Eavesdropping on the Conversational Cosmos
Part 2 of 4 of the Essay "First Notes on the Conversational Cosmos"
This is part 2 of 4 of an excerpt from our forthcoming book The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture. We are going to post part 3 next week.
For citing, this is the appropriate citation:
Dr. Marc Gafni (with Dr. Zachary Stein and Dr. Elena Maslova-Levin), The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture, forthcoming: World Philosophy and Religion Press: Spring 2025, “First Notes on the Conversational Cosmos: The Amorous Cosmos Is the Relational Cosmos Is the Conversational Cosmos.”[1]
4. Eavesdropping on the Conversational Cosmos
One of our key intellectual partners and our dear friend, Howard Bloom, with whom we have been in deep conversation for many years, speaks of the Conversational Cosmos from the perspective of the classical exterior sciences.[2] We speak of—or perhaps eavesdrop on—the Conversational Cosmos from the perspective of the interior sciences. We refer to the Conversational Cosmos by different names: the Intimate Universe, the Amorous Cosmos, the CosmoErotic Universe, the Universe: A Love Story, or Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe.
The conversation between the interior science and exterior science is critical, for reality is interiors and exteriors all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.[3]
The following text is derived from a conversation between Howard Bloom and myself. I had just introduced to him the key ideas around Reality is relationship, Reality is evolution, and Reality is the evolution of relationship. Howard was profoundly aligned with this view, to which he, from his self-described perspective of a materialist mystic,[4] then offered his exterior science view of the Conversational Cosmos in support. We deploy different language and take issue on multiple fronts. But we both see the truth of Reality is evolution, Reality is relationship, and Reality is the evolution of relationship as the fundamental pattern of Cosmos. Howard, as an expression of his own early training, uses words like sociality, while we use words like intimacy, Eros, and desire—but we are looking at the same patterns of Cosmos. Our empirical descriptions overlap and fructify each other. In the following section, my words in the language of CosmoErotic Humanism are interspersed with Howard’s, without identifying who the speakers were, in order to show the common nature of Cosmos toward which we are pointing.[5]
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The intimate configurations of communion that animate Cosmos—what empiricists sometimes call the sociality of the Cosmos—begins when the first particles emerge, in the very, very, very first blast of the Big Bang. The first particles are inherently conversational. These particles cannot exist without each other. They cannot exist without creating a society, and if they don’t make it into one of these twosomes or threesomes, they are over and out. How do the twosomes and threesomes get together? They converse with each other. They pick up the signals of attraction and repulsion from each other, and then they act on them. There is an exchange of meaningful information that leads to new emergence. This Universe, from its very first instant, if it’s anything like the axioms that are used by corollary generators, has inherent in it everything that will happen until the very end, in that first microflash of a second.
Imagine entropy as things continually falling apart. When you were a child, you would put a Slinky at the top of a staircase—if Slinkys were still something that you had in your house—and you watched it. You would put one end on the first stair going down, and you watched the Slinky go down stair after stair after stair. That’s what is supposed to happen to the Cosmos under the rules of entropy.
Entropy is not a valid idea. It is not borne out by any aspect of the Cosmos whatsoever. In fact, the impossible is the real perception, in the reality of this Cosmos. Because the Universe is like the Slinky footage being run in reverse. So, the next step up is invisible at any given point in time. It is implicit, meaning that from the very time of the very first particles, that staircase for the Slinky run in reverse is already there. All the stuff in the Universe is in the process of discovering its way toward the next invisible stairstep up. But when it comes to these quantum leaps, when it comes to these phase transitions, when it comes to the transition from quark soup to protons and neutrons, those stairsteps, a proton and a neutron, are not at first visible.
The Universe does not show randomness as the primary driver of Cosmos,[6] and it doesn’t show randomness especially at that first sliver of a second of the Universe’s existence. A random Universe would be a gazillion particles, a gazillion different kinds of particles, with no necessary coherence, no necessary relationship between them, even though they all sprang from the mother of the space-time manifold. But quite the opposite is what emerges. What emerges is a universe of inherent and necessary coherence. And it emerges in stairsteps.
Stairstep number one: the emergence of quarks.
Stairstep number two: quarks showing social properties and glomming together in groups of two or three, what we call in CosmoErotic Humanism configurations of intimacy. Without which the quarks disappear.
Stairstep number three: These threesomes turn out to have astonishing emergent properties—the emergent properties of protons and neutrons.
This is but one snippet—but one expression—of what we are describing in CosmoErotic Humanism as the evolution of relationships.
The evolution of relationships is, first, the evolution of the relationships between quarks.
Next is the evolution of the relationship between the neutrons and protons.
Way, way down the road, we have the evolution of relationships in a really big way, when we have electrons and protons, neutrons getting together. We have described this just above, and it is about 380,000 years later.
A hydrogen atom is based on what you could call a perpetual conversation between an electron and a proton. That’s a staggering emergence of a new kind of relationship that produces whole new emergent properties, radical supersized surprises, emergence that makes absolutely no sense based on prior causation. New wholes are clearly called by the music of future; they are not merely the result of mechanical process of the past. It is rather emergence based on the evolution of new forms of relationships that are called forth by the inherent value structure of Cosmos itself. The magical ingredient that we cannot leave out if we are honest empiricists is the supersized surprise. Indeed, emergence is the fairy dust of science.
This is what we describe as Intimacy generates Emergence. The radical amazement, the wonder of Cosmos, is that ever-deeper intensities of intimacy themselves generate new configurations of intimacy, which are in effect both the catalysts and expression of new emergence. The electrons and protons can get together, and out of nowhere, out of no thing, all of a sudden, the properties of hydrogen, helium, and lithium come into existence, and we couldn’t have predicted them by knowing the properties of electrons and protons (and neutrons). This is the creative advance into novelty emergent form, the lure of becoming which is core to CosmoErotic Humanism.[7]
Now, with this in mind, let’s turn to the valence, or value, of subatomic particles as it appears in chemistry and physics. The valence of an electron is negative, and the valence of a proton is positive. Now, if we were to go to the Oxford English Dictionary, we would see that the root of the word valence is the same as the root of the word value.[8] Valence is also part of the cluster of words that includes valor, valiance, valentes, and valentine, all of which, like valence, are rooted in value, which itself is self-validating.
Participate in the conversation:
At the outset of the Song of Songs, the lover says to her beloved, “Draw me after you, and I will run toward you.”[9] The word for run toward you—in Hebrew rutza—shares its etymological root and meaning with the Hebrew word ratzon—which translates as will. In other words, draw me after you, meaning allurement, and at some point, when the intensity of the intimate allurement becomes sufficiently potent, I will run after you. I will surrender my lower will to you and allow myself to be taken over by the deeper ErosValue—the erotic will of Reality—moving through me, which arouses me to you, generating a new and unique configuration of intimacy and Eros that overwhelms all separation and boundary and generates new emergence in Reality.
This text is central to the Song of Solomon. The song, however, is far from being a love song only about a particular love between human lover and beloved. Instead, it understands itself, together with an entire current of esoteric texts in the interior science of Hebrew wisdom, as describing the very source code of Reality itself, all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain, or some version of what used to be called the great chain of being. The core text of the Song of Songs is Tocho Ratzuf Ahava, “Its insides are lined with love.” Or, said differently: Reality is Eros.
Reality is Eros all the way down and all the way up, and a core quality of Eros and its allurements is will. Will is an expression of desire. And desire, in its clarified form, is simply the will toward value. In other words, the amorous desire of the Cosmos, the evolutionary will of Reality, always reaches for—desires—ever wider and deeper value. This notion of value is inherent in Reality from the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang. Value evolves—that is clear. But value at its core is not a human construction but an intrinsic property, the valence of Reality itself.
There are certain principles, certain relationships, that are in the Universe, very near the very beginning, and then they show up over and over again, level after level of emergence. Value is one of them. There is a primitive precursor of valentes—of will—at the very beginning of the Universe. The fact that this Universe spurts out space, time, and speed—that’s valentes. That’s the precursor of will in its later forms—precursor of the will that’s in you and me.
Now, we need a couple of Herbert Spencer’s terms here. Herbert Spencer talks about differentiation and integration. Indeed, that is the title of chapter 15 of his work First Principles.[10] What does that mean? That means that we all have unique personhoods and need to, in some way, demonstrate our uniqueness. Personhood is deeper then personality. It is not an accidental feature of the mechanical cosmos that developed a random new application. Personhood is the unique conversation that is every being and most potently incarnate in every human being.
When you enter a new group, you have two jobs:
The first is to show that you blend in. In other words, to feel your common identity. This is the first dimension that generates the communion (through integration) within the larger group.
And the second is to show that you stand out. In other words, to feel your irreducible uniqueness within the group. This is the second dimension that generates communion (through differentiation) within the larger group.
But then: Once you have differentiated, when you are coming together in a whole, the whole that you make—the society that you make—has radically new emergent properties. And this dialectical tension between our uniqueness and our sameness is the key to intimate communion at every level of Reality, from matter to life to mind. Indeed, this dialectic of sameness and uniqueness is an expression of what we call, in CosmoErotic Humanism, two First Principles and First Values of Cosmos, allurement and autonomy, or what are also sometimes referred as autonomy and communion.
A lump of dirt is a social relationship. Or said more clearly, it is a configuration of intimacy—of intimate coherence. A lump of dirt is composed of atoms and molecules in intimately configured relationship with each other. (And, if it is soil on Earth, it may even include hundreds of millions of microorganisms living in intimate communion.)
A single bacterial cell is a relationship at a whole different level of intimate communion. It builds on all the intimate relationships between the organic molecules inside of it, which make up the different parts of the cell, the DNA, the RNA, the amino acids, and proteins; but then it adds a radical new dimension of self-replication and self-actualization. If we were to musically compose the dazzling complexity of intimacies between myriad parts in insanely intricate, allured erotic unions of shapes and forms, we would understand that a single bacterial cell is a musical symphony of intimacies that would shame Mozart.
A bacterial colony is a relationship of a radically new kind generating an ever-higher and deeper level of intimate communion. It is a community of bacterial cells in communion; the cells communicate and support each other in locating or generating the optimal life conditions for the whole community. You and me, two human beings, again, we are manifestations of relationship that produce dramatic differences, dramatic new things. But we are in the same continuum of intimacy, conversation, and relationship.
Herbert Spencer called this progress. Another name for it might be the evolution of intimacy, or the evolution of love, or, most simply, the evolution of relationship. Clearly, relationship is a core plotline of Cosmos, even as it is equally clear that the evolution of relationship, or what we also refer to as the evolution of intimacy, is a core plotline of Cosmos.
In the language of CosmoErotic Humanism, we say that there is a wholeness that can generate more wholeness. In other words, a level of wholeness has been achieved through intimate communion between the parts. But that wholeness does not cease desiring. Wholeness is allured to ever-deeper and wider intimate communions, which means ever-more profound conversations that generate ever-deeper and wider wholeness. This is precisely the Eros equation that we referred to above:[11] Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, seeking, desiring, moving toward ever-deeper contact, ever-greater communication conversation and communion, and ever-greater wholeness.
The new wholeness is of a kind that you never imagined before. That’s why these are supersized surprises. In between differentiation and integration and progress lies the supersized surprise. This form of social organization, of intimate communion, produces a whole new kind of Reality, a previously unimagined new kind of Reality. What emerges is a new configuration of Eros, intimacy, and desire, a new level of conversation, which is what we call in evolutionary language a new emergent.
The allurement to higher intimacies is fundamental to cosmos. One relatively early incarnation of this phenomenological reality of Cosmos is a wave. A wave is constantly recruiting new water molecules and then abandoning them, and recruiting a whole bunch of new ones, and so on and so forth all the way across the ocean. It never has the same constituents for more than about fifteen seconds. The matter that makes it up is always changing. Yet it retains its coherence because there is some sort of tenacity to larger configurations of intimacy.
The wave is a result of intimate patterns of relationship that are evoked by the inherent nature of reality. But if you just looked at it as relationships, you wouldn’t see the wave. You can describe the wave with equations. It is this kind of relationship that can be described with simple equations, that persists. It has its own will, and yet it is nonmaterial.
Human beings are part of a continuum with the wave of evolving patterns of intimacy. But of course you and I are not just the water molecules in that wave. We are constantly changing, unlike the water molecules. But even though we are constantly changing, we are forming a part of some larger pattern that seems to have been inherent from the beginning. I mean, how can we go from people who lived in societies of thirty-five to a hundred fifty individuals eleven thousand years ago to people who live in a society of a billion today? And it‘s a largely coherent society, even while we are so individually fluid.
So, the question is, how does reality generate coherent complexity? In our reading, Alan Turing’s essential response in “Morphogenesis”[12] is simple first rules.
Yes, I came to a similar conclusion as Alan, based on a somewhat different set of scientific axioms of reality. There are three or four simple rules that are largely scientific but which have value implications.
These simple first rules are similar to what we call in CosmoErotic Humanism First Principles and First Values. But in CosmoErotic Humanism, the simple first rules address not only exteriors but also interiors. Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to say that complexity theory operates based on the iteration of simple First Principles and First Values in exteriors, while the evolution of culture and consciousness is animated and driven by the iteration of simple First Principles and First Values in interiors. We have identified, in CosmoErotic Humanism, some eighteen First Principles and First Values.
We might also talk about these as learning algorithms of the Cosmos. One example of a learning algorithm is very much akin to Herbert Spencer’s: First, reach out and explore; then, rush together again and consolidate; then, reach out and explore again. Fusion and Fission is another way to express the same simple first rule of Cosmos. So, those are the two fundamental learning rules of the Cosmos, and probably rules at the very beginning of the Cosmos—the simple rules, the First Principles and First Values, are what we might call the axioms that kick-started the Cosmos.
In CosmoErotic Humanism, we say it something like as follows: Differentiation is the drive toward ever-deeper irreducible uniqueness, a form of autonomy, while integration is the allurement toward ever-greater, deeper, and wider intimate communion. Allurement and autonomy are both First Principles and First Values, which are themselves the plotlines of Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe. Indeed, Eros itself is not allurement but rather the precisely calibrated dance between allurement and autonomy.[13]
The big thing to not lose track of is the things that we do not have sufficient words for and that science has not really grappled with—things like the wave, which is a self-sustaining pattern that is not dependent on any individual group of material things. Those are the stairsteps, those larger patterns that emerge only when there are enough of us getting together. Those are the invisible stairsteps, and those are all about relationship, except there is something bigger than relationship at work. It’s about the evolution of these new properties that we can derive. It’s also about the next stairsteps up, which are not things over which we have a choice. These new patterns are what we have called in many conversations a memory of the future, called forth by inherent Eros of Cosmos itself.
Footnotes
[1] At the turn of the twenty-first century, I partnered with a close friend at the time, Erica Fox, in the realizing of her dream of opening an institute for spirituality and negotiation under the auspices of Harvard Law School. The first event opened with a public dialogue between me and Bill Ury (the author of Getting to Yes, with Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton, 1991) in a packed hall at the law school. Then, I had a key conversation with Erica and Doug Stone (one of the authors of Difficult Conversations, 1999). In that conversation (2003 approximately), I unpacked an early version of the new Story of Value to Doug and Erica, and as part of the new Story I formulated an early notion of the Conversational Cosmos, which has later been refined over the years, in multiple teachings. To the best of my knowledge there are three of us who have expressed some notion of the Conversational Cosmos: myself, Howard Bloom, and David Whyte. Howard and I have discussed the term and its implications extensively over the years and will publish together on this term as part of our larger shared work on what we might call honest readings of science that disclose the Amorous Cosmos. Our thoughts on the Conversional Cosmos are somewhat related to David’s but in more important ways also radically different. The formal term was first coined and published by Howard.
[2] Bloom, The God Problem (2016).
[3] See Section I.2.
[4] Howard views his role as maintaining his materialism, and from there speaking into the classic scientific discourse. Howard’s materialism, as it has emerged in dozens of conversations between us over some seven years, has little to do with the kind of neo-Darwinian reductive materialism that is fashionable in the scientific community. Rather it more closely approximates what the seminal sage of Kashmir Shaivism Abhinavagupta called vimarsa, which itself discloses a kind of pervasive panpsychism, as the material body of all existence. New Materialists like Karen Barad have written importantly if partially in this regard. I have looked with some care at this set of issues over many years in multiple conversations with the sensitive teachers of Kashmir Shaivism, our dear friends Michael Murphy, Sally Kempton (Swami Durgananda), and Michael Schumacher (Swami Chetanananda). Worth reading in this regard is the work of Loriliai Biernacki, The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and the New Materialism (2023), who in part sees Abhinavagupta as a kind of materialist mystic, in which the split between the purely material and the purely mystical, or matter and what matters, virtually disappears.
[5] Howard’s voice in these texts is drawn from our conversation and leavened with pieces of his writing, or phrasing, particularly from The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2016).
[6] See also Sections V.1–2.
[7] The particular phraseology appears in various guises in the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, but the basic notion is also central to multiple other heterodox theorists of evolution from the proto-evolutionary theories of Luria to the writings of James Mark Baldwin and especially Charles Sanders Peirce. See also Essay Three, Section 3.
[8] Valere means both to be strong and to be of value, to be of worth. It goes from Latin valere to Old French valor, which is connected to worth. A valorous knight is not just strong but represents value; he is saving the damsel. Then it goes to Middle English, and then to value. A violation of value arouses political will. Will is aroused by value. The knight accesses their valor because their valor is connected to their values. That root is related to the root of the word will. This is a willful Universe. The word will in the original Hebrew—ratzon—is an Eros word, which is drawn, among other sources, from the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs is an erotic expression of Reality that declares its insides are lined with love—in other words, Reality itself is Eros. The Song of Songs is understood by Akiba—the central figure in the transition from the Jerusalem Temple to the oral law—in one text as participating in the ontology of the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple and in another text as being a sufficient basis to guide the moral world if the Torah had never been given.
[9] Songs of Songs 1:2–4.
[10] Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1880).
[11] See Section 2.4 in Essay One.
[12] Turing, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.”
[13] See Chapter III.