It's worthwhile to base our understanding of the human condition on the brute and obvious fact that we are living things.  "Being alive" involves participation in a vastly complex environment - sharing that environment with all living things. This is where to start - not the illusion of individuality.  In this way, we cannot escape the most fundamental form of assimilation: participation in the drama of all life. Since Darwin, our idea about what it means to be alive has changed beyond recognition. It is fair to say that the old myths, based on simple stories about the human condition, have not kept up with what we now understand our situation to be. Especially in the West and the Abrahamic religions that are base on the fate of the individual "soul", the simple fact of our interdependence has been forgotten. The discipline of mathematics and physics can be applied to the science of life (biology) but few biologists, let alone the lay public, have been exposed t

The original title of this blog was "Dragon Theory", which referred to my idea that humans create organizations that are alive in some sense and, in another sense, are machines like other human creations. There is a "flip side" to this theory. It's about how humans are assimilated into this machine. It turns out that assimilation is an easier thing for most of us to understand, since intelligent machines are (for most of us) a subject of Science Fiction ("AI"). In fiction, "AI" is presented for dramatic purposes as something super-human and implacably opposed to human life. "Real" AI is something else entirely. It presents a real and present threat precisely because it is so poorly understood. The concept of assimilation is quite familiar to most of us. We take it for granted that "social" animals form entities (herds, swarms, flocks, schools) that have a behavior all their own - behavour that cannot be described solely

Where to start? Summing up the human condition in a nutshell is perhaps a characteristic preoccupation of our species. We are obsessed by ourselves. What are we? What are we doing and why? What is the meaning of it all? And make it short, please ... Over the centuries, it seems we do make some kind of progress but, in doing so, the questions become deeper and more complex. As old ideas die out, they are replaced by richer world views that bristle with new questions that we didn't think to ask before. Myth It is certainly important to understand the role of myth, since we are always absorbed in it. In fact, myth only works when you are scarcely aware of it (like the proverbial fish in water). But becoming aware is a crucial first step: one that very few seekers make. Billions of us are still trapped in a religious world view without truly grasping the difference between the stories we are accepting as a framework for reality and reality itself. There is a good reason thinkers like C