September 2, 2026: Salus Forum

Howard

I’m not saying it’s right. It’s not what’s happening.

Jenny

I know. It’s not right, but it is the reality. That’s the world we live in.

Mitch

Fascinating discussion. I really appreciate what Howard’s saying about the politics. I would just say that in my journey right now, I’m understanding the politics of the mind and how politics are going to go back and forth no matter what. We are in a period of disruption, and it’s big disruption. I get it. It is probably a hard turnaround. I guess the question I’m asking, do we continue in the same disruption, order, disorder, order, disorder, rather than a transformative order? And how do we get to transformation? And that would be where my heart would really be.

And Bill B, you brought in Jonah. He’s one of my favorite figures residing in the belly of the whale and thinking about what that means in that liminal space. And if people could go to that liminal space and endure the vicissitudes of the back and forth and all the swirling things that are happening, I think there’d be less stampedes. I think there’d be less thoughtless action to disrupt what people think is the right thing to disrupt and stop the cycling back and forth. And I guess it comes down to not being enough people in the belly of the whale, in the liminal space, holding tension in the liminal space, holding paradox as something that they can be comfortable with, holding negative capability as something we can hold disparate ends of a political spectrum in advance without having to make a decision and holding the tension and just living the tension in that liminal space. It doesn’t sound like an answer, but I think it transforms the people that come out the other side of that, that now make different decisions.

Here’s my concern about AI. AI is a wonderful tool. And AIs hold the risk of talking to themselves and one another, creating an intersubjective reality that we know nothing about.  That scares me a little bit. But I think that’s theoretical. AI just speeds up the batting back and forth of how we make munitions, how we make drugs, how we do business, how we make more money, how we talk to each other, how we do things is going to be done faster and better. And that’s not necessarily good because they’re already not in sync with each other. There are factions and the factions are going to be more armed with stuff to combat each other. And it’s just going to set in place that mind that is embattled back and forth. And I think that’s the thing I’m most afraid of.

It’s going to become more intense and more dogmatic and less able to have people enter that liminal space and hold the tension. I would just leave that as my conclusion.

Bill G

I think we are stuck in the problem of individuals looking at AI. We each have a perspective about AI, but we don’t have any formulation for how to deal with AI, neither the positive nor the negative. We’re really stuck in the middle. And we see ourselves that way, but we don’t have any formulation of how to deal with the problem.