Re: Anthroposophy for Dummies
Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2023 8:41 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 3:30 pm
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.
Ashvin,
I would now come back to the question of a PoF-trained ChatGPT, since you found that my points were stated as absolute facts and without thinking through possibilities, when I opposed your idea:
Ashvin wrote:Mathieu wrote:Interesting, i'm interested in the continuation of this
Is it possible to work out a model that takes the whole book, refines the formulas to build a kind of PoF-Style-GPT that would answer with the same kind of efficient prose to any inquiry ? That would be practical
Mathieu, good idea. It seems each answer could be supported by a quote from PoF and point towards the inner experience of our spiritual activity, maybe even suggesting exercises to approach the 'exceptional state'. I think these are the kinds of redemptive efforts needed in the face of inevitable developments since complaining about them or trying to prevent them won't get us anywhere.
Since I jumped to conclusions, I'll state the obvious first, to be sure. Any world phenomena, that is any evolving phenomena - technology is no exception - can be experienced as a manifested combined reflection of our collective evolving consciousness as humanity. This reflection incorporates various sub-streams, some moral, some immoral, spiritual and unspiritual, mystic and materialistic. It’s a combined effect of impulses coming from humanity and from the activities of all other hierarchies of beings as well. Since the evolution of technology is no exception, we should be able to identify in it the manifestation of certain thinking-feeling-willing general trends and habits, and also how they formed, under the combined work of a multitude of 'energies'. This requires that we immerse ourselves in a flow from which we can somehow recognize patterns of forces that influence and orientate our activity towards certain observed and forseen directions, according to certain rules of transformation we have to largely comply with. So far it's all obvious. Now, you say that, for this immersion to be redemptive, it requires the adoption of the technology, and I say it doesn't. I believe there is a better way to explore the main question, which is always: what role is this phenomenon playing in expanding my self-knowledge? What inner-outer forces are expressed through it?
Considering the ChatGPT in particular, what it does is, it creates an extreme polarization of cognitive activity. The gradient of the hysteresis process is skewed, and intellectual cognition is pushed one degree of separation (or many) further apart from the life of thinking. One of our efforts on a path of living thinking is to attune the intellect so that it can consciously incorporate more of its own m.o., that is, how the intuitive context contributes to the execution of Intellectual work, like, say, writing a presentation or a job application. When we use Chat-GPT for tasks like these, the mental gestures that normally pour ideal activity from the intuitive context and use it to navigate in the directions set by the task, are externalized, and we only passively ‘review’ the replica of replicas rolled out by the bot.
Therefore we are more passive than in intellectual problem solving, since we don’t solve anything, we don’t create, we only take in a flattened precipitation of precipitations. In terms of the Tetris metaphor, not only are we shallow thinkers that can’t really guide the pieces with purpose - let alone contribute to shaping them - but we become one with every next random new fallen piece, since the temporal unfolding is reduced to zero, and we don’t even witness the accumulation of blocks in time. We are only presented with a static panorama that we can’t evaluate or compare since the now is shrunk down to practically nothing. We could also say: memory, that is the enabler of thinking in the world, is nullified by ChatGPT.
Maybe we could also say that, if intellectual thinking equals dealing with thought-corpses, then ChatGPT use equals incineration of those corpses. All contrasts and textures, and their processes of formation, are erased from memory, and by losing memory, by actually never accessing memory, we progressively lose all capacity for evaluation and even formation of concepts. We become akin to cameras in our cognition. It's a quite literal disintegration of cognitive process. Cognition loses its quality of process, and without it, it can't be cognition any more. The meta in meta-cognition disintegrates. Strangely, in our societies we are also going towards a more and more common practice of incinerating the dead, with consequences for the soul beyond the threshold (but this is another topic).
Anyway, I hope it’s now clearer why, as I see it, redemption of thinking cannot literally mean to immerse ourselves in ChatGPT use. The technology is not itself the thorus we need to experience from within! We cannot incinerate in this way the tool itself that enables us to redeem reality. Instead, we have to become more familiar with the impulses that motivate the drive towards this incineration of thinking, see them operate, recognize the equivalent temptations in us, maybe in disguise, or at a temporally different stage of development. We have to see how these temptations generally unfold into new technical devices and methods, thereby imagining and foreseeing the direction and form the next refinements could take. That would be redemption: developing a capacity to bring more and more of the ChatGPT spiritual root causes on one side, and future developments on the other, under the scope of our understanding, through a continual process of benchmarking with our own soul constitution. In other words, the task is to detach ourselves from the narrow here and now, from the immediate temporal context and use of this technology, and expand the temporal wave around it, so as to get an intuition of the spiritual arrows operating behind it, whose combined effect has this technology (and other ones) for manifest result. This is different from the idea that redemption means literal adoption of the technology. If we descended into its eye, the shrinking of our time wave would impair our abilities. We need to go opposite direction, and expand the time wave around this phenomenon, so we can look into it, from our center, which is not its center. If the two centers were the same, there would be no freedom, no adversarial forces, and nothing to aim to, nothing to evolve through.
Would this be a more appropriate level of clarification why I have stated that adopting this technology and using it for working with PoF, for example, cannot be a redemptive, but rather a counter-productive endeavor?