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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

"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.

A population of self-styled victims looking for excuses to reject truth

I am not optimistic about the necessary spiritual awakening in England, because we are mostly a population that are, as individuals, looking for excuses Not to do what we Need to do.

Of course, we are swimming in a mas/social-media and bureaucratic sea of evil-tending propaganda; but the fact is that most people are very keen to accept this; because a key tenet of their core beliefs is that individuals are not responsible for what they think, say or do. Somebody else is always to blame.

The tenor of modernity - mostly indirectly, but sometimes quite explicitly - is that we 'can't help' it, ever - where 'it' can be almost anything. And 'you can't help it' is a message that almost everybody is desperate to hear, for one thing or another; and if for one thing, then sooner-or-later for all things.

The deal is: you get let off the hook for this; if you agree to support others being let off the hook for that.

Every-body is thus encouraged to see himself as a helpless victim - a help-seeking victim; and is rewarded for doing so. The deal is that if I am a victim, everybody is a victim; and therefore everybody needs to be protected from everybody else; everybody needs to be helped.

But where does help come from (in a world of victims)? Well, the only sure answer is that everybody must be made to help everybody else: hence the totalitarian society we inhabit, hence its becoming ever more totalitarian.

Because, only an all-knowing, all-powerful unified state can monitor all injustices, and have the power to set all wrongs to right.

Only an impersonal, bureaucratic state can escape the facts that all are both victims and oppressors. Ultimately, only an inhuman 'artificial intelligence' will be regarded as sufficiently authoritative to wield the absolute power (over human thought) we all demand is necessary...

Of course such supposed 'impersonality' has been, is, and always will be a fake. In reality matters are run by the Establishment for personal agendas; which is why it is now forbidden to notice any purpose behind the bad things that happen.

Behind the Establishment stand the immortal demonic powers, responsible for the strategy that spans many human generations, and has persuaded the ruling human elites to behave 'unselfishly'; their policies of 'social justice' inevitably destroying their own later lives and cultural legacies - destroying everything they claim to value most...

This world is supposed to operate only on the basis of a mixture of selfishness and 'random', purposeless chaos. The totalitarian regime implicitly claims to transcend this, and to impose benign order by being impersonal (hence not a conspiracy). Until we are induced to accept a facade of impersonal artificial intelligence, we have bureaucracy.

This fake-impersonality is the function of the large committee/ vote based institutions - governments, executive boards, the European Union, the United Nations etc. - these massive institutions appear impersonal, claim therefore to be impersonally unselfish; and therefore are seen as morally superior to any actual individual human.

Thus the nonsense; but each individual person who chooses to say he has no alternative but to accept this nonsense, is lost. In trying to avoid responsibility, in his passion to be a victim; he has not merely lost but destroyed himself.

So it goes. We can't fix the world: true. Individuals just are free, and if they - en masse - freely choose death rather than Heavenly Life Eternal; they can and will do so.

So, our only necessary decision is what we, each, personally are going to do about it in our own lives.

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.

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. 

Any real-life Matrix could Not be Only computers - but would Always require Beings

There is a common notion that there could, in principle, be a ruling Matrix that was entirely an Artificial Intelligence; consisting entirely of computers - and that such could (for good or ill) administer reality.

But this is not possible, even in theory. The world of computers is a world of quantities, of numbers; and as such excludes the issue of which qualities - of the entirety of open-ended and interconnected reality - is being 'modelled' by the numbers.

But modern Man has become very adept at blinding himself to the presence of Beings in all functional systems - Beings with life, consciousness and purpose. The Scientist is left-out of science, The Bureaucrat ignored in a Bureaucracy. Yet he is always present, always making selections and judgements and over-riding The System - and necessarily so.

This will never go away - so if, or when, there is claimed to be a purely objective, quantitative, numerical System in place; there will always be, somewhere and probably concealed, a Being or Beings standing-outside and above The System and manipulating it, adjusting it; partly to maintain its processes, and overall in-line-with their purposes.

It is ultimately these Beings which matter; far more than any System, any Artificial Intelligence - and in some ways The System functions merely to conceal this reality. It is a case of 'Pay no attention to that Being behind The System...'.

And this is precisely why modernity is tending towards a single bureaucratic System; why all mainstream politics and media converge upon this version of the future; because The Matrix both facilitates and conceals the influence of demonic Beings on the world. 

 

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.)

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). 

Common sense may be rare and getting rarer - and cannot be taken for granted

*

I have tended to assume that common sense is something which pretty much everybody has - excepting the intellectual elite and psychotics - but which in our modern mass media has overlaid and overwhelmed.

But this is to take common sense for granted. Common sense is in fact a complex functional adaptation to (something like) 'survive and reproduce and raise offspring on earth', and complex adaptations can be lost. Indeed there is an inbuilt tendency to lose them.

Insofar as common sense is a gift of God; it can be lost by rejection of God. Insofar as common sense is a Good, it can be lost by subversion, inversion and the destruction of Good.

Insofar as common sense is a suite of evolved adaptations it can be destroyed by loss of adaptations - from mutational damage to the genes which make the structures which implement the common sense.

(All this on top of the fact that what was common sense in the ancestral evolutionary environment may be mis-matched to the modern environment and may function as common nonsense.)

*

So, until recently, I have assumed that when the mass media and the crazed, self-hating and suicidal structure of Leftism destroys itself or is destroyed, and brings down the material structure of modernity - we will 'at least' be left with common sense to help survival and rebuilding. Common sense and common experience - in a phrase I used.

But maybe I was being over-optimistic (!).

Common experience depends on intelligence, and average intelligence is falling so rapidly that it seems likely that people after the collapse will not able to learn from experience in the way that was normal through most of the past millennium or so: they will not be as quick nor as able to learn.

And if widespread and cumulatively-severe genetic damage from mutation accumulation is a major element in the decline of intelligence, as now seems to me (unfortunately) highly likely, then common sense will be much weakened and destroyed to a lesser or greater extent.

This seems inevitable as a consequence of accumulation of deleterious mutations which get worse with each generation, and which act like a shotgun blast against the genome - each 'pellet' smashing a gene, and the mass of pellets breaking functions here and there. Each new generation inherits the genetic damage and adds more damage.

*

The key point here (as Michael A Woodley realized in our conversation yesterday^)  is that in mutation accumulation it is not only adaptations which are transmitted from the parent and inherited by offspring, but non-adaptations, broken adaptations, wrecked and useless remnants of adaptations.

Parents do not just transmit 'fitness' to their offspring, but also the accumulation of unfitness. Common sense is - or was - presumably, to some significant extent, a suite of interconnected and mutually-supportive adaptations supported by genes; and therefore damage to common sense may have a genetic cause, and will be heritable.

The 'nightmare scenario' would therefore be a human population which not only lacks the intelligence to sustain and operate complex modern civilization, but lacks the common sense to function even in simpler societies.

*

The main message is that although common sense used to be near universal and something which could be taken for granted - and which would re-emerge in situations of crisis - this is much too complacent a view. We cannot just assume that the people who survive crisis or collapse and re-emerge from the rubble will be armed with the levels of intelligence and common sense which we take for granted from history. Common sense is vulnerable, at the biological level.

*

(^Note: Michael Woodley's insight yesterday concerned the difference between on the one hand heredity of functional and fitness-enhancing adaptations, which has always been the focus of evolutionary theory, and the way that modernity has selected-for non-adaptation, for broken adaptations. And furthermore, damage, hence dysfunction, is not merely inherited but is added-to with each new generation - with each generational wave of new and un-purged mutational damage, with each failure to eliminate the cluster spontaneously occurring deleterious mutations. This is not a matter of offspring inheriting fitness from their parents, but inheriting 'anti-fitness'; and it is not only inherited - because offspring will differ from their parents in having novel and added and extra forms of heritable anti-fitness. In is not an adapted genome which is being selected-for, but a broken genome. In sum, modernity has not selected for a population who are 'adapted' to modern conditions; but for a population whose adaptations are being  destroyed, progressively and generation upon generation. Modernity has not selected for fitness, not even for a new kind of fitness - but modernity has selected for a lack of fitness - for the destruction of complex functional adaptations. And this loss of fitness, of adaptations, is objective and in principle measurable and quantifiable. Such a situation may be unique to human society in the modern world - where humans created an artificial environment which destroyed a critical mechanism for purging deleterious mutations from each generation, and therefore both allowed the survival off, and also positively selected in favour of, high-mutation-load humans who could not sustain that artificial environment which allowed them to survive and reproduce. Clearly the situation is not stable - is meta-stable as WD Hamilton said. We are, at present, in the lag phase when the inertia has allowed modernity to continue after the fundamental basis for its continuation has gone. The uniqueness of this situation, enabled by the truly massive effect the human species has had upon the environment for the selection of the human species during the past few centuries, could explain why the phenomenon has apparently not been previously noticed by biologists - not even the greatest ones. Nonetheless, this is a fundamental attribute of natural selection - http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-primacy-of-red-queen-or-what-does.html.)

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.   

Could computers/ Artificial Intelligence take-over the world soon?

No - because they can't think; and they never will be able to think - BUT...

The totality of computers/ AI could make it possible for just a handful of humans (or other sentient entities) to take-over the world.

And indeed that is the present, rather than a possible future; especially in terms of the omnipresent social/ mass media/ linked-total-bureaucracy that is monitoring human behaviour and filling human minds all-but 24/7; such that ever-fewer people actually, ever, really think any more - they merely supply specialist parts of their intelligence and emotions to participate in the global system of information processing...

In the end, only those who think have agency - and only those with agency can rule - and the rulers will be those individuals (no matter how few, no matter how evil) who have agency. The rest will be either passively obedient, or shunted-aside into intoxication or psychosis.  

And that - Ladies and Gentlemen - is the demonic plan! So far, so 'good'...

Spookocracy - a suggested anti-"word-spell" defence

The terminology of totalitarian evil takes many forms; one aim of which is to enmesh our consciousness in word-spells conducive to the evil strategy of subversion, corruption, destruction and inversion. 

Literally all of the Litmus Test issues - great and small - have used positively-inflected tendentious terminologies that beg questions in their own favour; only the latest of which is "Artificial Intelligence". 

The same "Intelligence" term crops-up in the names and descriptors of the surveillance and manipulation institutions, and their role in the totalitarian systems of "Western" nations and globalist organizations. 

As an act of inner (and sometimes) public resistance - a counter-spell, if you like - directed against the manipulative aspects of this term; I suggest that Spookocracy can be substituted and/or adapted to all relevant and associated institutional manifestations...

Which term has the needful negative connotations; including essential malignity, an unnecessary and parasitic existence, elements of bluff; and a kind of spectral spectral half-alive/ undead quality. 

"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.

  

Life and Consciousness - two aspects of Beings

Consider the phenomenon of consciousness, of self-awareness; which is part of mainstream culture in the form of official, corporate and media outputs concerning Artificial Intelligence, the possibility of Sentient computers, robots, vehicles etc. 

It is clear that the mainstream culture has abstractly defined consciousness and abstracted it from the context of living beings; and is now off into the reals of untrammeled speculation about where it might or does exist in some electronic or informational kind, independent of life and of humans. 

But my baseline metaphysical assumption - which is apparently the built-in assumption of all (?) human beings as young children - is that everything is alive (or part of a living being) - and that consciousness is an aspect of being alive. 

In other words, consciousness cannot be separated from life. All living things are conscious to some degree and in some way; and all conscious things are living. 

Therefore; if/when a non-being seems to be conscious, then this consciousness is either not real, or else coming from a living being. 

 

A separate question is why our culture has assiduously implanted the idea that non-beings can or will be conscious. This has been portrayed in fiction, or wrongly claimed in media, so often that many people believe it is true - or at least possible and imminent. 

The answer to 'why' is partly because of the innate error of modern consciousness, which allows people to believe the false idea. 

And partly because of purposive, strategic evil supernatural beings; which aim to confuse and/or brainwash people, for purposes tending to make them choose their own damnation by desiring it.