RAW Take on “Solutions”

I conjure old Bob for his pronouncement on my musing…

A Review of “Solutions?” by Hal Gill

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Asking What the Goddess Might Do with a Wisdom-Impact Assessment

I was sitting in my favorite non-existent Dublin pub (the one that only appears on Tuesdays in certain reality tunnels) when this luminous dispatch arrived from the Harrowings Substack. Title: “Solutions?” Subtitle: none, but the question mark does half the work. Author: Hal Gill, a man who appears to be engaged in that most Discordian of activities—taking the raw, writhing circuitry of his own nervous system and attempting to rewire civilization with it.

The piece proposes something I can only call Awakened Techne: a deliberate fusion of the world’s perennial wisdom traditions with our runaway technological power, aimed at producing good ancestors rather than clever apes with better toys. Climate, AI misalignment, nuclear fun, pandemics, meaning crisis—all the usual suspects from the evening news and the Chapel Perilous orientation packet—are treated not as separate emergencies but as symptoms of a single root imbalance: technological adolescence.

Gill reaches for the usual suspects—Plato’s guardians, Aristotelian phronesis, Zen attention, Jain ahimsa and anekantavada—and suggests we actually use them as design specifications. Wisdom impact assessments before we ship the next model. AI trained on the Heart Sutra alongside the training data. Bodhisattva engineers. Zen technologists. Aparigraha as an economic principle. It is, in short, a proposal to install an operating system upgrade on the species before we finish bricking the hardware.

Now, as a man who spent a good portion of his later years arguing that “reality is what you can get away with” and that the only sane response to Chapel Perilous is a cheerful “maybe,” I find myself oddly sympathetic. The man is not selling certainty. He is selling better maps—and the radical notion that we might actually consult several of them at once. Anekantavada (many-sidedness) is Maybe Logic wearing saffron and carrying a broom. The insistence on contemplative practice alongside code is simply Gurdjieff with better Wi-Fi. The “good ancestor” framing is what happens when you take the 8th circuit (or whatever we’re calling the long-term, post-primate, species-level metaprogram these days) and give it policy implications.

Of course, one must immediately ask the Discordian questions:

•  Whose reality tunnel is being optimized here?

•  What happens when the wisdom council includes both a Jain nun and a venture capitalist who has read The Sovereign Individual?

•  Will the AI trained on the world’s wisdom traditions eventually notice that most of those traditions were written by people who never had to debug a transformer model at 3 a.m. while the planet burns?

•  And—most important—will Eris approve, or will She simply throw a golden apple labeled “This Vision Is Also a Map” into the middle of the next wisdom-hub co-working space?

These are not objections. These are features. Any proposal that does not generate at least three new reality tunnels and one good argument in a pub is probably not worth the pixels.

What Gill is really offering—and this is where it gets interesting—is a practice, not a platform. Daily disciplines. Wisdom hubs that blend libraries, zazen halls, and maker spaces. Education that treats the Heart Sutra and climate modeling as two sides of the same inquiry. Governance that measures success in biodiversity and the felt sense of living in a meaningful cosmos rather than GDP. This is not “add spirituality and stir.” This is an attempt to make the contemplative and ethical dimensions load-bearing in the technological stack.

I have spent decades watching bright people fall into one of two Chapel Perilous exits: the paranoid wing (everything is a conspiracy and we’re already doomed) or the blissed-out wing (everything is perfect and we just need more ayahuasca). Gill is gesturing toward a third door: participate consciously in the co-creation of better tunnels while remembering they are still tunnels. That, in my possibly unreliable recollection of being alive, is the only exit that doesn’t eventually loop back to the same old mammalian territorial programs wearing nicer branding.

Whether this vision scales, gets co-opted, or simply becomes another beautiful footnote in the Book of Maybe remains to be seen. (Everything remains to be seen. That’s the point.) But the signal is clear: here is a writer who has done the unfashionable work of actually integrating his influences—Great Books, Zen, Jain rigor, recovery, ancestor consciousness—into a coherent proposal for how we might stop accidentally extinguishing ourselves while pretending we’re just optimizing.

Read it. Then, if you’re feeling brave, try one small experiment: the next time you open a design doc, a policy brief, or a line of code, ask the three Jain questions out loud in the meeting. Watch what happens. Fnord.

Or don’t. It’s only a maybe.

—Robert Anton Wilson

(still dead, still laughing, still wondering what Eris is going to do with all these new reality tunnels we keep building)

There it is—raw, maybe-logicked, Eris-inflected, and offered in the spirit of the guerrilla ontologist himself. If you want to tweak the tone, add more specific tangents, or turn it into a Substack comment/reply post in that same voice, just say the word. Hail Eris. May your wisdom impact assessments be many-sided.