A very nice version of the Sussex Carol follows an excellent syncopated instrumental version of Christmas Day in the Morning; from a folk band called Magpie Lane; after a narrow ginnel off the High Street in Oxford, where they live. More of their music can be found here.
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The first performance of Sussex carol I heard was broadcast live (and rough and ready) on radio from The Etchingham Steam Band - with vocals including the first lady of Sussex folk music - Shirley Collins.
Nearly everybody nowadays (except young children, and maybe some residual tribal people) believes that the universe was originally unalive, and most of it is still unalive.
And this is a shared assumption among mainstream modern materialists, and all of the major Western religions.
The assumption that there was a time when the universe was just physics, biology came along much later - and consciousness later still.
The addition of God doesn't make all that much difference; because God is supposed to have created unalive physics first, then plants then animals; and only to have added conscious humans at the end of the process...
So that the unalive world of physics is still asserted to be the first and predominant reality.
Modern people - religious and atheistic - conceptualize themselves as islands of life (plus or minus consciousness) in a vast ocean of unlife.
This unlife-assumption is one of the iron chains that unbreakably binds modern Man's soul to the ideology of atheistic materialism. Because the assumed possibility - and even worse predominance - of unlife, negates the divine in ways that are crippling.
For instance, the unlife-assumption renders the individual here-and-now powerless whenever that individual lacks the material power to change the unalive environment.
the sheer mass of the unalive seems to be a colossal inertia, such that (with such a picture of reality in our minds) it feels like an individual spirit cannot overcome that mass.
If the physics world of the unalive is given temporal priority and spatial predominance (i.e. the unalive came first and comprises most of reality); then the spiritual is thereby rendered secondary in importance and minority on influence.
These assumptions make it very hard to believe, to convince ourselves, that the spiritual in me (e.g. here and now); can really affect the vast ocean of unlife in which I am supposed to be dwelling.
Little me thinking versus All That Stuff... How can "I" possibly make a significant difference?
It is so hard to believe, because it is so hard to understand - we can't make sense of it, with such a world-model we can't think of a plausible mechanism of action.
Thus, the context of a prior and predominant unalive universe; makes it very hard to grasp how "the individual spirit", - for example my own current conscious aspirations and commitments - really can and does make an ultimate difference to reality-as-a-whole...
Yet surely that is what Jesus taught as the truth? That what you or I think or want, here and now, can make an eternal and universal difference?
It seems to me that we need to drop the assumption of an unalive universe, and to return to that assumption with which we entered the world; the assumption of all reality being alive and conscious (to various degrees).
We need, therefore, to discard the "physics, biology, humanity" sequence of creation - whether that model comes from from the Old Testament, or from "science".
If we can then (and it is difficult indeed! Or, at least, I find it so) develop the original and true habit of regarding reality as alive, conscious, purposive etc - then Theism and Christianity begin to make understandable sense, we can grasp how the assertions may actually "work".
If we can recognize and discard the unlife assumption; can re-learn to think of everything as alive; and thereby relegate physics to the realm of more, or less, expedient models, but never "real-reality"...
Then I think we will find that claims and promises of Christianity can make a kind of obvious, "common sense".
After which clarity and grasp of understanding is attained; salvation becomes a simple matter of whether or not we personally want what Jesus offers.
Note: The above is a different and somewhat novel way of describing the "metaphysics of beings" that I have been propounding on this blog and elsewhere, for the past several years.)
We need to be sufficiently sure of our bottom-line convictions that they will serve strongly to fuel our personal motivation - so that we have the clarity and courage to aim at good; and to discern and navigate through life.
But we modern people, in this modern world, find it very hard to believe in - anything!
At least, we moderns don't believe in stuff strongly enough that we can be truly free, and choose God and divine creation, and have the courage to stick with this --- in the face of a world that continually subverts, ridicules, suppresses, persecutes... and even inverts such intentions.
We need true beliefs - i.e. beliefs that reflect reality (divine reality); and we also need to be subjectively sure about these beliefs in order that they can be positively motivating.
So how can we discover, and become sufficiently-convinced, by such things?
The short answer is "intuition" - but I need to explain what I mean by intuition.
For this I will here use the example of my earlier life as a scientist.
When I began learning science, in the "early" phase; it was learning "about" science; and I learned it in just the same way that we learn most other things about this world: we are told it we absorb it in terms of the assumptions that lie behind the functioning of our world.
And we generally believe what we are told, especially when it comes from socially-defined authority figures.
But such "early" learning is superficial and passive - and such beliefs are not strongly held, not least because they have never really been understood, and we have never invested anything very personal into them.
Consequently, these early beliefs concerning science were easily revised, modified, even reversed - when some "higher" authority said so.
So: this early kind of passive and external belief about science was only very weakly inwardly motivating, and was unstable.
The same applies to all such beliefs - and this accounts for almost all proclaimed political, social and religious beliefs. They are shallow, impersonal - and very easily redirected or reversed by a change in what "authorities" are currently-saying.
When I became a professional scientist, and began to do research; I entered an intermediate phase. I soon became much more discerning about what I believed, and more active in choosing who I would personally regard as authorities.
My own understanding became deeper; albeit in externally derived terms.
The doing of science became much more selective - but what I selected-from, and the criteria for regarding something as true; was something I assembled from that selective sample of what "authorities" stated.
I was not doing original or creative work in science; rather I was trying to be more professional, more discerning, and to do my work at a higher level than others.
At this intermediate level; the work I was doing was not really anything to do with "reality" - rather it was dictated by the scientific literature - and was a matter of filling in gaps, extrapolating from what had already been done - and refuting pieces of established science that were (I believed) refuted by better authorities.
It could be said I had "faith" in science as a process, as a social activity. This is analogous to most Christians "faith" in their church.
I changed my mind less often than in the early phase, because I was more motivated - but this motivation was very much bound-up with and shaped-by the professional scientific environment - which was regarded as the ultimate arbiter.
So, at this intermediate level; science was what the best scientists were saying (or had said) - and the intent was to become one of these "best" - and this was determined by the higher professional structures.
Such a vision of science is this-worldly, and its standards and motivations are of this-world - even if rather idealized within this-world.
The motivations are stronger, because of the personal investment in the process; but the motivation is still ultimately external - and when the external consensus of those I regarded as "best" scientists changed, then so would my own purposes and motivations.
I could (I hoped!) stand in a select company which I had partially chosen to ally-with; but I could not stand alone.
The highest level of science was concerned by transcendental ideals that looked beyond the scientific milieu; ideals to do with reality (not just the relevant scientific literature) and truth (not just professional standards.
At this highest level I was compelled to take personal responsibility for my beliefs; and might therefore need to "stand alone" when I thought that "the external world of science" (even of the best scientists, and by my evaluation) was wrong and misguided.
For these evaluations to become beliefs that were strong enough to motivate; I needed to have criteria for conviction that went beyond my interpretations of the external world of the professional scientific literature.
At this point, as may be clear, I had actually moved outside of the professional system of science.
I had come to recognize that science had its assumptions that were not really true; that it was a matter of models not reality; and that for science to be true and real, required that science be understood in terms of ultimate reality...
Which included God and divine creation, and myself as having some personal significance in this.
This was the point at which I developed sufficiently strong a personal motivation that I could, where I regarded it as necessary, maintain my convictions and direction without support from other scientists.
I was, in other words, innerly-motivated, and also (consequently) more strongly motivated.
This stronger inner motivation came from a different quality of conviction concerning what was true.
At the early and intermediate levels of science; I was dependent on external authority as expressed in external communications and externally-validated interpretations of these communications - i.e. my belief (hence motivation) was rooted the observations and theories to be found in some selective sample of the scientific literature...
To reiterate - this understands science as communications that are externally derived and externally validated.
At both early and intermediate levels; my convictions could be no different-from, deeper-than, or more-solid-than these external factors.
And when these external factors vacillated, or even apparently reversed - then there was no alternative but for me to revise my convictions.
This situation is demotivating! - especially when, by criteria external to science (and to do with truth and reality) science is being corrupted, as was very obviously the case.
(Science began explicitly to serve the needs of bureaucracy, careerism, politics etc. I could not fool myself other than that this really was corruption!)
For me to have a personal conviction and motivation in science; I needed to have an inner sense of truth and reality; what is more this inner sense needed to be direct, not a communication; needed to be self-interpreting - not dependent on observations and theories.
In other words "intuition".
Actually, I have put matters the word way around; because it was only after I had recognized that intuition was and ought to be the root of science, that I moved to the higher level.
What happened was that I would be thinking about something, working on something; when I realized that "this was it".
From the stream of superficial thinking and doing, there sometimes emerged, there was discovered, a solid sense of conviction and surety; a "this is it".
After a while, the intuition of "this is it" became the final validator of my work - unless I got it, and unless the sense of this-is-it was solid enough to survive repeated consultations; then I was not convinced.
Lacking such an intuition; I remained unsure.
I knew that "more work was needed".
But with this intuition, and so long as it lasted and was operative - I was highly motivated, and could withstand any amount of external contradiction.
To generalize from this specific experience; when we regard the external world as corrupt, and increasingly taking the side of evil; then unless we are to be drawn-into that; we need to move "above" considerations of the external, the communicated.
We need, I think, to operate from the kind of deep intuition I eventually found in doing science...
Because only this intuition can be the basis for us to be free and positively-motivated by something outwith "society" that is both solid and potentially real.
I remember the answer to this question from personal experience, from remembering my earlier self.
Modern people are indifferent to eternal life because it is pictured as "more of the same - but forever"...
As nothing more than a continuation of this-life, as it actually is experienced by modern people...
Which life is purposeless, meaningless; and ultimately isolated and disengaged.
Why, asks a modern Man, would it be regarded as good thing, eternally to continue a meaningless and purposeless existence?
In other words, when my personal Life is already pre-assumed to be something that Just Happened as a culmination of science and randomness...
When my life exists against a backdrop of "the universe is dead and going-nowhere and I am a brief-insignificant nothing within this vastness of time and space".
This is the official conviction of our civilization - taught from the highest to lowest levels, by those with greatest status and conferred authority.
And it forms the functional basis of all public and "objective" explanations and justifications from the major social institutions (politics, law, military, police, mass media, economics, science, medicine, arts, education etc, and also the churches).
When human life is regarded as as thus futile; its continuation forever seems to most people like a prospect that would be more of a torment than a thing to be desired.
In such a context, the core promise of Christianity has lost its appeal to the extent that most people think that - even if resurrected individual life beyond death could somehow be proved to be a real and genuine possibility - they wouldn't want it!
And would prefer the (supposed) assurance of a swift and painless death (i.e. euthanasia) followed by utter annihilation of consciousness.
Such is the depth of our modern sickness of soul.
Too deep to be touched by evangelism or apologetics - too deep to be touched even by the devout practice of any strict church Christianity.
Because the modern belief in purposelessness, and meaninglessness, and ultimate personal insignificance - is larger and more profound than our professed religions.
Until we - as individuals - are able to build our religion on a foundation of ultimate reality having a direction, personal meaning, individual significance that we can choose from ourselves; then we shall not escape the vortex of modernity.
Peoples' understanding of the world around them is substantially a matter of their explanatory models - to the point that experience and observations are essentially ignored.
For example, there is a model for how "democracy" works; then there is what actually happens. And people continue, decade after decade, to believe in the theory rather than their observations and experiences of what actually happens.
Same with laws and regulations: there is a model of what these are supposed to be aiming at, and are observations concerning how the law/rule is actually deployed in practice - which may be very different indeed, and yet the law/rule continues (usually successfully!) to be defended on the basis of the theoretical model.
Likewise with technology: there is the explanatory model of how some bit of technology is supposed to work - and then there are our observations about what it actually does... From which may sometimes be inferred that the bit-of-kit is not, and never was - and never could, be working in the manner of the model. "AI" is a topical instance of this.
Another example from medicine, is that once a drug has been marketed as an "anti-depressant", then people (doctors as well as patients) cannot seem grasp that drug's thus classified can and do cause depression (and suicide) in some patients.
The consequences of the Birdemic lockdowns and peck were another example of the same phenomenon - most people believed that theory that these "would help"; and apparently could not grasp that they would inevitably cause harm - even if they also helped (which, in the event, they did not).
But these are just specific examples: this way of thinking permeates our lives right down to the deepest levels. Consider ideologies such as feminism: people still talk about feminism as if it was 1880, and this was a new theory that "must work" and is intrinsically A Good Thing. A century and a half of actual personal experiences makes no apparent difference. (The same applies by close analogy to socialism or racism.)
Religions are the same as ideology in this respect. Once a model-of-realty of a religion is accepted; nothing could ever happen that would necessarily refute it.
And the same applies to people (like the recent New Atheists) who talk about the liberation of mankind from religion as if this was a new, untried theory of human happiness - that must surely work! When in actuality we already live (as did our parent, grandparents and back) in the least religious society in the history of the world, and it is continually getting less religious
We are back at that old favourite theme upon which I repeatedly harp: that metaphysics is prior to science; that theory is prior to experiment etc.
This just is the reality of human existence.
Totalitarian controllers are far more concerned about controlling the theoretical models by which we interpret the world, than they are about controlling specific "information" - because once the models are established, they cannot be refuted by any new information.
Once someone has assumed that there is no God and this is a purposeless and meaningless universe; nothing can ever happen to compel him to recognize the reality of God, purpose or meaning - everything possible can be explained away as random, the product of delusion or fraud - and so forth.
Once somebody has decided that their church is blessed by God and can never be corrupted and will last until the end of time/ Last Judgment - then no amount of corruption or evil done by that church and/or its members will make any difference to the assumption.
The lesson I draw from this is that we should be very careful what we assume!
Because upon our theoretical models of reality depend our experience of reality.
And we can only learn that which is learnable within the context of our assumptions.
Therefore; we ought, as a minimum, to become (as far as possible - which can only be known by sustained trying) explicitly aware of our own assumptions - of those "models" by which we understand and explain reality.
Current attitudes to "AI" are an example of the way that hierarchical power elicits compliance, by psychological methods and the hope of personal benefit.
This is seen in organizations, when management talk about "owning" change.
The desired change (i.e. currently, the implementation of "AI" technologies) is presented as (and may actually be) inevitable.
Therefore the choice presented to those upon whom change is being imposed; is either to suffer the (asserted) humiliation of being compelled kicking-and-screaming into compliance - and thereby having one's helplessness revealed to all and sundry...
Or else "owning" the change; which means accepting its inevitability and adjusting one's own psychology to embrace the valuation that "this change is good!
Or, at least, that the change can be made good...
Or, at least such change can be made good for-me".
The psychological appeal is obvious - instead of being visibly subject to miserable compulsion, one who "owns" the change can pretend to be in control of the process - and happy about it!
And - by pretending the change is good - one can (with a superficially clear conscience!) make the best of it for oneself - in pursuit of money, status, attention, sex... or whatever motivates.
One who "owns" change can "ride the wave" - be a cool surfer! instead of one upon whom the wave crashes.
Indeed, "owning change" is almost wholly to the short-term and this-worldly benefit of those who can perform this psychological act; which is why the process is so common as to be nigh universal.
Owning change is just seen as common sense - making the best of the inevitable...
Pretending to oneself that evil is actually good - until we actually do believe that evil is good...
And surely nobody can be blamed for doing that?
Experience > Knowledge
Reality > Truth
Thinking > Feeling
The above are notations or summaries of what may be chosen as ways of understanding the human condition, including mortal life; on the basis of metaphysical decisions. The intent is that the first term is distinct from and superior to the second - but that the second is usually preferred.
Mots people focus on "knowledge" - including, nowadays, the debased forms of information or even "data". I am suggesting that these are secondary forms, without participation. Knowledge is "about" something, and the tendency is to regard it as abstract and separable from the person who knows.
But I am saying that the only real knowledge is in (or from) the experience of the knower - all knowledge includes the subjective, the knower. Knowledge is not all in the knower, but always includes the knower.
It could be stated that what we "really" known must always be a matter of our experience.
Truth is only a partial view of reality; because reality is what-is, whereas truth is a description of what-is.
This relates to my conviction that the most fundamental philosophy is metaphysics - which is concerned with the nature of basic reality.
Any stated metaphysics (any philosophy) is, of course, secondary and therefore a description of something, not the something itself.
But underneath that ought-to-be a direct experience of reality.
That personal experience should the basis of the knowledge that is metaphysics.
(Against this is the idea that the most fundamental philosophy is epistemology - the philosophy of "knowledge"; which is often focused on asking what are the valid criteria of knowing, or how can knowledge become objective. I regard epistemology as a blind alley. )
Having said that personal experience is primary, and that experience of reality is the basis of that philosophy I aspire to; the question arises as to the nature of that experience.
What kind of experience is sought? Well, here I am suggesting that it is a kind of thinking, rather than a kind of feeling.
Although having said that, the kind of thinking includes feeling... In other words, the ultimate activity is not the sort of mundane "voice in my head" thinking in which most people engage most of the time that they are awake and conscious.
Neither is it intense unthinking feeling; of the kind that most people regard as powerful emotions - the feeling that is driven by some external event or input; and that "overwhelms" us.
Instead I am attempting to describe a feeling-thinking (a feeling-reinforced thinking, perhaps?) attaining its objective of experiencing reality in a direct and primary way independent of words, or pictures.
What I hope to get across is that we should regard conscious and purposive thinking (a particular kind of thinking) as the situation in which we may experience reality directly.
This conviction (which I derived from Rudolf Steiner, with modifications) is very different from many or most religious or spiritual ideas about where and how we may encounter truth; and different too from mainstream scientistic-materialism.
It is neither the subjective and passive revelation or imposition of truth in traditional religions - requring obedience to legitimate church authority...
Nor is it the idea of truth as objective and out-there (something established by experts that we can only passively obey)...
Nor is it the "my truth" subjectivism of new Age affectations - I say affectation because nobody remotely lives up to it, but instead New Agers are relativistic about their spirituality which is regarded in a "lifestyle" way, while being serious and objective about the truths of current-leftist politics (which they regard as mandatory; and opposition to which is the only "evil" they (in practice) recognize and oppose with vehemence.
(A New Ager may be relativistic about which religion is true, or "anything goes" concerning the validity of spiritual practices such as acupuncture, crystals, channelling, meditation etc; but highly objective and very coercive in their opinions about "right wing" politicians, or "fundamentalist Christians" - and what ought to be done with/ about them!)
The idea that we need to experience reality, and that reality may be experienced in thinking; is therefore something qualitatively different from any of the mainstream perspectives. I can only point it out as a possibility. Whether you (or anyone else) chooses to adopt such a point-of-view, is (and can only be) a matter for individual spiritual responsibility. A matter of your ultimate freedom.
The current primary global strategy for replacing people with "AI" programs; amounts to the substitution of a "Magic 8 Ball" for human judgment.
This statement is hardly an exaggeration!
The Magic 8 Ball is actually a yes-no dice* with a verbal output, which is indeed just an elaborated coin-flip.
To set-up the analogy with "AI"; here are three aspects of the Magic 8 Ball mechanism:
1. Functionally; M8B is an obscuration and complication of a simple device for generating positive and negative responses. A child does not realize that the (relative) complexity of operation, functions to confuse the user about what would otherwise be obvious. And the verbal nature of responses (e.g. "As I see it, yes", "Don't count on it") merely provide a more human-like output than would numbers or symbols.
2. The other point of the 8 Ball is that it is supposed to be "magic". In other words; the M8B user has had the idea planted that the ball is (something like) sentient, conscious, has innate wisdom, and even predictive power.
3. Finally; the complexity of the structure enables much more money to be charged for the device; than if it was a die, or a coin.
The analogy between the Magic 8 Ball and the global totalitarian "AI" project is very close:
1. The colossal computational complexity of "AI" obscures that it does not understand anything - any more than does an M8B. And "AI" in its post-November 30th-2022 iteration, has been specifically-engineered to generate pseudo-relevant, human-like verbal outputs.
2. By means of a vast propaganda PSYOP - "AI" has been attributed with "magical" powers of intelligence, wisdom, creativity etc; so that people are inclined to treat its output as having (or very soon about to have) literally superhuman capabilities.
3. Nobody would pay much for dice; but the global establishment have spent many trillions of dollars (of "our" money) in "AI" technologies and its infrastructure (which, functionally, merely amounts to an eight ball on steroids with plastic surgery); of which most has gone into the pockets of pseudo-"investors"; with significant sums spread among their managers, propagandists and minions.
The question arises as to what will happen if or when significant decision making is taken from humans and given to the output of a Giga-Magic Eight Ball?
The answer depends on whether the real decision makers (i.e. the ones who chose to develop the obfuscation in the first place, and who oversee its implementation) take any notice of the "AI" decisions, or just make their own decisions as usual, but pretend that the "AI" was responsible...
This seems the likely intended scenario.
But maybe, instead, many people really will believe their own propaganda (it surely looks like it!); and the M8B will actually, in real life, be used to generate decisions that humans will then obey!
And maybe the leadership class of the world will allow or encourage this to happen - probably from motivations such as spite, sadism and destructive zeal - and will them will "sit back" in their secure and provisioned shelters, cackling at having so grossly fooled so many people; to "enjoy the show" of what eventuates.
In which case civilization will crumble and collapse... and more rapidly than would otherwise be the case.
*Magic 8 Ball is a 20-sided dice suspended in fluid, which is shaken, and then provides ten "Yes" and five "No" themed verbal answers - the other five answers are essentially "roll again". All of which ultimately reduces to a die with only yes/ no responses (in this case; double the proportion of "yes" than "no" answers) which could further be reduced to coin-flips.
Setting-aside arguments about economic necessity (which very seldom hold water*) it is surely a blazingly obvious fact that monetizing of blogs and videos, by whatever means, is corrupting.
We can all see this for ourselves (especially if there is a before and after) - even when the scale of earnings is (presumably) negligible.
Indeed, this is what is striking; that even a small scale blog-video is distorted in predictable ways by monetization - in other words, monetization induces and enforces this-worldly short-termism in service to the mainstream agenda.
The mechanism of corruption is analogous to that which leads to the "convergence" that afflicts all charities in the UK (and I mean All charities) - which is that engagement with The System (in this case the economy) is intrinsically corrupting.
Which means, of course, that we are all (more or less) corrupted by the fact that we all depend on The System for our survival.
That is true. But it is also true that every time we choose to increase our integration with The System, we increase our corruption.
We can negate such spiritual harm if we explicitly acknowledge (to ourselves, in particular) that we have chosen to do what corrupted us because it seemed more expedient (i.e. if we take personal responsibility for our corrupting choice); and acknowledge too that we have actually become more corrupt as a result of our choices.
In other words; we are all sinners and cannot cease from sinning and indeed often choose to sin more and gratuitously.
But what usually happens is that we lie to ourselves; first that we "have to" engage-with and subordinate-to The System in this particular instance; and that "it won't make any difference".
With monetization - it takes the form of justifying that we "deserve" to be paid for the input of our time and effort...
OK; but that means we are selling our time and effort (even when we get very little back from that sale); and we cannot validly then claim that we are writing (or otherwise creating) in pursuit of truth, beauty and virtue.
In sum: as of 2025 (with our national and global totalitarian system) - if you are writing for money then you are, to a significant degree, Writing For Money; writing so as to be more compatible with making money; hence you have chosen to place your writing and its content within the totalitarian system.
One sign of corruption is when the writing engages with the monetization, another when the writing become PR for other system-affiliated activities: selling books or other merchandize, supporting your business; or promoting your-self, your career, your worldly-projects.
All that's fine if you support the evil-motivated actuality and aims of the global totalitarian system.
In that case you presumably want to become more corrupt, and selling your writing (or using your writing to sell) will help with this.
But insofar as you desire to take the side of God, divine creation and the good; then the decision to monetize your writing is one that will surely have adverse consequences on you personally, relative to how you otherwise would have been - and more so insofar as you try to deny this.
To put it the other way around; if you are genuinely serious in your motivation of wanting to align with the divine and enable good via your writing; then you should avoid (insofar as possible) inserting an economic interface between your writing and those who may read it.
In conclusion; I think we have recently reached a point when the old possibility of valid compromises between this-world and the spirit, have broken-down.
Things have come to a point.
We must make choices - one way, or the other.
The choice whether or not to monetize one's writing is only one of these choices; but it is one of these choices.
*If one is writing for money, in order to live; then it should be considered whether money may be got some other way - so as to liberate the writing. There are few less-efficient ways of making money than writing; so that a smaller amount of some other kind of work will nearly-always make money more reliably and efficiently than monetizing the writing. Also; most of the best writers in history have been "amateurs" who made money from some other work than writing; and their best writing was done without expectation of payment (even if that writing later made some, or a lot of, money).
The global Establishment "AI" project began almost exactly three years ago - with the multi-national, multi-pronged, coordinated mega-launch on 30th November 2022.
The "AI" project has, of course - like all such*, tried to capture both of the side of the "debate" - by using some portion of its multi-trillion dollar budget to fund courses, qualifications, conferences, books, and jobs; that purport to discuss the "ethics" of this technology.
Some of these "AI"-employees are techno-utopian apologists for "AI"; while others have the task of scaremongering.
"AI" scaremongering is done in such a way that the realities of this vast totalitarian project are obscured; and the categorically false assertions of "AI" are instead simply being-assumed to be true - by being used as the basis for the scaremongering!
In other words; the discourse variously called "AI ethics" (like the related field of "AI governance") is part of the PSYOPS that attempts (and successfully, it seems) to manipulate the masses into a state of bemused, terrified, passive and resigned acceptance of... whatever bad things "AI" brings.
Some of the "ethicists" base their "concern" on evaluations of what is coming - very soon!
These include assumptions that are smuggled in covertly, because they form the taken-for-granted basis of the ethical hand-wringing:
1. Inevitability
2. Takeover from humans
3. Destruction caused by the technology
The assumption of "inevitability" hides the unimaginable trillions of tax dollars confiscated from the masses to fund the "AI" project - its massive computational infrastructure, the massive energy consumption, the countless reallocated and recruited "AI"-personnel in innumerable organizations...
And to bribe/force compliance upon all the major social institutions and corporations by a vast and coordinated program.
The assumption that "AI" will "takeover" from humans; hides that all actual decisions to (allegedly) "replace" people with computers, are made by humans.
Yet the background-assumption is that this planned takeover of human activities by "AI" technologies will - somehow - happen because of the technologies innate alleged-"power".
Destruction: Software is stated to be the cause of the inevitable (i.e. planned) personal and social damage confidently-predicted to result from the "takeover" of "AI".
This tries to hide that the whole process of "AI"-replacing has been driven and enforced, top to bottom, by people.
And this includes the common appeal to "market forces" and geopolitical competition, that supposedly compel corporations and governments to implement "AI" technology - or else be overwhelmed by those who adopt "AI"...
This assumes what is false: that "AI" really does or soon-will replace humans more efficiently and effectively in significant functional roles.
It also takes no account that the "market" for "AI" has been deliberately and artificially constructed by totalitarian fiat using coercively-confiscated resources.
If the marketplace had instead been orientated towards effectiveness and efficiency in achieving real-world outcomes; then it would not, indeed could not, have led to "AI".
So; the "AI" project serves to conceal and deny a vast program of (yes - inevitable! if the totalitarian Establishment get Their way) planned personal and societal harm; under cover that all this has been done "by the AI" - and in a way that is unstoppable and impersonal.
In a way that is nobody's fault.
No person or group is to blame for anything!
It All Just Happened..
(And "how sad", say the AIethicists...)
The lie is that this is not really people who are doing the destroying by means of a colossal organized and resourced international strategy; but instead it is the software that is doing this to us humans!
(When we suffer or die; we are meant to cry out from our hearts: "Woe is me, my heart bleeds! But what can mere Men do against such impersonal necessity?")
Behind the advertised ethical "concern" lies a raft of made-up, dishonest and propagandistic assertions about the functional efficiency and effectiveness of (post-November 2022) "AI".
The truth of these assertions is another thing which is assumed, in the face of a complete lack of serious and honest evidence; and fundamentally rooted in the categorical impossibility of the claims.
My point here is clarify that those who are put-forward in mainstream discourse as "ethically concerned" by the "implications" of "AI" - including those who scaremonger on the basis of false assumptions concerning the technology's effectiveness and impersonal-inevitability - are themselves part of the coordinated AI-PSYOPS.
+++
*It seems that "AI" project (in all its facets) has been the primary - single largest and most sustained - strategy of the globalist leadership class over the past three years.
"AI" is the current main mechanism of progressing Ahrimanic evil; those in the leadership class who desire a wholly materialist society of omni-surveillance and micro-control.
Meanwhile, since early 2022, the "Agents of Chaos" (who pursue the spiteful and destructive agenda of Sorathic Evil); have been focussing their efforts on escalating everywhere-wars abroad plus intra-national violence at home.
Although these two types of evil are increasingly in conflict among the leadership class of the world; they seem to have reached an uneasy truce on the subject of "AI"; based on opposite understandings of what "AI" will actually do.
The totalitarians (falsely) believe that AI can be the basis of a world-administering bureaucracy that is both cheaper and more controllable than the current armies of managers and clerks.
On the other side, the Agents of Chaos (correctly) realize that "AI" cannot - therefore will not - perform this functional job; but will instead destroy social functioning, generate mass misery and death, and collapse civilization into that disorder they crave.
So, at present; both sides of the Global Establishment have reasons to continue to facilitate, fund, and propagandize the ongoing "AI" takeover - which is why you never hear an Establishment voice that is critical of "AI" for the right reasons and from the right assumptions.
It seems to me that Christianity - as I understand it, is qualitatively different from "religion".
I regard Christianity as in essence the commitment to accept Jesus Christ's offer of resurrected eternal life in Heaven, through following Jesus post-mortally.
For a Christian, therefore, life after death involves both a personal transformation (resurrection) and also (implicitly) a qualitatively different existence in a Heaven that is understood in terms of a Second Creation - a creative Heaven entirely motivated by love; and without death, entropy or evil.
This post-mortal expectation therefore provides a frame for everything else in reality; and especially for this mortal life of ours.
But Christianity does not fill our mortal life.
Being a Christian does not provide us with a blueprint, rule-book, ethical code, or detailed external and objective guidance for all important matters...
In other words (properly grasped); it seems that "being a Christian" is not really "a specific religion"
The "religion aspect of life" has been provided by many and various churches through history and today - some of which churches include following Jesus to resurrected life in Heaven as a core element - and these are validly "Christian churches"; but who all in addition offer various and detailed blueprints for daily living.
Guidance overlaps among validly Christian churches, but it also varies.
But each church offers, to a significant degree, that specific and detailed life-guidance in terms of principles, practices, necessary obediences etc. which religiously-inclined people seek; and that complex societies and civilizations required in order to function, and be sustainable.
What I am saying is that "being a Christian" is distinct from being religious; because being a Christian focuses on what happens after we die; while a religion focuses on what we do during this mortal life.
I am also saying that the relationship between the direct Christianity of what happens after we die, and the "blueprint" religion of what we do in this mortal life; is indirect and uncertain.
On the one hand; Christianity-itself does not have many very hard entailments -- and on the other hand; most of the multitude of detail in rule-books, ethical codes, and theologies lacks any solid basis in Christianity.
The true relationship between Christianity and religion is that Christianity comes hierarchically first, above all else, and is the framework for understanding our life and ultimate reality.
Within that framework of aspiration and faithful expectation; there will inevitably need to be something like a religion.
But the scope and details of any religion, even a genuinely-Christian religion, are-not and cannot-be an entailed consequence of Christianity.
Note added: This does not mean that all religions, or even all validly-Christian and self-identified-Christian churches, are equally valid. Some will be more Christianity-compatible than others. But it does mean that one could probably be-a-Christian (i.e. by intending to accept the post-mortal offer of Jesus Christ) while practicing a pretty wide range of religions. And this was, of course, the actual situation among the earliest Christians, before a distinct "Christian Church religion" arose - who, after conversion, seem to have continued practicing (for example) their Jewish, Samaritan and Roman Pagan religions.
There is an composer of church music, including some Christmas carols and songs, called John Rutter - and it is mandatory that at least one of his songs must be performed in every Christmas concert throughout England - as well as in every evensong in every cathedral every week.
Rutter was very prolific, and his work is of a consistent standard - and that standard is meh.
His music is not terrible, but it is never much good.
Rutter seems to have been around forever, or maybe that is just what his music makes me feel. Yet apparently the old cove is still with us, and only eighty years old!
How he achieved such a vice-like grip on Anglican choral music, I'm not sure; but my suspicion is that he has incriminating photographs of every Vicar in the Church of England.
I need not bother to provide evidence of how little the Establishment cares about the safety of children in the UK.
All their favourite strategic policies tormented, harmed and killed children on a truly colossal scale; and then condoned and concealed this - directly, and indirectly.
So when there is legislation that purports to be motivated by concern for the "safety of children", we should immediately know that this is a lie - and the motivation is certainly quite other.
And know too that the real motivation is certain to be evil - or else it would not systematically, and by saturation and coordination, have been lied-about.
(And also, we know with certainty it is evil because, everything that our Western leadership class is pursuing seriously over the long-term - is strategically and intentionally evil; and I mean Every Single Thing.)
It seems that the access to media is already more explicitly and aggressively restricted in the UK than any other Western nation - especially after geopolitical events in early 2020, and then again from early 2022.
A lot of stuff that can be read online from the US, Commonwealth and Europe; has been blocked in the UK for the past three-to-five years.
You didn't realise?
Well that is significant - one way or the other.
Q: What kind of stuff is blocked?
A; Stuff critical of the major programs of UK Establishment policy, of course!
Those Litmus Test issues I linked early.
So far this past week I have noticed several blog posts blocked by a message stating that the problem with content is child safety - when actually the content is related to some kind of analysis of (privileged and powerful) social and ethnic groups.
Would-be readers are sometimes asked to provide "age verification" (i.e. to create an account and explicitly identify themselves), in order to read this anti-Establishment material.
Well, I expected nothing else - the West is now, after all, a fully-totalitarian society, just closing a few remaining loopholes of un-restricted discourse.
And They are only interested in doing things to Us; and not-at-all in what We want; and it has been like this for many years.
As always, the truly vital thing is is that we:
1.Recognize the situation.
2. Recognize it for what it is - i.e. They are lying in order to harm us - physically, but mainly spiritually.
3. Recognize the net-evil strategic motivations of our leadership class - whether institutional, national, and global leadership.
4. Realize that therefore the worst spiritual harm comes from Our consenting to the validity of Their imposed world-view and motivations; and from consenting to Their authority to control Our world-view and motivations.
5. Be confident that They cannot spiritually harm Us... unless we invite Them into our hearts.
But that is exactly what So Many people do in excusing Them as having naïve good intentions, or being merely selfish and greedy, or being merely stupid and ignorant and short-sighted.
Things are much worse than that.
In truth; Our leaders do bad things to Us, for bad reasons.
What we need to do is be clear and explicit in our own minds as to what is going on and why; and then to reject it as evil*!
Too many people jump to advocating effective organized opposition... Not that this ever actually-happens! - but that does not stop people calling for it, automatically; like a speak-your-weight machine.
But opposition as such is futile and indeed counter-productive, especially when opposition is itself motivated by some strategically net-evil programme, inevitably rooted in the hedonic materialism of all public discourse.
Corrective and good social action may or may not be possible in practice; but whether possible or not, good action cannot possibly happen without a prior and sustained inner act of discernment, responsibility and courage.
While of course we should strive not to cooperate or support evil; organized opposition will be futile or counter-productive unless genuinely motivated at every level; because to evil does not lead to good, unless there is motivation to good.
And at the bottom line, as this process expands and envelops, we should recall that, in net-effect; mass/social media do vastly more harm than good.
All restrictions on mass media will almost-inevitably make it less popular overall, less engaging, less addictive**.
So that, by pursuing short-term expediency, evil is (to a significant extent) thwarting its own long term success.
After all; to be denied some particular external inputs, and to be thrown-back upon our own personal experiences, evaluations, personal contacts, and individual reasoning - is probably just what we most need.
In our civilization and nation; things probably need to get worse before they can get better - but they will get better only if we first understand enough of what is going-on.
*That is what is required of Christians for salvation - it is indeed, all that is required of us, in a negative sense. Of course, the reality is that to move on to resurrected eternal Heavenly life, we must commit eternally to live only by love - and the rejecting of evil is really just a means to that end.
** This also applies to the "AI"-slop that is flooding mass and social media. Since this (as with all aspects of "AI") is backed by subsidies and amplified by corrupt boosting into displacing appealing content; such a trend can only diminish the long-term influence, impact and appeal of mass and social media.
I have been re-reading HD Thoreau's Walden (1854) - starting at the very beginning with the chapter "Economy". (I've been reading this book, on-and-off, for fifty years!)
First, I was struck afresh by the muscular brilliance of the writing - this is prose of the highest level!
But secondly, it struck me how modern is the expressed perspective of Thoreau. He writes from the position of mainstream modern alienation, one which looks-out upon the world and deliberates how to get the best deal from our interactions.
And Thoreau's idea of a life-well-lived is rooted almost wholly in feelings; in his own responses to ideas and situations. And, much like New Age spirituality; Thoreau seeks to engineer his environment, and himself, such as to achieve the highest possible level of personal gratification - and minimize the inevitable degree of personal suffering.
The chapter is called "Economy" because it focuses on how to get the most gratification from life - which for Thoreau entails as much unstructured time as possible, to be spent in and around Concord and often alone; while paying for this with the least investment of of time and unpleasant-effort in "work".
This attitude was something new in mid-nineteenth century USA when the book was written and published, because so individualist; even Thoreau's direct-mentor RW Emerson (just c. 14 years older) was much more communal and social in his perspective.
Yet nowadays the argument of "Economy" is (more or less) what almost every adolescent considers at some point; although the conclusions most modern Westerners reach are typically very different from Thoreau's idea of reducing his material needs to the lowest minimum, so that he needed to perform the least amount of paid labour.
I would call Thoreau's attitude to the world "instrumental" - he was trying to use the world to attain his ends - to get as much as possible back from the least possible investment; even though Thoreau used his freedom to pursue a Romantic agenda - and it is as "a poet of nature" that he is most remembered.
And Thoreau is a pioneer and exemplar of the "hedonic" morality of mainstream modernity, in which goodness is calibrated against the current feelings of the observer.
Only in terms of a kind of pantheism does Thoreau depart (somewhat) from mainstream modernity - I mean that he seemed to assume a deistic, ordered, and therefore meaningful (although not purposive) backdrop of ultimate reality.
Consequently, because reality is not a creation, nor is it going anywhere; Thoreau was a "contemplative" - which we might term a "consumer" rather than a creator.
His aspiration was to enjoy nature; not to participate in creation.
He saw no role for himself or other individual persons in shaping reality - because that reality was going nowhere.
Therefore his highest spiritual experience was to forget himself and time and the world in extended-moments of ecstatic bliss: each of which was understood as an epiphanic-revelation of the ultimate stasis of oneness - the realization that he was part of this oneness, and had re-joined it, for a while.
Of course, I am exaggerating the simplicity and clarity of Thoreau's perspective and aspirations; because he was of course a mortal Man - and one who had been brought-up and educated in a Christian nation, town and city that retained considerable Theistic Calvinistic elements, as well as a more recent deistic Unitarianism.
Nonetheless, Thoreau is a strikingly modern figure; although his early death somewhat prevented the full implications of his world view from working themselves out in his life...
Post-Civil War USA - which Thoreau did not live to experience, starkly revealed many of the unpleasant consequences of Thoreau's perspective and assumptions - although he may of course have denied and ignored most of these ill-effects, as did most of his circle.
But I feel that Thoreau's mind-set was an inevitable phase in human history; one analogous to the arrival of adolescence.
Thoreau was, then, an expression of the adolescence of Mankind - emerging, in his era and culture, for the first time in a recognizable form.
And there is nothing intrinsically wrong with spiritual adolescence! - so long as it is indeed a phase, leading towards spiritual maturity; and does not become (as it has in the modern West) a lifelong state.
Sometimes the massive popularization of a term is symptomatic* of deep civilizational disorder: two instances are Life Hack and Bucket List.
Superficially these are harmless diversions - trivial rather than deadly.
The problem is in what lies underneath the pervasive chatter; the assumptions upon-which these terms are built.
A Life Hack is an instant, easy, short-cut or cheat; to deal-with some everyday problem of living.
The assumption of which this is a surface symptom, is that this is how Life ought to be dealt with.
A profound but concealed assumption of Life Hacking is that human Life consists of a multitude of discrete, immediate problems; and our job is to find the most efficient way to deal with these problems.
The implication is that our actual Life will incrementally and qualitatively be improved (ie. made more pleasurable, with less suffering) by implementing more and ever-more such Life Hacks.
The degenerate quality of Life Hacks; is that Life is the kind of thing for which we ought to be seeking quick and easy tricks - that Life is ultimately a set of problems of living that we need to solve.
So the best way to approach Life is to be armed with plenty of Hacks - applicable to the widest possible range of "challenges".
Life Hack attitudes and methods have, it seems, already taken-over student attitudes in formal education. Learning is just too slow, inefficient, and hard work. "Education" is now seen as a set of immediate problems, Tasks; for which the most effective approach is to have a tool-kit quick, easy short-cuts.
Also academic attitudes in "science". What gets called science nowadays has nothing to do with seeking or speaking truth. "Research" is all about Hacks to get funding, get the necessary results, get published, get cited and invited - get personal security, status and salary.
And Life Hacks are open-endedly extendible: For instance much Self Help, spiritual teaching of a New Age type, and including the "Manosphere"; is Life Hack thinking applied to human relationships, to love, marriage, family and friendship.
The same can be seen in discussions of religion. The Birdemic response of mainstream churches was that their religion was reducible to efficient and convenient Life Hacks; such as live-streamed and recorded "services" or sermons; and no-travel-required online interactions.
Bucket Lists derive from the idea that somebody is about to die - i.e. "kick the bucket"; and consists of a list of the things I most wish I had-done before I die.
As if someone is on the deathbed, looking back - and gaining satisfaction or plagued by regret over his accomplishments.
The underlying idea is that death is annihilation; and/but "therefore" a Good life is one in which we have done as many things that we "really want" to do, before the curtains come down.
A Bucket List is meant to be a public thing too; so that we can get status (and provoke conversations) by making public a Bucket List - preferably one that is suitably impressive to other people.
And then adverting via social media - or mass media if you are a "celebrity" - our progress in working-through that List.
You win the game by having an impressive-to-other-people List and completing the List: this is implicitly "to have had a Good Life".
Alternatively; people are invited to feel "sad" with you if, for some reason, you cannot or do not tick of an item - it terminal cancer prevents that bungee jumping, if an insufficiently supported "Kickstarter"-funding prevents you taking that African Safari...
This is implicitly to have had a "tragic" life.
Life Hacks and Bucket Lists are both degenerate fads because of their strategic dishonesty. And implicit evil!
Life Hacks are instrumental thinking.
They are predicated on "using" the world and other people for our own short-term ends, to fulfil our current desires.
If Life was the kind of thing susceptible to Life Hacks - Life would consist essentially of individuals efforts at learning tricks to exploit each-other; to get satisfaction at their expense.
Life would not be worth living.
And if Death was the kind of problem that could be In Any Genuine Way ameliorated by the successful completion of Bucket Lists, then death would not be final - death could not be an annihilation.
Because if Death is the end, then what we have done or not done in life makes no difference.
How we happen to feel about our previous Life, on our death bed, just about to die, looking-back -- would be utterly irrelevant; because dying would be just one temporary blip of emotion, among multi-millions of others - doomed to nothingness.
I
f after Death we will be gone utterly - then it cannot possibly matter either way whether or not we watched the sun rise, or set, off the Florida Keys.
Yet, if Death is not really the end; and we will survive in some form, to be affected in some way by our completion (or not) of Bucket Lists...
Then Life after Death is something that needs explicitly to be acknowledged, and its implications explored.
So yes; at one level these are trivial fads; "just" a harmless way of passing the time or having something to gossip about... Yet Life Hacks and Bucket lists are evidence of the deep, unacknowledged, and contradictory malaise of our civilization: of the ways in which we persistently refuse to think-through implications.
*A symptom is produced by the underlying pathology (in this instance, spiritual degeneracy); but a symptom is not conclusive evidence for the underlying pathology. So, you can have the pathology without the symptom, and vice versa.
William James Tychonievich has written a blog post about a fictional book that (as part of its story) attempts (albeit from a Jewish rather than Christian perspective - it was written by a Rabbi) to provide an intellectual model that combines the attributed omniscience and omnipotence of God, with human Agency, or Free Will.
But, as William argues (endorsed by comments from myself and Francis Berger) the model actually, by its assumptions and implications, sacrifices human agency in order to sustain the Omni-God assumption.
In this respect, and in common with nearly-all Christian theology (including mainstream Roman and Eastern Catholic and Protestant theology); it is evident that the omni-nature of God is primary - and an understanding of human agency and freedom is something that is, in practice, sacrificed to the need to ascribe omni attributes to God.
This is confirmed when the Rabbi author (Shaul Behr) responds to the post with a couple of comments; finishing with:
Like those who came before me, I am content, as you say, to leave it as an unresolved "mystery of God".
The Rabbi's response is therefore essentially identical with that of most Christian theologians over the past couple of millennia; and I translate it as follows:
We are sure and certain that God is omnipotent and omniscient. We also recognize that Men must be free agents in order that each Man's choices have meaning. But, although we can provide confusing, complex abstract pseudo-explanations of how this might be possible - none of these explanations really make sense. And we cannot provide a clear, simple, coherent account of how free agency is possible with an Omni-God. So we call the situation of Man's freedom in the context of Omni-God "a mystery".
The question I ask is: is this good enough?
And I answer: No it is not good enough.
It is, in practice, treating the matter of coherently understanding human agency as trivial - and not something that needs to be understood.
It is commonly asserted that all Christians (and, apparently, all Jews) must believe in the Omni-God, or else they are not Christians (or Jews) - because Omni-God Just Is God - because supposedly nothing else makes any sense...
Man's freedom, in stark contrast, becomes something that must be taken on faith, as a form of words; by the asserted necessity for each of us to trust in the validity of theological authority.
Apparently; Omni-God is mandatory; while by contrast free agency is something that needs to be asserted but does not need to be understood - and, because of Omni-God, freedom cannot be understood.
Unsurprisingly, in practice, traditional Christian theology has always tended to assert God's omni-nature as interpreted by "the church" (whichever church prevailed); while human agency was considered to be a problem.
Indeed, human agency is blamed for the evils of this world.
It seems that the only proper role of human freedom - in traditional theology - is to make the right choices from among those presented by God.
Unsurprisingly, since there is only one right answer among choices, and all possible answers are God-given; it has seemed to many Christians that it might be better if humans had simply been pre-programmed to make these right choices.
It has thus seemed that the only significant role of human agency is negative: freedom is seen as the freedom to do wrong.
Which fits with the pointlessness of human life when God is Omni... Since such a God is everything, then human beings can add nothing to creation; which implies that creation of humans was futile - because (from this perspective, at the bottom line) the best a human can do in life, is to follow a pre-determined path of correct choices.
Apparently; freedom has no positive role.
Thus, by such accounts; the problem of Omni-God and human freedom has been "solved" by reducing human freedom to an expression of negative resistance to God's reality.
Freedom becomes regarded like a disease; something wrong with Men... Hence the centrality of "original sin".
However, if the logic is followed - we get the bizarre assertion that this supposedly Omni God, for some "mysterious" reason, created flawed human beings who can only mess-up.
The things is: our freedom, our agency as human beings, is experiential; something we know innately and directly.
Whereas the Omni-nature of God is something inferred as a consequence of non-intuitive abstract assumptions; and via logical procedures that many or most people cannot follow, or regard as flawed.
And that is a problem!
It is a problem that will not go away: Christians know we are free, and yet we are told that this knowledge of agency is subordinate to the assertion of Omni-God.
Officially - we are told that the ultimate answer is that common sense cannot comprehend this situation - tha tthe situation is necessary and unavoidable - therefore "it is a Mystery".
And yet this mystery is made to be foundational to being-a-Christian (and also perhaps a Jew)!
Well, in the end, the only responsible way to address this situation is for each of us to plumb the depths of our primary assumptions concerning the ultimate nature of reality - to establish what we really suppose to be known, and sure, and foundational.
Is it what we have been told, or what we experience?
Upon this hinges a great deal.
I don't go looking for trouble, so I had not realized until now that people are confidently saying that such-and-such an "AI" has some particular level of IQ, apparently as measured by the program's performance in some or another Intelligence Test...
From this is inferred that such-and-such an "AI" has a measured intelligence in (say) the top 10%, or 5%, or 0.01% of the UK population, or whatever...
From which it is stated as a solid objective fact that "AI" is already at "genius level" IQ and will soon surpass all human capability...
After which comes various pseudo-concerned hand-wringings of the plight of human beings in this world where "AI" has inetellectual mastery; or else a techno-triumphalism asserting that humans must now "make way for the rule of machines" etc.
But this is utter nonsense.
That it is nonsense really ought to be obvious*.
If people can't realize this, then I'm afraid they are putty in the hands of those who strategize to destroy us - worse, they are complicit in their own proximate degradation and ultimate damnation.
I feel embarrassed at having to explain (and it is seldom possible to explain the really obvious); but here goes...
"AI" has no "IQ", because it has no intelligence.
None At All.
Computers don't have intelligence.
It is reasonable, and has been done, to measure using IQ tests (specially devised) the comparative intelligence of chimpanzees, or dogs, or other animals - because animals are living beings, and beings have intelligence...
But not computers, because computers don't have intelligence.
Intelligence (i.e. "general intelligence" or "g") is an inferred underlying attribute behind all cognitive abilities - and IQ tests infer this from one or a range of cognitive tests used to put people into a rank order - to which the IQ number is applied on the basis of an assumed normal distribution.
The test is not the intelligence, it is just a way of ranking the intelligence among beings with intelligence.
The IQ test score does not mean anything at all, of itself....
After all, if a person had been provided with a cheat sheet containing all the answers to an IQ test, then the test would would not be measuring intelligence, would it?
Correct answers are not the ability, are they?
An "AI" doing an IQ test is just an elaborate cheat sheet.
Computerized cheating to provide the right answers to a cognitive test is not intelligence.
The validity of an IQ test as a measure of intelligence depends on the fact that the person (or other being) doing the test is actually working it out, by using their intelligence-correlated cognitive abilities.
Computer mechanisms for answering IQ test papers have nothing to do with intelligence - computers don't think; they are nothing-but cheat-sheets when it comes to intelligence testing.
The only intelligence involved in "AI"-cheats on IQ testing; is that of humans; who are needed to provide the computer with the right answers - and programmers who engineer the algorithms for matching the right answers to the test questions.
+++
*I mean that when people are claiming that current "AI" has very high, or above possible, "intelligence" this is a stark reductio ad absurdum - at least for someone capable of understanding the world spontaneously from-themselves and directly-known (rather than through distorting lenses supplied by the totalitarian Establishment).
