Druid Principles

Principle 1: Coordination

Actively work to coordinate and couple harmoniously with other cognitive systems near and far; learn to communicate to negotiate shared intentions.

Principle 2: Compassion

Try to remain positive, loving, and supportive in thought, language, and action. Cultivate love, gratitude, compassion and understanding for others and society as a whole.

Principle 3: Learning

Learn from your experience. Reflect and optimize the way you perceive and interact with the environment. Strive to increase the complexity and nuance with which your consciousness can interact with the environment.

Principle 4: Creativity

Do as many as the following creative and co-creative sense-making activities as possible to increase your ability to interact effectively in your environment: art making and imaginative creative expression, meditation, formalizing intention through visualization.

1. Humans cognition is a sense-making process of interacting with the environment to learn from patterns of regularity in interaction.

The cognitive science theory of enaction proposes that cognitive agents make sense of their environment through a process of interaction during which the individual learns regularities in patterns of each interaction and their causal structure. Understanding this causal structure enables the agent to strategically interact with the environment to achieve certain aims in a process called sense-making. The environment is understood in terms of its interactive potential, i.e. object affordances.

2. Perception is an active process of seeking out the interactive potential of the environment based on the agent’s directive, goals, and intention.

Perception does not passively receive sensory information, as traditionally believed. It is an active and dynamic process of projecting predictions onto the environment based on the embodied knowledge and bodily constraints of a cognitive agent. Agents perceive the environment in terms of its interactive potential, which changes based on the agent’s intention.

There are potentially an infinite amount of affordances associated with each object, e.g. is it graspaable, liftable, movable, etc. Perceptual logic is the proposed mechanism whereby potential object affordances are filtered to provide only those that are relevant according to the currently active mental model, intention, and sensory data.

3. Perception clamps onto a perceptual logic to guide the interpretation of sensory data based on the intention of the individual.

Stable neural patterns (termed perceptual logic) act as perceptual filters that can be clamped (i.e. activated and held in place) to facilitate a task, and unclamped to generate new ideas and ways of interpreting the sensory data (i.e. building a new mental model). Developing perceptual logic enables expertise since it allows agents to effectively interact with the environment through intelligent perception and action to achieve goals.

Once an interaction strategies is developed, it becomes an attractor for thought, structuring the way that thoughts are generated; in this state, cognition is said to be clamped. If a surprising event happens, cognition unclamps and enables the individual to re-evaluate their mental model, intentions, sensory data, and perceptual logic. Therefore, pereption is not purely a function of sensory data, as is largely believed today, but rather perception is a combination of intention, the mental model, and sensory data filtered through perceptual logic.

4. Meditation trains the clamping muscle that crafts perceptual experience.

Meditation redirects perception’s active process inward through mental visualization, sustained attention, and mindful presence in the moment. It is a meta-skill that strengthens the clamping muscle and helps reveal the true inner self and genius of each human by allowing the person to unclamp from the perceptual logic we all develop while learning to be a part of society (i.e. the self/ego).

5. Meditation cultivates genius and helps humans achieve their latent potential.

Once a human begins this path of inward journeying, the genius potential within them begins to naturally unfold and blossom. When multiple humans band together to authentically join in this spiritual journey together, the process quickens for each of those involved (as well as for all others due to the nonlinear effects of the evolution of consciousness). Active meditation can be achieved through improvisational creativity and co-creation, such as solo and collaborative improvisational drawing, dancing, and playing music.

Foundational assumptions about how the environment functions

1. All living systems utilize resources from their environment to live.

In essence, all living things eat. Living things consume fuel that sustains the symphony of processes that continually generate their conditions for living, e.g. energy production, metabolic processes, cell growth, etc. Even complex emergent systems such as flocks of birds, weather patterns, and the free market utilize resources in their environment to sustain themselves.

2. Different types of environmental resources produce different types of fuel and byproducts.

Not all nutrient cycling is created equally. In nature, every organism’s waste, excretion, output, or byproduct is another organism’s food/fuel. Nature operates with elegantly closed loop systems. Unfortunately, humans deviate from these harmonious cycles greatly and ultimately to our own detriment.

3. The degree of harmony of an emergent system determines its overall health.

The fuel and byproducts can be more or less harmonious towards the goal of sustaining the emergent life processes of the system and the environment of which it is a part. The fuel source becomes the substance of the living thing and influences its health and its offspring or fruit.

4. All emergent life processes are part of one interconnected whole ecosystem.

Causing disharmony in any aspect of the living environment will negatively affect the whole, eventually, since everything is connected--although nature always balances to maintain harmony. It’s just that sometimes nature uses storms and natural disasters (e.g. hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.) to help balance its living conditions, which can cause death and suffering for humans.

5. We can tune the harmony of the global ecosystem using the appropriate tools.

Using tools based on the principle of nature allows us to design in harmony with our ecosystem, such as regenerative and sustainable design, biomimicry and bioinspired design, and employing machine learning and AI to evaluate the impact of our creative solutions.

Foundational assumptions about how technology and culture function

1. Human cognition is sense-making.

Sense-making is the process by which a cognitive agent interacts with its environment and notices regularities through a perception-action feedback loop that gradually casts a web of meaning onto the environment, i.e. making sense of the environment. When two or more agents engage in sense-making together, dynamic meaning structures emerge in the moment through co-creative interaction and feedback in a process known as participatory sense-making.

2. Formalized sense-making is technology.

Once a cognitive agent makes sense of how some system in the environment works, they may choose to creatively express this knowledge using language, gesture, writing, diagrams, etc. When these sense-making processes are formalized and creatively expressed, they become technology. Technology is emergently defined as any expressed means of systematically reducing the physical or mental energy it costs to perform a task or achieve a desired outcome. Technology becomes formally acknowledged when that outcome is socially useful and the means of achieving it are reliable enough for scaled adoption.

3. Technology has both a physical and conceptual aspect.

Physical technology operates on world (e.g. machines, artifacts, electronics), and conceptual technology operates purely on the mind (e.g. theories, processes, heuristics). Every piece of physical technology has a conceptual counterpart that began in someone’s mind--first as an idea, then a theory, then a formal piece of conceptual technology scrawled out in diagrammatic form. Eventually the idea can evolve into a functional piece of physical technology in reality that is reproducable via its plans and design.

4. Individuals choose of their own free will to make a cognitive investment to produce technology.

When humans invest energy developing, creatively expressing, refining, and crafting technology (with others), it becomes solidified as a piece of cultural knowledge that will reduce the energy expenditure to accomplish the designed task for anyone that has access to that technology from that point forward. This action performs a potential service to all of humanity by contributing to cultural learning.

5. It is culturally advantageous to transmit effective technology.

Once an idea is expressed and recorded, it can be transmitted at a much lower energy cost than it took to produce. Tools can be copied and improved upon once the first version is designed and built. An original idea that is manifested into reality is like the seed of a new tree that goes on to bear new seeds in the mind of all who come in contact with the idea. Thus, humans that strive to reach their full potential are those that actively contribute to this cultural garden by finding, creating, and sharing technologies that are useful to others in the community and society as a whole. Then, ideas will spread as forests grow--emergently, dynamically, and harmoniously.

Foundational assumptions about the way human relations and business function

1. Harmonious interactions are rhythmic balanced interchanges between parties.

In any complex network, each unit has natural surpluses and talents, i.e. things it can do well and gift to others, as well as deficits or potential areas of growth , i.e. things it would be grateful to receive help from others with. In a harmoniously balanced interchange, both parties offer that which they have in surplus (e.g. time, attention, money, wisdom, empathy, love, strength) in response to the genuine needs of their interaction partner--not for self-gain. Surpluses can be freely given in proportion to their abundance in the giver, since surpluses are generated by the life processes of each person.

2. When any party takes more than it gives in a human relationship, it creates disharmony.

For example if one person speaks too much in a conversation, they are taking too much of the person’s attention without letting them express their own thoughts--the exchange is imbalanced. Similarly, in business relations, if one company is taking advantage of another or of the consumer, that creates an imbalanced relationship. Even when parties are not aware they are being taken advantage of at the time, the imbalance causes lasting effects on the social fabric of our society and institutions, reducing their collective effectiveness, e.g. loyalty, business health, immunity to market disruption.

3. Harmony promotes sustainable healthy growth in organizations, while disharmony reduces overall effectiveness.

When a person experiences disharmony, they become frustrated and their outlook, personality, demeanor, and actions change as a result. This negativity transfers in micro-interactions throughout social and organizational networks propagating disharmony. Organizations can generate harmony by helping individuals cultivate their own personal value through cognitive techniques that unlock human potential. Harmony creates social value for people which inspires loyalty, creative thinking, and wealth generation.

4. Wealth is generated by the creation of new value through innovation using inspired thinking.

Ideas and money are not scarce resources, but infinite wells of potential that can be easily realized by all humans if they work to unfold their potential. When humans feel loved and supported in the journey of finding and expressing their personal truth and value, they generate wealth. When humans feel taken advantage of, they strive to maximize their own personal gain in fierce competition among perceived scarce resources. Harmony is created through loving human relations in all organizational networks.

5. A human realizes their wealth generating potential through genuine self-discovery in a harmonious environment.

During each person's individual journey, they come to understand their role in the interconnected whole of which we are all a part. A person's character emerges as a result of their outlook and interaction with society and culture, including small daily interactions with co-workers, family, and friends. Small changes in attitude and outlook at the individual level yield large systemic changes in organizations, institutions, and societies, since those changes spread exponentially and emergently throughout our interconnected networks.

Foundational assumptions about the way society and government fucntion

1. The government and free market can be understoods and modeled as enactive cognitive systems.

Similar to the human cognitive system, society and the elements of it (such as the government and free market) has a mind, body, and emergent consciousness. The mind is composed of all the societal experiences enacted by government and individual actions throughout history. The body is composed of the people that make up society; they all serve as individual sensors to the greater body of government. The emergent consciousness of society is its elected leader and their related governmental structures. Consciousness in both humans and government is an emergent and enactive process that continually re-defines itself through interaction with the environment, i.e. making new laws or taking actions on the environment. Living systems require certain environmental conditions to sustain their life through time. Thus, it is critically important to recieve feedback from the body of the government (the people) in addition to considering society's prior experience to inform the government's decisions.The government and free market exhibits emergence life just like a flock of birds, a river, or a human body, but we need the right tools to account for the many environmental variables affecting the health of the free market. The free market would naturally self-reproduce, evolve, and thrive if given a healthy environment. Then, the question becomes how do you create a healthy market environment?

2. A healthy market environment is created through an emergent and enactive government along with an engaged an informed citizenry.

We can think of the government as an emergent cognitive system with three components: a brain, a body, and a consciousness. The brain is composed of the lawmakers, government organizations, and the history of experience of the nation, i.e. the results of all governmental decisions. The body is composed of the people of a particular country. The consciousness is the elected leader, i.e. the president. The consciousness needs input from both the brain and body to operate effectively. In other words, the President should make decisions based on the collective opinion of lawmakers based on historical evidence, as well as the collective opinion of the body of people that make up the system. However, there is not an established feedback mechanism for citizens to provide their opinion other than voting. There are many important issues that arise through time, in between voting sessions, that citizens could provide feedback about.

It is crucial for the citizens to be able to provide feedback and input into the governing process as they are the body of the emergent government system. It should be through their collective opinion in tandem with governmental experience that decisions are made. There should be a federally managed online platform to post issues and raise concerns. The system could be similar to Reddit.com where users upvote relevant content and make comments on posts. Issues that garner support should be addressed by lawmakers. The hierarchy of lawmakers should be emergent in the sense that if one local lawmaker could not solve the issue, it is presented to the layer of administration above it. Then, if the individuals on that layer cannot solve the problem it is sent upward again, until it will eventually reach the President.

Each layer of government would act as a filter that attempts to solve the problem until eventually the consciousness of the whole system is notified of the problem. This means that one individual citizen could have such an impactful idea that the President is notified about it. This distributed structure allows the body of the system, the people, to act as individual sensors informing the larger structure about the effectiveness of its decisions. It is critical for a consciousness to have sensors informing it about the current state of the world. If we understood our government based on the principles of emergence found in nature and our own cognitive systems, we could increase its efficacy and improve the lives of its citizens.

A well educated citizenry ensures the free market and government function optimally because each citizen forms the fabric of the free market and government. The core principle of an emergent social system is that each unit is an autonomous microcosm of the macrocosm that exhibits its own unique autonomy. Each individual part of society is a reflection of the whole society, and the emergent whole is equally a reflection of all the individual parts. Following this, a society is only as good as it treats its most disadvantaged members. This principle highlights the importance of education in an emergentist society. Education is the key to helping individuals perceive and passionately pursue opportunities for improving and optimizing their environment in a bottom up manner through creative innovation. An education system that incorporates the principles of emergentism in its guiding philosophy would encourage individual growth to achieve global social change. For example, students would be encouraged to engage in meaningful and productive creative expression from a young age (12+yrs old), such as genuine knowledge building, technology production, and artistic expression.