Three Bucket Ontology

how to more precisely manage the Mysto

Just got back from a fun panel with Dr. Erik Davis (Techgnosis) Dr. Rick Doblin (MAPS), Dr. Bruce Damer (astrobiology/MINDS) and Dr. Manoj Doss (UT/Dell Med School) on the role of non-ordinary states in scientific innovation. I shared the Post-Conventional Metaphysics frame we discussed in recent posts here. Seemed to land well, but it was a high selection-bias crowd of trippers at the Texas Eclipse Festival ;)

Alright!

Finally have a minute to return back to our ongoing explication of a Post-Conventional Metaphysics and how to make sense of the non-sense that often presents in non-ordinary states.

Why? You might ask. Because we’re hurtling towards a Singularity of time, space, consciousness and information. (And we’re playing with all the rocket fuels to get us there at the same time).

Errors in calculating our trajectory could put us on the wrong planet entirely.

Biohacking, meditation, float tanks, neural implants, psychedelics, artificial intelligence, electronic music, non-conventional sexuality, augmented and virtual worlds—basically every “technique of ecstasy” is getting uncorked and sprayed around all over the place like that delightfully bent gas station scene in Zoolander.

Let’s hope it ends better for us than it did for them…

And here’s the other thing: there’s a statistically significant overlap between the folks playing with all of those techniques of ecstasy and the ones building the shit that’s gonna save us or doom us.

To wit: Sam Altman (founder, OpenAI) spoke right after I gave a talk at Burning Man. This was right before ChatGPT launched and catapulted him into the global spotlight—but he was blithely laying out two options for humanity—cyborg or midwife to something superior to us puny humans. And he was cool with that.

Elon Musk (the WSJ reports and he confirms via tweet) has been dipping into the K-hole for inspiration–a notoriously Tricksy Magic Mirror if ever there was one. Ketamine has a well known habit of seducing people into thinking they are at the center of a grand plot and a Master of the Universe. But for the richest man on earth (and soon to be, off it) that kind of confirmation bias could be near impossible to shake.

Google X engineers have been shooting the moon on 5Meo-DMT, obliterating their hyper-rationalist materialist worldviews, but (according to someone advising their leadership) slipping into nihilism when they can’t replace it with something more cohesive. Less Bodhisattvas, and more Aspy-Incels.

Sam Bankman Fried and a bunch of the Effectively Altruistic and Accelerating crowd veer towards ethical non-monogamy and polycules as their preferred mode of cohabiting, even as they calculate the future benefit to unborn trillions of futurehumans (and their bitcoin wallets)

And Zuck? Poor old Zuck’s square as fuck, it seems. But he does harbor Imperial Roman ambitions (hence the dumbass bowl cut and blowing billions on a legless Metaverse). Though he is dabbling a bit in hydrofoiling, so we’ve gotta give him that.

#marcelmarceauwouldgo

So, that’s a quick intro to why hammering out a Post-Conventional Metaphysics isn’t just a nerdy exercise in Silicon Scholasticism.

Many folks who are shaping our collective future are in dire need of better maps, and we all could do with some better navigation tools to not get lost in the Multiverse ourselves.

***

In the prior posts in this series, we left off outlining the basics of that Post Conventional OS:

Quick Recap:

First, crank your aperture wide open to conceive the inconceivable just in case it turns out to be true. UFOs, New World Orders, extinction events, civil wars, secret cabals, etc. All better to consider just in case one or more of ‘em turn out to be true.

#chooseyourillusion (#gnr4evr)

That’s the Pascal’s Wager part.

But then, you have to filter the hell out of all that flotsam and jetsam. Separate the kernels of wheat from all that Instagram/YouTube chaff, and only keep what’s most reasonable, plausible and supported by evidence.

“I was on drugs at the time” or “I guess I’ve been captured by a weaponized algorithm, and not really ‘doing my own research’ after all” cover an enormous amount of ground!

That’s the Ockham’s Razor bit.

Finally, we suggested that once you’ve done those two moves, your third leg of the triangle is to deploy Bayesian Probabilities to your ongoing meaning making.

So, rather than lunging for false certainty, stay provisional, and update your confidence as you learn more and test stuff.

As Vermont farmers love to quip, “hard sayin’ not knowin.’”

But that kind of provisional, agile, graceful updating of your priors as you go, is easier said than done.

So now let’s unpack that Bayesian Probability bit in some more detail.

To do that, it’s helpful to think of our Ontology–or the all encompassing worldview about the way Life the Universe and Everything works–into three buckets instead of just one.

And then we can play the game of moving ideas, experiences, and theories between those buckets, rather than overweighting them, or ignoring them altogether.

Typically, the yellow Bucket #1 on the left represents Consensus Reality. That’s all the stuff they taught us in grade school and Sunday school. We take it for granted as unquestioningly true…until we nibble on a laced Scooby Snack and realize “holy fuckballs, there’s more on heaven and earth than my philosophies after all!!!”

That’s where you need to add the green Bucket #2 to your ontology, to include all the far out shit you encounter while blissed out at a Vipassana retreat, dissolving into the void in a float tank, encountering angels and entities in your friendly neighborhood ketamine clinic, dancing your brains out to mindmeld psytrance, glimpsing divine tantric union in an extended zesty sesh, puking your guts out in a jungle on ayahuasca, or joyriding with any other technique of ecstasy you’ve got handy.

But (and this is the key distinction with the next bucket) no matter how wild, crazy or far-out what you see in Bucket #2 territory is, it doesn’t prompt you to quit your day job, leave your spouse, change your name and head for the hills.

(Apocalypse Now letter from the poor bastard who got there before Martin Sheen)

It happened. It blew your mind. But you kinda keep it up on the shelf, like a stash of Playboys you found in grandpa’s attic that one time. Only sneaking in when no one’s looking to have a peek when your curiosity tickles.

Now, for most of us, that’s as far as our Ontology needs to go. Consensus reality plus the weird/strange/farout that happens to us all from time to time.

But if we’re lucky, ballsy, crazy, or touched…

We might need the orange Bucket #3. That’s where we experience a structural break with all former realities. This is Neo in the Matrix realizing that his life as a computer programmer is an illusion and that he feels all funny in his tummy when he sees Trinity sporting that latex jumpsuit.

If C is now true (Zion and the machines), then A (agile scrums and a promotion) no longer matter.

A few examples:

If I found out that, beyond all shadow of a doubt. that Jeffrey Epstein was indeed a part of a global cabal of elites using black sex magick to rule the world…

I might no longer believe that voting in this next election mattered so much.

If I found out that in fact, UFO/UAPs were here an among us, and trying to either save or enslave us, well, that might impact my 401K savings plan.

If I concluded that we have less than a decade before the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current flip flops, inducing global famine and governmental collapse…

I might liquidate every stock I own and put it all in gold and guns. (despite what my friendly E-Trade advisor is recommending)

You get the idea.

Bucket #2 can hold the wildest craziest shit ever, provided it doesn’t prompt a schizoid break with Bucket #1 consensus realities.

I might have all sorts of whacky new ideas, experiences and beliefs rattling around inside my head, but to a video camera observer (or my family at Thanksgiving) no one’s has to be the wiser.

Unless you’re one of those godforsaken over-sharers on InstaTok. That would be on you though, and your mortal soul.

But Bucket #3 is entirely incompatible with Bucket #1. They’re not on speaking terms. If I hold Bucket #3 truths as real, then my behaviors will make no sense at all from the POV of Consensus Reality.

In fact, I will appear deluded or outright insane. Even, and especially as I am increasingly convinced that this new reality trumps all prior explanations of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Now that we’ve established what goes where in this three bucket model, let’s add the Bayesian Bit.

Because step one is to realize “oh, reality isn’t an either/or proposition! I shouldn’t just swap one bucket out for a new different bucket. That will lead to just as many distortions of reality as the old ones I’m trying to correct.

I actually need to sort and grade my experiences with more nuance, so lemme add buckets #2 and #3 to my process.

But key point: none of this is fixed!

If we’re to stay true to Bayes’ advice, we have to be able to update and adjust over time as we get better and better information.

So this is how we play the Three Bucket Ontology Game.

First, interrogate what’s in your Bucket #1–all the stuff you learned in grade school and Sunday school. And take out those socially defined “truths” that no longer serve you. Things like stodgy career advice…

or that ‘nice girls wait until marriage. or “Prozac, Ambien, Klonapin, alcohol, and tobacco are fine because they’re legal.”

And simply discard from Bucket #1 all those hand-me-down truths you conclude aren’t self evident after all.

Then, consider which things you’ve accumulated in Bucket #2 that aren’t just random chance or one-offs. Over time, you’ve actually come to trust them as repeatable and reliable.

For the best of those, you can start moving them over into Bucket #1 as part of your waking state worldview.

Could be something like “everytime I cut the heads off three chickens on a full moon, sprinkle corn meal on the ground and light a candle my greatest desire it comes true within a fortnight!”

or something more prosaic like “natural hot springs, mushrooms and good friends make for an epic weekend campout.”

or “when I have especially vivid dreams they often give me foresight into something that happens IRL.”

Every one of our own Bucket #2 assessments is gonna differ, based on our non-ordinary experiences and how often they happen to us. But in general, they lie outside socially defined cultural norms, and rational materialist descriptions of reality.

But if they start to seem less and less like random or mystical one-offs, and more and more like part of the fabric of our reality, we can take them down off that attic shelf, and start pinning them up on our bedroom walls.

#RIPFarrah

Finally, we’ve got those Bucket #3 Red Pill/structural break kinda realities. Those are the Whoppers, so we’ve gotta tread carefully. In general though, we repeat this same process.

As we empty out Bucket #1, we make space for the most repeatable nuggets from Bucket #2 to become a part of our waking-state worldview.

And as we glimpse Bucket #3 stuff more often, and add more information and experience to those tests, we can promote the least whacky of them to Bucket #2 status and start keeping them under increasingly close advisement.

This process reflects a really elegant integration of all three legs of the Post-Conventional Metaphysical OS.

Bucket #3 represents the place we hold all of our Pascal’s Wager inquiries. Far out, but worth keeping tabs on.

Bucket #1 represents the higher bar of Ockham’s Razor filtration. Only the most trustworthy stuff makes it here.

and Bucket #2 is the middle ground, the place we keep salient experiences until we can update them, Bayes style, with more evidence and repeatability.

Interestingly this maps 1:1 with Pythagoras and Plato and their notions of Geometric Proofs.

Bucket #1 represents Laws. What we conclude to be consistently true across all situations

Bucket #2 represents Postulates. Things we’ve taken time to establish as consistently plausible but not necessarily universally true. But since we’ve done the scratchwork, we don’t need to relitigate every time we use them.

Bucket #3 represents Theorems. Hypotheses. Hunches. Intuitions. Questions. Stuff that might seem persuasive and true, but need further scrutiny, evidence and noodling before we can take them for granted.

***

Hopefully a model like this helps us all treat non-ordinary experiences with a bit more rigor and nuance. And not go barking off the reservation the first time the Gates of Consensus Trance swing open wide.

As Plato famously said above the entrance to his Academy (which was itself steeped in the mystical Pythagorean and Eleusinian traditions before him)

“Let no one ignorant of Geometry enter here!”

Here’s to better math, fewer errors and more precise hedonic engineering.

Lord knows we need to sharpen our aim for the make-or-break moonshots ahead.