ChatGPT answers metaphysical questions :)

[AshvinP]

Hi Ashvin,

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

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

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

Federica,

I suppose it depends on what we mean by 'device consciousness'. In mainstream discussion, it seems that this equates more or less to a coherent inner perspective that wills its transformation of experiential states and creatively fashions those states to some extent. After all, there would be little hype or concern if it were imagined that devices could only attain a dim, buzzing state of sleep-like or dream-like experience. Rather, it stems from the idea that they can become aware of their programming and outgrow it to some extent, pursuing independently conceived goals. I include here the spiritualists who may imagine that certain adversarial beings can directly incarnate into a computer network, for example, and creatively steer its functioning.

The elementals could be considered analogous to 'software programs', routines and sub-routines, designed and maintained by various hierarchies (including humanity). They can follow repetitive paths of experience according to their programming (the habitual activity of hierarchies), sometimes with high 'intelligence' (similar to high computational power). Indeed, the processes of the natural kingdoms and our Earthly personality are an interference pattern of such elemental intelligences. Yet in the case of humanity, there also strikes into our experience an autonomous will that can reflect upon its elemental patterns and transmute them. That is lacking in the case of natural or mechanical elementals. Their transforming states can only be the expression of the will of other hierarchical beings.

I imagine we are still on the same page with all of the above, so I just wanted to state it for clarity's sake. It is not a question of whether the elemental beings can be harmful to humanity's progress - clearly, that is the case with all of our mechanical technologies, as you point out. It is more whether this harm is, in fact, an expression of our immoral and disorderly thoughts and passions. When the 'cellular automata' of the natural kingdoms run their 'calculations', they are perfectly within their place, maintaining the orderly rhythms of plant life, migratory patterns, etc. When these same elemental routines are excessively relied upon by humans in their potentially creative soul life, that's when the disharmonious influences come in.

re: the deception, I only mention it as a potential way for bad actors to leverage our modern human tendency to continually externalize our conscious activity. Unfortunately, it just seems like the most natural strategy for such bad actors to pursue. We here on the forum are continually trying to point attention toward the inner process, toward how to take more creative responsibility for that process. And the overall evolutionary process also steers toward this outcome, as the World Content becomes more and more testimonial to the inner process (as we see glimpses of in various thinkers today). From the perspective of the bad actors, the exact opposite is needed - everything should be crafted to reinforce the externalizing tendency and obscure the truthful contextual flow of the inner process. Certain narratives surrounding Alien/UFO, AI, and similar things seem primed to take up the mantle of the deception.

[Federica]

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



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

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

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

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

Hi Cleric, thank you for this “failed attempt in writing” One can see precise calibration in each word! Not sure how much I really understand, but I can say for sure, this is not confusing. With our soul and will life applied to the material Earth - patterns of technological activity - we are preparing the texture of the lower fold of Jupiter reality, and that 'nature' will not contain material decompositions, but the images of our untransformed astral bodies. That machines will “take life” means that this intelligent and unpredictable elemental ground of reality will condense as adverse skills that will confront us from outside to constrain our activity. We’ll have to take back our intellectualism. Today the living strata of Earthy nature - elements, plants, animals - are becoming more and more adverse to man. We can still rely on the laws of the inanimate world and transform matter with them, but the part we are not giving back - the intellect left to its own devices - will be dragged along as a landscape of poisonous soul substrate left to digest. One question I wonder about is how this state of affairs will be anticipated on Earth...


PS:

If we want a truer sense of the physical world, we shouldn't try to make a visual picture of it but try to feel from within, the depth of our bodily space and how it has assumed its present state through continuous metamorphosis.

This has reminded me of Steiners words: “The physical body does not belong to us; it is an optical illusion. Streams that flow from the high Thrones form it. Imagine streams flowing together; where they meet, a whirlpool is created. Thus, the physical arises where the streams from the Thrones meet.”

[Cleric]

PS:

If we want a truer sense of the physical world, we shouldn't try to make a visual picture of it but try to feel from within, the depth of our bodily space and how it has assumed its present state through continuous metamorphosis.

This has reminded me of Steiners words: “The physical body does not belong to us; it is an optical illusion. Streams that flow from the high Thrones form it. Imagine streams flowing together; where they meet, a whirlpool is created. Thus, the physical arises where the streams from the Thrones meet.”

Thanks, Federica!

Here's something that I attempt to include in the future essays (it has been addressed before but now there's a new illustration). First, our familiar picture:



With this we have attempted to symbolize how a given human perspective can only be understood as a part of the full gradient (Deep MAL). The simplistic Flat MAL struggles with the binary split between a homogeneous subjective soup and distinct bubbles in it. Here, in contrast, we can see how there's a gradient toward Oneness (and our full being spans the whole gradient).

Yet, this is half of the story. There's no convenient way to symbolically illustrate everything at once. The above image makes it look as if toward our personal sphere, we become more and more distinct. However, as we have mentioned in the past, if we 'reach' deeper and deeper in our inner bodily space, we approach oneness once again.



So, 'above' (the periphery) we have the unity of the Cosmos, 'below' (the center) we have the sameness of the elemental. It is in between that the diverse complementary perspectives can be decomposed and experienced relative to each other. This is what the animation attempts to illustrate. The in-phase Cosmic flow decomposes into out-of-phase components that appear to integrate as they are imploded. So the first image can be thought of as only the outer half of the second.

Of course, what we depict is only the 'downward' flow, the continuous condensation of phenomena. We can also conceive of the opposite flow of the will that reaches into the unknown periphery, as if trying to accommodate everything that is noble and beautiful (if this is the ideal).

In the days when we are blessed to attain greater resonance in our meditations, the above experience becomes a living reality. On one hand, the 'sampling rate' increases, as if a 'strobing light' flashes the moments of experience (liminal spaces) in between our ordinary ticking rate (achieved by concentrating and 'splitting the moment'). At the same time, however, these higher resolution phenomena can only make meaningful sense when contextualized by more and more overarching intuition of the flow-steering intents (the prayer-like surrender to the higher Intelligence). Then gradually we feel our inner being as a taut string between the poles of reality (of course, we need to be careful with taking this geometric aspect too literally). When we focus 'down,' it feels as if our rays of attention converge toward the center of the Earth. In the opposite direction, when we expand toward the unknown, we also find our unity in the Great Intuitive Being of the Cosmos. We can illustrate our human situation with the following symbol:



So even though in the middle our perspectives are spatially decomposed, if we integrate 'vertically' the spectrum of reality, we can feel that our 'feet' converge toward the center of the Earth and we open up above toward the Cosmic periphery. This openness is actually not that common today. Presently, the thus illustrated inner spaces are more like bell-shaped - that are open toward the below but are enclosed above.

Now to understand the beings of the first hierarchy (to which the Thrones - Spirits of Will - belong), we need to grasp these vortices as a kind of carrier flow. If all the complications of our convoluted human experience are removed (and even the higher hierarchies), what would remain would be a much smoother Cosmic flow, highly self-similar across the scales. And of course, we can only understand this flow in the true sense when we seek it as a first-person experience of Cosmic existence of integrating intuition. It is important to understand that in our middle-ground consciousness, we have only the strobed (aliased) experience. Thus the carrier Intuitive consciousness reaches far deeper below and above. Then we indeed feel as if we exist in the full spectrum of the Cosmos.

Even though the above sounds like just another crazy new age writing, when through concentration we are able to grasp our condensing mental flow as modulated over the primary flow of being, then everything becomes quite literal reality. It only seems speculative as long as we are engaged in the picture-in-picture mental arrangement of symbols in the middle.

[Federica]

Federica,

I suppose it depends on what we mean by 'device consciousness'. In mainstream discussion, it seems that this equates more or less to a coherent inner perspective that wills its transformation of experiential states and creatively fashions those states to some extent. After all, there would be little hype or concern if it were imagined that devices could only attain a dim, buzzing state of sleep-like or dream-like experience. Rather, it stems from the idea that they can become aware of their programming and outgrow it to some extent, pursuing independently conceived goals. I include here the spiritualists who may imagine that certain adversarial beings can directly incarnate into a computer network, for example, and creatively steer its functioning.

The elementals could be considered analogous to 'software programs', routines and sub-routines, designed and maintained by various hierarchies (including humanity). They can follow repetitive paths of experience according to their programming (the habitual activity of hierarchies), sometimes with high 'intelligence' (similar to high computational power). Indeed, the processes of the natural kingdoms and our Earthly personality are an interference pattern of such elemental intelligences. Yet in the case of humanity, there also strikes into our experience an autonomous will that can reflect upon its elemental patterns and transmute them. That is lacking in the case of natural or mechanical elementals. Their transforming states can only be the expression of the will of other hierarchical beings.

I imagine we are still on the same page with all of the above, so I just wanted to state it for clarity's sake. It is not a question of whether the elemental beings can be harmful to humanity's progress - clearly, that is the case with all of our mechanical technologies, as you point out. It is more whether this harm is, in fact, an expression of our immoral and disorderly thoughts and passions. When the 'cellular automata' of the natural kingdoms run their 'calculations', they are perfectly within their place, maintaining the orderly rhythms of plant life, migratory patterns, etc. When these same elemental routines are excessively relied upon by humans in their potentially creative soul life, that's when the disharmonious influences come in.

re: the deception, I only mention it as a potential way for bad actors to leverage our modern human tendency to continually externalize our conscious activity. Unfortunately, it just seems like the most natural strategy for such bad actors to pursue. We here on the forum are continually trying to point attention toward the inner process, toward how to take more creative responsibility for that process. And the overall evolutionary process also steers toward this outcome, as the World Content becomes more and more testimonial to the inner process (as we see glimpses of in various thinkers today). From the perspective of the bad actors, the exact opposite is needed - everything should be crafted to reinforce the externalizing tendency and obscure the truthful contextual flow of the inner process. Certain narratives surrounding Alien/UFO, AI, and similar things seem primed to take up the mantle of the deception.

Yes, in mainstream discussion the conscious AI would be an autonomous agent, but I was rather focusing on the anthroposophical understanding of device consciousness, which is not ‘cinematic’ as the mainstream is. In my understanding, elemental consciousness is in between the quote by Cleric about integration of memory which illustrates autonomous being, and what you describe as 'software programs', routines and sub-routines, designed and maintained by various hierarchies (including humanity). Their intelligence has an element of unpredictability, unlike a software program, and may also have astrality and temperament, though not an autonomous agency. After all, when we interact with those beings in the natural environment we do experience that mood of unpredictability, there is more than the mere laws of nature. I am not sure their transforming states can only be the expression of the will of other hierarchical beings. Steiner often said to keep the concepts very fluid when trying to grasp the elusive nature of the elemental kingdoms. I believe there is a mood and a temperament there, that express certain levels of will, of course not the higher, ego-based ones. Don’t you think this is possible?
(Also, I understand that our earthly personality is not only an interference pattern of such elemental intelligences, but is colored by the planets as well.)

[AshvinP]

Yes, in mainstream discussion the conscious AI would be an autonomous agent, but I was rather focusing on the anthroposophical understanding of device consciousness, which is not ‘cinematic’ as the mainstream is. In my understanding, elemental consciousness is in between the quote by Cleric about integration of memory which illustrates autonomous being, and what you describe as 'software programs', routines and sub-routines, designed and maintained by various hierarchies (including humanity). Their intelligence has an element of unpredictability, unlike a software program, and may also have astrality and temperament, though not an autonomous agency. After all, when we interact with those beings in the natural environment we do experience that mood of unpredictability, there is more than the mere laws of nature. I am not sure their transforming states can only be the expression of the will of other hierarchical beings. Steiner often said to keep the concepts very fluid when trying to grasp the elusive nature of the elemental kingdoms. I believe there is a mood and a temperament there, that express certain levels of will, of course not the higher, ego-based ones. Don’t you think this is possible?
(Also, I understand that our earthly personality is not only an interference pattern of such elemental intelligences, but is colored by the planets as well.)

Right, and I think it is generally useful to remind ourselves that the elemental beings are not entities which have this or that capacity or quality, but they are those capacities and qualities (and the same applies to all beings). In other words, the esoteric scientist comes to know the elemental beings by inwardly discerning that human soul life and processes of the natural kingdoms unfold in habitually patterned ways. When these habitual patterns are distinguished in the soul life as proceeding from different impulses, feelings, and thoughts across various scales, they can be artistically symbolized as demons, spectres, phantoms, egregores, and so on. When distinguished in the natural kingdoms, as undines, sylphs, gnomes, etc. As always, we attain the best idea of these beings when we become more sensitive to how their patterned qualities express in our soul life.

The computer software was only intended as a metaphor for living and lawful soul processes. There is certainly a quality of unpredictability in such processes, for example, a person possessed by the elemental pattern of greed or rage. We can't be sure exactly what they're going to do next; it's not something that can be perfectly predicted by a computational algorithm. Yet the soul is still conditioned to a habitual pattern that can be metaphorically compared to such an algorithm. Its attention is entirely sucked into the imploding memory stream, and its imaginative states feel to be unwittingly at the mercy of shadowy attractors which lead to associative thinking, negative feeling, and corresponding deeds. Even its unpredictability is a symptom of such conditioning, like the superficial improv group that spits out 'random' lines of a story without any coherent plot.

On the other hand, as you point out, the soul life is also stretched across domains (planetary spheres) where it opens up toward form-free potential through self-conscious thinking, devotional feeling, and moral will impulses (conscience). These are more like superpositions of experiential states that are still flexible and plastic; these storylines of experience can still be molded and filtered in various ways according to our high ideals. We distinguish and symbolize these intentional curvatures of our soul life and their lawful patterns as the archetypal beings of the hierarchies, whose outer expressions are the planetary spheres and their configurations.

When it comes to the Ahr elementals embodied in our mechanical technology like AI, I don't think it's currently possible that the states that are traversed by such AI will ever be the expression of a will other than humanity's (which, of course, will be inspired by progressive or adversarial beings). I think the confusion and unpredictability will come from us not being able to effectively trace all the elemental patterns that were embedded in the training data, and the various ways in which human agents have interfered in the training to bias the outcomes in one direction or another. It's like we have devised a computational technology that embodies out-of-phaseness, such that the inner activity feels immediately disconnected from its imploded outcomes.

Normally, we can't trace how inner activity from previous incarnations or earlier phases of life has fed back into our psycho-physical life circumstances, but we can at least sense how our mechanical creations are the result of previous ideas and activity. With the direction of AI, it's like even this relationship is being severed for those souls who keep real-time thinking in the blind spot. It's similar to a modern terrorist network in that sense. Unlike a national power, there is no clear individual 'running the show', no easy to identify set of rules being followed, the cells may seem to be working independently of one another, and so on. No one quite knows how to conduct a 'war against terror' because it's not even clear who the enemy is or who is pulling the strings of the various cells.

[Federica]

PS:

If we want a truer sense of the physical world, we shouldn't try to make a visual picture of it but try to feel from within, the depth of our bodily space and how it has assumed its present state through continuous metamorphosis.

This has reminded me of Steiners words: “The physical body does not belong to us; it is an optical illusion. Streams that flow from the high Thrones form it. Imagine streams flowing together; where they meet, a whirlpool is created. Thus, the physical arises where the streams from the Thrones meet.”

Thanks, Federica!

Here's something that I attempt to include in the future essays (it has been addressed before but now there's a new illustration). First, our familiar picture:



With this we have attempted to symbolize how a given human perspective can only be understood as a part of the full gradient (Deep MAL). The simplistic Flat MAL struggles with the binary split between a homogeneous subjective soup and distinct bubbles in it. Here, in contrast, we can see how there's a gradient toward Oneness (and our full being spans the whole gradient).

Yet, this is half of the story. There's no convenient way to symbolically illustrate everything at once. The above image makes it look as if toward our personal sphere, we become more and more distinct. However, as we have mentioned in the past, if we 'reach' deeper and deeper in our inner bodily space, we approach oneness once again.



So, 'above' (the periphery) we have the unity of the Cosmos, 'below' (the center) we have the sameness of the elemental. It is in between that the diverse complementary perspectives can be decomposed and experienced relative to each other. This is what the animation attempts to illustrate. The in-phase Cosmic flow decomposes into out-of-phase components that appear to integrate as they are imploded. So the first image can be thought of as only the outer half of the second.

Of course, what we depict is only the 'downward' flow, the continuous condensation of phenomena. We can also conceive of the opposite flow of the will that reaches into the unknown periphery, as if trying to accommodate everything that is noble and beautiful (if this is the ideal).

In the days when we are blessed to attain greater resonance in our meditations, the above experience becomes a living reality. On one hand, the 'sampling rate' increases, as if a 'strobing light' flashes the moments of experience (liminal spaces) in between our ordinary ticking rate (achieved by concentrating and 'splitting the moment'). At the same time, however, these higher resolution phenomena can only make meaningful sense when contextualized by more and more overarching intuition of the flow-steering intents (the prayer-like surrender to the higher Intelligence). Then gradually we feel our inner being as a taut string between the poles of reality (of course, we need to be careful with taking this geometric aspect too literally). When we focus 'down,' it feels as if our rays of attention converge toward the center of the Earth. In the opposite direction, when we expand toward the unknown, we also find our unity in the Great Intuitive Being of the Cosmos. We can illustrate our human situation with the following symbol:



So even though in the middle our perspectives are spatially decomposed, if we integrate 'vertically' the spectrum of reality, we can feel that our 'feet' converge toward the center of the Earth and we open up above toward the Cosmic periphery. This openness is actually not that common today. Presently, the thus illustrated inner spaces are more like bell-shaped - that are open toward the below but are enclosed above.

Now to understand the beings of the first hierarchy (to which the Thrones - Spirits of Will - belong), we need to grasp these vortices as a kind of carrier flow. If all the complications of our convoluted human experience are removed (and even the higher hierarchies), what would remain would be a much smoother Cosmic flow, highly self-similar across the scales. And of course, we can only understand this flow in the true sense when we seek it as a first-person experience of Cosmic existence of integrating intuition. It is important to understand that in our middle-ground consciousness, we have only the strobed (aliased) experience. Thus the carrier Intuitive consciousness reaches far deeper below and above. Then we indeed feel as if we exist in the full spectrum of the Cosmos.

Even though the above sounds like just another crazy new age writing, when through concentration we are able to grasp our condensing mental flow as modulated over the primary flow of being, then everything becomes quite literal reality. It only seems speculative as long as we are engaged in the picture-in-picture mental arrangement of symbols in the middle.

Ok just to give you an account of how this feels from the perspective of a person like me. Although the described meditative experience is far far from being a living reality for me, this exposition seems completely logical to me. I can definitely follow it - abstractly, though I try to relate for the small bits I can. It's logical because all the necessary anchor points are there, even if in concise form (so I had to read a few times to correctly focus). Not at all to say that more extensive elaborations would have been better. I think the trade off details-attention is nailed. For my part, I am also busy trying to connect the dots with the occult physiology things I’m studying, and other analogies, but I can’t really hold these things together properly at this point. Thank you for these pictures, anyway! Even if they can’t work as intended just in my case, I still feel it’s active material that is now imprinted and available to illustrate and clarify experiences for the future.

[Federica]

Right, and I think it is generally useful to remind ourselves that the elemental beings are not entities which have this or that capacity or quality, but they are those capacities and qualities (and the same applies to all beings). In other words, the esoteric scientist comes to know the elemental beings by inwardly discerning that human soul life and processes of the natural kingdoms unfold in habitually patterned ways. When these habitual patterns are distinguished in the soul life as proceeding from different impulses, feelings, and thoughts across various scales, they can be artistically symbolized as demons, spectres, phantoms, egregores, and so on. When distinguished in the natural kingdoms, as undines, sylphs, gnomes, etc. As always, we attain the best idea of these beings when we become more sensitive to how their patterned qualities express in our soul life.

The computer software was only intended as a metaphor for living and lawful soul processes. There is certainly a quality of unpredictability in such processes, for example, a person possessed by the elemental pattern of greed or rage. We can't be sure exactly what they're going to do next; it's not something that can be perfectly predicted by a computational algorithm. Yet the soul is still conditioned to a habitual pattern that can be metaphorically compared to such an algorithm. Its attention is entirely sucked into the imploding memory stream, and its imaginative states feel to be unwittingly at the mercy of shadowy attractors which lead to associative thinking, negative feeling, and corresponding deeds. Even its unpredictability is a symptom of such conditioning, like the superficial improv group that spits out 'random' lines of a story without any coherent plot.

On the other hand, as you point out, the soul life is also stretched across domains (planetary spheres) where it opens up toward form-free potential through self-conscious thinking, devotional feeling, and moral will impulses (conscience). These are more like superpositions of experiential states that are still flexible and plastic; these storylines of experience can still be molded and filtered in various ways according to our high ideals. We distinguish and symbolize these intentional curvatures of our soul life and their lawful patterns as the archetypal beings of the hierarchies, whose outer expressions are the planetary spheres and their configurations.

When it comes to the Ahr elementals embodied in our mechanical technology like AI, I don't think it's currently possible that the states that are traversed by such AI will ever be the expression of a will other than humanity's (which, of course, will be inspired by progressive or adversarial beings). I think the confusion and unpredictability will come from us not being able to effectively trace all the elemental patterns that were embedded in the training data, and the various ways in which human agents have interfered in the training to bias the outcomes in one direction or another. It's like we have devised a computational technology that embodies out-of-phaseness, such that the inner activity feels immediately disconnected from its imploded outcomes.

Normally, we can't trace how inner activity from previous incarnations or earlier phases of life has fed back into our psycho-physical life circumstances, but we can at least sense how our mechanical creations are the result of previous ideas and activity. With the direction of AI, it's like even this relationship is being severed for those souls who keep real-time thinking in the blind spot. It's similar to a modern terrorist network in that sense. Unlike a national power, there is no clear individual 'running the show', no easy to identify set of rules being followed, the cells may seem to be working independently of one another, and so on. No one quite knows how to conduct a 'war against terror' because it's not even clear who the enemy is or who is pulling the strings of the various cells.

Yes, I realize all the above. The only thing I would be more cautious excluding is the possibility that the AI states will express intents other than humanity's. Not that I am sure, but I think it's possible, though I agree that today it sounds unreasonable, from a non materialistic viewpoint. Speaking of horse power at the time of WWI, Steiner spoke of "ahrimanization of the Earth", and the formation of an additional earth crust made of machines, that would become independent. He said: "We live in the age of Ahrimanic contamination. People don't even notice that they are actually withdrawing from the world, that they are incorporating their intellect into the world and creating a world alongside themselves that becomes independent. (...) Shouldn't the question arise whether man should completely lose what is placed in his will, what is placed in his power of initiative? The question can be asked whether man should be led ever more towards the illusion that he is the one making things happen, while in truth the Ahrimanic forces ..."

Yes, one can say that those adversarial powers operate in technology through man's will, but it's also imaginable that a tipping point may be reached, when the inner activity not only feels disconnected from its outcomes, but for all intents and purposes becomes disconnected, or independent, once the head of the skein gets completely entangled in concentric layers of omnipresent datasets/training outcomes, as if forming a complete 'geological' overlay. In general, when this happens, you have to cut the thread. Today one can somehow still say never mind, let's opt out of everything, let's cut the thread. But will this be an option a century or two from now? I don't know.

[Cleric]

Ok just to give you an account of how this feels from the perspective of a person like me. Although the described meditative experience is far far from being a living reality for me, this exposition seems completely logical to me. I can definitely follow it - abstractly, though I try to relate for the small bits I can. It's logical because all the necessary anchor points are there, even if in concise form (so I had to read a few times to correctly focus). Not at all to say that more extensive elaborations would have been better. I think the trade off details-attention is nailed. For my part, I am also busy trying to connect the dots with the occult physiology things I’m studying, and other analogies, but I can’t really hold these things together properly at this point. Thank you for these pictures, anyway! Even if they can’t work as intended just in my case, I still feel it’s active material that is now imprinted and available to illustrate and clarify experiences for the future.

You know this, but it's still worth repeating that in the end, these technical descriptions should stir our deep religious feelings. The sense of reality only comes from that direction. The conceptual lattice is what gives them firm texture, definition, and resolution. But it is only through these feelings that we can grow into the deeper volumes of inner space. In a sense, the feelings are what initially that volume and its flux 'feel like'.

For example, the bell-shaped and open-ended inner space can never make satisfactory sense as long as we remain with the imaginative picture of the bell within the true bell. Unless one dares to feel what it could be that our destiny is prayerfully surrendered to higher ordering powers, and try to feel how we breathe in the frames of our life from all directions of the Cosmos, no fulfilling bridging can be found.

[AshvinP]

Yes, I realize all the above. The only thing I would be more cautious excluding is the possibility that the AI states will express intents other than humanity's. Not that I am sure, but I think it's possible, though I agree that today it sounds unreasonable, from a non materialistic viewpoint. Speaking of horse power at the time of WWI, Steiner spoke of "ahrimanization of the Earth", and the formation of an additional earth crust made of machines, that would become independent. He said: "We live in the age of Ahrimanic contamination. People don't even notice that they are actually withdrawing from the world, that they are incorporating their intellect into the world and creating a world alongside themselves that becomes independent. (...) Shouldn't the question arise whether man should completely lose what is placed in his will, what is placed in his power of initiative? The question can be asked whether man should be led ever more towards the illusion that he is the one making things happen, while in truth the Ahrimanic forces ..."

Yes, one can say that those adversarial powers operate in technology through man's will, but it's also imaginable that a tipping point may be reached, when the inner activity not only feels disconnected from its outcomes, but for all intents and purposes becomes disconnected, or independent, once the head of the skein gets completely entangled in concentric layers of omnipresent datasets/training outcomes, as if forming a complete 'geological' overlay. In general, when this happens, you have to cut the thread. Today one can somehow still say never mind, let's opt out of everything, let's cut the thread. But will this be an option a century or two from now? I don't know.

Thanks for bringing attention to this lecture. Phenomenologically speaking, we can notice that the more we divest and mediate our inner movements into our mechanical creations, the more we lose sensitivity to those movements and how they participate in the lawful flow of World content. It even begins to dull sensitivity to our participation in the process of writing and reading, going from point A to point B, constructing our living spaces and artworks, etc. This further reinforces the out-of-phaseness the modern intellectual soul already experienced with respect to the natural kingdoms and various aspects of cultural life. Thus we feel more and more to be passive spectators confronting an 'independent' world. We feel like we are in control of our decisions, but we are often led on strings by the previous patterns we have imprinted into our creations and lost sight of (which is happening more and more quickly).

I think it's simply critical to keep this phenomenological perspective of the situation in view at all times if one is not to begin straying into some form of superstition, where the machines have 'actually' become independent (e.g. Levin). There will come a time when our machines will become more conducive to non-human spiritual activity (including higher forms of our own activity), but that's only after it is brought into a more living state that doesn't only allow for the expression of fixed-rule patterns. Linnell often points to this possibility of 'biomachines' in the future as well and I have no doubt that it is reasonable and in keeping with the overall progression of spiritual evolution. The critical question for me, however, is how resilient we will be in perceiving the truthful flow of spiritual activity in the shortly upcoming years and decades when the temptation for perceiving 'independent realities' in the previously imprinted flow of human spiritual activity will only grow stronger.

[Federica]

Thanks for bringing attention to this lecture. Phenomenologically speaking, we can notice that the more we divest and mediate our inner movements into our mechanical creations, the more we lose sensitivity to those movements and how they participate in the lawful flow of World content. It even begins to dull sensitivity to our participation in the process of writing and reading, going from point A to point B, constructing our living spaces and artworks, etc. This further reinforces the out-of-phaseness the modern intellectual soul already experienced with respect to the natural kingdoms and various aspects of cultural life. Thus we feel more and more to be passive spectators confronting an 'independent' world. We feel like we are in control of our decisions, but we are often led on strings by the previous patterns we have imprinted into our creations and lost sight of (which is happening more and more quickly).

I think it's simply critical to keep this phenomenological perspective of the situation in view at all times if one is not to begin straying into some form of superstition, where the machines have 'actually' become independent (e.g. Levin). There will come a time when our machines will become more conducive to non-human spiritual activity (including higher forms of our own activity), but that's only after it is brought into a more living state that doesn't only allow for the expression of fixed-rule patterns. Linnell often points to this possibility of 'biomachines' in the future as well and I have no doubt that it is reasonable and in keeping with the overall progression of spiritual evolution. The critical question for me, however, is how resilient we will be in perceiving the truthful flow of spiritual activity in the shortly upcoming years and decades when the temptation for perceiving 'independent realities' in the previously imprinted flow of human spiritual activity will only grow stronger.

How do you see the difference between machines "brought into a more living state" and transhumanism / Levin's vision?