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Feb 12, 2023·edited Feb 12, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

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.

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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.

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Feb 12, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

💬 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

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Feb 12, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

I've had the thought parsing experiences into words, and into numbers, is organizing and degrading these ideas that come to mind.

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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.

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One of your clearest and most concise posts to date!

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Feb 12, 2023·edited Feb 12, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

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).

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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!

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Feb 13, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

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.

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deletedFeb 12, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch
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