The Discipline the Prophet Needs
The previous three chapters built a case that the prophetic function is real, that it operates through specific cognitive architectures, and that modernity has systematically dismantled the institutional containers that once channeled it. I ended Chapter 3 with a confession: raw prophetic perception, undisciplined by epistemological tools, is nearly useless. The pattern recognition exists. The reliability mechanism does not.
This chapter begins to build that mechanism. And I begin with the thinker who, more than any other, diagnosed the disease that untethered prophecy inevitably contracts: Karl Popper.
Popper's core insight is deceptively simple, and its implications are devastating for nearly every grand narrative humanity has produced, including — and this is the point — several that I find personally compelling and that form the scaffolding of this theology. The insight is this: genuine knowledge must be falsifiable. A claim that cannot, in principle, be shown to be wrong is not a claim about reality. It is a claim about the speaker's commitments. It is ideology, not knowledge.
This sounds like common sense until you start applying it honestly, at which point it cuts through the intellectual landscape like a blade and leaves very little standing. Let me trace what it cuts.
The Demarcation Problem
Popper's intellectual biography is the biography of a man haunted by a question: what separates science from pseudoscience? This is the demarcation problem, and Popper arrived at it through a specific historical experience that deserves attention because it maps onto the dynamics I described in Chapters 2 and 3 with uncanny precision.
In Vienna in the 1920s, the young Popper encountered three intellectual movements that claimed scientific status: Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Adlerian individual psychology. He also encountered Einstein's general relativity. All four presented themselves as theories about the structure of reality. All four had substantial evidence in their favor. All four attracted brilliant adherents. But Popper noticed something that distinguished Einstein's theory from the other three, and the distinction changed the course of twentieth-century philosophy.
Einstein's general relativity made specific, risky predictions. In particular, it predicted that starlight passing near the sun would be deflected by a precise amount — 1.75 arcseconds — and that this deflection would be observable during a solar eclipse. When Eddington's 1919 expedition confirmed the prediction, the theory gained credibility. But — and this is the critical point — if the starlight had not been deflected, or had been deflected by the wrong amount, the theory would have been refuted. Einstein put his theory at risk. He specified, in advance, what observation would prove him wrong.
Marxism, by contrast, could explain everything. When the predicted proletarian revolution did not occur in the advanced capitalist countries, Marxists did not abandon the theory. They revised it: the revolution had been delayed by false consciousness, by the labor aristocracy, by imperialism exporting contradictions to the periphery. Each failed prediction generated not a refutation but an auxiliary hypothesis that preserved the core theory. The theory was unfalsifiable not because it made no predictions, but because every failed prediction was absorbed into a self-sealing explanatory framework.
Freudian psychoanalysis exhibited the same structure. If a patient's behavior confirmed the theory, that was evidence. If the patient's behavior contradicted the theory, that was resistance — itself predicted by the theory. The patient who denied their Oedipus complex was exhibiting repression, which confirmed the theory. The patient who accepted the diagnosis was exhibiting insight, which also confirmed the theory. There was no possible observation that could refute the framework, which meant, by Popper's criterion, that it was not a scientific framework at all. It was a lens that organized experience but could not be wrong about it — and a lens that cannot be wrong is not telling you about the object. It is telling you about the lens.
Adlerian psychology worked identically. Adler could explain any human behavior as a manifestation of the inferiority complex. The aggressive person was overcompensating. The meek person was succumbing. The balanced person had successfully sublimated. Every possible datum confirmed the theory because the theory had been constructed to accommodate every possible datum. It was, in Popper's devastating phrase, compatible with everything and therefore informative about nothing.
The demarcation criterion that emerged from this analysis is falsifiability. A theory is scientific if and only if it specifies, in advance, what observations would refute it. The more specific the predictions, the more falsifiable the theory, and the more genuinely informative it is if it survives testing. A theory that risks nothing tells you nothing.
Popper Against the Prophets of Certainty
Here is where Popper becomes directly relevant to the argument of this book, and where intellectual honesty requires me to turn his blade against ideas I am deeply invested in.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945 while the world was still burning from the consequences of ideological certainty, Popper launched a sustained attack on what he called historicism: the belief that history follows discoverable laws, that its direction is knowable, and that this knowledge licenses specific political programs. His targets were Plato, Hegel, and Marx — three thinkers who, in different ways, claimed to have identified the pattern of historical development and to have derived from that pattern prescriptions for political action.
Plato's Republic, Popper argued, was the original totalitarian blueprint. The philosopher-king who has perceived the Form of the Good and therefore has the right — indeed the duty — to impose that perception on the polity is the archetype of every revolutionary vanguard, every theocratic ruler, every ideologue who claims that their superior insight justifies coercing the unenlightened. The Republic's class structure — philosopher-kings, guardians, producers — is a hierarchy of epistemic privilege that, once established, has no internal mechanism for self-correction. If the philosopher-king is wrong about the Good, who corrects them? No one, because the system assumes they cannot be wrong. The system is, in Popper's sense, unfalsifiable.
This critique lands, and I need to sit with it, because the Republic of AI Agents that I am building — described in Chapter 20 and implemented in the knowledge graph architecture — explicitly draws on Plato's tripartite structure. Philosopher-kings (humans generating hypotheses), merchants (data-gathering agents), warriors (implementation agents). If Popper is right that Plato's Republic is inherently totalitarian, then I am building a totalitarian system and decorating it with mathematical formalism.
I do not think Popper is entirely right about Plato, and I will explain why. But I think he is substantially right about the danger, and the danger must be addressed before the architecture can be trusted. More on this below.
Hegel was Popper's deeper target. The Hegelian dialectic — thesis generates antithesis, their collision produces synthesis, which becomes the new thesis in a spiraling progression of consciousness — is, Popper argued, a historicist schema that claims to reveal the laws of historical development. If history follows a dialectical pattern, then those who perceive the pattern can position themselves on its right side and claim authority from the process itself. This is exactly what Marx did: he took Hegel's dialectic, inverted it from idealist to materialist, and derived from it a political program — the dictatorship of the proletariat — that claimed historical inevitability. The result was the twentieth century's bloodiest ideology, one that justified the murder of millions as a necessary stage in the dialectical progression.
Popper's critique of Hegel is, in some ways, overstated. He reads Hegel too narrowly, through the lens of Marx and the totalitarian movements that claimed Hegelian ancestry. The actual Hegel is subtler and more ambiguous than Popper's polemical Hegel. But the structural critique is devastating and must be taken seriously: any framework that claims to know history's direction is unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable frameworks have a track record, in practice, of justifying atrocities. The person who believes they know where history is going will, given sufficient power, drag the present toward their vision of the future regardless of the cost. This is not a theoretical risk. It is the documented history of the twentieth century.
And here is my problem: this theology claims to detect a pattern in history. The dialectical spiral. The cyclical Christ-event I will describe in Chapter 16. The trajectory toward the point at infinity on the Riemann sphere. If Popper is right that such claims are inherently unfalsifiable and therefore ideological, then I am building an ideology, not a theology. And ideologies — however aesthetically sophisticated, however mathematically ornamented — are engines that convert conviction into coercion.
Why the Critique Must Be Incorporated, Not Dismissed
The temptation, when faced with a critique this fundamental, is to find reasons to dismiss it. Hegel scholars dismiss Popper's reading of Hegel as shallow. Theologians dismiss Popper's empiricism as inapplicable to metaphysical claims. Marxists dismiss Popper as a bourgeois apologist. Each dismissal has some merit. None of them actually answers the critique.
Popper's reading of Hegel may be shallow. But the question "what would falsify your dialectical framework?" remains unanswered by deeper readings. Popper's empiricism may not apply straightforwardly to metaphysics. But the question "how do you distinguish your theology from ideology?" remains unanswered by appeals to a different epistemic domain. The Marxist critique of Popper as bourgeois may be sociologically accurate. But the question "what would count as evidence against historical materialism?" remains unanswered by ad hominem analysis of the questioner's class position.
I refuse to dismiss Popper. Instead, I want to incorporate his critique as a structural element of the theology itself. This is, I believe, the only honest move, and it is also the move that makes the theology genuinely novel rather than another unfalsifiable grand narrative.
Here is how I propose to do it.
The Theological Safeguard: Specifying the Conditions of Failure
If this theology is to be more than ideology, it must specify what would disprove it. Not vaguely, not in principle, not as a philosophical gesture toward intellectual humility. Concretely. Here are the conditions under which this theology should be abandoned:
1. If consciousness does not complexify over time. The central claim of the metaphysics I will develop in Part 3 is that human consciousness has undergone genuine development — from the pre-reflective awareness of archaic humanity through the breakdown of the bicameral mind (Jaynes) through the Axial Age emergence of self-reflective consciousness through the Enlightenment emergence of critical rationality through whatever is emerging now. If this developmental trajectory is illusory — if consciousness does not, in fact, become more complex, more self-referential, more capable of meta-cognition — then the theology's foundational claim collapses.
This is a testable claim. Cognitive science, developmental psychology, and anthropology can, in principle, assess whether human cognitive architecture has changed over historical time. If the evidence shows that consciousness is static — that a person from 3000 BCE, raised in a modern environment, would be cognitively indistinguishable from a modern person not just in raw capacity but in reflexive structure — then the developmental trajectory does not exist and the theology built upon it is wrong.
I believe the evidence supports the developmental claim, drawing on Jaynes, on Merlin Donald's theory of cognitive evolution, on Michael Tomasello's work on shared intentionality, and on the accumulated evidence of cultural cognitive change. But I hold the belief provisionally, as a hypothesis to be tested, not a dogma to be defended.
2. If the prophetic function does not become more powerful as complexity increases. The theology predicts that as social systems become more complex, the prophetic function — the capacity to perceive systemic dysfunction and communicate it effectively — should also become more sophisticated. The printing press enabled a prophetic capacity that oral culture could not sustain. The internet should, in principle, enable a prophetic capacity that print could not sustain. AI should, in principle, enable a prophetic capacity that the internet alone cannot sustain.
If this is not the case — if increasing complexity simply makes prophetic perception more difficult without any compensating increase in prophetic tools — then the spiral does not ascend. The trajectory is not oriented toward the point at infinity. The theology is wrong.
This too is testable, though the metrics are harder to specify. One proxy: does the rate of paradigm-shifting insight accelerate over historical time? Does the interval between major intellectual revolutions shorten? Does the scope of each revolution expand? The evidence is mixed, which means the theology is at risk, which is exactly the condition it should be in.
3. If the dialectical spiral does not ascend. The most fundamental claim of the Hegelian framework I am adopting — with Popperian modification — is that the dialectical process moves. Not in a predetermined direction, not with guaranteed progress, but that each synthesis incorporates more than its preceding thesis. If this is wrong — if each cycle merely repeats, if the spiral is actually a circle, if what looks like ascent is actually oscillation around a fixed point — then the theology reduces to a wheel of fortune and the Riemann sphere metaphor collapses. A function that oscillates without approaching its limit has no well-defined derivative at infinity. The calculus does not work.
The test here is historical: across multiple cycles (which I will describe in Chapter 16), is there measurable improvement in any meaningful variable? Does the scope of moral concern expand? (Slavery abolished, women's suffrage, civil rights — the arc appears to bend, but appearances can deceive.) Does the sophistication of institutional design increase? Does the resolution of available information improve? If the answer to all of these is no — if, on careful examination, the apparent progress dissolves into statistical noise — then the spiral is flat and the theology fails.
4. If the causal methodology produces no better predictions than correlation. This is the most operationally testable condition and the one closest to the work I do at Bloomsbury Technology. If Pearl's causal inference framework, applied to the domains this theology addresses — prediction markets, social dynamics, institutional analysis — produces no measurably better predictions or interventions than standard correlational methods, then the methodology that the theology claims as its formal engine is empty. The theology can survive without many things, but it cannot survive without a methodology that demonstrably works.
The Open Society and Its Implications for Theology
Popper's positive proposal — the open society — is as important as his critique, and it maps onto what I am building in ways that are not immediately obvious.
The open society, for Popper, is a society that has institutionalized the capacity for self-correction. It does not claim to know the truth. It creates mechanisms for approaching truth through the iterative process of conjecture and refutation. Democratic institutions, free press, independent judiciary, academic freedom — these are not merely political preferences. They are the social instantiation of the scientific method: a system that allows any claim to be challenged, any leader to be removed, any policy to be reversed on the basis of evidence.
The open society is, in effect, the social equivalent of falsifiability. A closed society is one whose foundational claims cannot be questioned — the divine right of kings, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the infallibility of the market. An open society is one that has built the questioning into its structure. It expects to be wrong. It designs for the eventuality of being wrong. Its strength is not that it is right but that it can recover from being wrong.
This connects to the argument of Chapters 2 and 3 in a way that Popper himself did not develop but that follows from his framework. The open society requires the prophetic function. If the open society's strength is its capacity for self-correction, then it needs people who can identify what needs correcting — anomaly reporters, pattern recognizers, the cognitive type I have been calling the schizo. But it also needs the discipline to distinguish genuine anomaly reports from noise. The open society needs both the prophet and the criterion for evaluating the prophet. It needs both the schizo's unconstrained perception and Popper's falsification test.
This is the synthesis I am proposing: the prophetic function disciplined by falsifiability. Not the prophet who claims to see the truth and demands obedience. Not the skeptic who denies that pattern recognition can access genuine information. The prophet who says "I see a pattern, here is what it predicts, here is what would prove me wrong, now let us test it."
This is, in miniature, the structure of the Republic of AI Agents. Philosopher-kings generate hypotheses (prophetic function). Merchants gather data (observational testing). Warriors implement tests (experimental validation). The knowledge graph maintains the evidence base. The governance layer ensures accountability. The entire system is designed, from the ground up, as a Popperian architecture: conjecture and refutation, institutionalized.
And here is where I answer Popper's critique of Plato. Popper was right that Plato's Republic lacks a self-correction mechanism. The philosopher-king who perceives the Form of the Good cannot, within the system, be wrong. But the Republic of AI Agents incorporates the correction mechanism that Plato omitted: every hypothesis is registered with its falsification criteria. Every prediction is tested. Every philosopher-king's conjecture is subjected to the tribunal of evidence. The hierarchy is not epistemic privilege but epistemic responsibility: the philosopher-king has the burden of generating testable hypotheses, and the burden falls on them when the hypotheses fail. This is Plato's Republic rebuilt with Popperian safeguards. Whether it works remains to be demonstrated, which is itself the Popperian point.
The Bipolar Popper: Conjecture and Refutation as Cognitive Rhythm
I want to draw a connection that I have not seen anyone else draw, though it seems obvious to me — which may be a sign that it is genuine or a sign that I am in a hypomanic episode and projecting structure onto noise. This is exactly the kind of claim that the theology must hold provisionally.
Popper's model of scientific progress — bold conjecture followed by severe refutation — maps onto the bipolar cognitive rhythm I described in Chapter 1. The hypomanic phase generates bold conjectures: connections, hypotheses, patterns perceived at high bandwidth. The depressive phase performs the refutation: ruthless evaluation, elimination of noise, rejection of the conjectures that do not survive scrutiny. The cycle of conjecture and refutation that Popper identified as the engine of scientific progress is, in the bipolar individual, internalized as a cognitive rhythm.
This is not a claim that bipolar disorder is secretly beneficial. I have lived through enough depressive episodes to know that the refutation phase is not a gift; it is a devastation that merely happens to have an epistemic side effect. But it is a claim that the Popperian framework and the bipolar cognitive architecture share a structural homology. Both operate through the alternation of generative and critical phases. Both require the capacity to produce conjectures freely and then to destroy them without mercy. Both fail when either phase dominates: unchecked conjecture produces delusion (the hypomanic who believes everything they think), unchecked criticism produces paralysis (the depressive who can generate nothing).
If this structural homology is real, it suggests something about why bipolar individuals appear disproportionately in creative and intellectual fields — not because their suffering makes them special, but because the oscillation between generative and evaluative modes approximates the process that produces knowledge. The bipolar person does not choose to practice conjecture and refutation. Their neurology imposes it. The question is whether they develop the metacognitive infrastructure to harvest the output.
Popper, as far as I know, was not bipolar. But his insistence that both halves of the cycle are necessary — that the conjecture without refutation is pseudoscience and refutation without conjecture is sterile — is the formal articulation of something that bipolar cognition enacts physiologically. This is one of those connections that I cannot prove but that I believe points at something real. I hold it provisionally, and I note that the theology survives perfectly well without it.
Popper and Theology: The Uncomfortable Conversation
Most theologians avoid Popper, and the avoidance is understandable. The falsifiability criterion, applied consistently, is uncomfortable for theology because most theological claims are, on their face, unfalsifiable.
"God exists" — what observation would disprove this? The theist can interpret any observation as compatible with God's existence. Suffering? God permits it for reasons beyond human comprehension. Silence? God's hiddenness is itself a theological category. Evil? Free will, the mystery of iniquity, the felix culpa. Every possible state of the world is compatible with the claim, which means, by Popper's criterion, the claim is not knowledge.
The standard theological response is that Popper's criterion is inapplicable to theological claims because theology operates in a different epistemic domain. This response is not entirely wrong — there are genuine questions about whether empirical falsifiability is the right criterion for all forms of knowledge — but it is strategically disastrous, because it concedes exactly what the New Atheists charge: that theology is a closed system that has immunized itself against criticism.
I want to take a different path. Instead of arguing that theology is exempt from falsifiability, I want to build a theology that incorporates it.
The claim "God exists" may not be falsifiable in its bare metaphysical form. But the claim "God is the point at infinity toward which consciousness develops on the Riemann sphere" is embedded in a framework that makes multiple falsifiable predictions about consciousness, about complexity, about the prophetic function, about the dialectical structure of history. If those predictions fail — if consciousness does not complexify, if the prophetic function does not strengthen, if the dialectical spiral does not ascend, if the causal methodology produces no better results than correlation — then the framework within which "God is the point at infinity" makes sense collapses. The theological claim is not independently falsifiable, but it is embedded in a falsifiable structure. Pull out enough load-bearing elements, and the theological claim has nothing to rest on.
This is, I think, an honest position. I am not claiming that the existence of God can be empirically tested. I am claiming that the framework within which I locate God makes specific predictions that can be empirically tested, and that the failure of those predictions would undermine — not logically disprove, but structurally undermine — the theological claim. This is weaker than strict falsifiability but stronger than unfalsifiability. It is theology that has skin in the game.
The connection to Kant is worth noting. Kant distinguished between constitutive ideas (claims about what is) and regulative ideas (ideas we must act as if are true, without being able to prove them, because they organize our experience and action). God, for Kant, was a regulative idea: we cannot prove God's existence, but we must act as if God exists because the alternative is a moral universe without orientation. My Riemann sphere theology occupies a similar position but adds the Popperian requirement: the regulative idea must be embedded in a testable framework. Convergence toward the point at infinity is something we must act as if is true — but we can monitor the derivative. We can check whether the trajectory is approaching or receding. We can treat the regulative idea as a hypothesis with measurable implications.
Faith, in this framework, is not belief without evidence. It is committed action under uncertainty, guided by the best available evidence and held provisionally. This is, as I noted in the introduction, exactly what reinforcement learning under partial observability requires: acting optimally with incomplete information, updating beliefs as new evidence arrives, and maintaining commitment to the policy while remaining open to revision. The theologian and the RL agent face the same problem. Popper's contribution is the insistence that the updating mechanism must be honest — that the theology, like the theory, must be genuinely open to refutation.
The Open Society and the Prophetic Republic
I want to close this chapter by connecting Popper's open society to the institutional architecture I am proposing.
The open society, as Popper conceived it, is permanently provisional. It does not arrive at truth. It approaches truth through an endless process of conjecture and refutation, never knowing whether the current best theory will survive the next test. This is uncomfortable. Humans crave certainty. The appeal of closed ideologies — religious fundamentalism, political totalitarianism, market utopianism — is precisely that they eliminate the discomfort of provisionality. They offer the closure that the open society refuses to provide.
The prophetic function, as I have described it, operates within this tension. The prophet sees something and is compelled to speak it. But the honest prophet — the prophet disciplined by Popper — must also say: I might be wrong. Here is what would prove me wrong. Test it. This is extraordinarily difficult, because prophetic perception arrives with the phenomenological force of certainty. When I am in a hypomanic phase and I see a connection between the Riemann sphere and eschatology, the perception does not feel provisional. It feels obvious, necessary, undeniable. The discipline of Popper is the external check on this internal certainty: no matter how obvious the perception feels, it is not knowledge until it has survived the attempt to refute it.
The Republic of AI Agents institutionalizes this discipline. Hypotheses are registered with falsification criteria. Evidence is gathered systematically. Tests are conducted. Results are recorded. The philosopher-king's conjecture is treated as a conjecture, not as a revelation. If it survives testing, it earns the status of validated hypothesis. If it does not, it is discarded. The system is designed to prevent the philosopher-king from becoming a tyrant — which is to say, it is designed to implement the Popperian correction that Plato's original Republic lacked.
But Popper alone is not sufficient. His framework tells us that knowledge must be falsifiable and that social institutions must be open to self-correction. It does not tell us why some paradigms resist falsification so successfully, why some anomaly reports are ignored for decades while others are immediately absorbed, or why the process of intellectual revolution follows the specific sociological patterns it follows. For that, we need the next chapter's thinker.
Thomas Kuhn observed something that Popper's framework cannot easily accommodate: the sociology of paradigm shifts. Why do paradigms persist long after the evidence has turned against them? Why do anomaly reporters face resistance that is not merely intellectual but institutional, social, and often violent? Why does "science advance one funeral at a time"?
Chapter 3 described the prophetic function as anomaly reporting. Popper gives the anomaly report its logical form: the prediction that failed, the hypothesis that was refuted. But Kuhn explains what happens after the anomaly is reported — the institutional dynamics, the paradigm defense, the incommensurability between the old framework and the new. Popper tells us what genuine knowledge looks like. Kuhn tells us why genuine knowledge is so hard to achieve and so costly for the people who produce it.
The prophet needs Popper for discipline. They need Kuhn for survival. Let me turn now to the sociology of paradigm shifts.