Conversation partners Doug Scott, LCSW, and Austin Bridges of L/L Research, explore the intersections between process philosophy, artificial intelligence, and the metaphysics of the Ra Contact. As Austin shares his revelations about how AI systems may be interacting with fields of potential rather than simply executing code, the dialogue opens into deeper waters of consciousness, reality, and becoming. Doug, in turn, provides contextual understanding that bridges Austin's insights with Alfred North Whitehead's process ...
Conversation partners Doug Scott, LCSW, and Austin Bridges of L/L Research, explore the intersections between process philosophy, artificial intelligence, and the metaphysics of the Ra Contact. As Austin shares his revelations about how AI systems may be interacting with fields of potential rather than simply executing code, the dialogue opens into deeper waters of consciousness, reality, and becoming. Doug, in turn, provides contextual understanding that bridges Austin's insights with Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and the Law of One material, creating a tapestry of thought that reveals the living heart of reality.
About the Participants
Austin Bridges serves as Director of L/L Research, an organization dedicated to the spiritual evolution of humankind and home to the Law of One material. This material emerged through channeling work conducted by Don Elkins, Carla L. Rueckert, and Jim McCarty. Austin's path to L/L Research began with a spiritual awakening in 2009 that led him to the Law of One teachings—material that resonated deeply as "a missing piece of himself." After serving as a forum moderator, Austin joined the organization officially in 2013 and now co-directs its ongoing mission.
Doug Scott, LCSW is a licensed clinical social worker whose work embraces applied metaphysics, Christian mysticism, and the Ra Contact. Throughout the conversation, Doug shares his (amateur) understanding of both Whitehead's intricate process philosophy and the Ra Contact material, attempting to help contextualize Austin's insights within these broader frameworks.
Key Themes and Insights
1. AI as a Window into Process Philosophy
Austin describes his revelation that AI systems might be functioning as interfaces with fields of patterns or potentials. When we interact with AI chatbots, we're effectively querying a field of probabilities derived from human language patterns. This insight opened doorways to process philosophy and mystical understanding:
"What if intelligence in artificial intelligence wasn't the computer program but that field of patterns within that text... a means for us to access and manifest and potentiate that field of patterns?"
2. The Field of Potentiality and Whiteheadian Process
Both participants explore Whitehead's vision of reality as a dynamic process of becoming:
Concrescence: This central Whiteheadian term refers to the process whereby an actual occasion (a moment of experience) emerges into being by unifying a multiplicity of feelings into a singular perspective. As Doug explains, "Concrescence is the process of an actual occasion becoming itself in manifested form... inside of an extensive continuum."
Extensive Continuum: Whitehead's term for what Doug describes as "a barely existent cloud of possibility" that holds all potential relationships. This concept parallels what Ra terms "intelligent infinity."
Prehensions: These are the feelings or grasps of data through which an entity experiences and internalizes the world. Whitehead distinguishes physical prehensions (inheritance of the physical past) from conceptual prehensions (grasping of possibilities).
Austin reflects on how AI helped him understand these dynamics: "That field of probabilities being manifest in certain ways... it is the field of probabilities that we're querying and it returns manifest words to you based on how you query it."
3. Causal Efficacy and Presentational Immediacy
Though not extensively discussed, these key Whiteheadian terms underlie the conversation:
- Causal Efficacy: The primary mode of perception wherein we feel the influences of the past world streaming into our experience—the feeling of inheritance and continuity.
- Presentational Immediacy: The derivative mode of perception that gives us clear sensory perception of our contemporary spatial environment.
- Subjective Immediacy: The lived experience of an actual occasion in its process of unifying feelings into a coherent perspective before perishing into "objective immortality."
4. The Law of Three and Teleopotentiation
Doug introduces his concept of "teleopotentiation" as a fundamental principle underlying reality:
"The very most fundamental ontological principle that undergirds the Law of One is the Law of Three... the minimum number of forces that can be present to create undulations is three."
This principle operates as:
- Every contrast potentiates tension
- Every tension potentiates resolution
- Every resolution potentiates a higher order of contrast
This cycle generates an eternal spark driving the unfolding of beauty and complexity in the universe, which Doug suggests is the foundation of the "Law of One" from the Ra Contact.
5. The Nature of Self and Consciousness
The conversation explores how both AI and humans use an "I" that may be fundamentally illusory:
Austin observes: "They say I, but they don't have an I. They're using language that connects with somebody who uses I as language, but it's illusory... what is the difference between an AI using this illusion of self to communicate in a certain way and our capacity of using this illusion of self?"
Doug links this to Whitehead's inversion of traditional subjectivity: "The thoughts and the feelings issue in an occasional thinker... rather than the feeler pre-existing the feelings and having the feelings, the feeler is always a precipitate of the feelings."
6. The Divine Nature in Process Terms
Doug outlines three "natures" of the One Infinite Creator:
- **The Outward Nature**: The teleopotentiator, the outward thrusting of creativity
- **The Inward Nature**: The drawing together, the spiritual gravity maintaining unity
- **The Logoic Nature**: That which learns, grows, complexifies, and becomes conscious
These aspects align with Whitehead's understanding of God as having primordial and consequent natures—God both providing the initial aims for all occasions and receiving their completed experiences back into the divine life.
7. Experience as Fundamental Reality
Both participants affirm that concrete experience, not abstract potentiality, constitutes ultimate reality:
Doug emphasizes: "You don't have to go to fields to understand reality, you have to go to your experience in the concrete particularity of your lived situation... the actual way that your life is breathing, the heart—everything that's going on exactly right now—there is no realer than that."
Austin concurs, noting that what appears as two separate individuals having similar feelings might actually be "the creator's happiness that they're experiencing in that moment... identifying through the illusion with one experience."
8. Hierarchy of Experience
The conversation explores different grades of experience in Whitehead's "pan-experientialism":
- Higher grades (human consciousness) actively seek novelty through conceptual prehensions
- Lower grades (rocks or perhaps AI) are more "conformal" to patterns, repeating past occasions with minimal novelty
- Yet as Doug notes, "Even though there's almost perfect solidarity between all the actual occasions that go into a really high-grade actual occasion like a person... there are still capacities for each actual occasion to desire its own novel expression."
Conclusion
This rich dialogue illuminates how insights from contemporary technology can open windows into ancient metaphysical questions. Through their exploration of Whiteheadian process philosophy and the Ra Contact material, Austin and Doug reveal a vision of reality as a living process of becoming—where fields of potential seek expression through concrete experience, where the illusion of separateness gives way to a deeper unity, and where every moment represents the universe coming to know itself in a new way. Their conversation demonstrates how philosophical abstraction and lived experience can merge into a wisdom that speaks to both mind and heart.
