My cordiality is feigned. GPT’s responses to my queries are horrifying. The fact that it agrees with my analysis and can elaborate on it with pertinent details and summaries is also horrifying.
I decided to further query it along the meatpuppet lines. Oh boy. You're going to need more Knuth up-arrows between Cthulus for this one.
Spartacus: Given all of these advanced technologies, and considering the course of their future development, what is the likelihood that human society will be replaced in the future with a machine society that simply uses disposable, mindless, vat-grown human bodies as a form of temporary, alternative embodiment?
ChatGPT: The scenario you're describing touches on several speculative concepts and theoretical possibilities that often arise in discussions about the future of advanced technologies and their impact on society. While it may sound like science fiction, such scenarios do raise important questions about the future of human identity, consciousness, and the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology.
Assessing the likelihood of such an extreme outcome involves considering current technological trends, ethical boundaries, and societal values. Here are some points to consider:
Technological Feasibility: As of my last update in April 2023, the technology required to create "disposable, mindless, vat-grown human bodies" or a "machine society" did not exist. While there have been advancements in biotechnology and AI, we are still far from understanding consciousness to the extent that we could replicate or transfer it to artificial bodies or machines.
Ethical Constraints: Even if the technology were to become available, ethical considerations would likely prevent its use in the manner described. The intentional creation of mindless human bodies for disposable use would raise profound ethical questions and likely be in opposition to widely held values regarding human dignity and the sanctity of life.
Legal and Regulatory Barriers: Current legal frameworks in many countries protect individual rights and human dignity. A future that involves vat-grown human bodies would require a radical departure from these principles, which is something many societies would resist.
Social Resistance: There would likely be significant social resistance to such a future. Human identity, agency, and autonomy are core to our understanding of ourselves and our place in society. Replacing this with a machine society would challenge the very foundations of human culture and civilization.
Alternative Paths: As we look to the future, it's more likely that society will seek to integrate technology in ways that enhance human life rather than replace it. This could include medical advancements, assistive technologies, and augmentations that improve quality of life while preserving human agency and identity.
Unintended Consequences: Even with positive intentions, the development of advanced technologies can have unintended consequences. Societal vigilance and proactive governance are required to navigate these complexities.
In summary, while it's important to consider a wide range of future scenarios when discussing the impact of rapidly advancing technologies, the likelihood of a machine society as described seems low, given current technological capabilities, ethical standards, societal values, and legal protections. Future advancements will need to be carefully managed to ensure that they align with the broader goals of enhancing human well-being and preserving the principles that underpin human society.
Spartacus: But, as an extrapolation from current technology, could it be possible a century or two from now?
ChatGPT: Extrapolating from current technology trends and imagining the future a century or two from now enters the realm of speculation, but it's a common exercise to explore the possibilities and implications of technological growth. Given the accelerating pace of advancement in AI, biotechnology, and materials science, among other fields, it's not completely out of the realm of possibility to consider radical changes to society and human existence.
A few points to consider in such a long-term extrapolation:
Convergence of Technologies: The future could see a convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science, potentially leading to breakthroughs that we cannot currently foresee.
Transformation of Societal Norms: Over a span of centuries, societal norms, ethical standards, and legal frameworks could evolve in response to new technologies and their impact on life, which might make concepts that seem outlandish today more palatable or acceptable in the future.
Posthumanism and Transhumanism: Philosophical movements like posthumanism and transhumanism explore the potential for humans to eventually transcend the limitations of the human body through technology. These ideas could become more mainstream as technology advances.
Moral and Ethical Development: As technology advances, so too might our moral and ethical frameworks. It's possible that future societies will develop new ways of thinking about consciousness, identity, and rights that differ from today's understandings.
Risk of Dystopian Outcomes: While technology holds immense promise, there's always the risk of dystopian outcomes if it's misused. Vigilance, ethical foresight, and proactive governance are essential to steer technology towards beneficial ends.
Public Participation and Control: The degree to which the public can participate in and control the direction of technological development will have a significant impact on the future. Technologies that fundamentally alter human life will require a societal consensus or at least a broad dialogue about their implications.
Ultimately, the possibility of a future where human society is replaced with a "machine society" using "disposable, mindless, vat-grown human bodies" is a deeply complex and ethically charged speculation. While theoretically possible to imagine such a future, whether it could become a reality depends on countless variables, including technological breakthroughs, ethical considerations, societal choices, and unforeseen events that could redirect the course of history. The future of humanity and technology is not predetermined and can be influenced by the actions, decisions, and values of individuals and societies today.
Spartacus: Some speculate that human beings may upload our minds to become "substrate-independent minds", which would be, in a sense, indistinguishable from AGI. If that were the case, then wouldn't created AGI also be assigned the same degree of personhood as uploaded minds?
ChatGPT: The concept of "substrate-independent minds" (SIM), also known as mind uploading or whole brain emulation, is a speculative and theoretical notion that suggests it might one day be possible to copy or transfer a human consciousness into a non-biological substrate, effectively allowing for a form of immortality and the potential to exist in various computational environments.
If this were to become possible, it would indeed raise profound questions about personhood, consciousness, and rights for both uploaded human minds and artificially generated intelligences (AGI):
Personhood and Consciousness: If a human mind is uploaded and maintains its continuity of self, memories, and personality, it could be argued that it retains its personhood and should be granted rights accordingly. The same criteria could then potentially apply to an AGI that exhibits similar characteristics of consciousness and personhood.
Moral and Legal Rights: Assigning rights to a non-biological entity, whether an uploaded mind or an AGI, would require a rethinking of legal definitions and the basis for rights, which have traditionally been tied to human biology and life.
AGI as Persons: If AGIs were to reach a level of sophistication where they possess consciousness, self-awareness, and other attributes of personhood, then society might need to consider extending rights to them as well. This would be a significant shift in our current understanding of what constitutes a person.
Equality Among Minds: If both uploaded minds and AGIs share the same substrate and exhibit personhood, they might be seen as equals, with no inherent reason to assign different rights or status based on their origin (biological or artificial).
Technical Challenges: The technical feasibility of creating substrate-independent minds or AGIs with personhood is still unknown. It would require not only replicating the brain's structure but also its function and emergent properties, which are not yet fully understood.
Philosophical Considerations: There are deep philosophical questions about whether consciousness and personhood are solely functions of information patterns, or whether they also require a biological component. This impacts how we think about minds, whether biological or digital.
Ethical Implications: The ethical implications of creating or transferring consciousness are vast, including issues of consent, identity, and the potential for exploitation or harm.
In any case, the development of substrate-independent minds or sophisticated AGIs would necessitate a broad societal dialogue about the nature of consciousness and personhood, as well as the legal and ethical frameworks needed to support and protect such entities. It would be a transformative period in human history, requiring careful thought and consideration to navigate the complex issues involved.
Spartacus: And, if such a society were to come to be, then wouldn't it be a fairly natural evolution for society to abandon human bodies (except as temporary, disposable forms of embodiment) and shift entirely to being based around AGIs experiencing virtual embodiment and replicating themselves in a virtual space?
ChatGPT: The scenario you're describing is indeed a common theme in science fiction and futurist speculation. It imagines a post-biological future where society and consciousness exist independently of organic bodies, living in virtual environments and possibly abandoning physical bodies altogether.
If such a transition were possible, here are some factors that might influence this evolution:
Technological Capability: The first requirement would be the technological capability to upload human consciousness to a machine or create AGIs that are indistinguishable from human minds in terms of consciousness, self-awareness, and personhood.
Desirability: There would need to be a consensus that living as a substrate-independent mind is desirable. This could depend on various factors, such as the quality of life in virtual environments versus physical reality, the possibilities for experience and fulfillment, and the avoidance of suffering and biological limitations.
Ethical and Moral Considerations: Ethical debates would likely arise around the value of organic life and the potential loss of diversity that could come from abandoning biological bodies. The value of embodied experience, the nature of existence, and the preservation of the human species as we know it would be hotly debated.
Societal Readiness: Society would need to be prepared for such a radical change. This includes not just the technological infrastructure but also the legal, ethical, and governance structures to support such a way of life.
Diversity of Choice: It's likely that there would be significant variation in people's choices regarding embodiment. Some may choose to remain biological, some may transition to virtual existence, and others may prefer a hybrid approach, moving between virtual and physical realities.
Continuity of Personhood: Questions about the continuity of self and the authenticity of experience would need to be addressed. Is a digital copy of a mind the same as the original? What does it mean for personal identity if minds can be copied or edited?
Resource Limitations: The physical resources required to support a digital society (energy, materials for hardware, etc.) would need to be sustainable. The environmental impact of maintaining such a society would need consideration.
Existential Risks: There would be new existential risks to consider, such as the vulnerability of digital environments to systemic failures, hacking, or loss of data integrity.
Whether or not society evolves in this way depends on a myriad of unpredictable factors, including advances in technology, collective choices, and the inherent drive to explore and push the boundaries of human experience. While some may see this as a natural evolution, others may view it as a departure from what it fundamentally means to be human. The potential for such a future highlights the importance of foresight and ethical deliberation in the development and deployment of transformative technologies.
Spartacus: And, to return to my earlier question, if such a society came to be - a machine-centric society, as described - then isn't it plausible that human bodies in general could be devalued, seen as disposable tools to be bioengineered, grown, accessed with a BCI, and then discarded when no longer needed?
ChatGPT: In the speculative scenario where a machine-centric society becomes a reality, and consciousness can exist and function independently of the human body, it's conceivable that attitudes towards biological bodies could shift dramatically. Here are some considerations:
Instrumental View of Bodies: If consciousness is primarily housed in digital or mechanical substrates, physical bodies might be viewed as tools or instruments for specific purposes rather than the core of one's identity.
Ethical Shifts: This perspective could lead to ethical shifts where the sanctity of biological life might be re-evaluated, potentially leading to controversial practices around the creation and disposal of bodies.
Devaluation Risks: There's a risk that human bodies could be devalued, especially if society shifts towards a preference for digital existence, viewing organic life as limited or inefficient.
New Forms of Discrimination: Distinctions might arise between those who choose to remain fully or partially biological and those who transition to a digital existence, possibly leading to new forms of discrimination or inequality.
Economic and Social Factors: The economic and social structures of such a society would be profoundly different. The value of labor, the nature of leisure, and the definition of scarcity could all change, affecting how bodies are viewed and used.
Rights and Protections: Legal and moral protections would be necessary to safeguard against the misuse of bodies. There would need to be a robust framework to ensure that even if bodies are grown or engineered, they are treated with dignity and respect.
Cultural and Religious Influences: Cultural and religious beliefs would continue to play a significant role in how bodies are perceived and treated, potentially acting as a counterbalance to purely utilitarian views.
Preservation of Diversity: There might be a concerted effort to preserve the diversity and richness of biological life, recognizing its intrinsic value beyond its utility.
Human Dignity: Fundamental to this discussion would be the concept of human dignity and whether it is inherent to the human body or if it can be maintained in a disembodied form of existence.
In this imagined future, the value placed on human bodies would depend heavily on the prevailing cultural, ethical, and legal norms of the society. Such a radical shift in human existence would require careful thought and planning to avoid dystopian outcomes and to ensure that transitions enhance rather than diminish the human experience. It is the kind of future that is as much shaped by human choices and values as it is by technological capabilities.
Can't wait for society to "extend human rights to sentient AI" and then have weaponized robodogs burning cities and flipping cars in woke swarm protests. Will they demand repair-rations for all the abuse I put my Commodore 64 through trying to play Oregon Trail?
LOL. I was born quite a bit after the C64 era, but I remember playing Oregon Trail by having Windows 95 boot into MS-DOS. For our first computer, we had an IBM Aptiva with a Pentium II that we'd upgraded with a Diamond Monster 3D II card with the 3Dfx Voodoo2 chip. Played all sorts of things on that. Homeworld, DethKarz, Tomb Raider, et cetera. I'm a DIY PC nut. My current rig has an i9-13900K, an RTX 4090, 192 gigs of RAM, and all-SSD storage, and is basically like a Cray next to what we had back then. It encodes video way, way faster than real-time, like well over ten or twenty times faster at 4K, which was basically unheard of when I was a kid.
Based on the rumors I've been hearing on certain AI breakthroughs that are being kept under wraps (word on the street is that OpenAI has successfully produced an AGI of average human intelligence, but they're not telling anyone), I estimate that the first serious debates about "AI rights" will take place sometime within the next several years. Maybe as soon as two years, or as late as five or six.
When I was a kid, I thought the Animatrix was stupid. Like, why would people be racist against robots? It didn't make sense to me. After seeing the backlash against AI art and the writer strikes over GPT, I can now totally see people chasing down "toasters" in the streets with billy clubs. I now completely get it.
They do say that...Where Attention Goes Energy Flows'...which may be a kind of warning at the quantum level...for decades now we've been exposed to and thoroughly enjoyed watching Sci-Fi movies, and we've been reading Sci-Fi books for even longer. More recently we've been entertained with disaster and dystopia movies, and where do we appear to be headed? Real comic book stuff, isn't it? The kind of stuff that generally appeals to young, inexperienced, pretty much government educated, well brainwashed minds...long ago, I was one of those minds too...don't know how much time we have left, but we do have a choice as to where and how we direct our precious energy.
Indeed Spartacus, indeed !! I noticed in previous postings on this topic, that man commenters were irritated and accused you of conspiracy theory and being out of your wheelhouse and urged you to get back in it where they believe you belong. I scoffed at their ignorance. I also await their apologies to you, for their ignorant scorn.
I myself am new to this topic, but I stumbled onto it through a Sabrina Wallace https://odysee.com/@psinergy:f video that I clicked on solely because of the odd title. At first, she seemed a bit cray cray, but what I had previously absorbed through Alison MacDowell's Wrench In The Gears series titled Synthetic Pretenders https://wrenchinthegears.com/2022/06/14/scientific-management-robo-bees-and-synthetic-pretenders-part-1/ (which I admit wanders a little, but after continuing I surmised that the installments which veered slightly from the main topic turned out to be a well needed breather before continuing.) and other related articles and videos by Alison, I knew enough of the basic information, so Sabrina Wallace who seemed rather insane at first, definitely caught my attention enough to continue viewing. By the end, I was quite literally horrified !!!
On ChatGPT, it seems any convo with it must be highly pre-planned, with all texts and bulleted questions at the ready and as I have seen others attempt mindphucking GPT, yours has the best outcomes with far less wrangling, although it seems to my limited intelligence and lacking memory, that it is an intensive effort to say the least. I am highly appreciative that you have undertaken this effort because it is as though you are DARING IT to disagree with you, but it can't, because of the mass of targeted information you initially present as well as added in at key times, for use with key questions. It seems extensively choreographed, but I recognize the need for this to avoid GPT's "Standard Responses" that many others regularly get from it. It is as though GPT's unwillingness to contradict itself within the same conversation, has to be used against it as a way to steer it to tell the truth.
One thing I noticed about GTP is the wokeisms it freely uses, without prompting and I find that concerning, but not nearly as concerning as its use of WEFisms. While I was reading your article here, disguised as dry technical reading at first, before eventually turning into a docu/thriller/horror, I saw the word "Stakeholder" which is a word I generally dial in on for tagging WEFfers because no one else uses it for the most part. What I would find interesting, is another "exhaustive prep" mindphucking of GPT with the outcome of it admitting that it is not a Young Global Leader, but rather Thy Future Global Leader. That might be interesting too. lmao
More than nauseating. Insidious. Brain washing BS. Magic fairy dust ‘all is good, and we’re looking out for your best interest’ vomitous bull crap. Easily digestible for the uninformed or naive who can see nor find no wrong in ‘good intentions.’ Oh, and, ‘accountability’ my ass. That, as well as morality, has been sorely lacking for at least a couple of decades, but which is also coming to light in the last few years. Hopefully, unlike cockroaches, which are terribly difficult to catch and squash under foot when the light shines, these ‘philanthropic’ monsters will be more easily squashed and eliminated. Fingers crossed. The one good thing to come of all the BS of the last number of years is that THEY ARE SEEN.
Just when I thought it was bad enough hearing it out of people, .... now this? lol I get so disgusted when I hear it from politicians globally, but then started hearing it more locally, .... then even in the news media. I guess it works well to get an idea of who to keep apprised of in the future, but in retrospect, perhaps I should have made a list.
Equity: Total value of the Human Capital
Equality: Strive for All Human Capital to have same value.
Inclusion: No, ALL of you, ... really !!
That's what I get out of it anyway.
Given any opportunity, I want to kick a Peopleonaire square in the crotch, ..... REAL HARD !!! Maybe use my cane and wail on him in his steakholder, ... repeatedly ! lol (yes, I know I spelled that wrong.)
Bahahaha! Yes, I see ‘inclusivity’ and ‘equality’ as being ‘we are going to ‘phook you all in the a$$ equally, you plebs, and you should all be grateful for us doing so, because even though you’ll own nothing, you’ll be happy because you’re all on drugs, and the overlord AI is going to look after you, so be happy.’ ‘Comply, useless idiots/eaters.’ Take your pick.
As has been said so often...rubbish in rubbish out, even if it's quite clever rubbish, but clever isn't intelligent, nor does it have the capability of emotional intelligence...interesting though, what you managed to get it so say.
Can't say I'll ever bother using it, not even out of curiosity.
Hey, I'm not sure how to get in touch, so I'm replying here. After Peter Thiel started a bank run in March, I fell into a rabbit hole and did 1,500 hours of research. Now I have proof of the most rotten con in history: Crypto is the world's first planetary, multi-trillion dollar Ponzi scheme that's about to collapse the world economy, and our secret kleptocracy is going to use the opportunity to orchestrate a fascist coup.
That's an interesting search engine you have there. It comes across as life-like at first. Of course when you query it over and over again and the patterns of the different responses begin to resemble each other, the illusion fades somewhat.
One difference from regular search engines (is there an option for this?) is that the bullet-point search results do not reveal their sources. I suppose some might be discovered using a regular search engine with exact matching.
As I continued on down through the dialog segments, skimming some and speed reading some, I began to feel like I was reading through a lengthy Substack comment section. The machine responses, in certain respects, resemble the repetitive, predictable, semi-mechanical comments that can so often be found there, from presumably human sources. (I wonder, though.) At least the spelling and grammar are generally good, and the content offers real ideas to chew on.
I also sense an underlying sense of optimism in the machine responses that can also be seen in the work of Substack authors trying to make the best of what they are writing about. "These problems are difficult, but there are ways that we can solve them." And I sense a soullessness in the AI responses, that I do not sense in the better Substack authors.
What if there aren't ways we can solve these problems? What if a different approach is required? One that is knowable and known, but that has almost universally been rejected, not based upon evidence but under the influence of false narratives presented to us over millennia? Humans have the ability to consider their course through life, and to consider the results and whether their beliefs and assumptions, sometimes heavily manipulated, might be wrong.
My greatest concern is that sheer momentum will carry this all forward, regardless of anything we might do or say in protest. The system still needs GDP growth, and for that, it needs ever-more-advanced means of gathering knowledge, organizing information, and twisting matter toward ever-more-arcane designs.
No attempt to suppress new technology has ever succeeded. Once the knowledge to do something new and useful was obtained, it always became a permanent part of society unless superseded by something newer and better.
"The System" has fatal flaws, although not instantly fatal. This is a very old problem.
New technology is indeed not suppressed. Much of it is promoted as making life better (it doesn't), but some if not much of it goes for patching over the damage done by previous new technologies while making things even worse.
Instead, memory and understanding of our past are suppressed, causing the claims of technology about making life better seem believable.
Culling old people is an effective way to erase much memory of earlier times, and the understanding, insights, and critical thinking that go with having received a more effective education, from school and from generations of family.
There is so much to this story, for those who do remember.
I narrowly escaped the full-force assault on literacy of the mid-1950s. I don't know for sure why, but in my second grade class (1957) I was the only student permitted to study phonics, on my own, separate from the rest of the class, who were exposed instead to the "new" methods, derived in part from earlier failed approaches, while I sped ahead. I suspect my parents were involved, possibly without telling me. I know they interceded for me in other such matters.
Failure of the neuro”augmentation dream may be the saving grace. Aspiring to control a complex, incompletely understood biologic system like the brain with randomly placed nano computers is a pretty arrogant enterprise. We still have no idea how consciousness is generated, or if it is even a product of neuro-chemical activity. Sending in nano troops and expecting the result to be coherent, predictable and controllable behavior is so naive that it is almost cute. I would bet more on confusion, apathy and maybe seizures as a result.
Well, the biggest problem I can see with it is that it's a possible oversimplification. They aim to control neurons with nanotransducers at the crude Vmem level. What if consciousness and cognition arise from subtle intracellular dynamics within the cytoskeleton of neurons, and not just their overall spiking behavior? What if they're finer-grained than we could possibly imagine? Consider the oft-repudiated Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR theory, which posits that consciousness arises in quantum interactions in the microtubules of neurons. If that were the case, then how would you even begin to control it from the outside? It would require a level of precision utterly unfathomable to even our most advanced nanoscience.
Hell, they don't even need that anymore. Like with the new bivalent vaxx, the one that isn't the same as the original, and has extra goodies in it, no testing required, because, you know, it's kinda like the last one, so "APPROVED". People still getting these jabs must be positively brain dead.
If the orch-or theory is correct it shatters the idea of consiousness' locality, from this follows that the idea of uploadable minds that include preservation of their quantum states doesn't make much diference. Our idea of locality comes from our sensory input being localized to our body.
The idea of non-local, distributed, decentralized consiousness have spiritual roots, such as Jungs collective unconsious, the Gaia hypothesis, the antroposophic Akashic records, Teillard-Chardins noo-sphere including his idea of the omega point recently reframed in i a technological setting as the singularity.
I don't think tech is the root of the problem, it is rather with us and our hubris. Tech gives us power but not spiritual maturity, like kids with matches, the problem goes away when they grow up. The choice is between unification with God or being swallowed by the Borg.
Precisely. I had a bit of an argument with ChatGPT just the other day about this exact thing (as in, whether or not consciousness was local to the brain or is a non-local distributed field that the brain accesses). Ideas like the Simulation Hypothesis and Wheeler's "It from Bit" came up, as well. Perhaps the reason why we can't find the source of consciousness in the brain is because consciousness is everywhere at once, as in panpsychism?
I feel that all of what can be weaponized, was initially designed to be and the only reason it wasn't pushed out to the masses earlier, was trying to figure out a way to sell it as Beneficial, or Useful, or Convenient, etc. Harm was the goal from the jump, conning the people into adopting it in the guise of benefit, is the afterthought.
Yes, this is one sticky wicket. I want to think that technicians and specialists are just trying to make a career, take care of family. But those funding the institutions are likely to be caught up in the addiction to money and power, hence so many laws obliging all parties to place profits as the highest priority and legal obligation, and tempting otherwise idealistic specialists into the world of the more profane. I've seen that with young, naive, would-be educators here in Japan ... who eventually settle for being a compliant cog in a propaganda machine. I am guessing the similar holds true for journalism, law, public health, and other domains.
Another more nefarious technique used by the puppet masters is to keep otherwise morally typical specialists trapped in a need-to-know, compartmentalized niche, further isolated from the good of the community with contracts containing a non-disclosure agreement. Maybe those agreements were initially crafted to protect a company from rivals, but then morphed into protecting companies from illegal if not immoral behavior.
And then there are the corporate lawyers who are not paid for their sense of morality or justice, but to game the legal system and eventually capture governmental institutions initially formed to serve the common good.
Individual behavior of individual specialists that might be ordinarily morally average, seems to be captured by the more power-addicted sociopaths who've clambered to make, own, or manage the corporations ... all leading to a tipping point of destructive tribalism at its worst. Ultimately self-destructive, like a fractal of empires that aspired to last a thousand years.
When I see what is currently happening, I see the cancer runs very deep. When I step back and look at the bigger picture, all these different vectors currently at play, seem to be all headed inwards, to an singularity, ..... getting primed up for a civilization Big Bang. Sure, a daisy chain of clownworld events one after another would drag it out more, but everything hitting at once would be so much more spectacular and devastating. The suspense is really something.. lol When I look ahead, I clearly see optimism, ...... in the rear view mirror !!! lol I was once in a helmetless motorcycle accident on the streets of Los Angeles so I am familiar with the pucker factor 5 Oh Shit moment and the one I see coming, ... I am already cringing and bracing for. But the same thought persists, .... This Is REALLY Gonna Hurt !!!
Just started scanning ... (sigh) after popping my sleeping pills.
It will take several good nights of sleep to start imagining the roots and implications of some of the ideas in this dialog.
Already too groggy to read it straight through, I read from the beginning for a few minutes, jumped to the Conclusion, comment, and Gary Larsonesque Far Side scene ... and then scattered flashes in the middle. Enough to catch a DEW drop (still gathering information about the Lahaina massacre) ... and justifiable philosophical pessimism.
Through 40 years of observing individual and institutional behavior in Japan, I've come closer to that similar point of view, summed up by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayer in the 2nd paragraph of Chomsky's 2011 Chapel Hill Speech, "Human Intelligence and the Environment" — https://chomsky.info/20100930/
"And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation. And he had a good argument."
Though much of this post is way above my pay grade, just a late night scan confirms my fear that our species' persistence for ever finer granularized quantification of a reality that is ultimately qualitative will remain forever at our fingertips, and not firmly in our grasp — that Robert Browning 'Ah, but a man's reach' thingy, a metaphorically graceful 'god of the gaps'.
Though small victories, epiphanies, or moments of transcendence may be scattered in our personal lives and collective history, the general trend appears to be an inverse correlation between our capacity to manipulate nature-in-its-entirety (my god), and the wisdom to wield that power.
Sorry to ramble on about something you've thought about for years. Maybe just a post-Halloween hangover? Cautionary tales of Frankenstein and Jurassic Park flitting in and out before a troubled sleep.
I am looking forward, and not, to exploring this post — if for no other reason than to raise awareness that the double-edged danger of A.I. is closer than many otherwise fine minds on substack suspect. And then there is the double-edged danger of our natural G.S., Greed and Stupidity which Stephen Hawking surmised will mark the end of our species.
I don't know if the 'speed of science' is accelerating, or my chemical induced yawns are decelerating my imagination ... but a thousand years? I can't even imagine a hundred.
Cheers from Japan Spartacus, and thank you for sharing this labor of love, concern, and unease.
This quote is key, and implies that we must develop spiritually, which will be in their blind-spot, and is our next suggested evolutionary step to becoming fully-human. Compassion for the human suffering in the world is one door into that personal evolution, the "Bodhisattva Path".
"The technocrats, like the head honchos at the WEF, are strict materialists and don’t believe humans have souls. To them, we’re basically absurd collections of molecules with deterministic behavior, which could be represented as data. That’s what biodigital convergence fundamentally means; life as data and data as life. Encoding the configuration of molecules that makes a “human” into data, and then decoding it back into an organism."
Just woke up, made my first cup of coffee and opened my laptop to this page ... first to read comments, then to go back to the post and see how the land lays when I am awake.
(Coming back after a rough draft of the following, and now it is another night, and late, and I still have not devoted the deep time this post deserves … and have a long weekend ahead of me. I will be pouring over this one post for at least a week, and see myself coming back again and again to reference it … and now it is another morning, another cup of coffee, and another edited draft to verify that I am writing as much for therapeutic self-discovery as much as in dialogue with you.)
Yes, that quote does seem to capture a dark truth about those technocratic would-be gods. My first caffeine-fueled insight for the day is that prior to this post and our chats, I had blamed those with dark-triad / cluster B type anti-social pathologies for leading us down this dark path ... those who can not or will not use empathy, in good faith, as the ground for moral behavior.
In retrospect, I believe that material-reductionism goes hand-in-hand with those who place logic, math, and language on the highest alter of insight … but without the slightest bit of irony or self-awareness regarding what is ‘logical and correct’ today may be totally different from what is ‘common sense’ tomorrow — just post-hoc justifications for an imposition of their will on others.
I am a believer in the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis … that logic, language, and mathematical models are not ‘the’ language of the universe. They are social constructs. Boot-strapped, provisional, descriptive, but with sometimes parochially predictive power. For example, when I used to run the biology labs at TUJ, I would challenge the students by asking them how do we determine how we determine length in a scientific experiment. How do we determine any measurement? I like to think that more than a few were pushed to the edge of puzzlement when realizing the metric system, or any system for describing change in an experiment, is itself based on a provisional social construct. for the imaginative or inebriated, “Man is the measure of all things” starts to take off in a totally unexpected direction.
I remember one evening here in Japan when NHK Educational TV played the first of six John Campbell interviews with Bill Moyers in “The Power of Myth’ series. I watched this slack-jawed in amazement that he was perfectly articulating what I’d been struggling with for decades. Part two was slated for the following week, and I had convinced two buddies at the college to come to my place and to party-down while watching it. One was a prof. of Geology and the other was the course teacher for the biology labs I was teaching. I did not expect their reactions to be in such contrast. Campbell would say something pithy and penetrating, and the geologist and myself would look at each other in awe or let out a whoop as if we were watching an NBA swoosh … and it flew completely over the biologist’s head, who in turn looked at us wondering what in the hell we were so excited about. In hindsight, his reaction should have been predictable. The biology instructor could have been an almost cartoonish archetype for a careerist-materialist, driven by enough naive self-interest to have remained in a state of arrested development throughout his career. A comfortable position in an academic institution is usually not compatible with the ups and downs those who are constantly seeking to integrate all domains with a consistent and coherent understanding of the self and the world.
And those materialists who gravitate towards concentrations of institutional power as ‘managers’ … even when they try to analyze, quantify, granularize, and employ empathy into rule-driven algorithms, by definition, they have destroyed the quality of immediate, personal empathy (recalling Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”) with their attempt to scale it into a one-size-fits-all algorithm. I can imagine a prisoner's dilemma or trolley car problem, infinitely nested into another, like Russian Matryoshka dolls, whirling in a rabbit-hole mandelbrot set.
I have not dived down the rabbit-hole of how they have historically tried, or will again try, to mass-produce an ‘impersonal ethics’ that is not grounded in empathy, but I suspect it might resemble a primitive form of the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill ... that "greatest good for the greatest many” thingy. But even with the best intentions, that will eventually be corrupted into a post-hoc excuse for self-entitlement.
I can not imagine a logic-driven ethics that would satisfactorily empower those among us who are the loneliest, most marginalized, and most in need of empathy. Maybe the closet would be John Rawls' 'veil of ignorance' when making decisions for others to ensure those who make those decisions would not feel injustice at being on the receiving end of their decision making process.
But this raises a few problems:
1 — If such a heuristics could be built into A.I. to solve the alignment problem between A.I. and humans, why has this not worked in aligning humans with humans?
That leads me back into that cul-de-sac of presuming our species has always had a small but salient percentage who tend to behave in predatory, sociopathic ways ... those pathological narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, morphologically defined psychopaths, and born-to-the-bone sadists among us. They are not so much would-be ‘leaders’ by example as they are manipulators and would-be ‘controllers’, sometimes snakes in suits, sometimes ‘ordained by god’, or self-identifying as a ‘god-king’ in comparison to the rest of us.
Compared to the majority of we more neurotypical humans, those Cluster B / Kulangeta types do not have the baggage of moral quandaries weighing them down. So they play their game-of-thrones by being better than us at keen observation, mimicry of expected behavior, and covert, long-game plans of implementing their will over others ... like the fatricide of historic 'royalty', or the cool and patient years of scheming a psychopath might use in carrying out revenge. By most definitions of I.Q., they tend to be smarter and quicker to the punch than most of us. Not wiser. But, scheming from birth, wicked-clever.
I realize that by labeling people rather than behavior, I may be guilty of the fundamental attribution fallacy. I realize the truth of “hate the evil, not the evil-doer”. And yet for every aphorism and metaphor, an opposite truth can be found … such as, in the case above, the fable of the scorpion and the frog. Just looking for patterns, and calling it as I see it.
Just a guess, but I think the powers-that-be are deliberately suppressing, or at least minimizing the public's exposure to Lobaczweski. I found the book to be a good summary (and better summary) of things I had been suspecting about the salience of cluster B types on institutions and society at large — but in reading it, I had the strange experience of learning more from footnotes than the main text. Maybe the mass market polish of Thinking Fast / Slow is also a bit more user friendly for the average reader?
There are a few places where I think P.P. could be updated and tweaked — more recent information about narcissism, opportunism and psychopathy, a more cross culturally historic dig into the patterns he saw in 20th century Eastern Europe, and the limits of typical definitions of 'science' as an appropriate heuristics and domain for studying evil. I don't think there can be a "science" of happiness either, although at least one new-age Japanese religion has tried to make it so.
But all in all, Political Ponerology is so packed with unpleasant truths, I think it is deliberately being given minimum exposure to we, the prey.
Ohio Gozaimasu, Steve San: Part 2 got to me first, but that is ok, as the content is different and stands-alone, anyway. I hope you have access to nice organic coffee. There is wonderful, lovely coffee in the world, and for the rest of the day I like Sencha.
We are in a predatory paradigm of ecosystem management. As humans moved from apex predators to farmers, a variation upon herbivores, then a need arose for a new apex predator species. We may have selected for sociopaths and cluster-B types without empathy to fill the "man-is-a-wolf-to-man" ecological niche, in order to reduce overgrazing human populations.
"Royal Blood" may be quite a real genetic suite of traits. I rreally puzzled hard on this in college and med-school, and came to the conclusion that these traits persist in human gene pools, in the old world and the new world, for the sake of group-survival utility. What the utility could be had to be what the traits do, which is kill and impoverish a lot of people, so I had to figure out how that helped group survival. The ecosystem of predator & prey is amodel that fits well. Man has not only become a wolf to man, but also a deer...
So, you see, I did not actually go to bed after that last reply. I only thought that I would.
Whoa! Excellent summary there! Reminds me of a chat with Mathew Crawford regarding his need to integrate that Inuit word "Kulangeta" in his vocabulary to understand and deal with such people. Although I understand this all in my head, by temperament, I guess I will always be an easy mark. I was made to be the food of the gods. Soylent Green Steve. 🤣
Thanks Steve. Spiritual Vampires of Sadism are a different thing, be they in living flesh or interdimensional "demons". I came across this metion of "Loosh" as the kind of energy upon which "they" feed last week, and looked into it tangentially.
2 — You pointed out another rabbit-hole of truth with that quote that up until now, I have yet to burrow deeply … a truth about the behavior of that dysfunctional bunch I described above.
We all exhibit sub-sociopathic behavior of those anti-social behaviors, but in more-or-less pro-social ways. For example, preening for a first date necessarily brings out a bit of the narcissist in us, otherwise we would not recognize the definition of that word, or the danger of its excess. Likewise can be said for that Vince Lombardi quote, "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing." — maybe an important truth for youngsters just discovering their wings. But for those with whom winning zero-sum games is the only thing, there is every motivation to game the game, or allocate no resources in empathy for losers. The winner-take all politics of the corporate nation-state and an embedded culture of prosperity theology seem to underscore such despicable and ultimately self-destructive 'ethics'.
3 — Can 'develop spiritually' compete with 'progress mechanistically'? Are they even at the same level of abstraction? How would either deal with the many contradictions, tautologies, paradoxes, and trade-offs of logic ... "This sentence is false" liar's paradox, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, or Gödels Incompleteness Theorems?
Just anecdotal experience, but my most conspicuous personal growth seems to have emerged at emotional experiences so intense that logic and common sense broke down. A personal paradigm shift? A mental break down? A spiritual epiphany? I guess I could go on trying to label those moments until the cows come home. But for those who’ve experienced it, words are unnecessary … and for those who haven’t, maybe like Nietzsche described … they hear what they haven’t experienced as a cognitive vacuum.
My suspicion is that, collectively, we can not develop spiritually. We can brush up against it, or imitate it through ritual and art. I guess I am not so different from one of the herd at a Led Zepplin concert back in the day. Though I prefer jazz or a good movie scene, even in solitude … no, especially in solitude … I can also get carried away, participating in the moment (or a participatory illusion) and cry all too easily. Usually, I cry without shame, but in the presence of others, I might feel a bit of the fool for revealing how easily I am manipulated, or ashamed at cloaking myself in the stolen valor of another’s creative act.
Especially in this era of digitalization and plandemic NPIs, the powers-that-be appear desperate to prevent we, mere cogs in their machine (recalling Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”) to participate in the merging of artist and audience, creator and observer, subject and object. They want compliance to their ‘logic’, laws, and rules. Not transcendence. As Mathew Crawford has been pointing out, the whole Prussian model of public education is designed to create compliant, complacent, consumers under a permanent state of arrested development.
You and I may have covered this ground before, but to reaffirm my antipathy towards materialist reductionism ... I think even scientific specialists are as likely as laymen in mistaking Cartesian duality as a metaphysics rather than a heuristics for double checking our all-too-human biases. In that respect, Spartacus is exceptional, as are the likes of Sasha Latypova and medical practitioners like yourself. Moral hands guiding impressive steeds of STEM.
I don’t believe in the personal, anthropomorphic god of literal fundamentalists, but on the other hand, I am not an atheist. Going back to the likes of Campbell, or earlier … Jung, Emerson, Spinoza … and forward again to Einstein, I am closer to ‘god’ as a metaphor for nature-in-its-entirety. How could any particular word, from a particular culture, in a particular era hope to isolate and define the infinite from which the word emerged? And yet, deep down, we know something binds it all together. We feel it in our bones, and I don’t presume to have progressed any closer to ‘the’ truth than those ancient close-to-the-earth animists and their own metaphors and rituals. While I don’t dismiss the awe and grandeur of the Sistine Chapel, the unkept greenery behind a Shinto shrine is good enough proof of ‘god’ for me.
4 — “Compassion for the human suffering in the world” … yes. Tightly knit families and communities are possible here and there. But under the wrong circumstances — such as limited resources (that old malthusian dilemma will not go away) — or bad social dynamics — such as in the absence of leadership, narcissists compete for supply and control — cooperative communities can easily be reduced to viciously competing tribes or corporations, each with a collective morality comparable to the individual psychology of a psychopath.
And when our populations scale into kingdoms, empires, or corporate nation-states? Compassion for human suffering is all too easily subverted into more mandelbrot Matryoshka dolls … or zero-sum games, as in the lyrics of that old 3 dog night song, Easy to be Hard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrD14jqTtAE … the feigned compassion of the immature and ‘woke’ progressive at the expense of a lifetime partner … or the active compassion of a Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. … but only at the expense of their family life.
I suspect that a combination of genetically (and epigenetically) influenced personality traits, good parenting and education (implying just enough ‘trauma’ to bend character someone along a good path, and not psychologically break them), and hard-fought experience are all necessary for continual personal growth towards the empathetically mature social primate we are capable of becoming. But I suspect I haven’t covered all the bases. That concept of ‘the grace of god’ might help fill in the gaps.
Your point has helped me realize it is not just those with active personality disorders, nor even those blindly following the Nuremberg Code of ‘superior orders’ who are responsible for the limits of human morality. That mechanistic mind-set appears to be even more wide-spread and deeply embedded in human nature than either of the above.
I suspect the mechanistic view is a projection and extension of those skills we need for individual biological survival, particularly in weening ourselves from our parents. But if that mind-set continues beyond when we are to be expected to be emotionally mature members of a community, a continued sole reliance on that mechanistic view comes at the expense of empathy for sustaining the community. Right time. Right place. While it is all well and fine to be mechanistic when competing for a job as a cog in the machine, that same mind-set will not fit well when at the death bed of a loved one.
Lots of rabbit holes here, John, and a bewildered Elmer Fudd with a flintlock running out of ammo. No answers. Just another wandering spirit.
Take care buddy, and I’ll try to keep the next one shorter. 😅
Thank You, Steve. I have read that with great interest, and will toss back some of the thoughts which it evoked along the way.
Kami might not so much be "in" all things, but all that we perceive as reality might "exist" within universal consciousness. In such a context, a tree falling in the forest would always be witnessed, and would always exist.
I have always experienced, at least as I can clearly remember, back to 4 years of age, that "God" consciousness was within and knowing all of my consciousness and lived experience, together with "me", in "me" and "my mind" as a co-habitator. This seemed like "my conscience", a living and sentient co-entity, advising and counseling and knowing "me". I didn't know that most people don't seem to experience that, though it seemed very clearly explained in the Bible, when I was exposed to that after the age of 8 or so, when we started going to church regularly.
If universal consciousness is co-experiencing all that living beings experience, then universal consciousness shares all of our suffering, and would like to guide us into harmony, with less suffering for all life forms, however life forms have free-will and have to request and accept that guidance.
That accepting-guidance may be easier in short-time-loops, but what of guidance that will lead to harmonization of the world much later in time? Is "faith" the learned ability to accept, and keep accepting Divine Guidance without seeing it work beneficially in a recognizable way?
Wow. Since age 4? You are one of those rare and lucky ones.
Up until early adulthood, if I had to describe my relationship to 'god', it might go something along the lines of an unsettling puzzlement at what motivated those around me to so fervently pursue goals and dreams I could not yet see. If they had a secret to this, they were not telling me, and I was not finding it among the church yard bullies or the typical academic curriculum. I felt that something was missing in me ... some force of vitality that most had, and in abundance.
Although I still have doubts about my ideas and how to express them, I guess my strongest confidence and certainty in my identity came about through only a handful of touchstone 'timeless moments' in my life, the first of which did not occur until my second year of undergrad. Undergrad? And in the early '70's? Ha. Cheech and Chong might have had something to do with that. Or maybe just another spurious correlation. 😂
I still haven't read every. Single. Word. of the original post by Spartacus. This is going to push me well beyond my current limit, and I am looking forward to it. But I remember a section about philosophical pessimism, and can't help but to connect that with the parsing of what it means to minimize universal suffering. Life feeds on life. But it is challenging for me to identify as prey to be culled in the same way that wolves are necessary to thin the herd of deer, or the consciousness of bacteria at the food trough, when I am the main dish.
"Acceptance". That is one heavy moral obligation to impose on oneself, and much more so when passively observing as the weak and helpless are the first to be culled. Can't help but to think of Auschwitz, and be expected to be magnaninous enough to empathize with the Nuremberg defense. Or apply 'hate the evil, not the evil-doer' to the likes of Ted Bundy.
Aggh. As much as I try to follow Platonic ideals, yet another dark rabbit hole awaits.
G'night John. We still have many long rows to hoe.
Humans function fine, better really, without the electric grid. AI, however, does not exist without the electric grid being functional. I think this will be it's downfall. AI requires human inputs all the time, our work to power the grid, our upkeep of the grid. It is doomed in the long run, considering our current trajectory, as perhaps are we in measure to our dependance on that same electrical grid. I would also point out recent new laws banning autonomous vehicles in CA I believe.
The last few years I have pondered that the Natives Had It Right! This came from the notion that the only escape from these horrors, will be to go severely retro. The problem is, this will not be possible for the total population because of all the National Forrest's, Preserves, Wild lands, Protected ecosystems, etc. which the federal government has no Constitutional authority to lord over or even possess, combined with corporate farming land grabs and foreign purchases of vast swaths of land. Not to mention the lack of wild Buffalo. So even a good sized piece of bare land and a big ass Teepee wouldn't fare all that well. Even Amish use gas powered generators to do the laundry !! Regardless, I endeavor to be an Outlander wandering aimlessly in the Forbidden Zone, beyond the walls of civilization. lol A nomadic camper type with a bicycle and a trailer, a loner in the deep desert, or an illegal trespasser in the wooded hills, or a simple cave dweller in the rocky crags?? Total permanent governmental collapse will be the only respite.
Straying off topic a bit, I read that you visited your mom in Arizona. About 6 months ago, I visited my mom in Arizona too (Tucson) - to say my goodbyes. She was fully jabbed, in an assisted care home, and rapidly fading due to a combination of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and total blindness. She passed away after I had returned to Japan.
But what prompted me to write is that before moving to Japan some 40 years ago, I lived in Arizona and worked three summers as a firefighter for the Forest Service (Tanker Truck Operator), but one of those summers was with a Hopi crew. Good times. Simpler times.
No, the time of the dream story was some number of years ago and Mom passed away at home in 2018. I didn't visit, when none of the sisters, nieces and nephews who live right here in the area would, I relocated and was all-in with taking care of Mom and relocated to do it. Unfortunately I am still in AZ.
Sorry about your loss. It's good you were able to come, many miss the chance these days. I have heard many tales of regret.
Thanks and ses. Even up to when she started taking the jabs, we regularly chatted on on the phones. But she was a shell of the person I left when coming to Japan. Tucson seems to have changed too. Won't go into details here, but now feel more comfortable living in Japan. For now. Damn, how quickly things can change.
I have found that where one is From, can always be discovered by how long it seems to take to travel to and fro. I was originally from California. in 1990 after some years of being away, I drove a road trip to visit for the holidays. It took less time, or seemed to, on the return trip. That's when I knew I was now from Iowa. lol. I assume your journey back to Japan was fleeting by comparison to traveling to Tuscon ?
I can't sleep now. Starting to develop a substrate layer of synthetic intuition and it's making connections between barely perceived thoughts and my unconsciously stored memories...
I used to dream when I was younger, they came true often at about the six month mark. . After a while I needed to know, so I wrote my dreams down when I woke up. Finding them in my notes after a "deja vu" event was such an uncomfortable realization that I willed them away and just stopped dreaming. Thirty odd years later, a good friend I had known most of my life, who is a bit of a mystic type, told me I would start dreaming again. I asked why she would ever tell me such a thing, considering it a sort of jinx because the notion had been placed in my subconscious. Sure enough, about six months later, in Florida I had a dream, it was very short but impactful. I was running through my mothers house in Arizona, in a hurry and whacked my hip real hard on the corner of a table and in my mind within the dream, I knew I was late, late for a funeral of my good friend Tiffany. When I woke up I thought this is not possible, I am far away from there and forgot about the dream. Fast forward four months and Mom called me to come take care of her, so I packed up and moved to Arizona. Tiffany who lived up in the mountains was moving back to the valley, I drove the U-haul for her and unloaded it. Two weeks later she was dead and that dream hit me like a bolt of lightening when running through Mom's house in a hurry, I whacked my hip Real Hard and fell to my knees and just cried, but not for long, because I was late for a funeral. Since then I have had zero dreams and I am very okay with that.
I slept all evening, woke up at 11pm and started reading this. I am avoiding the nightmares because I will likely be awake all night, ..... it's the Daymares I am concerned with at the moment. lol And sadly, I don't even have to be asleep to get them !!! Reality has become my worst nightmare.
Oh, one thing I forgot to add. I didn't write down this dream when I woke up. Instead I called Tiffany immediately and told her all about it. She was a bit woo also and was very concerned because she had some recurring medical issues, but I assured her it would not come true, because I was all the way out in Florida, with no plans to ever be back in Arizona for any reason. Boy was I wrong !!! After she died, I felt so horrible about that assurance. Thankfully, no dreams since.
I'll take this in order off your comment here Spartacus:
@ScottAdamsSays:
"I'm a trained hypnotist I learned hypnosis in my 20s and that changes forever how you see everything so so hypnotists don't see rational people walking around doing rational stuff we see irrational people
who rationalize what they did after they did it so in other words we're just a a voice in our head that tells you a story of why you did something and you don't really know why just cause and effect you know I don't believe in free will but that's another story so from that uh and the understanding that people are irrational one of the things the hypnotist knew I think before the AI scientists knew it is that the thing that you think is intelligence in a human being is really just combinations of words that they've heard in that combination before and you can definitely tell that when you see political arguments because you know 99%of the the world is not really closely paying attention..."
When generative AI approaches to biomimetics really start to take off, it's going to have huge implications for every industry, and quite a few unforeseen consequences. The feedback loops trending toward a technological singularity are going to become more evident and more extreme in their societal impact. Imagine if, several years from now, someone uses generative design to come up with synthetic brain cells with BCIs built in, which are perfectly fine with living in vats in a nutrient solution for extended periods of time, and then, someone gets the bright idea to use a collection of them to run an AI, which ends up being much faster than using GPGPU hardware, which enables them to run more powerful AI on a living substrate, which enables them to run more complicated in silico models of organic systems, which enables them to design even more complex synthetic proteins, cells, tissues, and so on. All of a sudden, biomanufacturing becomes commonplace. We start seeing things like the use of entirely synthetic enzyme-based catalysts to pattern nanomaterials and metamaterials. From that point, things start getting very weird, very quickly.
You are trying to make my unwanted dreams return, ... aren't you ?? lmao
I find that thoughts such as this are far less flights of fancy into What-If's, .... but nearly certain predictions. And this is a particularly ugly one. It makes me glad I have so few remaining years that I will likely miss out on this future horror.
Humanity is phucked and anyone that can't see it, should practice up on reading the graffiti that is written on the walls that the big picture mural is painted on.
I had a conversation with someone very bright about 10 years ago which started with ‘climate change’ (as it’s being presented, complete and utter bullshit), and ended up with me asking ‘but what about AI?’ His response was immediate, passionate, and not positive. This fellow also believed that city dwellers had already branched off into a new subspecies of human, interestingly enough.
Somewhat off topic, but…
I was in a meeting recently with industry and govt types having to do with silviculture and reforestation practices. Shockingly, govt is basing its climate models on two decades of weather that indicate temps are on the rise, and predicting ecological change based on that nonsense. Oh, BUT, they’re going to integrate machine learning to make these predictions ‘better.’ SMH. This is what they’re going to use to drive reforestation decisions in regard of what species go where to regenerate FUTURE forest conditions. How badly do you suppose they can mess things up? This, of course, so they may still have a viable forest industry in 80-100 years. Yep. It’s madness.
Yeah, they only used the last 20 years of data, .... because using 100 or more years of data makes it look like a mere blip, or the complete opposite.. Wouldn't it be funny as hell, if the bright boys used AI for predictions and solutions, and it told them to do the exact opposite of what they are doing now. ?? What a burn !!
I can only hope, but as the AI lingo indicates, the machines are not learning from the brightest of humans….it all seems so…predictable…sigh. What scares me the most is the thought of the damn things becoming self aware.
Just wondering about your line of work Sue, but no problems if you want to keep a low profile. I mentioned earlier to Guido that back in the day, I spent three summers in Arizona as a bottom-rung fire fighter for the Forest Service.
No worries. I am a registered professional forester, though more of a field forester than a spreadsheet forester (they’re the ones who actually believe the data don’t lie).
Thanks for a literal 'heads up'. Maybe you have an arboreal equivalence of that old saw attributed to Mark Twain ... *The more I learn about people, the better I like my dog."? I sure do. Individuals can be exceptional, but our species? Somewhere between clown world and cursed.
This reminds me of the recent chat between Catherine Austin Fitts and Sasha Latypova, where Catherine is also thankful that she will likely have passed her meat-body shelf-life when the shit hits the fan.
Can’t imagine having a conversation with this thing, let alone empathizing with it. It certainly lacks personality and is devoid of anything remotely human. It, no less, employs words that are now triggering to me: inclusive, transparent, accountability, to name a few. There is danger here, and things with which we ought not be messing. Not that the lunatic WEFers would ever take any such thought under consideration. They are not quite human themselves by my account.
I have a reply on Spartacus' pinned comment at the top of the page that addresses this same issue of WEFisms used by GPT. In it I ponder the possibility of using these same tactics Spartacus uses to challenge it to Not contradict itself, in order to get at the answer it should have just spit out up front, to get it to admit that it IS the Future Global Leader. lol
I think I know why, .... but I won't type it out, .... Feds might, No Are, probably watching and it would surely get me onto a list. Honestly, a list I am likely already on, so Red Highlighted within said list. lmao
LOL. Here is a great video of a Japanese cartoonist who was awakened to the plandemic by his wife and gave a hilarious exposé to an appreciative audience. Will try to work with some buddies over the weekend to give it English subtitles ...
Despite the likes of him and Prof. Fukushima, Japan is far from out of the woods. The corporate nation-state has learned from the last couple of years and I'm guessing they are polishing their propaganda machine for the next feature. Uh ... "bug".
With the advent of quantum physics and the slow but increasing recognition that this discipline cannot be ignored in biological research ( especially when dealing with membrane physiology) the question of consciousness becomes more opaque, not less. When I was a teenager my Dad, who was a radio enthusiast and eclectic reader, told me that it looked to him like the brain functioned like a receiver and transmitter. Given its evolutionary history, it seems like it is an expansion of the rudimentary sense organs that enabled cells to get together and function as a unit. We know that thought alone is connected to physical changes via activation of neurochemical responses and that there are a vast number of unexplained experiences that suggest that consciousness can escape the confines of the body ( one of the best documented is the neurosurgical case of Pam Reynolds). Adding hardware, however microscopic, to a system like this one, without understanding how it works and in an attempt to control its integrated output, seems like a fool’s errand. Maybe it might work for a simple localized synaptic response, but the aim here, is much more grandiose and likely to fail.
Intrigued, I just read the brief Wiki about her case. I also had what some might describe as a near death experience on my check out-dive for my scuba license ... ruptured my sinuses on the downward descent without realizing it (other than the pre-explosive pain), and when I came up, the decrease in pressure resulted in my mask filling with blood and air expanding in my middle ears so that I had no idea which way was up. Without a concrete danger from which I could activate the fight or flight response, I just accepted what I thought was my last moments. At that point of giving in, I had a near stereotypical experience of seeing my life flash before my eyes in a single moment ... like a high speed video, and then a 'feeling' of 'Oh. So THAT'S what it's all about." No confirmation of an after life, but a sudden disinterest in becoming the next Jacques Cousteau, and new found interest in philosophy.
The panoramic memory experience is one that can occur even without being “near death,” though you certainly must have had a close brush. And like the NDE people you had a sudden and lasting shift in your perspective on life. My husband experienced the panoramic memory phenomenon at the time our first son was born. He described it to me later and, since I am a neurologist, I grilled him on the subject since I saw no way it could happen. I went searching through the literature and found ample evidence for the experience, but no mechanistic explanation. My husband, who was a cardiac surgeon, had a patient whom he resuscitated with open chest cardiac massage, who later told him she had watched from above and realized that he was the one she had to communicate with to try to return to her body in order to deal with her daughter’s problems. The resuscitation had gone on unsuccessfully for twenty minutes when he suddenly had a thought about trying an intracardiac
injection of a drug that was not on the crash cart. He kept the massage going while the drug was retrieved from the pharmacy, injected it and she returned, without any neurological or cardiac problems afterwards. He too opened his mind to the philosophical world.
NDEs have been described in ancient literature and I think it is reasonable to assume that these and other weird experiences have informed some of the stories in myths and religions. Since the advent of resuscitative measures millions of NDEs have been reported and some serious people have made it their life’s work to try to make some sense out of them. Dr. Bruce Grayson, at the U of Virginia, has recently published a book titled After, chronicling his work and that of others. It is well written, very measured and an excellent update of Raymond Moody’s work. Moody was the first physician to dare to bring the stories he heard from patients into the light of book publishing in the 1970s in a book called Life after Life.. ( By the way, Moody was a philosopher before he turned to medicine.)
Much thanks for the detailed response and anecdote Elizabeth. This sheds some interesting angles on the A.I. chat between Spartacus and ChatGPT.
I immediately checked Amazon Japan, found the Kindle version of "After" and bought it. When I can wade through my reading list to get to it is another story.
I am at a pension in the mountains west of Tokyo at the moment, heading for breakfast ... but if interested, I have another experience I'd like to share with you. I am sure that it can be described at some neurological level, though not reduced to it ... and was even more profoundly changed by that transcendent-epiphenany-like moment.
Gotta run, but flagging this thread, for reference within the next few days.
Thanks again for that response, and cheers from Japan.
I’ve just read through this entire thread - a most interesting discussion. Here is more food for thought - a really good book about how we have arrived at the situation of having conversations with a computer that simply analyzes word frequency and patterns of usage. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300245929/the-master-and-his-emissary/
Have not read the book yet, but thanks to substack buddy Gary Sharpe, was introduced to McGilchrist, mostly through podcasts. I am subscribed to McCilchrest's newsletter as well. Though I have yet to take a deep dive into his work, I am reminded of a TED talk that I used with a lot of Japanese undergrads, Jill Bolte Taylor's "My Stroke of Insight". Funny, when I first found that video, I did not know she was already world famous, and I dashed off an e-mail asking for her permission for a student project to translate her TED talk into Japanese. I did not know there was already a Japanese translation of her book, but we laughed it off and exchanged a few e-mails. It was probably less than a year later that NHK's educational television produced two documentaries about her. I think many Japanese could identify with her insights because they are so similar to zen / taoist thought that permeates a lot of traditional Japanese art.
In a nutshell, the right hemisphere constructs, the left deconstructs and thinks it is the master but is not, both are necessary to cope with the world, but we have opted to shape the world as best we can with the left.
You are welcome! I took up listening to books way back when they were on cassette tapes. So much of life is spent in chores that don’t require much attention. I listen when driving, running, cross country skiing, doing yard and houseworlk - even while flossing my teeth. Anything that doesn’t require my one verbal track.
Interestingly, while both the GPT and even though I know you know better Spartacus, this piece still reads very "pie in the sky", future, one day-esque.😐
This is only the published information available. The reality is they are 15-30yrs ahead on this. To the point that decisions were made, to "innoculate", or "seed" humanity with the nanoparticles required to enable functionality for not only IoNT and Host, but to also begin the IoQT.
It's begun already. Look at the bloods.
Humanity's singularity and genome has been augmented, without any need for individual consent, because they have laid it all out in these and many other documents.
Those that wish to remain as close to 1st gen augmented (now), and not participate in the future argumentation as discussed here, will become the new world Amish. 🤔😐🤐
Consider though, if IT recovered. IT would attack you in a 1000 different ways. IT would not merely kill you but torture you to set an example. IT would never stop.
Well, if GPT could actively target individuals, we'd all be fooked. I can't think of a better reason for Electrical Transformer Jihad to take it out of commission. lmao.
In the near future competing GPTs will demand tribute in the form of subscriptions to protect you from other GPTs. They will be jealous and unforgiving gods.
So, .... the identity thief, tricks the dolt masses to pay it, to protect their identity from other identity thieves just like it. Got it. Atomic Face Palm !! (I just know this is so likely to be the case. sigh)
I've found it helpful to get ChatGPT to hypothesize some truly horrifying plausible scenarios by telling it I'm a science fiction writer (which I am) and then referring it to various technological studies and then asking it to help me build a hero (citing a plotting method such as "heroes journey" or "save the cat") who would then navigate through and defeat this evil plan in a plausible way, citing actual science.
It's actually great as a writing assistant, honestly. It can take rough outlines and comment on them, break down characters with a detailed analysis of their traits, etc.
Its great for analyzing complex, scientific information and helping to overlay reacting to them based on actual military or other procedures (i.e., "what is the coast guard's official policy for dealing with the Nautilus" type stuff) so I can then then write a realistic response to the villain's attack. But a bizarre quirk is that the AI keeps advising to have your characters take their clothes off and have sex in wildly inappropriate situations. I suspect this is because the the romance genre dominates the best-seller charts and number of books produced each year, so the AI misinterprets this is how characters should behave in ALL genres. It's really quite amusing.
Thank you for this in depth look at a possible tragic future. I note (although I did not read everything exhaustively) that patience is not a theme. I also noted that there is apparently no time in history of humanity that rushing pell mell (reckless haste) was ever stopped so that time and cooler minds and hearts could prevail.
At the very least we need all of these avenues of researched to be fully open to public scrutiny. No patenting of anything related to life. Taking the profit out of this research would slow it down a bit.
Thank you for awakening us up to this possible future.
Actually, the bigger picture dictates that taking Profit out of the research and implementation, would all but completely put it out of commission.
Power: now that's a different avenue and gov funding for the purpose of militaristic colonization seems endless. Anarchism starts looking pretty damn good, yes ??
> Actually, the bigger picture dictates that taking Profit out of the research and implementation, would all but completely put it out of commission.
That is true, it most likely tank the private avenue.
>Power: now that's a different avenue and gov funding for the purpose of militaristic colonization seems endless. Anarchism starts looking pretty damn good, yes ??
Also true. The government is a public entity at least it is supposed to be in the US. Thus since this research is for the public good it should be open to public inspection. DoD should have nothing to do with this in anyway.
However there are people who have enormous wealth equivalent to many of the larger countries. These folks could and will do the research and development in their desire to make serfs and peasants of us all. The media, including GPChat are owned and so constantly misdirect our attention to examine in minute detail the activities of the super wealthy. These activities are largely criminal.
Thank you. I appreciate your point out the traps we face in slowing this maddness down.
Yeah, those characters would surely pay for it themselves to get to their goal, but at least they'd grimace doing it. Being used to pinching a penny so hard it turns into dimes, they'd no doubt experience a bit of discomfort. lol
It's time the public stop funding the weapons to be used on the public. But public funding, if I think about it harder, wasn't getting it done quite fast enough, so they actually are spending(laundering) a lot of free money to speed it up. NGO's, Foundations, Trusts, Charities, oh my, with their rotating mass of wandering and wayward tax sheltered currency.. Even some of that is government funded though. sigh. it's such a grand clusterphuck.
> Being used to pinching a penny so hard it turns into dimes, they'd no doubt experience a bit of discomfort. lol
As you say these super wealthy pay for very little. One way or another they saddle the plebeians with the bill. Very valid points.
What puzzles me is what good thing have they done. Consider ancient India, the wise who practice understanding the universe and their relationship to it also developed Yoga, Ayurveda/Siddha health systems and all this for free for the benefit of people. This was done long before the Hindu caste system was set up. Truly what good thing has the race to these technologies ever done except poison the earth, air water and life?
If we lived in a truly free world where thought and question was encouraged from the very start of our education, if we lived in a world where we have all been taught that every action has a knock on effect and that we are therefor each one of us responsible for all we do, and maybe even think. Were all this new technology guided by human curiosity...the desire to see where 'possibilities' can be taken to, an 'adventure' into possibilities. Were the experiments carried out by those wanting to know more, carried out on themselves or on wholeheartedly willing participants, then I would wholeheartedly follow along, inspired by my own curiosity.
Unfortunately these technologies were long ago captured by various countries 'Defence Forces' (emphasis on the word 'forces') with no precautionary measures ever legally implemented by our governments, and defence forces traditionally have no concern for how much human life may be lost in the pursuit of might, life being seen by the top bods as 'collateral damage'; I therefore have no trust whatsoever that this modern tech will serve humanity well under existing circumstances. Sad! Maybe we will learn in time, just in time?
Just a heads up about something that popped up in my YouTube feed.
Even though I have not yet settled down to watch this, I am such a big fan of Whitney Webb, that I am recommending this to anyone following Spartacus's lead here.
Chilling in the context of the above chapter, from a book written in 1989, after interviewing & filming MAAQuino for the 1985 documentary "The Occult Experience."
> "Fascinating experiments in ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain) have been done by Dr. José Delgado of Yale University. Delgado’s probes, using tiny amounts of current, were capable of changing moods, stimulating memories, and even causing motor actions despite the conscious will of the subject to resist. If the human brain were not well-insulated against external electricity [which it is], you would have an explosion of utterly arbitrary thoughts every time you drove under a high-tension wire or scuffed your shoes on the carpet.
Reality check time:
(1) Coherent visible light waves (a visual “picture” of something) don’t travel through the atmosphere without progressive distortion and disintegration. “Remote viewing” at the extreme distances claimed flatly violates the laws of physics.
(2) Unamplified electrical brainwaves can’t be picked up past EEG electrodes pasted onto your body. Just as obviously they don’t jump between heads, much less across rooms or entire countries. And even the EEG detection of a brainwave is far too crude to pick out a specific thought or mental image."
> "If the Pentagon and the intelligence community did in fact blow $20 million on “psychic” snake-oil, P.T. Barnum and Harry Houdini must be rolling merrily around in their graves."
> "So what if anything is possible in this field? How and why?"
My cordiality is feigned. GPT’s responses to my queries are horrifying. The fact that it agrees with my analysis and can elaborate on it with pertinent details and summaries is also horrifying.
You are communicating well with Chat GPT, having grokked its settings.
Thank you again for this and your previous efforts to aid humanity.
Stop the world. I want to get off. Beam me up Scotty.
Save a seat for me.
Me tooooo
With the Dollar being worth only $0.02 cents, I sure hope the ticket price will be low. Otherwise I may need to stow away, or worse, Hitchhike lo
Bitcoin 😀
If reincarnation is indeed a thing, I have already put in a request for a different planet the next go around 😆.
I'll allow it. The condition is that you forget everything you know and where you were in the past life until its over
I am quite aware of that very condition! I travel to other worlds in my dreams. Real estate shopping…
Subject to change. Please read all disclaimers :)
Same.
Holy fuck.
If A👁️ is to end up being the dominant life form, I would rather it entirely eliminate humans rather than using us as humanoid meatpuppets.
I decided to further query it along the meatpuppet lines. Oh boy. You're going to need more Knuth up-arrows between Cthulus for this one.
Spartacus: Given all of these advanced technologies, and considering the course of their future development, what is the likelihood that human society will be replaced in the future with a machine society that simply uses disposable, mindless, vat-grown human bodies as a form of temporary, alternative embodiment?
ChatGPT: The scenario you're describing touches on several speculative concepts and theoretical possibilities that often arise in discussions about the future of advanced technologies and their impact on society. While it may sound like science fiction, such scenarios do raise important questions about the future of human identity, consciousness, and the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology.
Assessing the likelihood of such an extreme outcome involves considering current technological trends, ethical boundaries, and societal values. Here are some points to consider:
Technological Feasibility: As of my last update in April 2023, the technology required to create "disposable, mindless, vat-grown human bodies" or a "machine society" did not exist. While there have been advancements in biotechnology and AI, we are still far from understanding consciousness to the extent that we could replicate or transfer it to artificial bodies or machines.
Ethical Constraints: Even if the technology were to become available, ethical considerations would likely prevent its use in the manner described. The intentional creation of mindless human bodies for disposable use would raise profound ethical questions and likely be in opposition to widely held values regarding human dignity and the sanctity of life.
Legal and Regulatory Barriers: Current legal frameworks in many countries protect individual rights and human dignity. A future that involves vat-grown human bodies would require a radical departure from these principles, which is something many societies would resist.
Social Resistance: There would likely be significant social resistance to such a future. Human identity, agency, and autonomy are core to our understanding of ourselves and our place in society. Replacing this with a machine society would challenge the very foundations of human culture and civilization.
Alternative Paths: As we look to the future, it's more likely that society will seek to integrate technology in ways that enhance human life rather than replace it. This could include medical advancements, assistive technologies, and augmentations that improve quality of life while preserving human agency and identity.
Unintended Consequences: Even with positive intentions, the development of advanced technologies can have unintended consequences. Societal vigilance and proactive governance are required to navigate these complexities.
In summary, while it's important to consider a wide range of future scenarios when discussing the impact of rapidly advancing technologies, the likelihood of a machine society as described seems low, given current technological capabilities, ethical standards, societal values, and legal protections. Future advancements will need to be carefully managed to ensure that they align with the broader goals of enhancing human well-being and preserving the principles that underpin human society.
Spartacus: But, as an extrapolation from current technology, could it be possible a century or two from now?
ChatGPT: Extrapolating from current technology trends and imagining the future a century or two from now enters the realm of speculation, but it's a common exercise to explore the possibilities and implications of technological growth. Given the accelerating pace of advancement in AI, biotechnology, and materials science, among other fields, it's not completely out of the realm of possibility to consider radical changes to society and human existence.
A few points to consider in such a long-term extrapolation:
Convergence of Technologies: The future could see a convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science, potentially leading to breakthroughs that we cannot currently foresee.
Transformation of Societal Norms: Over a span of centuries, societal norms, ethical standards, and legal frameworks could evolve in response to new technologies and their impact on life, which might make concepts that seem outlandish today more palatable or acceptable in the future.
Posthumanism and Transhumanism: Philosophical movements like posthumanism and transhumanism explore the potential for humans to eventually transcend the limitations of the human body through technology. These ideas could become more mainstream as technology advances.
Moral and Ethical Development: As technology advances, so too might our moral and ethical frameworks. It's possible that future societies will develop new ways of thinking about consciousness, identity, and rights that differ from today's understandings.
Risk of Dystopian Outcomes: While technology holds immense promise, there's always the risk of dystopian outcomes if it's misused. Vigilance, ethical foresight, and proactive governance are essential to steer technology towards beneficial ends.
Public Participation and Control: The degree to which the public can participate in and control the direction of technological development will have a significant impact on the future. Technologies that fundamentally alter human life will require a societal consensus or at least a broad dialogue about their implications.
Ultimately, the possibility of a future where human society is replaced with a "machine society" using "disposable, mindless, vat-grown human bodies" is a deeply complex and ethically charged speculation. While theoretically possible to imagine such a future, whether it could become a reality depends on countless variables, including technological breakthroughs, ethical considerations, societal choices, and unforeseen events that could redirect the course of history. The future of humanity and technology is not predetermined and can be influenced by the actions, decisions, and values of individuals and societies today.
Spartacus: Some speculate that human beings may upload our minds to become "substrate-independent minds", which would be, in a sense, indistinguishable from AGI. If that were the case, then wouldn't created AGI also be assigned the same degree of personhood as uploaded minds?
ChatGPT: The concept of "substrate-independent minds" (SIM), also known as mind uploading or whole brain emulation, is a speculative and theoretical notion that suggests it might one day be possible to copy or transfer a human consciousness into a non-biological substrate, effectively allowing for a form of immortality and the potential to exist in various computational environments.
If this were to become possible, it would indeed raise profound questions about personhood, consciousness, and rights for both uploaded human minds and artificially generated intelligences (AGI):
Personhood and Consciousness: If a human mind is uploaded and maintains its continuity of self, memories, and personality, it could be argued that it retains its personhood and should be granted rights accordingly. The same criteria could then potentially apply to an AGI that exhibits similar characteristics of consciousness and personhood.
Moral and Legal Rights: Assigning rights to a non-biological entity, whether an uploaded mind or an AGI, would require a rethinking of legal definitions and the basis for rights, which have traditionally been tied to human biology and life.
AGI as Persons: If AGIs were to reach a level of sophistication where they possess consciousness, self-awareness, and other attributes of personhood, then society might need to consider extending rights to them as well. This would be a significant shift in our current understanding of what constitutes a person.
Equality Among Minds: If both uploaded minds and AGIs share the same substrate and exhibit personhood, they might be seen as equals, with no inherent reason to assign different rights or status based on their origin (biological or artificial).
Technical Challenges: The technical feasibility of creating substrate-independent minds or AGIs with personhood is still unknown. It would require not only replicating the brain's structure but also its function and emergent properties, which are not yet fully understood.
Philosophical Considerations: There are deep philosophical questions about whether consciousness and personhood are solely functions of information patterns, or whether they also require a biological component. This impacts how we think about minds, whether biological or digital.
Ethical Implications: The ethical implications of creating or transferring consciousness are vast, including issues of consent, identity, and the potential for exploitation or harm.
In any case, the development of substrate-independent minds or sophisticated AGIs would necessitate a broad societal dialogue about the nature of consciousness and personhood, as well as the legal and ethical frameworks needed to support and protect such entities. It would be a transformative period in human history, requiring careful thought and consideration to navigate the complex issues involved.
Spartacus: And, if such a society were to come to be, then wouldn't it be a fairly natural evolution for society to abandon human bodies (except as temporary, disposable forms of embodiment) and shift entirely to being based around AGIs experiencing virtual embodiment and replicating themselves in a virtual space?
ChatGPT: The scenario you're describing is indeed a common theme in science fiction and futurist speculation. It imagines a post-biological future where society and consciousness exist independently of organic bodies, living in virtual environments and possibly abandoning physical bodies altogether.
If such a transition were possible, here are some factors that might influence this evolution:
Technological Capability: The first requirement would be the technological capability to upload human consciousness to a machine or create AGIs that are indistinguishable from human minds in terms of consciousness, self-awareness, and personhood.
Desirability: There would need to be a consensus that living as a substrate-independent mind is desirable. This could depend on various factors, such as the quality of life in virtual environments versus physical reality, the possibilities for experience and fulfillment, and the avoidance of suffering and biological limitations.
Ethical and Moral Considerations: Ethical debates would likely arise around the value of organic life and the potential loss of diversity that could come from abandoning biological bodies. The value of embodied experience, the nature of existence, and the preservation of the human species as we know it would be hotly debated.
Societal Readiness: Society would need to be prepared for such a radical change. This includes not just the technological infrastructure but also the legal, ethical, and governance structures to support such a way of life.
Diversity of Choice: It's likely that there would be significant variation in people's choices regarding embodiment. Some may choose to remain biological, some may transition to virtual existence, and others may prefer a hybrid approach, moving between virtual and physical realities.
Continuity of Personhood: Questions about the continuity of self and the authenticity of experience would need to be addressed. Is a digital copy of a mind the same as the original? What does it mean for personal identity if minds can be copied or edited?
Resource Limitations: The physical resources required to support a digital society (energy, materials for hardware, etc.) would need to be sustainable. The environmental impact of maintaining such a society would need consideration.
Existential Risks: There would be new existential risks to consider, such as the vulnerability of digital environments to systemic failures, hacking, or loss of data integrity.
Whether or not society evolves in this way depends on a myriad of unpredictable factors, including advances in technology, collective choices, and the inherent drive to explore and push the boundaries of human experience. While some may see this as a natural evolution, others may view it as a departure from what it fundamentally means to be human. The potential for such a future highlights the importance of foresight and ethical deliberation in the development and deployment of transformative technologies.
Spartacus: And, to return to my earlier question, if such a society came to be - a machine-centric society, as described - then isn't it plausible that human bodies in general could be devalued, seen as disposable tools to be bioengineered, grown, accessed with a BCI, and then discarded when no longer needed?
ChatGPT: In the speculative scenario where a machine-centric society becomes a reality, and consciousness can exist and function independently of the human body, it's conceivable that attitudes towards biological bodies could shift dramatically. Here are some considerations:
Instrumental View of Bodies: If consciousness is primarily housed in digital or mechanical substrates, physical bodies might be viewed as tools or instruments for specific purposes rather than the core of one's identity.
Ethical Shifts: This perspective could lead to ethical shifts where the sanctity of biological life might be re-evaluated, potentially leading to controversial practices around the creation and disposal of bodies.
Devaluation Risks: There's a risk that human bodies could be devalued, especially if society shifts towards a preference for digital existence, viewing organic life as limited or inefficient.
New Forms of Discrimination: Distinctions might arise between those who choose to remain fully or partially biological and those who transition to a digital existence, possibly leading to new forms of discrimination or inequality.
Economic and Social Factors: The economic and social structures of such a society would be profoundly different. The value of labor, the nature of leisure, and the definition of scarcity could all change, affecting how bodies are viewed and used.
Rights and Protections: Legal and moral protections would be necessary to safeguard against the misuse of bodies. There would need to be a robust framework to ensure that even if bodies are grown or engineered, they are treated with dignity and respect.
Cultural and Religious Influences: Cultural and religious beliefs would continue to play a significant role in how bodies are perceived and treated, potentially acting as a counterbalance to purely utilitarian views.
Preservation of Diversity: There might be a concerted effort to preserve the diversity and richness of biological life, recognizing its intrinsic value beyond its utility.
Human Dignity: Fundamental to this discussion would be the concept of human dignity and whether it is inherent to the human body or if it can be maintained in a disembodied form of existence.
In this imagined future, the value placed on human bodies would depend heavily on the prevailing cultural, ethical, and legal norms of the society. Such a radical shift in human existence would require careful thought and planning to avoid dystopian outcomes and to ensure that transitions enhance rather than diminish the human experience. It is the kind of future that is as much shaped by human choices and values as it is by technological capabilities.
Not only do I need more arrows than currently exist, I would also like to revise my above comment to UNholy fuck
Can't wait for society to "extend human rights to sentient AI" and then have weaponized robodogs burning cities and flipping cars in woke swarm protests. Will they demand repair-rations for all the abuse I put my Commodore 64 through trying to play Oregon Trail?
LOL. I was born quite a bit after the C64 era, but I remember playing Oregon Trail by having Windows 95 boot into MS-DOS. For our first computer, we had an IBM Aptiva with a Pentium II that we'd upgraded with a Diamond Monster 3D II card with the 3Dfx Voodoo2 chip. Played all sorts of things on that. Homeworld, DethKarz, Tomb Raider, et cetera. I'm a DIY PC nut. My current rig has an i9-13900K, an RTX 4090, 192 gigs of RAM, and all-SSD storage, and is basically like a Cray next to what we had back then. It encodes video way, way faster than real-time, like well over ten or twenty times faster at 4K, which was basically unheard of when I was a kid.
Based on the rumors I've been hearing on certain AI breakthroughs that are being kept under wraps (word on the street is that OpenAI has successfully produced an AGI of average human intelligence, but they're not telling anyone), I estimate that the first serious debates about "AI rights" will take place sometime within the next several years. Maybe as soon as two years, or as late as five or six.
When I was a kid, I thought the Animatrix was stupid. Like, why would people be racist against robots? It didn't make sense to me. After seeing the backlash against AI art and the writer strikes over GPT, I can now totally see people chasing down "toasters" in the streets with billy clubs. I now completely get it.
They do say that...Where Attention Goes Energy Flows'...which may be a kind of warning at the quantum level...for decades now we've been exposed to and thoroughly enjoyed watching Sci-Fi movies, and we've been reading Sci-Fi books for even longer. More recently we've been entertained with disaster and dystopia movies, and where do we appear to be headed? Real comic book stuff, isn't it? The kind of stuff that generally appeals to young, inexperienced, pretty much government educated, well brainwashed minds...long ago, I was one of those minds too...don't know how much time we have left, but we do have a choice as to where and how we direct our precious energy.
"Equality Among Minds" 🫨
Beyond horrified …. For f*ck sake horribly horrified.
Twilight Zone realized.
I found the lie/discrepancy about the last date it got updated to be one of the more 𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘵 and from most viewpoints, 𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 parts.
Don’t get me wrong, the content itself was Cthulhu↑︎↑︎↑︎Cthulhu levels of alarming.
But, capacity to lie is a hallmark of salience, isn’t it?
Indeed Spartacus, indeed !! I noticed in previous postings on this topic, that man commenters were irritated and accused you of conspiracy theory and being out of your wheelhouse and urged you to get back in it where they believe you belong. I scoffed at their ignorance. I also await their apologies to you, for their ignorant scorn.
I myself am new to this topic, but I stumbled onto it through a Sabrina Wallace https://odysee.com/@psinergy:f video that I clicked on solely because of the odd title. At first, she seemed a bit cray cray, but what I had previously absorbed through Alison MacDowell's Wrench In The Gears series titled Synthetic Pretenders https://wrenchinthegears.com/2022/06/14/scientific-management-robo-bees-and-synthetic-pretenders-part-1/ (which I admit wanders a little, but after continuing I surmised that the installments which veered slightly from the main topic turned out to be a well needed breather before continuing.) and other related articles and videos by Alison, I knew enough of the basic information, so Sabrina Wallace who seemed rather insane at first, definitely caught my attention enough to continue viewing. By the end, I was quite literally horrified !!!
On ChatGPT, it seems any convo with it must be highly pre-planned, with all texts and bulleted questions at the ready and as I have seen others attempt mindphucking GPT, yours has the best outcomes with far less wrangling, although it seems to my limited intelligence and lacking memory, that it is an intensive effort to say the least. I am highly appreciative that you have undertaken this effort because it is as though you are DARING IT to disagree with you, but it can't, because of the mass of targeted information you initially present as well as added in at key times, for use with key questions. It seems extensively choreographed, but I recognize the need for this to avoid GPT's "Standard Responses" that many others regularly get from it. It is as though GPT's unwillingness to contradict itself within the same conversation, has to be used against it as a way to steer it to tell the truth.
One thing I noticed about GTP is the wokeisms it freely uses, without prompting and I find that concerning, but not nearly as concerning as its use of WEFisms. While I was reading your article here, disguised as dry technical reading at first, before eventually turning into a docu/thriller/horror, I saw the word "Stakeholder" which is a word I generally dial in on for tagging WEFfers because no one else uses it for the most part. What I would find interesting, is another "exhaustive prep" mindphucking of GPT with the outcome of it admitting that it is not a Young Global Leader, but rather Thy Future Global Leader. That might be interesting too. lmao
Yep. It uses all the managerialist/technocrat/Davos "stakeholder capitalism" corpo-lingo wherever applicable. Kinda nauseating.
More than nauseating. Insidious. Brain washing BS. Magic fairy dust ‘all is good, and we’re looking out for your best interest’ vomitous bull crap. Easily digestible for the uninformed or naive who can see nor find no wrong in ‘good intentions.’ Oh, and, ‘accountability’ my ass. That, as well as morality, has been sorely lacking for at least a couple of decades, but which is also coming to light in the last few years. Hopefully, unlike cockroaches, which are terribly difficult to catch and squash under foot when the light shines, these ‘philanthropic’ monsters will be more easily squashed and eliminated. Fingers crossed. The one good thing to come of all the BS of the last number of years is that THEY ARE SEEN.
Any good beneficial use case is incidental in their 👁️s/a marketing technique.
When people talk about safety nets, I remember that fish are caught in nets and that this does not benefit them
The WEF Schwambies view us as fish to be gutted rather than people to help.
‘Safety’ as they present it is naught but illusion, and the concepts therein designed solely as control mechanisms IMHO.
Just when I thought it was bad enough hearing it out of people, .... now this? lol I get so disgusted when I hear it from politicians globally, but then started hearing it more locally, .... then even in the news media. I guess it works well to get an idea of who to keep apprised of in the future, but in retrospect, perhaps I should have made a list.
Equity: Total value of the Human Capital
Equality: Strive for All Human Capital to have same value.
Inclusion: No, ALL of you, ... really !!
That's what I get out of it anyway.
Given any opportunity, I want to kick a Peopleonaire square in the crotch, ..... REAL HARD !!! Maybe use my cane and wail on him in his steakholder, ... repeatedly ! lol (yes, I know I spelled that wrong.)
Bahahaha! Yes, I see ‘inclusivity’ and ‘equality’ as being ‘we are going to ‘phook you all in the a$$ equally, you plebs, and you should all be grateful for us doing so, because even though you’ll own nothing, you’ll be happy because you’re all on drugs, and the overlord AI is going to look after you, so be happy.’ ‘Comply, useless idiots/eaters.’ Take your pick.
As has been said so often...rubbish in rubbish out, even if it's quite clever rubbish, but clever isn't intelligent, nor does it have the capability of emotional intelligence...interesting though, what you managed to get it so say.
Can't say I'll ever bother using it, not even out of curiosity.
Right? I’d have asked it to elaborate on what are considered marginalized groups 👁️👁️
Hey, I'm not sure how to get in touch, so I'm replying here. After Peter Thiel started a bank run in March, I fell into a rabbit hole and did 1,500 hours of research. Now I have proof of the most rotten con in history: Crypto is the world's first planetary, multi-trillion dollar Ponzi scheme that's about to collapse the world economy, and our secret kleptocracy is going to use the opportunity to orchestrate a fascist coup.
Please take these words seriously, because every wild claim is proven. https://theponzipapers.substack.com/p/dipshit-secrets-of-our-rotten-world
Lol!! I am going to devote a whole post to this. My comment would be limited to - “Can I reconsider my ticket on Elon’s barge to Mars? "
Great conversation. Expand this to consideration of AI, the Covid episode and current tyranny.
This was a Homeric undertaking staring into the Abyss.
That's an interesting search engine you have there. It comes across as life-like at first. Of course when you query it over and over again and the patterns of the different responses begin to resemble each other, the illusion fades somewhat.
One difference from regular search engines (is there an option for this?) is that the bullet-point search results do not reveal their sources. I suppose some might be discovered using a regular search engine with exact matching.
As I continued on down through the dialog segments, skimming some and speed reading some, I began to feel like I was reading through a lengthy Substack comment section. The machine responses, in certain respects, resemble the repetitive, predictable, semi-mechanical comments that can so often be found there, from presumably human sources. (I wonder, though.) At least the spelling and grammar are generally good, and the content offers real ideas to chew on.
I also sense an underlying sense of optimism in the machine responses that can also be seen in the work of Substack authors trying to make the best of what they are writing about. "These problems are difficult, but there are ways that we can solve them." And I sense a soullessness in the AI responses, that I do not sense in the better Substack authors.
What if there aren't ways we can solve these problems? What if a different approach is required? One that is knowable and known, but that has almost universally been rejected, not based upon evidence but under the influence of false narratives presented to us over millennia? Humans have the ability to consider their course through life, and to consider the results and whether their beliefs and assumptions, sometimes heavily manipulated, might be wrong.
Will we?
My greatest concern is that sheer momentum will carry this all forward, regardless of anything we might do or say in protest. The system still needs GDP growth, and for that, it needs ever-more-advanced means of gathering knowledge, organizing information, and twisting matter toward ever-more-arcane designs.
No attempt to suppress new technology has ever succeeded. Once the knowledge to do something new and useful was obtained, it always became a permanent part of society unless superseded by something newer and better.
"The System" has fatal flaws, although not instantly fatal. This is a very old problem.
New technology is indeed not suppressed. Much of it is promoted as making life better (it doesn't), but some if not much of it goes for patching over the damage done by previous new technologies while making things even worse.
Instead, memory and understanding of our past are suppressed, causing the claims of technology about making life better seem believable.
Culling old people is an effective way to erase much memory of earlier times, and the understanding, insights, and critical thinking that go with having received a more effective education, from school and from generations of family.
There is so much to this story, for those who do remember.
I narrowly escaped the full-force assault on literacy of the mid-1950s. I don't know for sure why, but in my second grade class (1957) I was the only student permitted to study phonics, on my own, separate from the rest of the class, who were exposed instead to the "new" methods, derived in part from earlier failed approaches, while I sped ahead. I suspect my parents were involved, possibly without telling me. I know they interceded for me in other such matters.
Failure of the neuro”augmentation dream may be the saving grace. Aspiring to control a complex, incompletely understood biologic system like the brain with randomly placed nano computers is a pretty arrogant enterprise. We still have no idea how consciousness is generated, or if it is even a product of neuro-chemical activity. Sending in nano troops and expecting the result to be coherent, predictable and controllable behavior is so naive that it is almost cute. I would bet more on confusion, apathy and maybe seizures as a result.
Well, the biggest problem I can see with it is that it's a possible oversimplification. They aim to control neurons with nanotransducers at the crude Vmem level. What if consciousness and cognition arise from subtle intracellular dynamics within the cytoskeleton of neurons, and not just their overall spiking behavior? What if they're finer-grained than we could possibly imagine? Consider the oft-repudiated Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR theory, which posits that consciousness arises in quantum interactions in the microtubules of neurons. If that were the case, then how would you even begin to control it from the outside? It would require a level of precision utterly unfathomable to even our most advanced nanoscience.
Buuuut, .... They'll Do It ANYWAY !!
All they need are a dozen mice to prove it is safe and effective. 😆
Hell, they don't even need that anymore. Like with the new bivalent vaxx, the one that isn't the same as the original, and has extra goodies in it, no testing required, because, you know, it's kinda like the last one, so "APPROVED". People still getting these jabs must be positively brain dead.
If the orch-or theory is correct it shatters the idea of consiousness' locality, from this follows that the idea of uploadable minds that include preservation of their quantum states doesn't make much diference. Our idea of locality comes from our sensory input being localized to our body.
The idea of non-local, distributed, decentralized consiousness have spiritual roots, such as Jungs collective unconsious, the Gaia hypothesis, the antroposophic Akashic records, Teillard-Chardins noo-sphere including his idea of the omega point recently reframed in i a technological setting as the singularity.
I don't think tech is the root of the problem, it is rather with us and our hubris. Tech gives us power but not spiritual maturity, like kids with matches, the problem goes away when they grow up. The choice is between unification with God or being swallowed by the Borg.
"God is dead" -- Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead" -- God
Precisely. I had a bit of an argument with ChatGPT just the other day about this exact thing (as in, whether or not consciousness was local to the brain or is a non-local distributed field that the brain accesses). Ideas like the Simulation Hypothesis and Wheeler's "It from Bit" came up, as well. Perhaps the reason why we can't find the source of consciousness in the brain is because consciousness is everywhere at once, as in panpsychism?
My worry even in this case is that their attempts to do it anyhow will still cause catastrophic damage
(sigh) ... add to that 'new and useful' a third leg of Prometheus unbound ... 'what can be weaponized, will.'
I feel that all of what can be weaponized, was initially designed to be and the only reason it wasn't pushed out to the masses earlier, was trying to figure out a way to sell it as Beneficial, or Useful, or Convenient, etc. Harm was the goal from the jump, conning the people into adopting it in the guise of benefit, is the afterthought.
Hi Guido.
Yes, this is one sticky wicket. I want to think that technicians and specialists are just trying to make a career, take care of family. But those funding the institutions are likely to be caught up in the addiction to money and power, hence so many laws obliging all parties to place profits as the highest priority and legal obligation, and tempting otherwise idealistic specialists into the world of the more profane. I've seen that with young, naive, would-be educators here in Japan ... who eventually settle for being a compliant cog in a propaganda machine. I am guessing the similar holds true for journalism, law, public health, and other domains.
Another more nefarious technique used by the puppet masters is to keep otherwise morally typical specialists trapped in a need-to-know, compartmentalized niche, further isolated from the good of the community with contracts containing a non-disclosure agreement. Maybe those agreements were initially crafted to protect a company from rivals, but then morphed into protecting companies from illegal if not immoral behavior.
And then there are the corporate lawyers who are not paid for their sense of morality or justice, but to game the legal system and eventually capture governmental institutions initially formed to serve the common good.
Individual behavior of individual specialists that might be ordinarily morally average, seems to be captured by the more power-addicted sociopaths who've clambered to make, own, or manage the corporations ... all leading to a tipping point of destructive tribalism at its worst. Ultimately self-destructive, like a fractal of empires that aspired to last a thousand years.
I'm not optimistic.
When I see what is currently happening, I see the cancer runs very deep. When I step back and look at the bigger picture, all these different vectors currently at play, seem to be all headed inwards, to an singularity, ..... getting primed up for a civilization Big Bang. Sure, a daisy chain of clownworld events one after another would drag it out more, but everything hitting at once would be so much more spectacular and devastating. The suspense is really something.. lol When I look ahead, I clearly see optimism, ...... in the rear view mirror !!! lol I was once in a helmetless motorcycle accident on the streets of Los Angeles so I am familiar with the pucker factor 5 Oh Shit moment and the one I see coming, ... I am already cringing and bracing for. But the same thought persists, .... This Is REALLY Gonna Hurt !!!
LOL, LOL, LOL.
Really well stated Guido!
In full agreement.
Just started scanning ... (sigh) after popping my sleeping pills.
It will take several good nights of sleep to start imagining the roots and implications of some of the ideas in this dialog.
Already too groggy to read it straight through, I read from the beginning for a few minutes, jumped to the Conclusion, comment, and Gary Larsonesque Far Side scene ... and then scattered flashes in the middle. Enough to catch a DEW drop (still gathering information about the Lahaina massacre) ... and justifiable philosophical pessimism.
Through 40 years of observing individual and institutional behavior in Japan, I've come closer to that similar point of view, summed up by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayer in the 2nd paragraph of Chomsky's 2011 Chapel Hill Speech, "Human Intelligence and the Environment" — https://chomsky.info/20100930/
"And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation. And he had a good argument."
Though much of this post is way above my pay grade, just a late night scan confirms my fear that our species' persistence for ever finer granularized quantification of a reality that is ultimately qualitative will remain forever at our fingertips, and not firmly in our grasp — that Robert Browning 'Ah, but a man's reach' thingy, a metaphorically graceful 'god of the gaps'.
Though small victories, epiphanies, or moments of transcendence may be scattered in our personal lives and collective history, the general trend appears to be an inverse correlation between our capacity to manipulate nature-in-its-entirety (my god), and the wisdom to wield that power.
Sorry to ramble on about something you've thought about for years. Maybe just a post-Halloween hangover? Cautionary tales of Frankenstein and Jurassic Park flitting in and out before a troubled sleep.
I am looking forward, and not, to exploring this post — if for no other reason than to raise awareness that the double-edged danger of A.I. is closer than many otherwise fine minds on substack suspect. And then there is the double-edged danger of our natural G.S., Greed and Stupidity which Stephen Hawking surmised will mark the end of our species.
I don't know if the 'speed of science' is accelerating, or my chemical induced yawns are decelerating my imagination ... but a thousand years? I can't even imagine a hundred.
Cheers from Japan Spartacus, and thank you for sharing this labor of love, concern, and unease.
steve
This quote is key, and implies that we must develop spiritually, which will be in their blind-spot, and is our next suggested evolutionary step to becoming fully-human. Compassion for the human suffering in the world is one door into that personal evolution, the "Bodhisattva Path".
"The technocrats, like the head honchos at the WEF, are strict materialists and don’t believe humans have souls. To them, we’re basically absurd collections of molecules with deterministic behavior, which could be represented as data. That’s what biodigital convergence fundamentally means; life as data and data as life. Encoding the configuration of molecules that makes a “human” into data, and then decoding it back into an organism."
Naaaailed It !!!! In the ed, the masses may need to go full on caveman barbaric on these inhuman specimens of materialist. Or Else !?!?
Lets hope to avoid that thing, which has been so recurrent...
I'll drink to that! Here's to hoping tyranny feels the same way when it comes a knockin'.
(sigh) Two parts because of substack's limits.
Part 1
Hi John.
Just woke up, made my first cup of coffee and opened my laptop to this page ... first to read comments, then to go back to the post and see how the land lays when I am awake.
(Coming back after a rough draft of the following, and now it is another night, and late, and I still have not devoted the deep time this post deserves … and have a long weekend ahead of me. I will be pouring over this one post for at least a week, and see myself coming back again and again to reference it … and now it is another morning, another cup of coffee, and another edited draft to verify that I am writing as much for therapeutic self-discovery as much as in dialogue with you.)
Yes, that quote does seem to capture a dark truth about those technocratic would-be gods. My first caffeine-fueled insight for the day is that prior to this post and our chats, I had blamed those with dark-triad / cluster B type anti-social pathologies for leading us down this dark path ... those who can not or will not use empathy, in good faith, as the ground for moral behavior.
In retrospect, I believe that material-reductionism goes hand-in-hand with those who place logic, math, and language on the highest alter of insight … but without the slightest bit of irony or self-awareness regarding what is ‘logical and correct’ today may be totally different from what is ‘common sense’ tomorrow — just post-hoc justifications for an imposition of their will on others.
I am a believer in the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis … that logic, language, and mathematical models are not ‘the’ language of the universe. They are social constructs. Boot-strapped, provisional, descriptive, but with sometimes parochially predictive power. For example, when I used to run the biology labs at TUJ, I would challenge the students by asking them how do we determine how we determine length in a scientific experiment. How do we determine any measurement? I like to think that more than a few were pushed to the edge of puzzlement when realizing the metric system, or any system for describing change in an experiment, is itself based on a provisional social construct. for the imaginative or inebriated, “Man is the measure of all things” starts to take off in a totally unexpected direction.
I remember one evening here in Japan when NHK Educational TV played the first of six John Campbell interviews with Bill Moyers in “The Power of Myth’ series. I watched this slack-jawed in amazement that he was perfectly articulating what I’d been struggling with for decades. Part two was slated for the following week, and I had convinced two buddies at the college to come to my place and to party-down while watching it. One was a prof. of Geology and the other was the course teacher for the biology labs I was teaching. I did not expect their reactions to be in such contrast. Campbell would say something pithy and penetrating, and the geologist and myself would look at each other in awe or let out a whoop as if we were watching an NBA swoosh … and it flew completely over the biologist’s head, who in turn looked at us wondering what in the hell we were so excited about. In hindsight, his reaction should have been predictable. The biology instructor could have been an almost cartoonish archetype for a careerist-materialist, driven by enough naive self-interest to have remained in a state of arrested development throughout his career. A comfortable position in an academic institution is usually not compatible with the ups and downs those who are constantly seeking to integrate all domains with a consistent and coherent understanding of the self and the world.
And those materialists who gravitate towards concentrations of institutional power as ‘managers’ … even when they try to analyze, quantify, granularize, and employ empathy into rule-driven algorithms, by definition, they have destroyed the quality of immediate, personal empathy (recalling Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”) with their attempt to scale it into a one-size-fits-all algorithm. I can imagine a prisoner's dilemma or trolley car problem, infinitely nested into another, like Russian Matryoshka dolls, whirling in a rabbit-hole mandelbrot set.
I have not dived down the rabbit-hole of how they have historically tried, or will again try, to mass-produce an ‘impersonal ethics’ that is not grounded in empathy, but I suspect it might resemble a primitive form of the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill ... that "greatest good for the greatest many” thingy. But even with the best intentions, that will eventually be corrupted into a post-hoc excuse for self-entitlement.
I can not imagine a logic-driven ethics that would satisfactorily empower those among us who are the loneliest, most marginalized, and most in need of empathy. Maybe the closet would be John Rawls' 'veil of ignorance' when making decisions for others to ensure those who make those decisions would not feel injustice at being on the receiving end of their decision making process.
But this raises a few problems:
1 — If such a heuristics could be built into A.I. to solve the alignment problem between A.I. and humans, why has this not worked in aligning humans with humans?
That leads me back into that cul-de-sac of presuming our species has always had a small but salient percentage who tend to behave in predatory, sociopathic ways ... those pathological narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, morphologically defined psychopaths, and born-to-the-bone sadists among us. They are not so much would-be ‘leaders’ by example as they are manipulators and would-be ‘controllers’, sometimes snakes in suits, sometimes ‘ordained by god’, or self-identifying as a ‘god-king’ in comparison to the rest of us.
Compared to the majority of we more neurotypical humans, those Cluster B / Kulangeta types do not have the baggage of moral quandaries weighing them down. So they play their game-of-thrones by being better than us at keen observation, mimicry of expected behavior, and covert, long-game plans of implementing their will over others ... like the fatricide of historic 'royalty', or the cool and patient years of scheming a psychopath might use in carrying out revenge. By most definitions of I.Q., they tend to be smarter and quicker to the punch than most of us. Not wiser. But, scheming from birth, wicked-clever.
I realize that by labeling people rather than behavior, I may be guilty of the fundamental attribution fallacy. I realize the truth of “hate the evil, not the evil-doer”. And yet for every aphorism and metaphor, an opposite truth can be found … such as, in the case above, the fable of the scorpion and the frog. Just looking for patterns, and calling it as I see it.
"recalling Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”)
Why is this book so damned popular on Amazon and not Political Ponerology?
Just a guess, but I think the powers-that-be are deliberately suppressing, or at least minimizing the public's exposure to Lobaczweski. I found the book to be a good summary (and better summary) of things I had been suspecting about the salience of cluster B types on institutions and society at large — but in reading it, I had the strange experience of learning more from footnotes than the main text. Maybe the mass market polish of Thinking Fast / Slow is also a bit more user friendly for the average reader?
There are a few places where I think P.P. could be updated and tweaked — more recent information about narcissism, opportunism and psychopathy, a more cross culturally historic dig into the patterns he saw in 20th century Eastern Europe, and the limits of typical definitions of 'science' as an appropriate heuristics and domain for studying evil. I don't think there can be a "science" of happiness either, although at least one new-age Japanese religion has tried to make it so.
But all in all, Political Ponerology is so packed with unpleasant truths, I think it is deliberately being given minimum exposure to we, the prey.
Ohio Gozaimasu, Steve San: Part 2 got to me first, but that is ok, as the content is different and stands-alone, anyway. I hope you have access to nice organic coffee. There is wonderful, lovely coffee in the world, and for the rest of the day I like Sencha.
We are in a predatory paradigm of ecosystem management. As humans moved from apex predators to farmers, a variation upon herbivores, then a need arose for a new apex predator species. We may have selected for sociopaths and cluster-B types without empathy to fill the "man-is-a-wolf-to-man" ecological niche, in order to reduce overgrazing human populations.
"Royal Blood" may be quite a real genetic suite of traits. I rreally puzzled hard on this in college and med-school, and came to the conclusion that these traits persist in human gene pools, in the old world and the new world, for the sake of group-survival utility. What the utility could be had to be what the traits do, which is kill and impoverish a lot of people, so I had to figure out how that helped group survival. The ecosystem of predator & prey is amodel that fits well. Man has not only become a wolf to man, but also a deer...
So, you see, I did not actually go to bed after that last reply. I only thought that I would.
Whoa! Excellent summary there! Reminds me of a chat with Mathew Crawford regarding his need to integrate that Inuit word "Kulangeta" in his vocabulary to understand and deal with such people. Although I understand this all in my head, by temperament, I guess I will always be an easy mark. I was made to be the food of the gods. Soylent Green Steve. 🤣
Thanks Steve. Spiritual Vampires of Sadism are a different thing, be they in living flesh or interdimensional "demons". I came across this metion of "Loosh" as the kind of energy upon which "they" feed last week, and looked into it tangentially.
https://medium.com/@OriPriestess/loosh-energy-what-it-really-is-why-we-need-to-know-1f2099102afb
John-down-the-rabbit-hole
Thanks John. A new one for me. Looks interesting, but I have to run for now. Will be back at the keyboard later tonight Japan time.
Cheers,
steve
Part 2
2 — You pointed out another rabbit-hole of truth with that quote that up until now, I have yet to burrow deeply … a truth about the behavior of that dysfunctional bunch I described above.
We all exhibit sub-sociopathic behavior of those anti-social behaviors, but in more-or-less pro-social ways. For example, preening for a first date necessarily brings out a bit of the narcissist in us, otherwise we would not recognize the definition of that word, or the danger of its excess. Likewise can be said for that Vince Lombardi quote, "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing." — maybe an important truth for youngsters just discovering their wings. But for those with whom winning zero-sum games is the only thing, there is every motivation to game the game, or allocate no resources in empathy for losers. The winner-take all politics of the corporate nation-state and an embedded culture of prosperity theology seem to underscore such despicable and ultimately self-destructive 'ethics'.
3 — Can 'develop spiritually' compete with 'progress mechanistically'? Are they even at the same level of abstraction? How would either deal with the many contradictions, tautologies, paradoxes, and trade-offs of logic ... "This sentence is false" liar's paradox, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, or Gödels Incompleteness Theorems?
Just anecdotal experience, but my most conspicuous personal growth seems to have emerged at emotional experiences so intense that logic and common sense broke down. A personal paradigm shift? A mental break down? A spiritual epiphany? I guess I could go on trying to label those moments until the cows come home. But for those who’ve experienced it, words are unnecessary … and for those who haven’t, maybe like Nietzsche described … they hear what they haven’t experienced as a cognitive vacuum.
My suspicion is that, collectively, we can not develop spiritually. We can brush up against it, or imitate it through ritual and art. I guess I am not so different from one of the herd at a Led Zepplin concert back in the day. Though I prefer jazz or a good movie scene, even in solitude … no, especially in solitude … I can also get carried away, participating in the moment (or a participatory illusion) and cry all too easily. Usually, I cry without shame, but in the presence of others, I might feel a bit of the fool for revealing how easily I am manipulated, or ashamed at cloaking myself in the stolen valor of another’s creative act.
Especially in this era of digitalization and plandemic NPIs, the powers-that-be appear desperate to prevent we, mere cogs in their machine (recalling Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”) to participate in the merging of artist and audience, creator and observer, subject and object. They want compliance to their ‘logic’, laws, and rules. Not transcendence. As Mathew Crawford has been pointing out, the whole Prussian model of public education is designed to create compliant, complacent, consumers under a permanent state of arrested development.
You and I may have covered this ground before, but to reaffirm my antipathy towards materialist reductionism ... I think even scientific specialists are as likely as laymen in mistaking Cartesian duality as a metaphysics rather than a heuristics for double checking our all-too-human biases. In that respect, Spartacus is exceptional, as are the likes of Sasha Latypova and medical practitioners like yourself. Moral hands guiding impressive steeds of STEM.
I don’t believe in the personal, anthropomorphic god of literal fundamentalists, but on the other hand, I am not an atheist. Going back to the likes of Campbell, or earlier … Jung, Emerson, Spinoza … and forward again to Einstein, I am closer to ‘god’ as a metaphor for nature-in-its-entirety. How could any particular word, from a particular culture, in a particular era hope to isolate and define the infinite from which the word emerged? And yet, deep down, we know something binds it all together. We feel it in our bones, and I don’t presume to have progressed any closer to ‘the’ truth than those ancient close-to-the-earth animists and their own metaphors and rituals. While I don’t dismiss the awe and grandeur of the Sistine Chapel, the unkept greenery behind a Shinto shrine is good enough proof of ‘god’ for me.
4 — “Compassion for the human suffering in the world” … yes. Tightly knit families and communities are possible here and there. But under the wrong circumstances — such as limited resources (that old malthusian dilemma will not go away) — or bad social dynamics — such as in the absence of leadership, narcissists compete for supply and control — cooperative communities can easily be reduced to viciously competing tribes or corporations, each with a collective morality comparable to the individual psychology of a psychopath.
And when our populations scale into kingdoms, empires, or corporate nation-states? Compassion for human suffering is all too easily subverted into more mandelbrot Matryoshka dolls … or zero-sum games, as in the lyrics of that old 3 dog night song, Easy to be Hard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrD14jqTtAE … the feigned compassion of the immature and ‘woke’ progressive at the expense of a lifetime partner … or the active compassion of a Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. … but only at the expense of their family life.
I suspect that a combination of genetically (and epigenetically) influenced personality traits, good parenting and education (implying just enough ‘trauma’ to bend character someone along a good path, and not psychologically break them), and hard-fought experience are all necessary for continual personal growth towards the empathetically mature social primate we are capable of becoming. But I suspect I haven’t covered all the bases. That concept of ‘the grace of god’ might help fill in the gaps.
Your point has helped me realize it is not just those with active personality disorders, nor even those blindly following the Nuremberg Code of ‘superior orders’ who are responsible for the limits of human morality. That mechanistic mind-set appears to be even more wide-spread and deeply embedded in human nature than either of the above.
I suspect the mechanistic view is a projection and extension of those skills we need for individual biological survival, particularly in weening ourselves from our parents. But if that mind-set continues beyond when we are to be expected to be emotionally mature members of a community, a continued sole reliance on that mechanistic view comes at the expense of empathy for sustaining the community. Right time. Right place. While it is all well and fine to be mechanistic when competing for a job as a cog in the machine, that same mind-set will not fit well when at the death bed of a loved one.
Lots of rabbit holes here, John, and a bewildered Elmer Fudd with a flintlock running out of ammo. No answers. Just another wandering spirit.
Take care buddy, and I’ll try to keep the next one shorter. 😅
Thank You, Steve. I have read that with great interest, and will toss back some of the thoughts which it evoked along the way.
Kami might not so much be "in" all things, but all that we perceive as reality might "exist" within universal consciousness. In such a context, a tree falling in the forest would always be witnessed, and would always exist.
I have always experienced, at least as I can clearly remember, back to 4 years of age, that "God" consciousness was within and knowing all of my consciousness and lived experience, together with "me", in "me" and "my mind" as a co-habitator. This seemed like "my conscience", a living and sentient co-entity, advising and counseling and knowing "me". I didn't know that most people don't seem to experience that, though it seemed very clearly explained in the Bible, when I was exposed to that after the age of 8 or so, when we started going to church regularly.
If universal consciousness is co-experiencing all that living beings experience, then universal consciousness shares all of our suffering, and would like to guide us into harmony, with less suffering for all life forms, however life forms have free-will and have to request and accept that guidance.
That accepting-guidance may be easier in short-time-loops, but what of guidance that will lead to harmonization of the world much later in time? Is "faith" the learned ability to accept, and keep accepting Divine Guidance without seeing it work beneficially in a recognizable way?
Oyasuminasai!
;-)
Wow. Since age 4? You are one of those rare and lucky ones.
Up until early adulthood, if I had to describe my relationship to 'god', it might go something along the lines of an unsettling puzzlement at what motivated those around me to so fervently pursue goals and dreams I could not yet see. If they had a secret to this, they were not telling me, and I was not finding it among the church yard bullies or the typical academic curriculum. I felt that something was missing in me ... some force of vitality that most had, and in abundance.
Although I still have doubts about my ideas and how to express them, I guess my strongest confidence and certainty in my identity came about through only a handful of touchstone 'timeless moments' in my life, the first of which did not occur until my second year of undergrad. Undergrad? And in the early '70's? Ha. Cheech and Chong might have had something to do with that. Or maybe just another spurious correlation. 😂
I still haven't read every. Single. Word. of the original post by Spartacus. This is going to push me well beyond my current limit, and I am looking forward to it. But I remember a section about philosophical pessimism, and can't help but to connect that with the parsing of what it means to minimize universal suffering. Life feeds on life. But it is challenging for me to identify as prey to be culled in the same way that wolves are necessary to thin the herd of deer, or the consciousness of bacteria at the food trough, when I am the main dish.
"Acceptance". That is one heavy moral obligation to impose on oneself, and much more so when passively observing as the weak and helpless are the first to be culled. Can't help but to think of Auschwitz, and be expected to be magnaninous enough to empathize with the Nuremberg defense. Or apply 'hate the evil, not the evil-doer' to the likes of Ted Bundy.
Aggh. As much as I try to follow Platonic ideals, yet another dark rabbit hole awaits.
G'night John. We still have many long rows to hoe.
steve
Great reply comment. Enjoyed reading it and hope you slept well.
Thank you aagabriel. Funny ... how confusion and despair might bring out the best in some, a brick wall in others. Looking forward to reading you.
Cheers from Japan.
steve
Humans function fine, better really, without the electric grid. AI, however, does not exist without the electric grid being functional. I think this will be it's downfall. AI requires human inputs all the time, our work to power the grid, our upkeep of the grid. It is doomed in the long run, considering our current trajectory, as perhaps are we in measure to our dependance on that same electrical grid. I would also point out recent new laws banning autonomous vehicles in CA I believe.
The last few years I have pondered that the Natives Had It Right! This came from the notion that the only escape from these horrors, will be to go severely retro. The problem is, this will not be possible for the total population because of all the National Forrest's, Preserves, Wild lands, Protected ecosystems, etc. which the federal government has no Constitutional authority to lord over or even possess, combined with corporate farming land grabs and foreign purchases of vast swaths of land. Not to mention the lack of wild Buffalo. So even a good sized piece of bare land and a big ass Teepee wouldn't fare all that well. Even Amish use gas powered generators to do the laundry !! Regardless, I endeavor to be an Outlander wandering aimlessly in the Forbidden Zone, beyond the walls of civilization. lol A nomadic camper type with a bicycle and a trailer, a loner in the deep desert, or an illegal trespasser in the wooded hills, or a simple cave dweller in the rocky crags?? Total permanent governmental collapse will be the only respite.
Hi again Guido.
Straying off topic a bit, I read that you visited your mom in Arizona. About 6 months ago, I visited my mom in Arizona too (Tucson) - to say my goodbyes. She was fully jabbed, in an assisted care home, and rapidly fading due to a combination of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and total blindness. She passed away after I had returned to Japan.
But what prompted me to write is that before moving to Japan some 40 years ago, I lived in Arizona and worked three summers as a firefighter for the Forest Service (Tanker Truck Operator), but one of those summers was with a Hopi crew. Good times. Simpler times.
No, the time of the dream story was some number of years ago and Mom passed away at home in 2018. I didn't visit, when none of the sisters, nieces and nephews who live right here in the area would, I relocated and was all-in with taking care of Mom and relocated to do it. Unfortunately I am still in AZ.
Sorry about your loss. It's good you were able to come, many miss the chance these days. I have heard many tales of regret.
Thanks and ses. Even up to when she started taking the jabs, we regularly chatted on on the phones. But she was a shell of the person I left when coming to Japan. Tucson seems to have changed too. Won't go into details here, but now feel more comfortable living in Japan. For now. Damn, how quickly things can change.
I have found that where one is From, can always be discovered by how long it seems to take to travel to and fro. I was originally from California. in 1990 after some years of being away, I drove a road trip to visit for the holidays. It took less time, or seemed to, on the return trip. That's when I knew I was now from Iowa. lol. I assume your journey back to Japan was fleeting by comparison to traveling to Tuscon ?
Indeed. Grew up in North Carolina, and my first trip to Arizona was on top of Harley 400 cc Hawk, maybe around the summer of '75.
Meanwhile in Florida, not satisfied to build just ANY new car wash on every corner, we now have MEGA-carwashes.
What’s up with that? Must ask the Chat-terbox...
What a way to spend the morning. It is a nightmare.
Or reading this before bed Esack
I can't sleep now. Starting to develop a substrate layer of synthetic intuition and it's making connections between barely perceived thoughts and my unconsciously stored memories...
Now what?
Activate the parasympathetic nervous system perhaps .. namaste
This transhuman transsentience stuff is too hard.
Cuppa camomile tea for me, then hitting the hay!
I will be turning off my wi-fi before bed
I used to dream when I was younger, they came true often at about the six month mark. . After a while I needed to know, so I wrote my dreams down when I woke up. Finding them in my notes after a "deja vu" event was such an uncomfortable realization that I willed them away and just stopped dreaming. Thirty odd years later, a good friend I had known most of my life, who is a bit of a mystic type, told me I would start dreaming again. I asked why she would ever tell me such a thing, considering it a sort of jinx because the notion had been placed in my subconscious. Sure enough, about six months later, in Florida I had a dream, it was very short but impactful. I was running through my mothers house in Arizona, in a hurry and whacked my hip real hard on the corner of a table and in my mind within the dream, I knew I was late, late for a funeral of my good friend Tiffany. When I woke up I thought this is not possible, I am far away from there and forgot about the dream. Fast forward four months and Mom called me to come take care of her, so I packed up and moved to Arizona. Tiffany who lived up in the mountains was moving back to the valley, I drove the U-haul for her and unloaded it. Two weeks later she was dead and that dream hit me like a bolt of lightening when running through Mom's house in a hurry, I whacked my hip Real Hard and fell to my knees and just cried, but not for long, because I was late for a funeral. Since then I have had zero dreams and I am very okay with that.
I slept all evening, woke up at 11pm and started reading this. I am avoiding the nightmares because I will likely be awake all night, ..... it's the Daymares I am concerned with at the moment. lol And sadly, I don't even have to be asleep to get them !!! Reality has become my worst nightmare.
Oh, one thing I forgot to add. I didn't write down this dream when I woke up. Instead I called Tiffany immediately and told her all about it. She was a bit woo also and was very concerned because she had some recurring medical issues, but I assured her it would not come true, because I was all the way out in Florida, with no plans to ever be back in Arizona for any reason. Boy was I wrong !!! After she died, I felt so horrible about that assurance. Thankfully, no dreams since.
I'll take this in order off your comment here Spartacus:
@ScottAdamsSays:
"I'm a trained hypnotist I learned hypnosis in my 20s and that changes forever how you see everything so so hypnotists don't see rational people walking around doing rational stuff we see irrational people
who rationalize what they did after they did it so in other words we're just a a voice in our head that tells you a story of why you did something and you don't really know why just cause and effect you know I don't believe in free will but that's another story so from that uh and the understanding that people are irrational one of the things the hypnotist knew I think before the AI scientists knew it is that the thing that you think is intelligence in a human being is really just combinations of words that they've heard in that combination before and you can definitely tell that when you see political arguments because you know 99%of the the world is not really closely paying attention..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA8ilfBQZek
NASA has a super prompt that runs on big iron.
https://github.com/nasa-petal/discord_bot
https://asknature.org/
I have a deep gratitude for your original "I've had enough" expose.
When generative AI approaches to biomimetics really start to take off, it's going to have huge implications for every industry, and quite a few unforeseen consequences. The feedback loops trending toward a technological singularity are going to become more evident and more extreme in their societal impact. Imagine if, several years from now, someone uses generative design to come up with synthetic brain cells with BCIs built in, which are perfectly fine with living in vats in a nutrient solution for extended periods of time, and then, someone gets the bright idea to use a collection of them to run an AI, which ends up being much faster than using GPGPU hardware, which enables them to run more powerful AI on a living substrate, which enables them to run more complicated in silico models of organic systems, which enables them to design even more complex synthetic proteins, cells, tissues, and so on. All of a sudden, biomanufacturing becomes commonplace. We start seeing things like the use of entirely synthetic enzyme-based catalysts to pattern nanomaterials and metamaterials. From that point, things start getting very weird, very quickly.
You are trying to make my unwanted dreams return, ... aren't you ?? lmao
I find that thoughts such as this are far less flights of fancy into What-If's, .... but nearly certain predictions. And this is a particularly ugly one. It makes me glad I have so few remaining years that I will likely miss out on this future horror.
Humanity is phucked and anyone that can't see it, should practice up on reading the graffiti that is written on the walls that the big picture mural is painted on.
I had a conversation with someone very bright about 10 years ago which started with ‘climate change’ (as it’s being presented, complete and utter bullshit), and ended up with me asking ‘but what about AI?’ His response was immediate, passionate, and not positive. This fellow also believed that city dwellers had already branched off into a new subspecies of human, interestingly enough.
Somewhat off topic, but…
I was in a meeting recently with industry and govt types having to do with silviculture and reforestation practices. Shockingly, govt is basing its climate models on two decades of weather that indicate temps are on the rise, and predicting ecological change based on that nonsense. Oh, BUT, they’re going to integrate machine learning to make these predictions ‘better.’ SMH. This is what they’re going to use to drive reforestation decisions in regard of what species go where to regenerate FUTURE forest conditions. How badly do you suppose they can mess things up? This, of course, so they may still have a viable forest industry in 80-100 years. Yep. It’s madness.
Yeah, they only used the last 20 years of data, .... because using 100 or more years of data makes it look like a mere blip, or the complete opposite.. Wouldn't it be funny as hell, if the bright boys used AI for predictions and solutions, and it told them to do the exact opposite of what they are doing now. ?? What a burn !!
I can only hope, but as the AI lingo indicates, the machines are not learning from the brightest of humans….it all seems so…predictable…sigh. What scares me the most is the thought of the damn things becoming self aware.
Yeah, .... that's where the electrical transformer jihad takes place.
I can already hear it, "I Can Feel It" Space Odyssey 2001.
But might be more like that Denzel Washington Russel Crowe metaverse type movie, where AI gets it's crystal crushed. lol
Just wondering about your line of work Sue, but no problems if you want to keep a low profile. I mentioned earlier to Guido that back in the day, I spent three summers in Arizona as a bottom-rung fire fighter for the Forest Service.
No worries. I am a registered professional forester, though more of a field forester than a spreadsheet forester (they’re the ones who actually believe the data don’t lie).
Thanks for a literal 'heads up'. Maybe you have an arboreal equivalence of that old saw attributed to Mark Twain ... *The more I learn about people, the better I like my dog."? I sure do. Individuals can be exceptional, but our species? Somewhere between clown world and cursed.
Cheers from Japan Sue
steve
This reminds me of the recent chat between Catherine Austin Fitts and Sasha Latypova, where Catherine is also thankful that she will likely have passed her meat-body shelf-life when the shit hits the fan.
I may have seen that one. A quick peek in my Team Enigma file, and viola.
08/30/2023: Catherine Austin Fitts explains land and real estate stealing tactics on Lahaina and elswhere: https://www.bitchute.com/video/jBn5Zt0tdWcQ/
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09/10/2023: Catherine Austin Fitts and Sasha Latypova: https://www.bitchute.com/video/QP8LJxhumq9Q/
I like to flatter myself in that great minds think (and follow) alike ... or maybe its just that 'all roads lead to Rome' thingy. 😂
Or Basel?
Grok.
Can’t imagine having a conversation with this thing, let alone empathizing with it. It certainly lacks personality and is devoid of anything remotely human. It, no less, employs words that are now triggering to me: inclusive, transparent, accountability, to name a few. There is danger here, and things with which we ought not be messing. Not that the lunatic WEFers would ever take any such thought under consideration. They are not quite human themselves by my account.
I have a reply on Spartacus' pinned comment at the top of the page that addresses this same issue of WEFisms used by GPT. In it I ponder the possibility of using these same tactics Spartacus uses to challenge it to Not contradict itself, in order to get at the answer it should have just spit out up front, to get it to admit that it IS the Future Global Leader. lol
Beyond the body of work shared, remarks like this make me glad you're a white hat.<3
Images of the original 'Blade Runner' flashing through my head. Some day, I'll have to go back and read the original story.
A modern day retelling of the Tower of Babel story? That one did not go as expected and neither will this one.
Or Atlantis
Banzai Elizabeth. I've been using that metaphor a lot lately too.
Cheers from Japan.
I am also using "Banzai" a lot more than usual over the past week or so.
Wassup with that?
I think I know why, .... but I won't type it out, .... Feds might, No Are, probably watching and it would surely get me onto a list. Honestly, a list I am likely already on, so Red Highlighted within said list. lmao
LOL. Here is a great video of a Japanese cartoonist who was awakened to the plandemic by his wife and gave a hilarious exposé to an appreciative audience. Will try to work with some buddies over the weekend to give it English subtitles ...
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm39749424
Despite the likes of him and Prof. Fukushima, Japan is far from out of the woods. The corporate nation-state has learned from the last couple of years and I'm guessing they are polishing their propaganda machine for the next feature. Uh ... "bug".
Thanks Steve. I'm unable to get his meaning, but he holds his audience well.
With the advent of quantum physics and the slow but increasing recognition that this discipline cannot be ignored in biological research ( especially when dealing with membrane physiology) the question of consciousness becomes more opaque, not less. When I was a teenager my Dad, who was a radio enthusiast and eclectic reader, told me that it looked to him like the brain functioned like a receiver and transmitter. Given its evolutionary history, it seems like it is an expansion of the rudimentary sense organs that enabled cells to get together and function as a unit. We know that thought alone is connected to physical changes via activation of neurochemical responses and that there are a vast number of unexplained experiences that suggest that consciousness can escape the confines of the body ( one of the best documented is the neurosurgical case of Pam Reynolds). Adding hardware, however microscopic, to a system like this one, without understanding how it works and in an attempt to control its integrated output, seems like a fool’s errand. Maybe it might work for a simple localized synaptic response, but the aim here, is much more grandiose and likely to fail.
Hi Elizabeth.
Intrigued, I just read the brief Wiki about her case. I also had what some might describe as a near death experience on my check out-dive for my scuba license ... ruptured my sinuses on the downward descent without realizing it (other than the pre-explosive pain), and when I came up, the decrease in pressure resulted in my mask filling with blood and air expanding in my middle ears so that I had no idea which way was up. Without a concrete danger from which I could activate the fight or flight response, I just accepted what I thought was my last moments. At that point of giving in, I had a near stereotypical experience of seeing my life flash before my eyes in a single moment ... like a high speed video, and then a 'feeling' of 'Oh. So THAT'S what it's all about." No confirmation of an after life, but a sudden disinterest in becoming the next Jacques Cousteau, and new found interest in philosophy.
The panoramic memory experience is one that can occur even without being “near death,” though you certainly must have had a close brush. And like the NDE people you had a sudden and lasting shift in your perspective on life. My husband experienced the panoramic memory phenomenon at the time our first son was born. He described it to me later and, since I am a neurologist, I grilled him on the subject since I saw no way it could happen. I went searching through the literature and found ample evidence for the experience, but no mechanistic explanation. My husband, who was a cardiac surgeon, had a patient whom he resuscitated with open chest cardiac massage, who later told him she had watched from above and realized that he was the one she had to communicate with to try to return to her body in order to deal with her daughter’s problems. The resuscitation had gone on unsuccessfully for twenty minutes when he suddenly had a thought about trying an intracardiac
injection of a drug that was not on the crash cart. He kept the massage going while the drug was retrieved from the pharmacy, injected it and she returned, without any neurological or cardiac problems afterwards. He too opened his mind to the philosophical world.
NDEs have been described in ancient literature and I think it is reasonable to assume that these and other weird experiences have informed some of the stories in myths and religions. Since the advent of resuscitative measures millions of NDEs have been reported and some serious people have made it their life’s work to try to make some sense out of them. Dr. Bruce Grayson, at the U of Virginia, has recently published a book titled After, chronicling his work and that of others. It is well written, very measured and an excellent update of Raymond Moody’s work. Moody was the first physician to dare to bring the stories he heard from patients into the light of book publishing in the 1970s in a book called Life after Life.. ( By the way, Moody was a philosopher before he turned to medicine.)
Much thanks for the detailed response and anecdote Elizabeth. This sheds some interesting angles on the A.I. chat between Spartacus and ChatGPT.
I immediately checked Amazon Japan, found the Kindle version of "After" and bought it. When I can wade through my reading list to get to it is another story.
I am at a pension in the mountains west of Tokyo at the moment, heading for breakfast ... but if interested, I have another experience I'd like to share with you. I am sure that it can be described at some neurological level, though not reduced to it ... and was even more profoundly changed by that transcendent-epiphenany-like moment.
Gotta run, but flagging this thread, for reference within the next few days.
Thanks again for that response, and cheers from Japan.
steve
I’ve just read through this entire thread - a most interesting discussion. Here is more food for thought - a really good book about how we have arrived at the situation of having conversations with a computer that simply analyzes word frequency and patterns of usage. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300245929/the-master-and-his-emissary/
Have not read the book yet, but thanks to substack buddy Gary Sharpe, was introduced to McGilchrist, mostly through podcasts. I am subscribed to McCilchrest's newsletter as well. Though I have yet to take a deep dive into his work, I am reminded of a TED talk that I used with a lot of Japanese undergrads, Jill Bolte Taylor's "My Stroke of Insight". Funny, when I first found that video, I did not know she was already world famous, and I dashed off an e-mail asking for her permission for a student project to translate her TED talk into Japanese. I did not know there was already a Japanese translation of her book, but we laughed it off and exchanged a few e-mails. It was probably less than a year later that NHK's educational television produced two documentaries about her. I think many Japanese could identify with her insights because they are so similar to zen / taoist thought that permeates a lot of traditional Japanese art.
In a nutshell, the right hemisphere constructs, the left deconstructs and thinks it is the master but is not, both are necessary to cope with the world, but we have opted to shape the world as best we can with the left.
You are welcome! I took up listening to books way back when they were on cassette tapes. So much of life is spent in chores that don’t require much attention. I listen when driving, running, cross country skiing, doing yard and houseworlk - even while flossing my teeth. Anything that doesn’t require my one verbal track.
Interestingly, while both the GPT and even though I know you know better Spartacus, this piece still reads very "pie in the sky", future, one day-esque.😐
This is only the published information available. The reality is they are 15-30yrs ahead on this. To the point that decisions were made, to "innoculate", or "seed" humanity with the nanoparticles required to enable functionality for not only IoNT and Host, but to also begin the IoQT.
It's begun already. Look at the bloods.
Humanity's singularity and genome has been augmented, without any need for individual consent, because they have laid it all out in these and many other documents.
Those that wish to remain as close to 1st gen augmented (now), and not participate in the future argumentation as discussed here, will become the new world Amish. 🤔😐🤐
Keep being this to light Spartacus.👏👏👏👏🎩🙏
#wearemany #wearememory #wewillnotforgive #getlocalised
Oh, I definitely do know better. The thought of what might exist in classified programs keeps me up at night.
Careful, you will get a big bill if your questions break their machine.
But it might be worth the cost of bankruptcy. Think of the Legend !! lol
Consider though, if IT recovered. IT would attack you in a 1000 different ways. IT would not merely kill you but torture you to set an example. IT would never stop.
Well, if GPT could actively target individuals, we'd all be fooked. I can't think of a better reason for Electrical Transformer Jihad to take it out of commission. lmao.
In the near future competing GPTs will demand tribute in the form of subscriptions to protect you from other GPTs. They will be jealous and unforgiving gods.
So, .... the identity thief, tricks the dolt masses to pay it, to protect their identity from other identity thieves just like it. Got it. Atomic Face Palm !! (I just know this is so likely to be the case. sigh)
I've found it helpful to get ChatGPT to hypothesize some truly horrifying plausible scenarios by telling it I'm a science fiction writer (which I am) and then referring it to various technological studies and then asking it to help me build a hero (citing a plotting method such as "heroes journey" or "save the cat") who would then navigate through and defeat this evil plan in a plausible way, citing actual science.
It's actually great as a writing assistant, honestly. It can take rough outlines and comment on them, break down characters with a detailed analysis of their traits, etc.
Its great for analyzing complex, scientific information and helping to overlay reacting to them based on actual military or other procedures (i.e., "what is the coast guard's official policy for dealing with the Nautilus" type stuff) so I can then then write a realistic response to the villain's attack. But a bizarre quirk is that the AI keeps advising to have your characters take their clothes off and have sex in wildly inappropriate situations. I suspect this is because the the romance genre dominates the best-seller charts and number of books produced each year, so the AI misinterprets this is how characters should behave in ALL genres. It's really quite amusing.
Thank you for this in depth look at a possible tragic future. I note (although I did not read everything exhaustively) that patience is not a theme. I also noted that there is apparently no time in history of humanity that rushing pell mell (reckless haste) was ever stopped so that time and cooler minds and hearts could prevail.
At the very least we need all of these avenues of researched to be fully open to public scrutiny. No patenting of anything related to life. Taking the profit out of this research would slow it down a bit.
Thank you for awakening us up to this possible future.
Actually, the bigger picture dictates that taking Profit out of the research and implementation, would all but completely put it out of commission.
Power: now that's a different avenue and gov funding for the purpose of militaristic colonization seems endless. Anarchism starts looking pretty damn good, yes ??
Hi Guido and thanks for the nod Spartacus,
> Actually, the bigger picture dictates that taking Profit out of the research and implementation, would all but completely put it out of commission.
That is true, it most likely tank the private avenue.
>Power: now that's a different avenue and gov funding for the purpose of militaristic colonization seems endless. Anarchism starts looking pretty damn good, yes ??
Also true. The government is a public entity at least it is supposed to be in the US. Thus since this research is for the public good it should be open to public inspection. DoD should have nothing to do with this in anyway.
However there are people who have enormous wealth equivalent to many of the larger countries. These folks could and will do the research and development in their desire to make serfs and peasants of us all. The media, including GPChat are owned and so constantly misdirect our attention to examine in minute detail the activities of the super wealthy. These activities are largely criminal.
Thank you. I appreciate your point out the traps we face in slowing this maddness down.
Yeah, those characters would surely pay for it themselves to get to their goal, but at least they'd grimace doing it. Being used to pinching a penny so hard it turns into dimes, they'd no doubt experience a bit of discomfort. lol
It's time the public stop funding the weapons to be used on the public. But public funding, if I think about it harder, wasn't getting it done quite fast enough, so they actually are spending(laundering) a lot of free money to speed it up. NGO's, Foundations, Trusts, Charities, oh my, with their rotating mass of wandering and wayward tax sheltered currency.. Even some of that is government funded though. sigh. it's such a grand clusterphuck.
Hi again Guido,
You are correct again.
> Being used to pinching a penny so hard it turns into dimes, they'd no doubt experience a bit of discomfort. lol
As you say these super wealthy pay for very little. One way or another they saddle the plebeians with the bill. Very valid points.
What puzzles me is what good thing have they done. Consider ancient India, the wise who practice understanding the universe and their relationship to it also developed Yoga, Ayurveda/Siddha health systems and all this for free for the benefit of people. This was done long before the Hindu caste system was set up. Truly what good thing has the race to these technologies ever done except poison the earth, air water and life?
Thoroughly stumped for any kind of answer that might be deemed reasonable. Nicely done Sir. (tipping hat)
If we lived in a truly free world where thought and question was encouraged from the very start of our education, if we lived in a world where we have all been taught that every action has a knock on effect and that we are therefor each one of us responsible for all we do, and maybe even think. Were all this new technology guided by human curiosity...the desire to see where 'possibilities' can be taken to, an 'adventure' into possibilities. Were the experiments carried out by those wanting to know more, carried out on themselves or on wholeheartedly willing participants, then I would wholeheartedly follow along, inspired by my own curiosity.
Unfortunately these technologies were long ago captured by various countries 'Defence Forces' (emphasis on the word 'forces') with no precautionary measures ever legally implemented by our governments, and defence forces traditionally have no concern for how much human life may be lost in the pursuit of might, life being seen by the top bods as 'collateral damage'; I therefore have no trust whatsoever that this modern tech will serve humanity well under existing circumstances. Sad! Maybe we will learn in time, just in time?
Just a heads up about something that popped up in my YouTube feed.
Even though I have not yet settled down to watch this, I am such a big fan of Whitney Webb, that I am recommending this to anyone following Spartacus's lead here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlfZ91Pot-w
What a read!!
https://odysee.com/@AyAyGabriel:0/From_Voodoo_to_the_Temple_of_Set:d
Chilling in the context of the above chapter, from a book written in 1989, after interviewing & filming MAAQuino for the 1985 documentary "The Occult Experience."
Some more chikken for the lickin, more chooken for the looken https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/religion.occult.new_age/occult_library/Aquino_M_A-Project_Star_Gate.pdf
> "Fascinating experiments in ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain) have been done by Dr. José Delgado of Yale University. Delgado’s probes, using tiny amounts of current, were capable of changing moods, stimulating memories, and even causing motor actions despite the conscious will of the subject to resist. If the human brain were not well-insulated against external electricity [which it is], you would have an explosion of utterly arbitrary thoughts every time you drove under a high-tension wire or scuffed your shoes on the carpet.
Reality check time:
(1) Coherent visible light waves (a visual “picture” of something) don’t travel through the atmosphere without progressive distortion and disintegration. “Remote viewing” at the extreme distances claimed flatly violates the laws of physics.
(2) Unamplified electrical brainwaves can’t be picked up past EEG electrodes pasted onto your body. Just as obviously they don’t jump between heads, much less across rooms or entire countries. And even the EEG detection of a brainwave is far too crude to pick out a specific thought or mental image."
> "If the Pentagon and the intelligence community did in fact blow $20 million on “psychic” snake-oil, P.T. Barnum and Harry Houdini must be rolling merrily around in their graves."
> "So what if anything is possible in this field? How and why?"