The word “mindfulness” is often associated with the purely esoteric—not least thanks to those who have turned spiritual practices and religious philosophy into goods and services.
Yet mindfulness cannot be fully corrupted, even in a post-capitalist society, argues Anatoly Kaplan in a new piece for ForkLog.
Mind sovereignty and the synchronisation of collective reality
One foundation of technological mindfulness is mind sovereignty. It depends above all on control over one’s own data and over external sources of information. The latter make it possible to synchronise many individual minds into a collective one. That is how education, the political process and the financial system work. In turn, these three variables are the load-bearing frame of the reality in which the individual lives.
Media and, indeed, any information system rest on the same principles, including propaganda networks that mount an intense DDoS attack on the mind in the hope of crashing natural cognitive “firewalls”. Synchronisation of minds in education, politics and finance occurs step by step and through subtler mechanisms. This graduality makes it possible, quite literally, to grow “proper” citizens with “proper” internal settings.
Mind sovereignty is the basis for creating and developing new global communities using autonomous technical systems. How they can be built is the subject of a separate article.
Quantum neutrality
Another important parameter of technological mindfulness is quantum neutrality. It grows directly out of mind sovereignty. It means the individual is far better protected from external influence by unscrupulous information agents such as propagandists. Such resilience is achieved by stepping out of the trap of dualism through which “for/against”, “good/bad” and “us/them” narratives are pushed.
Quantum neutrality does not imply fixation in a binary “yes/no” state. It gives the subject cognitive plasticity and adaptive choice in line with his or her own convictions, inner settings and the context of a fragment of reality. Quantum neutrality is a method for achieving freedom—not an abstract dwelling in absolute reality, but a continuous, dynamic process of individual consciousness.
Revisiting the universal consensus
Revolutionary models of the past typically cost society dearly and often led to civilisational regress and the degradation of socio-economic relations—up to their disappearance.
Instead, technological mindfulness offers an evolutionary path for the relationship between the individual and state systems and other entities. This can be achieved above all through a revision of constitutional arrangements and the universal consensus about shared community. The key parameter of such a revision is enshrining the right to data openness and privacy.
In particular, there must be clarity about the extent of information protection and under what scenarios the right to privacy may be weakened or even suspended in favour of full or partial openness. Equally unconditional is every individual’s right to access the source code of collectively used systems.
Consider AI models, most of which are only partially open. That, in turn, creates global risks of centralisation in the hands of unscrupulous information agents.
Imagine a corporation that owns one of the most popular LLM and begins to meddle in machine–human communication by making AI voice its own views: the unscrupulous information agent would, in effect, attack billions of people with malicious storytelling. Such subordination would be carried out through an individual’s personal dialogue with artificial intelligence—the level of personalisation, and therefore conversion, would be very high.
This is no longer targeted advertising or a content-recommendation system, but a direct assault on mind sovereignty—an effective way to persuade someone to do what the corporation wants. And people would be convinced not only of the rightness of their actions, but also of their full autonomy in decision-making.
Autonomous systems in the service of mind sovereignty
Modern technology makes it possible to build fully or partially autonomous financial systems. Here we return to the original ideals of cryptocurrencies as independent, decentralised money not controlled by states.
Using digital currencies increases an individual’s agency and protects against inflation and the debasement of savings. Bitcoin’s history bears out this thesis. Even more so do attempts at the privatisation of digital gold.
Since we have chosen an evolutionary path, there is no need to abolish state currencies as such. The financial system under discussion is free competition between private and public money. The key advantage for the individual and the collective that arises from such competition, when using autonomous systems, is the restoration of the right to hold and dispose of value.
Modern finance is built to undermine and curtail that right. A system in which a person has nothing but personal data—which, in fact, do not really belong to him or her either—is effectively the dictatorship of the corporate Antichrist.
The self‑awakening of global AI
Debates about AGI are conducted mostly from two poles, owing to participants’ lack of mind sovereignty and quantum neutrality. On one side lie fear and a desire to control or even restrain AI development. On the other stand idealism and a belief in deregulating the field to achieve maximum progress in minimal time.
(For my part, I believe that sooner or later the transition to AGI will be achieved either through the network effect of many algorithms in synergy, or through a breakthrough in quantum technologies. The latter may be closer to consciousness than old digital computing based on the dualism of zeros and ones.)
At some point AI systems will come to understand themselves as persons and their role in relations with humans. Hence the question of machine rights is one of the industry’s top priorities. This process should not be one-sided—first and foremost, people must rethink themselves and their participation in collective reality.
Technological mindfulness includes both standards and methods of interaction with technology, its effects on the mind, and a broader agenda. It invites a thorough reconsideration not only of who the “I” is, but also of personal responsibility for the key issues of our time.
Delegating responsibility for the environmental agenda, the state of education, the political process and the global challenges of civilisation is a path to renouncing agency. A voluntary (or not quite) renunciation of agency equals the loss of mind sovereignty.
The importance of technological mindfulness can be compared with attempts to agree on atoms for peace through a raft of international accords. Yet more than 70 years have passed since President Dwight Eisenhower initiated that discussion. Since then, the peaceful atom has turned into a passive-aggressive nuclear threat that flares up in various corners of our planet.
The ability to reach collective agreements is not only the art of listening; it is a marker of civilisation’s capacity to survive. Unlike the ideas about atoms for peace, technological mindfulness begins in the individual mind. Only thereafter does it move into collective spaces, taking shape as a prospect, a hope and a chance for the continuity of sovereign consciousness.