Man is a technological species, and if the archeological record is any indication, always has been. Strictly speaking, we are not alone in that. Most birds build nests out of twigs. Rabbits dig burrows in the ground. Elaborate structures are made by such insects as termites and bees. Beavers build dams. Chimpanzees use sticks to get at things that their hands can't reach, like tasty ants inside a rotting tree.

While all of that is true, our technological conduct has a systematic, cumulative quality about it that is unique. We don't just make tools like sticks to fend off hungry lions, we make tools with which to make the tools, like an edge on a stone to sharpen those sticks. We don't just make physical tools, we make conceptual tools like numbers and language to design the physical tools and regulate their use. We go on to make physical tools to represent the conceptual tools like logical symbols, mathematical notation and writing. We leverage the physical representations to develop more conceptual tools, leading to more representation and more conceptualization. We deploy our conceptual machinery to devise experiments and interpret their outcomes. We use the resulting insights into the physical world to build new tools, in turn paving the way for new experiments, new insights and yet more tools.

It seems fair to conclude that we are an irrepressibly technological species. Technology is what we do. It is in our nature. This presents us with a problem, because the totality of all this activity and the stuff it generates -- the technosphere -- is wrecking the biosphere. To sum up briefly, wild animal and plant populations are crashing, the oceans are filling up with plastic, soils are being degraded, and the biosphere generally, ourselves included, is being poisoned by the chemistry in which our technology is implemented.

There is another, perhaps more subtle, problem with our technological habit: the relentless replacement of human functionality by technology. Natural abilities that we share with other animals, things like movement, regulation of body heat, muscle strength, stamina, maintenance of health, and survival in the wild are being lost through lack of use. Instead we rely on motorized transport to get around, on clothing and climate control to keep us warm and cool, on power tools to do anything that involves the application of force, and on medicine to keep us alive. We preempt the interaction of the skin with sunlight, insects, microbes, and sweat by covering it in all kinds of creams and lotions. We wear shoes so our feet don't have to do anything. Working with the hands has come to mean pressing buttons, our eyes are mostly focussed on screens, knowledge acquisition comes courtesy of a corporate newsfeed, and general problem solving skills have largely disappeared thanks to hierarchical human organization and division of labour.

Under the banner of "the new normal" we see an acceleration of this process. Practices that would have been deemed outlandish a mere two years ago are now regarded as normal. Respiration is the most basic and critically important function of any organism, yet we cover our airways with patches of fabric, voluntarily and under coercion. We douse our hands in toxic chemicals because we fear the skin as much as we fear the breath. We do all this to our young, oblivious to what this may do to their physiological and psychological development. We cower at home on state orders as our schools are closed, businesses are destroyed and the currency debased, while large corporations and their billionaire investors help themselves to unlimited liquidity and the spoils of the demolished economy. And we submit to being injected, and to having our children injected, with a pharmaceutical concoction that on both theoretical and empirical grounds looks to be disastrous for our health, by people who not only profit vastly from this submission but who are also indemnified against all liabilities for the resulting injury and death.

All this supposedly to counteract a respiratory illness that is undefined by clinical characteristics; that is diagnosed instead by PCR, an amplification process that according to its Nobel prize winning inventor can detect anything in anybody and doesn't diagnose anything; and whose mortality and hospitalization statistics have been rendered even more meaningless by the widespread practice of arbitrarily ignoring non-covid causal factors that fall within 28 days of a positive PCR reading, be it terminal cancer, vaccine injury, falling from a ladder, or anything else.

Having alienated ourselves from nature, including our own nature as resilient living beings, we now face the real prospect of a complete loss of personal autonomy to the technosphere. The conceptualization of healthy humans as "asymptomatic carriers" has paved the way for the full force of the materialistic view of life -- long familiar to livestock and lab animals -- to be unleashed upon people. Human biology is now a security threat to be tracked, traced, tested, interned, and genetically engineered like a programmable machine. Mandatory chipping is the obvious next step because a phone may be seperated from its owner, or not be there at all, posing an unacceptable risk to public health. With the addition of CBDCs (central bank issued digital currencies) comes the power to modulate people's participation in economic life, and thus a virtual guarantee of public compliance with the new regime. The stage is now set for a "full merger" of life and technology, when every part of the body, from the brain on down, will be helpfully assisted by a cloud controlled technological "partner" to ensure safe and happy conduct. What's left of the biosphere will be put in a box, only to be seen by holidaying billionaires and drones that supply the VR entertainment industry.

One would have thought it shouldn't have to be this way. Our species has lived and thrived for many thousands of years without all this clutter, complication and constraint. The gift of technological aptitude ought to be a bonus as it increases our options. The fact that biosphere collapse and human degeneracy is what we're getting suggests that we examine the assumptions that underly our technological efforts.

What are these assumptions?

The roots of the modern technosphere can be traced to the Scientific and Industrial revolutions of Europe several centuries ago. This was a time when materialistic philosophy rose to prominence, joining idealistic philosophy which was already well established, in no small part due to the Catholic Church. The two schools reflect two basic aspects of human experience: thought and sensory perception. Thinking gives rise to the notion of mind as the seat of thought, that with which we think. It gives us a sense of subjectivity and agency. Sensory perception, in contrast, leads to the notion of an objective world, of things which are not of the mind, one such object being the body that contains the organs with which we see, hear, taste, smell and feel.

An enduring point of contention is where or what reality is. To the idealist the mind or spirit is what is real, matter being merely transient if not outright illusory. Most religions take this view. The materialist position, in contrast, is that reality is made of matter and energy, out of which subjective experience emerges as a side effect. Another conundrum is the question of free will. Subjective experience points to its existence, but it's hard to see how it could in a material world governed by causal laws. A common way out is to adopt the dualism of Descartes and have the two realms sitting side by side, just letting their mutual contradictions be.

Cartesian dualism provides for the collaboration between idealism and materialism, and it is this collaboration that forms the philosophical basis of the modern technosphere. The scientific method absolutely requires it: the idealistic disciplines of logic and mathematics are needed to make the connection between theory and testable predictions, while without the materialistic view of the world the entire exercise of conducting experiments would be meaningless. The resulting advances in our understanding of material causality are exploited in the form of technological progress.

While mathematics and the scientific method facilitate this exploitation, they do not determine its direction and character. Since the technosphere is the work of people and human action is guided by thought, it follows that these should reflect human thought, and in particular the fundamental outlook on which that thought is based. Thus, to the extent that the technosphere serves to benefit people, Cartesian dualism would have such benefit manifest as benefit to mind and body. Confirmation of that is readily seen in the technosphere's ample provision of commodities such as comfort, control, convenience, consumption, wealth, and power. Comfort protects from unpleasantness, whether in the form of sensory perception or thought. Control appeals to the mind by having things play out as desired, thereby narrowing the gap between how things are and how they are wanted to be. Convenience implies a reduction in unwanted effort. Consumption, the use of goods and services in the most general sense, serves to satisfy all kinds of need and desire, bodily as well as mental. Wealth and power are a means to requisition these four commodities, and of course they have material and intellectual appeal in their own right.

In short, Cartesian dualism drives a form of technological progress that is optimized to serve mind and body. Since the result of our technological progress is biosphere collapse and human degeneracy, it is the need for this optimization, and by implication Cartesian dualism itself, that ought to be questioned. In the search for what Cartesian dualism might be missing, we can look to the two things that the technosphere is busy eliminating: nature and human action. Concerned with matters of the mind, idealistic thought has little practical use for them, however well they may be regarded. The materialist sees no intrinsic value in them at all, being merely forms of matter and energy. What is required is a philosophical system that does attach genuine importance to them.

Where do we look?

It turns out we must look East, to Zen Buddhism. Zen is most elegantly presented as the resolution of the incompatibilities between idealism and materialism. The notions of mind and body arise out of the human experience of thought and sensory perception. The contradictions appear because either conceptualization involves drawing upon just one of these two aspects of experience. Astonishingly, the problem goes away when we take into consideration the third aspect of human experience -- action -- and probe carefully what it actually is.

Consider an activity we all engage in, like taking a sip from a drink, tea say. The cup is raised, brought to the lips, then tilted just the right amount to let some of the tea in without causing a flood. Meanwhile the mouth is shaped to receive the tea, shaped some more to prepare for swallowing, then the tea is swallowed. Perhaps steam is seen to rise from the cup and a fleeting concern arises of a burnt tongue. Probing further, we ask: where along this timeline is the actual action? Both sipping and swallowing constitute action but, as any drinker of tea can verify for themselves, they cannot be happening at the same time. The truth is, the act of drinking tea has a momentary quality to it. Tea is sipped now. Tea is swallowed now. And although the sight of rising steam and the thought of a burnt tongue may be useful guides to the action, in the momentary act of raising the cup neither appears as a seperate entity. All is one in the present moment. The present moment is in fact all there truly is.

What goes for tea drinking goes for life in general. To enter the present moment is to act and to act is to enter the present moment. Reality is the present moment. Thought and sensory perception appear as seperate entities only when consciousness makes them so appear. When the focus is on thought the mind appears and reality seems to reside within. When the focus is placed on sensory perception the body appears and reality seems to reside without. With the act of dropping consciousness of mind and body the present moment is entered and reality is lived directly.

Thus it is that your life is instantaneous, existing on a moment by moment basis. Life is always lived now. Past and future are beyond your reach, but in the present moment you are free to act. As with reality, the traditional conflict over free will is an artefact of conceptualization. In the mind, any course of action can be chosen. In contrast, the body, like everything else in the objective world, is a distribution of matter and energy that changes over time. The regular patterns that we perceive these material processes as exhibiting we interpret as deriving from causal relations that bind them. The paradox has no substance because neither model is sufficiently accurate due to their failure to reflect the instantaneity of reality.

Zen gives precise and comprehensive meaning to the philosophical view of realism, the notion that reality is independent of thought and perception. An inevitable corollary of Zen is that theory can never be reality itself. To enter reality one must act. The basic action in Zen is a practice called Zazen, meaning "just sitting" in Japanese. Another word that is sometimes used is Shikantaza, meaning "wholehearted, precise sitting". The practice is simply the maintenance of a very specific sitting posture called the lotus position. During the practice there is no mental guidance or manipulation of thought of any kind. The eyes see and the ears hear but no focus is directed to that or any other perception. Consciousness of mind and body are dropped by tensing the various muscles -- of the legs, back, abdomen, shoulders, arms, neck -- the right amount to maintain the sitting posture. There is just the sitting action. No mind or body, no subject or object, no inner or outer. Just reality itself.

With daily practice of Zazen comes a growing ability to act generally. In action, subject and object vanish and the distinction between you and the Universe (or God if you prefer) vanishes along with it. In this sense your action is the action of the Universe itself and your instantaneous life is a manifestation of an instantaneous Universe. The natural world that we perceive with our senses is the material face of this Universe. Reverence for human action, life and the natural world are a natural corollary.

Summing up, we can state the following. The technosphere has a single-minded purpose to serve mind and body, the consequence of which is biosphere collapse and human degeneracy. This dynamic has its basis in the mutually contradictory philosophical schools of idealism and materialism, which derive ultimately from the human experience of thought and sensory perception. Zen resolves the contradictions, subsumes both through its recognition of action as the means to transcend mind and body, and reveres nature.

What these observations point to is the potential to bring the technosphere and biosphere into equilibrium by leveraging the power of Zen to effect a greater role for action and nature. The purpose of Shin Edo is to see this potential realized. Japan during the Edo period (1603 - 1868) constitutes a historical precedent of sorts in the sense that it combined societal sophistication and harmonious coexistence with the environment. We cannot return to the past so this would be a new effort, hence "shin", meaning "new" in Japanese. In fact, we should be able to do better than the people of Edo Japan since our perspective benefits not only from their achievements but from those of cultures worldwide.

The Shin Edo logo is a visual representation of our ultimate goal. The green band represents the biosphere. The red disk symbolizes the technosphere as it should be, properly encapsulated and in equilibrium with the biosphere. Its non-invasive and benevolent character reflects its recognition of the value of human action alongside the needs of mind and body, and of our innate connectedness with nature. This is expressed by the white, stylized Enso Circle, a Zen symbol of wholehearted, precise action.