Current-wave AI ("Artificial Intelligence") is just simulated humanness

The current wave of Establishment-styled AI ("Artificial Intelligence") is a fake and a cheat, designed and implemented for the malefit of Men - as must be the case given its provenance.

(i.e. Given the sources that have funded, devised, advertised and imposed these technologies). 

Current-wave AI is not, of course, intelligence; but what is its relationship to intelligence? 

Current-wave AI is a simulation of human intelligence, it is a set of computer programming technologies specifically designed to mislead human beings into supposing they are dealing with another human being. 

Current AI is, in other words, designed to be a way of successfully cheating at the Turing Test.  

But for current-AI to be an effective simulation, for it to fool humans as successfully as it does; entails that humans are operating in such a pervasively reductionistic and computerised environment that this cheating becomes almost undetectable; and that such humans have habitually assimilated computer-like patterns of thinking*. 

The success of AI entails that the full scope of the natural human world has become stripped-down to such a minimal level - for instance; that the fullness of Man's sociality has become brief and hurried interactions with de facto strangers on restricted themes, via type-written media. 

So impoverished, so unnatural, have become our worlds, our relationships with other people and with nature and the cosmos; that within-this-context, it is possible for the outputs of computers to be indistinguishable from the real people who are hamstrung in multiple directions, by the compulsion to operate in such constricted and artificial situations. 

As a thought experiment, imagine current AI technologies being introduced to historical societies - even just a few generations ago, but more obviously some centuries in the past - and then ask yourself whether in such a total-context AI technologies would have been able to pass for human beings? 

Of course they would not; and considering this fact brings to the surface the extremity of reductionism of culture, within which current AI is making its claim of intelligence.   

*See Jeremy Naydler's In the shadow of the machine. 

The AI ("Artificial Intelligence") agenda: Evil works mainly by doing things to people's *minds* - not their bodies

An AI-generated image of "nice AI versus evil AI" - 

naturally, necessarily, both AI images are clearly (and seductively) evil

I am not saying, because it is not true - that our bodies and the physical material world are irrelevant to the workings of evil. 

On the contrary; the material is always spiritual (but not vice-versa). However the workings of evil are primarily on the mind, not the body - because evil is primarily engaged in a spiritual war on God and creation. 

It is one of the many deceptions of evil to induce people to take the common attitude of focusing on the physical and material aims and consequences of evil - rationalizing this by emphasizing that it is the most urgent thing that is needed to fix...

The excuse being that after people are "safe" from such-and-such a threat (war, mass immigration, economic destruction, poisoning of food and environment etc), then will be the proper time to transfer our attention and efforts towards the spirit. 

Yet this is wrong and fatally mistaken. Not just because the time of safety will, in practice, never come - and we will instead struggle from one engineered existential material threat to the next, and the next...

But also because the material threats cannot, and will not, be dealt with until after the endemic spiritual disease of Western Civilization has been identified, acknowledged, and self-treated.

Spirit must come first, or else the desired material changes will not come at-all. 

As many people have often noted; it is not usually (in principle) difficult to deal with the physical threats of evil - it is known how to do this; and the problem is that we do not actually do what would work. 

However; how this situation arose and prevails (i.e the situation that we do not, in practice, solve soluble-problems) is regarded as a superficial and trivial matter (to be dealt with after the potentially-lethal problems have, somehow, been dealt-with)  - when in reality it is the pointer towards the very essence of our civilizational malaise. 

Consequently we see such insane absurdities as the vast, colossal, genuinely titanic levels of analysis, discussion, prediction, guidance... with respect to campaigning and voting in the US Presidential election, including among people who purport (and suppose themselves) to be first-and-foremost spiritually motivated!

Likewise, when it comes to commentary on the Establishment drive towards implementing AI (artificial Intelligence) in ever more domains of everyday life and socio-economic functioning; the focus is entirely on evaluating the validity of claims, and the material consequences in terms of unemployment and effective administration. 

Yet, behind the Establishment puppets and dupes who do all this implementing, and who devise the oceanic AI-related propaganda in novels, movies, plays, computer games etc; are demonic spirits for whom this agenda is primarily spiritual - not physical, not material, not civilizational. 

We need to focus on the strategy behind (or below) all the huge, persisting, multi-pronged tsunami of AI... The soft-sell of awareness-raising, arts and media depictions, the profit-luring, and the hard managerial compulsion - beneath this lies a whole underworld of demonic scheming that intends to corrupt human Minds - not just control or destroy human bodies. 

Unless this evil purpose of mental shaping with respect to AI is acknowledged and identified - then human beings are just mind-putty for the agenda of evil. 

AI will be worse - but it will happen anyway... (Artificial Intelligence is the new bureaucracy)

As always, public discourse focuses us upon the wrong issues. With Artificial Intelligence the focus is upon whether it can be 'better' than the human mind - but the real question is much simpler: whether AI can replace the human mind.

The point is that AI systems can replace human thinking whether they are better or worse. Better or worse doesn't matter...

AI will, in fact, be worse than the human mind: much, much worse - but that doesn't stop AI from replacing the human mind.

AI is an extension of bureaucracy - which has replaced the individual human with systems of committees; has replaced judgement with votes; has destroyed responsibility.

Is a committee better than the individual - No, it is worse.

Has that fact prevented committees replacing individuals in all positions of significant authority in all societies in the developed world? No. Bureaucracy is everywhere, all the bureaucracies are linked, the individual is is a slave of The System - not the slave of a person; and this slavery applies to all individuals, even/ especially those who are members of the committees...

AI is bureaucracy cubed - it is driven by the same intent, it has the same objectives, and it has the same indifference to consequence. Just as bureaucracy is intrinsically immoral, intrinsically evil, in its destruction of responsibility - so exactly is AI - but this is no accident. On the contrary this is precisely why committees run everything; and why bureaucracy can (and will, if plans go through) be replaced by AI. 

AI is bureaucracy 2.0.  The question is, who - or what - stands behind the bureaucracy? What purpose drives this long-term agenda to replace all human thinking - that is, to replace all human thinking, by all individual humans, ultimately.

(Clue: the answer isn't human.)

All through our world, the worse-bureaucracy has replaced the better-individual; responisbility and judgment have been annihilated on multiple fronts... The process continues, globally, without evaluation or negative feedback -  and this is the exact intention for rolling-out AI.

Bureaucracy is always worse, but it has happened anyway. AI will be worse, but it will happen anyway. 

(Unless, of course, we stop it. And the place to stop it is in our own minds, our own hearts, our own deepest understanding. AI is a vampire - it can only enter where it is invited; but at present we are inviting-in the vampire - we are indeed paying the vampires to assimilate our souls.)

Is AI (Artificial Intelligence) another Litmus Test issue?

I have previously described what I regard as the major Litmus Test issues for discerning which side a person has chosen in the spiritual war of the world (i.e. the sides for- and against-divine creation) - things like climate change, feminism, the birdemic/ peck, antiracism, and hostility to the autonomous existence of the Fire Nation.

I wonder whether a positive attitude towards AI (Artificial Intelligence) is another of these Litmus Tests? I am inclined to think so. 

Others might suggest that AI is merely neutral in its values, and what matters is the specific application - and, to some extent this is bound to be true: it is trivially correct that there are always exceptions to even the most valid of generalizations. 

There is also the confusion about "what AI means" - because the term has been around for many decades; and probably some usages that were commoner in the past may be less discerning as to spiritual attitudes. 

But, like all the Litmus Tests: What matters in 2023 is how that term is used in 2023. 

And the biggest evidence concerning the spiritual valence of any term in 2023, is the agenda to which the term is attached - and who is pushing that agenda.  

Thus, while some theoretical usages of "racism" are indeed sinful for Christians; in actual 2023 practical usage - "racism" is not any kind of a sin.  

By this criterion it is completely obvious that - whatever theories and exceptions we might imagine or manufacture - actually-happening AI is attached to an agenda that is being pushed by the global totalitarians. 

And that is all we really need to know. 

Because even if we personally have theories about potential benefits of AI, and even if we cannot understand or guess the nature of the harm that AI will actually be used to do -- we can nonetheless be sure that AI as it actually gets implemented, will be used on the side of Satan and against God. 

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is worse than what it will replace: but it will happen anyway (assuming we let it)

I am bemused by the deluge of credulous drivel being written about self-styled AI (Artificial Intelligence) across the blogosphere. 

But, unfortunately it confirms what I wrote five years ago, and which now seems worth revisiting. 

AI will be worse than whatever it replaces - but it will happen anyway; this because AI is an extension of bureaucracy, and bureaucracy was worse than what it replaced (Much worse); but bureaucracy happened anyway. 

For so long as this world is ruled via bureaucracy, for so long will AI be imposed not only despite its being worse, but also because of the way that it is worse.

Which is that AI is dehumanizing - entraining Men to 'process' like computers - thus destructive of thinking; is anti-spiritual, and a short-cut to self-damnation.

Put like that; it's obvious why AI is irresistible to the demonic global totalitarians rulers, their deluded minions, and the corrupted masses over whom they rule.

So-called "AI" (Artificial Intelligence) is a case of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"

Because so-called AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a top-down-imposed, totalitarian Establishment imposed, lying fake; it is always a product of some or another "man behind the curtain" (or institution behind the curtain) - someone who is trying to distract attention from himself and deny responsibility for whatever AI is trying to do. 

And what AI is trying to do - the reason for its existence, the reason it is being coercively implemented by multiple social institutions and puppet-leaders all across The West - is overall and by intention evil... of various types and kinds. 

Sometimes the evil is exploiting society in a parasitic fashion for money, security, power, lust etc. 

Sometimes it is to create helplessness, passivity, fascinated horror; or to sow fear, resentment, despair.

Sometimes the evil is to destroy that which is Good - the true, beautiful or virtuous. 

Sometimes the evil is in destroying life itself, divine creation - or what it is to be human. 

And overall AI is part of the demonic strategy of damnation to induce people to go along with, accept, defend, argue-for, and finally embrace these evils. 

Because, in the end, to be damned, we each must choose damnation. 

So, whenever confronted by AI, in theory or in practice; ask yourself who is the being behind the curtain of technology; and ask yourself what evil that being is attempting to induce you to do to yourself.  

So-called AI is all about human beings - Not about "thinking machines"

Artificial Intelligence (AI) research began by claiming to be able to make a thinking machine: an intelligent computer that was intelligent in the way human beings are intelligent. 

It has ended-up by fobbing us off with computer programmes that use human intelligence to mimic human intelligence (in ways that the uninformed and inattentive users do not always and instantly detect - this being the current ultra-low bar criterion of successful AI!...)...

And then claiming that they have done the job they set out to do! 

It seems that people simply do not notice that human beings are involved at every step of the current so-called AI!

The currently vaunted text AI is first programmed by human beings; then it uses human-produced texts in order to generate human-mimicking texts; then it "learns" by being subjected to continual positive and negative reinforcement by human beings!   

In other words; the "Learning" of AI by "feedback" gathered during usage; amounts to a continual process of re-programming!

It has reached the bizarre situation that a massive and continual process of human-dictation, direction, and correction of computation; is somehow being edited-out from our awareness - and all the 'credit' is being allocated to Artificial, not human, intelligence! 

People are fooled because they want to be fooled; and they fail to learn from experience because they fear to learn. 

Obvious failure may thus be 'sold' as success; and System-sustaining propaganda gets lapped-up by masses of willing dupes who want nonsense to be true.

 

Note added: Why do so many people want the AI nonsense to be true? Perhaps because they (rightly) mistrust and fear human beings; and have rejected faith/trust in the Christian God so deeply and thoroughly that they are almost insensible to their own consequent psychosis -- therefore they grasp at the straw of potentially wise-and-benign AI, as the only hope they know for avoiding the nihilism of utter despair.

Current AI is "Industrial-scale Plagiarism"

A comment from yesterday by William James Tychonievich on the subject of the "creativity" of the post 2022 iteration of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) is well worth highlighting:

Real creativity is impossible for a computer, but since “AI” is based on industrial-scale plagiarism, it’s possible in principle that it could “produce” something moving. In that case, it’s pale fire would have been snatched from the sun, the human beings from which it plagiarized.

Industrial-scale plagiarism is a useful phrase to remember. 

Current AI is Exactly That - and as with all forms of plagiarism, whenever it generates something apparently creative, that is merely a re-labelling of human-derived creativity - an unacknowledged theft more or less disguised through distortion by selection and recombination. 

It reminds me strongly of that "fake creativity" I discussed in The Genius Famine (word search for it); when humans (e.g. those working in in advertising, PR, journalism) claim other people's original ideas, but disguise the origins of their de facto plagiarism using similar strategies.  

Yet, as William goes on to say: All this is hypothetical, though. In the real world, “AI” products remain palpably and repellently soulless. 

That spiritual fact tells us much about the motivations behind AI. 

The intentional psychological and spiritual harm of current "AI" is located in the deceptive sleight of hand that pretends "intelligence" and creativity when dishonest plagiarism is done by computers. 

Because these machines are operated by mega-corporations that stand above-the-law and control the mass media and "science" in a closed-loop; they are enabled to steal brazenly, indeed with vast self-congratulation; larded with repeated assertions of their own brilliance and wisdom. 

Such behaviour would potentially lead to legal action and heavy fines if it was proved against ordinary human beings. 

But when done under the disguise of AI, this is supposed to make us stand in awe of the industrial scale plagiarizers; to induce us to acknowledge them as higher and better forms of "intelligence".

We are supposed to conclude that the Establishment justifiers, funders, and operators of AI; not only can and shall (by force majeure), but actually deserve to, take-over the running of the world from the minds and souls of (puny) individual persons. 

The idea is that post-2022 AI has successfully rendered obsolete those human beings from-whom anything that happens to be good in AI (including the existence of AI programs and engineering) has originally been stolen.   

The Artificial Intelligence agenda

The idea behind Artificial Intelligence (AI) (I mean the ultimate demonic strategy, implemented by The Establishment) is to replace the 'human mind' with something less-than-human under the pretence of making us more-than-human.

Transhumanism is the advertisement - Subhumanism is the product.

I don't think replacement is actually possible - but it is certainly possible to amplify considerably - using AI, preferably implanted - the damage of social media in suppressing consciousness.

The method is, mainly, distraction. But distraction from what? What is it that they want to distract us from?

Higher consciousness (Final Participation by Primary Thinking) is the answer - and the thing about the next-step in consciousness is that it must be chosen/ willed/ wanted. So, if AI can continually distract and gratify/ terrify us; then we will probably not-choose/ not-will/ not-want to make that step into Final Participation.

The evil Establishment want people to not-want higher consciousness - and instead to choose one of two options:

The first is un-consciousness (what Rudolf Steiner terms the Luciferic path). This is, roughly speaking, the mass media in its immersive and passive-inducing forms.

The second is alienated consciousness (what Steiner terms the Ahrimanic path). And this is approximately bureaucracy - to live-within The Total System: constrained by the materialist, positivistic perspective... purposeless, meaningless... each self-aware individual a disconnected consciousness.

What is Not wanted is for our self-consciousness to expand to include everything real - that our awake self-awareness become directly and intuitively aware of the totality.

And what is also Not wanted is that our unconscious, passive, manipulated minds wake-up inside the dream.

What Artificial Intelligence is intended to prevent is that we choose to become scientists of the divine and lucid dreamers of this world.

The lesson of so-called AI: Most of Man's "thinking" is just "thinking-about", like the abstract symbolic token-juggling of Artificial Intelligence

If you have ever experienced real thinking on a subject, you will know that this rare and relatively brief activity is qualitatively different from thinking-about the same thing. 

Once you have actually thought on a matter, you can recognize when others have not - but are merely parroting on that subject. And you will also be aware that most of your own speaking and writing is also a species of parroting - even when it is a matter of parroting your own previous real-thinking... 

(This, by the way, is analogous to Wittgenstein's distinction between doing Philosophy, and the usual academic business of just "parroting" on the subject. It is what I mean when I say that I was only doing science from 1994 to 2015, although I was officially "a scientist" for some years on either side of that.)   

The current mass imposition of so-called "AI" (Artificial Intelligence) provides one potentially valuable learning experience, if it makes us realize (with shame) how much of our own mental activity is hardly superior to the kind of automatic and unconscious processing of these computer programmes.

The shame is that Man is free, hence capable of doing more than parroting. 

But computers are not Beings and cannot be free; hence they are always, only, and necessarily; forever stuck in the activity of "thinking-about" - by which I mean the whole business is symbolic and abstract, and the relationship of this token-juggling to real-reality is purely asserted; and the validity of the assertion purely conjectural*. 

(*This applies even when computers are used by spiritual Beings, such - especially- as demons; the computer cannot ever itself become a Being, because all Beings are eternally pre-existent, and cannot be made or destroyed. But a computer and its activities may be included within the scope of the spirit of a Being; rather as (but in a material way) the water in our blood may be included in our own Being.) 

We can describe the business of thinking-about in terms of tokens; tokens that "represent" things, concepts etc, and the "thinking-about" is the process of (for instance) selecting, extracting, extrapolating, combining, and arranging these tokens. 

The tokens are supposed to represent reality, in some way; but there is no "participation" in this reality - the token is not that which it represents, and the processes of token manipulation are utterly separate from the reality that is supposed to be represented by it. 

No matter how much it may be claimed otherwise, the tokens and what happens to them, are not that which they purport to represent.  

But there is another kind of thinking which is involved in the actuality of that which is being-thought, a thinking that participates in reality. This is a matter I have tried to discuss in terms such as primary thinking, and direct knowing (and which is discussed in Rudolf Steiner's books Truth and Knowledge, and The Philosophy of Freedom). 

This participating-thinking can be envisaged (although this description here is linguistic, hence itself, of course, a model) in terms of our thinking becoming the same as the thinking of other Beings; a sharing of thinking in real time. 

This is reality, because participated thinking is real - so to believe the above we must also recognize that our thinking is potentially part of ultimate reality... Our thinking (when it is primary) changes the world. 

But many/most people nowadays assert that our human thinking is itself always-and-only a symbolic activity, that our thinking is just another instance of token-juggling - and this elucidates why so many people are so completely confused by and about AI. 

They are confused because they have pre-decided that human thinking is exactly the same kind of abstract symbolic merely-representative activity as computation, then they can find no difference between thinking and the stuff that AI programs are doing.

Yet much/most of what we modern Westerners call thinking is indeed guilty as charged: merely symbolic, merely representative, merely pattern-making with tokens...  

And perhaps more so now than ever before, because of our ideology that this Must Be what thinking is, that thinking cannot-be otherwise - and to believe anything else is wishful thinking or delusional. 

Thereby, that non-participating, alienated, symbolic-representative understanding of the world which led-to, is-encapsulated-by, and is imposed upon Men by the current so-called AI - becomes habitual, and indeed mandatory, in public discourse. 

To think otherwise is partly a matter of assumptions, and partly of experience. If you have never experienced primary thinking, direct knowing, then it is easy to believe that it does not exist - or that it is just a self-deluded variant of that token-juggling which constitutes almost all of our personal, social, and professional living. 

And people probably never will experience the participating possible in thinking, if they are not motivated to do it; unless they invest a level of time, attention and effort that is extraordinarily rare - even, or especially, among the intellectual classes involved in science, academic, law, philosophy - and Christian theology. 

Note: A clearer understanding of the distinction between abstract-symbolic, token-shuffling thinking-about, and the participative possibility of real thinking, may be had from a careful reading of Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances (1957). 

Actually-being-implemented "AI" is being introduced as an intended tool for mass thought control... Obviously!

Any Artificial Intelligence ("AI") which is not merely hypothetical and concerned with possibilities - and that is actually being implemented in Western Society on any significant scale - should be regarded as the intentional product of the ruling totalitarian Establishment in one of its manifestations. 

AI is - from the point-of-view of those in the Establishment who have funded, promoted, and spread it - a tool. 

AI as a phenomenon therefore needs to be recognized as a totalitarian Establishment tool for implementing Their aims; a means to some end. 

The question is: What end?

Therefore we ought to ask ourselves of AI in general, and specific instances: 

What is AI technology intended to do to the humans who use it? 

How is AI intended to affect Man's thinking, emotions, reasoning, understanding?

And (in total, over time): What is frequent, pervasive, mandatory human interaction with AI intended to do to Men's overall assumptions concerning the nature of reality.

Actually-used AI is not a matter of what we personally think it might be useful for; the reason we have it, the reason it is being puffed and pushed, the reason it is being implemented with no serious testing, no fair comparison, no objective checking of outcomes is intentional: there is will behind this vast and coordinated pro-AI activity. 

The reason for all this, is that from the perspective of Those with effective power, wealth, fame, status - AI has a job to do on "the masses" - a job to do on those human beings that are subjected-to omni-surveillance and micro-control. 

Meanwhile, from the POV of the masses - AI is being evaluated merely piecemeal, as a possible basis of short-term and personal convenience or amusement; or as a possible threat/ opportunity to immediate employment and wages. 

With AI we therefore have on one side a top-down system of (intended) mass thought control motivated by Ahrimanic evil; and on the other side... well, merely frivolous hedonism and desperate careerism.  

"What have you got against AI?"

"AI" (Artificial Intelligence) has done a lot of harm by making it seem "necessary" for us to defend not interacting personally with AI entities and AI products! 

We need to notice and think about this. It reveals that an open-ended acceptance of "AI" into human society is already the default. 

We got here step-by-step over many decades, and centuries; and indeed all online communities (such as you, reading this) are already many steps along the way -- but general, consensus, default AI-acceptance brings us all the way. 

We Have Arrived.

What this means is that there is here-and-now a consensus (which may itself be mostly artificial) that it already is (and indeed should be) fine and normal for individual human beings to interact (inevitably personally) indiscriminately with some unknown and unknowable mixture of other-humans and AI entities and products. 

The key concept is "interact". 

From my perspective; this implicitly amounts to a denial of the ultimate reality and existential significance of this mortal life. 

Which is, of course, a great victory for the powers of purposive evil. 

And such a situation is not some future possible dystopian bogeyman state that may happen "if we are not careful" - for many, many people this is how things already are. 

For some of these people (and I suspect this has always been the case), I think there never has been any genuine inner distinction between interacting with other real beings, and with simulated-Beings (with projections, for instance) - because such people are ultimately solipsistic: they only really "believe in" themselves. 

But there seem to be more and more such people; because they are numerous and strong enough to demand that anyone who does not want to become one of them, must justify "why not".

When you are in a situation of trying to convince others "why not?" go along with their plans for you - you have already and decisively lost the rhetorical war; the battle of Public Relations. 

...At which point you either give-up and join the downslide to damnation; or else effectively fight-back: maybe materially, certainly spiritually.

  

"Artificial Intelligence" and "Sustainable" technologies are just money laundering

Untold trillions of dollars are being extracted from tax-payers and poured-into projects that claim to be developing forms of AI (Artificial Intelligence) such as driverless cars and robotics; and 'sustainable' technologies such as bicycle lanes, wind turbines (subsidy-generating mills) and solar panels.

None of them work. None ever will work. They are not intended to work.  

From an engineering perspective these are futile non-solutions to non-problems; and there is nothing more that needs to be said. Don't be duped into arguing the technologies: they are not serious - they are not even intended to work. 

But the real function is to create sufficiently-plausible excuses for channeling massive resources into Establishment funds. (Some small proportion being invested in constructing Potemkin devices illustrated by fake videos pretending to show breakthroughs.)

AI and Green-Tech are merely a rationale for coercive confiscation of enormous amounts of money from productive working people, for use in funding The System. 

'Nuff said.

Fake science, fake academia, fake research... fake expertise (and the AI PSYOPS)

As became blatant in 2020 during the Birdemic and its aftermath; under a totalitarian regime, where all social functions are part of a single system; credentials, jobs, promotions, publications grants, status... all the markers of expertise; are controlled by The System. 

Therefore, as well as nobody in public discourse being honest or trustworthy (because they have, instead, been selected for the opposite traits) - you cannot rely on experts being expert At All. 

Anyone who cares to reason for himself can see that incoherent garbage is promoted and treated as if it was the result of exceptional insight, ability and knowledge. 

This has become evident in the discourse around the current self-styled AI (Artificial Intelligence). Incredible quantities of sheer nonsense are being generated and debated with apparent seriousness on this theme by people who will - apparently - think, speak or write anything their Masters require of them; and by those gullible enough to treat such outputs as valid. 

I means the stuff about AI taking-over, AI becoming sentient or self-aware, AI having moral rights...

One can only shake the head incredulously when such drivel is taken with seriousness. It is not even wrong, because such conversations do not rise to the level of being capable of truth and reality.

It is PSYOPS pure and simple - and it works - because too many people are so corrupt that they actually want AI to be something it cannot possibly be at all ever.  

Our world is replete with such stuff, however, so that AI discourse hardly stands-out against the systemic lies, manipulations, and corruptions of the many Litmus Test issues such as Birdemic, climate change, contrived mutually destructive wars, planned economic destruction and starvation.  

There is little cause for optimism since the Global Establishment believe their own lies; because they think that civilizational chaos can be flipped into the world of omni-surveillance and micro-control which are regarded as necessary and good. 

Meanwhile, the demons behind the scenes have set up a raft of win-win situations - of evil versus evil options.

And people are oblivious; hence self-damned. 

So keen are we to "do something constructive" and implement answers; that people cannot perceive what is plain.

That is our minimal and vital task in this mortal life. Simply to see what is happening, discern good from evil, and learn from it. 

That is valuable in itself, and the only basis for good action. Otherwise we are part of the problem.  

    

Is Artificial Intelligence alive and conscious; and, if so, how?

I regard the notion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as manipulative or delusional, built upon many layers of incompetence and dishonesty.

But there is a fair question that could be put to someone like myself who believes that Everything is alive and conscious: reality is made-up of Beings.

Since Everything (humans, mice, trees, mountains, planets) is - in some sense - alive and conscious; then why not computers?

My answer is that computers Must be alive and conscious in some sense; but it all hinges on how.

Some things are Beings, and other things are parts of Beings. Humans are Beings. But most of the things we commonly regard as not-alive and not-conscious are parts-of Beings - things like the cells of a coral, the atoms of a grain of sand... These are probably not Beings in their own right, but participate in larger, more inclusive Beings that do have some degree of bounded, agent consciousness.

So, it is in this sense that computers are alive and conscious - they are part-of Beings; not Beings in their own right. Computers can participate in systems of intelligence, but cannot themselves be intelligent.

And these intelligent systems are Beings (at least, they are Beings by a minimalist definition).

The danger of AI is therefore Not that computers will become Beings, agents, conscious and alive; but that we will begin to treat them as such. This would be intrinsically evil, and lead to greater evil.

The Turing Test is an example of evil propaganda. It argues and implies, rhetorically, that anything that superficially appears to be a Being by reductionist and simplified criteria; really is a Being, and ought to be treated as a Being.

This treating of a part-of-Being asif it were a Being would actually be a human choice - and would be a chosen-lie, a falsehood, Not-Really Real - thus it would clear a path to the condition of virtuality; in which the not-real it lived as if it were real; and the real is ignored or denied.

Which is precisely where we are now.

"If I do it, then it can't be bad..." (The example of "AI")

A recurrent theme - in everyday life and online, in mundane matters and in philosophy - the "argument" that if I (of all people) do it, then that proves it can't be bad. 

Such reasoning can be, and is, used to justify (and normalize) almost anything; especially new things; especially new evil things.  

For the past two years, since the globalist totalitarians simultaneously media-launched and bureaucratically imposed several new text and image technologies; it has been Artificial Intelligence or "AI". 

Suddenly, this was pervasive, hyped, and all-but unavoidable - therefore most people were compelled to "use" it, whether driven by sheer omnipresence, peer pressure, curiosity, or the demands of the workplace. 

Having used AI, then the assumption of many people seems to be that "it can't be bad" because, well, "look at me!". 

The assumption behind the argument is that "I" am obviously a Good Person and I use AI; or that "I used AI, and it did me no harm...". 

The argument is made; but there is no feedback-loop of asking or waiting for confirmations that A: You really do regard "me" as A Good Person; or B: You agree that I have not been changed for the worse by my usage of AI. 

In fact, most of the people who regard themselves as Good People, I would regard as (whether unwitting or willing) servants of the agenda of evil.

Furthermore, I have observed plenty of people whose discernment and sensibility has apparently been coarsened, and their motives corrupted, by usage of AI. 

But such feedback evaluations of character and trends are not sought; and if they were known they would cause offence as being obviously (and necessarily) unjustified, hence clearly dishonest and/or intended to hurt.

Thus is evil normalized, and rendered into an invisible background. 

    

Note added: Because the nature of this world is such that we are all compelled to do much evil, and a great deal more we do because of the weakness of our natures. The point is not that we refrain from evil - which is impossible - but that we recognize evil, and repent it. (In a world of endemic and pervasive AI; you will be forced, bullied, bribed or tempted into using it.) Repent even - or especially - those many, many evils that we cannot or will not cease from doing. Even though we do it, and keep on doing it, and have zero intention of stopping doing it; and even though we have a thousand excuses - that doesn't make it good. Jesus came to save sinners, and that means you (and me). Only Repent. (But how difficult is that "only".) 

Confusing selection-replacement with transformative developmental-evolution... The covertly suicidal impulse in Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, and Oneness spiritualities

There is a very prevalent logical error that pervades our culture; so thoroughly pervades it that it is all-but invisible, and difficult to understand. 

The error is to confuse annihilation and replacement, with transformational development. 

This error was made clear to me only in recent years and through reading Owen Barfield; but until that point (around 2014) I too was in thrall to the mistake. 

We have a deep, ancient and primary understanding of 'evolution' as a process akin to the development of an acorn to an oak tree, and egg to a chicken, a newborn baby to an adult. 

That is, we understand evolution to be a transformation of the self - while retaining the identity of the self. 

This could be called developmental-transformative evolution. 

In this primary understanding of evolution; the Being remains itself - but changes form. 

Thus, if we (as Christians) imagine our future spiritual evolution from this mortal life to resurrected eternal life; this is a 'process' during which we remain our-self but undergo developmental or transformative changes in both body and mind. 

The result is that our resurrected eternal self is the same person as he was during mortal life. And in Heaven we can 'recognize' others whom we knew in mortal life: they are still themselves.

But from the time that evolution by natural selection became a dominant social paradigm (during the late 1900s) there has emerged a qualitatively different conception of 'evolution'. 

This could be called selection-reproductive evolution. 

The key to this concept is selection acting on reproduction. Evolution of this sort 'happens' after reproduction, and is defined in terms of changed offspring. Therefore it is Not about transformation of the same-self; but replacement of the original parent by following generations. 

With selection-reproductive evolution; a variety of different types - different selves - compete; some reproduce differentially more than others; and evolution has occurred when either one or just-some of the original selves continue to reproduce. 

Meanwhile the other selves have Not reproduced, and their continuity has been annihilated. 

So this concept is based on Darwinian ideas of natural selection; and entails not transformation but replacement. After such selectional evolution, what persists is Not the previous self - but a different self: a different Being; because offspring are different Beings than their parents.  

In a brief phrase: natural selection is reproductive replacement. It is all-about replacing one thing with some other thing. 

Some survive and others do not; and those which survive replace those which do not. 

Because if the identity of the organism is being defined in terms of its genetic composition; then any genetic change is itself a kind of replacement. 

Following Barfield; I believe that many people are often deeply confused between these two concepts of evolution. The seem to believe emotionally that they are proposing a developmental-transformative evolution; when in fact they are advocating replacement of one thing by another. 

For instance; when people are keen on a future based upon Artificial Intelligence, or the Transhumanist changing of Man (by means of drugs, genetic engineering, inorganic implants, links to computers or the internet etc); they seem to suppose that this is an transformational enhancement of Men. 

But in fact such aspirations are simply the annihilation of Men and their replacement. Replacement of Men with... something else. 

In spiritual terms; AI and Transhumanism are therefore advocating covert suicide: suicide, because they themselves (and all other Men) will cease to exist; covert, because this desire for self-destruction is hidden by an irrelevant focus on what might replace us. 

This is closely analogous to a plan to solve the problems of this Earth by exploding the planet - and then calling Mars 'the new and better Earth'. Maybe Mars is better (fewer problems), maybe not - but better or worse, Mars is Not an evolved Earth; it is some-thing different. 

So much is fairly obvious; but the 'afterlife' proposed and yearned-for by many people shares this fundamentally suicidal impulse; because it hopes for the total destruction of the body, the self, the ego and all that is individual - by its absorption into the impersonal and discarnate divine.  

I am talking about the Oneness spiritual movement - which is so much a feature of the New Age in The West. This talks constantly about how all things truly are one, and how separation into persons is an illusion (Maya), and a 'sin'; and separation of Man from God is an illusion and a sin. 

According to Oneness; in reality there are no persons, no Men - only one God; and that God is not a person - because the divine encompasses everything, so there can be no definition or description of God. 

Nothing specific can be said about the divine except for an infinite series of denials of all less-than-total claims of God's nature: i.e. a negative theology of what God is not.

To hope for the 'evolution' of my-self, and Mankind, into One; is therefore to hope-for one's own annihilation and replacement. 

There would be - could be -  no continuity between me-now, and now living Men - and the aimed for annihilation of separateness into divine unity.

Oneness spirituality is not to solve any of the problems of the world; but to destroy the world - to destroy every-thing... and replace it with something else. 

It is solving the problem of misery and suffering in life, by ending all life - by killing everything. 

In other words; Oneness offers exactly the same kind of 'solution' to the problem of Man's mortal life as does Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism. 

Oneness is just as much a covert advocacy of suicide, as are the schemes of technological replacement of Man by... 'something better'. 

And the reason why this is not immediately obvious; is that our culture has become deeply confused by the two concepts of evolution.

And has erroneously carried-over the spiritual aspirations of evolution understood as transformative-development, into the annihilation-seeking mechanisms of transformative-replacement.

AI-dolatry among Christians is the flip-side of fundamentally anti-personal metaphysical assumptions

I have commented before about my dismay at AI-dolatry among so many self-identified Christians - specifically their failure to recognise and grasp that the current iteration of "Artificial Intelligence" (which was top-down launched nearly three years ago, at the end of November 2022) is primarily a totalitarian - hence evil - strategy; designed for the accelerating corruption and damnation of Men. 

But vulnerability to AI-dolatry is the other side of a coin which in practice asserts and assumes the abstract impersonality of God and created reality - despite that Christians are supposed to recognize God as a person, as our Father, and we his children. 

That this is "in practice" and almost indifferent to theological theory, is evident from the official Mormon church's positive response to AI, describing it as: "a rapidly developing technology that has significant potential to assist the Church in accomplishing God’s work of salvation and exaltation." 

This despite that the CJCLDS officially regards God as an exalted and embodied Man; indeed as two Men - a Heavenly Father and Mother; which is an explicitly non-abstract primary understanding of the creator and creation that, one might have supposed, should have protected Mormons from AI-dolatry. 

But no. 

The fact is that modern Christians get their fundamental metaphysical assumptions from mainstream society, not from their religion; and our society is bureaucratic hence fundamentally anti-personal, anti-human. 

We have, for many decades, denigrated individuals and their personal judgments and evaluations; and instead given primary moral authority to the impersonal: to system; laws and regulations; process and procedures; voting and committees. 

(And all churches operate internally by these same assumptions; all churches are bureaucratic, procedural, deploy committees and voting at their fundamental levels of decision-making etc. - which of course affects their evaluations.)

It has been a "natural" extension of this abstract-impersonal way of thinking; that the human element ought ideally to be minimized or eliminated - such that computers, robots, "AI" are by their nature potentially superior to humans... 

Supposedly superior because less prone to corruption, error, variation; and (by our false but common mainstream understanding of these terms) more informed, more knowledgeable, more intelligent - hence wiser and authoritative; than any possible human or combination of humans.  

In short: the assertion is that "AI" is potentially superior because (and insofar as) it is not human.      

In theory, Christians ought to be immune to such self-destructive and deluded foolishness - but in practice they are qualitatively as bad as everyone else! (ie. Any measured differences between modern Christians and the mainstream - e.g. in surveys - are merely quantitative, and insufficient to make a qualitative difference.) 

My understanding of this, is that Christians are now reaping the consequences of ancient errors in their metaphysics - in particular of rejecting our spontaneous knowledge that reality is plural and animated: in other words that the ultimate reality includes many living, conscious, purposive and eternal beings - and these are the basis with which divine creation has worked. 

(That is; God created from and by-means-of many pre-existent Beings.)

There was, very early, a capture of the Christianity of Jesus Christ; by a metaphysics of oneness (hence monotheism) - and the adoption of multiple abstract assumptions (which became dogmas) such as: creation from nothing; omnipotence/ omniscience, omnipresence; and the conceptualization of God's creation as including unalive/ non-living aspects such as minerals...

This metaphysics imposed itself upon the simple teachings of Jesus (essentially, the promise of resurrected eternal life in Heaven to those who followed Him) to make a complex systemic religion of this-world and its institutions - in which the essential teaching became obscured, distorted... 

(And indeed all-but denied at times and in some places, such that salvation became so complex and contingent-upon-this-world, as to be regarded as actually impossible for some/ many people.).  

Many centuries downstream; and in the unique and unprecedented actual conditions of our modern society; these have led to underpinning assumptions that dominate (often unconsciously) most Christians - and almost everybody else. 

We see physics or mathematics as the primary reality, and the unalive as existing prior to (what we regard as) living beings - and as life and consciousness as having been made-from and/or added-to dead materials.   

In a nutshell; even those who believe in creation imagine God as starting with non-living materials; then making plants, animal, then Men by adding life, movement, consciousness etc. 

Whereas we ought instead to imagine everything created as alive (and outside it, only incomprehensible chaos); spirit as coming before matter; with matter "condensing" from spirit - so that spiritual life and consciousness are basic, have always-been - and always shall be. 

I think this is how we spontaneously (but mostly unconsciously) come into this world understanding things; and that young children still think this way. And I think the reason for this is that God implanted such knowledge in us, as innate knowledge which we (nearly always) need in order to live well and attain salvation. 

The discarding of our innate animism and pluralism did not matter much when Men spontaneously retained "participation" through into adulthood. 

Because in effect these Men (e.g. in the Classical and Medieval times) continued - but unconsciously and unavoidably - to perceive the world in the same way as young children, or could return to this way of thinking via the methods of religion (ritual, symbol, scripture etc). 

But now we all become alienated through adolescence; becoming cut-off from this innate knowledge and the spontaneous sense of being part of a living world - and from this state of alienation; modern Men therefore consciously need to choose to return to our innate knowledge and understanding. 

And we need to do this conscious act of return for-ourselves, because there are no institutions - not even churches - that will teach or encourage us to do so. 

Not just for-ourselves; but from-ourselves; because it is actually contradicted by many of the actual, here-and-now dominant and mandatory, Christian church teachings. 

And therefore church-orientated Christians (those who regard a church, or any external source, as having primary authority over Christian understanding) are stuck in delusional materialism; including AI-dolatry... 

Which, unless identified and repented at some point, has the potential to lead to their self-chosen damnation.   

My take-home message here, is that anyone who hopes to escape their own self-chosen damnation - which will eventuate for those who follow external "authority" in this actual world, including church authority; would be wise to bring to consciousness, and reflect deeply upon, their most fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of reality. 

 

The Absolute stupidity of (totalitarian) bureaucracy

There is an absolute and ineradicable stupidity at the heart of The System: the bureaucracy that controls our totalitarian society. 

This is something that I observed first-hand in the year and a half I worked in the National Health Service administration. What is characteristic of the stupidity is a conviction that because we need it to be so, then it can be so*. 

When The System finds some-thing necessary, then The System will believe that it is possible. 

Indeed, The System cannot comprehend that what it regards as necessary, is actually impossible - because The System only takes regard of itself. 

The System is its own world; and works by assuming that itself is the whole world. 

So that when The System recognizes something as necessary, or even as simply desirable - then The System also automatically-intrinsically regards that something as possible. 

We see this characteristic everywhere - or, at least, we can see it if we stand outwith The System, which apparently not all that many people can or do (or even want to do). 

We see it at the large scale and at the small scale of bureaucratic operations. 

At the large scale there is the colossal socio-economic phenomenon of the Global Climate Warming/ Change Emergency; by which something not-a-problem, and anyway immeasurable (i.e. the temperature of the earth/ocean surface/ atmosphere is not measurable coherently); and which has unknown determinants; is claimed by The System to be understood, predictable, and controllable (by The System) down to fractions of a degree... So The System regards the climate problem as solved and it is all a matter of implementation. 

On a smaller scale there is the current wave of AI ("Artificial Intelligence"), which The System believes it needs in order to exert what The System regards as the necessary degree of monitoring and control over the mass population. And the fact that "AI" cannot by its nature possibly work in the real world for such purposes, and therefore it does not work; is unknowable by The System. So The System regards the AI problem as solved and it is all a matter of implementation. 

And implementation of such schemes is also something that The System knows how to do, to its own satisfaction, by the means it has generated internally. 

So that the actually accelerating collapse of social order and capability in the world outside The System, and that this collapse is actually caused by The System, simply does not register; because it is not part of The System.

From inside The System, the only "real" problems are ones of implementation: the problem that "people" simply aren't properly doing... whatever it is that The System currently wants them to do. 

Which means that the only "real" problem for The System is that of monitoring and controlling "people". 

And thus the circle is completed.    

 *The specific instance when this became clear was when I was questioning a government minister in a meeting at the Health Authority. The NHS bureaucracy had set as a numerical-monitored-target, that national suicide rates should and would be reduced. I pointed-out that this was nonsensical, because nobody knew how national suicide rates could be reduced. The minister rather impatiently explained to me that it was necessary that Psychiatric services had a target (or else they would be neglected), and this was the only suitable measurable outcome; so now it was "up to us" to discover how to reach that target - i.e. how to reduce national suicide levels in line with the targets. In practice, The System generated some (totally conjectural) methods that it believed ought to work. These were accepted (eagerly) because something must be done. The hypothetical notion was, basically, prescribing more antidepressant drugs (because that must stop suicides, right?... Ignoring that the SSRI drugs actually increase suicides, which was what happened in the real world). And so drug-pushing was the policy which got implemented. At least until The System changed the targets, for reasons of its own.

Note added: The above is a soft version of the Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann - which is summarized and developed in the Appendix of my (pre-Christian, and leftist) book The Modernization Imperative.  

The intrinsic validity of so-called AI is analogous to the authority of bureaucracy - that is, it has zero validity

AI - so-called Artificial Intelligence - is (just) the latest version of a phenomenon I have spent most of my working life understanding and arguing against: that phenomenon appears in various guises including bureaucracy, voting, statistics applied to understanding, quality management, guidelines...

I have given-up on trying to explain why all of these are wrong when used to make decisions, to achieve insights, to monitor and regulate practices, in government. 

I have given-up; because it has become evident that the belief in such technologies is a matter of faith; it is an expression of deep and self-destructive (as well as socially-destructive) ideals. 

Their wrongness is innate and objective, and can be proved - but first we need to understand these phenomena - and extremely few genuinely wish to understand. 

(If you are sufficiently interested to make the effort, word search these on this blog and read the links. But, really, this stuff would not need explaining; if Men were properly orientated.)  

Most people are happily under the spell cast by these technologies/ methods  and their apologists. They believe because they want to believe; therefore they are strongly resistant to understanding. 

This is a civilization that is killing itself; and one major manifestation of this 'death wish' is that people persist in seeking some kind of technological or methodological technique of making judgments. 

Thus; people under the spell of AI are obviously enchanted by the idea that we can have computers/ machines/ systems which will make judgments, do learning, create poems/ pictures/ stories, discover, 'implement' values, organize people etc. etc. 

Behind such claims, and the eager credulity that welcomes them, there is a not-so-covert desire for human self-annihilation. A lot of people apparently want to hand-over all the highest, greatest, most divine aspects of being a Man - and they are prepared to give their faith to anyone who claims that this can and should be done. 

Because all this is ultimately a matter of faith. 

We now have a world of bureaucracy, with most major decisions made by voting; because that is where people have put their faith - their ultimate faith! 

People's faith is to believe - without any coherent logic, or honest 'evidence', and contrary to vast experience! - that bureaucratic organization and voting are superior to the judgment of individual human beings. 

And so the world is organized; and whatever happens to the world, that faith remains intact. 

Our desire to be rid of human judgment is, at root, an expression of our rejection of God.

This is why it is so pervasive, why it is a matter of faith, and why it will destroy us. 

We cannot be awoken from a spell that we have chosen to succumb to. 

Note added 30 Sep 23: It strikes me that with the advent of AI we have (as it were) officially entered a world in which public discourse consists of parroting: of uncomprehending computer-parrots speaking to other parrots (some computers, some 'humans') who cannot comprehend the parroted stimuli (because, strictly, there is nothing to comprehend), but which generate even more parroted responses... On and on, until the night comes.