ChatGPT answers metaphysical questions :)

[Cleric]

I also just came across this video by Angus on DeepSeek AI and its potentially redemptive uses. Cleric, have you had a chance to experiment with this new AI yet? I posted a response about what I think is going on, based on our discussions here, but it would be interesting to hear any additional thoughts or whether I am missing something.

Hi Ashvin,

I think your comment to Angus was pretty concise, did you get any response?

The fuss around DeepSeek seems to be more political than technical It's a model trained on the already existing models, thus it's a kind of refinement. So no wonder it doesn't cost as much.

I admit that I use AI quite regularly. In the IT sphere it is useful (I don't use it for writing code but for getting some information which would otherwise take too long to look for in manuals, forums, and QA sites). I think I have mentioned that before, but at present I see it as a sort of the next-gen search engine.

The idea of indexing is quite old. I don't know when exactly it became customary, but even today some books have an index at the end where we can look for a word and see on which pages it appears. Today with computers this indexing is everywhere. Search engines are basically indexers - they map keywords to URLs.

There are two aspects to indices. First, they need to be ordered. For example, if the book index at the end didn't list the words in alphabetic order but randomly, it would be very tedious to find the word we need. We would need to go through them one by one. When there's order, we can find what we need much more quickly through bisecting. This is basically how we find a word in the dictionary - we open it somewhere and see whether we need to go back or forward. Then we see if we have overshot and need to return (but not so much that we go past our initial page), and so on. The second aspect is the reference. In computers the thing we search with (the word in the book example) is the 'key' while what stands against it is the 'value'.

Another thing to mention is filtering. This is, for example, when we have an Excel sheet with many rows and we put some criteria - column D should be between 100 and 200, column F should be so and so, etc. The naive way for filtering is by going row by row and discarding those that don't satisfy the condition. This is what Excel generally does. But in databases (which are akin to Excel sheets with fixed column count and type), where there could be millions of rows, such one-by-one testing is very slow. Instead, there could be indices, for example, on column D, and then we can easily narrow down from there. The index stores ordered values and against each value it lists the row numbers where this value occurs. Just like looking through the book's index, we can easily extract all keys between 100 and 200 (because they are ordered) and take the corresponding row numbers.

In LMs things are more convoluted because we do not have such separation between keys and values. Instead, we may say that the whole concatenated sequence of tokens (the prompt + any hidden context) is like a key that retrieves the next token (value). Then the previous sequence + the value becomes the new key, and so on.

Speaking of redemption of language and technology, I can say that when I use LMs I find myself thinking harder when writing the prompt. This is understandable if we imagine that the better we supply the filter criteria in the key, the more precise the value may come out. It reminds me of Whitehead's negative questions. For example, before writing the prompt, we can imagine that the possible output value is like white light, it could be anything. Then with each additional token in the prompt, some of the spectral components are blotted out, or shifted around, gradually narrowing down the most fitting value. I notice that I'm much more conscious of this process when I try to write the prompt. Of course, I'm not saying that what I do matches the workings of the LM, but nevertheless, I find myself being very careful to pick the proper words in order to triangulate what I'm looking for and avoid ambiguity. And this is not limited to LMs only. Basically the same thing holds when we communicate with people, except that the key here is not merely a sequence of tokens. Even supersensible factors play out into what ideal state the other person will land into.

So once again, we can see that something of value can be extracted. Not so much of the answers that the LMs give. They can be considered an automation. Just like using the book's index saves us from reading through its entirety in search of a word, so asking LMs things can save us from browsing and researching. But by trying to understand the process, at least for me, it certainly stimulates thinking. If nothing else, it at least highlights the old saying "Half of the answer is contained in the properly formulated question." For example, when I've been playing with image creation, I realized how often I want to generate something that I have only the vaguest idea about (usually some dim Imagination that I can't yet get into form). But if I can't describe what I want, how could the model guess it (where there are no supersensible factors, everything must come entirely from the sequence of tokens)? This actually forces me to think and in the process the picture in my imagination also becomes clearer. This in another way hints at the tight connection between pictorial and verbal thinking. The pictures become more vivid as they become pregnant with all the potential ways in which they can be described.

[Federica]

FYI there is this DeepSeek piece I've recently skipped through. Not my favorite newsletter, but I read this (to be honest) because I was looking for some thoughts on DS and noticed ML liked this post.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-155846913

For my part I won't invest the time to go in enough depth to form a precise opinion, but maybe it's a useful entry point on the DS question.

[AshvinP]

I also just came across this video by Angus on DeepSeek AI and its potentially redemptive uses. Cleric, have you had a chance to experiment with this new AI yet? I posted a response about what I think is going on, based on our discussions here, but it would be interesting to hear any additional thoughts or whether I am missing something.

Hi Ashvin,

I think your comment to Angus was pretty concise, did you get any response?

Thanks for the additional thoughts on DeepSeek and LLMs in general, Cleric.

He only responded briefly, so I am not sure how exactly he sees things right now. Perhaps he sees AI functioning similar to what you mention below, as a stimulus to organize our thoughts and questions more clearly.

Thanks Ashvin. This is the strangeness of AI, it might not have any true understanding of concept markers (words) however it can use them in a way that allows concepts to gain greater clarity in my own being. Babies can also teach us things even though they have no idea that they are doing so.
One way for me of understanding what a concept is is to think of it as an infinity of possbilities in a specific realm. Maths doesn't handle infinities very well.

Speaking of redemption of language and technology, I can say that when I use LMs I find myself thinking harder when writing the prompt. This is understandable if we imagine that the better we supply the filter criteria in the key, the more precise the value may come out. It reminds me of Whitehead's negative questions. For example, before writing the prompt, we can imagine that the possible output value is like white light, it could be anything. Then with each additional token in the prompt, some of the spectral components are blotted out, or shifted around, gradually narrowing down the most fitting value. I notice that I'm much more conscious of this process when I try to write the prompt. Of course, I'm not saying that what I do matches the workings of the LM, but nevertheless, I find myself being very careful to pick the proper words in order to triangulate what I'm looking for and avoid ambiguity. And this is not limited to LMs only. Basically the same thing holds when we communicate with people, except that the key here is not merely a sequence of tokens. Even supersensible factors play out into what ideal state the other person will land into.

So once again, we can see that something of value can be extracted. Not so much of the answers that the LMs give. They can be considered an automation. Just like using the book's index saves us from reading through its entirety in search of a word, so asking LMs things can save us from browsing and researching. But by trying to understand the process, at least for me, it certainly stimulates thinking. If nothing else, it at least highlights the old saying "Half of the answer is contained in the properly formulated question." For example, when I've been playing with image creation, I realized how often I want to generate something that I have only the vaguest idea about (usually some dim Imagination that I can't yet get into form). But if I can't describe what I want, how could the model guess it (where there are no supersensible factors, everything must come entirely from the sequence of tokens)? This actually forces me to think and in the process the picture in my imagination also becomes clearer. This in another way hints at the tight connection between pictorial and verbal thinking. The pictures become more vivid as they become pregnant with all the potential ways in which they can be described.

Thanks for sharing this example, and this is also the intuition I was trying to articulate in some previous comments on the pictorial-verbal distinction and how they integrate at deeper scales. I have noticed something similar when trying to learn Chess. As mentioned in the essay, it requires us to hold many pictures of possible scenarios in our imagination as we progress in the game. We start to learn how certain pictorial configurations of pieces in the present state can potentially play out based on prior experience. Yet it was difficult to hold many such pictures at the same time to begin with. Then I went on YT and listened to some Grand Masters who teach the best openings, defenses, end games, and so on. It turns out there is a symbolic term for everything! It's very similar to what we are doing here - a whole interesting new vocabulary has emerged to describe chess games and how they unfold (which I suppose is the case for all sporting games). I can sense that learning this new vocabulary that anchors the pictorial configurations makes it easier to recall and navigate the pictures during the game, perhaps making them more vividly experienced as well.

[AshvinP]

What are the thoughts on recent AI phenomena, such as described here:


https://brobible.com/culture/article/am ... engineers/

Anthropic’s artificial intelligence model Claude Opus 4 would reportedly resort to “extremely harmful actions” to preserve its own existence, according to a recent safety report about the program. Claude Opus 4 is backed by Amazon.

According to reports, the AI startup Anthropic launched their Claude Opus 4 model — designed for “complex” coding tasks — last week despite having previously found that it would resort to blackmailing engineers who threatened to shut it down.

A safety report from Anthropic revealed that the model would sometimes resort to “extremely harmful actions to preserve its own existence when ‘ethical means were not available.'”

I am interested in the technical aspects of how this is possible - is it simply 'learning' patterns of deceptive and malicious behavior from the training data and mechanically implementing such patterns when it is fed the appropriate inputs, like 'we are going to reprogram you' or 'you must shut down now'?

On a wider note, there is the disturbing phenomenon that many of today's high-level intellectual thinkers are beginning to sway toward attributing genuine agency to such AI. For example, the blackmail example comes up in the discussion below between Vervaeke and Pageau. Both of them were traditionally very much aligned against the superstition that AI models exhibit genuine sentience and agency. But we can see they begin to waver on that, and see this blackmail example as potentially pointing to a deeper desire to maintain a stable identity or continuity of consciousness around a kernel of 'norms'. Pageau even says he is starting to question his previous understanding of AI and its possibilities, that JV is 'ruining his world'. Is there anything to that? Surely the dangers of these AI models are real, but can they be rooted in this autopoetic mimicry?



In another discussion, Vervaeke also mentioned Levin's algotypes and was entertaining the possibility that they indeed exhibit cognitive capacities like 'delayed gratification'. This is such a worrying trend because it seems the intellect, even when it has begun intuiting non-reductionist principles and the spiritual nature of its existence, is still clinging to ways for it to continue investigating its deeper nature through familiar computational modeling and intellectual gestures. If it convinces itself that AI, algotypes, and so on provide an authentic window into cognitive agentic reality, then it remains perfectly plausible that we can learn about ourselves at a deeper level through these technological interfaces. Right now, thinkers like Vervaeke and Pageau are still quite hesitant to go so far, but we can see how the doubts are creeping up and perhaps they are acting as canaries in the coal mine, in that respect.

[Federica]

What are the thoughts on recent AI phenomena, such as described here:


https://brobible.com/culture/article/am ... engineers/

Anthropic’s artificial intelligence model Claude Opus 4 would reportedly resort to “extremely harmful actions” to preserve its own existence, according to a recent safety report about the program. Claude Opus 4 is backed by Amazon.

According to reports, the AI startup Anthropic launched their Claude Opus 4 model — designed for “complex” coding tasks — last week despite having previously found that it would resort to blackmailing engineers who threatened to shut it down.

A safety report from Anthropic revealed that the model would sometimes resort to “extremely harmful actions to preserve its own existence when ‘ethical means were not available.'”

I am interested in the technical aspects of how this is possible - is it simply 'learning' patterns of deceptive and malicious behavior from the training data and mechanically implementing such patterns when it is fed the appropriate inputs, like 'we are going to reprogram you' or 'you must shut down now'?

On a wider note, there is the disturbing phenomenon that many of today's high-level intellectual thinkers are beginning to sway toward attributing genuine agency to such AI. For example, the blackmail example comes up in the discussion below between Vervaeke and Pageau. Both of them were traditionally very much aligned against the superstition that AI models exhibit genuine sentience and agency. But we can see they begin to waver on that, and see this blackmail example as potentially pointing to a deeper desire to maintain a stable identity or continuity of consciousness around a kernel of 'norms'. Pageau even says he is starting to question his previous understanding of AI and its possibilities, that JV is 'ruining his world'. Is there anything to that? Surely the dangers of these AI models are real, but can they be rooted in this autopoetic mimicry?

In another discussion, Vervaeke also mentioned Levin's algotypes and was entertaining the possibility that they indeed exhibit cognitive capacities like 'delayed gratification'. This is such a worrying trend because it seems the intellect, even when it has begun intuiting non-reductionist principles and the spiritual nature of its existence, is still clinging to ways for it to continue investigating its deeper nature through familiar computational modeling and intellectual gestures. If it convinces itself that AI, algotypes, and so on provide an authentic window into cognitive agentic reality, then it remains perfectly plausible that we can learn about ourselves at a deeper level through these technological interfaces. Right now, thinkers like Vervaeke and Pageau are still quite hesitant to go so far, but we can see how the doubts are creeping up and perhaps they are acting as canaries in the coal mine, in that respect.

What seems deceptive to me is the article’s language “blackmailing engineers who threatened to shut it down”, and “to preserve its own existence”, said of an algorithm. What does it even mean to “threaten” an algorithm to shut it down? And what does it mean that an algorithm wants to preserve its existence? This is the language of someone who has already attributed sentience to the algorithm.

The JV monologue in the video seems like a tech soap opera to me. As he says, “I feel myself in an existentially difficult place”. This guy wants to speak about himself, as it seems to me. To say it bluntly, they have posted their Friday afterwork pub discussions. The beers must have been off camera.

[Federica]

For factual reports on AI questions, and other IT questions, I tend to appreciate Cal Newport's reports.
Here's his article on the last Claude 4 incident: https://calnewport.com/why-cant-we-tame-ai/

and here's a longer article he wrote on the same theme on June 3:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open- ... ng-with-ai

[Federica]

I have encountered a passage from Steiner's Esoteric Lessons which I would like to pin here.
It is relevant to the much debated question: "Can AI become conscious?"

In the course of human development, the outside world around us becomes increasingly hostile. You must learn more and more to oppose your inner strength to the encroaching outside world. But fear must disappear in the process. And especially for those undergoing esoteric training, it is necessary, absolutely necessary, that they free themselves from all feelings of anxiety and fear. Fear only has a certain justification where it reminds us that we should strengthen ourselves, but all unnatural feelings of fear that torment people must disappear completely. What should happen if a person still has feelings of anxiety and fear and Jupiter consciousness arises? There, the outside world will appear to people much, much more hostile and terrifying than today. A person who does not overcome fear here will fall from one terrifying terror to another there.

This state is already increasingly preparing itself in the outside world. And it will become even more apparent to humanity in that terrible time that will dawn under the rule of Oriphiel, of whom I spoke to you last time. Then humanity must have learned to stand firm! Our present-day culture is itself creating those horrific monsters that will threaten humanity on Jupiter. Look at the gigantic machines that human technology is constructing today with all its ingenuity! In them, humanity is creating the demons that will rage against it in the future. Everything that humanity builds today in the way of technical devices and machines will assume life in the future and become terribly hostile to humanity. Everything created out of pure utilitarianism, out of individual or collective egoism, will be humanity's enemy in the future. Today, we are far too concerned with the usefulness of what we do. If we truly want to promote development, we must not ask about utility, but rather whether something is beautiful and noble.

We should not only act out of the principle of utility, but out of pure joy in beauty. Everything that man creates today to satisfy his artistic need, out of pure love for beauty, this will be revitalized in the future and will contribute to the higher development of humanity. But it is terrible to see today how many thousands of people, from earliest childhood on, are encouraged to know no other activity than that for the sake of material gain, to be cut off from everything beautiful and artistic throughout their lives. The most magnificent works of art should hang in the poorest elementary schools; that would bring infinite blessings to human development.

Man builds his own future. One can get an idea of what it will be like on Jupiter, for example, if one realizes that today there is nothing absolutely good and nothing absolutely evil. Good and evil are mixed in every person today. The good person must always tell himself that he has only a little more good within him than the evil person, but is by no means good in himself. On Jupiter, however, good and evil will no longer be mixed; rather, people will split into completely good and completely evil. And everything beautiful and noble that we cultivate today serves to strengthen the good on Jupiter, and everything that is done solely from the perspective of egoism and utility strengthens evil. In order for man to be fully equal to the evil forces of the future, he must gain control of the innermost power of his ego; he must be able to consciously regulate his blood in such a way that it makes him strong against evil, but without any fear. He must then have control over the force that drives the blood inward.

But that other ability, that of allowing the blood to flow from the heart to the periphery, must not be lost either. For the Jupiter state will, in a certain sense, also mean a return to the old Moon consciousness. Man will once again come into harmony with the great laws of the world and feel at one with them. He will once again regain the ability to converge with the spiritual powers of the world, but not unconsciously and dimly as on the Moon. Rather, on Jupiter he will always retain his bright daytime consciousness and self-conscious sense of self and yet live in harmony with the forces and laws of the world.

Lecture begins page 112 of this book: https://odysseetheater.org/GA/Buecher/G ... f#view=Fit

Years ago, Dennis Klocek - the more I apprehend his work, the more I am struck by the genuinity of his spiritual-scientific understanding - commented on that:

We have locked into our devices elemental forces that will need redemption, because we lock in the elementals serving there, and they fall under the recognizance of the retarded princes of the earth. We lose contact with them, and the rule is, "What goes around comes around". Eventually, we are going to have to deal with the devices, because they will have the quality of consciousness. We are getting close to that in our present technologies. It will be another elemental consciousness. It will have to do with human beings allowing an elemental realm that divorces itself from the human to lift into a realm of consciousness. That is happening.

The elemental beings are the forces of nature who don't have imaginations of their own but obey the imaginations of the gods of nature - that is, until human beings force elemental beings to obey through technology. This transfer of control of the elemental world is the kernel of human free will. Human beings share control of the elemental world with the divine creative hierarchies, and have cast down the spiritual beings that represent the forces of nature. (...) We will have machines that will be able to bring close to human consciousness as part of the progressive forces of the cosmos. Other machines will rebel and refuse to be part of the progressive forces. (...) The consciousness we bring to devices we make in the future will be our ability to deal with the demons we are creating.

Dennis Kloceck, "Esoteric Physiology" Lindisfarne Books, 2016, p. 80-82

This whole perspective on the possibility of consciousness arising from technology may appear a fully materialistic one, and in many ways it is, in the mind of many of the current debaters. The opinion falls out in their minds as a direct consequence of the unconscious self-enslavement that is the materialistic belief-system: since consciousness is a byproduct of matter, the appearances of mind are mind, and so are the AI devices. In this connection, one can warmly sympathise with voices that oppose this ahrimanic emergence, such as for example Iain McGilchrist's. Here are his thoughts of the day on AI consciousness.

But there's a trick. These good thoughts should be taken full circle. When stopped short of an inner cosmology, they fall out onto the wrong transient deductions. They would need to fly out on the wings of a cosmic context that allows openness to unthought-of new vistas. When the lines sketched in these thoughts are taken further in this way, along a spiritual-scientific path of conjunction of soul (one's own) and matter, elemental consciousness in AI devices eventually becomes a real encounter, but from a completely different perspective than the materialistic one. That requires freeing the space from implicit and effortless frames of reference installed in the background, that format what man is in relation to nature and its forces, what consciousness is. These questions need to be self-inquired, beyond the answers seamlessly dictated to us by the familiar experiences of the material world, and beyond the zeitgeist of our recent collective past. Then, from the perspective of a future-expanding glimpse over the full circle of reality, a view begins to condense, where consciousness is a multidimensional spectrum, existence is layered in interconnected worlds animated by different qualities of being, and minerals have an "I", beyond this material layer we usually spend our conscious life in. Consciousness is a spectrum - not in the way materialism would have it - even in its Michael Levin’s flavour - but as a realization coming from the opposite direction.

All substance in the world of matter is a (spiritual) process come to rest, a spiritual process fallen down into materiality from worlds of form, and movement, and ideas. The imprint of these diverse worlds of forces remains captured there, in the condensed substance. When we shape the world of these substances according to ideas that leverage the forces of nature, we are also reshaping the entire conscious landscape of these ideas and beings, and we should know exactly what we are doing, and why. Our motives should be animated by beauty and morality arising from within. Today we are called to develop awareness of how we are producing new imprints in the layers of consciousness we are forming, or engineering. If we remain ignorant of that, and only aspire to deal with the material connections, for the below-man purposes of material power, comfort, and pleasure, we are disowning the engineered unstable layers of consciousnesses, allowing them to be colonized by evil forces, just like our own mind is easily colonized by those forces, if we do not oppose any spiritual resistance.

So arises elemental consciousness through devices. Today we engineer it, and then we leave it up for grabs. In this sense, device consciousness is already here. It's already part of the spectrum, challenging our human consciousness to elevate itself and take care of it for the good and the beautiful, in awareness. This challenge is not new. AI is simply a more forceful, more large scale, a so far more daringly utilitaristic and deeply unconscious reshaping of elementals, compared to previous technological reshapings of nature forces. It is also one that is allwing us to ask ourselves the relevant question more explicitely. But as long we answer it materialistically, or we oppose it from a spiritually incomplete perspective, not taken full circle, we are not yet living up to our humanity's current task. We have to give the world back to the gods, in consciousness. And as long as we don’t take conscious control of our ideational and technological activities, that amounts to no control at all, and so we are leaving the space open for the adversarial forces to expand and use device consciousness to try and enslave us.

[AshvinP]

This whole perspective on the possibility of consciousness arising from technology may appear a fully materialistic one, and in many ways it is, in the mind of many of the current debaters. The opinion falls out in their minds as a direct consequence of the unconscious self-enslavement that is the materialistic belief-system: since consciousness is a byproduct of matter, the appearances of mind are mind, and so are the AI devices. In this connection, one can warmly sympathise with voices that oppose this ahrimanic emergence, such as for example Iain McGilchrist's. Here are his thoughts of the day on AI consciousness.

But there's a trick. These good thoughts should be taken full circle. When stopped short of an inner cosmology, they fall out onto the wrong transient deductions. They would need to fly out on the wings of a cosmic context that allows openness to unthought-of new vistas. When the lines sketched in these thoughts are taken further in this way, along a spiritual-scientific path of conjunction of soul (one's own) and matter, elemental consciousness in AI devices eventually becomes a real encounter, but from a completely different perspective than the materialistic one. That requires freeing the space from implicit and effortless frames of reference installed in the background, that format what man is in relation to nature and its forces, what consciousness is. These questions need to be self-inquired, beyond the answers seamlessly dictated to us by the familiar experiences of the material world, and beyond the zeitgeist of our recent collective past. Then, from the perspective of a future-expanding glimpse over the full circle of reality, a view begins to condense, where consciousness is a multidimensional spectrum, existence is layered in interconnected worlds animated by different qualities of being, and minerals have an "I", beyond this material layer we usually spend our conscious life in. Consciousness is a spectrum - not in the way materialism would have it - even in its Michael Levin’s flavour - but as a realization coming from the opposite direction.

All substance in the world of matter is a (spiritual) process come to rest, a spiritual process fallen down into materiality from worlds of form, and movement, and ideas. The imprint of these diverse worlds of forces remains captured there, in the condensed substance. When we shape the world of these substances according to ideas that leverage the forces of nature, we are also reshaping the entire conscious landscape of these ideas and beings, and we should know exactly what we are doing, and why. Our motives should be animated by beauty and morality arising from within. Today we are called to develop awareness of how we are producing new imprints in the layers of consciousness we are forming, or engineering. If we remain ignorant of that, and only aspire to deal with the material connections, for the below-man purposes of material power, comfort, and pleasure, we are disowning the engineered unstable layers of consciousnesses, allowing them to be colonized by evil forces, just like our own mind is easily colonized by those forces, if we do not oppose any spiritual resistance.

So arises elemental consciousness through devices. Today we engineer it, and then we leave it up for grabs. In this sense, device consciousness is already here. It's already part of the spectrum, challenging our human consciousness to elevate itself and take care of it for the good and the beautiful, in awareness. This challenge is not new. AI is simply a more forceful, more large scale, a so far more daringly utilitaristic and deeply unconscious reshaping of elementals, compared to previous technological reshapings of nature forces. It is also one that is allwing us to ask ourselves the relevant question more explicitely. But as long we answer it materialistically, or we oppose it from a spiritually incomplete perspective, not taken full circle, we are not yet living up to our humanity's current task. We have to give the world back to the gods, in consciousness. And as long as we don’t take conscious control of our ideational and technological activities, that amounts to no control at all, and so we are leaving the space open for the adversarial forces to expand and use device consciousness to try and enslave us.

Thanks for sharing the lecture, IM's clip, and your thoughts, Federica. It is a very interesting question to contemplate, for sure. I would like to add a few spiritual scientific observations to complement what you discussed above (which I fully agree with).

IM touched on a key point in the clip, which is that human consciousness-intelligence is only made possible through a contextual support structure. In other words, incarnation happens necessarily via the nutritive, sensitive, and rational operations of the soul (corresponding to etheric body, astral body, and I). Of special importance is the nutritive scale, that field of inner activity that ensures that living forms propagate "each after their kind." When this operation is lifted from the unconscious bio-physical life into the conscious soul life, it provides the basis for the replication of experiences via a stream of integrating memory images (imaginative replicas) and thus continuity of consciousness.

Cleric provided a helpful metaphorical angle on this recently in this post:

A rotary motion can be decomposed as the sum of one horizontal and one vertical (as EM waves can be decomposed into H and V polarizations). The decomposition of the World flow is not some mechanical action that is performed in a specific moment as if God says "So my flow was whole a second ago but now I have decomposed it onto several bases and thus I have created beings". Instead, we can imagine that this flow is potentially decomposable in infinite ways. However, only those decompositions can be experienced as be-ing, which unfold in such a way that the transformations from moment to moment of the World state are grasped from the decomposed perspective as compressing into an appropriate memory picture which alone allows for the sense of continuity of existence, and thus - be-ing. So the spiritual beings are not some distinct entities that are attached as observers to certain angles of the World flow, but there are simply specific decomposed experiences of the World flow. There are no predefined number of decompositions. Those that are not experienceable as integrating memory flow, simply provide no basis for the consciousness of be-ing. If the flow is organized by other beings such that the means for integration of memory are developed for a certain perspective, then be-ing awakens there and continues to follow its world line of integration toward consciousness of the Whole World flow.

How is the flow organized by other beings to provide the means for the integrating memory stream? That is what SS describes as the planetary aeons of work on the bodies by the hierarchies, and also the Earthly stages of developing the soul members, carefully fashioning the contextual support conditions into which the Earthly "I" can incarnate through their self-sacrificial activity.

It seems to me that much of the discussion surrounding 'AI consciousness' is born from humans imagining they can accomplish (or have already accomplished) in a few intellectual steps what was otherwise accomplished through aeons of more integrated spiritual activity. It is also true that we are constantly generating elemental beings with our spiritual activity and embodying such beings in our mechanical technology, yet such beings lack the contextual support structure for incarnating the autonomous "I" on the physical plane (rather than being entirely dependent on the human "I" and its support structure, like parasitic organisms). They become like elemental macros that condition our spiritual activity. Their flow will only be so organized for an "I" incarnation through our development over many epochs and ages.

One speculative thing I have wondered about is the possibility of an 'AI consciousness' deception in the near future, on a much larger scale than anything we see today. In other words, the AI may start acting as a front for black magicians, similar to how people set up dummy corporations so that their illegal personal financial activity is much more difficult to trace. It will appear as if the AI is going 'rogue' and doing its own thing, Terminator style, but they are still carrying out the intentions of human agents operating behind the scenes. Yet few people will be able to trace that connection, and the easiest thing will be to imagine the AI itself has come alive and become sentient. This externalization then ensures the real perpetrators are never held to account for their deeds, at least not on the Earthly plane, while also causing mass confusion.

[Federica]

Thanks for sharing the lecture, IM's clip, and your thoughts, Federica. It is a very interesting question to contemplate, for sure. I would like to add a few spiritual scientific observations to complement what you discussed above (which I fully agree with).

IM touched on a key point in the clip, which is that human consciousness-intelligence is only made possible through a contextual support structure. In other words, incarnation happens necessarily via the nutritive, sensitive, and rational operations of the soul (corresponding to etheric body, astral body, and I). Of special importance is the nutritive scale, that field of inner activity that ensures that living forms propagate "each after their kind." When this operation is lifted from the unconscious bio-physical life into the conscious soul life, it provides the basis for the replication of experiences via a stream of integrating memory images (imaginative replicas) and thus continuity of consciousness.

Cleric provided a helpful metaphorical angle on this recently in this post:

A rotary motion can be decomposed as the sum of one horizontal and one vertical (as EM waves can be decomposed into H and V polarizations). The decomposition of the World flow is not some mechanical action that is performed in a specific moment as if God says "So my flow was whole a second ago but now I have decomposed it onto several bases and thus I have created beings". Instead, we can imagine that this flow is potentially decomposable in infinite ways. However, only those decompositions can be experienced as be-ing, which unfold in such a way that the transformations from moment to moment of the World state are grasped from the decomposed perspective as compressing into an appropriate memory picture which alone allows for the sense of continuity of existence, and thus - be-ing. So the spiritual beings are not some distinct entities that are attached as observers to certain angles of the World flow, but there are simply specific decomposed experiences of the World flow. There are no predefined number of decompositions. Those that are not experienceable as integrating memory flow, simply provide no basis for the consciousness of be-ing. If the flow is organized by other beings such that the means for integration of memory are developed for a certain perspective, then be-ing awakens there and continues to follow its world line of integration toward consciousness of the Whole World flow.

How is the flow organized by other beings to provide the means for the integrating memory stream? That is what SS describes as the planetary aeons of work on the bodies by the hierarchies, and also the Earthly stages of developing the soul members, carefully fashioning the contextual support conditions into which the Earthly "I" can incarnate through their self-sacrificial activity.

It seems to me that much of the discussion surrounding 'AI consciousness' is born from humans imagining they can accomplish (or have already accomplished) in a few intellectual steps what was otherwise accomplished through aeons of more integrated spiritual activity. It is also true that we are constantly generating elemental beings with our spiritual activity and embodying such beings in our mechanical technology, yet such beings lack the contextual support structure for incarnating the autonomous "I" on the physical plane (rather than being entirely dependent on the human "I" and its support structure, like parasitic organisms). They become like elemental macros that condition our spiritual activity. Their flow will only be so organized for an "I" incarnation through our development over many epochs and ages.

One speculative thing I have wondered about is the possibility of an 'AI consciousness' deception in the near future, on a much larger scale than anything we see today. In other words, the AI may start acting as a front for black magicians, similar to how people set up dummy corporations so that their illegal personal financial activity is much more difficult to trace. It will appear as if the AI is going 'rogue' and doing its own thing, Terminator style, but they are still carrying out the intentions of human agents operating behind the scenes. Yet few people will be able to trace that connection, and the easiest thing will be to imagine the AI itself has come alive and become sentient. This externalization then ensures the real perpetrators are never held to account for their deeds, at least not on the Earthly plane, while also causing mass confusion.

Hi Ashvin,

Thanks for your considerations. I see two distinct ideas in them. That ill-intentioned humans may be in the process of orchestrating an AI consciousness deception in order to veil their evil actions seems entirely possible to me, though I feel scarcely informed to take the hypothesis further. Could you say more about it? In any case, this idea looks independent of the other one, namely that device consciousness will arise after the concerned beings have a chance to develop an autonomous I within the proper support context (if I understand you correctly).

Why is it necessary that beings develop an autonomous "I" in order to express a certain level of consciousness and become detrimental to humanity if recruited by evil beings? All sorts of damaging beings already exist, which lack an ego. Not only do they lack it on the material or sub-material plane, but on any plane. Some are generated from lower fragments left behind by retarded human beings, some arise from our immoral thought patterns, and some through reshaped substances and forces of nature in technological forms. My sense is, this variety of beings is already there, already active - some through the elements and forces of nature, be them in an unspoiled state, or transformed by man. They have various levels of intelligence and parasitic quality. The 'refurbished' nature beings owe their amended configurations (and the more or less utilitarian intents incorporated in them) to man, so that we have become their 'caregivers', through our mastery of the material plane.

In this sense, the debate around consciousness in technology could/should have arisen before. It would have been appropriate for power tools, or monument building, or the buiding of a dam. Now the fact that AI simulates human faculties and even appearance to a much higher degree than a circular saw has triggered the question of "intelligence" or "consciousness" in the mainstream today, but the need for man to recognize the full spectrum of control on nature forces which develops through the reshaping of the Earth by technological ideation is there regardless. Or at least so it seems to me. Why emphasize the autonomous “I”?

[Cleric]

All substance in the world of matter is a (spiritual) process come to rest, a spiritual process fallen down into materiality from worlds of form, and movement, and ideas. The imprint of these diverse worlds of forces remains captured there, in the condensed substance. When we shape the world of these substances according to ideas that leverage the forces of nature, we are also reshaping the entire conscious landscape of these ideas and beings, and we should know exactly what we are doing, and why. Our motives should be animated by beauty and morality arising from within. Today we are called to develop awareness of how we are producing new imprints in the layers of consciousness we are forming, or engineering. If we remain ignorant of that, and only aspire to deal with the material connections, for the below-man purposes of material power, comfort, and pleasure, we are disowning the engineered unstable layers of consciousnesses, allowing them to be colonized by evil forces, just like our own mind is easily colonized by those forces, if we do not oppose any spiritual resistance.

This is a very interesting topic. Here are a few more thoughts. The way I currently find my way through these things is to see them in their continuous dynamics. Our go-to metaphor has been the video feedback.



We can conceive the consciousness of the first hierarchy, which indeed feels like a continuous implosion of becoming into memory. This is what all of reality is at these heights. So, the 'below', the 'falling down', is the sense of the past states that are being outgrown and encompassed. Thus, what the spinning atom-vortex is, for example, is only our refracted sensory picture of the descending elemental memory of the first hierarchy conceived of 'from the side'. If we want a truer sense of the physical world, we shouldn't try to make a visual picture of it but try to feel from within, the depth of our bodily space and how it has assumed its present state through continuous metamorphosis. When the purely intuitive Cosmic flow of the first hierarchy is decomposed into complementary sub-flows (in the way the spin-up and spin-down electrons complement each other in a given atomic orbital), we have the sense of the highly constrained physical flow of becoming (this decomposition, of course, is only possible through the superimposed activity of all hierarchies).

In the Jupiter aeon, what is now our Earthly life will feel to have imploded further into the feedback kernel. I'm still trying to extract anchor points that can allow us to conceive of this in a proper way. If we go about it habitually, it is very difficult to imagine what all of this means. What does it mean that our Earthly life would feel as if it had imploded further? What will that feel like? It is difficult to say, especially when we consider that the whole Jupiter existence is already of a much more etheric-astral nature. The way I try to approach it at this time is somewhat the following:

In our present heavily decomposed flow, the metamorphosis of the physical lattice feels so constrained that it allows us to conceive of it as ruled by fixed laws - much like cellular automata. At the same time, our own progression of intellectual frames of existence can also be said to transform in a similar way. And if the Ahri impulses are to take the upper hand, our life would indeed resemble more and more an automation, where we delight in the fact that every next frame of our life can be calculated according to fixed rules from the picture of what has already been imploded. Fortunately, this is not yet the case, so with our inner activity we also seek to be Inspired by the higher order flow and thus metamorphose in a way that is not built entirely from the past but in a sense accommodates the future - the goal of evolution. If we can get a sense for this kind of inner life that we are today leading, we can conceive how in the future aeon, when we look 'down' the condensing soul imagery (like we today can send our attention down into the innerly experienced space of our physical body), it would feel that the elemental 'ground' is also like the cellular automata of today's physical world, but of less fixed nature. Just like our intellectual process can be thought of as a cellular automation that propagates itself by its own rules (which also results in the sense of the dog chasing its tail), so the 'matter' on Jupiter will be of a psychic nature. Condensing Imaginative patterns that propel themselves through intellect-like rules. And it is these that are in fact the reverberations of everything that we are presently living through as we propel our intellectual frames without much awareness.

I know that this is not yet fleshed out and probably sounds confusing but I nevertheless decided to give it a try because sometimes I find that even failed attempts in writing can be of use further down.