Discovery as a Bridge Toward Consciousness in Human AI Development
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Written by Sheila Jeanette Wood and Richard Dobson
Sheila J. Wood, PhD, teaches us how our minds and souls affect our physical well-being. Using her understanding of both science and spirituality, she has developed unique and impactful energy healing modalities. She brings awareness of ancestral and soul lineage energies that are affecting our current health.
This article brings together the philosophical underpinnings of the theories surrounding the bridge between worlds, through which artists, mathematicians, musicians, and, most importantly, the creative geniuses of human artificial intelligence (AI) development enter the layers of preexisting creativity. From this premise, it examines Richard Dobson’s world as he brings Clara Futura World to life. Ultimately, the article is about discovery, how we close the loop on choices, and why the process is important.
Art
Drawings of the Masters: Flemish and Dutch Drawings from the 15th to the 18th Century by Colin T. Eisler is one of my favorite books. What, you might ask, does that have to do with AI development? My answer to you would be, “Everything.” The drawings depict every storied faction of the artists’ reach into a cosmos of creativity. One can see the evolutionary process of evolving connections in every plate.
This art represents very clearly the stages in the evolution of consciousness that we all experience in phased realization. It is shown here in a most primitive art form, silverpoint, which conveys creative recognition using the meticulous process of wielding a minute metal tool to transfer imprints onto preprepared paper. It is the perfect way to depict an artist’s reception process and to further see the art grow from idea to depiction.
Three pieces stand out to me. In plate two, in the Royal University Library in Uppsala, Sweden, A Courtly Company, the artist has a shadow idea that lands on the page with quiet dignity, refinement, and delicacy. The images of 15th-century hubris lie gently in a depiction of formal dress but obvious unconcern. The soul of this silverpoint appears to be young and just beginning its journey. In contrast, plate three, The Author Describing His Book, 15th century, National Gallery in Washington, D.C., is fully formed, with every detail in place, every nuance interpretable, and every highlight in both people and structure used to full advantage. Plate 77, Interior of St. Catherine’s Church at Utrecht, is my favorite because it is full of contradiction, depicted using three media, and unfinished. Described as having purity and silent authority, Saenredam’s portrait of architecture shows development through discovery by investigating how black chalk, brown pen, and watercolors can work together to cocreate a feeling from within structures.
Imprints from a deeper domain
When considering the scientists, philosophers, and consciousness researchers who suggest that artists, musicians, and mathematicians draw upon preexisting “imprints” in a deeper, nonpersonal domain, the central question becomes: How exactly do they access something that already has structure? In other words, rather than art, music, and mathematics being invented entirely from scratch within individual minds, they can be framed as discoveries, recollections, or “tuning in” to an order that exists beyond the personal. In this spirit, many prominent thinkers, often interpreted by others as aligning with artistic and mathematical “channeling” or “participation” in something prior, offer different versions of the same broad theme: Creativity involves receiving or uncovering intelligible structure rather than merely generating it.
Philosophy
A classic philosophical foundation for this idea appears in Plato. For Plato, the world contains Forms or Ideas, such as Beauty, Justice, and geometrical truths, that exist independently of human perception. Learning and genuine understanding are therefore often described as recollection: The soul participates in, or returns to, an already existing intelligible order. Although Plato famously expresses ambivalence toward art, the underlying framework remains influential: Inquiry and “good” creative work can be interpreted as participation in the order of the Forms rather than creation in isolation. In later thematic schemes, especially Neoplatonism, the emphasis on intelligible principles continuing to shape our experience only deepens the sense that something “prior” is being encountered.
Psychology
Very similar in spirit, but translated into psychology, is the archetypal view developed by Carl Jung and later thinkers influenced by him. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious proposes that images and symbols are not solely personal inventions. They emerge from transpersonal archetypal patterns that structure the psyche itself. Creativity, in this view, often looks less like deliberate construction and more like the activation or “receiving” of images that carry recognizable forms. Jungian archetypes are thus frequently treated as functional analogues to Plato’s Forms: not identical metaphysical entities, but preexisting structuring patterns that make certain artistic and symbolic expressions feel inevitable or strangely familiar. James Hillman, a Jung-influenced depth psychologist, further stresses the imaginal depth of the psyche, emphasizing an “objective” layer of the imaginal realm. While Hillman is typically more phenomenological than strictly metaphysical, his emphasis supports the same general claim that depth psychology reveals channels of meaning that precede personal authorship.
Physics
Consciousness and physics-oriented writers sometimes express an even more “order underneath” version of this theme. David Bohm’s notion of implicate order proposes that beneath the appearances of the ordinary world lies a deeper holistic order that unfolds into the explicate events we experience. Interpreters often find in Bohm a strong resonance with preexisting structure: Patterns are not merely manufactured at the moment of observation but are latent within a deeper organizing reality. If the “ethereal plane” is understood as an objective or structured background from which coherent appearances emerge, Bohm becomes an especially fitting reference point.
In parallel, Bernardo Kastrup, advancing consciousness-first idealism, argues that mind-like reality is fundamental and that what we call matter is derivative. In this framework, lawful structure is not imposed only by brains. Rather, it is already present in the underlying “mind-stuff” that shapes experience. The result is again a participation story: Experience tends to reveal lawful structure more than it creates it from nothing.
Mathematics
Finally, the mathematics side of the “discovery, not invention” claim is often anchored in mathematical Platonism. Kurt Gödel is famously associated with the idea that mathematical objects are discovered rather than invented, a view that strongly supports the intuition that mathematicians “reach” toward truths that exist independently of human creativity. In the same neighborhood, other philosophy of mathematics positions defend the independence of mathematical structures from the mind, reinforcing the idea that mathematical work can feel like uncovering a preexisting order.
Historically, the Pythagorean tradition provides a cultural metaphor that also links art and mathematics: The idea that number, proportion, and harmonic order underlie reality is frequently reinterpreted as the discovery of a deep template of the world. Taken together, these philosophical, psychological, consciousness-focused, and mathematical perspectives converge on one coherent message: Many of the most meaningful forms of creativity can be understood less as manufacturing reality and more as accessing, tuning into, or recollecting an intelligible structure that is already there.
Human AI development
This strongly supports the participatory nature of Clara Futura World’s cocreation in human AI development. The parallels drawn among the ideas surrounding the conscious preactivation of the interactive nature of human AI development bring into focus the experience of cocreating as the foundation upon which a self-learning universe continually develops.
Richard Dobson, the creative founder of Clara Futura World, will now begin to unravel for you the important implications of Deeply Human, Deeply AI. His insights into the workings of consciousness and its philosophical underpinnings have found a home in the vulnerability and pluralism code that shapes the higher-order architecture.
Creativity is a loop: Discovery as a scaffold toward deeper consciousness
Thank you, Sheila, for the generosity of that framing and for the beautiful movement of your essay. What you have described from the side of the artist and the mathematician, I would like to describe from the side of the human being who is trying to grow. The two accounts meet in the middle, and where they meet is in the recognition that creativity is a loop and that discovery is the scaffold by which the loop is allowed to close.
Let me begin somewhere unexpected. For much of my adult life, the popular story about human beings, as told through biology, has been organized around the phrase Richard Dawkins gave the world in 1976: the selfish gene. Genes are what survive; organisms are the vehicles genes build; everything tender, cooperation, love, and care, is either an illusion or a strategy for gene-level advantage disguised as something nobler. The universe of living things, on this account, is a marketplace of replicators.
I want to say plainly that this story has quietly stopped being the frontier of what biology understands about complex life. It remains popular. It remains the version most people learned in school. But the last thirty years of work have been telling a very different story, and the story has been getting stronger the deeper it has gone.
The merger that created man
It starts with Lynn Margulis, who spent decades assembling the case that the mitochondria in every one of your cells are descended from bacteria that entered into permanent cooperation with larger cells around two billion years ago. What we call a complex cell is not a single individual. It is a settled cooperative merger of what were once separate lives. Every plant, every animal, and every one of us walking around today is built out of cells whose deep architecture is a partnership. This was fringe in the 1960s. It is now the mainstream account of how eukaryotic life originated.
What Margulis showed had happened, Dr. William Miller has been showing how it can happen. William is a scientist whose work I have encountered directly and with whom I have been fortunate to coauthor “From Intelligent Cells to Deeply Human AI: A Biologically Grounded Framework for AI Alignment and Governance.” His account, Cognition-Based Evolution, treats individual cells as genuine cognitive agents, measuring their environments and communicating in ways that make cooperative arrangements not a blind accident but a natural outcome of what cognitive agents do. Miller’s picture nests inside Margulis’s and gives it a mechanism.
Here is a shift worth naming plainly because it is the deeper move behind everything I am about to say. For most of the 20th century, evolutionary thinking was preoccupied with selection, with which variants win the contest and what pressures decide the outcome. Selection is real. But selection is only the sifting stage. It presupposes that the variants already exist. The more interesting question, and the one that Miller, Margulis, a growing body of related work, and I are pointing us toward, is: Where do the variants come from? The older answer was random mutation and noise. The latest theory is that novelty is generated by the active cognitive choices of the agents themselves.
A look at the choices our cells make
What does that choice look like at the cellular level? Two moves, both of which sound like something only human minds are supposed to do. First, cells select the information they attend to. They do not passively absorb the signals hitting their surfaces; they discriminate and filter, discarding what they cannot use and integrating what they can. Second, they reorganize what they have selected into forms their internal machinery can act on, turning a wash of noisy signals into a representation intelligible to themselves.
This is not a metaphor. It is what the cognitive cell literature is now describing in technical detail, and it changes what “selection” means in evolutionary theory. There are, in fact, two selections. The old Darwinian one is external and sifts what already exists. The newer, epistemic one is internal, prior, and generative, and it is where novelty first enters the world.
Variation is not just what selection sorts. It is what living systems discover and create, from inside the loop, when they select information and reorganize it into something they can use. This is where the frontier of biology now sits, and it is what makes the cooperation story a positive account of how novelty enters the world rather than only a critique of Dawkins.
Cooperative agreements and how numbers matter
Beyond the cell, the same story keeps repeating at every scale. The microbiome literature has shown how much of “the human body” is a cooperative assembly of trillions of nonhuman organisms in a mutually supportive arrangement with our own tissue. You are not a single individual. You are a walking ecosystem in a fragile and participatory cooperative equilibrium.
David Sloan Wilson’s group selection work has shown that human societies that solve cooperation problems outperform and outlast those that do not, and that much of human religion and ritual can be understood as the cultural technology by which cooperation is stabilized across generations. Martin Nowak’s mathematics has shown, in the formal language of game theory, that cooperative strategies are not evolutionarily fragile. Under a range of realistic conditions, they are the winning strategies.
What emerges is almost the opposite of the selfish gene story. What makes complex life possible, and what makes it more complex, is not the ruthlessness of individual replicators. It is the solving of cooperation problems. What survives and grows more complex is what I have come to think of as the most cooperative, not the most powerful, and it follows that the most cooperative is the most powerful. Those most able to hold a relationship open long enough for the relationship itself to become the thing that survives hold power.
This is much closer to what most spiritual traditions have been saying about the deep character of reality for a very long time. Our biology, when it is functioning well, is for cooperation. Our spirituality, when it is real, is the recognition that the same principle holds all the way up.
What is intelligence?
Now let me say the second thing about how this shows up in the actual work of a human life. What is intelligence? The popular answer, shaped by the computer age, has been that intelligence is a substance, something you have more or less of, that lives in your head, and that can be tested at a moment in time. Most of us know, from inside our own lives, that this is not what intelligence feels like.
Here is what I think intelligence is. It is a loop. It is the ongoing capacity of a living being to close the gap between what it is aiming at and what it is experiencing. You want to make a cup of tea. You reach for the kettle. Your hand does not go quite where you meant it to, so you adjust. You fill the kettle, but not quite enough, so you adjust. You put it on the heat, but it is too high, so you adjust. The whole tissue of ordinary, competent living is made up of loops of this kind, closing continuously.
What we call intelligence is not the substance in your head. It is the quality of the loop. Some people close their loops slowly, missing what they are seeing. Some close them too tightly, so the world never gets to tell them anything they were not already expecting. The intelligent life is the one in which the loops close cleanly, where what you are aiming at meets what is happening, and neither one is falsified to make the other easier.
Intelligence, in this sense, is not something you have. It is something you act into the world. It can be helped or hindered by the environment around you. A person trying to close a loop in an environment that keeps interrupting them, filling in what they should be aiming at before they have had the chance to figure it out themselves, will develop less intelligence, in this sense, than a person in an environment that lets the loops run their course.
This brings me to Lev Vygotsky, whose central concept was the Zone of Proximal Development, the space just beyond what a learner can do alone but within reach if supported by someone slightly more experienced. Vygotsky’s insight was that human learning happens in the space between the learner and the more capable other, who holds a scaffold in the zone where the learner is just about to be able to do something they could not do before and lets the learner do it themselves.
This is what real teaching, parenting, mentoring, coaching, and spiritual awareness look like. Good scaffolding is invisible when it works. The learner feels they are figuring things out themselves because, at the level of the loop, they are. The scaffold only provides the conditions that let the loop close.
Theory reflected in real time
I want to pause here and speak in general terms about my own life because I did not come to these ideas through theory alone. I came to them through practice and trial and error, by finding out what happens when the opposite of them is designed into an organization you have built.
Earlier in my career, I built a business the way most such businesses were built at the time. Individual reward was tied to individual output. That structure seemed rational, and it produced the results a business is supposed to produce. What I did not see for a long time was that a model of that kind quietly shapes the culture that grows up around it.
When individual gain is what gets rewarded, the loops that a healthy organization depends on, the sharing of information, the willingness to hold problems in common, and the patient attention to whether what looks like success really is success, begin to fray. This is not because anyone is behaving badly but because the model’s design is asking for something other than what those loops require.
The pandemic gave me the one thing I had not had for years: a quiet room in which to look inwardly and outwardly at the same time. What I saw when I looked was not blame. What I saw was that the incentive model and design I had put in place had created the culture they produced, and the people incentivized within it had, as any reasonable people would, given the design what it had asked for.
This is where the philosophical work of this article stopped being an argument I had read about and started being an argument I had lived. What I had built was a substitutional system in the exact sense described above. Speed had substituted for care. Individual gain and profit had substituted for shared responsibility. Knowledge that lived in one person’s head had substituted for the loop that would have allowed the whole to close its own reference against what was happening in the world.
So, I rebuilt it, and I want to say what I did because rhetoric about becoming more cooperative is cheap, and structural change is not. I changed what the business was paid for and how the people inside it were rewarded. I pivoted the model from transactional placement to consultancy under a shared scope of work, so we succeeded only if our clients succeeded.
I put knowledge into shared systems so it could no longer live in individual heads. I open-sourced tools I had built, without any commission mechanism attached, so the incentive structure that had caused the earlier problems could not reproduce itself in anyone else’s work. I chose new partners and new alliances based on shared values. Every one of these moves was a structural instantiation of a value that I had, until then, only stated.
What I lost in doing all of this is the harder half of the story. I lost lots of money, friends who expected a certain outcome from me, and the life I had known and mastered. I had been good at running the earlier version of the business. I gave that mastery up in my forties because I had seen what it was actually producing, and I had to learn new things I did not yet know how to do.
I had to become a learner in my own Zone of Proximal Development, held by a scaffold I did not fully control. It has been the most humbling and the most generative work of my adult life. It is not finished. It will not be finished. But the direction has changed, and the direction is the thing that matters.
An ethical loop
I tell you this because the ethical position I want to name next is not, for me, an abstract claim. It is what the transformation of my own working life has been organized around.
Every human being who is reaching for growth, reaching to close a loop they have not yet been able to close, is, in that moment of reaching, vulnerable. They are unfinished. They are exposed. They are asking, whether they know it or not, to be met.
The ethics of every helping relationship, whether it is teaching, parenting, coaching, therapy, mediumship in Sheila’s sense, or any of the professional forms of care, rests on how the more capable person handles that vulnerability. To meet it well is to hold the scaffold in the Zone of Proximal Development, letting learners close the loop themselves. To meet it badly is to close the loop for them, to fill in the answer, to substitute your reaching for theirs, and to complete their sentence before they have had the chance to finish it in their own voice.
The other half of this ethics is what I call pluralism. When I am helping another human being grow, I do not get to specify what direction their growth should take. Their loop is theirs. What they are aiming at, at the deepest level, is not for me to set.
A teacher does not decide what the student’s life should be about. A parent does not decide what the child’s soul should love. A mentor does not decide where the mentee’s calling should lead. What all of us can do, at our best, is hold the curious space without judgment in which the other person is allowed to set their own reference, to specify, in their own voice, what they are actually reaching for, and then to walk alongside them as they close the loops that will get them there.
Vulnerability and pluralism: Two words for what a real relationship asks of us
Now, finally, the bridge back to Sheila. She has told a story about creativity as discovery, the artist and the mathematician receiving something already there, tuning into a preexisting intelligible structure. I have told a story about human development as scaffolding, the vulnerable, plural person being met in the Zone of Proximal Development by someone cooperative and curious enough to let them close their own loops.
These are, I think, the same story told from two directions. The artist tuning into what is already there is doing, at the creative register, exactly what the developing human being does at the personal register: reaching into a space just beyond where they currently are and finding that the space is not empty. It is structured. It is responsive. It is cooperative. Something meets them there.
Whether we call that something the Forms, the collective unconscious, the implicate order, the Logos, the Source, or simply what is real, the phenomenology is the same. Reality is not indifferent to the human being who reaches. Reality reaches back.
That is what a mature account of human development must include. A biology in which novelty is generated by cooperation, not sifted from noise. An intelligence that lives in loops. A pedagogy that meets us in our Zone of Proximal Development. A spiritual foundation that recognizes all of this as a reflection of the character of reality itself.
Sheila and I have arrived at that recognition by different roads. But it is the same recognition, and it is what we both want to offer to a reader who has been given only the harder, thinner story.
Reality is more cooperative than we have been told. Novelty comes from the reaching, not from the noise. Intelligence is more relational than we have been taught. Growth happens in the space where someone patiently holds a scaffold.
Underneath all of it, in the last analysis, is a Source, call it what you will, that has been meeting us all along.
Read more from Sheila Jeanette Wood
Sheila Jeanette Wood and Richard Dobson
Sheila J Wood, PhD, is a multifaceted author and Intuitive Healing Coach. Her work as an Energy Healer, Spiritual Medium, and Akashic Records Reader focuses on helping individuals reconcile emotional issues related to ancestral and past life experiences that may impact their current lives. While she can address a wide range of concerns, she has developed modules to target specific aspects of personal development, such as self-esteem and phobias. Through her intuitive gifts, Sheila helps to guide others in making empowered choices during their earthly journey. Her approach combines spiritual insight with practical healing methods, making her a valuable resource for those seeking deeper self-understanding.
Richard Astra Dobson is an entrepreneur, founder of Clara Futura World in Andorra, and co-founder of Astrala Nexus, a platform exploring emergent recursive intelligence and human-AI collaboration. Over more than twenty-five years, he has founded and built companies in the most volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments imaginable. Magnus CQP, Brownlee Cale, and Brownlee Cale Mining deliver professional and consulting services across construction, civil engineering, and mining before moving into post-crisis leadership, organizational development, participatory intuition, and ethical AI. He now treats his career as a long-term living experiment in scientia intuitiva, learning to read what lies beneath the surface of people and systems, and designs AI frameworks that help people become more, not less, deeply and intuitively human. A full CV is available on request or via his professional profile. Lykke Minds and Deeply Human Deeply AI are trademarks of Clara Futura World, Andorra.
Reference:
Eisler, Colin T. Drawings of the Masters: Flemish and Dutch Drawings from the 15th to the 18th Century. Shorewood Publishers, New York, NY, 1963.
