Comprehension of the Dynamics of Collective Selfing and Othering via AI

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 19 Jan 2026

Anthony Judge | Laetus in Praesens - TRANSCEND Media Service

Requiste multidimensionality of SDG memorability beyond individualistic binary categories of self and other.

Introduction

19 Jan 2026 – This exploration is the development of an earlier exercise Paradoxical Geopolitical Implications of Dynamics of Self-Other Overlap (2026) with the aid of AI — of relevance to the empathy-reification challenges of Israeli-Palestinian and Trump-Putin relations. That exercise articulated self-other relations in the light of three complementary 36-fold sets, together forming a 108-fold pattern of memorable significance, notably from evident in the traditional circlet configurations of prayer beads (Designing Cultural Rosaries and Meaning Malas to Sustain Associations within the Pattern that Connects, 2000).

These numbers were tentatively mapped onto the 36-edged tetrakis hexahedron and onto a 3D projection of the 4D tesseract (or hypercube). The exercise also highlighted traditional reference to related patterns — characteristically recognizable in terms of the set of simpler 3-smooth numbers from 1 to 216. The exercise can also be considered the further development of AI-enabled memorable pattern recognition of relevance to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (Turbocharging SDGs by Activating Global Cycles in a 64-fold 3D Array, 2024).

As noted with respect to the preceding exercise, the relation between “self” and “other” could be considered a well-worn theme on which further comment is merely an intellectual indulgence. There is a plethora of insights on the matter, variously explored in the light of particular agendas — seemingly to little effect, given the tragic nature of society and the conflicts which continue to be enabled. There is no lack of righteous indignation regarding the merits of “us” and the problematic behaviour of “them” (Us and Them: Relating to Challenging Others: patterns in the shadow dance between “good” and “evil”, 2009).

The emerging foreign policy of the USA — exemplified by the withdrawal from many international institutions — calls for new insight into the distinction between “selfish” and “otherish“, dynamically framed as “selfing” in contrast to “othering”. However, as initially explored there and below, potentially most intriguing are the dynamics associated with those frames, given their current relevance in collective contexts (John A. Powell, et al, The Problem of Othering: towards inclusiveness and belonging, OtheringandBelonging, 29 June 2017; Kendra Cherry, How Othering Contributes to Discrimination and Prejudice, VeryWellMind, 26 February 2025).

Could the explicit efforts of various countries “to be great again” — most notably evident in the aspirations of the USA, Israel, Russia and China — be usefully explored as collective “selfing”, complemented by the necessary “othering” of those unreasonably opposed to that process? Could the aspirations of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals be recognized as effectively a collective quest for a balancing dynamic between “selfing” and “othering”?

Of concern, as illustrated at the time of writing, is the constrained frameworks within which the dynamics of “selfing” are explored. This is exemplified by the focus of an Australian government initiative (Establishment of Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, 2026). The initiative is explicitly designed to frame the introduction of new laws to criminalize “hate speech” and “hate preachers” — in the curious absence of any mention of “love speech” and “love preachers” and how they might be sensitively enabled (Global Civilization through Interweaving Polyamory and Polyanimosity? 2018). Coincidentally Australia has been faced with a major scandal, with political implications, as a consequence of the “othering” of a Palestinian-Australian author, as summarized by Wikipedia (Adelaide Writers’ Week boycott). This serves in part to illustrate the “dimensions” of the challenge in that (whilst practicing “exclusion”) ensuring the principle of “inclusion” is upheld by a board whose constitution only formally distinguishes two genders. There is little formal recognition of the appropriate variety of perspectives which merit participation in such a collective endeavour. Such binary dynamics suggest recognition of what might be termed “memetic eugenics”.

“Others” continue to be framed as a major problem — currently exemplified by “terrorists” and “antisemites” — or ironically as the “right-wing” or “left-wing” advocates in political discourse. Inspired by the response to antisemitism, the questionable behaviour evoked by the many varieties of “others” could even be seen as meriting Elaborating a Declaration on Combating Anti-otherness (2018). However, in the face of various forms of societal fragmentation and collapse and polycrisis, there is a case for exploring the “us-them” / “self-other” dynamic with the new facilities of artificial intelligence, especially given the irony that AI could be understood as yet another “other” — if not the ultimate “other” — understood by many as a threat to humanity. The threat is exemplified by the focus on the “artificiality” of AI — whilst carefully avoiding the extent to which humanity is effectively becoming ever more “artificial”, rather than ever more “human” as is too readily assumed (How Artificial is Human Intelligence — and Humanity? 2023).

In this respect, the following exercise is a further experiment in eliciting insight from the world’s resources with AI facilities. It contrast to the use of three AIs in the previous exercise, the following makes use of Claude-4.5 alone. The question framed by such experiments is whether relevant insight into controversial “us-them” issues can be fruitfully gleaned from extensive exchanges with AI. The responses of AI recorded below can of course be checked by readers — even challenged — by posing the questions differently, or to other AIs, or to the more sophisticated variants under development.

The extended exchange with AI took explicit account of the challenge of balancing appreciable requisite complexity with comprehensibility, memorability, visualization and systemic significance. The exchange progressed tentatively through levels of detail and a variety of remarkable 3D animations generated by AI. It is therefore appropriate to introduce that exchange with a summary of its concluding insights rather than reporting on the progressive development of those arguments — necessarily of secondary interest, and only to some. That experimental detail (following earlier exercises) is however potentially of further relevance to any appreciation of the future role of AI in the reconfiguration of challenges otherwise perceived to be intractable — and for which the conventional organization of human expertise into “information silos” is ill-adapted, in contrast to the remarkable AI ability to navigate between the many domains on which it has been trained (Mathematical Modelling of Silo Thinking in Interdisciplinary Contexts, 2024).

As explored in the exchange, humanity could now be said to suffer from a “memory problem” that manifests across multiple dimensions, as previously described (Societal Learning and the Erosion of Collective Memory, 1980):

• disciplinary silos prevent insights from one domain informing another, ensuring that wisdom hard-won in psychology remains unavailable to geopolitics, that mathematical structures with cognitive implications gather dust in specialist journals;
• historical amnesia guarantees that each generation re-encounters catastrophes their predecessors navigated, minus the navigation charts;
• complexity aversion privileges simple narratives over the pattern recognition that might reveal how insights recur across 36-fold and 64-fold systems;
• diminishing attention spans foreclose the sustained inquiry through which questions could be held rather than prematurely collapsed into answers;
• information deluge paradoxically produces mnemonic poverty — more data, less memorable structure;
• temporal compression creates an eternal present drained of depth, where “now” becomes a point rather than a toroidal hole through which past and future circulate;
• question fatigue defaults to answer-consumption while the questioning arts atrophy.

These deficits compound. Without cross-domain pattern recognition, it becomes difficult to recognize how catastrophes faced may resemble those already survived. Without mnemonic structures, adequate complexity cannot be held such as to recognize the resemblance. Without sustained attention, the structures cannot be learned; without learning from history, it is simply repeated — but with less capacity to remember that it is being repeated. These suggest the need for cognitive holding patterns adequate to the complexity: geometric frameworks that can bind disparate insights, sustain questioning without premature closure, and offer the memorable architecture through which civilizational learning might actually accumulate.

The conclusions endeavour to relate the cognitive dynamics of selfing and othering — most evident in the individual, especially in courtship, romance and domestic abuse — to their increasingly problematic collective manifestation. As with that earlier exercise, the conventional reliance on a “Western” framing is challenged here by “Eastern” articulations (Susantha Goonatilake, Non-Western Science: mining civilizational knowledge. Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems — EOLSS). This is exemplified by speculatively considering selfing and othering as “yanging” and “yinning” respectively.

Given the detail evoked in the exchange recorded in what follows — and the quest for enhanced comprehensibility — the summaries presented initially (accompanied by the generated visualizations) highlight the dynamics of selfing and othering, the requisite dimensionality for its appropriate comprehension, and the adaptation of those dynamics to sustainable development. Whilst these summaries could be understood as extended “abstracts”, the details thereafter need only be optionally explored as “footnotes” (which could be edited otherwise for some purposes, or omitted

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