CHAPTER 2 The First Definition
As a parent, what is the single most important thing you could give a child?
The elimination of all dangers in the environment? A total abundance of material goods and comfort? Total safety and security? Of course not.
The only lasting gift --- in addition to your love--- would be developing in them the qualities of self-reliance, creativity, judgment, responsibility, and kindness so they could then go out and confront and handle life.
Let's frame what we are facing in those terms.
Can we make technology so perfect that it never fails humans? Can we legislate, or moralize or protect against all contingencies in a world inhabited by man and with all of the natural catastrophes that mother nature could throw at us?
Again, of course not.
The only truly viable thing to do is to create lots of sane, capable, self-determined, responsible and compassionate human beings to wield these tools sanely.
As a starting point, we would need to correctly define this entity we are calling the individual.
What is this thing that that can create, choose, perceive and assume responsibility?
This is not a philosophical abstraction. There is something there that we can directly observe — it animates, it is aware, it originates. It can be kind or brilliant or troublesome or as dense as a fog.
No physicist, neuroscientist, philosopher, priest, or mystic is necessary to recognize its existence. One need only look.
Defining it correctly is not an academic exercise.
Incorrect or incomplete definitions abound.
To say that the individual is merely the mind, or the brain, or a neural network, or something to be enhanced by biochemistry or electronics is incomplete and shoddy work and has led to much confusion in the mental sciences and the humanities. One need only look at the results in those fields to conclude that something is missing.
I base this on the more than 20,000 hours of my own one-on-one consulting work with individuals and observing the success that comes from understanding who the individual really is and what his actual capabilities are.
Here is a working definition:
The individual is a unit of being that is aware of being aware. It has the ability to create. It possesses power of choice. It can observe, evaluate, and act independently. It can assume responsibility and act with compassion. It appears to grow stronger when it takes on more responsibility and diminishes when it abdicates responsibility. Self-determinism is a defining characteristic.
It is the seat of cognitive sovereignty.
It is the individual himself and is the key to ensuring that the age of AI proves to be the gift to humanity that it can be.
DRILL TWO — The First Definition
The idea of cognitive sovereignty implies correctly that there is an independent awareness of awareness unit that is the individual. This drill is designed to have you observe its existence.
1 — Get an image in your mind of a yellow elephant.
2 — Look at that image.
3 — Answer these questions: A-Who created that image and B- Who is looking at it?
That entity — the one that created the image and observed it — is not your mind. It is not your body. It is simply you. That is the First Definition.
Cognitive Sovereignty and The Mad Hatters of Silicon Valley is a work in progress. Chapters are being published as they are written. To follow along and receive each new chapter directly visit:
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