Preparing for the Emergence of Collective Awareness

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 13 Jan 2025

Anthony Judge | Laetus in Praesens - TRANSCEND Media Service

Emergency Preparedness Understood Otherwise with AI Assistance

Introduction

13 Jan 2025 – There is currently an unusual degree of global focus on emergency preparedness. This extends beyond the long-standing concerns with national security as exemplified by the recent declaration of Donald Trump as US President-elect (Trump says NATO members should raise defense spending to 5% of GDP, France24, 7 January 2025). Following the disastrous management of the COVID-19 pandemic, such concerns are being framed urgently and controversially by the World Health Organization (Governments progress on negotiations for a pandemic agreement to boost global preparedness for future emergencies, WHO, 20 September 2024; Intergovernmental Negotiating Body to draft and negotiate a WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, WHO, 27 May 2024; The Pandemic Treaty: shameful and unjust, The Lancet, 403, 2024, 10429). Many other foreseen catastrophic challenges to governance now call for new measures of emergency preparedness.

Understood more generally, the challenges foreseen have long been a focus of resolutions of intergovernmental organizations, most notably the United Nations. Unfortunately, as with “New Years Resolutions“, little account is taken of indications that serious effort to implement such resolutions tends to be only of token form. As noted decades ago by Chadwick F. Alger, with the exception of some specialized technical agencies, intergovernmental assemblies have become an arena in which developing countries are placated and contained by encouraging them to spend endless hours in formulating toothless resolutions with little hope of implementation. The analysis has shown that only 53 of some 2000 (less than 3%) decisions in the assemblies and executive bodies of the UN, ILO and WHO created new activities in the years 1955, 1960 and 1965 (Decision-Making in the United Nations, International Associations, 1972. p. 461-464).

Denial and negligence in the face of warning signals enables disasters of different kinds. Curiously this is despite rational arguments in the light of evidence-based research, exemplified by those of climate scientists with respect to the challenges of global warming. Reactive responses, if implemented, tend to be undermined in the light of management adages such as: Every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, plausible — and wrong or Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts. As a consequence, and even more curiously, collective learning tends primarily to result from the disasters themselves rather than from studious consideration of their probability. As noted by C. S. Lewis:

Out of all human events, it is tragedy alone that brings people out of their own petty desires and into awareness of other humans’ suffering. Tragedy occurs in human lives so that we will learn to reach out and comfort others.

Tragedy merits recognition as a systemic remedy as a consequence of neglect (Systemic Crises as Keys to Systemic Remedies, 2008; Variety of System Failures Engendered by Negligent Distinctions, 2016).

There is no lack of calls for “change” and the “need for change” — especially with respect to the policy and behavior of others. As with reform of the United Nations, failures have long been framed by “lack of political will” — as in the health domain (F. Baum, et al, Creating Political Will for Action on Health Equity: practical lessons for public health policy actors, 2020). The question can be considered more generally (Indicators of Political Will, Remedial and Coping Capacity? 2019; International Organizations and the Generation of the Will to Change, 1970). Far more subtle has been the advice of Mohandas Gandhi (“Be the change you wish to see in the world“) — but with little sense of how to enable that collectively.

Reference to “emergency” necessarily implies a matter of urgency with the need to be prepared for potentially disastrous disruption. This is readily confused with any form of “emergence” offering new forms of beneficial coherence for humanity — such as an emergence of awareness. That sense is implied by recognition of the possibility of a New Renaissance (Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna, Are We Living in a New Renaissance? Scientific American, 24 May 2016; David Lorimer and Oliver Robinson, A New Renaissance: transforming science, spirit and society, 2023).

Some end times scenarios envisaged by religions foresee forms of beneficial emergence. These may well be conflated with other varieties of singularity which may indeed have a memetic dimension — as an unforeseen emergence of collective awareness (Emerging Memetic Singularity in the Global Knowledge Society, 2009). Religions may see their role as preparing for such an “emergence”. Techo-optimists now frame the process in relation to artificial intelligence. Transhumanists might even imagine a “mergence” of humanity with AI — perhaps to be appropriately termed “e-mergence”

Such considerations call into question the current problematic institutional focus on emergency preparedness. Is this necessarily able to adapt appropriately to the quality of insight potentially associated with the emergence of collective awareness — an “emergency” understood otherwise? Science fiction has explored the manner in which conventional logic may be quite unable to distinguish the benefits of such emergence from the threats to which their logic is programmed to react as emergencies.

Much has been made of the conspiracies evoked by the COVID pandemic and the responses to it (WHO pandemic treaty: “Torrent of fake news” has put negotiations at risk, says WHO chief, BMJ, 2024, 384). The situation can be framed as a crisis of misinformation and confidence in authority — a crisis of collective trust. So understood the collective realization is one of being lied to — namely the emergence of one form of collective awareness. Legislative and regulatory remedies envisaged effectively define, through exceptions, what may then be perceived as a “license to lie” by certain “authorized” sectors of society — especially government agencies (who may defensively claim the need to do so for reasons of “national security”). The remedies necessarily fail to address the misinformation systematically purveyed through advertising (under the protective banner of “puffery“) or through the “unfact-checked” claims of religions (Comparability of “Vaxxing Saves” with “Jesus Saves” as Misinformation? 2021).

The argument which follows explores the possible future emergence of collective awareness capable of transcending the problematic dilemmas and dynamics increasingly evident.

As in the previous experiments with AI assistance, the responses of ChatGPT 4o are distinctively presented below in grayed areas, with those of Claude 3.5 (in some cases). Given the length of the document to which the exchange gives rise, the form of presentation has itself been treated as an experiment — in anticipation of the future implication of AI into research documents. Web technology now enables the whole document to be held as a single “page” with only the “questions” to AI rendered immediately visible — a facility developed in this case with the assistance of both ChatGPT and Claude 3 (but not operational in PDF variants of the page, in contrast with the original). Reservations and commentary on the process of interaction with AI to that end have been discussed separately (Methodological comment on experimental use of AI, 2024). Readers may well be encourage to pose the same questions (or others considered more appropriate) to AIs to which they may in future have access — as artificial intelligence develops.

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