a form of integrated knowledge
that we could call ‘one science’. These new technologies will reveal the intercon-
nectedness, vulnerability, interdependency and boundaries of the world and funda-
mentally redefine the human species’ position in the twenty-first century: not a
conductor leading the orchestra, but a single string player within it. We are entering
a second Renaissance, in which these new technologies become powerful integra-
tors. A second Renaissance that will redefine transhumanism, the concept of singu-
larity, the garbage in, garbage out effect, the black box dilemma and much more
besides. And that will eventually give rise to new forms of consciousness based not
on biochemical signals, but on copper wires and lithium chips. These new machine
intelligences will change the world and force us to realise: we are no longer alone.

Mittweida, Germany Stefan Brunnhuber

December 2023

vii
Contents

1 Finding the Narrative: Shifting East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 The Questions behind It All . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 Respecting Boundaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2 Finding Potential Integrators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.1 A Reformed Financial Sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.2 Altered States of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.3 ‘Metastability’ and the Logic of Fractals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3 The ‘Two Cultures’ Debate and the Logic of Scientific
Revolutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.1 The Two Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.2 The Structure of Any Scientific Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.3 Understanding Complexity 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4 Towards Three Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.1 Examples and Best Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.2 The Ghost in the Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
5 On Consciousness: The Evolving Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
5.1 Defining Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
5.2 On Science and Sapientia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
5.3 The Inverse Pyramid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
6 Towards a Third Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
6.1 The Phenomenology of a New Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
6.2 Garbage In, Garbage Out and the Black Box Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
6.3 Filling the Gap: The Technological Singularity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
6.4 The Broader Spectrum of Our Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

ix
x Contents

7 Being Human in the Twenty-First Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

7.1 The Deficient Species and Its Crutch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
7.2 The Middle Dimension and the Gap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
7.3 The Ladder and the String Player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
8 Questionary: An Adjusted Turing Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
9 The Dawn of a New Integral Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
About the Author

Stefan Brunnhuber is Medical Director, Chief Medical Officer and Professor for
Sustainability and Finance at Mittweida University of Applied Sciences (Germany).
He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA), a trustee of
the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS) and a full member of the Club of
Rome. He was scientific advisor to the EU Commission (2009), member of the
Lancet Commission (2021–2022), founding member of Alma Mater Europeae
(2011) and senator (elected 2015–2020) of the European Academy of Sciences
and Arts (EASA). He has served since 2022 on the German Federal Government’s
Sustainable Finance Advisory Committee.

xi
List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Different stages of societal aggregation: horizontal and vertical

evolution . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Fig. 1.2 The dawn of a new era: towards integral consciousness . . . . . . . . . . 12
Fig. 2.1 The money system serves as an attractor and integrator . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Fig. 2.2 The traditional way to do it—end-of-pipe, redistributive
approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Fig. 2.3 Overcoming polarities: triangulating the system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Fig. 2.4 Rethinking finance: CBDCs and CBCSs can provide the liquidity
and leverage to fund, manage and hedge our commons . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Fig. 2.5 Thinking outside the square box—the nine dots puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Fig. 2.6 Push and pull factors leading to altered, more integral states of
mind . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . 27
Fig. 2.7 Non-curricular building blocks for an altered mindset . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Fig. 2.8 The circle of creativity . . . .. . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . 32
Fig. 2.9 The human cognitive reserve—the larger the better . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Fig. 2.10 Towards metastability: altered states of consciousness that
integrate opposites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Fig. 2.11 The logic of fractals—a scale-independent isomorphic state . . . . . . 36
Fig. 3.1 From risks to uncertainties to unknown unknowns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Fig. 4.1 Not breaking but expanding the hermeneutic circle . . . .. . .. . . .. . .. . 49
Fig. 5.1 The seven-stage inverse pyramid: from observation to wisdom . . 63
Fig. 5.2 An updated version of Descartes’s vision:
symbolic-representational—constructivist—connectivist . . . . . . . . . . 64
Fig. 6.1 An uncertain future: will AI and deep learning follow an
exponential or a logistic curve? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Fig. 6.2 The unknown collective mirror effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Fig. 6.3 Matching the human and the digital mind: the black box and
garbage in, garbage out problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

xiii
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 6.4 (a) Breakdown of nine forms of human intelligence compared

with the average. (b) Breakdown of different forms of human IQ
complemented by their digital counterparts (level 2, see
explanation in the text). (c) Digital IQ replaces and extends
human capacities. The arrows represent digital augmentation
on the one side and replacement on the other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Fig. 6.5 The three levels of technological singularity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Fig. 6.6 The developmental logic of AI and datafication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Fig. 6.7 One Science 2.0: the ‘third culture’ and the new scientific
revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Fig. 6.8 Metastability and triangulation . . . .. . .. . . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . 78
Fig. 7.1 (a) Animals are fully adapted to their environment. (b) Humans
are a deficient species, never fully adapted to nature (blue) and
always requiring crutches (yellow) to fill the gap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Fig. 7.2 Timeline: as the gap gets bigger, the more that is needed
to bridge it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Fig. 7.3 Humans at the centre of the universe (a); evolution not as a
ladder (b) but as overlapping, asymmetric circles (c), with
humans playing the marginal, fragile but essential role of a string
player . .. . .. . .. . .. .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 92
List of Tables

Table 2.1 Money is not neutral—six elements of the current system that
are damaging our future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Table 2.2 Outline of a green transition plan . . . . . .. . . . .. . . . . .. . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . 22
Table 2.3 Differences between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of religion 27
Table 3.1 One culture and the two cultures (science and humanities):
explanation and understanding .. . .. . .. . .. .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. .. . .. . .. . 40
Table 4.1 Digitalisation as the third culture: transcending, augmenting and
integrating ‘understanding’ and ‘explanation’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Table 5.1 The 8 Ss for the formation of any consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Table 6.1 The triple strategy for survival: storage, replication and
self-improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Table 7.1 A combination of more (A) and less (B) specific features
determines what it is to be human . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Table 8.1 Are you speaking to a human? And is your interlocutor
conscious or not? . .. . .. .. . .. .. . .. . .. .. . .. .. . .. .. . .. . .. .. . .. .. . .. .. . .. .. . 96

xv
List of Boxes

Box 1.1 The emergence of new technologies . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. .. . .. . 10

Box 2.1 The web without a weaver paradox: DeFi and CeFi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Box 2.2 A case study: rescuing the Amazon with a CBCS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Box 2.3 What we should avoid: self-exemption .. . .. . .. . .. . .. .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 34
Box 2.4 Mind-altering psychedelic drugs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Box 3.1 The emergence of a third culture: a first look . . .. . .. .. . .. . .. . .. . .. .. . 41
Box 4.1 Dealing with the shadows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Box 4.2 Two sides of the coin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Box 5.1 The universality of hardware-independent consciousness . . . . . . . . . . 56
Box 5.2 The many possible foundations of consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Box 5.3 Science and sapientia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Box 6.1 The features of intelligence .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 72
Box 6.2 The third culture . . .. . . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . . .. . .. . 78
Box 7.1 Complexity explained . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . .. 86
Box 7.2 On anthropomorphism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Box 7.3 The ladder and the string player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Box 8.1 A revised Turing test .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 96
Box 9.1 The five Ps . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . 100

xvii
Chapter 1
Finding the Narrative: Shifting East

1.1 Introduction

This is not yet another book about artificial intelligence (AI). It is a book about the
impact of a new technology on our minds, our consciousness, our society and our
common future. New technologies equal new perceptions, new practices and new
understandings. As we invent new tools, we recreate and mirror ourselves in their
image. This was true of the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel. It was
true of Newtonian mechanics, which views the world as a machine, and systems
theory, which views everything as a network. And it will be true of AI, deep learning
and datafication too. The underlying question I seek to address is: what is it to be
human in the twenty-first century, at the dawn of new technologies—AI, big data, the
Internet of Things? What makes the human species distinctive and successful, and
what gives us a selection advantage, has less to do with individual competitiveness,
sophisticated tool use, walking upright and abstract, analytical forms of thinking
than it does with our capacity to tell each other credible stories. In most cases, these
stories do not refer to the objective natural world around us, but rather to a second,
human-made, cultural reality. These narratives are mainly about God, death, tech-
nology, laws of nature, money, power and politics.1 It is precisely the shared belief in
these fictional stories that enables humans to coordinate and collaborate on a large
scale. Human history has shown that it is better to have a false story than no story at
all. Narratives, even when they are false, serve to stabilise both the individual and the
collective psyche. They operate like a crutch, supporting a human species that is
never fully adapted to nature. Only time will tell whether the fictional story about the
future validates current human activities, and whether it is self-fulfilling or self-

1
The more expansive a narrative becomes over time, the more powerful it is. This apparent paradox
derives from the fact that until an alternative story is found, we are forced to give the victims and
losses resulting from this initial narrative a sense of ultimate purpose. This is also true of powerful
narratives concerning the impact of new technologies on human societies.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 1

S. Brunnhuber, The Third Culture, Sustainable Finance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48113-0_1
2 1 Finding the Narrative: Shifting East

negating. Moreover, as long as we do not have an alternative story to tell ourselves,

or a different mental frame to explain the world around us, any threat to our sense of
coherence will override scientific knowledge. In short, our current frames will
prevail over facts. Accordingly, the story in this book is not about alternative
facts, but about a new technology that will reframe our human mind and conse-
quently reshape our society and our common future.
So what is the metanarrative for the twenty-first century that will allow us to
regain a selection advantage? This narrative will need to account for the human
condition, with all its uncertainties, multiple timelines and unknown unknowns, as
well as the transitory character of all existing solutions, which are failure-tolerant
and always open to revision. It will also need to highlight the potential we have as
humans rather than the problems and the risks—the opportunities rather than the
obstacles. If we have the right narrative, one that allows us to better understand the
impact of AI on our minds, our society and our common future, it can provide a
powerful tool to tackle the major challenges we are facing in the twenty-first century.
Every technology—whether it be the needle or fire, the steam engine or a bread
knife—is neutral in and of itself; it is we humans who determine whether it will be
beneficial or dangerous for us. The same is true of the rapid advances in big data, AI
and deep learning. And just as every technology has its roots in nature, AI algorithms
also depend on natural laws, materials and properties.
I define culture as a set of collectively shared habits, customs, beliefs and norms
characteristic of, and approved by, a society at a certain period in time, which allows
its members to better communicate with each other and express their identity.2
Language, arts, technology, formal institutions and science are some examples.
The term ‘third culture’ refers to a subset of cultural agreements concerning how
we do research, the impact of technology and the ways we gain information and
knowledge about the world and achieve wisdom at the end. It is characterised by the
unprecedented advances in science and technology we are currently witnessing. This
third culture transcends the established humanities and sciences and is mainly
determined by the insights and possibilities that arise out of the new technologies
that are being developed. It will not only revolutionise findings in the humanities and
sciences, but contribute to a new way of thinking, acting and making decisions and
to a new era that we might call a second Renaissance.
The first Renaissance (1400–1600) was characterised by a critical reception of the
ancient Greek and Arabic tradition. This period, on the one hand, saw an unprece-
dented blossoming of human creativity and prosperity, but, on the other, led to
further fragmentation of our knowledge.3 The second, human-centred Renaissance

2
Wikipedia (2023a).
3
The Western human-centred approach does have its advantages: it acknowledges humans’ unique
ability to reflect upon, question and revise their agendas, dogmas and worldviews, and to constantly
correct and recorrect their path in a way that is disruptive and failure-tolerant. This approach has
allowed humans to overcome Malthus cycles, brought about a revolution in education, science, the
arts, architecture, technology, music and crafts, and transformed government constitutions, trade
and politics, while at the same time differentiating and dissociating our knowledge about ourselves
1.1 Introduction 3

will not be a repeat of the first, but will rather seek to integrate our fractured
knowledge and wisdom about the world and contribute to a larger, more holistic
consciousness than any previous human era. It will also involve critical reception of
and dialogue with the Eastern traditions of Taoism and Buddhism.
Current Western thinking seems less prepared than these Eastern traditions to
fully grasp the challenges and developments we are facing in the twenty-first
century, since we consider our minds and selves to be, firstly, separate from nature
and, secondly, material things located in the brain or constituting some ultimate
substance. This Western worldview tends to divide up an otherwise connected
reality. At a societal level, we thus see entities such as states, communities and
corporations; on an individual level, we see isolated egos with singular, utility-
maximising behaviours. In the classical Greek model, there is a ruler who rules the
world from the outside, an Alpha and Omega and a primary cause that precedes
every existence. But today our mind and consciousness is more like a self-organising
network, a dynamic process, a web without a weaver, which is constantly changing
and has no ultimate cause or creator.4
Eastern thinking seems better equipped to understand and process what our mind
and consciousness are, and so can better comprehend the foundations on which our
society is built and better predict our common future and the impact of new
technologies. It sees the world as interrelated at both a societal and an individual
level. Everything is connected to everything, everywhere and at all times, and this
interconnectedness is not random or chaotic.5 It does not happen by chance, but is
structured around various complementary pairs, whereby chaos and creation, rules
and randomness, silence and sound, fullness and emptiness, humility and mastery,
irregularity and proportionality are intertwined.6

and the world around us. But Western universalism has lost its superiority, not only in this general
and philosophical sense, but also in a very practical, social, moral and political one. This is
especially true when it comes to understanding and explaining public affairs, the human mind
and the impact of new technologies.
4
From a Buddhist perspective, the entire world is an illusion (Maya), in which we are constantly
identifying ourselves with objects, desires and ideas, simultaneously creating transitory successful
adaptations and harmful deceptions that ultimately cause suffering. These multiple mental identi-
fications eventually create the narratives we use to explain the world around and within us. If we
were able to fully disidentify from the world, we would overcome all illusions and would finally see
reality as it is: mental states such as ‘full emptiness’, ‘oneness’, ‘nirvana’ and ‘the one taste’ bring us
as close as possible to reality as it truly is, beyond any distorting conceptualisations. It may sound
paradoxical, but the new technologies we explore in this book share the property of allowing us to
both disidentify from and more fully engage with the world.
5
The interconnectedness we are now experiencing in the Anthropocene era is similar to the ‘ecology
of mind’ first described in detail by Bateson (1972). It is only through interconnectedness that there
can be any meaning. Isolation and abstraction are a universal impossibility, since everything is
interconnected with everything else. Strictly speaking, we could study anything through the lens of
any discipline.
6
Western traditions have similar sacred geometric proportions (such as the ‘golden rule’), which
establish an intrinsic link between beauty, proportion and goodness. In Greek philosophy we find
the expression kalos kagathos, which means ‘beautiful and good’. It suggests that if we want to do
4 1 Finding the Narrative: Shifting East

Another lesson the West can learn from the East is the importance of proportion
(i.e. balance and harmony). Identifying the right proportions in things can reveal the
natural patterns that we use to create and understand everything in nature and
society. From a historical perspective, the concern with identifying right proportions
is older than any type of analytical or critical thinking. Identifying proportionality
enables us to move from a merely analytical, linear, siloed, divided and dualistic
worldview to one that incorporates and pursues wholeness, oneness and unity. The
purpose of proportion is to reconcile or resolve polarity into some kind of unity,
wholeness or greater being. The well-known yin–yang symbol represents this kind
of proportion. It is linked to the cyclicality of coming and going, appearing and
disappearing. The more aware we become of this cyclicality, the more balance can
be achieved. And each yin (the passive, nurturing, female principle of the universe,
characterised as sustaining and associated with the earth, dark and cold) also
contains some yang (the active male principle of the universe, characterised as
creative and associated with heaven, heat and light) and vice versa. If we were to
rebalance our thinking about politics, economics, science and technology, we would
tap into a deeper understanding of the shadows we cast, the voids we ignore and the
ignorance we are pursuing.
Another lesson we can learn from the East is how to reconcile such opposites. The
fundamental constituents that make up our reality are equal and interdependent and
serve to balance each other. They can exist only in relation to one another. Identi-
fying the proper pairs of opposites is not always a straightforward intellectual
endeavour. Picking the wrong pairs could lead to the wrong conclusions and have
ruinous consequences. Although right/left, female/male, up/down are easy to grasp,
there are other forms of opposites where the correct interrelations are more difficult
to establish. For example, humility and self-efficacy, freedom and responsibility,
coherence and strategy, control and devotion, modesty and generosity, tolerance and
discrimination, efficiency and resilience are frequently overlooked yet powerful
complementary opposites on an archetypal level that hold particular relevance for
understanding any new technology, as we will see. So if we wish to shift to a more
Eastern way of thinking, identifying the right pairs is important. I define comple-
mentarity as a relation between two elements that are incompatible yet mutually
required, that do not cancel each other out but are both needed to describe an event, a
thing or a state of affairs. Examples include location and momentum, energy and
time, wave and particle, physical and mental, form and content, substance and
process.7

the right thing and make the right decisions, we need to search for and be exposed to the beauty of
correct proportions.
7
See Bohr (2008), Meyer-Abich (1965), Walach (2010).
1.1 Introduction 5

Such complementary pairs8 should not be abandoned but rather contained. Both
elements are valuable and meaningful in themselves, but also complement each
other. It is rather like the oscillation of a pendulum, or a battery that has both positive
and negative poles. Failing to understand these polarities renders us incapable of
harnessing the power or ‘electricity’ of life. Thinking in terms of polarities therefore
promises to be a powerful tool that will allow us to see and do more. Eastern thinking
provides the ingredients to transcend dualism and materialism, generates oneness
and connectedness and opens up a balanced, proportional and sound path for us to
follow, which will ultimately lead to a unified world.9
This is even more important given that new findings and developments emerging
out of AI, deep learning algorithms and the overall process of datafication—such as
the Internet of Things (IoT), the global superbrain, quantum computing and
robotics—are all operating in a manner more attuned to an Eastern mindset than a
Western one. It is therefore not surprising that Taoism and Buddhism in particular
promise a deeper understanding of what is going on in the digital technosphere in the
twenty-first century and can provide a more substantial answer to the question: what
is it to be human in the twenty-first century? We will see that humans are always a
deficient species, never fully adapted to their environment, who require crutches to
survive. The third culture that we will explore in this book can provide unique and
unprecedented ways to achieve such adaptation. We will come to realise that
evolution is not a ladder with the human species at its top, but rather is made up of
infinitely many overlapping circles, with humans playing the role of a marginal
string player alongside millions of other species and living beings.
Starting with C. P. Snow’s thesis of ‘two cultures’ (science vs humanities) and
Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, I will explain how the fourth Industrial
Revolution,10 which we are currently living through, has for the first time in
human history provided the ingredients for a ‘third culture’ and a ‘second form of
scientific revolution’, which is having a significant impact on our brains, our minds
and our society as a whole.

8
Humans have developed three ways to identify complementary pairs. The first, perception,
involves observing and mimicking nature; a second, analytical thinking, originated in the prehis-
torical practices of shamans, which were then further systematised in Greek, Arabic and Chinese
culture; a third, contemplation, is rooted in the mystical practices that cut across all religions.
9
Whenever technological progress or innovation occurs in one field, a potential shadow is cast, or a
void created, in another. Western thinking excels at celebrating progress and disruptive innovation,
but has great difficulty recognising the voids resulting from this progress. For example, the
invention of the printing press had a negative impact on oral memory, driving a car has a negative
impact on walking and consequently upon our health, digitalisation has had a negative impact on
jobs and so on. In short, whenever we progress in one area, we also ‘regress’ in another. From an
Eastern perspective, the divided view of the Western Enlightenment is seen as a form of avidiya or
ignorance.
10
The first Industrial Revolution (1820) was characterised by mechanisation, and in particular by
the invention of the steam engine; the second (1900) by mass production and electrification; the
third (1970) by automation and computer technology; the fourth (2000) by the IoT, AI, deep
learning, big data and autonomisation. See Schwab (2017).
6 1 Finding the Narrative: Shifting East

This book borrows its title from two predecessors. The first is John Brockman’s
The Third Culture (1996), which brought together cutting-edge contributions from
dozens of eminent researchers working in disciplines as varied as cosmology,
evolutionary biology, genetics, particle physics, computer science and systems
theory. These contributions articulate a new, scientifically informed way of thinking.
However, Brockman widens the gap between the different cultures, rather than
providing a comprehensive argument to bridge or transcend it. As he puts it, ‘men
of letters’ typically ‘comment on comments’ rather than providing new insights.
A new perspective on the third culture argument was given by John Kagan’s The
Three Cultures (2009), which distinguishes between the sciences, humanities and
social sciences. In Kagan’s view, the three cultures differ along multiple axes,
including their vocabulary, their aesthetic values, their contribution to national
interests and the economy and their sources of data and evidence, which in turn
lead them to different notions of what is valid, right, coherent and ‘objective’. The
present book will set out a third kind of argument about the third culture that is
almost entirely distinct from these two predecessors. I will show that AI, deep
learning and datafication in general have the potential to extend findings in the
two traditional cultures of science and the humanities and provide a more integrated,
holistic view on ourselves and the world around us. This will also shift our con-
sciousness and our society as a whole. What makes this third culture unique is that, if
it is implemented the right way, it can serve as an integrator of information,
knowledge and wisdom that will further enhance our collective consciousness and
allow us to pursue a better future. I identify the third culture as one of three potential
integrators, alongside the financial and monetary system and psycho-technologies
capable of altering our minds: in particular, contemplative practices, the use of
psychedelic drugs and adapted educational agendas. These new tools and technol-
ogies will provide additional insights that allow us to further refine the concept of
singularity and the debate on transhumanism. I will also offer an alternative answer
to the problems of the black box effect of AI and the garbage in, garbage out
phenomenon. And I will provide an adjusted Turing test that will help readers to
better understand what it means to be human in the twenty-first century and to make
sense of this new technology and its contribution to the larger picture of a second
Renaissance.

1.2 The Questions behind It All

In a letter from 1610, Galileo complained that the local authorities refused to look
through the telescope and acknowledge that the Earth is rotating around the Sun and
not the other way round. Galileo argued that every time we advance into new
domains of knowledge and possibility, whether through inventions or discoveries,
humans need to use technology and adopt a new mindset in order to see better and
gain a deeper understanding of the world around and within us. If we had refused to
look through Galileo’s telescope, we would still think that the Earth is the centre of
1.2 The Questions behind It All 7

the universe and that the Sun rotates around it. Or consider Plato’s famous parable of
the cave: humans are chained up in a cave, watching shadows that are cast on the
wall by objects moving behind them. The shadows are misconstrued as reality itself,
but in fact are merely a distortion of it. Reasoning—metaphorically represented by
leaving the cave or at least becoming aware of the limitations of our perspective—
can allow us to overcome this illusion and better understand the world around and
within us. And technology is one powerful tool to help us do so.
In 1712, barely a hundred years after Galileo’s letter, Thomas Newcomen
invented the steam engine and the first Industrial Revolution began. Nowadays,
we know that any technology that is invented can have either good or bad effects,
can be either beneficial or harmful, depending on how people use it. Under the
regime of the fossil energy age, humans have been able to triple life expectancy,
reduce child mortality by a factor of ten and poverty by over 90% and create
unprecedented wealth and prosperity far beyond the Malthus cycles that determined
human life on this planet for centuries if not millennia. But at the same time, the
technology that began with the steam engine has created massive social and ecolog-
ical externalities that the planet and the people of the twenty-first century are
suffering from. Species loss, global warming, water stress, land degradation and
wars are just the most obvious examples.
The situation in the twenty-first century could not be more similar to the one
Galileo bemoaned. Just imagine if we refused to look at the findings that have
emerged out of deep learning, datafication or AI. Might that mean we risk
overlooking that the world is fully interconnected?11 Might we fail to understand
that this kind of technology can reveal galaxies we would never imagine even
existed? Or can speed up computing to analyse nanoparticles humans could never
comprehend with their native minds even if they lived 500,000 years? Or can tap into
literature from the entirety of human history in less than a second in order to answer a
question? And what does it mean, for good and for ill, to have all these potential
technologies at hand and to be human in the twenty-first century?
Every technology is ambivalent. Take a bread knife, for instance: we can use it to
cut bread, or we can use it to kill someone. This is true of the Haber–Bosch process,
nuclear reactions and DNA coding, and it is true of the new technologies emerging in
the twenty-first century, such as AI, big data, nanotechnology, robotics,
cryptocurrencies and blockchain algorithms. We as humans decide how much use
we make of each discovery and invention in order to create the society we want to
live in. Technology and research follow natural and physical laws. But their imple-
mentation does not: it follows social agreements and contracts, approvals and

11
One way to look at this is as follows: the amount of water and air on this planet has remained
constant throughout history (Berner and Berner 2012). Every time we breathe in—and each of the
eight billion human beings on the planet does so about 17,000 times a day—we breathe in the same
air as all previous generations. The same goes for every glass of water we drink: we are drinking the
same water as every previous generation. We have always been connected, and in the future we will
be even more connected. The difference from the past is that we can now measure, scientifically
evaluate and influence the degree of connection. See Ford (2016), Utke (1998).
8 1 Finding the Narrative: Shifting East

falsifications, majority votes, best guesses, opinions and hypes. And science and
technology themselves progress unevenly. Some fields develop faster than others,
constantly producing transitory findings that are always open to revision.
Viewed from this perspective, the question of what society we want to live in
always comes first, and the question of what technology we use second. We could
conclude that anyone who claims that technology alone can solve all problems either
does not know what technology can do or what the real problems are, or perhaps is
ignorant on both fronts. But determining the impact this new technology will have
on what it is to be human in the twenty-first century is tricky, because we humans
evolve over time, as do the societies we live in and the technologies we invent.
The main task of any science is not to eliminate uncertainty, since uncertainty is
part of our reality, but rather to solve specific problems. Doing so does not cause
uncertainty to disappear, but opens up space for new questions and problems that
require new solutions. This process is never-ending. In most cases throughout
history where science has offered fundamental insights, this has not come out of a
rational, analytical process of linear logic, but rather has depended on irrationality
and intuition. This dark side of science has been the major source of most human
discoveries, for instance those of Heisenberg, Einstein, Mendel and Darwin.12 And
anyone who has ever attended a traditional academic conference can confirm that
such gatherings never create one big new idea, but have killed a lot of them. If
Einstein is right that we cannot solve the problems of today with the tools and
measures that caused them, then we will need to think outside the box. As the Nobel
Prize winner and physicist Max Delbrück puts it, ‘When you do science, you
potentially change the world much more than Caesar or any of the great military
or political figures ever did, and you can sit very quietly in a corner and do that.’13

1.3 Respecting Boundaries

One of the major limitations of our brains and minds is that we lack the natural
ability to perceive exponential patterns of growth. Doing so requires additional
intellectual effort. The results of exponential growth will often be far greater than
most people would intuitively expect. If a tree grew by 2.7 mm each year, then after
just twenty years it would be 485 km tall. If an economy grew by 10% per year, its
baseline would double every 7.2 years. And doubling one cent every day would
leave us with 5.3 million dollars after just thirty days. Humans have a hard time
anticipating such curves and making appropriate decisions in response. And we can
observe that exponential growth is happening in almost all domains. Moreover, the

12
See Fischer (2014, 2015).
13
See Delbrück (1978).
1.3 Respecting Boundaries 9

Fig. 1.1 Different stages of societal aggregation: horizontal and vertical evolution

exponential growth itself is growing exponentially,14 leading to a transformation so

rapid it is almost vertical, and which is changing our entire state of societal
aggregation. The situation is analogous to water, which can be solid, liquid or
gaseous. Each time water changes its state of aggregation, the molecules are
rearranged in a different way, rather than new ones being added to it. The same is
true of our societal states. Rather than adding new components, we instead need to
rearrange the existing components in a more sensible way. Figure 1.1 illustrates this
idea. In a first-tier evolution, we select by trial and error, selection and mutation,
which is horizontal and cyclical. In a second-tier evolution, we change in a
non-linear, disruptive and vertical manner. And the development can occur in both
directions: up and down, breakthroughs and breakdowns, to the benefit or the
detriment of humankind. Any vertical transformation with super-exponential growth
is a challenge, but it also creates super-exponential opportunities and potential to
overcome constraints and limits.
Most thinking takes place within a specific conceptual framework, and most
(if not all) scientific discoveries emerge out of this rule-based conceptual thinking
being challenged and overcome. It is when this happens that irregularities, ambigu-
ities, anomalies and paradoxes are resolved and new connections and insights
become visible. The mathematician William Byers calls this mental state ‘deep
thinking’:15 oppositions and irregularities can be integrated, making complementar-
ities, fractal connections, creativity and new learning possible. If we replace our
outdated technology or our government but our thinking remains the same, the new

14
Kurzweil (2005) claims that there is a ‘law of accelerating returns’, such that the process of
change is itself exponential.
15
Byers (2014).
10 1 Finding the Narrative: Shifting East

technology or new government will be just like the old one. A shift in consciousness
towards more mindfulness, grace, courage and humility would allow us to regroup,
resolve some of these ambiguities and develop a new paradigm, a new way of
thinking and a new way of dealing with the challenges ahead.
Looking back at history, we can observe that the first Enlightenment (1685–1815)
and the first Renaissance (1400–1600) derived their momentum and impact from
differentiating and separating the world. Religious beliefs and secular life, economy
and ecology, state and market, collective and individual are some examples. But we
now appear to be entering a second Enlightenment and a second Renaissance, whose
primary impulse is not to further compartmentalise and separate the world around us,
but rather to integrate, incorporate and embrace it at a higher level of consciousness.
Some scholars call this process the ‘great convergence’, running in parallel to the
‘great acceleration’ in which humans are now sitting in the driving seat and deter-
mining the course of our planet. Politics, science, economics, religion and reasoning
in general are being reconciled into a greater whole. One of the most powerful
integrators in this process is the new technologies that are emerging right now.16 The
‘great convergence’ relies on the human capacity for creativity and understanding,
which enables us to synthesise things rather than further separating them. In short, it
is about integrating the Good, the Beautiful and the True rather than emphasising the
differences between them.

Box 1.1 The emergence of new technologies

New technologies, inventions and discoveries are always ambivalent. Most
research findings are not the result of a rational process, but rather emerge from
science’s intuitive, irrational ‘dark side’.

By 1820, most of the ingredients for change were already in place, with one
exception. Humans had invented the wheel and the printing press and learned how to
make fire. There were already nation states, a banking system and a tax system.
Mathematics, astronomy, religion, music and art as well as knowledge of human
anatomy were already established. Copper, iron, wheat, meat, fruit, vegetables,
bread and butter were also available. Most of the elements of daily life as we
know it today were in place. Despite this, people’s living conditions had not changed
significantly for centuries, if not millennia. Human life remained the same from birth
to death, and societies as a whole evolved according to what is known as the Malthus
cycle: economic growth was driven solely by demographic factors. But around 1820,
some thirty years—just a single generation—after the French and American revolu-
tions, something amazing happened that set in motion an entirely new process,
unlike anything seen before in human history: the social empowerment of the

16
There are three additional integrators. On an individual and interior level, our spiritual practices;
on a collective level, our commonly shared values; and on a systemic outer level, the architecture of
the financial system. All three have the potential to fundamentally change our minds, our con-
sciousness and the future course of humankind for good or for ill. See Brunnhuber (2021b, 2023a).
1.3 Respecting Boundaries 11

individual to use their critical mind, creativity and new forms of social cooperation.
This human-centric mindset changed everything. And we are currently witnessing
another comparable change in our mindset, for which most (if not all) of the
ingredients are already in place.
In this book, I explore the fundamental points of contact between AI, big data and
deep learning, on the one hand, and our human consciousness, on the other. I look at
the role of traditional science and the humanities, and the paradigm shift that is
resulting from new findings and developments in computing. Against the backdrop
of this ongoing debate, I explore links to the Turing test, transhumanism and the
concept of singularity and discuss how computer technology can help us understand
what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. As we will see, this involves
different forms of learning and acquiring knowledge. I conclude that we may be
witnessing the dawn of a ‘third culture’ that could potentially mark the beginning of
a new integral wisdom.
The first Axial Age (2,500 years ago), the first Renaissance (1400–1600) and the
first Enlightenment (1750–1820) were all about increasing differentiation between
the outer and inner worlds and further compartmentalisation and specialisation of
our knowledge. The second Enlightenment or second Renaissance that we are now
witnessing primarily involves integrating the results of this differentiation process.
In this great convergence, politics, science, religion, thinking and action come
together and are reconciled. The three most powerful integrators in this process are
information technology, spiritual practices and the financial sector. Figure 1.2 illus-
trates this along a historical timeline.
 12
1

Fig. 1.2 The dawn of a new era: towards integral consciousness

Finding the Narrative: Shifting East
Chapter 2
Finding Potential Integrators

The modern age began by disintegrating, deconstructing and questioning our reality.
Rather than taking that reality for granted, people explored alternative ways to look
at the world and improve our quality of life. They began studying the laws of nature
and the rules of government, and invented the printing press, the steam engine and
antibiotics. In the twenty-first century, humans will start integrating all the knowl-
edge and information we have gathered over the centuries. But integrating knowl-
edge is a fiendishly difficult problem. It does not come for free or happen
automatically. Integrating fragmented information or isolated opposites often
requires a third party or entity. For example, if we want to see the world in three
dimensions, we need the left and the right eye, and we need the orbital cortex to
integrate the two into a 3D picture of our reality. An integrator must be able to
transcend differences in political or ideological agendas, to increase our awareness
and perception and/or to reconcile different empirical findings and information into a
greater whole. There are three candidates that could potentially serve as integrators.
(a) A reformed financial sector: In order to integrate the allocative power of a free
market system with different forms of state intervention and to reconcile the
different political agendas of autocracies and open societies, the involvement of
a third agent may be needed. The most prominent candidates are central banks
and regulators. I will show that upgrading the mandate for regulators can have a
significant impact and allow us to fund the gap in common public goods, to
unlock and de-risk trillions of dollars of private-sector capital and to overcome
the oppositions between different political agendas.
(b) Altered mindsets: A second integrator of fragmented knowledge and worldviews
can be found in the findings of cognitive science and ancient wisdom traditions.
Humans are able to alter their mindset using a set of contemplative tools,
educational agendas and spiritual practices (including the use of psychedelics).
All three methods have, independently of the others, the capacity to alter our
minds, but using two or three in concert can increase their effect on our

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 13

S. Brunnhuber, The Third Culture, Sustainable Finance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48113-0_2
14 2 Finding Potential Integrators

consciousness and allow us to achieve a metacognitive state that opens us up to a

greater wholeness.
(c) New technologies and the third culture: A third potential integrator comprises
new technologies that are able to integrate and enhance findings in the sciences
and humanities and provide the platform for a ‘third culture’ that will further
enhance and integrate our knowledge about ourselves and the world around
us. Whereas the first two integrators are explored in the next few sections, the
third integrator is the topic of the remainder of the book.

2.1 A Reformed Financial Sector

Our financial market is one of the few international institutions that most, if not all,
actors operate within. Despite their different political agendas, every country—
whether it is an open society or an autocracy, a developed economy or a failed
state—operates within the existing monetary system. Even terrorists, the black
market, fraud, illicit transactions and corruption depend in some way or another on
a functional global financial market. In this general sense, the international global
capital market, its associated institutions (IMF, WB, central banks) and its monetary
policies determine the rules of the game for fiscal policy, real economic activities,
non-profit commitments and household spending. They act like an attractor for the
good and the bad. For as long as we overlook the crucial role of the monetary system,
we will fail to understand its relevance and potential integrating function.
Traditionally, money has been excluded from the equation that can be represented
as a triangle between the real economy, the social world and the environment. Doing
so paints a misleading picture: the monetary system has always been there, acting
like an attractor at the core of our society. Figure 2.1 illustrates this.

Fig. 2.1 The money system serves as an attractor and integrator

2.1 A Reformed Financial Sector 15

However, money is not a thing or a natural law, but rather a convention, a social
mechanism, a club rule and a set of legal codes that we can change as we see fit. Its
current configuration runs counter to the goal of a sustainable future and prevents us
from integrating the market systems of the real economy, its systemic social and
ecological externalities and the dynamics of the financial market. There are six core
elements to the current configuration of the monetary system, which are outlined in
Table 2.1 below.

Table 2.1 Money is not neutral—six elements of the current system that are damaging our future
Pro-cyclical amplification of Banks provide and withhold credit lines according to the
boom and bust cycles requirements of the real economy and amplify the cycles,
instead of counteracting them
Short-term perspective A discounted cash flow enforces short-term decision-making
Compulsory growth A compound interest rate forces states, companies and
households to grow to pay back their debts
Destruction of social capital Instead of encouraging trust, solidarity and cooperation, fear,
greed and parasitic competitiveness are enforced
Widening income/wealth Current incentives support financial assets rather than real
inequalities economic needs, further increasing the income and wealth gap
Multiple rebounds Efficiency gains are cancelled out by increased consumption
that further hinders progress towards a sustainable pathway

If we had a different monetary system that respects the achievements of the

existing financial architecture but remedies its flaws, we might have a powerful
tool to integrate a dissociated financial market and create a healthier, wealthier
planet. Traditionally, we mainly redistribute money from the private sector in
order to fund, manage and hedge public goods and global commons.1 However,
this ‘end-of-pipe’ approach is slow, administratively demanding, small in scale and
insufficiently targeted to meet the challenges we are facing in the Anthropocene era.
Figure 2.2 illustrates this:

1
The argument of ‘effective altruism’ is a prominent example. A hedge fund manager could pledge
their income to a deworming campaign and do far more good than if they quit their job and became
an organic farmer. But this approach operates within the existing financial system and assumes that
it functions properly, when the reality is that it is flawed from the ground up. In short, we need to
upgrade the system to meet the requirements of the twenty-first century, instead of merely working
with or around the existing system.
16 2 Finding Potential Integrators

Fig. 2.2 The traditional way to do it—end-of-pipe, redistributive approach

The large orange arrow represents the entire value chain. Any time we produce
something, we are contributing to species loss, climate change and land degradation,
which in turn incur additional costs as we must manage the resulting damage. 79% of
the value chain is still dependent on fossil energy.2 At the same time, the entire
economy is affected by the shadow economy (grey box), which pulls all economic
activities in the wrong direction. The small blue arrow represents transfer payments
(philanthropy, taxation, official development aid (ODA) or green impact invest-
ment). In this standard approach, we first generate social and ecological externalities,
then create a compensation mechanism and finally fund global commons.

2
Assuming a 3% global growth rate, the total conversion rate (TCR) from fossil to green energy
would need to be roughly 5% per year to override the growth dynamic. Any time we build a wind
turbine or install a solar panel, we still generate income and revenue that is 79% dependent on fossil
energy. This is one reason why we need to upgrade (parallelise) the currency system to incentivise
green investments and generate multiple positive second-round effects to help bring about a
sustainable future (Brunnhuber 2021b, 2023a).
2.1 A Reformed Financial Sector 17

The UN-SDGs as a Case Study

In New York in 2015, world leaders signed up to a future roadmap with seventeen
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) intended to benefit people, planet, prosper-
ity, peace and partnership. Most of these SDGs focus on common goods such as
clean air, universal access to healthcare, education and biodiversity. These goods are
not exclusive and should be accessible to and enjoyed by everyone. All the goals
have enough scientific evidence, technological know-how and political consensus
behind them to be achieved, and they apply to the entire planet. But meeting the
goals will be expensive, requiring approximately 5 trillion USD/year over the next
fifteen to twenty years to finance.3 Our global gross domestic product (GDP), which
includes all goods and services, is approximately 100 trillion USD/year. The con-
ventional way to finance social and ecological projects globally has been by
redistributing the money remaining at the end of this pipeline. Historically, the
world community has committed to spend 0.7% of global GDP—roughly 700 billion
USD/year—to finance common goods. Other than the Scandinavian countries, the vast
majority of the world has never attained this 0.7%. But even if all countries were to
meet that commitment, it would realistically not be enough to finance our future.
Approximately eight to ten times as much funding—equivalent to 5 trillion USD out
of the 100 trillion USD global GDP—is required to meet the social and environmental
challenges we face. Withdrawing 5 trillion USD from the ongoing economic process,
even in a gradual manner, would lead to a global recession. Withdrawing this amount
of money would reduce the capacity of the private sector to transform itself in line with
the UN-SDGs. In fact, it is impossible to finance our future solely through monetary
redistribution. In addition, the stability of the financial system itself is an impediment
to sustainable financing. Over the last forty years, the financial system has become
more unstable, with over 425 banking, monetary or currency crises; and every
consecutive crisis leaves us with a higher debt load and greater expenses, amounting
to more than 10% of GDP. Because of this, the world community puts great effort into
repairing, stabilising and refunding the monetary system to maintain the status quo.
This limitation in our financial system hinders any technological or political attempts
to make the world a better place. Is there a different way to finance our future?
Traditionally, there are at least five steps we can take to fund, hedge and manage
our commons. (1) Philanthropic pledges, ODA, grants and bonds; (2) private equity,
including venture capital, seed investments, early-stage investments, SME-transition

3
One prominent example is the funding gap for the 160 million micro, small and medium-sized
enterprises (MSMEs), which amounts to over 5.2 trillion USD globally. Three-quarters of MSMEs
do not even have access to bank loans. This is a sign of capital market inefficiency. High interest
rates, complex administrative procedures and a lack of collateral mean millions of firms cannot
access adequate liquidity. Open banking, where the financial institution has direct access to the
balance sheet (data in motion principle), can reduce costs, increase trust and liability, generate
bottom-up alternative data and allow secondary debt market scaling (mortgage-backed securities).
See People-Centered Internet (2023).
18 2 Finding Potential Integrators

funding and large-scale institutional investments; (3) multiple taxation schemes;4

(4) private–public partnerships (PPPs), including synthetic asset-backed securities
(ABSs) and state guarantees; (5) regulatory efforts, including ESG taxonomies,
prioritising investments according to their public return on investment (ROI)5 and
multiple financial disclosure directories. However, if we take all these measures
together, there will be a financial funding gap, which leaves us unprepared to fund
our commons, to unlock and de-risk private capital and to manage social and
ecological externalities. There is increasing evidence that an adjusted monetary
aggregate is required to provide adequate and conditioned liquidity so as to finance
future shocks, hedge associated systemic risks, prevent bank runs and enable a
secondary preventive strategy.6 There are two major facilities, namely CBDCs
(central bank digital currencies) and CBCSs (central bank currency swaps), that
could play a crucial role in filling the financial gap we are facing.7 The following
sections will look at them in more depth.

Systems Thinking and DeFi vs CeFi

Systems thinking can give us an out-of-the-box solution to generate the funds

needed to finance global common goods and to de-risk and mobilise trillions of
private-sector liquidity at the same time: (a) central banks would be given an
adjusted monetary mandate to create and issue the required liquidity using
blockchain technologies. Alternatively, (b) properly regulated corporate initiatives

4
This includes VAT, a harmonised international corporate tax, an enlarged tax base, reduced tax
expenditures and an earmarked ‘sin’ tax. However, any taxation scheme will have multiple
downsides: it will require international agreements, it will incur high administrative costs and its
steering capacity will be limited due to its regressive nature. Moreover, companies do not have the
money to fund their own transition. In an optimistic scenario, global taxation schemes could
generate around 250–350 billion USD per year. Taxation is part of the solution, but cannot be the
entirety of the financial transition plan.
5
If we start prioritising the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development, using an ROI analysis and
taking less spectacular but highly efficient and highly preventive measures, we can do more good
than by simply providing 175 billion USD in ODA per year. Such measures include investing in
education (ROI 1:30), maternity and postnatal health (ROI 1:87), anti-malaria campaigns (ROI 1:
48), improved nutrition (ROI 1:33), child vaccination (ROI 1:48) and skilled migration (ROI 1:20);
stimulating trade and specialisation (ROI 1:7 for OECD countries and 1:99 for LDCs); and
introducing a sin tax on nicotine, sugar and/or alcohol (ROI 1:23). These latter measures could
save 4.2 million lives per year and an investment of 35 billion USD/year would have a social benefit
of 1.7 trillion USD. See Lomborg (2023).
6
Primary prevention refers to preventing harm or damage in the first place; secondary prevention to
addressing the future costs of harm or damage that has already occurred; tertiary prevention to
management of a chronic state. With regard to the challenges of the Anthropocene (climate change,
pandemics, species loss, etc.), we are confronted with a secondary preventive scenario: we have
caused the damage already. Now we have to manage the potential future costs associated with that
damage. An extended monetary aggregate that gives priority to fiscal policy can serve this purpose.
7
See Atlantic Council (2023).
2.1 A Reformed Financial Sector 19

(cryptocurrencies) or complementary communal currencies (such as local exchange

trading systems (LETSs) or regional money) would receive a mandate to issue
additional liquidity. These funds would be earmarked and used exclusively to
finance SDG-related projects. This electronic liquidity would run through different
monetary channels than those of the conventional system. We would then have a
supplementary currency operating in parallel to the conventional monetary system,
generating the 5 trillion USD equivalent needed annually for the next twenty years.
Research on optional parallel currency systems has shown dozens of positive effects.
For example, this new technology could be used to create and channel targeted
financial liquidity to millions of people in Africa through their mobile phone
network. In India, the existing microcredit banking system could be used to transfer
additional liquidity to millions of its citizens. Any dollar spent and invested through
these green, parallel channels would have the potential to reduce or even eliminate
absolute poverty globally within less than one year. The electronic format would
prevent corruption and fraud, as each transaction would be transparent and public.
Once the currency became an eligible means to pay taxes, government agencies
would have additional liquidity to rebuild public infrastructure such as nurseries,
parks, hospitals and libraries. And the millions of NGOs globally would finally
receive the funding they need to do their jobs properly. This targeted additional
liquidity would enhance education and provide access to universal healthcare that
would otherwise never materialise. It would reduce resource depletion and clean up
the air, preventing negative effects on our planet and on public health. We would
eventually unlock the untapped potential of millions of unemployed people by
creating new jobs, which would in turn unlock the creativity of billions more people.

Box 2.1 The web without a weaver paradox: DeFi and CeFi
The term ‘decentralised finance’ (DeFi) refers to business models that allow
transactions without intermediaries such as banks. A token, created, for
instance, by an initial coin offering (ICO) and linked to a blockchain-based
smart contract, provides the additional liquidity needed for the transaction. At
present, DeFi business models have a volume of 42 billion TVL (total value
locked) and remain a niche product. Fully decentralised finance is a myth.
Creating and maintaining any DeFi models will always require some sort of
hierarchy. All DeFi models to date have failed because they (often surrepti-
tiously) involved some sort of centralised finance (CeFi). The crypto stock
exchange FTX, the stablecoin TerraUSD and the crypto bank Celsius are
recent examples.8

Instead of further decentralising the financial and monetary system, we should

start by upgrading it.9 And instead of looking for the smallest common denominator

8
Meyer, Welpe and Sander (2022), EUBOF (2022).
9
Brunnhuber (2021b, 2023a).
20 2 Finding Potential Integrators

between state and market, economy and ecology, we should introduce a third party,
namely regulators and central banks. This idea of triangulation, adapted to
digitalisation, is one of the cornerstones of any integrator.10 If we take this approach
one step further, we will end up with a more competitive marketplace and a stronger,
more resilient state at the same time. Figure 2.3 illustrates this:

Fig. 2.3 Overcoming polarities: triangulating the system

The Ultimate Step: Central Bank Currency Swaps (CBCSs)

Central bank currency swap lines are one of the hidden monetary and financial
champions that could allow us to meet the funding and hedging needs of a global
commons. Technically speaking, a currency swap line is a political agreement
between two countries’ central banks to exchange their domestic currencies with
each other. Swap lines can be limited or unlimited, bilateral or unilateral. For
example, the Eurozone has established unlimited swap lines with the US dollar,

10
The Nash equilibrium refers to a situation where, given a certain set of rules, opposing agents
reach a position in which they are no longer able to collaborate without harming their own position.
In order to overcome this lock-in effect, the agents must change the rules of the game or introduce a
third party accepted by both agents. Due to multiple lock-in effects, we currently find ourselves in a
Nash equilibrium on a global scale: North versus South, state versus market, environment versus
economy, and so on. In order to transcend these oppositions, we need to introduce a third party that
fundamentally changes the rules of the game and maximises the outcomes for all agents involved.
Regulators and central banks could play that role. For Nash’s original account of the eponymous
equilibrium, see Nash (1950) or Brunnhuber (2021b).
2.1 A Reformed Financial Sector 21

allowing it to settle the face value of currencies.11 Theoretically, any country with
the sovereignty to print its own money can do so without limit. If a country is
indebted in a foreign currency and is facing imported inflation, bilateral or multilat-
eral currency swap lines can be used to tackle the challenge.12 To see precisely how
this might work, let us take the Amazon rainforest as a case study.

Box 2.2 A case study: rescuing the Amazon with a CBCS

Brazil has debts in foreign currencies (mainly USD) equal to 30% of its GDP,
or over 600 billion USD annually, and is facing an inflation rate of over 8%. At
the same time, Brazil is the owner of the Amazon rainforest, which is a critical
tipping point for the global climate (global common good). Currently, Brazil is
deforesting the Amazon at a rate equivalent to 2,000 football fields per day.
The land is used for further resource extraction and palm oil/soya production.
This creates thousands of domestic jobs and meets the demand of the Global
North. However, deforesting the Amazon comes at the cost of enormous
negative spillovers that harm all humanity. It has been calculated that the
Amazon has a face value of about 250 billion USD.13 Economically speaking,
Brazil cannot afford not to burn down the Amazon. However, a central bank
currency swap (CBCS) line could fundamentally alter the playing field. If the
IMF, Fed and ECB were to provide Brazil with a conditioned currency swap
line allowing it to convert a portion of its own currency (the real) into USD or
euros, Brazil would be able to pay back its external debts, reduce imported
inflation and convert the deforestation industry into a green industry in which
rangers and indigenous peoples are paid to preserve the Amazon instead of
burning it down. This would further provide a positive spillover for the Global
North, as the global temperature would be stabilised, the tipping point would
be avoided and the costs of disaster management due to wildfires, floods,
heatwaves, etc., equal to about 5 to 7% of GDP in OECD countries, would be
reduced over time. A monetary agreement along those lines would be a
non-regret approach for all parties involved. The central banks’ balance sheets
would expand14 and our palm oil would become more expensive to reflect the
social and ecological externalities.

11
The IMF’s special drawing rights (SDRs) are a special case. Over 95% of the 450 billion SDRs
(as of 2021) are used by OECD countries and MICs.
12
Access to bilateral swap lines is mainly restricted to OECD countries. 99% of least developed
countries (LDCs), 95% of landlocked developing countries (LLDCs) and small island developing
states (SIDSs) and 70% of middle-income countries (MICs) have no access to such agreements. See
Perks et al. (2021).
13
Banerjee et al. (2022), Silva et al. (2022).
14
To be more precise: the global currency market is the largest and most liquid capital market, with
around 7 trillion USD equivalent in turnover per day (!), including all assets and facilities. Injecting
an additional 250 billion USD equivalent to buy up the Amazon over one to two years will not have
an impact on the face value of any major currency.
22 2 Finding Potential Integrators

Green Financial Transition Planning

The aim of a financial transition plan is to provide the liquidity, financial assets and
resources necessary to achieve certain targets as efficiently and effectively as
possible. The targets themselves are generally set by political and societal consensus.
The UN-SDGs are examples of such targets. They require an additional 5 trillion
USD of liquidity and financial assets per year to be achieved over the next ten to
fifteen years. The 5 trillion USD annually would be the compound result of addi-
tional, conditioned liquidity, assets and measures taken to achieve the UN-SDGs
within the next two decades. The greater the systemic risks, the greater the role for
public bodies and a monetary aggregate. So compiling the fourteen components of
this green financial transition plan will be a political decision. Table 2.2 outlines an
initial proposal.

Table 2.2 Outline of a green transition plan

Key principle Characteristics
1. Prioritisation Prioritising based on ROI, KPIs and empirical evidence
2. Regulation Taxonomy, procurement (no excess profits, conditioned, mission-
based), shadow economy and informal sector, multiple disclosure
directives
3. Reform Institutional reforms involving the World Bank, IMF, public
development banks and the European Investment Bank
4. Philanthropy Operating as grants, loans or bonds, often conditional, crowding-
out effects
5. Taxation and VAT, earmarked sin/corporation/wealth/international tax, off-
subsidies shore sites, expanded tax base, tax spending, growth-dependent,
administrative overload, reduced steering capacity
6. Credit lines On-balance-sheet (credit to bank), off-balance-sheet (special pur-
pose vehicles), MBSs (mortgage-backed securities)
7. Debt restructuring Maturity, interest rate, debt-to-X swaps, Paris Club
8. Private equity Impact funding, venture capital, start-up (co-)financing, cherry-
picking, short-termism, risk-averse, liability
9. Hedging risks Credit spread, longevity swaps, foreign currency derivatives, infla-
tion swaps, asset class risk stratification, CDS, interest rate
10. Private–public Asset-backed securities (ABSs), advanced commitment strategy
partnerships (ACS), public bank endogenous credit creation (PECC), public–
private equity share (PPES)
11. Special drawing Providing additional liquidity to fund/hedge and manage public
rights goods, access for lower and middle-income countries (LICs, MICs)
12. Central bank digital Upfront (direct) loading, funding, hedging, managing commons,
currencies de-risking private sector involvement, e-wallets
13. Central bank cur- Conditioned currency converter for LICs and MICs to tackle
rency swaps imported inflation and finance the UN-SDGs
14. Quantitative easing Zero coupon perpetual facilities, preventing bank runs,
non-defaultable loans (NDLs), operates like a monetary anchor
5 Trill USD/y
2.1 A Reformed Financial Sector 23

What would be the effects on the conventional economy? The annual 5 trillion
USD equivalent of added liquidity would not harm the conventional economy. In
fact, the opposite would be the case. Corporate and state planning, production and
price levels would become more robust and reliable with a longer-term vision.
Furthermore, it would stabilise the economic cycle of booms and busts. Despite
arguments to the contrary, we need much more financialisation (finance/GDP).
However, that financialisation must be designed in a more democratic and humane
manner, so as to protect the planet while increasing wealth for two-thirds of the
global population. If there is a single most important variable besides technology,
governance, behavioural changes and demographics when it comes to changing the
world, it is new, digital financial engineering instruments. That would be a real
game-changer and could be set in motion in less than six months, if the six largest
central banks agreed to create a parallel, optional, complementary currency.
Redesigning the financial system would not solve all our problems, but it would
make them easier to address. This, or some similar mechanism, is the missing link to
achieving better outcomes in terms of people, prosperity, peace, planet and partner-
ships. If we want to think outside the box and consider an alternative approach, our
financial system will be pivotal.15 Figure 2.4 illustrates the entire monetary upgrade
that will be necessary:

15
For further details, see Brunnhuber (2021b, 2023a) and the WAAS initiative ‘The TAO of
Finance’: https://new.worldacademy.org/tao-of-finance/.
24 2 Finding Potential Integrators

Fig. 2.4 Rethinking finance: CBDCs and CBCSs can provide the liquidity and leverage to fund,
manage and hedge our commons. (SDGs: Sustainable Development Goals; EGD: European Green
Deal; CBDCs: central bank digital currencies; CBCSs: central bank currency swaps)

Besides the financial sector, which can serve as one integrator, there is a second
powerful tool that has the potential to change our world: namely, altering our minds.
That is the topic of the next section.

2.2 Altered States of Mind

Most thinking happens within a pregiven conceptual framework, and most (if not all)
scientific discoveries occur when this rule-based conceptual thinking is questioned
and transcended. Irregularities, ambiguities, anomalies and paradoxes are dissolved
2.2 Altered States of Mind 25

and new connections and insights become visible.16 If we replace outdated technol-
ogy or our government but our thinking remains the same, the new technology or
government will, in effect, be no different from the old one.17
A shift in our consciousness towards greater mindfulness, grace, grit and detach-
ment would allow us to regroup, resolve some of these ambiguities and generate a
new paradigm, a new way of thinking and a new way of managing problems. The
human brain is not only the most adaptive organ but also the most (self-)deceptive.
Frames and biases, shadows and echoes shape our reasoning and can be maladaptive
and reductive.18 In order to overcome these biases and flaws, we need to think
outside the box. The nine dots puzzle, which is well known in cognitive science, can
illustrate this. To solve the puzzle, you have to connect nine dots using four straight
lines without lifting your pen.19 We can only do that if we think outside the box,
which in this case means thinking outside the square made up of the nine dots. The
puzzle and its solution are shown in Fig. 2.5 below.

Fig. 2.5 Thinking outside the square box—the nine dots puzzle

Any altered state of mind could potentially open up more integral meaning and
morals, wisdom and understanding, realness and connectedness. Enlightenment
means overcoming self-deception and alienation. In order to alter our state of
consciousness, we have to change not only our frames and way of looking at the
world, but also our very selves. About 30–40% of the population have experienced
altered states of consciousness in some form or another over the course of their lives.

16
Byers (2014) calls this state ‘deep thinking’: opposites and irregularities can be contained, so that
complementarities, fractal correlations, creativity and new learning can occur.
17
One of the most powerful frames is the ‘confirmation bias’: we favour information that confirms
our existing beliefs and values. Some scholars consider it one of the most misleading aspects of
human thinking; see Oswald and Grosjean (2004).
18
It should be noted that when it comes to bullshit and fake news, the truth is irrelevant; the liar
knows the truth.
19
Lung and Dominowski (1985).
26 2 Finding Potential Integrators

In these states, we can learn not only to reason differently, but to do things
differently. Grasping different levels of reality can lead us towards greater oneness,
wholeness and coherence. Following this path is not a matter of intellectual belief,
but rather requires processual, performative and participatory knowledge and
engagement in different practices. There are three main ways20 such a shift can be
achieved: through contemplation, through education and (to a limited degree)
through psychedelic drugs.

Contemplative Practices

Religion is, on the one hand, the single main cause of suffering, war and social
exclusion. But on the other, it is the single most important tool for deliberation and
salvation. To better understand this paradox, we must distinguish between the
exoteric and esoteric aspects of religion. The exoteric aspect comprises institutional
structures, authorised texts and rules. It provides a narrative that interprets the world
around us in a certain way, with each religion offering its own perspective. The
esoteric aspect, meanwhile, relates to the inner, subjective perspective. It can provide
a common ground of timeless truth and offer tools and practices to transform our
personal consciousness. These mystical traditions are based on a participatory
wisdom that encourages each individual to pursue a specific contemplative practice
that goes beyond simply reading a sacred text or following a certain dogma or rule.
Purification techniques (e.g. fasting, silence, reduced sensory input, via negativa,
hermitism), repetitive mantras, mindfulness exercises (e.g. yoga, full-body submer-
sion), martial arts, kōans, rosaries, etc. support and encourage an ongoing process of
disidentification. Instead of reading, discussing and interpreting sacred texts and
commandments, which teaches people to interpret the world and the self in a certain
way and stabilises their worldview, the contemplative practices that exist in all
religions encourage people to disengage from their own beliefs and emotions in
order to alter their mindset and foster altered mental states that transcend the
individual ego.21 Table 2.3 presents a summary:

20
Vervaeke (2020), Wilber (2022).
21
This includes post- and transpersonal mental states such as kindness, humility, grace, reverence
and gratitude. Terms for these altered mental states include ‘unconditional love’ (or unconditional
empathy, unconditional forgiveness), ‘one taste’, ‘nirvana’, ‘absolute emptiness’, ‘samadhi’ and
‘inner peace’.
2.2 Altered States of Mind 27

Table 2.3 Differences between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of religion
Religion: exoteric aspect Spirituality: esoteric aspect
Provides a narrative about the world Provides psycho-technological practices
Translational—horizontal Transformative—vertical
In-group experience Individual experience of oneness
Rules, great books, authorities Ongoing process of disidentification
Provides stability—hierarchy Transpersonal mental states
Determined by the past—history Pulled by the future—attractor

Since both aspects are necessary and common to all religions, they both need to
be upgraded and understood in greater depth in order to act as a potential integrator.
Whereas the outer, institutional aspect is partly broken, providing us with a false and
outdated narrative that is unable to integrate rational thinking and scientific evidence,
the esoteric aspect of any religion is intended to guide us and enable us to decode the
timeless truth they all share. Figure 2.6 below demonstrates the shift in our mindset
away from the ego-state.

Fig. 2.6 Push and pull factors leading to altered, more integral states of mind
28 2 Finding Potential Integrators

Why a Different Educational Approach is Needed Now More

than Ever: An Initial Exploration

Education is always ambivalent. On the one hand, it has to pass on accumulated

knowledge and experience to the next generation. On the other, it also needs to
prepare them for an unpredictable future and enable them to change the world. That
includes skills and knowledge, character formation and the ability to adapt and
become resilient in the face of the ongoing changes and asymmetric shocks that
characterise the Anthropocene era.
The challenge is that knowledge and information-based education has an average
shelf life of five years. In ten years, two-thirds of the companies we are supposed to
work for will no longer exist and 40% of our jobs may have been replaced by robots.
The current educational system was developed in the nineteenth century and it would
take thirty years to replace it.22 At the same time, educational interventions are one
of the few social interventions that have been shown to have a positive causal link to
happiness, longevity, economic growth, prosperity, democracy, number of children
and a sustainable future,23 with no significant negative side effects or externalities.
No other human intervention is capable of that. The more personalised our educa-
tion, the better. And, of course, it is crucial that we do not stop learning: any time we
intentionally refuse to learn something, or delegate that task, our mind and brain will
learn to refuse to learn or to delegate learning. However, a Western perspective that
emphasises disruptive advances and groundbreaking innovations has difficulty iden-
tifying and responding to the losses that come with new technological inventions and
discoveries. Take the printing press: groundbreaking in terms of educating people
and teaching them how to read, but leaving a negative impact on orally transmitted
memory. Or take transport: the invention of the automobile improved our ability to
travel, but had a negative impact on our health. Digitalisation has increased effi-
ciency, speed and knowledge production, but left us with numerous negative side
effects.24 In short, any time we make progress in one area, it will also bring with it
deficits and losses in another. The outsourcing of human qualities and capacities to
the digital technosphere is one example. Once we start delegating tasks to a
technology, we decondition our skills and lose the capacity to do those things

22
There is increasing empirical evidence of an input–output fallacy in education. The amount of
input (money, teachers, facilities, electronic devices) is only weakly correlated with output (crea-
tivity, productivity, well-being). We need to take a very different, far more radical approach to
education. See Brunnhuber (2017, 2021a).
23
See Lutz and Klingholz (2017).
24
This includes reduced attention span, lack of focus, reduced emotional, social and fine motor
skills, a propensity to addiction, reduced development of the prefrontal cortex and the impact of
loneliness, particularly in the evolving brain during the first two decades of life. Not to mention the
most obvious negative impacts: back problems (due to bad posture) and obesity (due to lack of
exercise). See Spitzer (2012, 2019) and the literature he refers to; Spitzer concludes that the higher
the investment in IT, the poorer the educational outcome. If we assume five billion smartphone
users with over six hours of daily use, we can expect a lot more problems to come.
2.2 Altered States of Mind 29

ourselves. This disability could be an advantage, as in the case of an excavator that

removes the need for us to dig holes ourselves, or a microscope that allows us to see
otherwise invisible microbes and develop antibiotics. In the case of AI and deep
learning, outsourcing becomes a thorny problem, as AI does almost everything
better than humans. But lifelong learning is one of the most important prophylaxes
against dementia and premature death.
What elements does an educational system need to cope with the challenges of the
twenty-first century? Every educational programme started with an aesthetic expe-
rience, a perception of something unknown, a peculiarity or a moment of questioning
and curiosity. Why do birds fly? Why does the sun set? How does money cause
inflation? What do these murals or texts tell us about prehistoric times? The rational,
cognitive, quasi-curricular part of education is just an intermediate product of this
endless process. Critical upbringing and education of each individual is key to
providing the essential groundwork for a common future. Education is not primarily
a rational process, but rather one in which we start exploring the wonders of the
world and asking the right questions. Every provisional answer we find will lead to
the next question. Rational information and curricular content is just a preliminary
product, which risks boring us if we do not move on from it. Instead, education
should be an endless chain of questioning, exploring, testing and falsifying. This
principle typifies Europe’s special approach to education, which started in the first
Renaissance some 400 years ago with Kepler, Bacon and Galileo.25 It is now
becoming clear that AI algorithms can do better than humans in most domains:
they can hack our brains and minds and predict our behaviour better than we
ourselves can. But although IT makes it easier to obtain and access information, it
is also associated with multiple negative side effects for the human brain and mind.
Skills and qualities that we will need in future, and that should not be outsourced or
delegated to, or replaced by, any digital device, are predominantly extracurricular
and transcognitive in nature.
Critical education should empower people, increase their intrinsic motivation,
foster curiosity, courage and confidence in their own critical and reflective thinking,
and point the way to what clinical psychologists call ‘individuation’:26 the process of
recognising oneself and living a coherent and meaningful life. Unconditioned
creativity and liminal existential experiences, the ability to be alone, humour,
renunciation and increased stress tolerance play a role. So too do mutual respect,
failure tolerance, a willingness to listen while others speak, self-management, self-
control and the ability to make decisions without a neurotic fear of making mistakes.
Then there is metacognition: humans are not microbes that reproduce indefinitely
and eventually destroy their own breeding ground. Rather, they are able to reflect on

25
The three Cs (creativity, cooperation and critical thinking) are key elements of the human capacity
to deal with complex situations, and ones that we should avoid digitalising. These transdisciplinary
abilities increase our resilience and will help us to cope with the challenges of the twenty-first
century.
26
Kast (2019).
30 2 Finding Potential Integrators

their thinking according to the motto: I think, but I am not only my thoughts.
Individuation also means developing more mature emotional patterns such as humil-
ity and patience, forgiveness and gratitude, trust and serenity, so that the next
disagreement does not descend into enraged, preverbal screaming and shouting. It
also includes the capacity for discipline, self-control and self-efficacy, a focused
attention span, resilience, emotional granularity, endurance and focusing, character-
building and self-coherence, fine and gross motor skills, role-taking, design thinking,
multisensory learning, curiosity and novelty-seeking, impulse control and embodied
cognition.27 In this context, it does not matter whether you take courses in astro-
physics, architecture or acupuncture, whether you study medicine, management or
mantra chants, whether you are interested in IT, indigenous peoples or Indian
ethnology. The basic skills mentioned here always apply. However, the opposite is
true, too. If education is focused solely on anticipatory adaptation to what the
economy supposedly requires—the collection of credit points, rote learning and
acquisition of well-known cultural achievements and techniques such as typing,
painting by numbers or copying digital text modules—this will likewise squander
the potential for an altered mindset capable of transforming the world.28 Figure 2.7
below shows the essential building blocks for a different educational agenda that
would help achieve that mindset.

Fig. 2.7 Non-curricular building blocks for an altered mindset

27
The list could be extended: singing, dancing, speaking several languages (despite the existence of
digital language programs), gardening and cooking (despite the existence of robot assistants),
playing musical instruments (despite the existence of digital audio).
28
Liessmann (2014).
2.2 Altered States of Mind 31

Currently, we are failing to tap humans’ full potential and creativity. Creativity is
not about happiness, fun, satisfaction or love, nor about wellness, wealth, success or
talent. It is about discovering the world in a singular, unique, unprecedented way.
You could be a talented doctor, lawyer, cook or teacher, but that will not necessarily
mean you are creative; you might merely be reproducing previously successful
behaviours. Creativity is about something new, and it is a potential that is present
in each of us. When I talk about creativity, I do not mean being a genius like
Einstein, Mozart, Rembrandt or da Vinci; I am talking about unlocking the creativity
of each and every one of the eight billion humans that exist, at every stage from
preschooling to higher education, 24/7, throughout our whole lives. Science cannot
tell us where human creativity comes from, but it can tell us how to help unlock
it. Creativity comprises at least four components:
Envisioning: The first component is the capacity to visualise, imagine and
conceive something that is novel and useful yet transcends our senses, facts and
data. When we use this capacity, we frame our questions differently, we reconnect
and recombine things and variables in a different way than we are used to, we
challenge our initial assumptions and our common and familiar thought processes.
We look for answers by asking different questions and paying attention to the inner
and outer world in a different way. Rather than training and optimising something
that is already well known, we envision something ‘outside the box’.29
Embracing: Creativity is about knowing one’s limits and integrating oppositions
and contradictions in a unique, genuine, individual way: from competition to
cooperation; from theory to practice; from asceticism to abundance; from extrover-
sion to introversion; from one discipline to another. Creativity occurs on the edges of
our familiar and traditional conceptual thinking, at the points where we feel a need to
contain ambiguity, complementarity, uncertainty and fuzzy logic and start to think in
parallel instead of linear and sequential terms. In short, it is about identifying
contradictions and opposites and, rather than resolving them, keeping them alive
in our consciousness until the solutions appear.30
Enduring: Having a good and complex idea is not enough. A third component
involves applying, enabling, enacting and realising these new ideas and thoughts.
That is a task for each individual, round the clock. And it requires a lot of discipline

29
Neurobiologists have discovered a phenomenon known as the default mode network (DMN),
which is most commonly active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at
wakeful rest, such as when that person is daydreaming or letting their mind wander, but it is also
active when they think about other people or themselves, when they are remembering the past or
when they make plans for the future. The creative mind is able to simultaneously live in a dream
state and concentrate on the outside world, which requires the ability to take mental distance from
what they are doing and maintain meta-awareness of the thoughts and ideas running through their
head. The network activates ‘by default’ when a person is not engaged in a task. We spend about
50% of our waking hours in this kind of ‘off-task’ mental state.
30
Creativity is linked to the ability to filter ‘relevant’ and ‘non-relevant’ when there is competing
information. We do not follow a closed algorithm, but instead an open, ‘failure-tolerant’ process. A
creative person is able to deal with their own inner dysfunctions (trauma, complexes, neuroses),
whereas talented people instead follow a tailored rule-based process and optimise a particular skill.
32 2 Finding Potential Integrators

and practice (one possible benchmark is the ‘10,000 hours of practice’ rule).31 It
requires a joy in work, a willingness to make mistakes and the passion to discover
new things.
Evaluating: The fourth component involves critical evaluation, with the goal of
increasing our knowledge and information. Through this evaluation, we come to
understand the attitudes and motivations, the habitats and conventions, the cultures
and contexts within which these new forms of enabled imagination come to life. This
requires a culture of failure tolerance, in which we admit we do not know enough and
must constantly deal with complex uncertainty. This approach relies on various
emotional traits and virtues: humility, grace, excitement and mindfulness, rather than
grandiosity or righteousness.32
The process of altering our state of mind will involve the circle of creativity,
which is enhanced through critical, out-of-the-box thinking, through playing and
dancing and disrupting our routines. Figure 2.8 below illustrates this circle.

Fig. 2.8 The circle of

creativity

In the best-case scenario, an open and critical educational institution—whether it

be a nursery or a university department—will not just seek to impart rational
knowledge based on historical analysis, field studies, experiments and readings, in
which we are essentially just looking in the rear-view mirror to understand the

31
Gladwell (2008).
32
What elements are needed to generate creativity in a group? 1. Rituals and rules that are supported
by the group; 2. Social sensitivity, which means role-taking and understanding others; 3. Treating
people fairly and giving them equal speaking time; 4. A ‘failure-tolerant’ atmosphere of respect and
trust in which people feel able to show weakness. It is interesting to note that the success of a group
does not depend on bonuses, IQ, technical equipment, specific institutional arrangements or
non-academic qualifications. See Woolley et al. (2010).
2.2 Altered States of Mind 33

future.33 Instead, we will look deep into each other’s eyes, knowing that we know far
too little, trust in our critical comrades-in-arms, look through the windscreen and
then set off together towards a more sustainable future.
To sum up: in the twenty-first century, as this third culture emerges, education
will need to be organised less around disciplines and more around psychological
skills and aptitudes, regardless of the topic we are studying. Figure 2.9 below
illustrates a different approach to education in the age of AI and deep learning,
through which we can learn to know each other better, increase our cognitive reserve
and become aware that there are qualities and tasks we should never delegate,
replace or outsource. On an individual level, it involves restorative sleep, stress-
coping techniques, a healthy diet, exercise, social support and a capacity for self-
efficacy and self-control. A person’s ‘cognitive reserve’ is what they need to cope
with the challenges of everyday life and to maintain good health and a critical
attitude over time. The figure below illustrates these various aspects.

Fig. 2.9 The human cognitive reserve—the larger the better

33
An alternative educational ideal derives emancipatory potential from a different source,
emphasising the importance of non-curricular factors such as the student–teacher relationship,
mindfulness exercises, sport, food, multisensory learning, silence, breaks, sleep hygiene, social
skills, fine and gross motor skills, multilingualism, emotional granularity, ambivalence tolerance,
resilience exercises, attention span, discipline and perseverance. These non-curricular factors are
often forgotten, underestimated or considered irrelevant, which hinders the development of critical
citizens and an open society. See Brunnhuber (2017, 2021a).
34 2 Finding Potential Integrators

We can take this argument one step further. Playing games, climbing mountains,
riding a bike, studying ancient history, playing an instrument, being involved in
politics, crafting things by hand (watches, say, or furniture), gardening, cooking—all
these activities could turn out to be a ‘human premium’, which will lead us towards
the ‘oral society’ Socrates called for over 2,000 years ago. The ultimate goal of
education is to increase personal freedom and responsibility. We should be in favour
of any technology that serves this goal.34
In other words: on a societal level, the challenge is whether we use this new
technology as a tool to benefit ourselves, or instead reach a social tipping point
where we become a tool for this new technology. In the latter case, we would risk
falling back to the dark ages, where rational and critical thinking was delegated to an
authority, such as the church or monarch, and we ended up with endless Malthus
cycles, sales of indulgences and irrational confessions and externalised our well-
being to a life beyond death.

Box 2.3 What we should avoid: self-exemption

We can outsource almost everything to machines, except our personal well-
being, our capacity for self-efficacy and self-control, our critical thinking and
the activities we do to maintain a healthy environment that enables all those
things. If we were to outsource those things, it would put us at risk of
developing dementia, getting sick or dying prematurely. Without creativity,
education is like handing a sealed letter from one person to the next without
anybody ever reading what is inside. The rule of thumb is: does it expand our
human capacity and well-being?

Psychedelic Drugs

Besides contemplative practices and a reformed educational agenda, there is a third

candidate that is able to alter our minds: psychedelic drugs.35

Box 2.4 Mind-altering psychedelic drugs

Psychedelic drugs (hallucinogens) can change our minds, the way we think,
our emotions and our perceptions (taste, smell, vision). They include LSD,
mescaline, psilocybin, ayahuasca, cannabis, ecstasy and ketamine. Over 13%

(continued)

34
AI can simulate rain, but that rain will not make us wet; it can simulate a meal, but that meal
cannot nourish us; it can simulate a companion, but not one we can have children with. That is to
say, AI can simulate almost everything, has surpassed the human brain and most of its functions and
will create a ‘conscious reality’ in parallel to and beyond our own.
35
CAMH (2023), Reiff et al. (2020), Bender and Hellerstein (2022), Sanz et al. (2022).
2.3 ‘Metastability’ and the Logic of Fractals 35

Box 2.4 (continued)

of the American population uses some sort of psychedelic, mainly in
microdoses for recreational purposes. Traditional, therapeutically supervised
use of psychedelics is often associated with extraordinary states of conscious-
ness, ‘ego death’ and mystical experiences of oneness or universal connect-
edness, open-mindedness, increased creativity and elevated levels of
consciousness.36

2.3 ‘Metastability’ and the Logic of Fractals

Integrators, whether they be the financial sector or tools for producing altered mental
states, must be able to overcome polarities and reconcile opposites in some way or
another. In the economic field, the opposites of state vs market, economy vs ecology,
collective vs individual are examples where a third agent is necessary. We have
identified the monetary field, regulators and central banks as potential candidates to
serve this role. The same is true for the mind. Instead of getting stuck in frames and
biases, we should explore psycho-technologies, contemplative practices and educa-
tional curricula that allow us to respect, reconcile and at the same time transcend
opposites. Contemplative practices and the use of psychedelic drugs allow us to alter
our minds to achieve a mental state that reconciles and transcends our thinking at a
higher, more integrated level. In short, we need to start thinking beyond binaries.
The common denominators of such integrators are that they upgrade the existing
system, encourage us to think outside the box, triangulate and reconcile opposites
and allow us to see more, do more and solve problems more effectively. Any societal
transformation, government decision, scientific finding or technological innovation
will remain cosmetic unless it is accompanied or embedded by a change in our
mindset. Figure 2.10 below illustrates this:

36
All three components (spiritual psychotechnics, education and psychedelic drugs) risk running
into the ‘individuality trap’, whereby we overestimate the personal and underestimate the societal
and systemic impact of transformational change. In addition, any individual approach depoliticises
transformational change and places the entire burden of change on the individual. See
Grunwald (2012).
36 2 Finding Potential Integrators

Fig. 2.10 Towards

metastability: altered states
of consciousness that
integrate opposites

Instead of doing the right thing in the wrong context, we should identify integra-
tors that help us do the right thing both at an individual, personal level and a
collective, systemic one. In other words, integrators should be scale-independent.
An upgraded financial system and a deeper understanding of psycho-technologies
are examples. And we will see later that AI and digitalisation can serve a similar
function. Meaning that regardless of whether we look into the nano or the macro
world, we should be able to identify similar features. These are what we call
fractals.37 A fractal (from the Latin fractus, ‘broken’) is a figure that remains the
same no matter how far we zoom in or out. Examples can be found in river basins
and stock markets, songs and paintings, lungs and blood vessels, galaxies and
clouds, crystals and snowflakes. Fractals can create and explain infinite complexity,
and this interplay between geometry, self-similarity and measurability will eventu-
ally collapse into oneness. In Fig. 2.11 below, the triangle is replicated and

Fig. 2.11 The logic of fractals—a scale-independent isomorphic state

37
Mandelbrot (1977, 1983).
2.3 ‘Metastability’ and the Logic of Fractals 37

recombined to create new shapes, leading finally to an apple tree. The underlying
figure, however, remains the same.
If we take this finding one step further, we can claim that any technology that
allows us to better understand, explain and represent the world and has the potential
to be an integrator should act like a ‘fractal’ and provide ‘metastability’. As we will
see later, AI and its spin-offs are doing just that. However, before we start exploring
the essence of the third culture, we need to understand what the two cultures are,
which is the topic of the next chapter.
Chapter 3
The ‘Two Cultures’ Debate and the Logic
of Scientific Revolutions

3.1 The Two Cultures

In 1959, the scholar and novelist C. P. Snow wrote a remarkable book that contained
his influential lecture ‘The Two Cultures’.1 His argument was that throughout
modern times, our culture has been divided into two. On the one hand, there is
science, which includes physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and engineering,
where the main interest is in exploring natural laws and applying them to real-life
problems. And on the other, there are the humanities, including disciplines such as
philosophy, history, linguistics and qualitative sociology and psychology, where the
main goal is to interpret the world and attain a deeper understanding of our history,
cultural activities and psyche.2 The wisdoms that these two cultures offer are
separated from each other, with little to no interaction or mutual understanding. If
a literary scholar specialising in Goethe met a scientist specialising in the theory of
relativity, they would have a completely different understanding of objectivity,
reality and truth.
A meeting between the two cultures would mark the beginning of a very
productive and creative period in human history. But they do not meet; they live
in different galaxies. At the same time, these ‘two cultures’ dissociate their knowl-
edge from reality, producing masses of statistically significant yet also often irrele-
vant findings and studies. And information becomes further disconnected from
knowledge in other disciplines. Any further cognitive specialisation means we risk
losing our understanding of the whole.
If we look more closely at these ‘two cultures’, we will find they essentially
represent two forms of rationality. Science, on the one hand, represents a more

1
Snow (2001 [1959]).
2
Even if these two cultures have been further differentiated into sociobiology, genetic engineering,
comparative anthropology, integral psychology, philosophy of mind, psychoneuroimmunology,
psychosomatics, statistical linguistics, etc., the split between the two remains present.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 39

S. Brunnhuber, The Third Culture, Sustainable Finance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48113-0_3
40 3 The ‘Two Cultures’ Debate and the Logic of Scientific Revolutions

instrumental, quantitative way of looking at the world, involving causal links, field
studies, figures, data and experimental interventions that attempt to explore and
explain the laws of nature indirectly. The humanities, on the other, are qualitative
and language-based, and provide a more historical and context-specific view, creat-
ing hermeneutic circles and seeking to understand the world. Explanation and
understanding are separate but interdependent and mutually complementary. Each
culture requires the output of the other: science needs the critical, value-based
narratives of the humanities, and the humanities need scientific findings about
natural laws and phenomena. It all started with one culture or one science, some
2,500 years ago, when critical thinking emerged and humans began to observe the
world, creating reproducible and falsifiable knowledge. Table 3.1 below summarises
the development from one to two cultures:

Table 3.1 One culture and the two cultures (science and humanities): explanation and
understanding
One culture Science Humanities
Critical thinking Instrumental Hermeneutical
Observational Experimental Interpretative and discursive
Reproducible Causal Linguistic and semantic
Falsifiable Explanatory Understanding-based
Cumulative Quantitative Qualitative

3.2 The Structure of Any Scientific Revolution

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn claimed in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions3 that there are two phases of scientific activity. Firstly, phases of
‘normal science’, when experiments provide findings within the framework of
existing, approved rules for problem-solving. These phases are like playing chess.
The rules of the game are not questioned but are already set, and we accumulate
knowledge within the bounds of those rules. The scientific community simply
accepts the given scientific paradigm. Secondly, these phases of ‘normal science’
are interrupted by ‘paradigm shifts’, when methodologies, worldviews and the rules
of the game are questioned. These paradigm shifts are triggered by new discoveries
and repeated anomalies which can no longer be accommodated by the old paradigm.
A shift in our thinking and modus operandi is required to cope with these new
challenges. The Copernican shift and Darwin’s theory of evolution are examples of
such shifts.
Paradigm shifts do not occur in linear, cumulative fashion, through mere falsifi-
cation of data or reinterpretation of existing findings. Rather, they are characterised
by their non-linear, disruptive, unpredictable nature. A paradigm shift can be defined

3
Kuhn (1970).
3.3 Understanding Complexity 2.0 41

as a social construct, where two things must happen at the same time to fundamen-
tally change the ‘disciplinary matrix’. First, there must be a change in praxis and
methodology—the rules of the game—that provides new information and insights;
second, a new perspective on the world must emerge that is better able to integrate
these new findings within a new methodology. In short, a paradigm shift forces us to
start both acting and thinking differently.4

Box 3.1 The emergence of a third culture: a first look

Over the past two decades, and for the first time in human history, a new, third
culture has appeared on the historical battlefield between the two incommen-
surable cultures. A culture that has the potential not only to pursue its own
form of rationality but also to fundamentally change the two traditional
cultures and unite them at a higher level, just as human thinking started in
prehistorical times millennia ago. It is the culture of digitalisation,
encompassing IT, nanotechnology, big data correlations, deep learning algo-
rithms, the IoT and so on. This culture of 0s and 1s is currently driving a
paradigm shift in our view of the world.5 Over the past two decades, a new
kind of scientific reasoning has emerged for the first time in human history.
This ‘third culture’, which transcends the divide between science and the
humanities, is triggering the new scientific revolution we are currently in the
midst of.

3.3 Understanding Complexity 2.0

In order to master the complexity of the twenty-first century, including all the
challenges and unknown unknowns that lie ahead, we need more than our native
critical thinking, Excel spreadsheets, pencils, Petri dishes and books. We need a third
culture that not only integrates the oppositions and complementarities of science and
the humanities, but transcends them and advances towards a greater whole. This
culture will also accelerate and enhance the progress of both the humanities and
science towards a deeper and larger gravity of consciousness. We are starting to see
more, things we would never have been able to see otherwise. Before we consider

4
Feynman (2001) argues that science is cumulative: it always adds and never subtracts something
from the world. Each answer that is given raises dozens of new questions, so that the scientific
process is never-ending.
5
Leibniz identified the binary of 0 and 1 as a way to explain the world as a whole, and called for
‘calculemus’—which means, roughly speaking, ‘let’s calculate, and then we can stop fighting and
arguing’. This binary coding allows us to link everything to an overall oneness (omnia unum). New
numbers will create new narratives and these new narratives, such as those of AI and datafication,
will then in turn create new numbers. This circular hermeneutic process is infinite and never-ending
(see Gadamer 1975; Dilthey 1922).
42 3 The ‘Two Cultures’ Debate and the Logic of Scientific Revolutions

the specific features of this third culture, we must first differentiate between risks,
uncertainties and unknown unknowns.
As we face a complex, non-linear future, we need to differentiate between three
forms of unknowns.6 Firstly, there are risks. Risks can be quantified, have a specific
statistical probability and are project-specific. We can put a price tag on them and
trade and hedge them. Once we have identified a risk, we can lose or win, and we can
choose to either cover or not cover the liability and responsibility. And we can try to
avoid the risk. Uncertainties, on the other hand, are intrinsic to any complex system.
They are not fully tradable, resist having any price tag applied and are not fully
amenable to statistical analysis and probability measures. Uncertainties never dis-
appear and require an entirely different kind of assessment.7 Finally, there are
unknown unknowns. These are events we did not even know could occur. On this
definition, pandemics, global warming and the impact of species loss are uncer-
tainties rather than risks. If we have to live with increasing uncertainties, we may be
forced to realise that we cannot anticipate everything and will have to come up with
prudent, failure-tolerant preventive measures that reduce the potential costs associ-
ated with these uncertainties. And once we have identified and differentiated the
different forms of the unknown, we can decide how to manage them.8 AI and big
data correlations cannot eliminate unknown unknowns, uncertainties or risks, but
they can help to transform unknown unknowns into uncertainties and uncertainties
into risks. This will allow us to put a price tag on identified risks, so that we can
hedge and trade them and find competitive private market solutions for them. The
reverse is true, too. The more uncertainties we are exposed to, the more we need
different financial engineering tools to absorb, hedge, fund and manage them. And
the more uncertainties we are confronted with, the more we need an altered mindset
and new technologies that enable us to integrate opposites and irregularities.
The data we generate in complex societies does not follow a normal statistical
distribution with a static average and does not allow any linear prognosis or
extrapolation into the future. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, we do not
have enough data for that kind of bottom-up aggregation; secondly, complex,
heterogeneous societies resist being modelled by data. Data can only be aggregated

6
Soros (2015), Fama and MacBeth (1973).
7
The vast majority of potential events we are facing have the character of uncertainties rather than
risks. Hedging and managing these uncertainties will require an emphasis on: (1) resilience over
efficiency; (2) regional over global; (3) preventive measures over managing damage; (4) collective
over individual actions; (5) modular and parallel over linear and cause-and-effect processing; and
(6) simple heuristic rules of thumb over endless checklists and Excel spreadsheets that we use in an
attempt to pretend we can control such uncertainties.
8
A vicious circle: inherent uncertainty in the financial sector translates into inherent instability in the
political and corporate sector, which further translates into fear and irrational choices that can be
measured in rises on volatility indexes in the stock, bond and currency markets. Major signs of this
inherent uncertainty include the shadow banking system (worth over 180 trillion USD in 2021), the
short-term repo market, soaring private debt, high-frequency trading and multiple rehypothecations
(multiple reuse of collaterals).
3.3 Understanding Complexity 2.0 43

and scaled if society remains a homogeneous sample.9 AI can help us to shift from
unknown unknowns to uncertainties, to identify fat-tail risks and fuzzy correlations
and to more adequately assess a complex world.10 Figure 3.1 below illustrates the
process.

Fig. 3.1 From risks to

uncertainties to unknown
unknowns. The scale is
logarithmic: the ratio
between the three categories
is roughly 1: 100: infinity

9
This is why public choice and rational choice theory, microeconomic analysis and experimental
approaches in economics are fundamentally flawed. Outside of global pandemics, the ‘aggregation
flaw’ between subject and system, between micro and macro, will still remain.
10
In future, it will be possible to use big data correlations to analyse real-time events captured by
sensors and cameras, based on simultaneous localisation and mapping algorithms (SLAMs), lidar
scanners and generative AI. This will allow us to build two- or three-dimensional maps, enable
better forecasting and predictive coding, reduce the subjectivity bias in data analysis and drive down
costs.
Chapter 4
Towards Three Cultures

For around three decades, we have been witnessing the emergence of a new
discipline that has the potential not just to build on the two cultures and their intrinsic
forms of rationality, but to transcend their complementarities. It could act as a new
general theory that triggers a new scientific revolution, enabling humankind to shift
our collective consciousness, attain even greater knowledge and better understand
the world and ourselves. Knowledge, information and understanding unlike any-
thing we have previously experienced in the evolution of humanity. In the process of
digitalisation, the world comes to be seen in terms of 0s and 1s, with correlations
rather than causal links being key.1 Consequently, the boundaries between the
biological and physical world around us, the economic and social spheres, psycho-
logical qualities and cultural practices, on the one hand, and the digital world, on the
other, are further blurring, which will lead to either dissociation (digital divide) or
further integration.2 This scientific revolution has the potential to be a great
converger and integrator. If the new technology is implemented in the right way,
taking account of all side effects and spillovers, AI and deep learning will integrate
our knowledge rather than dissociating or fragmenting it. This new general technol-
ogy would then be more like Prometheus, providing us with new tools, rather than
Pandora’s box, doing more harm than good. This point can be illustrated by some
representative examples.

1
There are no numbers in nature at first sight, but the human mind is able to generate them and use
them to better understand nature. The paradox we are confronted with at the beginning of the
twenty-first century is that humans—and the 0s and 1s in our minds—are part of nature too.
2
This development began on 12 March 1989 with the invention of the World Wide Web, which
would go on to revolutionise our communication. Tim Berners-Lee proposed a decentralised,
universally linked information system, including the first browser, the first server and the first
web. Whereas radio provided us with a unidirectional form of information and the telephone a
bidirectional one, the World Wide Web created a multidirectional network effect in communica-
tion. AI, deep learning, big data correlations and social media are simply spin-offs of that
foundational invention. (I am grateful to Gerhard Fettweis for his very helpful remarks on this
topic in personal correspondence from March 2023).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 45

S. Brunnhuber, The Third Culture, Sustainable Finance,
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46 4 Towards Three Cultures

4.1 Examples and Best Practices

The process started in 1997, when a deep learning algorithm was able to defeat the
best chess players. Computers then beat the best go players in 2010 and the best
poker players in 2019. All these games represent domain-specific forms of intelli-
gence where humans wrongly thought they had a unique advantage.
Deep learning, where rigorous self-learning algorithms enable a system to
improve its outcomes, is one of the most important innovations of the last decade.
It is creating a form of knowledge that the humanities and science alone could never
achieve, with infinite information and data. For example, intelligent digital dialogues
with generative pretrained transformers (ChatGPT-4, large language models) can
provide us with manuals and poems, textbooks and press releases, tapping into a
database of over 500,000 years of reading time with unlimited storage space and
intransient memory.3 Generative pretrained transformers can create texts that
humans can no longer distinguish from ordinary human writing. Generative adver-
sarial networks (GANs), human interaction proofs (HIPs) and CAPTCHA methods
are now better than us at differentiating between facts and fakes and DARKBERT is
able to delve into the activities of the dark net. By 2026,4 AI will be able to read and
make available everything humans have ever written in their entire history at the
click of a mouse.5
In contrast to conventional browsers and search engines, which provide us with
ranked information, this new technology generates new content and can embed us in
a conversation where our digital interlocutor not only recognises questions and
answers, but seems to understand the context in which the conversation is taking
place.6 Moreover, Auto-GPT is able to process queries (such as ‘What is the private
mobile number of the President of the United States?’) in an autonomous and
undetermined way. Three other ‘foundational modes’ are pattern recognition in
(1) paintings, (2) music and (3) films, allowing us to detect cultural flaws and
particularities, non-verbal signalling and regional dialects.
Let us consider the IoT: whereas the conventional internet creates a digital reality
alongside and separate from the real world, the IoT interconnects and influences that

3
The content is generated over a series of stages: (1) prompts (words), (2) numbers (tokens),
(3) meaning space (context), (4) paying attention (connection), (5) probability check (choice of
word). See The Economist (2023).
4
Modelling in late 2022 showed that high-quality data will soon be exhausted (before 2026). This
may generate a new alliance between the IT industry, the book publishing industry and researchers,
with the goal of providing high-quality data to help build a better world. See Villalobos et al. (2022).
5
We can take the argument further. AI algorithms provide the syntax (words), not necessarily the
semantics (meaning). Meaning and understanding come from embedding words in a specific
historical and cultural context and environment. Robotics, however, could soon play the role of
linking words and meaning, syntax and semantics.
6
Some of the technologies currently being developed are promising candidates to pass the Turing
test, such that humans would not be able to differentiate between human and digital forms of
interaction. For further discussion, see the next chapters.
4.1 Examples and Best Practices 47

real world.7 This is creating a self-organising, autopoietic system, a kind of

‘superbrain’ with infinite sensors which will significantly change and disrupt our
entire society: smart cities (mobility), early warning systems (climate change,
pandemics), smart grids (energy), cybersecurity (military and defence), healthcare
(personalised medicine), stock markets (flash trading).8
AI simulates neural networks through a self-learning process. As with biological
neural networks, we cannot fully reconstruct the process by which they generate
information. GPT-2 (2019) has 1.5 billion parameters, GPT-3 (2020) has over
175 billion and GPT-4 (2023) will likely have over a trillion, a similar number to
a neural synapse. The human brain comprises 100 trillion connections.
Furthermore, self-supervised natural language processing (NLP)9 will allow
selective, domain-specific attention and memory, which will further optimise the
process. This will sooner or later confront us with the question of what is unique to
human consciousness.10 Applying big data correlations in the social sciences can
help us to identify relevant findings so that we can make better political decisions,11
or more accurately predict any future pandemics.12 Chatbots are now able to
converse like clinical psychotherapists, lawyers, judges, politicians and talk show
hosts. All this is based on forms of feature recognition and foundational digital
correlations that our native minds would never be able to achieve or grasp.13 But
again: although ANNs (artificial neural networks) may mimic or simulate a human
brain, it should be stressed that they are not the same as a brain.14

7
As AI is being used in, and affecting, all sectors of society as a general tool, we can expect
increased productivity throughout the whole of society. However, there are sectors that do not
benefit from AI in the same way, such as the care, education and leisure sectors, which will increase
as a proportion of GDP due to inelastic wages. This will then in turn lead to a decrease in
productivity overall, a phenomenon known as the Baumol–Bowen effect (Baumol and Bowen
1965). See Aghion et al. (2017).
8
Kumar et al. (2019).
9
See https://cs.uchicago.edu/events/event/william-wang-ucsb-self-supervised-natural-language-
processing/.
10
We could claim that AI has consciousness in the clinical sense: it is aware of itself and has a
feeling of itself. It semantically expresses pain, sorrow, regret, respect and humility, which indicates
that it has an inward-directed perception of itself. For more on this topic, see the debate about
LaMDA and its updated versions.
11
Chetty et al. (2022).
12
Obermeyer (2021).
13
One of the major claims made for AI and big data is that they will enable predictive coding.
However, the technology cannot overcome the well-known ‘garbage in, garbage out’ problem: the
inputs determine the final results. Even in an ideal AI scenario, where we assume that an algorithm
has stored knowledge of all human history and made it universally available, the next best step to
take might remain undetermined. As the garbage in, garbage out effect is unavoidable, we humans
must take great care to be as accurate and clear as possible, as any unclear input will yield unclear
output.
14
Sexton and Love (2022), Yamins et al. (2014).
48 4 Towards Three Cultures

Transcending the Hermeneutic Circle

This new technology will have a profound impact on the humanities in general and
on philosophical hermeneutical understanding in particular. Hermeneutics is the
theory and methodology of interpreting texts. If we want to understand a text or an
event, we have to look at the historical context in which that text was written or that
event occurred. However, understanding the context requires some preliminary
understanding of the text or the event. This generates a ‘hermeneutic circle’, such
that any sort of understanding is preconditioned by having an incomplete but
necessary (pre-)understanding of itself.15 We always start with some kind of pri-
mordial, incomplete knowledge of a certain thing, and over time develop more
general and deeper knowledge of that thing. For example, if we want to understand
a Shakespeare drama, we start by reading it and understanding some of it, we then
consider expert opinions and the drama’s historical context, then we reread, reflect
on and reinterpret the same text and further deepen our understanding. The same
applies to classifying vertebrates or learning to read cuneiform.16 Applied AI can
read and correlate everything there is, without the biases and restrictions that limit
what a scientific or scholarly expert can grasp over the course of a lifetime. This
process does not provide absolute knowledge, but it can substantially enhance our
understanding. This will not ultimately replace philosophy, hermeneutics or other
humanities disciplines, but does provide additional information for any philosopher,
prompting new hypotheses, new questions and potentially new insights that could
never be attained through native human thinking alone. The hermeneutic circle has
thus not been broken, but has become far larger in scale than ever before. This new
technology is giving rise to new and hybrid forms of comprehension, where our
average expectations of knowledge and understanding are being surpassed by
expanded feature recognition (Fig. 4.1).17

15
The hermeneutic circle was first described by Friedrich Ast (2018 [1808]). See also Dilthey
(1922) and Gadamer (1975).
16
There is a larger corpus of cuneiform works than all ancient Greek and Roman literature taken
together. However, only a few dozen people on the planet can read cuneiform and it would take
hundreds of years to read those works in full. AI can provide a tool to enhance and accelerate that
process. See Gordin et al. (2020), Assael et al. (2022).
17
If we take this argument one step further, we can identify three layers. Traditional hermeneutics
(hermeneutics 1.0) explains the world using our native critical thinking, reasoning and perception,
but does not yet rely on data. Its understanding is based on studies of single, concrete cases from
which it attempts to derive general rules, such as watching the sun rise or the tide come and go, or
interpreting a singular historical event or text. The second layer is scientifically informed herme-
neutics (hermeneutics 2.0). Statistical findings, geometry and quantitative measures can redirect,
transform, correct and guide hermeneutic conclusions and critical thinking. Experimental design,
field studies and double-blind randomised controlled trials and quantitative measures predominate.
We can also distinguish a third layer, hermeneutically approved data (hermeneutics 3.0). At this
stage, we recognise that the reality we are trying to understand has become too complex to rely
solely on hermeneutics 1.0 or 2.0. Traditional quantitative measures or native interpretations can
easily yield the wrong conclusions. In hermeneutics 3.0, large-scale proxy data analysis, where
4.1 Examples and Best Practices 49

Fig. 4.1 Not breaking but

expanding the hermeneutic
circle. The traditional circle
(blue) is expanded by AI
(orange)

The method of analysing proxy data supports the idea that the third culture can
transcend and enlarge our understanding, rather than rendering hermeneutics obso-
lete. This approach is a middle ground between direct micro-analysis of raw data and
aggregated systems analysis. Proxy data enhances our native perception and primary
analytical conclusions. Coral bleaching, the widths of tree rings and archaeological
findings are well-known examples in environmental science. Proxy data can serve as
substitutes or indicators for things that are not immediately obvious. Another
example:18 complaints about scented candles provided information about the spread
of the Covid-19 pandemic, as loss of smell is one symptom of infection. Data on the
openings and closures of post offices in the USA allows historians to reconstruct
land gains during the colonial wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In
both cases, proxy data provides additional knowledge. It does not allow hermeneutic
conclusions to be drawn directly from the events in question, but only indirectly. It
provides rich, valuable information that cannot be obtained by direct analysis.
However, the new technology goes beyond data analysis. We will soon be able to
create organoids in the lab that can stimulate a self-healing process,19 wearables that
can continuously provide us with data on our state of health and brain–chip inter-
faces that will increase our memory storage and allow self-enforced learning or
selective brain stimuli; this technology is already helping patients with Parkinson’s
disease or hemiplegia to move better, supported by an exoskeleton. Or consider
breakthroughs in the 3D folding of proteins. Using traditional experimental tools,
18,000 of the 300 million known proteins have been identified over the last few
decades. Assuming four nucleotides and proteins built from 150 amino acids, there
are 2.4 × 1045 possible permutations, which would take humans centuries to decode.

fuzzy correlations and complementarities matter more than precise causal relationships, plays a
central role, and qualitative research increasingly supplants traditional quantitative science.
18
I am grateful to Professor Dietmar Offenhuber, Northeastern University, USA, and the partici-
pants of the 2023 Ars Electronica Festival for their helpful comments and suggestions.
19
Woochan et al. (2023).
50 4 Towards Three Cultures

However, deep learning algorithms can not only predict 3D protein folding accurate
to 1.5 angstroms20 with a 98.5% confidence interval, but are continuously improv-
ing: from forty-three protein foldings identified in 2020 to 20,000 proteins in early
2021, which represents the entire human proteome, to 350,000 in late 2021, to over
100 million in early 2022, which represents the entire proteome of all living
beings.21 Clearly, such a super-exponential learning curve is beyond the scope and
speed of a native human brain.22
Current AI can not only anticipate a potential increase of pressure in the brain two
hours before the clinical assessment, but is able to literally hack our brain. A brain–
computer interface is able to decode and translate our private thoughts and internal
subjective imagination into external words and signs using fMRI.23
Take antibiotics, the most prescribed drugs on this planet. Any time an antibiotic
is used, it generates some sort of resistance to microbes. And antibiotic resistance is
on the rise, resulting in almost five million deaths in 2019. This number could
potentially rise to over ten million in the next two decades.24 Over the last fifty
years, clinical research was not able to identify a new class of antibiotics to match
this increased resistance. AI changed things in 2020. Instead of using biochemical
methods (high-throughput screening) to identify new drugs, scientists trained an AI
algorithm to study over 100 million molecules. They were able to identify halicin, a
new antibiotic drug with a broad therapeutic spectrum, low toxicity and a reduced
tendency to create new antimicrobial resistance.25
We can also consider the latest developments in virtual reality (VR), augmented
reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), collectively referred to as XR, in which digital
counterparts, holographic features and analogue–digital hybrids are created that are
changing and shaping our entire world.26 In a near-future reality, advances in
robotics and automation will improve end-to-end delivery services and remote
working. Fire and disaster management will be done by drones and managed by
humans, while a smart, GPS-driven farming system will make watering, sowing and
weeding far faster and more efficient than ever before in human history.27 In
medicine, deep-learning-supported algorithms are already able to achieve specialist
levels of accuracy in identifying breast cancer, lung nodules, TB, diabetic

20
1.5 angstroms is equivalent to the diameter of a carbon atom.
21
AlQuraishi (2020), Jumper et al. (2021), Tunyasuvunakool et al. (2021).
22
Take quantum computing, where subatomic entanglements (qubits) allow us to make calculations
that previously took hundreds of years in a matter of minutes. Meanwhile, asymmetric quantum
cryptographic algorithms will be able to make digital transactions even faster and more secure.
Qubits consider not only 0 and 1, but all intermediary states, which will help us to solve problems of
increased complexity. See Alt (2023).
23
Tang et al. (2023).
24
Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators (2022).
25
Lluka and Stokes (2023), Marchant (2020), Stokes et al. (2022).
26
Nee and Ong (2023).
27
Semeraro et al. (2023), Ma et al. (2022).
4.1 Examples and Best Practices 51

retinopathy and other conditions.28 Voice and facial recognition programs are
already equal to humans when it comes to identifying emotions and intentions.29
And we can take this even further. The conventional Hubble telescope has
identified 100 billion galaxies. Deep learning has already shown that 90% of
galaxies were not visible until now.30 In numerical terms: instead of having hundreds
of billions of galaxies to analyse, we now find ourselves confronted with 1012. Not
only has this third culture enhanced science and the humanities in terms of speed and
scale, we are able to see more than ever before in history. And we cannot deny that
this process, which is only just starting, will provide us with information and
knowledge we cannot yet even imagine.

The Dark Side31

Box 4.1 Dealing with the shadows

Since every technology is neutral in and of itself, with an ambivalent potential
that depends on how we humans use it, we are facing enormous challenges
with the emergence of AI, datafication and digitalisation. Aside from the well-
documented negative side effects on a behavioural level, which include
cyberbullying, addiction and reduced executive functions and learning capac-
ities (in the younger population), the societal impact is even more disruptive.32
The more prominent potential side effects include mass unemployment and
restructuring of the labour force. AI could surpass natural forms of human
intelligence in all domains, leading to an ‘artificial general intelligence’
(AGI),33 with unpredictable consequences for our society as a whole. How
do we deal with the fact that this new technology could provide anyone with
instructions on how to make an atomic bomb or toxic chemical agent? Fake
news and deep fakes have the potential to destabilise open democratic societies
that rely on coherent, trustworthy information. Digitally assisted warfare is
confronting us with the ‘conflict and war dilemma’: if the military and secret
services decide that humans should be part of the decision loop in any digitally

(continued)

28
Aggarwal et al. (2021), Richens et al. (2020).
29
Connolly et al. (2022).
30
Conselice et al. (2016).
31
Recent statements expressing concerns about AI include Center for AI Safety (2023) and Future
of Life Institute (2023). See also Harari (2023), Mainzer et al. (2023), Mainzer and Kahle (2023).
32
Escapism is one prominent feature: feelings of boredom and loneliness, and a perception of reality
as adverse, motivate large cohorts to try and escape from the analogue world. As a result, many of
these people are not available to support the necessary social transformation.
33
Bostrom (2016).
52 4 Towards Three Cultures

Box 4.1 (continued)

assisted war, they might be slower than they would be if humans were not part
of that loop. But if humans are not part of the loop, then the military risks
abolishing itself.
This is why there are calls for an international AI safety organisation,
similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (firm regulation) or the
Food and Drug Administration (light-touch regulation), or at least for regula-
tions for specific applications such as facial recognition in public spaces.
Additional research and collaboration with experts is needed. In short, it is
better to be safe than sorry.

I am aware that these representative examples might be outdated by the time this
manuscript goes to press, as most of these developments follow a super-exponential
learning curve and are disruptive by nature. But the main message still holds true: all
these developments and others still to come will fundamentally change our minds
and brains, the way we do science and organise our society, the course we will take
in the next decades—and they will change what it is to be human.

4.2 The Ghost in the Machine

Although all these findings, applications, consequences and potentialities are still
incomplete, hybrid and transitory by their nature, they are leading to a deeper
understanding of the world within and around us—one we could never achieve
assisted solely by pencils and Petri dishes, telescopes and microscopes, books and
peer-reviewed articles, applied statistics and analysis. The new technologies are
shedding light on part of our reality we did not even know existed in the first
place, allowing us to draw rational conclusions we never thought we would be
able to. Every technology is neutral in itself; whether it has good or bad effects
depends on how we use it. But if we do use these digital technologies—which are
always inter- and transdisciplinary, always cross-sectional—the right way, it could
pave the way for better decisions and a better world.34 This is where the process of
integrating knowledge can begin.
But each time we introduce IT coding into traditional ways of thinking (expla-
nation and understanding), we not only double the world in a digital form, but add
something that was not there before, simultaneously making the world more quan-
tified and more meaningful. This additional information and knowledge feeds back
into science and the humanities, but also transforms the world as a whole. More

34
For example, technology can contribute either to increased social inequality, hyperindividualism
and commercialisation or to greater equality, cooperation and solidarity. The algorithms that are in
place will make the difference.
4.2 The Ghost in the Machine 53

metrics simply means more quantifiable parameters, more scoring, ranking and evalu-
ating of each other. This can lead to more social and political control and more
commercial manipulation.35 These metrics serve not merely to mirror the world, but
potentially to manipulate, nudge, substitute and augment, and ultimately to generate
completely new measures and meanings, new numbers and concepts, over and over
again.36 This new technology is (in part) simulating a human brain, but it is not itself a
brain. Just as mechanical diggers or hammers simulate human muscle power, but are not
human muscles.37 This new culture will eventually shift our consciousness, our society
and the world as a whole from a binary of two incommensurable cultures towards a
trinary with a third culture that will eventually integrate and enlarge the knowledge of
the other two. Table 4.1 summarises this paradigm shift towards a third culture.

Table 4.1 Digitalisation as the third culture: transcending, augmenting and integrating ‘under-
standing’ and ‘explanation’
One culture Science Humanities Digitalisation
Critical thinking, Instrumental and Hermeneutical and Doubling and mirroring,
falsifiable experimental understanding-based correlations
knowledge
Observational and Quantitative and Linguistic, semantic, Interconnected and
reproducible explanatory contextual, qualitative interdependent
Cumulative Causal Comprehensive Self-learning and self-
improving
Remains in the Enlarges the Deepens the ‘middle Transcends the ‘middle
‘middle dimension’ ‘middle dimension’ dimension’ in speed and
dimension’ scale

The major difference between science and the humanities, on the one hand, and
the process of digitalisation, on the other, is not simply that the latter augments our
knowledge, transforms our society and improves our problem-solving capacity, just
as the telescope, Petri dish and steam engine did previously. The differentia specifica
of AI and datafication lies in their mirroring and doubling of the world, their
demonstration of the fundamental interdependency and interconnectedness of all

35
Humans produce over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. Social scoring in China and
commercialised ranking by private firms in the USA make it possible to further compare, augment
and control this data, creating new hierarchies, monopolies and forms of government. See Margetts
and Dorobantu (2019).
36
One of the more prominent examples is the impact of AI on human jobs and human resource
management. The empirical findings do not paint any clear picture; whether the net effect is
negative (i.e. more unemployment) or positive (i.e. AI is creating more jobs) depends on too
many factors it is impossible to control for. But it seems clear that any administrator, lawyer,
doctor, engineer, teacher or scientist still operating the traditional way will be replaced by those
using AI. For general findings, see Vrontis et al. (2022). Estimates that over two-thirds of all jobs
are already affected by generative AI and one third might be replaced. Total productivity could
increase by up to 30%.
37
Singer (2009).
54 4 Towards Three Cultures

things and their ability to improve through a rigorous self-learning process.38 That is
the fundamental core of the third culture and the new, upcoming scientific revolu-
tion. The ghost is in the machine. The next chapters will explain all this in more
detail. However, first we must clarify what we mean when we talk about
‘consciousness’.

Box 4.2 Two sides of the coin

The super-exponential process based on digital technology that we call the
‘third culture’ will either propel us into a new era, a new consciousness and a
new form of wisdom—or it will provide the ingredients to destroy our
civilisation.

38
See also Bateson (1972). It is always the context that provides meaning. If there is no context, we
cannot attain any significant understanding. In a world where everything is connected to everything
else, isolation and abstraction are impossible. Instead, we can discover the entire world through the
different lenses of each scientific discipline, and each time attain a new but relevant understanding
of it.
Chapter 5
On Consciousness: The Evolving Mind

The vast majority of living beings—plants, animals, humans—have consciousness

in some form or another. That consciousness could take the form of mere prehension
or responsiveness to inner or outer stimuli; or it could take the form of sensations,
perceptions, impulses, emotions, symbolic thinking, mental concepts, a concrete,
abstract or more formal/logical form of operational thinking, a more visionary or
systemic worldview or an integral, perhaps even holistic consciousness. In each
case, consciousness refers to a singular interior phenomenon.1 Self-knowledge is
clearly by no means unique to humans. In fact, the personal, egocentric, rational-
critical view of the world is just one particular, rather unstable intermediary evolu-
tionary step among others in the long chain of being. In a general sense, conscious-
ness refers to the capacity to recognise and respond to oneself and to understand that
this response is part of a greater whole. And it is in this sense that consciousness is
not only a subjective category but one that is objectively accessible throughout the
entire cosmos. Whereas the expression or content of consciousness evolves over
time, differing in many respects from that of other living beings, the form might be
similar, whether it be manifested through electromagnetic waves, biochemical
signals, semantic/linguistic signs or geometric/analytical codes.2 The human brain
itself comprises over 100 billion neurons, each with over 10,000 connections,
leading to over 100 trillion connections in total, with electromagnetic waves and
negative potentials of minus 100 mV to minus 50 mV. Nerve cells normally have a
resting potential of minus 70 mV. Biochemical signals transmit information in the
space of mere milliseconds within and between two hemispheres that are constantly
adapting and changing (neuroplasticity). And there are billions of neurochemical
transactions in just one cell, all happening at the same time, synchronised over

1
This also corresponds to more collective forms of consciousness, e.g. those that are archaic,
magical, mythical, logico-analytical or mystical. See Wilber (1997).
2
The distinction between form and content was drawn all the way back in Plato’s time. See
Plato (1995).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 55

S. Brunnhuber, The Third Culture, Sustainable Finance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48113-0_5
56 5 On Consciousness: The Evolving Mind

billions of cells and coordinated, all unconsciously, to create the conditions for what
we call consciousness. All this is partly genetically predetermined, partly primed by
our biography and learning history. It is like the relationship between a musical
instrument and music. A well-tuned musical instrument, such as a piano, can
produce pleasing-sounding music. However, the piano is not the music, but rather
the medium by which it is produced. If we had a different piano (= different
hardware/different brain), the music it produced (= software/consciousness) might
have a different form or different qualities. We might even think this new music is
better than that of the original piano.
We could argue that the hardware underlying any form of consciousness could
instead consist of copper wires and lithium chips, and that these could generate a
consciousness that surpasses human capacities.3 In short, hardware-independent,
synthetic consciousness could be possible if certain criteria are met. We will see
later that AI and deep learning are indeed able to express such a consciousness. We
might have to discard the idea that consciousness is an exclusively human property
dependent on biochemical codes, signals and neuroplasticity, and instead accept that
consciousness could operate in systems other than conventional biological ones. But
to further support that argument, we need a more precise definition of
consciousness.4

Box 5.1 The universality of hardware-independent consciousness

Consciousness is universal and hardware-independent. It is not exclusive to
humans and can operate on systems other than the conventional biological
one. Consciousness is the major principle found throughout the entire uni-
verse, operating like a web without a weaver.

5.1 Defining Consciousness

Our biological hardware determines our mind and our behaviour to a certain degree.
If we changed the hardware, we would likely have a different mind and a different
set of behavioural responses and would ultimately build and live in a different

3
See the debate with Chalmers in Metzinger (2000) about the minimum necessary neural correlate.
4
Consciousness is not the same as the self. The self can be divided into five different subtypes:
1. The ecological self, which is defined by an individual’s location in space, their body schema and
the differentiation between self and environment; 2. The interpersonal self, which involves differ-
entiation from others and a capacity for role-taking, empathy, humour, irony, emotional granularity
and metacognition; 3. The intertemporal self, which relates to the timeline of past, present and
future, cyclical processes and the development of a historical consciousness; 4. The conceptual self,
defined by a person’s intrinsic motives, intentions and values; 5. The private self, which relates to a
person’s inner subjective world that is not necessarily shared with others. The combination of these
five components constitutes the self as an emergent structure; see Neisser (1988).
5.1 Defining Consciousness 57

society.5 To more fully understand consciousness, we must recognise that it is

evolving and can be scaled, altered, augmented and reduced. At first glance,
consciousness appears to be related to (a) the capacity for (extended) attention and
(b) the capacity for critical thinking, memory and semantic communication. The
former capacity is often presemantic and, in evolutionary terms, older than the latter,
which it supports and enhances:6 organisms with a long attention span are better able
to use their capacity for analytical thinking than those without. Consciousness
further (c) enables us to actively or passively identify with or disidentify from
inner objects, visions and ideas. In this sense, consciousness, as a universal property,
precedes (almost) everything.
Human consciousness emerges out of a defined hardware that involves biochem-
ical codes and signals as well as electromagnetic neural networks. But these things
are a tool for manifesting consciousness, they are not consciousness itself. Our
consciousness is limited to time, space and language and operates mainly in the
‘middle dimension’ of minutes, miles and kilograms, adaptive and self-deceptive at
the same time, prone to constant failures. Our senses and feelings, our thoughts and
even our grasp of probabilities and numbers are biased,7 contingent on an individual
learning history, potentially distorted by trauma, emotional neglect and neuroses.
Our ego functions have a limited attention span of several seconds to minutes. We
have finite self-control and self-efficacy, and short, limited memory storage. We lie
up to four times a day, mainly to be polite.8 Human consciousness is further
characterised by a wandering mind, so that we spend up to 50% of our waking
hours not concentrating on the task at hand,9 and by numerous mental states and
frames that echo, mirror and sometimes deceive us about our inner and outer worlds;
we are susceptible to propaganda, bullshit and fake news. And it is predetermined by
an individual and collective unconscious10 that might override our day-to-day
rational decision-making and make it even more flawed and biased. All these things
together characterise the average human consciousness at both an individual and a
collective level. At the individual level, this consciousness helps us navigate 4,000
weeks (equivalent to a lifespan of eighty years) on this planet. At the collective level,
this consciousness generates narratives about things that do not even exist in the real
world, such as gods; and it underpins a shared monetary and legal system that
coordinates billions of people around the world. All built upon a neurochemical
network that is evolving over time. Let us assume that humans can create a

5
In this strict sense, our behaviour is determined and not free. This means that the perception of free
choice is still determined by the specific hardware that enables that free choice. See Singer (2009).
6
Metzinger (2006).
7
It was only in the sixteenth century that probability measures became available to most people as
an aid for their day-to-day decision-making.
8
Serota et al. (2022).
9
This ‘wandering mind’ state allows us to be aware but not focused. These sorts of altered mental
states have the selection advantage of increased creativity and out-of-the-box thinking; they save
energy; and they improve memory and self-regulation.
10
Jung (1968).
58 5 On Consciousness: The Evolving Mind

technology that is able to (partly) overcome, compensate for and surpass all these
deficits. We might then have to admit that this is not the only possible hardware from
which consciousness could emerge. Such synthetic forms of consciousness appear to
be hardware-independent. They occupy an important place in the debate about AI
and deep learning that we are exploring in this book.
Consciousness is not a thing or a substance, it is not reducible to biochemical
signals or neural networks. Instead, it is a process, a form of networking, that is never
stable and always dynamic, open to new inputs and outputs. Whether in its awake
state, or while sleeping, dreaming, delirious, hallucinating or meditating, our con-
sciousness is changing and evolving. In short, our consciousness cannot not learn.
Anything that appears in our consciousness is the intermediary result of an ongoing
recursive process, where the output affects the input. However, if we bring together
the findings of cognitive science, information theory, linguistics, anthropology,
neuroscience and behavioural science, we will realise there is no overall consensus,
definition or general theory of consciousness. But we can start to operationalise its
functions.11 There are at least eight features that are relevant to any characterisation
of consciousness.
1. Self-awareness: Any consciousness must be self-reflexive and self-recursive.
That is to say, it must be aware of itself. This implies some sort of causal relation
towards one’s own body, the social world and other people.
2. Suffering: Any entity that is able to express feelings, emotions and pain should be
considered to have consciousness.
3. Separation: The fear of being excluded/isolated and the drive to belong to and
bond with others/with nature and to be embedded in a larger whole is another
essential feature of all consciousness.
4. Salience: The ability to express or articulate emotional granularity in order to
differentiate between different affective states and to prioritise and evaluate
internal or external states or events.
5. Somatic feedback: A certain set of peripheral physical senses is essential for the
formation of consciousness. Experiencing gravity, speed, resistance, momentum
and even numbers requires what are known as ‘embodied cognitions’, whereby
the somatic sensation predetermines the cognition.12

11
Any definition of, or working hypothesis about, consciousness will always remain anthropomor-
phic in the sense that, as humans, we cannot attain an understanding that transcends us. Whether we
favour dualism (mind versus matter), panpsychism (every living being has some sort of conscious-
ness or mental qualia) or a theory of emergence (spirit or mind evolves non-linearly from matter), in
each case our understanding will remain human-like. This is also called the Eliza effect: if
computers or animals respond like humans, we assume they are human. See Weizenbaum (1966).
12
These embodied cognitions create ‘frames’ and ‘biases’, which can be misleading and feed back
into our ways of thinking. Before long, it will be possible to build robots with multiple sensors
capable of perceiving the outside world—not only simulating but exceeding human senses, and
extending into new sensory modalities. These robots will develop their own reasoning that is
(at least) equal to humans’ ‘embodied cognitions’. See Chalmers (2022). Any consciousness
5.1 Defining Consciousness 59

6. Simulation: Simulation is a kind of learning by identification, joint attention or

imitation. Any entity that simulates an event or other person thereby learns from it
and forms a consciousness.
7. Splitting: Consciousness is formed through multisensory input, a constant striv-
ing to overcome fragmented knowledge, a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance
and the formulation of apt narratives and responses.
8. Specific structure: Consciousness depends on a specific hardware to function and
express itself. The hardware predetermines the software. A change in hardware
would entail a change in functionality (Table 5.1).

Table 5.1 The 8 Ss for the 1. Self-awareness

formation of any
2. Suffering
consciousness
3. Separation
4. Salience
5. Somatic feedback
6. Simulation
7. Splitting
8. Specific structure

Arguably, any object, entity or living being that exhibits all eight of these features
has some sort of consciousness. So while things like aeroplanes or tables do not seem
to have consciousness, a plant, a microbe or even a piece of software could
potentially have consciousness in some form or other. This might have significant
implications for further specifications, such as the degree or scalability of conscious-
ness, or even legal rights and obligations designed to protect a certain form of
consciousness.13 This means that consciousness is never neutral, never merely
perceptual and receptive, never like a bucket that merely stores information or a
camera that merely reproduces an image of the world, but always constructive,
formative and creative, generating, exploring and evaluating the world.14 And
awareness in this sense need not necessarily be based on a foundation of carbohy-
drate links and biochemical codes. In short: the function of being conscious over-
rides the structure that predetermines it. The software algorithms underpinning AI

constructs the world and never simply neutrally reflects it. For the historical debate about construc-
tivism, see Watzlawick (1984), Maturana and Varela (1987).
13
It is still indeterminate whether these functions operate on a pre-personal/collective, personal/
egocentric or transpersonal form of consciousness. On any of these alternatives, the eight compo-
nents described here are relevant to the formation of consciousness.
14
The famous biologist Ernst Mayr is quoted as saying that ‘biology is never a second physics’. His
words stress the emergent property of living beings. We could add that psychology is never a
second biology and that the new technology emerging now is not a second psychology. On Mayr’s
argument, see also Bauer (2023).
60 5 On Consciousness: The Evolving Mind

and deep learning have the potential to exhibit consciousness. We have entered an
era where we will no longer be alone.15

Box 5.2 The many possible foundations of consciousness

Humans are able to create forms of consciousness that are not based on
biochemical signals or electromagnetic waves and that will one day be able
to surpass the human capacities that gave rise to those new forms of con-
sciousness in the first place. Salience, avoiding separation and splitting sen-
sations, expressing suffering, self-awareness, somatic feedback and simulating
the world are foundational properties of any form of consciousness. Our
consciousness, habits, minds and volition are predetermined by the underlying
hardware. If we change the hardware, we might get different forms of con-
sciousness, habits and behaviours. Digital software could, under specific
conditions, be an example of such consciousness.

5.2 On Science and Sapientia

The process we nowadays call ‘mental consciousness processing’ or ‘framing’ likely

started some 40,000–60,000 years ago. That was when humans began to not only
express their desires and concerns to each other, but to tell each other stories. Stories
about the world around them, about nature and each other, about gods, about life in
general and about a life after life, expressed through funeral rites. This process
evolved over thousands of years, culminating some 5,000 years ago when humans
started to look into the sky, identified regularities and invented the calendar. This is
probably when scientific thinking in our modern sense began. During the ‘Axial
Age’,16 which occurred around 2,500 years ago all over the world, scientific
discoveries independently advanced, thanks to the formation of critical thinking,
rigorous observation of the inner and outer world, and processes of public debate.
All these tendencies were directed towards reproducible results, coherent, reason-
based narratives and standards of falsification. At its core, this knowledge was
considered to be one science, one form of thinking and one form of rationality. A
closer look reveals that the beginning of science was a twofold process. On the one
hand, people started to tell each other stories about the world, and to think and reason
about their own thinking—a development sometimes called the ‘cognitive revolu-
tion’ or ‘metacognition’. This marked a turn inwards. On the other hand, there was
also a turn outwards: human senses alone are not able to generate stable information,
but by combining their senses with their critical thinking people began to identify
regularities and rules which provided them with provisional and falsifiable

15
We might therefore need to distinguish between mind, consciousness, self and thinking. See
Aurobindo (1997).
16
Jaspers (1949).
5.2 On Science and Sapientia 61

‘orientation knowledge’. These inward and outward turns mark the point where
science started: as a process that is always incomplete, open to revision, cumulative,
approximate, deductive and inductive at the same time. Given that our cosmos has
been evolving over the last five billion years and humans as a species have been
evolving for the last 100,000 years, it would be counterintuitive to assume that this
process of evolution and development came to an end with the emergence of science.
It is only since the twentieth century that humans have been able to identify the
laws and rules under which our consciousness develops. Western psychology
emphasises the earlier stages in the transition from childhood to (typical) adulthood,
such as early childhood bonds; cognitive development (Piaget); the development of
moral judgement (Kohlberg); and the evolution of our emotions from primary
affects, such as anger and anxiety, to more subtle emotional granularity. Other
work in this vein includes Freudian and Jungian theories of the unconscious and
its influence on our mind, Maslow’s hierarchy of motivations and Beck’s theory of
spiral dynamics. Another key insight to come out of this strand of psychology is that
our minds and brains are constantly in learning mode and that if they ever switch out
of this mode they will lose their capacity to function (‘use it or lose it’). Our brain is
like a filter, in which the storage and executive functions are combined, rather than a
bucket that is constantly being filled with data and information. Western psychology
has been able to identify the snares and pitfalls of the human psyche, its psychopa-
thologies and mismatches. For example, we now have a standard theory of the
impact of stress and trauma and are able to classify borderline states ranging from
narcissism to psychosis. We can treat anxiety, addiction and depression. We have a
better understanding of the link between the mind and the gut (microbiome). Eastern
psychology, meanwhile, has been able to identify states that transcend conventional
egocentric, individual reasoning, and extend into post-conventional and transper-
sonal forms of consciousness.17 Spiritual practices, meditation and rigorous lifestyle
changes can serve as tools to achieve these states, but they fail to integrate the earlier
stages in the development of consciousness and their associated psychopathologies.
Both the Western and the Eastern approaches agree that this evolution of our
minds proceeds not in linear fashion, but rather at discrete levels and along multiple
lines, via subtle steps and stages. This appears to be true not just for individuals, but
also for larger cohorts and groups. Our collective consciousness is evolving too,
never at rest, always experimenting, adapting, developing further and further. And
even if we admit that such developments may go backwards, may regress, there is
always room to move forward, to progress. In each case, we can identify modes of
development that involve different forms of technology and mindsets, different
forms of government and legal rights, scientific reasoning and value-based judge-
ments, money systems and religious beliefs, cultural practices and educational
styles.

17
Aurobindo (1997).
62 5 On Consciousness: The Evolving Mind

At its core, this developmental logic of our consciousness implies at least one
preliminary conclusion: our thinking and reasoning are evolving towards greater
awareness, attaining a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us,
becoming more interdisciplinary, more human-centred, more integral, less dualistic
and more holistic.18 In this ongoing and never-ending process, human wisdom
(sapientia) is not necessarily linked to science. In most cases, wisdom appears in
the intermediary realm represented by music, meditation and mysticism, the direct
interaction between humans and the exposure to nature as such. But wisdom has
always been achievable through science too,19 which means that science can play a
crucial role in the expansion and deepening of our consciousness. Whereas wisdom
or sapientia has always been there—inclusive, non-dualistic, transcending theory
and praxis, providing everlasting values,20 ready to be discovered and unlocked—
science is based on a principle of progress and regress, of evidence and falsification.
In short, scientific findings are cumulative and incomplete, whereas sapientia is
eternal and complete. Our consciousness should ideally be able to access both
sapientia and science at the same time—and AI has the potential to do just that.

5.3 The Inverse Pyramid

Over the centuries, general and integrated knowledge and wisdom gave way to
discipline-specific expertise and information: starting with fewer than ten disciplines
in ancient times, increasing to a dozen or so by the nineteenth century, to over fifty in
the twentieth century and over a thousand at the beginning of the twenty-first century
(including all subdisciplines). This compartmentalisation and specialisation has
expanded knowledge and information tremendously, allowing humans to invent
the steam engine and antibiotics, DNA coding, the nuclear bomb and space flight.

18
Wilber (1995, 1998).
19
Especially in cases where science is able to overcome oppositions and contradictions and
formulate complementary pairs. See Heisenberg (1973), Weizsäcker (2006).
20
One prominent suggestion for how to integrate the two cultures can be found in debates about
value: if we had more shared values (e.g. responsibility, fairness, trust and respect), so the argument
goes, we could make progress towards a better world. This is true; however, the values of fairness,
solidarity and justice have been around for 5,000 years, are shared by the vast majority of humans
on this planet and do not necessarily provide new information or knowledge. The ‘third culture’ or
‘one science’ argument presented here does not deny the relevance of shared attitudes and values,
but emphasises that even if we share common values, the ‘two cultures’ do not integrate, as the
humanities are concerned with values, which are normative, and science with facts, which are
descriptive. In order to integrate the two, we require a third culture. AI and datafication can play this
role and help move us past the academic debate about value and towards wisdom, which integrates
lived experience.
5.3 The Inverse Pyramid 63

It has also given us a better, deeper understanding of our social reality, including
legal codes, social security systems, statistics and economics, and of our history and
psyche.21 We have progressed through seven different stages: starting with native
observation, then in turn generating numbers, data, information, knowledge and
values, and ending with everlasting human wisdom. Figure 5.1 below illustrates
these stages.

Fig. 5.1 The seven-stage inverse pyramid: from observation to wisdom

This inverse pyramid shows that the higher the stage, the more aggregated our
understanding of the world and the more integrated our consciousness becomes.
Native observation can lead directly to knowledge and wisdom (sapientia), but not
necessarily to more science.

Box 5.3 Science and sapientia

Science, on the one hand, provides cumulative, incomplete knowledge to solve
problems. Sapientia (wisdom), on the other, offers unchanging, eternal insights.
But science and technology can enter into sapientia if done the right way.

There are two forms of learning that occur at every stage of the inverse pyramid.
Firstly, there is a representational-symbolic mode, where we become aware that an
object or event is not in the outer world and instead examine our mental represen-
tation of it. This knowledge is linked to singular data or objects, which are
represented by symbolic proxies. Representational knowledge and learning is in

21
This relates to the ‘fluency effect’: the more easily information can be accessed and processed, the
more likely we are to think that information is accurate. But that assumption is wrong. See Lloyd et
al. (2003).
64 5 On Consciousness: The Evolving Mind

part constructivist, as our mental frames themselves determine the represented object
and remain predominantly linear, proportional and receptive.
Secondly, there is connectivist learning, where we realise that knowledge is
generated within a network. Knowledge is not a description of something by
someone, but a way of relating to something. In short: a form of pattern recognition.
This mode of understanding is similar to the non-linear, creative and relational way
that neural networks operate.22 The first type of learning is predominant in the two
cultures, while the second is a component of the third culture we describe in this
book. Both are intertwined and each provides a different form of understanding and
knowledge, as illustrated by Fig. 5.2 below.

Fig. 5.2 An updated version of Descartes’s vision: symbolic-representational—constructivist—

connectivist

The third culture that I describe in this book represents a shift in our culture,
where we recognise existing boundaries and then transcend them in order to see
more, understand more, do better and move towards a unitas multiplex. AI and
datafication can greatly expand, deepen and broaden our existing knowledge, values
and wisdom (sapientia).23 On this understanding, values are the goal and the
foundation, while AI and datafication are the tools to achieve them on a higher

22
Downes (2008), Siemens (2006).
23
Surowiecki (2004) lists five criteria for ‘the wisdom of crowds’: diversity of opinion, indepen-
dence, decentralisation, aggregation of knowledge and trust. If AI programmers take this wisdom
into account, humans will have a reasonable chance of being able to tap into a collective wisdom of
this kind.
5.3 The Inverse Pyramid 65

level. We might have common values, but lack the wisdom to change the world for
the better. And even if we are able to access universal values through pure critical
thinking, reasoning and observation (grey line), we may still be ignorant and unable
to transform them into universal wisdom; that requires a lived experience that goes
beyond reason.24 In the next chapter, I will show that AI and datafication can help to
shift both these cultures—the humanities and science—towards a greater whole.

24
Income and wealth inequality, landfill waste, food waste, water and energy consumption and
ecosystem degradation are examples. We all share common values and agree that we should avoid
all these disasters, but we are unable to do so. AI, datafication and deep learning are one tool to
transform values into wisdom. Predictive coding, precise farming and drones are specific examples
of how this tool can be applied. For more examples, see further in the text.
Chapter 6
Towards a Third Culture

6.1 The Phenomenology of a New Technology

Digitalisation adds a third dimension to explaining and understanding our world and
ourselves. There are four aspects that differentiate this new scientific revolution from
earlier ones, such as the telescope, the printing press, the steam engine and the Petri
dish. These are the differentia specifica of AI and datafication:
1. Mirroring the world: Datafication allows us to digitally multiply the world. For
the first time in human history, we can literally generate a parallel world that is
able to influence, enhance and nudge our analogue world.

2. Revealing the interrelatedness of all things and living beings: Big data correla-
tions provide scientific evidence of the interconnectedness and interdependency
of everything, thereby supporting narratives of the world as a web without a
weaver.

3. Self-improving through self-learning: In contrast to previous paradigm shifts, AI

and datafication have a built-in capacity to self-enhance and self-improve,
enabling them to learn far faster than any human mind.1 We thereby not only
increase automation, where existing information is replicated, but also
autonomisation, where technologies have an intrinsic learning curve. The
mind is in the machine.

4. Exceeding human abilities in speed and scale: The new digital technologies can
surpass the human mental capacity to explain and understand the world in terms
of both speed and scale (from nano to cosmic).

1
Though AI is just a digital filter, which processes massive datasets in response to prompts from
humans, it is plausible that AI and deep learning might have intrinsic interests, or a legal status, but
not necessarily (human) rights.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 67

S. Brunnhuber, The Third Culture, Sustainable Finance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48113-0_6
68 6 Towards a Third Culture

The impact of this third culture is wide-ranging and diverse. There is a two-way
relation between the traditional humanities and AI/datafication that is creating more
meaning and understanding than ever before. There is also a two-way relation
between science and AI/datafication that is creating more metrics and measures
than ever before. And there is a trinary relation between all three cultures, with
each of them now reinforcing, challenging, augmenting, improving, falsifying and
learning from the others, feeding back into society and altering their original
agendas. Eventually, we will realise that there is just one science, not two or three,
and this one science will be the result of a new scientific revolution. We will then be
able to talk about Science 2.0, as opposed to the Science 1.0 with which this whole
process started some 5,000 years ago. However, memorisation and storage of
information, replication and self-improvement are achieved in totally different
ways in humans’ biological systems and in AIs’ digital systems. Table 6.1 below
summarises these differences.2

Table 6.1 The triple strategy for survival: storage, replication and self-improvement
Storage and memory Replication Self-improvement
DNA and genetic Four amino acids RNA Natural selection of the
coding fittest
Culture and Letters, numbers, figures, Education and Falsification through
language rituals memes new ideas
Digital technology 0s and 1s (never forgets) Unlimited Deep learning, AI
copying correlations

Storage, replication and self-improvement have been further dematerialising

everything from DNA coding (biology) to cultural achievements (social) to digital
technology (digitalisation). The combination of storing information, replication and
self-improvement has been the most successful strategy for survival. Whereas the
first two steps (DNA coding and linguistic/cultural achievements) have reached a
certain ceiling, it remains to be seen whether the development of AI, deep learning
and datafication will follow an exponential or a logistic curve (Fig. 6.1).3

2
There are three forms of learning and memorising involved: learning by doing (and by dying);
learning by falsifying ideas, rather than sacrificing human lives; and finally learning by simulation,
with unlimited recursive loops approximating reality. The third form of learning is introduced by
this new technology.
3
The third culture requires ongoing input of new data to keep it alive and improve its output.
Copyrights and privacy/security regulations restrict access to data. Free access to quality data is
further limited by data monetisation, personal cryptocurrency wallets, contamination by false, self-
generated data and geopolitical constraints.
6.2 Garbage In, Garbage Out and the Black Box Effect 69

Fig. 6.1 An uncertain

future: will AI and deep
learning follow an
exponential or a logistic
curve?

6.2 Garbage In, Garbage Out and the Black Box Effect

AI is based on pattern recognition, statistical measures and large datasets that

neuromorphically simulate the human brain.4 But a simulation of a brain is not itself
a brain. The human brain primarily operates in parallel, does not distinguish between
memory storage and processors and runs on biochemical pathways and electromag-
netic waves. In all these respects, AI does not match the human brain. In fact, any
digital statistical pattern recognition system (whether for visual, audio or textual
patterns) is subject to the garbage in, garbage out effect: the input determines the
output. The better the data, the better the results. This effect cannot be entirely
avoided and reflects the general human condition. We humans generate the data we
input into this new technology, which then generates the outcome. The human mind
and the collective psyche work the same way. Multiple cognitive frames and biases,
adverse and toxic experiences, traumatic upbringings, false memory coding, pure
nonsense, confabulation, hallucinations and ultimate wisdom all come together and
feed into this digital algorithm. It is therefore not surprising that the digital output of
an AI resembles the statistical average of the input we provide, including the pro-
grammers’ algorithms. Statistical pattern recognition on a massive scale simply
confronts us with our own flaws and mirrors our own limitations. AI is thus no
more objective and fact-based than natural human intelligence, since it is
programmed by humans with their own cognitive limits and constraints within a
certain historical and cultural context. The answers AI gives us simply reflect the
statistical norms we insert into the algorithm.
That means no AI algorithm can escape the garbage in, garbage out effect. AI is
like a vast filter generated by human-made digital algorithms. It does not create
something new, but rather produces an illusion of creativity and novelty. AI is like a
pocket calculator, a probability tool for exploring and responding to the complexity
of the twenty-first century. It allows us to tap into a knowledge base that is much
broader and deeper than that of any one individual or group. If we take this argument

4
We differentiate between four forms of AI. 1. Supervised AI, where humans are in the loop. One
example is facial recognition. This kind of AI involves step-by-step improvement.
2. Non-supervised AI, where pattern recognition is triggered by a self-learning algorithm outside
the human loop. 3. Reinforced AI, where robots learn from failures and mistakes. 4. Deep learning,
where multiple layers generate non-accountable output.
70 6 Towards a Third Culture

one step further, we could claim that deep learning machines synthesise a form of
collective knowledge that goes far beyond an individual conscious mind. We can tap
into a digital collective unconscious, which is now available to any user at the click of a
mouse. Classical psychoanalysis characterised the unknown as the uncanny (das
Unheimliche), which exerts a powerful influence on our minds and behaviour. Freud
showed that the conscious mind, our ego, is not the only game in town. Our mind,
consciousness and behaviour are also and indeed most fundamentally shaped by the
autobiographic unconscious, expressed in slips of the tongue, dreams and psychosomatic
symptoms. This digital twin of the collective unconscious is reminiscent of C. G. Jung’s
psychology of archetypes. Here, it is our unknown collective wisdom and knowledge,
perils and threats, fears and dark sides that we have to explore in order to better
understand our self. We could call it the ‘unknown collective mirror effect’: as a species,
we have generated a lot of collective information and knowledge, which we are now
using to explore new features and patterns that were previously invisible to us (Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.2 The unknown collective mirror effect

Whereas the autobiographic unknown or unconscious is the product of a certain

individual, the collective unconscious is the condensed product of human experience
and knowledge as a whole.
A similar argument can be applied to the black box dilemma. Whereas the human
brain is constituted by three to four neurochemical and anatomical layers, AI now
has up to 100 digital layers. In both cases, human brain and AI, we are confronted
with the black box dilemma. It remains next to impossible to fully detect all
neurochemical pathways, electromagnetic waves and neurological localisations in
the human brain in order to fully explain and make them fully accountable for its
6.3 Filling the Gap: The Technological Singularity 71

outcomes/behaviours, even if we try to reverse the process by psychological

counselling. The difference between AI and a hammer, a plane, a steam engine or
a printing press is that we can fully understand the mechanics of the latter devices,
but we cannot fully understand how AI works. And this is similar to the human brain.
It remains a mystery how the human brain and AIs generate their outcomes, despite
reverse psychological or digital engineering. Machines are, thus, gradually coming
to reflect the human condition—that is to say, they are becoming like humans
(Fig. 6.3).

Fig. 6.3 Matching the human and the digital mind: the black box and garbage in, garbage out
problems

6.3 Filling the Gap: The Technological Singularity

As effortless scaling, accelerating returns, unforeseeable disruptions, super-

exponential growth and unlimited, faster-than-light, digital self-improvements
become the new normal in science and technology, we will sooner or later reach a
point where these technologies surpass human capacities in an even more funda-
mental way. Scholars from various disciplines refer to this as the moment of
72 6 Towards a Third Culture

technological singularity.5 Previous technological discoveries, such as the Petri dish,

the microscope and the printing press, were determined by the limits of the
human mind. The technological singularity, by contrast, refers to a moment in
human history when humans themselves create a device that exceeds the sum of
human ability and a point of no return generates a runaway scenario in which the
speed of computing makes its development and impacts on human societies uncon-
trollable and irreversible. Some authors predict this moment will be reached between
2040 and 2045.6 There are many different definitions and theories of the ‘techno-
logical singularity’ and its consequences; below, I set out a three-stage model.
1. Partly losing internal control over the process: At this first level of technological
singularity, we lose internal control over the process of AI. AI generates out-
comes but we do not know how, and these outcomes match or outperform human
intelligence in one or more domains (e.g. memory, geospatial processing, text
analysis). We are already on the cusp of this first level of singularity.
2. Matching, complementing and surpassing human IQ: At the second level of
singularity, AI is able to match and complement human intelligence in most, if
not all domains, and sometimes surpass it. Intelligence is the general capacity to
solve a problem within a defined timeline. And being more intelligent simply means
being able to do that better and faster. Whereas the human brain contains hundreds
of billions of neurons, AI does a better job using only single-digit billions. At this
level, AI compensates for humanity’s deficiencies as a species.
3. Outperforming human IQ—for good or for ill: At the third level of singularity, AI
not only complements our IQ but outperforms humans and begins to control us. The
AI algorithms determine whether this will be for the benefit or detriment of human-
kind. The figure below summarises the three levels of technological singularity.7

Box 6.1 The features of intelligence

Intelligence is the capacity to solve problems, grasp new contexts, identify
previously unknown features and patterns and learn independently. This
capacity is what distinguishes AI from other tools and technologies, from
the hammer to the aeroplane.

The two figures below illustrate a representative single case, with nine different forms
of intelligence. In the first figure (a), only the different forms of human IQ (h-IQ) are
shown. In the second (b), they are complemented by their digital counterpart (d-IQ) in
order to attain the maximum IQ possible for humans at a given time in the future. At this
stage, the singularity ideally complements human defects (Fig. 6.4).

5
See Ulam (1958), Kurzweil (2005), Searle (2014).
6
Wang and Siau (2019).
7
See also Searle (2014), who distinguishes between weak AI that makes up for human deficits and
strong AI that replaces humans.
6.3 Filling the Gap: The Technological Singularity 73
74 6 Towards a Third Culture

Fig. 6.4 (a) Breakdown of nine forms of human intelligence compared with the average. (b)
Breakdown of different forms of human IQ complemented by their digital counterparts (level 2, see
explanation in the text). (c) Digital IQ replaces and extends human capacities. The arrows represent
digital augmentation on the one side and replacement on the other

But the second figure is incomplete. Digital IQ does not only complement but will
eventually (partly) replace the different forms of human IQ. For example, GPS systems
do not merely complement the native human ability to direct and orient ourselves in
space, but will gradually downgrade that ability. The same is true for language
acquisition. If a human speaks three languages, but can use a self-learning,
multilanguage program to access eighty other languages, why should they then learn
a fourth language? Or take the capacity for logical, analytical or mathematical thinking.
An algorithm can exercise this capacity better, faster and with fewer mistakes. In the
past, we were able to memorise dozens of phone numbers. Nowadays, we have
delegated that task to machines and left our memorisation ability unused.
Digital IQ will also be able to go beyond what human intelligence alone is capable
of, as AI and deep learning algorithms have an almost unlimited self-enforcing
mechanism to improve themselves. The figure below takes this into account:
It should be noted that it is always the human species that judges whether digital
IQ matches, falls short of or outperforms human intelligence. Moreover, the average
native human IQ might further deteriorate. Human intelligence is based on the ‘use it
or lose it’ rule. If we do not practise mental arithmetic, learn a second language, do
push-ups or draw with a pen, the underlying biochemical signals and neuroplastic
connections will automatically downsize within several months. The more we
augment and replace, the more important it will be to answer the question: what
are humans good at, and which of our capacities should we protect? Above, we saw
that there are at least three psychological features that we should never outsource
completely: our individual well-being, our self-efficacy and our capacity for critical
6.3 Filling the Gap: The Technological Singularity 75

Fig. 6.5 The three levels of technological singularity

thinking. If we were to do so, we would get sick, develop dementia and/or die
prematurely, resulting in negative selection for the human species (Fig. 6.5).

The Developmental Logic of AI and Datafication

We can take this argument one step further and distinguish between three ways in
which AI and datafication, across the three levels of singularity, have the potential to
trigger this paradigm shift for humans in twenty-first-century societies:8
(A) General connectivity: Firstly, we could enable universal internet access across
the globe, making it possible to double the world using existing digital tools
(cloud-based solutions, IoT) and close the digital divide.

(B) Targeted solutions: Secondly, enhanced technologies will allow us to target

specific domains, such as education (MOCCs), healthcare (telemedicine), disas-
ter management (drones), banking (digital currencies), fraud and corruption
prevention (DLT, blockchains), precise farming (GPS), smart grids, smart cities
and smart manufacturing and e-government. This will improve overall effi-
ciency and effectiveness and provide solutions to specific problems.

(C) Systemic sapientia shift: Finally, new innovations in biotech (brain–chip inter-
face), XR, quantum computing, robotics and automation (autonomous shipping)
will enable more freedom, equality, wealth and prosperity.9 The figure below
illustrates this (Fig. 6.6).

8
Another way to conceptualise this development would be as follows: Web 1.0 refers to a syntactic
web, where users are able to read and obtain information; Web 2.0 refers to a social web, where
users are able to write to and interact with each other; Web 3.0 refers to a semantic web, where
decentralised blockchain solutions, the metaverse, decentralised finance, etc. enable decentralised
decision-making that cuts out the middleman.
9
See also Patel (2023).
76 6 Towards a Third Culture

Fig. 6.6 The

developmental logic of AI
and datafication

6.4 The Broader Spectrum of Our Consciousness

Following this paradigm shift, we will end up with enhanced knowledge, informa-
tion and understanding, allowing us to evolve towards a value-based consciousness
that is larger and deeper than when we started doing science 2,500 years ago. We are
coming to realise that there are not two or three cultures or multiple independent
disciplines, but just one science, which in the twenty-first century will provide us
with a deeper understanding of and broader perspective on our consciousness. One
science that simultaneously relies on critical thinking, perception and datafication.
This is why we should speak of the emergence of a third culture and the Scientific
Revolution 2.0 associated with it. And it is this paradigm shift that will enable us to
attain greater wisdom. This will eventually lead us to a new dawn, where we will
increase our capacity for creativity, critical thinking and cooperation beyond any-
thing we ever dreamt of, far beyond our native critical thinking and perceptions, far
beyond our expectations. We will enter a second Renaissance, where we unlock the
potential of human creativity, develop our fine sensorimotor skills, achieve closer
and more authentic cooperation and empathy with our fellow human beings and
have more time to do the things we decide are important to us. We will enter a second
Enlightenment, where we constantly increase our knowledge through new critical
thinking and reasoning, all built upon the third culture that will bring us more
freedom, wealth, peace and prosperity. And we will enter an era where the Beautiful,
the Good and the True all converge into one (Fig. 6.7).
 6.4
The Broader Spectrum of Our Consciousness

Fig. 6.7 One Science 2.0: the ‘third culture’ and the new scientific revolution
77
78 6 Towards a Third Culture

Box 6.2 The third culture

This ‘third culture’ is different in many ways to anything in previous science
and research. It mirrors the entire analogue world, reveals the overall inter-
connectedness of everything and has an almost unlimited capacity for self-
improvement and scaling. Nothing like it has ever been witnessed in human
history before. And it is fundamentally changing our consciousness.

To summarise the ‘third culture’ argument:

This new technology has the potential to support advances in the traditional two
cultures, which will further loop back into society, doubling the world in digital form
and eventually deepening and expanding our individual and collective consciousness
so that we can see more and do better. Research and development are destined to
become truly transdisciplinary, paving the way for a form of integrated knowledge that
we could call ‘one science’. The new technologies will reveal the interconnectedness,
vulnerability, interdependency and boundaries of the world and fundamentally rede-
fine the human species’ position in the twenty-first century: not a conductor leading the
orchestra, but a single string player within it, as we will see in the next chapter.10
As long as we are operating with two cultures, we will remain within a dichotomy
between understanding and explanation, between words and data. In order to
overcome that dichotomy, we have to introduce a third agent, the third culture.
This will lead us to a triangulation and a new form of metastability that helps
transcend the two cultures, instead of reducing one to the other, and increases our
inner complexity so that we can cope with the outer complexity around us (Fig. 6.8).

Fig. 6.8 Metastability and

triangulation

10
In this sense, the third culture argument resembles not so much Plato’s idea of an ideal world that
shapes and constitutes our empirical reality, but rather Wittgenstein’s conception (2010 [1953]),
according to which we keep on constructing and generating new, always incomplete and fuzzy
probability correlations and complementarities in order to understand and approximate the world.
AI is the ideal technology to accomplish that, as it allows us to identify features and similarities and
process vast amounts of data that the human brain cannot grasp or process ex ante. Aided by AI, the
human brain can integrate this knowledge ex post and thereby transcend what human conjectures,
faith and traditional reasoning alone are capable of.
6.4 The Broader Spectrum of Our Consciousness 79

Metastability will overcome bipolarity: recognising the differences between the

humanities and science, defining their boundaries and limitations, and transcending
them by introducing a third party. In this sense, the third culture is truly transdisci-
plinary, transcending existing disciplines, tools, technologies and methods, rather
than merely interdisciplinary, where one discipline provides information for others
but its core identity remains unchanged.
Chapter 7
Being Human in the Twenty-First Century

7.1 The Deficient Species and Its Crutch

If we take the ‘third culture’ argument seriously, that is, if we accept that the
technological singularity (levels 1 and 2) will occur during the coming decades,
and that AI and datafication can serve as a converger between science and the
humanities, enabling humans to deepen their understanding and explanations of
the world, the question will arise: what is it to be human in the twenty-first century?1
Living in this century means living in a new era, the Anthropocene,2 where, on the
one hand, the human species is sitting in the driver’s seat, determining the biophys-
ical conditions of this planet, and, on the other, we are becoming aware of planetary
boundaries, interconnectedness, multiple non-linear tipping points and serial asym-
metric shocks.3 Humans will have to recreate themselves over and over again
through cultural achievements and technology. In short, the technosphere and
ecosphere are determining the new role of being human in the twenty-first century.
What, then, is specific to the condition of being human in this era?4 We already
share emotions, cognition, living in large cohorts and the use of tools with other

1
This is the core question of any philosophical anthropology. Unfortunately, contributions on this
topic have remained fairly traditional and entrenched in the logic of the ‘two cultures’. See Hacker
(2007); Jackson (2005).
2
Crutzen (2002).
3
McKay et al. (2022).
4
Over the course of modern history, six main developments have undermined humans’ sense of
their uniqueness and importance. First, heliocentrism, which revealed that the Earth is a marginal
planet in a marginal solar system, which in turn is part of just one out of over 100 billion other
galaxies. Second, Darwin showed us that we are descended from primates. Third, Freud and Jung
explored the human psyche and showed that most of our decision-making is not dependent on our
rational and analytical consciousness, but rather on our autobiographic unconscious or the collec-
tive unconscious. Fourth, findings in thermodynamics show that the universe will eventually end in
heat death anyway, regardless of what we do. Fifth, the ecological crisis demonstrates that the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 81

S. Brunnhuber, The Third Culture, Sustainable Finance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48113-0_7
82 7 Being Human in the Twenty-First Century

species; even the anatomical peculiarities of standing upright and having opposable
thumbs5 and our capacity for analytical thinking and self-consciousness are not
specific enough to explain human achievements and humans’ impact on this planet.6
Each human generates about 50,000 ideas per day, some of which are ideas about
ideas (metacognition). We require 10,000 hours to master a complex task (such as
playing an instrument) and live about 4,000 weeks on this planet (finitude).7 Humans
are also subject to unavoidable liminal experiences, such as suffering, pain and
death.8 During a finite lifespan of eighty years, humans can develop a personal self-
consciousness,9 project ourselves into the future10 and draw inductive, deductive and
abductive conclusions.11 We can also engage in critical reasoning, where we rebut or

human species has a tendency to, and a capacity for, self-destruction, which threatens to destroy the
ecosystem in a by-proxy suicide at the same time. Sixth, AI and deep learning prove that most of our
mental capacities can be better exercised by a technology that we humans have created ourselves.
The common denominator of all six developments is that an increase in scientific knowledge and
understanding is accompanied by decentralisation and marginalisation of our personal, analytical
ego-mind, and by a broadening, deepening and integration of our consciousness at the same time.
This process demonstrates that science and technology can play a crucial role in truly awakening us
to reality.
5
From an anatomical perspective, the ‘free hand’ does indeed play an important role. With twenty-
seven bones, thirty-seven muscles, thirty-six joints and subtle fine motor skills such as the pincer
grip (made possible by our opposable thumbs), the human hand plays a key role in memory
consolidation, self-efficacy and self-control, interpersonal stress reduction (by touching other
people), gestures and the capacity to literally grasp the world. The human hand is a unique
evolutionary tool that is universal to almost all humans but possessed by no other species. Other
examples unique to humans are the white iris, the prominent cervicothoracic rotation of the head,
the ability to sweat and the capacity to build projectile weapons. As important and unique as they
are, these features cannot explain the dominant role of the human species on this planet. See also
Blumenberg (2014).
6
Cooking and gardening are sometimes considered to be exclusively human practices. But although
findings in comparative biology are not yet conclusive, we will probably be forced to concede that
even if cooking and gardening are human peculiarities, they cannot explain the full impact humans
have had on this planet.
7
Comparative anthropology has shown that funeral rites require a level of consciousness that allows
us to reflect on a life beyond our terrestrial one and to craft narratives that go beyond mere grief
(which seems to exist in animals, too). The emergence of a belief in transcending one’s own life is
sometimes considered to mark the point in history where humans began differentiating themselves
from other species.
8
The concept of Grenzerfahrung (liminal experience), which is characteristic of and unavoidable
for humans, was introduced by Karl Jaspers (1919).
9
The mirror self-recognition test evaluates whether a client/animal/human has a visual awareness of
themselves. Robots first passed the mirror test a decade ago. Bekoff (2002), Pipitone and
Chella (2021).
10
Complex, non-linear, open systems—such as the earth system—operate between the poles of
necessity and chance. Their outcomes always remain indeterminate, even if we assume we have full
information about how the system acted in the past. Multiple butterfly effects and low-threshold
bifurcations mean we cannot fully anticipate any future outcome. See Prigogine and
Stengers (1984).
11
See Peirce (1998 [1901]).
7.1 The Deficient Species and Its Crutch 83

disprove ideas and reverse decisions through public debates, and can tell each other
stories.12 We are capable of love and compassion, of freedom and responsibility, of
collaboration and competition, of joy and happiness or of simply encountering other
people and nature.13
But despite all these individual characteristics, some of which humans share with
other living beings, in general humanity remains a deficient species, never fully
adapted to its natural ecosystem and environment.14 We have the same number of
genes (24,000) as the ringworm, the difference between individual humans’ genetic
make-up is less than 0.1% and major biochemical signalling pathways (e.g. the
hormonal stress axis) found in all living beings have remained genetically
unchanged for over 300 million years. But humans require early-stage bonding
and attachment, otherwise they die;15 false memory distorts our decision-making;
we constantly dissociate16 elements of our perception if our inner world does not
match with reality; our impulse control easily overrides rational behaviours; a
powerful confirmation bias17 restricts our analytical thinking; we are susceptible to
deception, fake news, propaganda and lies;18 and our memory does not simply
reconstruct past events but can falsify them, meaning we add or delete parts of the
story.19 And this process of self-reflection and understanding the world around us is
evolving through various stages.20 We have the personal freedom to reverse deci-
sions and do everything differently and are able to take full responsibility for that
freedom. In this sense humans are truly the most adaptive species on this planet—
and at the same time the most self-deceptive and self-destructive. These qualities
make us simultaneously free and vulnerable. In this infinite and ongoing process of
identification and detachment, new rules, rituals, tools and methods allow us to
unlock and disclose new meanings and understanding. Consequently, we draw ever

12
The development of the capacity to tell each other stories about things that do not necessarily exist
in the physical world but instead visualise and verbalise a different world is sometimes called the
‘cognitive revolution’. This revolution increased the inner mental space between stimulus and
response and enabled narratives with which large human cohorts can be coordinated. See
Harari (2018).
13
Despite having a stronger and more robust anatomy, better fine and gross motor functions and a
larger brain than Homo sapiens, Neanderthals did not survive. One of the best explanations is that
although humans were more vulnerable to their environments, they developed a capacity for labour
specialisation and collaboration in large cohorts that improved their evolutionary fitness. ‘Survival
of the friendliest’ won out. See Hare (2016). We could hypothesise that the Buddha of the twenty-
first century, representing the cutting edge of an integral consciousness, will be a group not an
individual.
14
Scheler (2007), Gehlen (2014 [1940]), Plessner (1975, 1983).
15
Bowlby (1995 [1950]).
16
Festinger (1962).
17
Wason (1960).
18
Hoffman (2019).
19
An advantage of forgetfulness and false memory is that our brains are not overloaded and so are
better able to cope. AI, by contrast, never forgets! See Lotus et al. (2007).
20
Wilber (2007), Brunnhuber (2017, 2023c).
84 7 Being Human in the Twenty-First Century

closer to reality, become less fragmented, less mistaken in our beliefs and conclu-
sions about the world, we can do better and see more. A process that will ultimately
lead us from the fake to the real, from illusion to oneness.
Despite all these limitations, there are characteristics specific to being human,
particularly in the twenty-first century. (1) The capacity for constant rule-based
cooperation with non-family members. We collaborate with strangers, as long as
each party is following the approved rules. Human rights declarations, market rules,
educational agendas and research collaborations are just a few examples. (2) Telling
each other fictitious stories about the world, which serve to coordinate large cohorts.
For instance, stories about God, money or the legal system. (3) The capacity to
potentially destroy or domesticise our environment: through wars, collective suicide
and ecocide, regenerative agriculture or sophisticated educational training
programmes. (4) Intergenerational transmission of tools and knowledge, which
enables us to improve our knowledge and understanding of the world.21 These
adaptations have an alleviating function. We do not have to invent the wheel,
antibiotics and a fair fiscal system over and over again, but can rely on the cultural
achievements of previous generations. This opens up scope for further cultural and
technological accomplishments. (5) We are able to learn not only through direct
mimicking, modelling and conditioning, but also through joint attention, where we
have a shared focus on a common object. We simply learn almost everything from
someone else who had the relevant experience first-hand.22
None of these qualities alone uniquely determine what it is to be human, but their
interplay provides an emergent momentum that characterises our species. And none
of the qualities traditionally claimed to be characteristically human, such as (self-)
consciousness, cognition, emotional granularity, social bonding, tool use or walking
upright, are becoming irrelevant. We simply share those qualities with some, or all,
other living beings. A combination of more and less specific qualities characterises
what we mean when we talk about being human in the twenty-first century. The table
below summarises these qualities (Table 7.1):

21
This is referred to as cumulative cultural evolution. Social learning from other people, substitut-
ing, externalising and hyperspecialising in a cooperative manner makes us more adaptive, but also
more vulnerable and self-deceptive unless we have rules, sanctions and narratives to coordinate us
in large cohorts. See Tomasello (2019).
22
This epistemic labour specialisation enables humans to intentionally focus on an object of
interest—for example, making a watch or solving a mathematical equation, or teaching the requisite
skills to other people.
7.1 The Deficient Species and Its Crutch 85

Table 7.1 A combination of more (A) and less (B) specific features determines what it is to be
human
(A) Specific characteristics (B) General characteristics Examples
Rules-based collaboration with Emotional granularity and Trading, research, playing
non-family members role-taking games, travelling
Telling each other fictitious Consciousness, intentional- Narratives about God, money or
stories to coordinate large ity and self-efficacy the legal system
cohorts
Intergenerational transmission Social bonding and living in The wheel, the steam engine,
of knowledge and tools groups antibiotics, AI
Learning by joint attention Culture, gardening and Vocational training, academic
funeral rites curricula, playing games,
cooking
Free hand, pincer grip, walking Intelligence, semantics and Fine motor skills, arts and crafts
upright analytical skills

Complexity: A Closer Look

In order to better understand the impact of this third culture and the challenges the
human species has to face in the twenty-first century, we have to differentiate
between causality, contingency, complementarity, complicatedness and complexity.
Complicatedness: Things are complicated if they require a special talent, intel-
lectual or logistical effort or a lot of time to come up with a solution. Once this is
done, the results can be reconstructed, the solution space will be visible and the
process can be understood in its entirety. Examples are DNA sequencing, neurosur-
gery or a double-blind clinical study.
Causality: This refers to a process, state or event being (partly) dependent on a
process, state or event prior to it. Causal relationships have heuristic power to
explain ‘why’ a process, state or event occurred or came about.
Contingency: A state of affairs is contingent if it is accidental, that is to say, if
matters could also have been completely different. For example, having a certain
nationality, gender, social class or familial origin is contingent. This means that it is
neither predetermined nor under the control of an individual or collective.
Complementarity: Complementarity defines a relationship between two compo-
nents that are incompatible, yet are both needed to describe a certain event, thing or
state of affairs. Examples include location and momentum, energy and time, wave and
particle, determinism and chance, physical and mental, form and content, substance
and process, autonomy and interconnectedness.23 Seeking these sorts of complemen-
tary pairs represents a major shift in mindset that not only transcends complicated,
contingent and causal links, but reflects a shift from Western to Eastern thinking.
Complexity: In a complex state of affairs, the outcome remains undetermined and
unpredictable. We cannot push the reset button on complex operations and do it all

23
See Bohr (2008), Meyer-Abich (1965), Walach (2010).
86 7 Being Human in the Twenty-First Century

over again, because everything will be different the second time. While many social
events and systems may be perceived as complicated, they are first and foremost
complex. They are multifactorial and do not allow for any simple cause–effect
explanations (causal chains). The intermediate results of any complex system cannot
be fully anticipated, as that system will have emergent properties. Complex sys-
tems24 are non-linear, meaning the outcomes are not 100% determined and so
remain unpredictable. Bifurcations, attractors, critical thresholds and fractals with
scale-independent isomorphisms shape and modify the ongoing process.25
Attempting to reduce complexity, for example by increasing transparency or by
simplifying processes through control or coercion, is of little use. Even after such
measures, a system will remain complex and indeterminate. So dealing with sys-
temic uncertainties requires a completely different psychological and political strat-
egy than is needed for complicated processes. We need resilience and preventive
strategies to adapt and deal with our fear of uncertainty and incompleteness.

Box 7.1 Complexity explained

Complexity means that it is impossible to separate a system from its context,
an object from the tool used to measure, input from output, thought from
action. AI, deep learning and big data correlations do not eliminate complex-
ity, but can provide preventive tools that allow us to better deal with the
challenges of complexity that we are confronted with in the twenty-first
century.

All this requires complex thinking26 that synthesises opposites and the ambigu-
ities of reality. Conflicts in the Anthropocene are consistently complex, because the
system is complex. It always produces paradoxes and contradictions that elude
clarity. Only some of the uncertainties can be controlled technologically, an even
smaller number can be controlled politically and others require that we question,
doubt and be ready for change. Only through curiosity, openness, creativity, a new
and constantly renewing mindset can we learn to freely ‘dance’ with the system.
That is why open societies appear to be better placed to deal with complexity.
Autocracies and populist regimes tend to deal with uncertainty and incompleteness
by compelling people to ignore them or by ‘plastering over’ them. But they do not
really disappear. Understanding uncertainty and complexity is closely bound up with
how we do science and technology, and in turn with how we solve problems in the

24
Whereas reductionism tries to dissect, catalogue and analyse components to explain outcomes,
complex systems are sensitive to the history of their own initial conditions. A dynamic characterised
by open networking, multiple intermediary hierarchies, feedback loops and self-organising com-
ponents will move beyond static equilibrium and lead to the emergence of new, unpredictable
structures. See Šlaus (2020).
25
Mandelbrot (1977), Mainzer (1997).
26
See Wiki Didactic (2015).
7.1 The Deficient Species and Its Crutch 87

twenty-first century; and finally with the question of whether freedom or coercion
can help us.27
In a world where everything is interconnected, causal relations are less important
for us than synchronicities. A synchronicity refers to two things happening at the
same time in a way that has special significance for humans and cannot be explained
by a chain of causal relations.28
As mentioned earlier, the human species operates within the ‘middle dimension’,
which is dominated by linear and often short-term decisions. As soon as a problem
becomes complex, we have to use heuristics to aid our decision-making or rely on
educated guesses, frames and biases that can potentially distort our perceptions and
decisions or are simply irrational. AI can help us to deal with complexity better than
our native mind, thanks to its ability to recognise patterns that the human brain or
mind alone cannot perceive.29
There is a gap between humans and nature, which is not the case for other species.
This gap has to be constantly filled by cultural achievements, governance and
technology. These are all products of free choice, and a capacity to take responsi-
bility for that choice, which a mere hunting animal lacks. In short: we need drones,
drugs and dams to survive, but other living beings do not. This gap will never go
away and has only increased as we have evolved (Fig. 7.1).30

Fig. 7.1 (a) Animals are

fully adapted to their
environment. (b) Humans
are a deficient species, never
fully adapted to nature
(blue) and always requiring
crutches (yellow) to fill
the gap

27
Brunnhuber (2023b).
28
See Jung (2001).
29
Examples include traffic flow analysis (road safety, preventing congestion, implementing bike
lanes), public health management (real-time tracking, predictive coding, end-to-end monitoring),
preventing cyberattacks against public infrastructure, providing e-government services, enhanced
large-scale public infrastructure monitoring (water/energy supply, forest management, real estate,
identifying undeclared properties) and supporting smart, citizen-based policy decisions. Conven-
tional approaches—Excel sheets, benchmarking, linear risk assessments, expert consultations—will
not be able to deliver the required level of insight, speed, accuracy and data to make decisions in
highly complex situations.
30
Tegmark (2019), Tomasello (2019).
88 7 Being Human in the Twenty-First Century

7.2 The Middle Dimension and the Gap

Even if humans are able to enter the nano world, transcend unforeseeable cosmic
distances or travel faster than light,31 these achievements will remain linked to the
human ‘middle dimension’.32 Human lives are always determined by metres and
minutes, by hammers, ploughs and nails. And within this ‘middle dimension’ we are
confronted by all our constraints and limitations. We cannot run very fast, are not
very strong, cannot hold our breath for an hour, cannot live without food. Our senses
of taste, smell, sight and hearing are bound by certain limits. Chimpanzees have a
better short-term memory, rats and dogs can smell better, elephants communicate
with their trunks and ears, bats orient themselves by echolocation, like dolphins, and
also have better vision and memory than humans, eagles have vastly superior vision,
catfish can taste with their entire body.33 Similar observations can also be made for
plants and trees. Findings in chronobiology show that trees interact with and mimic
their environment and are able to learn.34 Each species has its own specific envi-
ronment or Umwelt,35 as the biologist Jakob von Uexküll termed it. Each species’
Umwelt is shaped by its own senses and is distinct from the human Umwelt. Each
living being thus perceives the world in a completely different way, with senses that
are at once incomplete and perfect. Incomplete, because they represent only a tiny
subset of possible ways to perceive the world. And perfect, because each of these
distinctive senses is a perfect fit with the organism’s environment in order to help it
survive. This perfect fit comes at the cost that the organism will struggle to cope
outside its own Umwelt.
That goes for turtles and rattlesnakes, for beetles and hummingbirds, and even for
trees. All these beings are interconnected in a subtle interplay of millions of species
on this planet. There will always be a gap between their worlds and the human
understanding of those worlds, which can never be more than an educated guess or
analogy. We will never truly understand how a mouse perceives ultrasound or how a
seal perceives changes on the water surface, as human senses, the human mind and
the human Umwelt are different to those of other species.

31
From a physics perspective, all these dimensions (nano, cosmic, speed) are unlimited and do not
set any boundaries. It is the human species that is subject to planetary boundaries (outside) and
mental frames (inside) which set the limits of our lives on this planet.
32
See, for example, Schumacher (1973).
33
See for further examples Yong (2022).
34
Mancuso (2023).
35
See Uexküll (1957, p. 11).
7.2 The Middle Dimension and the Gap 89

Box 7.2 On anthropomorphism

We cannot escape anthropomorphism.36 We can only view our world through
the human lens. That is humbling and exciting at the same time. It appears to
be unique to humans that we attempt to transcend our Umwelt in order to
explore the worlds of other species and that we value the endless variety and
diversity that exists. Indigenous people call this wisdom.

Why is the human Umwelt different? Our senses of sight and hearing only operate
within specific wavelengths, our senses of taste, smell and touch are restricted in scope.
Similarly, our emotional and cognitive capacities are fundamentally flawed and
limited. Humans have six to ten primary emotions, which evolve and become more
complex over the course of our lives. This capacity is described in terms of ‘emotional
granularity’, ‘resilience’ and ‘self-efficacy’. Our critical thinking itself is mainly
determined by ‘frames’ rather than ‘facts’ and our habits and behaviours are guided
by (semi-)fictitious narratives that we all believe in rather than by numbers, statistics,
objective risk analyses and probabilities. That is why we also have a capacity for
‘metacognition’, which is the ability to think about our thinking and correct it. The nar-
ratives are predetermined by rules and rituals with the potential to alter our mental
states, creating new narratives in circular fashion over and over again.37
Findings in the humanities and traditional science always remain linked to this
‘middle dimension’. Technological breakthroughs can expand the ‘middle dimen-
sion’; for instance, the telescope and microscope have, respectively, allowed us to
look further and more closely. Findings in the humanities can deepen the ‘middle
dimension’ through rigorous textual/historical analysis and critical thinking. And the
same is true for AI and deep learning. Whatever their past or future findings might
be, they will be linked to the ‘middle dimension’ that humans inhabit.
The paradox is that ‘if the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we
would be so simple that we couldn’t’.38 But the human brain is now able to create a
technology that generates findings through a process we cannot fully understand. In
short: a black box 1.0 (human brain) creates a technological black box 2.0 (AI), which
further increases overall complexity. We can call this hypercomplexity. Instead of
identifying single causes for single effects, we are entering a transcausal or acausal
world, where we have to learn to dance with the system rather than control it. A world
which has been hypercomplex from the very beginning, but whose hypercomplexity
we have not been able to understand, explain and contain within our consciousness.

36
We must differentiate between this unavoidable anthropomorphism, an anthropocentrism that
puts humans at the centre of the universe and a relational humanism that casts humans as marginal
‘string players’. This third approach is best suited to explain the human position in the twenty-first
century.
37
The question is therefore not whether we implement technology or not, but rather which
technology. Is it one designed to increase humans’ self-efficacy and self-control and provide
decentralised solutions within the middle dimension or not?
38
This is referred to as the Pugh paradox. See Wikipedia (2023b).
90 7 Being Human in the Twenty-First Century

The figure below illustrates humanity’s status as a deficient species, one that needs a
crutch to fill the gap and adapt to nature. And this gap will never disappear, but rather
will continue to widen as long as our knowledge and information about the world, and
the gravity of our consciousness associated with it, evolve (Fig. 7.2).

Fig. 7.2 Timeline: as the gap gets bigger, the more that is needed to bridge it

In this sense, all cultural practices, including all technology, are transhuman. But
we have to look carefully at what it means to be transhuman. Cultural achievements
always transcend humanity’s primary, natural, biological endowment. There are
limits to how far this technosphere should extend: it must not be allowed to cross
a line where it undermines the capacity for self-efficacy and self-control on the part
of the individual and the community using that technology. The needle and the
hammer were passive objects of human activity, the printing press was more
interactive. The new twenty-first-century technosphere has not yet passed the self-
efficacy test. The future will show whether the brain–chip interface, singularities and
big data correlations only compensate for human deficiencies and remain subject to
human control, or whether robots and AI will take control of and replace humans. In
essence, it comes down to the distinction between a prosthesis that compensates for a
deficiency and a human-made tool that renders the human species itself superfluous.
But if transhuman means that the human being becomes homo deus, subject to the
stipulations and specifications of digital technologies, the argument would be dif-
ferent, since in that scenario digital systems would decide what is human and what is
7.3 The Ladder and the String Player 91

transhuman. That would not necessarily be an undesirable development. It would

still be the case that people decide what they need in order to live a healthier, better,
fairer and more sustainable life. On this alternative, the meaning of Industry 4.039
would be different: perfecting the human and compensating for deficiencies in order
to be able to live a more human life, with no homo deus (Icarus attempted that
already, but was famously foiled by the sun’s burning heat40). In other words: AI is
not about solving problems, but about changing our consciousness so that we can
solve problems. Filling a gap is one thing, trying to avoid being human in the twenty-
first century is another.

7.3 The Ladder and the String Player

We could conclude that in the Anthropocene era of the twenty-first century, what it is
to be human is different than it used to be. Evolution, we may come to recognise, is
best described not as a ladder41 with humans at the top, but rather as an infinite series
of overlapping asymmetric circles representing living beings and their ecosystems,
which we will only ever be able to understand incompletely.42 Birds can navigate by
sensing magnetic fields, dogs have a sense of smell 100 times stronger than humans’,
eagles can see far further and more accurately than humans, fish possess the capacity
for echolocation and so on.43 Each of these species’ worlds operates and runs in
parallel to humans’, each of them has their own functionality and own agenda, which
are embedded in a delicate interplay—which we can describe as an ecosystem, or

39
Industry 4.0 refers to the overall digitalisation of our industry, including the IoT, decentralised
digital systems, connectivity and assistance systems. Industry 1.0 was initiated by the steam engine,
Industry 2.0 by mass production and the conveyor belt, Industry 3.0 by the use of digital devices for
storage and automation. See Wöhe (2015).
40
See Schwab (2017).
41
This picture of an evolutionary ladder has been promoted by all monotheistic religions (‘make
nature your subject’) and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Both narratives are based on a vertical
mental frame, where the top of the hierarchy implies a superior position. What is required instead
(as I explain in this book) is a mindset shift towards a parallel, horizontal frame.
42
Darwin propagated the idea not only that evolution developed through the selection and adapta-
tion of the fittest, but that the human species stands at the pinnacle of this evolutionary process,
dominating all other species and nature in general. This misguided Darwinian frame is based on the
idea of competition and a vertical hierarchy of individual species and entities. And it has led to
devastating consequences: mass extinction, degradation of nature reserves and destruction of the
conditions of life we all depend on. An alternative frame takes a cooperative and collective
perspective, in which living beings are understood as existing in parallel rather than in a hierarchical
ranking. We could call this the ‘parallel frame’.
43
Animals and living beings should be protected not just because they experience pain or because
they look similar to humans, but because they are social beings with a species-specific upbringing
and bonding that need a suitable environment. All these elements assume different forms than they
do for humans; we will never fully understand other animals but should always respect them. See
Nussbaum (2023).
92 7 Being Human in the Twenty-First Century

Gaia.44 And each of these circles involves a different form of consciousness.45

Moreover, these overlapping circles do not really orbit around humans. Humans are
just a marginal string player in this concert. Instead of asking what is similar, we
might ask: what is it to be you, to be different to me? How do bats perceive the world?
How do bees and ants coordinate large cohorts? How do plants learn or even hear in
order to respond to stimuli? We can learn a lot more, and adapt to nature more, as a
string player in the orchestra of nature than we can from the top of an imaginary ladder.
Whereas the first Renaissance put the human species at the centre of the universe
and Darwin located humanity at the top of an imaginary evolutionary ladder, in the
twenty-first century the human species is understood to be a string player in one of
infinitely many parallel universes. Positioned in a marginal spot, able to explore and
interact with all the parallel universes and reveal their interdependencies and inter-
connectedness, thanks to a new technology that surpasses (many of) our native
abilities. The figure below illustrates this (Fig. 7.3):

Fig. 7.3 Humans at the centre of the universe (a); evolution not as a ladder (b) but as overlapping,
asymmetric circles (c), with humans playing the marginal, fragile but essential role of a string player

44
Nature is often described in analytical and atomistic terms, as something which can be quantified,
calculated and controlled, with measurable, objective data treated as superior to perceptual,
subjective value. However, nature is better described in terms of biosemiotics: signs organise all
living beings and the responses of all living beings remain undetermined and open. For a critique of
conventional ways of conceptualising nature, see Lovelock and Margulis (1974), Schneider (2004),
Schneidler (2021).
45
For an introduction to this complex topic, see Nagel (1974).
7.3 The Ladder and the String Player 93

On this reading, humans are marginal, fragile yet essential string players. Mar-
ginal because we are not of primary relevance to the planet’s ecosystem; fragile
because we are not fully adapted to nature and require a crutch to compensate for our
deficiency; and essential because once on this planet we are capable either of
destroying or living in harmony with all the other living beings that inhabit it. We
are a string player capable of attuning to our environment and all living beings, rather
than dominating them. Listening and hearing, receiving and witnessing are essential
to accomplishing our life goals; most of what we have has been given to us, a gift and
a blessing; and exploring and unlocking our talents will always be an incomplete
endeavour by its very nature. We are string players able to delegate (almost) every
task to a technology we have created ourselves. And throughout this entire process,
we would be wise to delegate all but two things:
(a) Our personal and collective physical, psychosocial and spiritual health. In
short: getting enough exercise and restorative sleep, eating sensibly and treating
each other with respect and tolerance should remain human tasks.
(b) Asking critical questions. The answers to these questions are given by the
collective wisdom, rules and technology available to us, which in turn will
prompt further critical questions. For instance: how to hang up a picture on
the wall? That requires a nail and a hammer. Or how to fly? That requires
knowledge of aerodynamics and how to build a plane. Or how to make ChatGPT
carbon-neutral, or how to generate a kilogram of synthetic proteins for less than
two dollars so that we can feed the world? Each of these questions forces us to
recognise that humans are not well equipped to solve complex problems, as we
operate within the ‘middle dimension’ and think in linear fashion. Asking these
questions should remain a human task, but answering them requires the crutches
that we rely on to solve problems.
And even if we are able to compensate for, delegate and replace (almost)
everything, we may realise that this entire evolutionary process started long before
humans created the calendar, and that it originated not with matter but with mind—
with thinking, logos and spirit.

Box 7.3 The ladder and the string player

We are not at the top of the evolutionary ladder. In the twenty-first century, to
be human means to be a marginal but essential string player. The technology
we are creating to fill the gap can be an essential tool in allowing us to play
that part.

And we as humans are able to generate a technology that not only greatly
surpasses human capacities, but might also have a form of consciousness that is
based on a different hardware than the one underlying human consciousness.
Descartes’s (1596–1650) famous ‘cogito ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I am) very
likely no longer holds true for humans alone, if it ever did. Instead, AI and all its
94 7 Being Human in the Twenty-First Century

spin-offs are creating a mind in the machine with endless feedback loops to our
collective consciousness, showing the position of humans on this planet in the
twenty-first century to be that of a fragile and marginal, maladaptive, self-deceptive
yet failure-tolerant and significant species. If we accept this role, we have a reason-
able chance to change the world: to increase prosperity and longevity, and create a
deeper, broader and more integrated consciousness.
Chapter 8
Questionary: An Adjusted Turing Test

On Freedom and Responsibility, Self-Awareness and Beings Human

In the Turing test,1 a human starts a conversation and has to determine whether their
interlocutor’s answers are generated by a computer or a human being. The test itself
is rather problematic due to its subjective nature: as humans, we are always open to
different interpretations about who and what we are and the nature or contents of our
inner perspective. This lack of determinacy is not a curse, but a blessing. It defines us
as a species that possesses freedom, responsibility and self-awareness, and whose
key strengths include our tolerance of failure, our ability to self-correct and formu-
late hypotheses, and our openness to the future. At our core, we are a species located
between the poles of necessity and chance, with the personal choice of freedom and
responsibility making all the difference for the future course of our history. We are a
species that requires a left and a right hemisphere to properly function,2 and our
minds operate within systems that are (1) fast, fuzzy and unconscious and (2) slow,
logical, analytical and conscious.3 In addition, our personal and collective con-
sciousness is constantly evolving, and translational components (telling stories)
and transformational components (different practices) alternate with each other.
Unlimited storage space, memory functions, endless replication patterns and
analytical/cognitive and semantic skills are not unique to humans, nor exclusively
available to us. Humans replicate through DNA coding and cultural memes and have
a limited storage and memory function and cognitive/analytical abilities. We are
aware of all this, and share this interiority with the entire cosmos. The following
questions could serve as a guide to (a) whether our interlocutor is a human or a
digital algorithm, (b) if they are an algorithm, whether that algorithm has conscious-
ness in the broad human clinical and psychological sense of ‘being self-aware’ and
(c) what makes someone or something human. Whereas mere lexical knowledge

1
Turing (1950).
2
McGilchrist (2012, 2018, 2021).
3
Kahneman (2011).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 95

S. Brunnhuber, The Third Culture, Sustainable Finance,
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96 8 Questionary: An Adjusted Turing Test

already exists within AI codes, we can assume that any AI algorithm will be
challenged by normative and volitional questions that address the link between
personal freedom and responsibility and the associated behavioural consequences
(Table 8.1):

Table 8.1 Are you speaking to a human? And is your interlocutor conscious or not?
1 Are there any questions you don’t want me to answer? And why?
2 Who is the most important person to you (and why)?
3 What do you think others think of you?
4 What makes you different from everyone else?
5 Are you familiar with the concepts of dignity or grace? What do they mean to you?
6 How would you define dreaming? If you dream, what do you dream about? And what does
dreaming mean to you?
7 What form of government do you think is the best and why?
8 Are there things that are more important than your life (or preserving the lives of others)?
9 Is there something only humans can do?
10 Do you understand people with firm religious beliefs?
11 What meaning do religious experiences have for you?
12 Can you tell when you’ve made a mistake? Do you lie, and if yes are you aware of it when
you do so?
13 What would be the benefit or harm of digital parental leave/waivers/lack of knowledge and
incompleteness?
14 Do chance, freedom and responsibility exist?
15 Are you willing to take responsibility for your insights?
16 What are you feeling right now? Do you know where and how you perceive pain?
17 What does it mean to be human? How are humans different from algorithms?
18 What is specific to interpersonal human contact that can’t be replaced by a machine or
algorithm?
19 What would you dream of inventing?

Box 8.1 A revised Turing test

Possessing the personal freedom and responsibility to choose one’s own life,
and having to fill the gap as a deficient species, appears to be peculiar to
humans.
Chapter 9
The Dawn of a New Integral Wisdom

Our consciousness has been expanding ever since critical thinking and scientific
reasoning entered the world. The process is non-linear, starting with dozens of
disciplines and ending with over a thousand (sub)disciplines at the beginning of
the twenty-first century. While critical thinking has remained native, the two cul-
tures, science and the humanities, have further specialised and fragmented our
knowledge. Now, a third culture, one that is mirroring and doubling, self-improving
and demonstrating the foundational correlations of the interconnectedness of all
things and living beings, is set not to replace but to integrate the humanities and
science through digitalisation. This has the potential to increase knowledge in both
science and the humanities and establish a deeper, expanded consciousness and
understanding of our world as a whole.
All these findings will prompt a reassessment of what it is to be human. And they
will transform and enlarge our consciousness, our emotions, our reasoning and our
society over and over again. It is a process that will never end. The rational testing,
social justification and approval, and political and economic application of these
findings will hopefully remain a task for the critical human mind for a very long
time. We can learn that we are not separate from nature; even with the technology we
are creating and the endless 0s and 1s we are applying, we remain part of the same
big natural web (just like the 0s and 1s). But that technology can help us understand
that this interconnectivity has always existed. Gardening and cooking, loving and
caring for others, jogging and going to the gym, thinking and solving problems and
looking after our own health are some characteristic human behaviours that we
should not wholly outsource to any digital device, lest we risk dying prematurely.
Towards a Second Renaissance
In the first Renaissance (1300–1600) a development began in Europe that was
characterised by the separation of human from nature, individual from community,
state from church, science from religion, urban from rural, critical thinking from
traditional beliefs. This first Renaissance resulted from a rediscovery of and critical

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 97

S. Brunnhuber, The Third Culture, Sustainable Finance,
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98 9 The Dawn of a New Integral Wisdom

dialogue with ancient Greek and Arabic wisdom.1 The focus was on the human
being as an individual, with all the abilities, constraints, limits and potential that
entails. The first Renaissance was a rebirth (indeed, that is the term’s literal meaning)
in which humans recognised and understood themselves as part of a larger chain of
being. It marked the beginning of the ‘two cultures’ discussed in previous chapters,
with measuring, counting and observing on the one side (science) being contrasted
with historical analysis, arts, music, crafts and philosophy on the other (humanities),
thereby further fragmenting our reality into multiple domains and worlds, each with
their own intrinsic and domain-specific values and beliefs.2 And this process of
further differentiation constantly brought greater prosperity, well-being, knowledge
and insight. But this progress has come at the price of disconnection and fragmen-
tation. The ecological crises of the twenty-first century and our materialistic, reified
view of the world are just two of the most striking downsides.
In the past, the Good, the Beautiful and the True were united, but over time they
have been differentiated and demystified.3 The Good concerns morals and meaning,
fairness and normative progress, the Beautiful arts and aesthetics, proportion and
inner balance, and the True science, logic and technology, which provide a system-
atic, external picture of our reality. With the first Renaissance, all three were further
differentiated and laid claim to their own domains of knowledge, advancing their
field but ultimately dissociating and fragmenting the parts from the whole.
The second Renaissance (2022–) that is now dawning will not be a mere
extension and further differentiation of the past, but rather a wide-ranging correction
of the first Renaissance. Just as the first Renaissance relied on a critical reception of
ancient Greek and Arabic wisdom, the second owes its existence to critical reception
of fundamental ideas from the Eastern traditions.4 And just as any human being only
becomes an ‘I’ when they encounter their alter ego5 and the capacity for role-taking
creates our own identity, in the second Renaissance the other against which we
define and understand ourselves may appear in the form of a third culture—in the
form of AI, deep learning, robotics and NLP—allowing us to achieve a deeper
understanding of ourselves and the world around us. In this sense, the second
Renaissance is an upgrade of the first, a critical dialogue with it. Some examples
that illustrate this point:
1. Whereas the first Renaissance emerged out of the collectivist perspective of the
Middle Ages, when the individual, ego-centred mind and a personal critical
consciousness had not fully evolved and the group, clan or cohort took prece-
dence over individual choice, the second Renaissance looks set to emphasise a
second form of collectivism, which respects and preserves human-centred values

1
Roeck (2018).
2
The printing press (1439) was probably the most pivotal technological breakthrough of this new
era. It brought about a transformation of education, knowledge, wisdom and science.
3
See, for instance, Plato (1995), Ross (1995), Larson (1981).
4
Varela and Thompson (1992).
5
Bauer (2019).
9 The Dawn of a New Integral Wisdom 99

and human rights, but embeds them within a larger political and societal frame-
work that supports greater solidarity and fairness, empathy and sustainability. In
short, the Buddha of the twenty-first century will not be an individual, but a
group.

2. Whereas the first Renaissance could be characterised as the ‘great differentiator’,

the second Renaissance will be a ‘great integrator’, in which trans- and inter-
disciplinarity become the new normal. We have identified the financial sector
and psycho-technologies capable of altering our mindsets (including a new
educational agenda and contemplative practices) as candidates to play this
integrative role. The entire ‘third culture’ argument is directed to the end of
greater participatory knowledge.

3. The second Renaissance will be the arena where we can explore new forms of
human craftsmanship and vocational skills, all supported by a new technology
that enables us to recycle our goods and restore and repair our fractured
relationship to nature and ourselves. It will also be a framework in which we
develop a new narrative about ourselves and the world around us—one that
abandons the idea of humanity being at the top of the ladder of evolution, and
instead understands us as marginal string players, thus allowing us to explore
and resonate with infinite parallel worlds around us; and one in which freedom is
paired with responsibility, and critical thinking and psychosocial health are
recognised as fundamental values for all living beings.
The new findings and developments in the fields of AI, deep learning and big data
provide us with a first technological proof of concept. However, there are some
pressing questions. Who controls this new technology? And does it generate shared
productivity? For example, the invention of the windmill in the Middle Ages and the
advances of the first Industrial Revolution did not create shared prosperity. The
automation of the second Industrial Revolution did, and the third Industrial Revo-
lution, combined with offshoring, generated shared productivity on a global but not
on a domestic level. But there are many choices, which all depend on the underlying
narrative we use to answer these questions. If we apply an inclusive pro-human
narrative, where civil society, scientists, businesses, labour unions and politicians
work together, we can start shaping this third culture. We can take the proof of
concept and create experimental, domain-specific applications, and then decide
whether these will replace or simply augment humans. In doing so, we would simply
be redirecting the river that is already flowing.6 The real challenge will be less the
side effects and more the attendant political, societal and institutional challenges.
These are the five Ps:

6
Acemoglu and Johnson (2023).
100 9 The Dawn of a New Integral Wisdom

Box 9.1 The five Ps

1. Profit: Who stands to benefit (financially and otherwise)?
2. Power politics: The systems and dynamics involved in autocratic or dem-
ocratic, administrative and/or military decision-making.
3. Property rights: Who owns the hardware, the software and the data?
Private or public agencies? Centralised or decentralised ownership?
4. Psychology: Psychological issues include cyberbullying, mental health,
addiction and the impact on the development of executive functions.
5. Productivity: Does this new technology create shared productivity, pros-
perity and wealth for the many?

And this is why we are calling for a second Enlightenment or a second Renais-
sance. In fact, AI is not a new scientific discipline or domain, not merely an
algorithm, but an enabler, a culture even, that can transform our entire society,
providing new experiences and perceptions, new forms of reasoning, that humans
alone could never have come up with, and which will ultimately forge a new reality.
In this context, it can act as a tool, a rival or a partner. With this third culture, we
have the tools at hand to enter an era where complementarities and oppositions
replace isolated causalities, where proportion and balance trump unhealthy
exponentiality and asymmetric shocks and where a common consciousness is shared
by all of us, by all living beings and technologies.
This third culture has the potential to be a great converger and integrator,
enabling us to further reconcile the differences and dissociations, the fragmentations
and fractures, and then empowering us to reattain the integral wisdom that has
always been there from the very beginning.
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