The Druid Principles consists of a set of principles and directives to explain how to function harmonsiously in our society. The principles systematically describe several key domains, including: human cognition, nature, and technology. The principles utilize the cognitive science theory of enaction, dynamical systems theory, and emergence to derive their core features. Each principle and directive is designed to be dynamic, living, and open for debate. This list should be viewed as a kind of wiki article that can be edited by the members of Druidry based on well reasoned arguments for the addition or subtraction of content.
Please Note: These principles do not reflect other druidic organizations, nor are they derived from ancient sources or research about Druidry. The principles are a modern take on what the spirit and ethos of Druidry may have been about, i.e. understanding humans and nature. It could be surmised that the ancient Druids also studied life in this manner given that there were intensive Druid Colleges presumably teaching different sciences and philosophy of the time.
Actively work to coordinate and couple harmoniously with other cognitive systems near and far; learn to communicate to negotiate shared intentions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.