UPTM Prelude: On Bildungsroman's and The Cultural Operating System of The West
A brief personal background on the impetus to contribute to the discourse on meaning & Western culture
|| UPTM Table of Contents || Prelude | Part 1: 21st Century Paradigm | Part 2: Nature | Part 3: Man | Part 4: Bible | Part 5: Organic-Computational Theology | Part 6: Transcendental Ideals | Part 7: Re-Imagining Modernity | Full Research PDF
1. My Personal Bildungsroman
After graduating from Columbia University, I found myself working long hours in mergers & acquisitions investment banking. Like many of my peers, I had been drawn to the siren song of finance, with it’s promises of prestige and financial rewards. But one late night, as I stared bleary-eyed at yet another Excel spreadsheet, I had your typical existential realization: despite the outward markers of success, I wasn't fulfilled by my work. I began to question why so many talented people were dedicating their lives to moving money around rather than working on the harder, more meaningful problems facing humanity.
This concern crystallized when one of my close friends went through a mental health scare. Witnessing their struggle firsthand made the issues of meaninglessness and existential angst viscerally real to me. I saw how even those who seemed successful by conventional metrics could be deeply struggling beneath the surface. As I reached out to other friends, I discovered that this was not an isolated incident but a pervasive problem.
Seeking more purpose-driven work, I transitioned from New York’s Wall Street to Silicon Valley’s technology industry. However, I soon noticed another pattern - the overselling of incremental progress and techno-optimism and the underselling of authentic conversations on what real impact and progress looked like. Conversations with friends and colleagues often times revealed a sense of disillusionment with the modern incentives of the tech industry.
One silly but striking moment crystallized this for me. I was in a meeting presenting to the executives of my tech company, discussing our plans for a new strategic initiative. Meanwhile, in the background, a TV show about Genghis Khan and his court was playing in the living room. I was struck by the uncanny parallels between the power dynamics and interpersonal dramas unfolding in the historical reenactment and those playing out in our modern corporate setting. Far from being relics of a barbaric past, the "royal courts" of the 21st century are executive meetings and boardrooms, where influence is peddled and fates are decided.
This realization sparked a broader insight: for all our technological progress, human nature remains more constant than we often acknowledge and like to admit. We are still driven by the same fundamental desires, fears, and social instincts that animated our ancestors. In fact, our modern technologies can be seen as "force multipliers" for these deep-seated human traits, amplifying both our potential for good and our capacity for destruction. We are, in essence, what I’m endearingly calling “apes in iron man suits” - wielding immense power without necessarily having developed the wisdom to manage it responsibly.
At the same time, I began to see parallels between the structures of human organizations and the complex interplay of mind and body. Just as our individual thoughts, feelings, and actions emerge from the intricate coordination of our biological systems, so too do the behaviors of companies, governments, and societies arise from the interactions of their constituent parts. This connection felt powerful to me - if we could understand the deep principles that govern the flourishing of minds and bodies, perhaps we could apply those same insights to design institutions that better serve human needs.
These experiences and reflections prompted a period of introspection and a return to the philosophical foundations of Western civilization. I dusted off my copies of Plato and Aristotle from my undergraduate core curriculum, approaching them not as historical artifacts, but as vital resources for grappling with timeless questions of meaning and purpose. I picked up my interest in computational neuroscience that I engaged with as an undergraduate researcher, learning about the latest developments in the Bayesian Brain and the free energy principle. As I engaged with these texts late into the night and explored the latest developments in cognition, they came alive in a new way - I was no longer just passively absorbing information, but actively wrestling with the same existential issues that motivated these great historical thinkers.
Note: This is a summary of Call to Adventure: In Pursuit of Meaning in Modernity - check that piece out for a fuller genesis backstory! There will be overlap between these two essays but the focus here is to reiterate the backstory in the spirit of laying the foundation for our proposed integrated solution: The Unified Process Theory of Meaning.
2. Deeper Roots: On the Cracks Facing Western Civilization
When we look at Western society today, it is impossible not to notice the pervasiveness of mental health issues, loneliness, and a lack of deeper meaning and purpose. Depression rates have been steadily climbing for decades and rates of anxiety are at all time highs, especially among younger generations. Fewer people are participating in organized religion and civic institutions that traditionally provided community and existential grounding. Many report feeling socially isolated and existentially adrift. These trends were painfully visible in my own social circles. The disillusionment I observed in the tech industry was a microcosm of a broader crisis of meaning playing out across society.
At the same time, we face growing game-theoretic risks as a species. Technological developments are enabling us to manipulate matter and life in unprecedented ways, from nanotechnology to biotechnology to artificial intelligence. These tools have immense potential to benefit humanity, but also to cause catastrophic harm if misused, either intentionally or unintentionally. For the first time in history, we are gaining the power to literally destroy ourselves and our planetary environment if we are not extraordinarily cautious and wise in how we develop and deploy these technologies.
Globalization has created a complex web of interdependence that increases efficiency but reduces local resilience. Global supply chains enable a historically unprecedented exchange of goods and ideas that is responsible for lifting billions out of poverty. But the flip side is that a shock to one part of the system, whether a natural disaster, cyber attack, or political conflict, can rapidly cascade around the world and grind the gears of industry and commerce to a halt.
Simply put, our technological and economic progress seems to be outpacing our philosophical maturity. We are developing god-like powers to shape the world without a corresponding development in wisdom and virtue to steward those powers responsibly.
Wrestling with these challenges prompted me to undertake a deep study of the Western canon in search of civilizational insights. I wanted to critically examine the evolution of Western thought, from ancient Greek philosophy and mathematics, to the Judeo-Christian tradition, to the Enlightenment, to the modern era. By engaging with the greatest minds in history, I hoped to better diagnose the roots of our current predicament and imagine alternative paths forward.
What emerged from this study was a growing conviction that the core problem is not ultimately material, but conceptual - a crisis of meaning and an inadequate understanding of human nature, our environment, and our place in the cosmos. The rise of the scientific worldview has enabled us to manipulate the material world with incredible precision, but has also fragmented our conceptual frameworks and left us without a coherent, compelling vision of who we are and what we should be aiming at individually and collectively.
At the root, I came to believe, is a failure to appreciate the deep patterning of nature and how humanity fits into the larger unfolding of the universe. We have lost the sense of enchantment and inherent purposiveness that pervaded premodern worldviews, but have not yet developed a rigorous, empirically grounded understanding of meaning and mattering to replace it. The result is a growing sense of arbitrariness, alienation, and angst in modern life.
3. A Preliminary Solution: Introducing A Unified Process Theory of Meaning
As I grappled with these questions, I found myself returning again and again to the great works of philosophy. But now, rather than approaching them as historical artifacts or mandatory reading, I saw them as vital resources for navigating the challenges of meaning and purpose in the 21st century. The questions these thinkers were wrestling with came alive to me in a new way, as I recognized the same existential issues playing out in my own life and society.
Gradually, a new synthesis began to take shape in my mind - a unified process theory of meaning that integrates insights from Greek philosophy, mathematics, computational neuroscience, and the Judeo-Christian tradition. At a high level, this theory understands the world as a vast organic and creative process that is continuously unfolding new patterns of order and complexity. These patterns are not merely arbitrary, but deeply meaningful and purposive structures that emerge from the fundamental dynamics of the universe.
Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, provides the foundational insight that nature is imbued with inherent purposiveness, or telos. In recent times, Alfred North Whitehead reconciles Plato’s intuition with the latest scientific enterprise. Just as the acorn naturally grows into the oak tree which then seeds new acorns, realizing its essential form, so too do all things have a natural end state they are striving to actualize. This teleological view challenges the reductionistic materialism that pervades modern thought, revealing a cosmos pregnant with meaning and value.
Mathematics, namely the free energy principle, in turn, shows us that this purposive unfolding is deeply patterned in precise, compressible ways where ancient metaphysics can become actual physics from the latest statistical formulations of identity, Markov blankets. From the symmetries of physics to the fractals of biology and the beautiful simplicity of the free energy principle, we find nature expressing herself in stunningly beautiful and regular forms. This points to an underlying generative order or logos that gives rise to the manifest complexity of the universe. Furthermore, we are now in an intellectual position to merge mathematics and philosophy. Meaning, in this view, is about discerning and aligning ourselves with this deep patterning.
Computational neuroscience, particularly the Bayesian brain hypothesis, further illuminates the process by which we detect these meaningful patterns. Our brains, it turns out, are essentially prediction machines, continuously modeling regularities in our environment and using those models to anticipate the future. We experience the world as meaningful to the extent that we can successfully compress its complexity into reliable patterns and make sense of unfolding events. This suggests that the mind reflects the underlying structure of nature and that meaning is not some abstract property, but a function of how well we can understand and navigate the world.
Finally, the Judeo-Christian tradition provides a powerful vision of humanity's role in this unfolding process as we look to demonstrate the underlying rhyme & reason to the Biblical narrative. We are not passive observers, but active participants, endowed with the capacity for higher-order cognition and reasoning. Our purpose is to use these faculties to discern the deep structure of nature and align ourselves with its co-creative and dynamic unfolding. Humanity itself is a living and breathing organism, and we are the creatures through whom the logos becomes conscious of itself.
Even more fascinatingly, our thesis proposes that the underlying literary architecture of the Biblical works reflecting the cognitive architecture of our minds in an outstanding consilience, subsuming our scientific paradigm within a broader and more holistic truth-seeking narrative across both science & religion. More pragmatically, it could offer a potential solution to our AI alignment problem by demonstrating our efforts are, in a sense, modern idolatry, backed empirically by the latest understanding of the Brain and Scripture itself.
Putting these pieces together, which I’ve done in the following Substack posts and research paper and am calling a Unified Process Theory of Meaning, yields a potentially compelling new foundation - or at the very least a starting point to further build upon - for meaning and mattering in the 21st century, rooting our Western civilization in a more integrated foundation by revisiting ancient truths in a modern light.
The process theory reveals the universe as a magnificent self-organizing system pregnant with purpose and potential. As conscious beings embedded in this larger process of cosmic unfolding, our role is to discover its underlying purpose and contribute creatively to its ongoing evolution. We find meaning by resonating with the deep patterning of nature and adding new layers of beauty, order, and complexity to the broader symphony.
Crucially, this view has the potential to address many of the existential challenges facing individuals and society. By situating our struggles and strivings in a cosmological context, it provides a renewed sense of participating in something immensely meaningful and worthwhile. Angst and alienation can give way to a sense of adventure and creative unfolding, as we use our higher faculties to discern and extend the generative patterns of nature.
On a personal level, engaging with these ideas has cultivated a renewed sense of enchantment and meaning in my own life. Intellectually, the process theory provides a rigorous, empirically grounded framework for making sense of existence and our place in the unfolding cosmos. It offers a way to reconcile the powerful insights of science with the enduring wisdom of philosophy and religion, revealing a nature that is both rationally intelligible and inherently meaningful.
At a civilizational level, the process theory offers a framework for wisely stewarding the powerful technologies we are developing. By understanding ourselves as part of a larger evolutionary process, we can strive to align our technological capacities with the deep structure of nature, ensuring that our growing powers are used in service of life's continued flourishing. The process perspective suggests that the ultimate purpose of our scientific and technological progress is not mere mastery over nature, but rather a deeper understanding and harmonization with its intrinsic purposiveness.
Experientially, this understanding has transformed my lived experience in subtle but meaningful ways. The simplest moments - a conversation with a friend, a walk in nature, tackling an ambitious personal goal like completing an Ironman - feel imbued with a new depth and significance, as I recognize them as part of a vast, purposive process of complexification. Cultivating an awareness of this deep patterning, and striving to align myself with its dynamics, has become a notable source of motivation for me personally.
4. Pragmatic Civilizational Import, Not Simply Bedtime Intellectual Musings
While I’ve attempted to address my own relationship to meaning, this diagnosis suggests a tantalizing possibility: what if we could design our organizational systems to be optimally aligned with the deep structures of the mind and the principles of complexity theory? Just as the human brain is a marvel of self-organizing complexity, with billions of neurons cooperating to give rise to the emergent phenomena of consciousness and intelligence, could we architect our institutions to harness the same generative dynamics?
Imagine businesses, governments, and social initiatives that were explicitly modeled on the latest insights from neuroscience, complex systems theory, and evolutionary biology. These organizations would be designed to cultivate the conditions for individual flourishing and collective intelligence. They would be adaptive, resilient, and self-optimizing, with feedback loops and error-correction mechanisms analogous to those found in living systems.
Such a vision may sound far-fetched and is most definitely idealistic, but there are already pioneering efforts underway to apply these principles. As our understanding of complex systems matures, and as our computing power and data-gathering capabilities grow, the potential for "bio-inspired" institutions that are optimally tuned for human flourishing will only increase.
Of course, realizing this potential will require a massive effort of intellectual synthesis and practical experimentation. We will need to integrate insights across disciplines, from the natural sciences to the humanities, and develop new methodologies for translating abstract principles into concrete institutional designs. We will need to be humble in the face of complexity, and embrace a spirit of iterative learning and adaptation.
But if we can rise to this challenge, the payoffs could be immense. By aligning our societal systems with the deep structures of life and mind, we may be able to unlock new frontiers of human creativity, cooperation, and meaning-making. We may be able to create a world in which our technologies and institutions are not just efficient but also wise, not just powerful but also humane.
This is the pragmatic animating vision behind the theory - a vision of civilizational harmony grounded in a rigorous understanding of the deep patterns of nature. By embracing this vision, and doing the hard work of translating it into practice, we can take a crucial step towards creating a future worthy of our highest aspirations.
5. Next Steps: Launching Publicly!
This is not to say that this theory eliminates all existential difficulties or provides a final, fixed answer to life's deepest questions. Reality remains a profound mystery, and grappling with the challenges of existence will always be an essential part of the human journey. But by providing a starting framework for understanding our struggles and strivings as part of a beautiful, unfolding process, the theory offers a new basis for hope, resilience, and creative engagement with life.
The process theory of meaning, as outlined in the following posts and research paper, represents a preliminary attempt to articulate a framework for meaning and matter adequate to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. By integrating insights from the natural sciences, computational neuroscience, philosophy, theology and the lived experience of embodied practice, it seeks to provide a coherent vision of human flourishing grounded in the deep patterns of nature.
Much work remains to be done to refine and apply this framework, such as:
Refining Thesis: First, I’m seeking to engage in deep dialogue with leading scholars and practitioners across relevant domains, from complexity science and neuroscience to philosophy and the humanities. Through a series of structured conversations and collaborations, I’m looking to stress-test the core thesis, identify areas for refinement and elaboration, and build a network of intellectual partners who can contribute to its ongoing development. Please feel free to reach out or expect a DM if you are working on something similar!
GTM & Media Production: Second, I’m looking to translate the key ideas of the process theory into compelling multimedia content for a broader public audience. This includes creating short video essays and articles that introduce the core concepts in an accessible and engaging way, and invite viewers to reflect on their implications for their own lives and for society at large. By leveraging the power of digital media, we can help spread these ideas far beyond the confines of academia and inspire a wider conversation about the future of meaning.
Community Engagement & Building: Third, I’m looking to lay the groundwork for a vibrant community of practice. This could involve participating in and hosting online and offline events, facilitating discussion groups and working circles, and creating resources and platforms for people to connect, collaborate, and explore the ideas in their own contexts. By fostering a sense of shared purpose and providing opportunities for experiential learning, we can move from abstract understanding to embodied application.
Partnerships: Finally, I’m seeking to build partnerships with organizations and initiatives that are already working to apply similar principles in their respective domains. From innovative companies and social enterprises to research institutes and policy initiatives, there is a growing ecosystem of efforts to harness the power of complex systems for human flourishing. By identifying synergies and forging alliances, we can amplify our collective impact and accelerate the translation of ideas into practice.
Note that I will also be publishing a follow-up series called “Ontology & Technology” that goes deeper into the historical & philosophical foundations of technology and exploring recent trends of transhumanism and virtual reality - stay tuned!
Ultimately, the goal of this work is not just to develop a compelling intellectual framework, but to catalyze a cultural shift towards a more integrative, purposeful, and life-affirming worldview. By engaging hearts and minds across diverse contexts, and providing people with the conceptual tools and experiential practices to create meaning in their own lives, we can help sow the seeds of a civilizational renaissance.
6. Concluding Thoughts
In a world that can often feel fragmented and adrift, the hope is that this preliminary theory offers a humble starting point - a new compass for navigating the complexities of the 21st century. By illuminating the deep structures of meaning that pervade the natural world and our own being, it invites us to participate more consciously and creatively in the grand adventure of life. I believe this perspective has the potential to transform not only individual lives but also our collective institutions and cultural narratives. It is a vision worth pursuing with the passion and rigor we can muster.
I believe it represents a vital step in our ongoing quest to understand our place in the cosmos and create a future worthy of our highest aspirations. By embracing the adventure of existence, and striving to align ourselves with the deep patterns of meaning and value woven into nature, we can help ensure that the story of humanity is one of continued growth, discovery, and flourishing.
- Tomer Solomon
Next Section: UPTM #1 | A Paradigm for the 21st Century: Introducing A Unified Process Theory of Meaning
I agree human nature is fairly constant, but it's interesting to consider how testosterone levels are falling in males. This should have a pretty big effect on aggressiveness, risk taking, and perhaps even the nature and solidity of dominance hierarchies. History can act as a guide, but it rarely maps on perfectly. The emergence of technological progress means history is no longer as relevant as it used to be.
I assume you are familiar with Teilhard de Chardin?