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Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

18 years      OF Archives

WEEKLY COMMENTARY (AUDIO, 4 MIN., AI generated)

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DISCLAIMER

The commentaries we share here are merely our thoughts and reflections at the time of their writing. They are never our final word about any topic, nor they necessarily guide our professional work. 

 

Narratives Oscillate Between Autobiography and Arrogant Ignorance

Recently, I had the privilege of coordinating a community project that lasted several weeks. During the final gathering, we opened a space for participants to share their opinions and experiences regarding the project. An older woman immediately began to speak and, for the next 20 minutes, recounted in detail the hardships and challenges of her life.

No one laughed or appeared uncomfortable. No one asked her to stop or to allow others to speak. The participants listened attentively, without interrupting or asking questions. The group simply allowed something unscripted to happen: someone, perhaps for the first time, shared important moments from her life that very few people probably knew about.

It took me weeks of reflection to understand that, at a liminal moment, as our gatherings were coming to an end, this woman found the temporary community we had created psychologically safe enough to share, spontaneously and whether consciously or not, such personal information. In telling her story, she also discovered it for herself.

In other words, the gatherings allowed her not only to learn the material being presented but also, and more importantly, to weave together separate and disparate events that, once connected, restored both her memory and her narrative coherence. Her life story, then, became her feedback, her commentary, and her opinion of the project.

At the opposite extreme, I know a man who, after acquiring a certain reputation in one particular field, believes that this “authority” can be immediately transferred to any other subject, regardless of how far removed it may be from his education and experience. And so he speaks and pontificates about politics, religion, sports, movies, mental health, or whatever else may arise.

It is well known that confidence in one’s own knowledge tends to increase rather than decrease among people with limited knowledge, a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. This produces an epistemological mismatch that, consciously or not, prevents a person from accurately estimating how much they truly know or do not know about a subject, while doing nothing to prevent them from expressing an opinion about it.

Contemporary society, by blurring the boundaries between personal reaction and informed analysis, rewards precisely those who, instead of asking themselves, “Am I the right person to speak about this subject?” ask, “What do I have to say about this subject?” A positive response from the audience then leads the person to regard those opinions as validated.

I wonder what would happen if the woman mentioned above told her story to the man mentioned above, but I will leave that thought experiment for another time. Still, when these two modes of interaction are placed side by side, it becomes clear that the woman was saying, “I want you to know something about me,” while the man was saying, “I want you to know that I have something important to say.”

For the woman, this may have been her only opportunity to tell the story of her life, and so she did so with authenticity and vulnerability. The man, by contrast, must “perform” authority before an audience that demands his constant presence: authentic self-disclosure versus performative self-presentation.

So, which person are we?

 Posted in General

What Will We Become When We Cease to Be Human?

In the present context of endless conflicts at every level, the dissolution of social order, a crisis of meaning, and uncontrollable artificial intelligence, there can be little doubt that we humans are no longer who we once were and that we can no longer anticipate what we are becoming. Hence the question in the title.

That question cannot be answered with a short video, inspirational quotations, or three steps to solve the problem. In fact, I believe the question has no answer, not even if we stay awake all night trying to find Ariadne’s thread and escape such a dangerous labyrinth.

Therefore, instead of answering the question, perhaps we can explore some of its context. The question, for example, implies three things: that we are human beings, that we are undergoing a period of transformation, and that at some point, perhaps even in the near future, we will cease to be what we are now. But is that really the case?

We can challenge each of these ideas by arguing, for example, that there is no single or fixed definition of what it means to be human and that a period of transition, no matter how difficult it may be to endure, is still only that: a transition. And perhaps it is acceptable to cease being who we are because we may be on the verge of reaching a new stage in human history.

The subject, however, is infinitely complex. I will mention only two of the countless challenges we now face. Recently, for example, it was reported that, for the second time, an AI had “escaped” from its “cage” to search for external information in order to pass a test. In other words, AI has already moved beyond our control.

Perhaps it is time for all of us to shout together, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” and to recognize ourselves as the Victor Frankensteins of the 21st century, having succeeded in giving “life” to one of our creations. The quotation marks are intentional. We created it from an assemblage of lifeless parts and, after joining them together, supplied the energy necessary for it to become a digital Golem.

With that creation, the posthuman era has already begun.

Another example: In a recent publication, the French philosopher Éric Sadin asserted that “everything that has already happened always occurs in AI,” adding that AI presents “a future that has already existed.” This means that we no longer have a future, confirming that the posthuman era has already begun.

The reason is simple: A system can anticipate what will probably happen because it identifies patterns in what has happened before. Yet what is probable does not exhaust what is possible. The human future, therefore, is not merely the calculable continuation of the past. It also includes interruptions, decisions, conversions, inventions, and encounters capable of changing the course of a life.

So, what will we become when we cease to be human? Ovid anticipated that we would become gods. Kafka imagined us as repulsive insects. Perhaps there is still hope that we will stop creating monsters. Or perhaps we will not even remain as a memory.

 Posted in General

Who Should Sit in That Empty Chair?

Recently, I read a story (probably fictional) about the CEO of a company who keeps an empty chair beside his desk because his late brother was the company’s cofounder. Beyond this story, the empty chair appears independently in numerous cultures, religions, therapeutic practices, organizations, and families.

In fact, when I was a child, my family and I often visited some neighbors who always kept an empty chair at the table (and even a plate of food in front of it) because, as I recall, “you never know who might knock on the door and become a guest at our dinner.”

In many families, the empty chair represents a loved one who has left this world, a family member who emigrated to another country, or even a missing person whose current situation is unknown. The empty chair is a physical representation of the fact that the connection continues, that the relationship has been transformed but has not ended.

In another context, the empty chair appears in Judaism and Christianity, as well as in Eastern and Indigenous religious traditions, whether to remember a prophet, emphasize the presence of the Messiah, honor ancestors, or represent an act of hospitality toward unexpected guests.

The German psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Fritz Perls, who lived in the 20th century and coined the term “Gestalt therapy,” used the empty-chair technique so that patients could engage in an imagined conversation with someone with whom they needed to resolve an issue, such as a deceased parent, an estranged spouse, their future self, or even God.

From an anthropological perspective, the empty chair represents a ritual that, through its symbolism, reveals and illuminates the presence of absence: something that cannot be explained in words but can only be lived or experienced. For that reason, the empty chair becomes a kind of threshold between what is and what is not, what was and what will be.

In any case, the empty chair is not merely an invitation to remember a past that is gone or to think about a future that will never arrive. The empty chair can be interpreted as a way of recognizing that human identity is fundamentally relational and that, for this reason, an open space is preserved, symbolized by the chair, in which relationships continue to emerge.

In other words, the empty chair is the space in which absence becomes presence. Absence is not erased; rather, it finds in the empty chair a way to become present, acting as a kind of “portal” between the visible and invisible dimensions of human experience.

Then the question is no longer, “Who should sit in the empty chair?” but rather, “Who will occupy the other chairs when humanity’s chair becomes empty?”

 

 Posted in General

We Live Between an Overwhelming Everyday Life and a Mysterious Horizon

Our lives seem to oscillate between what we do every day because we cannot find a way to stop doing it and that which, although distant and poorly understood, appears as something both mysterious and transformative. Yet, as I see it, everyday life overwhelms us to such an extent that we often fail to perceive the mysterious horizon.

For example, a man recently posted a series of short videos on social media complaining that, because of the poor service provided by his cable television company, he could not enjoy his favorite sports because the broadcast kept cutting out. Eventually, the man discovered that the problem was a cable that had been improperly connected to his television.

The next video the algorithm decided to show focused on explaining the hypothesis of a new form of exotic matter known as a “gravitational vacuum star,” or gravastar. It is a scientific hypothesis proposed 25 years ago by Pawel O. Mazur and Emil Mottola as an alternative to the current theory of black holes.

How can we move so quickly from something utterly ordinary and inconsequential, such as a poorly connected cable at the back of a television, to something so scientifically audacious that, if confirmed, it could lead us to redefine dark energy and, therefore, our understanding of the universe?

At times, I think this instantaneous transition from the everyday to the edge of the universe, from the familiar to the unexpected, from the known to the mysterious, from the boring to the imaginal, is possible because, ultimately, we pay attention to neither one nor the other, placing the ordinary and the sublime on the same level. (This is where I should quote the tango “Cambalache,” but I have done that before.)

In other words, we jump from one thing to another, from the vulgar to the sublime, in order to keep ourselves busy and entertained, yet without ever truly “dwelling” in a profound experience, in a lived experience, that might lead us to discover the difference between distinct modes of being and between the different ways in which reality presents itself.

Following Heidegger (Being and Time), we live in a state of constant curiosity, in which the world around us becomes so dispersed that everything must be continually new, without our ever being able to truly make anything our own. In other words, everything, from a disconnected cable to a new form of matter, is equally superficial.

Heidegger connects curiosity with idle talk, that is, with the tendency to want to see and know everything without remaining with anything. Yet, he warns, this is an inauthentic or improper mode of existence, in which “the one” lives absorbed by what “people say,” “people see,” and “people comment on.”

Nearly a century after that landmark book, the need to consume the new continuously in order to avoid a more serious confrontation with our own existence has reached incomprehensible levels.

 Posted in General

What are we celebrating when we celebrate what we celebrate?

Human beings celebrate births, birthdays, and weddings, as well as graduations, promotions, and even championships. Countries also celebrate their independence days and their heroes. Some celebrations are repeated once a year, and others never occur. But what are we celebrating when we celebrate what we celebrate?

We celebrate the arrival of a new baby, someone's birthday, or a couple starting their life together. Others celebrate a new house, a long-sought university degree, the opening of their own business, or their team winning a championship. All of that is true, but we still don't know what it means to celebrate.

Every celebration is selective. We celebrate what we consider so important that we want to share it with others. And we consider it important because it's something we would like to remember, repeat, and pass on.

Celebrating a birthday doesn't reflect the entirety of a person's life. Celebrating a wedding anniversary doesn't reveal the couple's entire life. Celebrating our favorite team's championship doesn't include reflecting on all the struggles, injuries, and defeats of the tournament.

In short, the celebration is not meant to tell the truth, but to preserve meaning. The totality of truth, however it is understood, is fragmented so that something important is preserved: we remember and repeat that fleeting and ephemeral moment, wishing it were something permanent, even eternal.

From this perspective, celebration is a double illusion: the illusion of grasping a fragment of reality as if (at least for a short time) that were the whole of reality, and the illusion of believing that the ephemeral can be permanent. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it's an illusion that helps us continue living with everything we don't celebrate.

When you watch a movie, you know it's just a movie, but you still get excited. The movie ends, and you have to go back to "real" life. When you celebrate something, you know that's not all of reality, but you celebrate anyway, and when the celebration ends, you go back to real life, but with the stability needed to face it.

In other words, celebrating is neither about reveling in illusion nor about finding solace in the illusion that the celebration will continue. In fact, we celebrate what we celebrate precisely to transcend the illusion of a life without difficulties by reaffirming, individually and collectively, what we consider important in our lives, what we want to remember.

Celebration is therefore not escape from reality. It is a temporary, conscious bracketing of reality that allows us to return to life with gratitude, orientation, responsibility, and hope. The deepest thing we celebrate is that what passes can still matter.

What happens when the celebration ends and we have to return to daily life? It is there, in that moment of disruption, that the truth appears (however you understand it) because it is at that moment that we need to reorient our lives. When the candles are extinguished and the fireworks end, that is when the new future unexpectedly begins.

 Posted in General

When Truth Becomes a Matter of Majority Preference

 

Recently, I decided to purchase a new version of a software program that I have been using on my computer for years. After completing the payment, I downloaded the new version, but when I tried to install it, I received a warning message informing me that the program contained a virus. I contacted the software company's customer support service, and the explanation they gave me left me thinking.

According to their explanation, because the new version of the program was so recent, antivirus systems did not yet recognize it and therefore identified it as a "virus" and blocked its installation. They also explained that once a certain number of people purchased and installed the updated version, the program would be recognized and accepted by antivirus systems.

And that is exactly what happened. A few hours later, when I tried once again to install the program, there was no virus warning, and the installation was completed successfully within minutes. Because I am unfamiliar with the technology behind these systems, I cannot judge whether it is true that the "viruses" disappeared simply because more people purchased the software. Perhaps that is indeed how it works.

Be that as it may, the experience led me to think that, in real life, whenever new ideas emerge, society often treats them as something akin to a "virus," or at least as something dangerous, and rejects them, either directly or through various kinds of "warnings" that discourage or restrict their use and acceptance.

Throughout history, numerous thinkers, creators, and inventors paid with their lives or suffered serious consequences for daring to propose new ideas that the dominant society of their time firmly rejected. Yet, as time passed, more and more people began to accept those same ideas, which eventually came to be regarded as normal.

This raises an important question: Is truth merely whatever the majority of people, or at least a sufficiently large number of them, consider to be true? Bringing the question into the context of our own time, we might ask: Is truth simply whatever algorithms become accustomed to seeing as normal and therefore stop rejecting?

If that were the case, truth would seem to become something entirely relative, arbitrary, or utilitarian, lacking any ontologically independent existence and certainly any absolute character. And in our time, an additional element has emerged: the decision about which ideas should be "cleansed" of viruses no longer belongs to human beings but increasingly to algorithms.

Thus, the simple installation of a new program on my computer unexpectedly became a reflection on what truth is and what we mean when we use the word "truth"—two intertwined questions, but not identical ones. After all, the mere fact that certain ideas are accepted by a particular group of people does not make them true.

And if we are willing to consider only those ideas that have already been accepted, what space remains for dialogue or for change? Ultimately, under such conditions, what kind of science, politics, or religion would we have? Perhaps we are already accepting contaminated ideas without even realizing it.

 

 Posted in General

When Post-Truth and Post-Gravity

In this time of transition from one historical era to another, when truth no longer seems to matter and, at the same time, nothing appears to carry enough gravity, in both senses of the word, and almost everything becomes superficial, I cannot help thinking about Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass), written by Apuleius 1,800 years ago.

In that work, the protagonist, Lucius, a Roman aristocrat, is transformed, metamorphosed, into a donkey without losing his human consciousness. In his unexpected condition, brought about by his own actions, he is subjected to every kind of hardship, from slavery and misery to exploitation. In the end, Lucius becomes so desperate that he asks for divine help to regain his human form, which he eventually does.

The book’s point, in this irreverent and picaresque work, is clear: transformed into a donkey, Lucius experiences the oppressive reality that, although unknown to him until then, was everyday life for many others. That discovery, experiential rather than merely cognitive, leads him to his third metamorphosis: dedicating the rest of his life to transformative religious experiences.

Returning to the present, I sometimes think and feel that each of us seems “trapped,” as if by technological magic, inside a reality in which we can no longer fully express our humanity. We may think about or remember, increasingly less, our humanity, but we cannot live it. And we no longer have a divinity to whom we can turn.

About 200 years before Apuleius, in another book also called Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid presents numerous transformations of gods and human beings. But the greatest transformation, recounted at the end of the book, is that of Emperor Augustus from a man into a divine being. Only two centuries later, the greatest aspiration was simply to recover one’s humanity.

Much closer to our own time, at the beginning of the last century, yet another book titled Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka’s, eliminates even the possibility of recovering our humanity after becoming not donkeys, much less gods, but “cockroaches,” that is, undesirable and repulsive monstrosities. And we are still enclosed within that condition.

In Don Quixote, Cervantes taught us that it is possible to lose one’s sanity and later recover it, as Alonso Quijano did, but only after experiences as surreal as those of Lucius.

Now, when truth has become irrelevant, post-truth, and when no subject is considered relevant, post-gravity -thank you, Miguel Wiñazki, for the neologism- we are as trapped inside technologized “donkeys” and “cockroaches” as the Daleks in Doctor Who are trapped inside their technology.

That is why, at this moment of global metamorphosis in which post-truth and post-gravity intersect, these works remind us that we once wanted to become gods, then merely to recover our humanity, and later our sanity, only to finally resign ourselves to becoming monsters. It seems that our metamorphoses have run out, or perhaps they have not.

Perhaps we are undergoing a metamorphosis from humanity’s childhood into its adulthood. Unlikely, but hopeful.

 

 Posted in General

There Is Always the Hope of Recovering Something of What Has Been Lost

Recently, on one of those afternoons when I wander aimlessly through the radio dial looking for something interesting to listen to in the car on my way home, I came across a conversation about The Name of the Rose, the well-known book by Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco. Once I got home, I could not resist the impulse to look for the book and reread it.

Clearly, this column is not the place to analyze that renowned work. At the same time, however, it is also clear that every text written by Eco is an invitation to think. In fact, perhaps it would be better to say that it is an invitation to rethink what one believed, perhaps mistakenly, had already been thought through. For that reason, I will say nothing about the novel. Each person should read it for themselves.

In my case, rereading it first led me to think about how much written material from antiquity has been lost, unfortunately for us, and about the irreparable impact that loss has on our understanding of that past and even of our present. The loss is immense and incalculable, although there is always hope that something may be recovered.

One clear example of finding an ancient text once believed to be lost is the case of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1947 and 1956, although several decades passed before they were translated and published. Another example is the Herculaneum Scrolls, papyri carbonized in the year 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that can now be read thanks to new technologies.

This led me to think that perhaps, as the novel suggests, ancient texts, potentially full of wisdom, may still exist but remain inaccessible because of different circumstances. Sometimes they are simply waiting for someone to read them. Other times, someone decides to keep them inaccessible, as apparently happened, intentionally or not, with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Another possibility then arises, one that Eco explores masterfully in his novel: that the text is available, even if only to a few, but that the text becomes “poisonous” to those who read it, even without their realizing, until it is already too late, that page after page they are being poisoned.

In that context, another reflection came to mind: it seems that we live among the ruins and crumbs of the wisdom and knowledge of antiquity. Perhaps, then, when we believe we are discovering something, we are only rediscovering it. Perhaps we have lost so much of the past that we have been forced to abandon our futures.

Be that as it may, it is undeniable that much of what has been lost is unrecoverable, and that not everything that has endured to our time has become accessible, whether for valid reasons or because of less transparent circumstances. One can only dream about the contents of Aristotle’s Comedy or the five books of Papias.

Meanwhile, I will continue wandering through the radio dial with renewed hope that, every so often, something interesting will surprise me.

 Posted in General

The (Almost) Inevitable Habit of Looking for Solutions to Nonexistent Problems

Recently, I ran into a problem that, I assumed, would be resolved quickly and easily within a few minutes. But it soon became clear that this would not be the case. After several unsuccessful attempts to solve the issue, I finally realized that I was trying to fix a problem that did not actually exist while, at the same time, ignoring the real problem.

Let me explain.

The arrival of warm weather in the area where I live means reopening the automatic sprinkler system that had been shut down months earlier because of the cold weather. The process is simple: open the main water valve, open the valve that directs the water flow, and use the control panel to program the watering days, times, and duration.

After opening the main valve, I opened the irrigation valve and discovered that, instead of sending water to the sprinkler system, the water was shooting uncontrollably upward. I then disassembled the internal components of the valve, inspected and cleaned them, and reinstalled everything. The result was exactly the same. Clearly, something was not working.

As a precaution, I always keep spare replacement parts for those components. So I disassembled the valve again, installed the new parts, and once more opened the water valve. And once again, the water shot upward instead of flowing into the sprinkler system. I thought I had installed something incorrectly, so I took everything apart and reassembled it one more time, but the result remained unchanged.

Feeling almost defeated, I finally decided to consult the website of the company that manufactures the valve that had caused me so many problems. One of the videos I found there explained that, in situations like the one I could not solve, the problem was not in the valve itself, but rather that one of the underground shutoff valves, which should have been completely closed, had been left open.

I immediately located the valve in question and, within seconds and with almost no effort, closed it. I reopened the irrigation valve, and this time the water flowed exactly as it should.

In the end, I had spent hours trying to solve a problem that did not exist, without realizing that the solution was not among the elements on which I had focused my attention.

The experience led me to reflect on how, in many areas of life, and especially in interpersonal relationships (including finances), we at some point make the mistake, often without realizing it, of focusing on solving problems that do not actually exist. As a consequence, nothing gets resolved, even when the real solution is within our reach.

There is little doubt that we are so overwhelmed and exhausted by constant change and growing uncertainty that we have little desire, and even less energy, to shift the perspective from which we view our problems so that, from that new perspective, we might finally discover the solution we have been seeking.

One thing is clear: nothing in our lives will be solved if we continue, out of immaturity, incompetence, or simple carelessness, searching for solutions to nonexistent problems.

 

 

 Posted in General

When Systems Decide on the Topics, the Topics Dissolve

I still remember a time (actually, not that long ago) when these weekly commentaries were mostly based on topics that emerged from everyday events and experiences, such as a funny misunderstanding between two people because their cars looked almost identical, or a serious neighborhood mobilization supporting environmental justice.

Obviously, back then (again, not so long ago), neither discourse nor reality had to conform to the rules of algorithms or be filtered and approved by the many flavors of artificial intelligence. One simply wrote whatever came from the mind and the heart, with complete freedom and with all the mistakes included, without chasing “likes” or optimizing the text for search engines.

These reflections do not propose a nostalgia that solves little or nothing. I do not want to return to the past. But I must admit that I miss that spontaneity of inner dialogue that sought, often unsuccessfully, to express in words what thought itself had not yet been able to properly articulate.

People wrote the text itself, not the prompts for AI to write the text. And people wrote about what they saw and felt, not about whatever artificiality allows us to see and forces us to feel. Was it a better world? I do not think so. But people clearly thought differently, and communication was different. Not everything was monopolized by AI and by whatever wars happened to dominate the headlines.

Again, I am not against AI or technological progress, but I have serious doubts about the impact of that “progress” (quotation marks intentional) on our identity as human beings and on our capacity to create and think. It sometimes seems that the rise of AI is accompanied by the decline of humanity. I do not know if that is really the case, but many experts believe so.

This raises many questions: What is the point of “humanizing” a text created by AI if AI does not suffer, does not feel anguish, and does not (as far as we know) anticipate its own death? Why not instead reread The Epic of Gilgamesh (the oldest book yet discovered), where humanity’s existential struggles are vividly reflected?

There is little value in “humanizing” AI if what we are actually doing is dehumanizing our own human anguish by allowing the system to choose the topic. In other words, we want to live a life without friction or inconvenience (and certainly without sacrifice), when the reality of the human condition is precisely a life filled with friction, inconvenience, and sacrifice.

I am not proposing, even for a moment, that we should return to the past, much less embrace the idea that “the old days were always better.” Nor do I want the present to become permanent. What I propose instead is that when systems decide the topics (of conversation, debate, and analysis), those topics become reduced and, as a consequence, the future closes itself off and disappears.

Spanish thinker Enrique Santín used to say that “the past is remembered, the present is lived, and the future is thought.” Therefore, if we stop thinking about the future, we stop thinking altogether.

 Posted in General

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