Federica wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 8:17 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 12:34 am
Federica wrote: ↑Sat Dec 02, 2023 11:01 pm
Ashvin, you should know the answer to these questions very well. Where are these random thoughts and random FB comments coming from? You are trying to find an impossible compromise. There can’t be any strengthening of spiritual activity through the reflective model of Chat GPT, beyond the freezing recognition of the extent of ahrimanic dominion it demonstrates. You know that.
Any delegation of the effortful thinking activity necessary to internalize PoF towards an external linguistic processor, can only be a spoke in the wheel of individual spiritual development, as it inevitably counteracts and vilifies the will and the freedom that constitute the one and only purpose of the PoF experience.
There’s no way to jazz it up, Ashvin. You can have the GPT add the inspirational quote, you can have it add the recommended exercises, you can add the VR experience where Steiner pops up and tells you well done my dear friend,
all this ‘creativity’ would not get anyone a spit further. Rather, these are all ahrimanic spanners in the works of thinking that
will have to be costly undone, one by one, before real progress can be made through the only activity that is of relevance here, a spiritual one, which, as such, is
not externalizable in anyway, and less than all, to a
cemetery of thought-corpses such as a collection of Chat GPT answers.
It’s already quite tough. Why make it even harder with these new obstacles? Is it to quench the fear of becoming out of the game and unfashionable? Then it’s necessary to treat that anxiety, not to welcome a PoF-style GPT. There, only
further dissolution of thinking is possible. Not even the anxiety in itself can be cured in endeavors like this. On the contrary, the anxiety will be pushed one step ahead at every step.
Redemption means to find and inhabit the force of life that can brighten up the darkness of death through us. Redemption doesn't mean to wander to exhaustion through the valley of death letting our blood be preyed on by ever-thirstier, shinier and plumpier networks of thought-replicas.
These are the spider-like networks that wait for us to entirely fall prey to their tentacular coils. There is no chance of redemption in those seducing but lethal metal arms of death.
Well, Federica, we have been here before and your position on 'redemption' seems to become more extreme with each iteration. It comes to resemble more and more the 'salvation and redemption' we find in protestant Christianity. Just link yourself up with the Divine and the World will take care of itself. It is useless to play in the Devil's playground. We should be 'in the world, but not of the world'. Needless to say, this is diametrically opposed to the Spirit of Michael and Anthroposophy. I will quote this gain, but clearly it isn't being taken concretely enough.
Steiner wrote:In this way we come ever closer to a truth which should be engraved in the human soul as a lofty moral maxim: When you see something evil in the world, do not say, Here is evil — that is, imperfection; ask, rather, How can I attain to the enlightenment which will show me that on a higher plane this evil is transformed into good by the wisdom of the cosmos? How can I learn to tell myself: Here you see naught but imperfection because you are as yet unable to grasp the perfection of this imperfect thing?
Whenever man sees evil he should look into his own soul and ask himself, Why am I not yet able to recognize the good in this evil that confronts me?
Ironically, the 'not of the world' approach expresses a
lack of faith in the Divine and what it can creatively accomplish within and through us. It is something we can only express
before the inner metamorphoses have really taken hold, and before we are truly aware of the endless power, love, and wisdom of the Spirit. But I have tried countless times to point this out before. You still presume 'I know that' but am clinging to 'materialistic residue', 'fear of becoming unfashionable', or whatever. Each time it is shown my reasoning is much deeper than you presume, but you simply transfer your unexamined antipathies and premature judgments to a new topic. The judgments are always of a sort that
shuts down further creative thinking through the topic - it pronounces a 'final word' and tells us we are better off not engaging our creative thinking. You don't even want to engage in reasonable dialogue about the
prospect of such efforts.
I don't know... maybe if I think of some illuminating new way to get the message across, I will share it. Until then, I think it's best not to further indulge these distractions you keep seeking.
It’s interesting how, instead of replying to the points of substance I made, you prefer to leave out all matters of fact about the PoF-GPT. So 80% of your post is your two cents on my psychology, and 20% is the Steiner quote. I forgive you the 80%. Let’s go to the quote.
Yes, I absolutely realize that everything humanity is facing in its development, has a purpose and a usefulness in the big scheme of things. Including the Luciferic, and even the Ahrimanic events. These are there in order to make possible the blossoming of the free human being. Without Lucifer, we wouldn’t have developed an individual ego, that can desire independently and egotistically, but can also freely decide not to. Without Ahriman we wouldn’t have descended into hardened matter so much. The spiritual world would have been self-evident, and there would have been nothing to discover, nothing to reconnect with through our willed activity, as free, individual human beings.
This is what the quote is saying.
And there is no way whatsoever that you can recruit this quote and try to make it say that one should welcome, adopt and help develop a PoF-GPT. This is your A+B side, let’s call it so. It's not serving you here. Steiner cannot help you on this one, Ashvin. Maybe an AI-augmented fake-Steiner would, and will, in the near future, but the real spirit of Rudolf Steiner won’t. Not now, and not later on. It is to no avail that you then try to limit the evident spiritual catastrophe that a PoF-GPT would represent for the ones adopting it, by being ‘creative’ with instructing the bot to provide you with inspirational quotes and exercise suggestions. There is nothing creative in this, quite the opposite, please see that.
It’s as if you decided to buy the wife-replacement bot suggested in the “scientific paper" on
the other thread (it’s interesting what kind of new members are attracted to the forum, and when), the “
intelligent young gorgeous seductive warm & soft and well-lubricated A.I. sex robot that cooks, does dishes, sweeps and vacuums floors, does laundry, washes your car, is never tired, does not buy any female cosmetics nor spend your hard-earned money on expensive hair-styling every Friday” etcetera, and then you 'redeem it' by letting it recite the Rosary, so you don’t have to memorize it, and you train it to suggest to you daily moral deeds, adapted to your everyday life. You realize, don't you, that’s the same thing that you are suggesting for the PoF-GPT? Of course you can do all this, under the stolen insignia of 'redemption', and maybe you will.
But that couldn’t be farest from Steiner’s message, Ashvin, no matter how many new quotes you will throw in. By the way, we should be increasingly careful what a “quote” is going to really consist of, seeing the pace at which mind controlling attempts are trying to take over the discourse, at the expense of authenticity and truth.
So think again what creativity really means, in the face of a threat like a PoF-GPT, for instance. And what the connection may be with the spider-like beings that Steiner described.
As mentioned, what you are calling 'substantive points" and 'matters of fact' is, in my view, dogmatic judgments that shut down further creative thinking and reasonable dialogue through these topics. We should always try to pay more attention to what we are doing in our thinking, especially on topics we are passionate about, so we can trace the forces that are steering its states. This is not psychoanalysis, but the very core of modern initiation.
You could have responded, 'Ashvin you haven't thought this through enough... what you suggest is not feasible and would cause more confusion than light and here are the reasons X, Y, Z and here are examples A, B, C, etc.". (simply stating conclusions as facts is not reasoning). Then we could have continued the dialogue and allowed new inspirations to flourish within the liminal spaces of our thoughts, with no particular conceptual agenda for where those inspirations should or should not lead. I am not at all attached to my speculative ideas about a GPT bot for people who have encountered PoF or Steiner and have questions like Anthony did at the beginning of this thread when asking for 10 summary points. If it turns out to be infeasible and/or something that would simply cause more confusion and mislead people, then I have no problem scrapping the idea and moving on.
But that's not what you are responding, is it? Instead, the response is that even
thinking through such possibilities is the equivalent of 'wandering to exhaustion through the valley of death letting our blood be preyed on by ever-thirstier, shinier and plumpier networks of thought-replicas.' This is stated as absolute fact that should be 'obvious' to everyone (and obviously it's not). In this last post, there is one 'analogy that is another recitation of the
conclusion that new technologies cannot be incorporated into spiritual striving without the worst possible consequences, under any circumstances. Any attempt to even think through such a possibility is leading us into the depths of illusion.
We have seen a similar thing in many discussions with Eugene. He says, 'Yes, I agree that working through the living details of Earthly evolution is integral and needs to be done', but when we come to concrete examples and the prospect of
putting that principle into practice, then we hear, 'the genetic structure of humanity doesn't allow it to escape the clutches of duality, so any efforts in that respect can only be tinkering at the edges, missing the core of nondual realization'. All of this dogma serves to put obstacles in the way of doing the redemptive inner work necessary to gradually
spiritualize the Earth from the inside-out, such as developing right thought, right feeling, right judgment, etc. and moving our living spirit through the World Content. If you are working with those exercises and concentration, then you are keeping your being unnecessarily split by casting the principles aside on certain topics and defaulting to old passion-fueled habits. We should be honest with ourselves - it's much easier to absorb the principles intellectually and then adapt
them to our normal habits than it is to transform the latter and adapt our way of be-ing to the principles.
We will all oscillate between the poles on the inner path, and this should give us opportunities to
gain insight how our intuitive activity is being shaped by the pathways of our soul and intellectual environment. To discern more clearly what is going on in our thinking, we can focus on the potential results if people were to agree with the content of our thinking. If I agreed that there is a conspiracy around every corner from Linnell on FB to the new member showing up on the forum, what would result? How would this stimulate productive dialogue and strengthen our inner forces? Likewise, if I agreed that all creative efforts towards integrating new technologies for spiritual purposes must necessarily be a path towards spider-like beings, where would that leave us? What kind of ideal (inner) atmosphere would we be living in once our thinking is entrained by that content? I ask you to contemplate such questions fairly and deeply. This is the real inner work through which the Divine is born within us.