Mystical Pragmatics Living Intelligently with Information Technology Paul Hague September 2013 paul at mysticalpragmatics.net www.mysticalpragmatics.net Contents The mystical worldview ............................................................................................................................... 3 Peirce’s architectonic ................................................................................................................................... 5 The information systems architect’s role ................................................................................................... 13 Data and information ........................................................................................................................ 15 The meaning triangle ........................................................................................................................ 17 Knowing that and knowing how ....................................................................................................... 19 Logic and psychology ........................................................................................................................ 20 Scientific method ............................................................................................................................... 22 Mathematical mapmaking ................................................................................................................. 28 The two dimensions of time .............................................................................................................. 29 Calculus of relations .......................................................................................................................... 31 Structured systems design .................................................................................................................. 33 Healing our sick society ............................................................................................................................. 37 The universal system of thought ................................................................................................................ 41 Starting afresh at the very beginning ................................................................................................. 42 Primal concepts ................................................................................................................................. 45 Building relationships ........................................................................................................................ 46 Unifying opposites ............................................................................................................................. 49 Transcending the categories .............................................................................................................. 51 The Singularity in time ............................................................................................................................. 55 Exponential rate of growth ................................................................................................................ 57 Seven simultaneous turning points .................................................................................................... 61 The divisiveness of money ......................................................................................................................... 65 Meaning and value ............................................................................................................................ 68 Money as an immortality symbol ....................................................................................................... 74 The spectrum of consciousness .......................................................................................................... 77 The great taboo ................................................................................................................................. 79 The Jonah Syndrome ......................................................................................................................... 81 Two possible scenarios ...................................................................................................................... 84 Harmonizing evolutionary convergence ............................................................................................ 85 Recapitulating the Cosmogonic Cycle ...................................................................................................... 88 Becoming free of our ancestry ........................................................................................................... 90 An ontogenetic perspective ................................................................................................................ 93 A phylogenetic perspective ................................................................................................................ 94 Stillness is the way ............................................................................................................................. 95 Note At the beginning of June, Ananta Kumar Giri of the Madras Institute of Development Studies kindly invited me to write an essay on ‘Mystical Pragmatics’, inspired by workshops he is currently holding on Practical Spirituality and Spiritual Pragmatics. As he suggested, what has become a treatise, as a summary of my life’s work, is based on the architectonic of Charles Sanders Peirce, whose voluminous writings I studied in the autumn and winter of 2011 and 2012, discovering a kindred spirit. For Peirce began developing his philosophy of pragmatism, for which he is most famous, in 1878 in an article titled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’. This has been the guiding principle of my entire life since I was eight years of age in 1950, when I realized that what I was being taught in religion and science did not make sense, an intuitive feeling that was confirmed over and over again as my rational education progressed. This questioning approach to learning stood me in good stead when I came to investigate the root causes of the unprecedented rate of evolutionary change being driven by scientists and technologists today, explained in outline in this treatise. However, for this to be understood, it needs to be seen in the broader context that affects every child, woman, and man on our beautiful planet Earth. The changes currently happening in the world are the culmination of some fourteen billion years of evolutionary development since the most recent big bang. Yet, for the most part we do not understand the psychospiritual causes of all this change and hence we are not adapting to our rapidly changing environment, which we, ourselves, are creating. To live intelligently with information technology, we need to learn to think and live in a quite new way. For as Einstein famously said, you cannot solve a problem with the mindset that created it. What this means is that the changes that my twin granddaughters will experience during the next fifty years will be greater than all the changes that have taken place during the past five thousand. So what can we do, as grandparents and parents, to help the next generations make the changes that they will need to make? Well, no doubt they will discover this for themselves, for Max Planck sadly remarked, “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Nevertheless, the wisdom of the elders can also help, bringing the challenges our descendants will face into full perspective. John L. Petersen, founder of the Arlington Institute, has set up an Internet portal for what he sees as the World’s Biggest Problems: Economic Collapse, Peak Oil, Global Water Crisis, Species Extinction, and Rapid Climate Change. However, there is an even greater challenge facing humanity today, as Martin Rees, one of the most distinguished scientists in the UK, describes in Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? As Lord Rees says, we are currently facing a technology shock, where the hazards from technology could be far greater than their potential benefits. In particular, he has said, “A superintelligent machine could be the last invention humans ever make.” We can compare the situation today with the threat of nuclear war in the 1950s, as he points out. Then eleven concerned scientists, led by Joseph Rotblat, signed what became known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, issued on 9th July 1955, containing the words, “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” This Manifesto was followed by the first Pugwash conference on Science and World Affairs in a village in Nova Scotia in July 1957. We need something similar today. To this end, I am currently planning to set up a new website for the Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics, with the motto ‘Harmonizing Evolutionary Convergence’. However, this is not an intellectual exercise. To face today’s challenges, we need human intelligence, not artificial intelligence. To this end, in Spirituality and Social Action: A Holistic Approach, Vimala Thakar was much inspired by Mohandas Gandhi’s Satyagraha ‘Truth force’ as a means of transforming society. Ananta Giri has been similarly inspired in Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations. In