Intelligence is not intellect, not thought or knowledge. The original Greek definition of ‘mystical’ was to experience directly that which is hidden from the mind enchanted by image and concept. Note the basic distinction of these two states, intelligence and enchantment.
Civilization, representing only 1% to 5% of human evolution, is the creation of the enchanted mind, symbols, words, metaphors, hallucinations, imagined images, and concepts. We misuse this powerful image-making tool when we reify the image, believing the image is not an image. The misuse of AI’s enchantments is no different.
Nature could not foresee this original sin with the addition of the neocortex, its extended memory and symbolic image making capacity. Today we are on the razor’s edge in a race with AI to evolve what David Bohm called ‘proprioception of thought and memory,’ before that capacity and living intelligence is swept off stage – perhaps forever.
Intelligence, the original ‘species typical’ human mind, representing 99% or 95% of human existence, marinated in the original, unenchanted or mystical mind, an entangled-empathic, shared, altruistic, and yes, compassionate identity-reality. Appreciating this distinction between an identity grounded in direct experience or empathic-intelligence, and the enchanted self-image identity, brings new meaning to the biblical Tower of Babel. According to Genesis, the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty tower “with its top in the heavens.” The workers became so confused by languages, words, symbols and concepts, they could no longer understand one another. The city was never completed, and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth. Past is prologue. David Bohm put it this way:
We are faced with a breakdown of general social order and human values that threatens stability throughout the world. Existing knowledge cannot meet this challenge. Something much deeper is needed, a completely new approach. I am suggesting that the very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem. The source of our problems is within the structure of thought (and therefore AI) itself.
We don’t really understand the nature of our thought process; we’re not aware of how it works, how it is disrupting not only our society and our individual lives but also the way the brain and nervous system operate, making us unhealthy or perhaps even damaging the system.
It is recognized that thought, rational, orderly, factual thought, such as in doing proper science, is valuable, but the kind of thought that is damaging is self-centered thought. The ultimate purpose is to free humanity from the destructive conditioning around this self-centered thought which is really an enslavement to absurdity, to destruction, to unhappiness, sorrow, and no other kind of freedom means anything unless we are free from that. Once humanity is free from that, the way would be open to creative unfoldment in all sorts of directions.
As it is being developed, AI is a virtual Tower of Babble enchantment machine on steroids, 10x, 100x, 1,000x more powerful than we have imagined, blinding, cementing over and negating our entangled-empathic sensitivities that make us uniquely human.
“Machines are aggressive,” warned Emerson in the mid 1800s. “The weaver becomes the web.” Once released, which has already happened, the machine takes on a life of its own, transforming everything into itself by censoring, excluding what it is not; most importantly, the direct experience of living presence and our sensual, interdependent, organic relationships. One nail drives out the other.
Understanding the deep layers, the structural limitations and self-deceptions that distort human consciousness that David Bohm describes, for more than 2,000 years the ‘science of mind’ known as Tibetan Buddhism created powerful tools to awaken the practitioner from thought’s implicit enchantments. As thought is always re-enchanting, the need for tools that always-awaken is essential.
One such tool is ‘to use the illness as medicine.’ That is, to approach the stronger systems that enchant with a quality of mindfulness that awakens, restoring the mind (and one’s identity-reality) to its natural order, intense attention and empathic action, rather than feeding our enchanted, self-centered social identity. Mindful AI developers are working on this ‘always awakening’ design to counter many of AI’s most dangerous qualities. More on this as it develops.
Discovering and experiencing for oneself this distinction between the original human mind with its entangled-empathy and compassion, and the mind enchanted by mental images, words, symbols, and culture, is the prerequisite for using mental images as the tool that nature designed, rather than being used by them.
Being data driven, machines are incapable of making this distinction, other than another bit of data or concept. Using the Star Wars metaphor, computers are not influenced by ‘the force.’ The deluge of enchanting, mechanical, data driven AI enchantments at double, triple or greater exponential rates now flood the mind of humanity with enchanting babble, negating the discovery of this core distinction, leaving only babble, not real intelligence. Swift content is not the issue. The humanity-changing danger is epigenetic, the way changes in the environment alter genetic expression, perception and reality.
In the attached essay “AI Revolution: The Final Coup d’Etat?” Whitney Web describes the not so hidden agenda of those leading the race for AI world dominance: to completely eradicate any hint of humanity’s original organic intelligence, mechanically replacing it with Ai’s streaming babble virtual reality. Whitney’s brilliant summary reminds me of Ashley Montagu’s, ‘The Dehumanization of Man,’ 1983.
The last refuge of the secret self (privacy), the deepest hidden recesses of spontaneity and freedom, must be infiltrated, subjected, and recycled into conformity with the technological society… The dehumanization of man, innated from without, would be finally accomplished when the individual accepted his fate and completed the process from within, by a voluntary act of compliance and conversion.
This, of course, is a choice we can make, but only when we are not enchanted.
M
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