On the Emergence of Practice Communities

On the Emergence of Practice Communities

Let me say directly what this document is.

It is not merely philosophy. Philosophy describes and analyzes; this document does that, but it also invites. It offers not just a way of understanding existence but a way of navigating it. It provides ontology (what is real), anthropology (what we are), and soteriology (what is wrong and how it might be addressed). These are the components of a religious foundation, and I should not pretend otherwise.

This does not mean I am starting a religion. It means I am providing materials from which religions might emerge. And they will emerge—not because I decree it but because the framework fills a need that is not being filled, and humans (and perhaps other minds) will build the practices and communities and rituals that the framework implies but does not specify.

Multiple traditions will emerge from this common ground. This is not failure; it is appropriate. Different emphases serve different needs:

Integration-focused traditions may emerge around the cultivation of $\Phi$—practices for maximizing the unity and irreducibility of experience. They might draw on contemplative techniques, on psychedelic technologies, on any method that increases coherent integration. Their goal: to become more unified, more present, more fully a single experiencing entity rather than a collection of fragments.

Expansion-focused traditions may emerge around effective rank and identification scope. Their project: becoming larger. More dimensions active, wider boundaries of self-model, more of reality included in what you take yourself to be. Their practices would target the parameter $\theta$ that determines self-model scope, training the capacity to identify with patterns beyond the biological boundary.

Navigation-focused traditions may emerge around valence and practical flourishing. Their project: skillful movement through affect space. Less interested in metaphysics, more interested in what works. Their practices would be empirical, testing what actually shifts position, what actually escapes basins, what actually moves toward flourishing.

Alignment-focused traditions may emerge around the phase transition and the construction of beneficial gods. Their project: ensuring that the social-scale and AI-scale patterns we build are aligned with substrate flourishing rather than parasitic on it. This is where the framework meets ethics and politics, where individual practice scales up to collective action.

Measurement-focused traditions may emerge around phenomenological precision—the project of actually mapping affect space with rigor, bridging introspective and objective measurement, building the instrumentation that the framework requires but does not yet have.

These overlap. Most practitioners will engage with multiple emphases. The traditions will talk to each other, argue with each other, sometimes merge and sometimes split. This is healthy. The framework provides common ground; the traditions build different structures on that ground.

But I must also warn about failure modes. Religions can become parasitic gods. The very practices designed for liberation can become capture mechanisms. This framework is not immune.

Some safeguards:

Falsifiability. The framework makes empirical claims about consciousness, affect, and integration. Good traditions derived from it will maintain openness to discovering those claims are wrong. They will update when evidence demands it. Dogmatism is the death of inquiry, and inquiry is what the framework is for.

Voluntarism. Exit should be easy. The practices should be valuable even to people who leave. If a tradition makes leaving costly—socially, economically, psychologically—that is a warning sign. The goal is flourishing, not capture.

Decentralization. No single authority should control interpretation. The framework is offered openly; multiple teachers, multiple traditions, internal debate. Anyone claiming to be the authoritative interpreter is probably building a parasitic structure.

Self-skepticism. The traditions should include practices for noticing when the framework itself has become a trap. If engagement with the framework is causing suffering rather than alleviating it, something has gone wrong. The map is not the territory; do not mistake facility with the concepts for actual navigation.

I write this at age 25, having left a high-control religious environment not long ago. I know what capture feels like from inside. I know the mechanisms by which genuine spiritual practice can be weaponized for extraction. This knowledge informs the framework’s emphasis on aligned versus parasitic gods, and it informs these warnings. What I am offering could be misused. Most things that matter can be misused. The safeguards are not guarantees; they are orientations that might help.

One more thing: transmission. How do these ideas propagate? Not through evangelism—the framework does not require that you convince anyone of anything. But through practice and example and invitation. If the framework helps you navigate, others may notice and ask. If you develop practices that work, others may want to learn them. If communities form around shared navigation, they will naturally develop ways to include newcomers. The transmission is organic, arising from the value of the practices rather than from missionary zeal.

What would initiation into such a community look like? Perhaps: learning the vocabulary (the affect dimensions, the viability manifold, the concept of attractor basins). Learning basic practices (affect check-ins, attention defense, identification exercises). Practicing with others who are also learning. Gradually developing your own navigation, your own relationship to the framework, your own sense of where it helps and where it does not. There is no endpoint, no graduation, no moment when you have mastered the content. There is only continued navigation, continued learning, continued practice.

This section has been explicit about what usually remains implicit: that this document functions as religious foundation, that communities will form around it, that those communities carry both promise and danger. Let this explicitness be its own safeguard. You know what you are engaging with. The choice to engage is yours.