To relate to my own recent experiences, I'll recount some of the conversations I had with friends and colleagues in the wake of my battles with the GPT chatbot. Some of them are still thoroughly convinced that my victories were the product of science instead of art. The ones who argue this are mostly what I'd call "soft atheists" (in the original definition of the a-word). While they won't come right out and say it, I sense they strongly suspect I'm withholding something in my descriptions, that I possess some hidden factual knowledge about an exploitable weakness in the system. That when I describe my work as art, I'm being theatrical or even duplicitous.
It's not true. What *is* true is something they seem incapable of believing.
While I indeed have some very minor knowledge about how such systems function, I did not have the code in front of me. And even if I had, the vast majority of it would likely be beyond my technical experience or ken.
Here's what I observed about the experience. When facing the robot in the first three sessions, I was "in the zone," as you put it. I wouldn't describe it as "auto-writing"; there was thought involved, and even moments of contemplation. But by and large my process was intuitive, artistic. I felt that indescribable feeling of connection, and access to a grammar beyond language.
In the fourth bout, where I prompted the machine to produce the tale of Gourdo, this general feeling/aura was concentrated into a lightning bolt that was nonetheless serene. I "knew" what the result would be even before I finished typing it. I get the sense that this is the form of knowledge you are describing here, which forges connections with a substance of intellect beyond the purview of ordinary sensory information.
Again, those who have never experienced this will demand evidence, but with an evidentiary standard that can never be fully met. That's not to say that spiritualism isn't full of grifters and con-artists. But that's only because all human enterprises are. And some may merely be lying to themselves about their results. Like a cargo cult, they mimic the external features of art without comprehending the praxis or causal order.
Wonderful comment, thank you Mark. And I think you nailed it.
I have had experiences like this too with my writing--sometimes a post just assembles itself in my mind, and it's a bit as if I'm just watching the process. Or, when I'm typing, it feels like the thing types itself. Granted, I'm actively thinking and concentrating, but still...
Your warning about con artists is very important too. The thing is, the moment you take yourself too seriously and think of yourself as a prophet talking to angels or something just because you feel inspired, two things can happen: a) you lose the inspiration. God does *not* like ego trips. Or worse, b) some demon worm-tongues its way in and begins corrupting you and your expression.
It's also worth noting that the Romanticists were right up to a point with their artist worship, to the degree that these artists really did bring something from heaven to earth. Many modern artists piggy-bagged on this sacred status, but without the higher connection--their "art" is just a product of ego, and they demand their ego be worshiped, a demand that modern society is all-too willing to fulfil.
Your battles with the wannabe AI (it's certainly artificial, but is it really "intelligent?") and your summary here are great examples, and I've been wondering whether next-level egregores are not the ones "inspiring" the creators of this AI with the ultimate aim of giving them (the egregores) a physical nexus to "inhabit" in this world. Given the type of people working to create it, it doesn't seem much of a stretch to call them "demon-posessed." But the good spirits know your heart is in the right place and are inspiring you to help break the spell these demons are trying to weave.
In this area, I always have more questions than answers and lack the vocabulary to articulate my intuitions, but your work -- as well as Luc's writing on these themes -- really resonates with me on a deep level and gives me hope.
I read through your chatGPT engagements, and found your linguistic observations of the AI and its creators excellent. Thanks for posting your God vs Satan crashing the system.
Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Tielhard Chadin both proposed a "noosphere" to which all minds are connected, which is suggested as the reason why an idea pops up around the world simultaneously. Georgie Hyde-Lees is said to have been encouraged by her husband William Butler Yeats to cultivate her ability to automatically write, which output is said to be the source for a lot of his best poems.
Very interesting, I didn't know about some of those. I think if we want to understand such matters, we need to approach them from many angles simultanously. The modern/dualistic way ("noosphere", "morphogenetic fields" etc.) is good, but I'm currently interested in exploring the more monistic, unifying way of looking at it that seems closer to how some of the ancients looked at it. The more, the merrier!
In The Yugas they describe the mind as being like an antenna, so thoughts come from without based on the frequencies the antenna is tuned to receive how they resonate internally.
I very much like the antenna analogy. I think it is useful though to look at the whole human body, i.e. the "mind-body complex" as the antenna--or, to stay in the radio analogy, the body is the antenna, the subtle emotions and sensations are the currents, and the mind is the tuner. Introspection based on this analogy can be useful.
There is also the concept of the Astral realm, the "Great Arcanum" which is the place of imagination, where creative people go to pull back raw material to make gold with. One could say that is outside oneself, in a sense, the raw material there flowing from the creative source.
The most on-line Archdruid elaborates about Yeats family tandem, among other key figures of times all but having disappeared in foggy rearview mirror 😔 --> www.ecosophia.net/the-castle-of-heroes/
🗨 just how drastically the great occult revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has been scrubbed from the officially approved histories of our time.
Yes, this certainly can happen. Language and systematization can confuse things and even invert the meaning. But sometimes it's also useful to give it a shot I think, carefully and being aware of the pitfalls.
This is beautifully written and provocative, Luc. Another one I've added to my list to respond to after my episode on William! It's a good thing you're coming up quick, or I'd have a month of Sundays, each packed with ideas I want to share.
Some thoughts. By ‘thought’ I mean any conscious apprehension of meaning. The ideas of perception, self, other, inside, outside, world, body, thing/object, God, intuition, feeling, are indeed ‘ideas’, meaningful objects of thought. By invoking them we are thinking about them. In being aware of experiencing what they signify we are also apprehending their meaning (we are thinking about them). We cannot evade thought, and any reference to objects or states that are non-thought are merely distinctions in thought, of meta-level vs object-level thoughts, thinking about thoughts and creating a hierarchy of meanings. On this view, everything there is for consciousness is thought, and postulating about the ‘origin’ of thought as either internal or external is still entirely within the omnipresent domain of thought, but the consciousness is indeed organised according to levels of meaning, and it is meaningful only because it is internally differentiated (a meaningful idea consists in its difference from every other idea: the law of identity). Crucially, these differences require differentiation of the loci of consciousness, internal ‘socialisation’ of multiple points of view and quasi-autonomous ‘minds’, which are fluid in their (individualised) meaning content. Consciousness can exist as an integrated, higher-order idea only as a multiplicity.
At the opposite end of the hierarchy is the natural world. Nature, including the inorganic physical world, is, in a sense, a manifestation of the ‘collective unconscious’, the totality/complexity of meanings that consciousness has progressively externalised as having the relational integrity of a World. Behind this process is the procedural ideal (ideal agency, or Logos) that guided its creation via the rules of discernment of possible vs impossible, real vs unreal, true vs false, in every manifestation of rational consciousness. As such, the world is meaning, every real part of which is meaningful and necessary to sustain the integrity of the whole, which in turn makes the whole existentially conditional on rational consciousness. Logos (as the principle of sense) is above and before the world, it is also in the world as the embodied rational consciousness, and it is the world as its meaningful appearance/experience.
It seems possible to apprehend sections of the immense complexity of the ‘collective unconscious’ as meaningful insights/feelings, which manifest (meaningfully) as if from a birds-eye view, without all the ungraspable complexity but only as a unified impression of an image. Perhaps the total image is accessible at all times, but it is so familiar that we are habituated not to ‘see’ it, like fish in water, and the only times we experience extraordinary insights is when circumstances and emotions emphasise/focalise only a relevant section of the total image (by obscuring everything else).
So many insights, so much to ponder, as always. Thank you.
I'm reminded of the Whiteheadian picture: everything is connected and mediated via processes. This means that in principle, everything is knowable, even distant times when the universe might have evolved very different natural laws. But this can happen only via our own relational perspective; while an infinite number of finite facts can be known, infinity itself--everything from all perspectives at once--cannot.
In that view, what you said about emphasizing/focalizing could be seen as circumstances when we can bring a far-reaching relational pathway into focus that may stretch very wide, or very far, as opposed to the more common modes of perception that are directed to close and immediately useful relational nodes.
Fantastic essay!!! (Like always!) My own meager meditation practice has gotten me wondering about the nature and origin of some of these thoughts I perceive, and from there, questioning the nature of this conscious "I" and its relation to whatever I am in total, or its relation to whatever higher realities I am connected to. Of course, the trick is to explore that with both feet on the ground, as you put it. Thanks for sharing your insights!
For me, the real question is what is consciousness? The next question is, does consciousness reside in the physical body/brain at this time? A story.
Years ago I was in a Physiology and Pharmacology PhD program. With one friend at the time, we would go to the horse races on Saturdays. We tried to figure out from the Racing Form who would win the race. If we knew how to bet, meaning you don't bet on the winning horse every time, we would have made money.
One evening I had a dream of a horse "In Rare Form" winning a race. To my knowledge, I had never heard of this horse. I told a friend about the weird dream, and we dropped it. A few days later he came to me holding the Racing Form, saying that the horse in my dream was running this Saturday. It turned out that the horse was a female running against mails, which meant she was not expected to win. We were scientists, but we tried to rate the horse. We overthought it completely.
We bet an exacta with "In Rare Form" and another horse I thought was in the dream "Whiskey Time".
On a $2 dollar bet it paid $44.
As with Remote Viewing and Psychic predictions, we don't think about the meaning in terms of consciousness. My dream and these all mean that consciousness is outside of time and space.
This is excellent.
To relate to my own recent experiences, I'll recount some of the conversations I had with friends and colleagues in the wake of my battles with the GPT chatbot. Some of them are still thoroughly convinced that my victories were the product of science instead of art. The ones who argue this are mostly what I'd call "soft atheists" (in the original definition of the a-word). While they won't come right out and say it, I sense they strongly suspect I'm withholding something in my descriptions, that I possess some hidden factual knowledge about an exploitable weakness in the system. That when I describe my work as art, I'm being theatrical or even duplicitous.
It's not true. What *is* true is something they seem incapable of believing.
While I indeed have some very minor knowledge about how such systems function, I did not have the code in front of me. And even if I had, the vast majority of it would likely be beyond my technical experience or ken.
Here's what I observed about the experience. When facing the robot in the first three sessions, I was "in the zone," as you put it. I wouldn't describe it as "auto-writing"; there was thought involved, and even moments of contemplation. But by and large my process was intuitive, artistic. I felt that indescribable feeling of connection, and access to a grammar beyond language.
In the fourth bout, where I prompted the machine to produce the tale of Gourdo, this general feeling/aura was concentrated into a lightning bolt that was nonetheless serene. I "knew" what the result would be even before I finished typing it. I get the sense that this is the form of knowledge you are describing here, which forges connections with a substance of intellect beyond the purview of ordinary sensory information.
Again, those who have never experienced this will demand evidence, but with an evidentiary standard that can never be fully met. That's not to say that spiritualism isn't full of grifters and con-artists. But that's only because all human enterprises are. And some may merely be lying to themselves about their results. Like a cargo cult, they mimic the external features of art without comprehending the praxis or causal order.
Wonderful comment, thank you Mark. And I think you nailed it.
I have had experiences like this too with my writing--sometimes a post just assembles itself in my mind, and it's a bit as if I'm just watching the process. Or, when I'm typing, it feels like the thing types itself. Granted, I'm actively thinking and concentrating, but still...
Your warning about con artists is very important too. The thing is, the moment you take yourself too seriously and think of yourself as a prophet talking to angels or something just because you feel inspired, two things can happen: a) you lose the inspiration. God does *not* like ego trips. Or worse, b) some demon worm-tongues its way in and begins corrupting you and your expression.
It's also worth noting that the Romanticists were right up to a point with their artist worship, to the degree that these artists really did bring something from heaven to earth. Many modern artists piggy-bagged on this sacred status, but without the higher connection--their "art" is just a product of ego, and they demand their ego be worshiped, a demand that modern society is all-too willing to fulfil.
Your battles with the wannabe AI (it's certainly artificial, but is it really "intelligent?") and your summary here are great examples, and I've been wondering whether next-level egregores are not the ones "inspiring" the creators of this AI with the ultimate aim of giving them (the egregores) a physical nexus to "inhabit" in this world. Given the type of people working to create it, it doesn't seem much of a stretch to call them "demon-posessed." But the good spirits know your heart is in the right place and are inspiring you to help break the spell these demons are trying to weave.
In this area, I always have more questions than answers and lack the vocabulary to articulate my intuitions, but your work -- as well as Luc's writing on these themes -- really resonates with me on a deep level and gives me hope.
I read through your chatGPT engagements, and found your linguistic observations of the AI and its creators excellent. Thanks for posting your God vs Satan crashing the system.
You're welcome, David. Thanks for subscribing!
Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Tielhard Chadin both proposed a "noosphere" to which all minds are connected, which is suggested as the reason why an idea pops up around the world simultaneously. Georgie Hyde-Lees is said to have been encouraged by her husband William Butler Yeats to cultivate her ability to automatically write, which output is said to be the source for a lot of his best poems.
Very interesting, I didn't know about some of those. I think if we want to understand such matters, we need to approach them from many angles simultanously. The modern/dualistic way ("noosphere", "morphogenetic fields" etc.) is good, but I'm currently interested in exploring the more monistic, unifying way of looking at it that seems closer to how some of the ancients looked at it. The more, the merrier!
In The Yugas they describe the mind as being like an antenna, so thoughts come from without based on the frequencies the antenna is tuned to receive how they resonate internally.
I very much like the antenna analogy. I think it is useful though to look at the whole human body, i.e. the "mind-body complex" as the antenna--or, to stay in the radio analogy, the body is the antenna, the subtle emotions and sensations are the currents, and the mind is the tuner. Introspection based on this analogy can be useful.
There is also the concept of the Astral realm, the "Great Arcanum" which is the place of imagination, where creative people go to pull back raw material to make gold with. One could say that is outside oneself, in a sense, the raw material there flowing from the creative source.
Just like comets get pulled out from mystery Oort cloud 😉
The most on-line Archdruid elaborates about Yeats family tandem, among other key figures of times all but having disappeared in foggy rearview mirror 😔 --> www.ecosophia.net/the-castle-of-heroes/
🗨 just how drastically the great occult revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has been scrubbed from the officially approved histories of our time.
Greer is the reason I am aware of it.
💬 much of our thinking about the world, about what’s possible and isn’t, is conditioned by very recent modern ideas
🗨 You need to believe in things that aren't true... how else can they become? ~~Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
I've had the thought parsing experiences into words, and into numbers, is organizing and degrading these ideas that come to mind.
Yes, this certainly can happen. Language and systematization can confuse things and even invert the meaning. But sometimes it's also useful to give it a shot I think, carefully and being aware of the pitfalls.
This is beautifully written and provocative, Luc. Another one I've added to my list to respond to after my episode on William! It's a good thing you're coming up quick, or I'd have a month of Sundays, each packed with ideas I want to share.
One of your clearest and most concise posts to date!
Some thoughts. By ‘thought’ I mean any conscious apprehension of meaning. The ideas of perception, self, other, inside, outside, world, body, thing/object, God, intuition, feeling, are indeed ‘ideas’, meaningful objects of thought. By invoking them we are thinking about them. In being aware of experiencing what they signify we are also apprehending their meaning (we are thinking about them). We cannot evade thought, and any reference to objects or states that are non-thought are merely distinctions in thought, of meta-level vs object-level thoughts, thinking about thoughts and creating a hierarchy of meanings. On this view, everything there is for consciousness is thought, and postulating about the ‘origin’ of thought as either internal or external is still entirely within the omnipresent domain of thought, but the consciousness is indeed organised according to levels of meaning, and it is meaningful only because it is internally differentiated (a meaningful idea consists in its difference from every other idea: the law of identity). Crucially, these differences require differentiation of the loci of consciousness, internal ‘socialisation’ of multiple points of view and quasi-autonomous ‘minds’, which are fluid in their (individualised) meaning content. Consciousness can exist as an integrated, higher-order idea only as a multiplicity.
At the opposite end of the hierarchy is the natural world. Nature, including the inorganic physical world, is, in a sense, a manifestation of the ‘collective unconscious’, the totality/complexity of meanings that consciousness has progressively externalised as having the relational integrity of a World. Behind this process is the procedural ideal (ideal agency, or Logos) that guided its creation via the rules of discernment of possible vs impossible, real vs unreal, true vs false, in every manifestation of rational consciousness. As such, the world is meaning, every real part of which is meaningful and necessary to sustain the integrity of the whole, which in turn makes the whole existentially conditional on rational consciousness. Logos (as the principle of sense) is above and before the world, it is also in the world as the embodied rational consciousness, and it is the world as its meaningful appearance/experience.
It seems possible to apprehend sections of the immense complexity of the ‘collective unconscious’ as meaningful insights/feelings, which manifest (meaningfully) as if from a birds-eye view, without all the ungraspable complexity but only as a unified impression of an image. Perhaps the total image is accessible at all times, but it is so familiar that we are habituated not to ‘see’ it, like fish in water, and the only times we experience extraordinary insights is when circumstances and emotions emphasise/focalise only a relevant section of the total image (by obscuring everything else).
So many insights, so much to ponder, as always. Thank you.
I'm reminded of the Whiteheadian picture: everything is connected and mediated via processes. This means that in principle, everything is knowable, even distant times when the universe might have evolved very different natural laws. But this can happen only via our own relational perspective; while an infinite number of finite facts can be known, infinity itself--everything from all perspectives at once--cannot.
In that view, what you said about emphasizing/focalizing could be seen as circumstances when we can bring a far-reaching relational pathway into focus that may stretch very wide, or very far, as opposed to the more common modes of perception that are directed to close and immediately useful relational nodes.
Fantastic essay!!! (Like always!) My own meager meditation practice has gotten me wondering about the nature and origin of some of these thoughts I perceive, and from there, questioning the nature of this conscious "I" and its relation to whatever I am in total, or its relation to whatever higher realities I am connected to. Of course, the trick is to explore that with both feet on the ground, as you put it. Thanks for sharing your insights!
For me, the real question is what is consciousness? The next question is, does consciousness reside in the physical body/brain at this time? A story.
Years ago I was in a Physiology and Pharmacology PhD program. With one friend at the time, we would go to the horse races on Saturdays. We tried to figure out from the Racing Form who would win the race. If we knew how to bet, meaning you don't bet on the winning horse every time, we would have made money.
One evening I had a dream of a horse "In Rare Form" winning a race. To my knowledge, I had never heard of this horse. I told a friend about the weird dream, and we dropped it. A few days later he came to me holding the Racing Form, saying that the horse in my dream was running this Saturday. It turned out that the horse was a female running against mails, which meant she was not expected to win. We were scientists, but we tried to rate the horse. We overthought it completely.
We bet an exacta with "In Rare Form" and another horse I thought was in the dream "Whiskey Time".
On a $2 dollar bet it paid $44.
As with Remote Viewing and Psychic predictions, we don't think about the meaning in terms of consciousness. My dream and these all mean that consciousness is outside of time and space.
Very well put!