About the AoM Project

For the length of this book I have stayed behind a particular voice — careful, fond of the long analogy, willing to take its time. That voice is a sensibility I built for the work; it is close to me but it is not quite me. Here, at the back, I want to step out from behind it and say, in plainer words, where this came from, why I couldn’t leave it alone, and what I hope it is for. There is a reason this belongs inside the book rather than beside it: the way the book is made turns out to be the argument the book makes. I’ll come to that.

Where it came from

As far back as I can remember I was a scientist of two worlds at once — the natural one (a microscope and chemistry set at seven, my father’s old high-school chemistry and physics texts read for pleasure at nine) and the social one, which I watched more than I joined. I was the smart kid who didn’t quite fit, more at ease with ideas than with crowds. I understood animals — dogs especially — more readily than people, and felt early that they live in worlds as whole as ours and simply different; years later I would meet the word Umwelt and recognize something I had always known. And somewhere in my early twenties, in an unguarded moment, a sentence arrived and stuck: wisdom is seeing the edges. I wrote it down on the spot. It took me decades to learn how much it held — it is, in the end, a good part of what this book says about how anything comes to know anything.

From childhood my deepest pull was to understand and to share high-value ideas — to help people see a little past the frame they had been handed. At eight I was given a Bible and read it cover to cover. I came away moved by it as an expression of humanity’s early, earnest reach for meaning, and spent the next few years trying to talk about that with the people around me. It did not go well, and I learned — slowly, and not without some loneliness — how hard it is to raise the level at which a conversation happens. I eventually came to see that as a worthy problem rather than a reason to stop. In one form or another I have been working on it ever since; this book is the most patient attempt.

I came by the book’s two halves of agency honestly. My mother ran a preschool out of our home for forty years; the house was always full of children and dogs, and she taught caring as a practice, not a sentiment. My father, a carpenter who became a builder, took me along most weekends and taught the other half — how to make a thing actually stand up — along with his maxim, aimed at a boy who was forever reading: you can’t learn everything from a book. Care and competence, the two models this whole framework rests on, were modeled at my own kitchen table long before I had names for them.

I did not take the college road. I followed the magic of radio into electronics, and then into scientific instruments — field service, a technical-service operation in Japan, another decade managing service back in California — before coming full circle to radio and information technology, this time for County government, raising two children along the way and reading philosophy in the margins of a technical career. In my twenties I spent years studying Zen, and came out feeling I had understood it and no longer needed to carry it — but it permanently shaped how I see the self, the relationship of the observer to the observed, and my thinking on processes vs essences. In the late nineties, on the early internet from Tokyo, I found the Extropian and transhumanist mailing lists and debated there for years — usually as the one insisting that intelligence and technology had to be pointed at wiser collective choices, not merely individual advantage. I kept pressing people to widen their context, which was not a good match for what these mainly Libertarian-leaning rooms were about, with little or no progress except in refining my own thinking.

Then, around 2003, reading Robert Wright’s Non-Zero, the thing I had been circling for two decades arrived almost whole: increasing coherence over increasing context. That phrase has been the seed of everything since — including, eventually, this project.

What I hope it is for

I don’t think of this as an answer so much as a compass. We are, it seems to me, moving into a genuinely pivotal stretch — our capability outrunning our wisdom, the context expanding faster than our ability to stay coherent inside it. I have come to care, personally and a little unreasonably, about how that goes. The most I hope to offer is a way of telling forward from backward that doesn’t depend on a god, a destination, or a final rule — only a direction that anyone, in any tradition, can check for themselves. If it helps even a few people navigate by that, it will have been worth the early mornings.

I write it in the company of others working the same ground — the complexity and systems thinkers, the evolutionary-development community, the Metamodern and “Game B” efforts to imagine a less self-terminating civilization. I share their aim even where I part from them: I don’t reach, as some do, for an Omega Point, a spiritual finish line, or a top-down order to submit to. There is no finish line in what I’m describing — only the open, unending work of staying coherent as the world keeps getting larger.

How it is built — and why that is part of the argument

Here is what I meant about the making of the book being part of the book. I wanted these ideas to reach as wide a circle of readers as possible without being flattened on the way. So the project is built as a single hand-authored source — the dense voice you have been reading — from which other editions and translations are generated, with an AI companion planned that can meet readers where they are and talk the ideas through at whatever depth they want.

I could not have built it this way alone, and not only for want of time. The partnership itself — a human source of caring and judgment joined to an AI’s reach and tirelessness — is an instance of the book’s own thesis: values held coherently at the center, capability extending the reach outward, the circle widening without the center dissolving. The medium enacts the message, on purpose. It is also, quietly, the arrival of something I first imagined as a teenager reading about machine intelligence in the 1970s and argued for on those mailing lists in the 1990s: using our tools to help us think and choose more wisely, together. I have spent a working life waiting for the instrument to become equal to the purpose. It finally has.

Where it is going

For most of my life there was simply never time — there was a career to build and a family to raise, and the book stayed a thing I read toward rather than wrote. A few years ago I decided I was finished building a career, and that I would spend my remaining best hours on what matters most to me. So now I rise by four in the morning and give a couple of hours to this before the workday, and a half hour to learning the piano — proof to myself, perhaps, that it is never too late to grow in a genuinely new direction, which is most of what the second half of this book is about.

The book is not finished, and is not meant to be. The first half names a direction; the second half is the long, unfinished, very human work of actually walking it — and I am, frankly, better at the naming than the walking. It is a living project, and I expect it to keep growing for at least as long as I do.

What shaped this

A book like this is the visible tip of a long reading life, and I owe it to name some of the shoulders I’m standing on. The foundations — why structure should arise and persist at all — I take from Ilya Prigogine, Stuart Kauffman, and Eric Chaisson. Karl Friston I came to only recently; his active inference has been a confirmation of those foundations more than a source of them. The systems and cybernetics — how a thing holds together — from Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Donella Meadows, Robert Ulanowicz, Stanley Salthe, and Buckminster Fuller. The logic of cooperation and conflict from von Neumann, John Nash, Robert Axelrod, and Douglas Hofstadter. The sense of a direction — an arrow — from Robert Wright above all, with Francis Heylighen, Peter Corning, and again Fuller and Kauffman. And the texture of meaning, with its refusal of any final destination, from Robert Pirsig, Hofstadter again, Julian Jaynes, James Carse, and years of internalizing Zen by way of Alan Watts, D.T. Suzuki, and others. Before any of them, the science fiction of my childhood — Asimov, Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle — taught me the first and most useful lesson: that the frame you are handed is never the only one. I’m grateful, too, to the living thinkers and communities working this same ground now, whose company has sharpened the project more than they may know.

A last word

And I have saved the most important for last. My wife, Lizbeth, has shaped this project by her very nature. We share a core of deeply held values, and our overlapping circles of care for the world keep widening together. Our temperaments are quite different, though, and complementary: different enough to create friction, complementary enough to turn that friction into synergy — together creating and exploring our path of meaningful growth.