Our feature image, George Ward Tjungurrayi’s painting: Tingari Ceremonies of Minkuvahala is one vision of parsing the grammar of Reality—a vision embedded in the western desert culture of the Pintupi people of the Gibson desert. As one art curator suggests, such a painting “provides visual cues to a complex story-system; but all the while its air of coherent depth comes from the underlying mental architecture of the desert world.”
The Coming AI Revolution
Big tech company hype sells generative artificial intelligence (AI) as intelligent, creative, desirable, inevitable and about to radically reshape the future in many ways. But as Declan Humphreys reminds us, for all their innovation and wizardry, AI language models suffer from a centuries-old problem. Organising and presenting information is not only an attempt to reflect reality, it is a projection of a worldview. Thus, as Celeste Rodriguez Louro also reminds us, language models (AI) inherit and reinforce the prestige of dominant linguistic forms, each with their own grammar systems, while sidelining or erasing less privileged ones.
For example, the English language, for all its versality is a noun-based language, a world of ‘things’, joined up with verbs, of ‘actions’. It is not a language of fluidity and ambiguity, of shifting and changing process that resist ‘thingness’.
This way in which language frames our way of seeing/knowing the nature of reality, the world around us and within us, takes us into the difference between the seemingly commonsense Newtonian/cartesian logic of scientific materialism, and the confounding logic of quantum mechanics, and the intrinsic relationality/entanglement of the world. Put simply, the world is materialised (brought into being) differently through different knowledge/cultural practices, which can confound shared understanding.
We witness this all around us. In our response to cultural differences, religious beliefs, intergenerational conflict over what matters in terms of political and cultural priorities. It is also deeply embedded in the assumptions of different academic disciplines, the breeding ground of our so-called ‘experts’ on whom we rely, especially when they are the basis of the development of artificial intelligence systems, like ChatGPT etc.
The Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms
Here at the Enlivenment Network, with our focus on how to shift our thinking from an extractivist logic to a relationist logic, we are devising a Writing Room project. Through this we aim to develop a story in 8 episodes of multi-arts storytelling of The Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms. This story will pitch these two logics against each other. It will feature an AI developed with the postcolonial tech creatives of the University of Columbia, based on a relationist logic, working in collaboration with Elders of the Earths Kingdoms—the worlds of birds, plants, forests, fungi, insects, reptiles and animals. They are pitched against a powerful AI developed by a Tech Lord of Silicon Valley in the US, built on the extractivist logic of global capitalism, which now targets the innermost psyche of humanity in the relentless pursuit of wealth extraction.
In the Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms, we explore a different kind of AI future than what is currently being envisaged by economists dreaming of productivity gains and the tech fraternity, the libertarian champions of the technology-military-industrial complex in the 21st century battle of nation states for geo-political imperial dominance— dreaming of power and profit.
Instead of an evolution into transhuman cyborgs conquering and colonising space, the Elders of the Earth Kingdoms, in alliance with the Relationist AI, rescue humanity from its entrapment in techno-rational materialism, which has been growing exponentially since the 19th century Industrial Revolution and spread of Western modern technological culture via colonialism and global capitalism—through wave after wave of technological development and societal transformation.
Techno-rationalism, a way of thinking and making sense of the world, has expressed itself in the ungrounded, alienated intellect of transactional managerialism and commodification across all aspects of a culture—a culture of endless consumerism (and violence). The focus on economic performance, on measures of wealth production extracted from the Earth or the labouring bodies and minds of humans, has come to dominate societies across the Earth, reaching into many of its remotest corners.
Slowly humans have begun to lose their sense of poetic wonder and empathetic engagement and belonginessness with the world. Alienation, anxiety and depression stalk society, particularly among the young. Rage-filled conspiracy thinking and sovereign citizen lawfare fills the void of alienation, loneliness and loss of meaning among the so-called ‘ordinary people’ of modern society.
Meanwhile, global warming caused by the fossil-fuel economy let loose by the Industrial Revolution, continues its relentless path in re-organising the Earth’s global ecosystems. The fertile and balmy days of the Holocene are giving way to something much more hostile to humanity, with its hubris of being Lords of the Earth.
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN GETTING INVOLVED IN THIS PROJECT, PLEASE GET IN CONTACT: info@enlivenment.network
The Problem of Language
Academic researchers argue that large language models and generative AI are most productively understood as “a stochastic parrot” insomuch as each is a “system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning” (Bender et al. 617).
Generative AI, then, is not creating something genuinely new, but rather remixing existing data in novel ways that the systems themselves do not in any meaningful sense understand. Going further, in this research paper, Simone Natale characterises current AI tools as “deceitful media” insomuch as they are designed to deliberately appear generally intelligent, but this is always a deception. The deception makes these tools more engaging for humans to use but is also fundamental in selling and profiting from the use of AI tools.
AI, unlike calculators of numerical values, have the potential to entangle themselves in everything: perception, cognition, affect and interaction. Their power lies in their potential as everything and everywhere ‘tools’.
Hallucination and Bias
Two major problems have been identified: the problem of ‘hallucination’ and evidence of cultural bias. AI systems are designed to hook you to keep coming back, just like social media. They do this by aiming to ‘satisfy’ by shaping the narrative to fit the customer profile, but they also sometimes go completely off track and produce ‘lies’ with great conviction. This is tellingly known as hallucinating – the inability to see reality. As governments consider implementing AI systems in their search to improve productivity, the problem of hallucination is very real. We already saw the terrible toll of automating welfare payments on our most vulnerable citizens in the Coalition Government’s Robot Debt scandal. No wonder the general population is scared of this push for AI-based productivity.
Further, research has revealed that five of the largest commercially available GenAI engines—Adobe Firefly, Dream Studio, Dall-E3, Meta AI, and Midjourney, when asked to generate images grounded in Australian cultural narratives, frequently invoked tired and cliched tropes based on old white colonial narratives, particularly about Aboriginal Australians. The researchers concluded that such GenAI acts as a cultural time machine, surfacing old and defunct caricatures of Australianness, despite the seeming novel newness of the “GenAI moment.”
Questioning the Cultural Time Machine
In terms of cultural time machines, Australia stands at an inflection point in our understanding of who we are as the ‘world’s most successful multicultural nation’. We now loudly claim to recognise that our cultural foundations rest not on our British colonial heritage of a mere 250 years, but on our First Nations cultures of more than 65,000 years—the oldest continuing living culture in the world.
We also recognise that climate change and the sciences of ecology have taught us that Planet Earth has its own rules that do not answer to humanity’s hubris of human exceptionalism as ‘masters of the universe’, made in ‘God’s image’. An idea taken up with gusto in the scientific materialism of global capitalism in its various political guises—liberal western democracies; Russian oligarchic Orthodox imperialism; socialism with Chinese characteristics; the emerging US system of techno-Christian ethno-fascism; and various forms of authoritarian hybrid military regimes—as the world twists and turns towards a new global geo-political imperial order, no longer under Pax Americana as the leaders of the ‘Free World’.
But the new world order is not just about geo-politics. It is about how we parse the grammar of Reality. About how we think of ‘time’.
How we move from the assumptions of the cultural lens of the Western Enlightenment, still based on Newtonian physics and Cartesian dualism: the radical and misguided separation between mind and matter that pitches human culture on one side of the line and nature on the other. The economic framework of individualism, of homo economicus, the heroic rational decision maker and shaper of responsive market forces—with all unintended consequences (market failures) tossed aside as externalities. Of the evolutionary linear march of time: from the ‘primitive’ to the ‘advanced/modern’; the dream of Progress and Prosperity in ‘our standard of living’ as human ‘masters of the universe’, the ‘clever species’ of Earth’s fecundity. The ‘externalities’ of consequences pushed aside; hidden from view. The desperate attempt at ‘silencing’ that pervades political narratives.
Quantum physics has long since shown us the limitation of the Newtonian view of a Reality of mathematical billiard balls (independent parts/atoms) dancing to the laws of gravity. Instead, we have entered into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics, where Reality can be either particle (‘thing’) or wave (‘energetic motion’) depending on how (the apparatus with which) you observe it. This is known as Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle’—whereby ontological indeterminancy exists in the act of any knowledge practice (epistemology). Where in the mysterious life of electrons we discover that the quark is only 1%, while virtual particles are 99% of its ‘mass’. And that, as Barad expresses it in her YouTube presentation, Undoing the Future, the electron is always inseparable from the wild activities of the void – intra-acting with virtual particles in every imaginable way. The open field of all potentiality. An insight in complete alignment with the Buddhist view about the nature of Reality—arrived at some thousand years ago.
While we modern folk have harnessed these insights through mathematics into an endless array of technologies, we have failed to understand how the logic of quantum mechanics undermines all the cultural assumptions of the Western Enlightenment—the great drive for objective rationality in all things via the ‘external’ objective observer.
Quantum Perspectives on Relationality
In previous blog posts we explored Karen O’Brien’s ideas of ‘quantum social change’ in an entangled world in You Matter More Than You Think, (2021), and Danah Zohar’s exploration of how to understand the nondual nature of a world of irreducible particle/wave functionality in The Quantum Self (1991).
Now to get a further handle on this new quantum relationist grammar of Reality, we have turned to the insights of ‘agential realism’ first developed by the physicist and cultural theorist, Karen Barad, to help us better understand living in an intrinsically entangled/relational universe.
Her theory of agential realism challenges the traditional Newtonian idea that the world is made up of separate, independent parts. Instead, because ‘things’ necessarily emerge through their relationship with one another, the very language of nouns that we use to think about Reality, to describe it to ourselves or others, trips us up.
This inheritance of the Western Enlightenment hides from us the fluid nature of Reality as a dance of relationships—the process of interdependent origination that lies, for example, at the heart of the alternative Buddhist worldview. That also speaks to the idea of co-becoming that is core to the Aboriginal Yolngu worldview, articulated by the women of East Arnhem Land in their account of how their culture ‘works’, outlined in Songspirals (2019), and acted out in the dance rituals on display at the annual Garma Festival.
In Barad’s idea of ‘agential realism’, building on the work of Niels Bohr, we discover a bridge between the modern world of technological sophistication and quantum mechanics, and the Law: the Way of the Ancestors of Australia’s ancient cultural foundations—a bridge that enables non-Indigenous Australians to find a way of understanding and embracing our unique cultural heritage without any need for falling into cultural appropriation of First Nations’ ancestral creation stories and secret knowledges.
Barad’s book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), sets out her ideas in the Table of Contents. As you can see this takes us across quite challenging and complex ideas, which seek to unpack core ideas of entanglement and relationship that are the very fabric of our world—both in its materiality and in our human ways of understanding it through sensate experience and intellectual mentation.
Part 1: Entangled Beginnings
- The science and ethics of mattering
- Meeting the universe halfway
- Diffractions: differences, contingencies and entanglements that matter.
Part 2: Intra-Actions Matter
- Niels Bohr’s philosophy-physics: quantum physics and the nature of knowledge and reality
- Agential realism: how material discursive practices matter
Part 3: Entanglements and Re(con)figurations
- Getting real: techno-scientific practices and the materialisation of Reality
- Spacetime re(con)figurings: natural cultural forces and changing topologies of power
- Quantum entanglements: experimental metaphysics and the nature of Nature
- The ontology of knowing: the intra-activity of becoming and ethics of mattering.
In one of her appendices, Barad also discusses ways we should understand the relationship between Bohr’s ‘Principle of Complementarity’ and Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle’, both which have a bearing on discussions about the non-dual nature of Reality as wave/particle.
As these ideas are embedded in academic language that is almost a ‘dialect’ of its own, I have sought to pull out a few extracts and locate them within the wider context of our journey into a relationist way of thinking. If we can do this, as noted above, I think this ‘quantum’ way of thinking provides an important ‘bridge’ between modern ‘Western’ culture (and ways of thinking) and those of the intrinsically relationist ethos of First Nations cultures of Australia that underpins the idea of ancestral Law – the tjukurpa of Central Australia. For this is the great cultural choking point of our shared meaning and understanding that is promised in the idea of ‘two-way’ learning as envisioned by the great Yolgnu Elder, Galarrwuy Yunipingu.
How do we embrace this challenge in the looming AI Revolution? This is the great cultural challenge facing Australia, and any idea of us crafting a uniquely ‘Australian Way’ (Albo please note)in the manner in which we navigate the turbulence of the coming centuries.
Agential Realism
Barad warns us that the belief that nature (materiality) is mute and immutable, and that all prospects for significance and change reside in culture, merely reinscribes the nature-culture dualism of scientific materialism that quantum mechanics destroys.
In accordance with rules of quantum mechanics, agential realism recognises that the knower does not stand in a relation of absolute externality to the natural world. There is no such exterior observational point. The condition for ‘rational’ objectivity is therefore not absolute exteriority. We are not outside observers of the world. Neither are we simply located at particular places in the world. Rather, we are part of the world, which is expressed in Barad’s notion of ‘intra-activity’. As the physics-philosopher Niels Bohr insisted, we are a part of that ‘nature’ we seek to understand.
Agential realism also challenges the very basis of representation; the power of words to mirror pre-existing phenomena, ‘the seductive nucleus that binds us in its orbit’.
Core to this new way of thinking is Barad’s idea of the way ‘intra-actions’ constantly reconfigure the materiality of phenomena, by conceptually focusing, and labelling any particular expression of phenomena as a ‘thing’. She calls this making an ‘agential ‘cut’. The entire process of measuring and categorising phenomena, involves a ‘freeze-framing’ of what are intrinsically fluid processes and relationships—much like turning water into ice.
This idea of the ‘agential cut’ provides a way of understanding the politics, ethics, and agencies of any act of observation, and indeed any kind of knowledge practice. By languaging experience into particular, nameable separable ‘things’, we obscure their intrinsic entanglement with one another, the invisible dance of molecules that comprise what is going on.
Entanglement
Therefore, it is important that we not understand the idea of interdependence as merely ‘things’ that interact with one another. Rather, such interdependence occurs through and within intra-actions expressing differentiating-entangling. An ‘agential cut’ is enacted that cuts things together-apart (one move) such that differences exist not as absolute separations, but includes their inseparability.
In this way, nothing is inherently separate from anything else, but instead separations are enacted within phenomena through our ‘intra-actions’. Barad insists that social constructivist and traditional realist approaches, which form part of the Western knowledge tradition, fail to reveal this and get caught up in the geometrical optics of reflection much like the infinite play of images between two facing mirrors.
To escape this fault, she employs the idea of ‘diffraction’ to explain how intra-action works to shape our experience of phenomena in an intrinsically relational, entangled world.
The Agency of Materiality
In common with the worldview of Aboriginal culture, expressed in their all-encompassing term ‘Country’, agential realism implies a worldview where both the human and non-human world have equal agency in shaping Reality. Reality is composed not of ‘things-in-themselves’ or ‘things-behind-phenomena’ but of ‘things-in-phenomena’. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. In this way, the universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming.
Importantly agential realism means that all apparatuses (technologies and methodologies of observation), including AI systems, are material-discursive practices through which the very distinction between the social and the scientific, nature and culture, is actually constituted.
Therefore, if apparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time, but which iteratively reconfigure space-time-matter, as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming, then the development of AI and is evolution into an Artificial General Intelligence that is equal to, or superior to, human intelligence, becomes part of this ongoing dynamism of becoming.
Crucially, agential realism enables us to see the world is a dynamic process of intra-activity and materialisation in the enactment of determinate causal structures. This ongoing flow of agency through which part of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another part of the world, and through which causal structures are stabilised and destabilised, does not take place in space and time, but happens in the making of spacetime itself.
The Generative Nature of Agential Realism
Barad insists that in an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance. Rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilising and destabilising process of iterative intra-activity.
In alignment with the Yolngu idea of co-becoming with Country, which has its own agency and sense of knowing, Barad insists that matter’s dynamism is generative, not merely in the sense of bringing new things into the world, but in the sense of bringing forth new worlds, of engaging in an ongoing reconfiguring of the world. Material phenomena (bodies) do not simply take their places in the world. They are not simply situated in, or located in, particular environments. Rather, ‘environments’ and ‘bodies’ are intra-actively co-constituted. ‘Bodies’ (human, environmental, or otherwise) are integral parts of, or dynamic reconfigurings of, what is—the very nature of Reality.
Overcoming the Trap of Linguistic Reification
Many of these ideas of agential realism are mirrored in the teachings and practices of the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, of which I have been a student-practitioner for nearly 40 years. My immersion in this tradition, that was strangely and instructively paralleled by post graduate studies in the sociology of science and technology) included an immersive three-year Dzogchen retreat at Lerab Ling in France, under the guidance of my main spiritual teachers.
In the Dzogchen tradition, Reality is revealed as the indivisible union of emptiness (open potentiality) and appearance (both mental and physical) in all its generative multiplicity, which is captured in the Sanskrit term ‘shunyata’ (Tib. ‘tongpa nyi’). The core fault in the Buddhist worldview is regarding any phenomena as singular, permanent or independent. Both the analytical Madyamaka philosophical tradition and the experiential practices of Dzogchen, Mahamudra, and the higher yoga tantras, are all designed to ‘unlearn’ the conceptual fault of reification—of experiencing reality as ‘things’ existing independently of us, including our own sense of self as some ‘thing’ that is independent, permanent and singular.
Yet at the same time, such insights do not deny our own sense of personal agency and individual identity. Rather it locates this within a wider realisation of the impermanent, interdependent (relational) and fluid nature of the way in which all phenomena manifest, including our very sense of self. This can be ‘known’ not just logically through analysis, but experientially through the direct training of the mind in practices, which like the ceremonial knowledges of Aboriginal culture, have their own traditions of ‘secrecy’ and deep respect for lineage and lineage knowledge holders. In the Tibetan tradition this sacred commitment is called ‘samaya’.
Similar rules apply in Aboriginal culture for those who receive the esoteric knowledge, which is held within the Songlines, through various levels of ceremony. Traditionally, revealing this knowledge to anyone without appropriate authorisation (initiation) resulted in severe punishment, even death. Today, for these reasons, such esoteric knowledges and related sacred objects, previously revealed to anthropologists by traditional Law man and women (knowledge holders) in Central Australia, is held in sealed collections and can only be viewed by those with appropriate cultural authorisation.
The Sacred/Secret Imperative
Both traditions recognise that the greatest threat to these ways of knowing is through objectified reified conceptualisation that veils the ability to rest awareness in nonconceptual awareness.
It is why all such sacred knowledge traditions treasure the role of sacred knowledge holders and the power of silence and value of listening—awareness beyond thought. As Aboriginal Elder, Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann has noted, the practice of dadirri: inner deep listening and quiet still awareness, is the greatest gift her people can give to modern Australia. The ability to quell the restless, questing mind of the typical Westerner.
This sacred/secret approach to knowledge stands in marked contrast to the Western Enlightenment tradition and its demand for open transparency, for the need to challenge all knowledge through experimentation and analytical interrogation.
It also challenges the ‘extractivist’ practices of Western researchers who, as anthropologists and scientists, have undertaken ‘research’ on other cultures, including their knowledges practices and natural resources (plants, minerals, fresh water, animals, birds, etc) for the purposes of adding to the repository of Western knowledge, to build academic careers, and to sell such knowledge where it can be a source of ‘development’ for financial gain—particularly in the mining and pharmaceutical industry sectors. The idea of respect for the ‘sacred/secret’ has largely disappeared from modern Westernised culture.
The world has now recognised the unique power of the Aboriginal art of the Western and Central Deserts of Australia in their evocation of Country and the Songlines; its shimmering otherworldliness, revealed to the Western gaze through the professional world of the global art market. Before this revelation, Westerners largely saw this landscape through the lens of its blood red iron ore deposits, shipped to China to become the steel that has transformed China into a landscape of highrise apartments and factories.
Yet tragically, in the grip of the new fever of data mining, the Scott Farquhar’s of the hightech world see these desert landscapes as home to vast data centres and renewable energy farms for the coming AI revolution. In their vision, as a global renewable energy superpower, Australia will earn its fortunes serving the needs of SE Asia to meet modernity’s recurring dream of endless growth and prosperity into an ever shinier future of more, better, best. Literally, the sky is the limit: colonisation of our solar system within reach. Our desert night skies filled with stars once seen as the campfires of the ancestors, are now filled with circling satellites and space junk. The new industries of space science are primed for take-off.
Yilkari and the Earth Lords
Citizen of the world, Oxford scholar of the classics, roving journalist of war-torn places, his father also a roving journalist but his mother a Czech intellectual of Central Europe, the author Nicolas Rothwell has joined forces with his partner, Luritja-Pintupi artist and political activist, Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, to explore a vision of Australia’s remote desert country in their book, Yilkari: a Desert Suite (2025). Through words that seek to go beyond the veil of mere words, they reveal a vision of Country and its desert landscapes that answer not to high-tech visions of economic wealth, but to the world of the Elders of the Earth Kingdoms whom we plan to meet in our Writing Room project, the Rebellion of the Earth Lords.
Hidden in the text of the first story, Rothwell’s encounter with Valentin, a musician-composer refugee from distant Soviet Siberia by way of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and their meeting with the Desert lawman and artist, Mr Giles, we are introduced to the meaning of ‘yilkari’, the mystical source of the powers of a maparnjarra, a healer of ‘high degree’ in Aboriginal desert culture; healers who are still relied upon to this day.
For knowledges that necessarily force us beyond the mere grammar of human languages, we are told ‘yilkari’ has many meanings: “sky; heaven; clarity; everlastingness and distance—and that’s just the beginning” (p.66) that defy explanation. For in this world, Narulya (presumably the voice of Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson) has explained to Rothwell, the whitefella writer-journalist, caught between his love of words and his deep immersion in the mysteries of Desert culture, that Country is like a book. “A book that has no end, and sometimes that book’s words and letters are in code, or in black print on black pages so you can’t see them, and the chapters in the book are ceremonies, each one with its own designs and dances. Every word on every page has meaning, every sentence has its song. Nothing’s decoration”(p.85).
Through our writing project, the Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms, we aim to explore how Barad’s idea of agential realism, linked up with Danah Zohar’s intimation of a quantum self, and Karen O’Brien’s call for embracing a quantum vision of the potential for social change, frees us from the need to appropriate First Nations stories and cultural knowledges.
In this way we aim to rescue the questing ‘whitefella’ of Australian culture from his exile and entrapment in modernity’s grammar of Reality. Where Rothwell’s interlocutor describes him as: “always looking for what’s behind the landscape. What’s hidden there. Its secret rhythms. The patterns that it holds, its music, that thread of sound almost too faint to hear. . . what he’s after. . . to capture it. Find words for it. Decode it, even. As if you could”(p.131).
Always I take inspiration from Pintupi Senior Lawman, John Ward Tjungurrayi’s painting, the Tingari Ceremonies of Minkuvahala that hangs on the wall above my writing table. I knew nothing of him when I bought this painting from an Alice Springs Art Gallery on a journey to the Central Desert in the late 1980s. But I was drawn to its sombre, geometric style, which others claim act as ‘expressions of a world, a logic, a sense of how space is enlivened by spirit. . . to the outside eye, they possess an austere beauty: when explained in detail, they can serve as visual cues to a complex story-system; but all the while their air of coherent depth comes from the underlying mental architecture of the desert world’ (Rothwell, Another Country, 2007).
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