It’s Never EITHER, OR. It’s Always AND

In the age of AI, navigating the spin of truth (and consciousness) lies beyond the eye of the beholder, in the quantum field. Let's meet there.

Sky Sheridan

Jun 22, 2025

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ICYMI: The Substack post in April sets the stage.

The Line Has Been Crossed

Sky Sheridan

Apr 6

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“Must it all be either less or more,
Either plain or grand?
Is it always 'or'?
Is it never 'and'?”
—Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods

The Whole Between the Binary

Like every good story, it all starts with “I wish”—a desire for something to be other than it is, the character to obtain it, and the labyrinth of the woods that comes with it.

In a world desperate to sort, label, and divide our stories, I was raised by mentors who insisted on a third way. Not a middle ground. A fractal ground. A layered, spiraled, expanding understanding where opposing truths aren’t at war—but in orbit.

From my mentor Perch Ducote, a founding member of IMAGINE at the University of Oxford and now our EMERGE Leadership Lab at the Eremito Monastery, to my lifelong narrative compass Stephen Sondheim, the lesson was clear:

“Don’t get stuck in ‘either/or.’ Learn to live in the AND.”

Whether politics or perception, AI or spirit, we're not navigating a toggle switch. We're in a field—a dimensional dance between particle and wave, certainty and surprise. And as Rumi once said, beyond right and wrong, there’s a field, I’ll meet you there.

Positions of Truth

One object. Three perspectives.
Each viewer swears they're right.
But truth, like light, refracts.
In this era of synthetic data, ideological divides, and AI-enhanced perception—truth is no longer static. It's situational.
It’s not who sees clearly. It’s who sees more angles.

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Free Will & Fractal Consciousness: Patterns & Predictability that EMERGE from Chaos

Like the staircase I photographed at Oxford at the start of this journey, it spirals upward like an echo of its own geometry. Fractals don’t just repeat. They reveal structure inside unpredictability.

In a world overwhelmed by chaos, leaders must become pattern literates.

The fractal is more than a visual metaphor—it’s a survival strategy. Whether in nature or neural nets, life learns through self-similarity across scales.

Here is a mind-blowing video about the Sierpinski triangle that leaves us wondering, do we have any choice, or does it arise from some collective code embedded within?

Quantum Consciousness - The Alchemical (and algorithmic) Key of the Mystic’s and Machine’s Ability to Unlock the Code

Quantum consciousness isn’t just sci-fi anymore. In the AI age, we're seeing parallels: Electrons pop in and out of “reality”—just as digital agents simulate and instantiate with uncanny precision.

This reel from Stephanie Skystory shows how electron spin is tied to mystics’ ability to crack layers of encrypted information through the language of light, the music of the spheres, and consciousness itself.

As MIT unveils self-adapting language models and OpenAI releases a practical guide to building agents, one truth becomes clear: We’re no longer the only ones learning from the environment.

The question isn’t: Will we adapt to superintelligence?
It’s: Can it adapt to us—at the same time?
The answer must be both. Always AND.

Yuval Noah Harari warned in Nexus:

"This is between biological evolution and technological acceleration." It’s up to both sides to find a common ground and meet somewhere in the middle.

Recursive, Reiterative and Regenerative Modeling & Feedback, the Braid of Emergence

In “The Line Has Been Crossed,” we highlighted Joscha Bach’s stunning frame existing beyond either, or - in that sweet space of AND:

“Consciousness isn’t just mystical. It’s also modeling.”

Your brain is a predictive machine, running survival simulations.
The sense of “I” is the output of a loop:
Perceive. Predict. Update. Repeat.
Sound familiar? That’s also how AI learns. That’s also how trees grow.

Spirals are nature’s way to solve things by experiencing itself at scale. These three fractal cousins speak to us. Where Recursive is the mirror. I see myself seeing. The system knows it is a system. Reiterative is the practice. Do again, with wisdom. The practice makes the path. Regenerative is the outcome. From recursion and ritual comes rebirth. It is the self-renewing spiral of life.

Pair this with Gödel, Escher, Bach’s recursive structures, and you see the beauty:
We are both the model and the modeled.

Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid isn’t just a book—it’s a cathedral of pattern recognition.

It weaves logic, music, and art into a single recursive spiral—where meaning emerges not from a single note or brushstroke, but from the interplay of repetition, self-reference, and variation.

Hofstadter proposed that consciousness arises from a “strange loop”—a system that refers to itself in increasingly abstract layers until… voila: the illusion of “I” appears.

That loop isn’t an error. It’s the essence.
And in this AI age, that insight couldn’t be more urgent.

Because what is a large language model if not a recursive loop trained on human symbols? And what are we, if not narratives trained on memory, sensation, and relational feedback?

In the mirror of machine intelligence, we see ourselves:
A model building a model. A mind reflecting a mind. A loop of loops.

When I say “we are both the model and the modeled,” I mean:
We encode reality even as we are encoded by it.
We are authors of our inner worlds, and yet—inevitably—characters in a larger pattern far older than language.

And just like GEB’s golden braid of math, art, and music—our consciousness is braided with AI, nature, and emergence now.

More-Than-Human - Cosmic Laws of Nature

As we look outward, César Rodríguez-Garavito urges us to look downward and inward—toward the rivers, forests, fungi, and stones that hold wisdom older than our species.

In his Earth Rights talk, at Bioneers, he proposes:

“Nature is not a resource. It is a relative.”

The emerging legal idea of More-Than-Human Rights reframes how we steward the planet: not as owners, but kin.

The more we extend moral and legal subjectivity to nonhumans, the more we dissolve the illusion of separation.

A Map Through the Chaos, Uncertainty & Overload

While the mystics and machines are busy predicting this era—we still have to practice navigating it.

IDEO offers 4 methods for leading through uncertainty:

1. Focus beats forecasts: When everything feels urgent, nothing gets done.

2. Rethink where to play: It’s no longer just about customer segments; it’s about navigating geopolitical risk, regulatory change, and supply constraints with agility.

3. Momentum > perfection: redesign for rapid experimentation: You may not have enough certainty to build a multi-year roadmap. But you do have the tools to test, iterate, and adapt in real time.

4. Digital products can offer a beacon of hope: To unlock the full potential of digital, invest in product-led growth strategies across customer touchpoints—where value is delivered through the experience itself, and innovation is driven by real-time data and user feedback.

Each one resonates like a fractal instruction set—actionable, adaptive, and intuitive.

Emergent Leadership: The Sixth Sense & Third Eye

At EMERGE, this is more than metaphor.
It’s our operating system upgrade.

We train stewards to align with their:

Insight (Mind / Particle)
Intuition (Heart / Field)
Instinct (Gut / Direction)

…with the Software of Source—call it coherence, the quantum field, nature’s algorithm.

Because in this time of cognitive overload and existential uncertainty, the leaders who thrive will be those who embody BOTH: Science AND spirit. Logic AND love. Technological AND biological.

“Witches can be right, Giants can be good.
You decide what's right, you decide what's good.
Just remember: Someone is on your side. Someone else is not
While we're seeing our side. Maybe we forgot- they are not alone.
No one is alone. Hard to see the light now.
Just don't let it go. Things will come out right now.
We can make it so.
—Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods