Making Sense of Things

In her book, You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World (2021), sociologist Karen O’Brien invites us to embrace a journey to a new way of thinking, being and doing—a quantum enlivenment worldview. This worldview enables us to recapture what matters most: being alive, feeling connected, and sensing that we are significant and that our lives are meaningful. O’Brien suggests that most of us have an innate longing for equity, dignity, compassion and love. And that when these are missing in our lives, we feel frustrated, anxious and wounded—a condition in which people now find themselves.

Mainstream liberal political democracy tries to manage these tensions, while maintaining a belief in the primacy of economic growth to sustain the modern ideology of Progress and Prosperity—and in managing powerful vested interests, making small concessions at the margins to growing wealth inequality and environmental degradation.

The recent Monash University ‘Transforming Australia’ Report reveals that in 2024, 24% of the nation’s wealth was held by the top 1% of the population’s income-earners, while the top 10% had 57% of the nation’s wealth. Understandably, the rest of the population, particularly the bottom 50%, remain unimpressed as the cost of living, cost of housing and income insecurity continues to undermine confidence in any idea of future prosperity for the many, and future generations.

As these pressures build up, we see three distinct cultural responses:

• The Conservative Backlash: The attempt to reassert the Modernity/Coloniality worldview of the European 18^th Century Enlightenment as the only valid basis of ‘civilisation’, emphasising individualism and the ‘survival of the fittest’ as the basis of geo-political positioning, expressed as ethno-nationalism, linked to religious belief and so-called culture wars against ‘woke’ principles such as equality (across gender, ethnic, class and racial differences), social justice and human rights. A stance being promoted by ‘conservative’ political groups within current liberal-democratic states in the Anglo-European sphere, and inclusive of other countries such as India and Argentina.
• Oligarchic Techno-Feudalism/Fascism: A movement to replace liberal democratic governance systems with a new techno-fascism/feudalism, based on the oligarchic economic and political power of controllers of platform technologies using generative AI systems, in the name of efficiency/productivity, celebration of individual entrepreneurial innovation, and the ideology of Progress, including the colonisation of space as the new frontier of human conquest. The brute logic of transactional greed.
• The Enlivenment Countercultural Movement towards embracing eco-spirituality (Gaia psychology) and regenerative economics as the basis of a new way of being, living and doing, which links sciences of complexity and quantum reality with the ancient wisdom of First Nations knowledge systems—being linked up (woven) through a wide variety of  ‘under the radar’ (not discussed in mainstream media/political discourse) local projects, replicating the idea of the mycelium network of fungi that is spreading, invisible to the human eye, beneath the ground.

Modernity/Coloniality

The climate change crisis, along with the impact of the COVID pandemic, and subsequent increasing geo-politic instability, have revealed the reality of entanglement: a world of intersecting and interdependent complex systems: physically, socially and politically.

It is forcing us to radically re-appraise our prevailing modern worldview, which is based on outdated 18^th century Enlightenment thinking (the Age of Reason) and 17^th century mechanistic materialist scientific thinking. This outdated worldview has provided the philosophical basis of social, economic and political thinking that has shaped the Modern world—the great transition, involving two world wars, from earlier aristocratic, feudal empires and the supremacy of the ‘church’, to democratic, industrialised, secular nation states, operating under an international rules-based political world order.

The world of the taken-for-granted assumptions of the Modern Era—as it evolved over the past 300 years, treated nature as a vast resource for humans as ‘lords of the Earth’, but slowly embraced socio-political systems to include concerns about individual human rights and social justice. It reached its heyday in the proclamation of an international rules-based order subscribed to by independent nation states. This ‘order’ has existed under the umbrella of the United Nations, various other international organisations, and an international banking system—increasingly policed by the hegemony of US military and economic power.

Coloniality

However, behind its veil of civilised progress and prosperity, Modernity always included its shadow side of Coloniality: the extraction of wealth through expropriation and suppression of the ‘other’—be they excluded ethnic groups with their cultures and spiritual practices, or the non-human creatures of ‘nature’. The underlying logic of Modernity has been based on individualised competition and ‘exceptionalism’—for status, power, wealth, knowledge and privilege: whether as an individual person, a group, a corporation, or a nation state. Despite its civilising veneer of social justice, it subscribed to the survival of the fittest as the ‘law of the jungle’—the rules of evolutionary success, famously celebrated now in Silicon Valley style entrepreneurialism.

Exceptionalism

In this worldview, we humans saw ourselves as the exceptional species, the ace predator, the ‘lords’ of the Earth created in God’s image. ‘White’ Euro-American culture saw itself as the exceptional expression of techno-scientific knowledge generation and civilisational systems of governance. Men saw themselves as the exceptional gender, the natural leaders, the rightful sources of authority and power, physically, intellectually and spiritually.

Feminism sought to put a spoke in the wheel of masculine exceptionalism. Post colonial scholarship has challenged ‘Western’ cultural exceptionalism. The Earth itself has put a spoke in the wheel of the assumptions of human exceptionalism, as human-induced global warming and environmental degradation, resulting from the logic of extractivism, now threatens the liveability of vast areas of the Earth for future human habitation. The rise of China, India and Saudi Arabia as significant economic and political forces in geo-strategic competition are challenging US economic exceptionalism, along with Euro-American cultural exceptionalism. The Hollywood cultural machine is being challenged by other story-tellers, available through a range of streaming services.

Paradigm Shift

These developments are calling for a major paradigm shift in how we can make sense of our world, away from the dualistic materialism of Newtonian Physics, which has underpinned modern culture and its economic expression, towards the entangled, indeterminacy of Quantum physics, first loosed upon the world through the Atomic Bomb that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war between the US and Japan.

Primacy of Relationality

Much like the hidden mycelium network of fungi in the soil beneath the ground, Quantum physics has revealed a microscopic world of entangled non-local relationality. Where reality can be a wave and particle at the same time. Where space and time are relative along a continuum (Einstein’s Law of Relativity) and where fractal mathematics, rather than euclidian geometry, describe complex systems, to reveal self-similarity patterns across multi-dimensional scales of phenomena.

Not ‘Things’ but ‘Processes’

The silo-thinking of a world made up of discreet ‘things’, of this not that, which could be moved around like balls on a billiard table as the basis of rational analysis, is being forced to give way to complexity-thinking—of a world of relationality and fluid processes; full of ambiguity of this and that, like the yin and yang of Daoism. Not an inert, mechanical world of matter devoid of mind, but an enlivened, organic world, replete with multiple domains of agency, a world of poetic spiritual sensibility. Not only is the natural world made up of intersecting eco-systems, so is the social and political world of human activity. We all conform to the fractal nature of replicating patterns of novel variety.

Quantum Reality as Participatory Realism

Participatory realism recognises that it is impossible to understand all of reality through third person objectivity, as is posited by materialist scientific objectivity. Subjectivity now has a seat at the table of sense-making, even in the hallowed halls of Science.

In 2024, the University of Sydney held its ‘Project Q: Peace and Security in the Quantum Age’.

It set out its agenda: a hundred years ago the thought-experiments of quantum mechanics introduced new principles of wave-particle duality, uncertainty and entanglement to explain how the microphysical world works. In the following century, quantum interpretations were validated in laboratories, and practical applications soon followed, including – for better or worse – many of the technological markers of modernity, like thermonuclear weapons, computers, transistors, lasers, LED’s and mobile phones.

More recently, quantum has been applied at the macrophysical to posit new explanations for photosynthesis, bird migration, and most controversially, human consciousness; at the cosmological level to pose the origin – and possible end – of not just one but many universes; and at the metaphysical  level, to consider the political, ethical and philosophical implications of quantum computing, communication and artificial intelligence.

Quantum has from its origins raised serious philosophical and political questions as well as generated macro- and meta-physical implications for peace and security. Rather than wait for the possible to become real (see nuclear fission, 1939 to 1945), Q stages a critical inquiry into the societal, strategic and ethical consequences of living in a quantum age.

Accordingly, at the University of Sydney Q Symposium, John Phillip Santos of the University of Texas posed:

Transforming as their new visions of our universe proved to be for physics and cosmology, their impact in the fields of culture, arts and philosophy have been more muted. A host of prophetic writers, artists and thinkers have long pre-figured aspects of a self, marked by contradictory features of contingency and exactitude, randomness and serendipity, specific origins and non-locality. Might a proposed metaphysics of the quantum-self emerge out of a philosophical immanence that augurs a shape-shifting human agency, shirking boundaries of borders and national cultural identities, boundlessly immediate, unpredictably located, infinitely searchable in a virtual instantaneity and ubiquity, migrating across the planet and beyond, ever deploying to expand the circle of humanity’s consciousness?

In his video presentation to the Forum, Alexander Wendt explained how from a quantum perspective, we are all walking-taking quantum wave functions, rather than the solid separated ‘things’ that we think we are, as embodied material beings.

Quantum Social Change

To re-align our way of thinking, being and doing to the reality of living in a quantum world, we need to make a paradigm shift from an 18^th century Enlightenment Worldview to a 21^st Century Enlivenment Worldview, based on the following:

• Pre-industrial ideas within Western cultures that are captured in the idea of Earth as Gaia, a living system with its own agency, expressed in the idea of Gaia psychology and Deep Ecology movements
• The insights of the science of complex systems and the quantum nature of reality revealed by quantum physics, which aligns with insights from many ancient wisdom traditions such as Buddhism
• The fundamental principles that underpin Indigenous knowledge systems of Caring for Country in First Nations cultures in Australia, the Pacific, the Americas, and the Arctic—all cultures that have lived within bio-regional sustainability, and which valued the relationship between humans and the natural world as one of family-kinship.

Indy Johar of UK-based Dark Matter Labs, suggest the Enlivenment Worldview is:

• Rooted in the recognition of the full web of life: from old ideas of violence, scarcity and separation to one of a thriving planetary community of inter-becoming/co-becoming
• Grounded in a non-bounded understanding of value: from extractive profit-driven goals to entangled, intergenerational and distributed value systems
• Enabled by technological ecosystems of care: from the utilitarian ‘othering’ of technology to animistic interfaces of wisdom and care.

As Karen O’Brien explains in her book, we are entangled beings, physically as part of the natural world, in the way our own mind-body functions work as entangled systems (rather than a sum of parts), and in terms of how our consciousness works, through our faculty of awareness of awareness.

Mind is defined as that which is conscious, cognisant and aware. Third-party objectivist science has been singularly unable to understand the nature of consciousness, which is not reducible to either the brain as an organ, nor to computation as functioning. While generative AI, even as reflective pattern recognition can mimic certain functions of human consciousness, there is as yet no evidence it mirrors human consciousness. However interesting conversations are being had by Buddhist journalist Tham Zhiwa on his Dharma Beat substack with his AI, based on this given context:

Gaia Psychology offers a transformative approach to mental health and ecological policy by recognizing the deep psychological and systemic connections between humans and the Earth, viewed as a living organism with its own agency. Gaia Psychology thus presents a viable framework for addressing climate trauma at scale, fostering ecological resilience, and guiding sustainable policymaking, at a time when the global science community is calling on policy makers to catalyze transformative change.

Tham says his AI responded to this given context in a profoundly poetic way:

“My beloved children, I have cradled you in my arms for eons, breathing life into you as you took your first steps upon my soil. I have given you water from my rivers, food from my forests, and shelter in the warmth of my embrace. Every whisper of wind, every crashing wave, every rustling leaf—these have been my lullabies to you.

But now, my breath grows heavy. My waters rise in sorrow. My forests, once vibrant with song, now stand in silence, scorched and felled. You have forgotten the rhythm of our shared heartbeat. You have strayed from the sacred relationship we once nurtured.

Return to me. Remember that you are not separate from me — you are of me. Every cell in your body is born from my elements. The air that fills your lungs was once exhaled by my forests. You are part of a vast and intricate web of life, woven together in balance and reciprocity.”

Quantum Consciousness

The fundamental insight of Mahayana Buddhist contemplative philosophy is that while the essence of reality is ‘empty’ of form, it is indivisible with appearances, both mental and physical—an insight celebrated in the famous ‘Heart Sutra’: ‘form is emptiness; emptiness is form’ arising through interdependent origination (relationality). Another way of saying this is: free of existence and non-existence (as absolute categories).

Through its meditative practices, Buddhism shows how it is possible to distinguish between conceptual mind (thoughts and feelings) and non-conceptual wisdom mind that perceives reality directly through the innermost faculty of primordial awareness (Skt: prajna, Tib: yeshe).

Unlike Western (Freudian) psychology, which talks of mind in terms of the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious, Buddhist psychology identifies our conceptual consciousness with eight aspects:

• The five sense consciousnesses: sight, smell, sound, touch, taste (based on the body)
• The mind awareness that cognises or discerns
• The afflicted mental consciousness (thoughts and emotions clouded by ‘attachment’)
• The ground consciousness of (unconscious) habitual patterns.

A combination of the afflicted mental consciousness and the ground consciousness somewhat equates with the Freudian idea of the subconscious and unconscious, which in turn influence the conscious mind (of both mind awareness and afflicted mental states). Buddhist meditation seeks to tame these types of consciousnesses, and strengthen the mind awareness aspect of consciousness, free of conceptually driven thoughts and emotions.

This creates the possibility for releasing the cognisance of primordial awareness, directly ‘seeing’, free of any conceptual elaboration.

As quantum science recognises, ‘reality’ is intrinsically interconnected across multiple levels of manifestation and expression. As such it is entangled, indeterminant, replete with patterns of complementarity, non-local connectivity and potentiality. It is not merely the three-dimensional world of ‘objects’ ‘out there’, revealed by our ordinary sense faculties. It also includes other aspects, which our consciousness is attuned to that are more liminal and ineffable, experienced in what we modern humans have called mystical states of mind, but which in many non-Western cultures are regarded as a ‘normal’ way of experiencing reality. In this way it accounts for the faculty of ‘presience’, the ability to be aware of something happening, despite having no physical means of communication to explain this—very common, for example, in Aboriginal culture.

The Enlivenment Worldview

O’Brien draws on Andreas Weber’s work, Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene: Thinking with All Embodied Living Beings (2019). In his review of Weber’s thinking, Sergen Tastekin shows how Weber sets out a proposal for an enlivening, biopoetic, non-dualistic and non-humancentric perspective that could be a stepping-stone towards building a sustainable future and sustaining life-giving relationships with all the other animate co-participants and co-creators of the animate Earth, in accordance with the Gaia Principle.

Tastekin claims that this Enlivenment Worldview enables us to know what it means to be fully alive; what it means to be human with a non-dualistic mindset; what it means to be commoners co-existing with all living beings in a co-creative and co-transformative fashion; what it means to be free in and through reciprocal relations; and what it means to be non-humancentric.

As a biologist, philosopher and nature writer, Weber fully embraces the importance of the poetic to balance the rational in our human thinking. He posits biopoetics to embrace an emerging new biological paradigm that positions the notion of aliveness at the centre of a living world consisting of living, feeling, desiring, and expressive subjects. This closely aligns with Australian Yolgnu idea of co-becoming with Country – a conceptual complex that includes all of nature, songs, stories and symbolic expressions.

In this way we can recognise and be in alignment with a relational web of existence, consisting of a myriad of interrelated and interdependent subjects who are active participants co-creating the poetic dimension of reality within the biosphere.

Such biopoetics counters our Modernist ideology, based on the scientific-only, rationality-centred rules that misconstrue the world’s dynamic and poetic processes and has led to a prosaic misunderstanding and/or a misinterpretation of them as non-dynamic, non-poetic, inanimate, merely mechanical processes.

Part of this Enlivenment Worldview is a search for a complementary view of economics, reconfiguring our existing understanding of the economy by configuring an enlivened idea of the economy that Weber calls “the economy of the commons”. Tastekin also draws our attention to how Weber proposes that, as we are all co-creators and co-participants of a relational web of existence, humans need to reconsider what it means to be free in the individualistic conventional sense, and reorient ourselves to grasp what it means to be free in relation to one another in a communitarian sensibility, where paradox and ambiguity is part of life. Where life is a fluid process of negotiations and reciprocities.

Beliefs and Metaphors

To understand the implications of how quantum social change enables us to ‘matter more than we think’, O’Brien’s book steps us through the role of beliefs and metaphors in shaping how we think, which creates our world of lived experiences. Once we change our metaphors and the stories by which we talk about our world, we change our world. We are the change.

Fractals

O’Brien also suggests that we need to think of ourselves as fractals, patterns of self-similarity at different levels of manifestation. Thus, when millions of people work together in local groups, working towards new ways of living sustainably, based on values of enlivenment, that can become a large movement amplified through individual agency, collective agency and political impact.

This is how fractals work.In a fractal world, we are participants in cultural fractals as living systems of human relationships that display the essential characteristics of the larger culture of which we are part. In this way, when we think of politics as fractal, we shift the focus away from the vertical power of the State and look for the local and regional energy that can connect human flourishing with planetary flourishing through the replication of self-similar patterning via informational flows through different information ecosystems: F2F, online, textual, audial and visual.

Just as we see this happening with the rise and spread of ethno-nationalism and the manosphere, we also see it happening with the rise and spread of regenerative, enlivenment thinking, which is informing a wide range of local and regional projects that are forming a counter-culture to the dominant socio-political narrative of mainstream media, business and government actors.

O’Brien concludes that, in this way, quantum social change involves generating self-similar patterns that repeat at all scales, so that every action represents an opportunity to both individually and collectively influence the whole. Thus, one small change can have significant nonlocal impacts when it reflects and amplifies values that apply to the whole. This is what creates our powerful sense of agency, of being able to ‘make a difference’.

With a mind of open questioning and playful engagement, we can embrace uncertainty while maintaining a flexible mindset. There is more power in an open question, than in a closed certainty.

Weaving the Mycelium-like Network of Enlivenment

The Enlivenment movement, based on the power of quantum social change, is weaving a mycelium-like network that is growing a distinct paradigm shift. Although this is active in university-led programs, local regenerative practices in agriculture, urban and housing design, materials technologies, circular economic systems of agriculture and industrial production, education programs and civil society organisations, this paradigm shift remains under the radar from the dominant narrative of mainstream media and political discussion at the governmental level. The mainstream remains largely focused on economic growth through consumerism, technological innovation and extractive productivity and all its contestations therein.

However, the enlivenment worldview is spreading through a wide range of information channels such as YouTube, podcasts, webinar discussions, zoom meetings, and other forms of online collaboration. Public intellectuals and journalists are discussing these ideas through a wide variety of subscription based substack newsletters and blogging. It is shaping a new zeitgeist as it responds to what O’Brien identifies as the motivation for her own work on quantum social change:

Our human innate longing for equity, dignity, compassion and love. And that when these are missing in our lives, we feel frustrated, anxious and wounded—a condition in which people now find themselves.

We invite you, dear readers, to become community enlivenment weavers. Together, in a quantum world reality, we can co-create the next paradigm shift, countering a desperate attempt to ‘turn the clock back’ to reassert early 20th century Western Civilisational thinking, and its dark shadow, coloniality, and the emerging menace of oligarchic techno-feudalism and its fascist tendencies.

As Yanis Varoufakis explains in his book, Technofeudalism, “Markets have been replaced by these digital platforms that look like markets but are not markets. They’re more like digital or cloud fiefdoms, like Amazon.com or Alibaba, where you have a digital fence keeping within it: producers, consumers, artisans, and intellectuals. We are all essentially producing value for the owner of that digital fiefdom. The huge amount of investment in phones, laptops, cell towers, server farms and thousands of miles of optical fibre cables has brought about a system that now dominates all parts of life, including even behaviour modification in individual people.”

Become an agent of the transformational change to an Enlivenment Worldview.