civilization, Meta Intelligence

Being at Home in the World/Universe

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty provided an introduction to the problem of being at home when he wrote:

“The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. ‘There is a world’, or rather: “There is the world’; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life.”
Joseph J. Kockelmans (Editor), Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Anchor Books Edition, 1967, page 369.

Remy C. Kwant, in his essay “Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology”, commented:

For, according to him, the original lies buried in a dimension of darkness in such a way that it cannot be brought to light. Our existence is interwoven with the world, is a dialogue with the world. This dialogue reaches its most profound point there where the first and most original meaning arises, a meaning that is pre-conscious and pre-personal. Whatever is in our consciousness, whatever comes to light, becomes lucid, originates also in this darkness. As we have seen, man is able to obtain a measure of knowledge regarding this dark depth. He is able to divine something about the mysterious dialogue between the body-subject and the world. However, according to Merleau-Ponty, an absolute illumination of the phenomenal field is in principle impossible. All man can do is to erect some pointers in a darkness which resists full illumination.
Joseph J. Kockelmans (Editor), Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Anchor Books Edition, 1967, page 390-391.

We sense that the interaction between ourselves and the world at every level may not be explainable. Therefore, we seek emotional or psychological shelter. The three levels of shelter are:

hearth and home
a sense of belonging
gods

Think of the song, “A House Is Not a Home”, sung by Dionne Warwick. “A chair is still a chair / Even though there’s no one sitting there … But a room is not a house
/ And a house is not a home” depicts the human longing for shelter via hearth and home. The French philosopher Bruno Latour referred to this as a “parliament of things.”

Consider “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, as well as the novel (and later film) The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Both of these cover the deep issue of shelter.

Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (German: Bauen Wohnen Denken) states:

In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. This venture in thought does not view building as an art or as a technique of construction; rather it traces building back into that domain to which everything that is belongs. We ask:

What is it to dwell?

How does building belong to dwelling?

I

We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today’s housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today’s houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but—do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man’s dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building. Dwelling and building are related as end and means. However, as long as this is all we have in mind, we take dwelling and building as two separate activities, an idea that has something correct in it. Yet at the same time by the means-end schema we block our view of the essential relations. For building is not merely a means and a way toward dwelling—to build is in itself already to dwell. Who tells us this? Who gives us a standard at all by which we can take the measure of the nature of dwelling and building?
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, (translated by Albert Hofstadter), Harper & Row, 1975, pages 145-146.

Stuart Kauffman comes at this from a different angle:

Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Did Neanderthal, Homo habilis, or Homo erectus ask? Around which fire in the past 3 million years of hominid evolution did these questions first arise? Who knows.

Somewhere along our path, paradise has been lost, lost to the Western mind, and in the spreading world civilization, lost to our collective mind. John Milton must have been the last superb poet of Western civilization who could have sought to justify the ways of God to man in those early years foreshadowing the modern era. Paradise has been lost, not to sin, but to science. Once, a scant few centuries ago, we of the West believed ourselves the chosen of God, made in his image, keeping his word in a creation wrought by his love for us. Now, only 400 years later, we find ourselves on a tiny planet, on the edge of a humdrum galaxy among billions like it scattered across vast megaparsecs, around the curvature of space-time back to the Big Bang. We are but accidents, we’re told. Purpose and value are ours alone to make. Without Satan and God, the universe now appears the neutral home of matter, dark and light, and is utterly indifferent. We bustle, but are no longer at home in the ancient sense.
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, page 4.

Kauffman comes to grips with this problem with the final line above. He continues:

In this new view of life, organisms are not merely tinkered-together contraptions, bricolage, in Jacob’s phrase. Evolution is not merely “chance caught on the wing,” in Monod’s evocative image. The history of life captures the natural order, on which selection is privileged to act. If this idea is true, many features of organisms are not merely historical accidents, but also reflections of the profound order that evolution has further molded. If true, we are at home in the universe in ways not imagined since Darwin stood natural theology on is head with his blind watchmaker.
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, pages 25-26.

Kauffman wants to complete the Darwinian revolution by adding self-organization and complexity to natural selection. In his vision, this will begin to produce a holistic picture of who we are. This will perhaps allow us to feel “We are all at home in the universe, poised to sanctify by our best, brief, only stay.” [page 30.]

Zooming out from this, we can see a meta-intelligent sense in which science believes it can convert mysteries into problems using math. In contrast to this, philosophers believe the opposite, that the problems are becoming more mysterious.

Monomania and the West

There have been all kinds of “voices” in the history of Western civilization. Perhaps the loudest voice is that of monomaniacs, who always claim that behind the appearance of the many is the one. If we illustrate the West, and at its roots, the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem, we see the origins of this monomania. Plato’s realm of ideas was supposed to explain everything encountered in our daily lives. His main student and rival, Aristotle, has his own competing explanation, based in biology instead of mathematics.

These monomanias in their modern counterpart in ideologies. In communism, the key to have everything is class and the resulting class struggles. Nazism revolves around race and racial conflict.

In our own era, the era of scientism, we have the idea of god replaced with Stephen Hawking’s “mind of god,” Leon Lederman’s The God Particle and KAKU Michio’s The God Equation. In the 2009 film, Angels & Demons, there’s a senior Vatican official, played by Ewan McGregor, who is absolutely outraged by the blasphemous phrase, “the god particle.”

Currently, the monomania impetus continues full-force. For example, Professor Seth Lloyd of MIT tells us that reality is the cosmos and not chaos, because all of reality together is a computer. His MIT colleague, Max Tegmark, argues in his books that the world is not explained by mathematics, but rather is mathematics. Perhaps the climax of this kind of thinking is given to us by the essay “Everything Is Computation” by Joscha Bach:

These days we see a tremendous number of significant scientific news stories, and it’s hard to say which has the highest significance. Climate models indicate that we are past crucial tipping points and irrevocably headed for a new, difficult age for our civilization. Mark van Raamsdonk expands on the work of Brian Swingle and Juan Maldacena and demonstrates how we can abolish the idea of spacetime in favor of a discrete tensor network, thus opening the way for a unified theory of physics. Bruce Conklin, George Church, and others have given us CRISPR/Cas9, a technology that holds promise for simple and ubiquitous gene editing. “Deep learning” starts to tell us how hierarchies of interconnected feature detectors can autonomously form a model of the world, learn to solve problems, and recognize speech, images, and video.

It is perhaps equally important to notice where we lack progress: Sociology fails to teach us how societies work; philosophy seems to have become infertile; the economic sciences seem ill-equipped to inform our economic and fiscal policies; psychology does not encompass the logic of our psyche; and neuroscience tells us where things happen in the brain but largely not what they are.

In my view, the 20th century’s most important addition to understanding the world is not positivist science, computer technology, spaceflight, or the foundational theories of physics.

It is the notion of computation. Computation, at its core, and as informally described as possible, is simple: Every observation yields a set of discernible differences.

These we call information. If the observation corresponds to a system that can change its state, we can describe those state changes. If we identify regularity in those state changes, we are looking at a computational system. If the regularity is completely described, we call this system an algorithm. Once a system can perform conditional state transitions and revisit earlier states, it becomes almost impossible to stop it from performing arbitrary computation. In the infinite case that is, if we allow it to make an unbounded number of state transitions and use unbounded storage for the states—it becomes a Turing machine, or a Lambda calculus, or a Post machine, or one of the many other mutually equivalent formalisms that capture universal computation.

Computational terms rephrase the idea of “causality,” something that philosophers have struggled with for centuries. Causality is the transition from one state in a computational system to the next. They also replace the concept of “mechanism” in mechanistic, or naturalistic, philosophy. Computationalism is the new mechanism, and unlike its predecessor, it is not fraught with misleading intuitions of moving parts.

Computation is different from mathematics. Mathematics turns out to be the domain of formal languages and is mostly undecidable, which is just another word for saying “uncomputable” (since decision making and proving are alternative words for computation, too). All our explorations into mathematics are computational ones, though. To compute means to actually do all the work, to move from one state to the next.

Computation changes our idea of knowledge: Instead of justified true belief, knowledge describes a local minimum in capturing regularities between observables. Knowledge is almost never static but progresses on a gradient through a state space of possible worldviews. We will no longer aspire to teach our children the truth, because, like us, they will never stop changing their minds. We will teach them how to productively change their minds, how to explore the never-ending land of insight.

A growing number of physicists understands that the universe is not mathematical but computational, and physics is in the business of finding an algorithm that can reproduce our observations. The switch from uncomputable mathematical notions (such as continuous space) makes progress possible. Climate science, molecular genetics, and AI are computational sciences. Sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are not: They still seem confused by the apparent dichotomy between mechanism (rigid moving parts) and the objects of their study. They are looking for social, behavioral, chemical, neural regularities, where they should be looking for computational ones.

Everything is computation.
Know This: Today’s Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments, John Brockman (editor), Harper Perennial, 2017, pages 228-230.

Friedrich Nietzsche rebelled against this type of thinking the most profoundly. If scientism represents the modern, then Nietzsche was the prophet of postmodernism. Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “God is dead.” is not about a creator or divinity, but rather finality itself. There is no final explanation.

Realms and Domains: Levels and Confusion

Are we governed by words or numbers? Martin Heidegger’s star pupil, Hans-Georg Gadamer, points a penetrating flashlight at this question of words vs. numbers when he writes, “It is obvious that not mathematics but the linguistic nature of people is the basis of human civilization.”

According to Gadamer, our primary way of being is interpretative rather than computative. Our fundamental function is to cope, not to theorize. He argues, we can never finally step outside the traditions and practices of our culture. As one critic stated, “the metaphysical aid of a view from nowhere is seen by Gadamer as a questionable illusion that can have damaging consequences for a culture. It is not that scientific methods are mistaken—he thinks that science is involved an unstoppable dynamic which cannot be halted by philosophical or other objections…Gadamer gives a central role to art in questioning the dominance of the methods of the natural sciences. The artwork is not something to be determined by concepts, but something which ‘happens’ via its reception in real social contexts…”

Think about the interaction between words and numbers in the opening of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Vintage Books, 1989, page 19.

Note how Nabokov describes our existence above. Think about the word “eternities”? It brings to mind infinity. For example, in algebra, 1/x goes to infinity as 1 approaches zero. Nabokov also states that man is doing all this infinity-watching which he describes in heartbeats per hour.

Another issue in this realm and domain confusion is provided by Gabriel Marcel, when he writes, “We must carefully avoid all confusion between the mysterious and the unknowable.” Marcel continues:

A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I myself am involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as “a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity”. A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by the exercise of which it is defined; whereas a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique. It is, no doubt, always possible (logically and psychologically) to degrade a mystery so as to turn it into a problem. But this is a fundamentally vicious proceeding, whose springs might perhaps be discovered in a kind of corruption of the intelligence. The problem of evil, as the philosophers have called it, supplies us with a particularly instructive example of this degradation.

Just because it is the essence of mystery to be recognized or capable of recognition, it may also be ignored and actively denied. It then becomes reduced to something I have “heard talked about” but which I refuse as only “being for other people”; and that in virtue of an illusion which these “others” are deceived by, but which I myself claim to have detected.

We must carefully avoid all confusion between the mysterious and the unknowable. The unknowable is in fact only the limiting case of the problematic, which cannot be actualized without contradiction. The recognition of mystery, on the contrary, is an essentially positive act of the mind, the supremely positive act in virtue of which all positivity may perhaps be strictly defined. In this sphere everything seems to go on as if I found myself acting on an intuition which I possess without immediately knowing myself to possess it— an intuition which cannot be, strictly speaking, self-conscious and which can grasp itself only through the modes of experience in which its image is reflected, and which it lights up by being thus reflected in them.
Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection & Mystery, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, page 260-261.

A final profound confusion is the body as a physical item vs. a means of expression. Picture Fred Astaire dancing opposite Ginger Rogers. You have both the movements of his dance and what he conveys through body language. In order to dance, you have the biochemical fuel (food) to enable the biomechanical movement of the dance. The courtship expressed through his movements is something different. Marcel describes it thus:

We should recall, at this point, what we said in an earlier lecture about the body; the latter is not merely an instrument, it presents us with a kind of reality which is quite different from the reality of any sort of apparatus, in so far as it, my body, is also my way of being in the world.
Gabriel Marcel, page 257.

See also “Existence and the Problem of Separability”, “Is It Good to Be a Detached Observer?” and “Arguments Without End: A Few Simple Examples” which also reference Marcel.

World-Watching: Old Problem, Modern Solution: Emerging Technologies for Anti-Corruption

[from Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, 29 July, 2025]

by Emmanuel A. San Andres and Glacer Nino A. Vasquez

Harnessing new tools to strengthen transparency and accountability can help APEC economies combat corruption and build public trust.

The Code of Hammurabi is one of humanity’s oldest surviving legal texts. Etched in basalt nearly four millennia ago, one of the many crimes it proscribes is corruption by a judge, for which the punishment is a hefty fine—“twelve times the fine set by him in the case”—plus removal and perpetual disqualification from office. Today, laws are published online rather than on stone tablets, but corruption remains a scourge across societies.

Thousands of years later, the fight against corruption continues. Corruption scandals continue to make headlines across the region, affecting both public and private institutions. Whether involving procurement fraud or illicit finance flows, these cases underscore how quickly trust can erode when institutions fail to adapt. The need for preventive systems, powered by data, backed by law and enabled by technology, has never been more urgent. Across APEC, the principles of transparency, accountability and integrity remain central to strong public institutions. As economies become more interconnected and more data-driven, emerging technologies are offering new ways to advance these goals.

APEC economies have long relied on oversight mechanisms such as audits, procurement rules, and internal checks to prevent, detect and prosecute corruption. These tools have been effective in fighting corruption, and they remain essential. But at the same time, new technology has also opened new pathways for corruption: The discreet meeting at a coffeeshop may now occur over an encrypted messaging app, and the cash-filled envelope replaced by a cryptocurrency transfer.

As corrupt actors grow more technologically sophisticated, so too must anti-corruption efforts. APEC economies are not new to digital solutions—e-government and e-procurement portals have reduced opportunities for hidden transactions. Beneficial ownership registries and asset tracking systems make it easier to prosecute and penalise incidents of corruption when they do occur. But emerging technologies offer even more powerful tools to prevent, detect and deter corruption.

For example, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) enable real-time monitoring, risk scoring, pattern detection, and predictive analytics. These tools can support monitoring and investigation by automating document review and evidence gathering. AI/ML can also enhance institutional capacity through adaptive, personalized training systems. Meanwhile, advanced data analytics can support the review of large volumes of data, revealing patterns of corrupt activity and informing decision-making. When data from different sources are connected, it becomes easier to understand corruption risks early and act with greater precision.

Blockchain—the technology that enables cryptocurrencies—can be used to create immutable, transparent ledgers for government transactions, supply chain monitoring and secure identity management, making it harder to conceal corrupt activity. Remote sensing and facial recognition technologies also offer potential in compliance monitoring and anomaly detection.

However, implementing these emerging technologies have their share of challenges and risks. The effectiveness of AI/ML systems is only as good as the quality, integrity and objectivity of the data they are fed; biased inputs can produce biased outcomes. Blockchain technology is very energy-intensive, which may hinder its scalability and availability. Facial recognition raises serious concerns over privacy and due process, enabling widespread surveillance without individual consent.

These trends mirror growing international momentum around the digitalization of integrity systems. International organizations are helping lead the way: the OECD is leveraging AI and big data to detect corruption risks and improve compliance, while the World Bank’s Governance Risk Assessment System [archived PDF] uses analytics to uncover fraud in public procurement, with pilots already underway in Brazil. As stewards of major anti-corruption conventions, these institutions are turning innovation into accountability. For APEC economies, this alignment offers a timely opportunity to shape global standards while advancing domestic reform.

It is also important to recognize the central role of human and institutional elements in anti-corruption efforts. Emerging technologies are not a silver bullet; they will only be effective if they are well integrated into government processes and are aligned with the skills of the people who need to use them. Training and capacity building will be essential to bridge capability gaps, while a committed leadership will be needed to implement the legal reforms and oversight structures needed to ensure effective adoption.

Buy-in from anti-corruption stakeholders across government, the private sector and civil society is also crucial to this pursuit. Technologies like AI/ML and advanced analytics require large volumes of reliable data, requiring cooperation and information sharing. Public understanding and trust, ethical use of data and equitable access to technology are all essential to ensuring long-term success.

APEC economies are at different stages of readiness to adopt these emerging technologies. While some economies have yet to develop adequate digital infrastructure, human capital and institutional structures, others are already in a position to expand or integrate more advanced anti-corruption tools into their day-to-day processes. Capacity building, information sharing and dialogue can help narrow this gap while learning from the experiences of those ahead.

This is where regional cooperation can make a difference APEC provides a platform for knowledge sharing, capacity building and policy cooperation. The Anti-Corruption and Transparency Experts Working Group could provide a venue for a collaborative strategy to mainstream emerging technology in anti-corruption work, while building technical capacity for economies that need it. Likewise, the upcoming APEC High-Level Dialogue on Anti-Corruption Cooperation provides an opportunity to reaffirm values and shared commitments in the fight against corruption.

Corruption has existed since the dawn of civilization. As methods to commit corruption have evolved, so must the tools to combat it. People and institutions will always remain at the heart of anti-corruption efforts, but with the right governance and safeguards, emerging technologies can be game-changers in fighting corruption and recovering its proceeds, whether it’s in Babylonian sheqels or in bitcoins.

Emmanuel A. San Andres is a senior analyst, Glacer Niño A. Vasquez is a researcher at the APEC Policy Support Unit. For more on this topic, read the latest issue paper “Technologies for Preventing, Detecting, and Combatting Corruption” [archived PDF].