Introduction
I grew up reading sci fi with a passion. At the time it seemed to be about anticipating the future. Then suddenly I stopped when it just became space age costume dramas and morality plays. When The Matrix came along, I was initially excited that there might be a deep idea behind it. That feeling didn’t last long.
Sci fans of my generation often debated the credibility of the ideas. We didn’t know anything about space flight or robots or future tech or future societies, but we strengthened our fledgling minds on those conversations. Then reality kicked in.
It seems now that we are in a sci fi cusp age. Space flight is almost a thing. Ditto autonomous robots, energy weapons, amazing tech and ET. It feels like we are halfway through the door to our future.
At the moment, several things are meshing together for me. There’s a book called The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna. There’s a YouTube video Senior CIA Officer: Even We Don’t Know What the Phenomenon Is coming hot on the heels of Streiber’s The Fourth Mind. And, strangely, there’s my inquiry into neurodiversity.
Here’s a summary of these 3 things – isn’t real, we have no idea, and it isn’t what it has become.
The inflatable lifejacket of emotional certainty we hope will keep us afloat in a swirling ocean of doubt will, if we dare seek truth, elude our efforts to blow it up fully. We seem doomed to be tossed in the currents of change. We can be loose like rag dolls or stiff like true believers.
Below I want to reflect on doubt, certainty and general sense of anxiety about what’s coming next.
What does our love of the natural world tell us?
It seems an uncontested truth that we revive ourselves emotionally and psychically when we escape our human constructed and mediated environment into ‘nature’ – especially where plants grow and critters dwell. I don’t know whether this applies to oceans and desert, save maybe in the short term. (A niece who lives on a catamaran doesn’t think the ocean is equivalent to a forest.)
It seems as though who we are doesn’t end at our skin but extends into landscapes. For some being in a relentless urban setting may have become normal, but it does not appear to be sustainable without us losing something vital.
The idea that we are separate beings seems to be an illusion. Psychologically we rely on connection and belonging. On an organic level we are a complex community of micro-critters and compounds that connect us to the physical world. How would we really be if severed from what holds and sustains us?
Even Star Trek 2nd has the holodeck where simulations of natural settings can be crafted. But is it just the feeling of immersion or is there an actual dependency on actual nature? Can we actually leave this planet in our biological form for any length of time?
Back 1996/7 I quit Australia for the UK intending to be away long term. But after 13 months I felt a deep malaise. I was homesick – not for human community so much as country. I was suffering spiritually.
Maybe organic forms do best when in their natural settings? Would we survive on Mars sans our terrestrial nature? There’s a fair chance we wouldn’t – and maybe that’s what we should pay attention to first, before getting excited over Musk’s wet red dream of loosening the surly bond of Earth? Is this just a case of a dream based on no substance?
The AI dream
In The AI Con the authors argue that AI is an illusion because there is no mind behind any computer that hosts an AI program.
The idea that the human mind is created by a rational brain is a materialist’s fantasy.
There is certainly a ‘rational’ structure to our reality as the actuality of mathematics confirms. And it is evident that our minds engage with that. But to what degree?
How much of our consciousness is rational process and how much is emotion and how much is instinct? We have been induced to champion Mind over Soul, mostly as a reaction against Christian dogma. In a sense the idea of Mind being the site of reason alone is irrational. Mind as in holistic sense cannot champion rationality as pure reason and discount emotion and instinct as lower unworthy things.
Once we move away from the materialistic paradigm, intelligence isn’t at all brain dependent, and neither is it wholly rational. In fact, once we move away from the body, we still have emotions and at least the vestiges of instinctual reflexes (for a time).
There is a deep temptation to believe that if we can create computer generated simulations of our experience of reality then reality must be made up of entirely rational elements. This quite forgetting that very complex human minds made it this illusion at all possible in the first place. Rational elements can simulate emotional and instinctive behaviour – but not emulate them. There’s a difference – and its huge.
The ‘Intelligence’ in AI isn’t mind. It is rational processing power only. There is no prospect of AI ever becoming mind or a self that resembles a human self because it cannot have the experiential components – no body to generate instinctive awareness and no relationships to develop emotional awareness.
Human intelligence is a trinity – rationality, emotion and instinct. We don’t have a formal breakdown of the elements of that triad but nothing in psychology, neurology or philosophy suggests to me that saying rationality is at 10% would be an over-estimate. A recent comment from the Neuroleadership Institute (NLI), whose work I love, confirms this for me. The NLI observed that we are quite bad at thinking. The regular laments about the paucity of critical thinking skills in an age of conspiracy theories further testifies to this lack. The Bible scholar Dan McClellan often exhorts challengers on his YouTube channel to “learn to google competently and think critically.”
The thing about self-awareness is that the self is there to begin with. It is the seed from which awareness grows.
Does this mean that AI will never become sentient? I don’t think so because we can’t predict what will happen next. However, being rationality only seems to me to be a very primitive level of being – like a precursor state at the very beginning of an evolutionary process. When does self-aware become a thing for an endless chain of processes? This is a bit like the Flatland world.
Computers are not the bodies of AI in the same way that our organic bodies are the dwelling places of our spirits. This is a major problem for AI boosters. They dance between sci fi, science and metaphysics with no sense that what they have produced as an argument is an incoherent fantasy.
What we call AI is a Large Language Model that, depending on the number of words it is exposed to predicts what is most likely to come next. Like the predictive text on my phone, it will get things wrong often simply because it doesn’t have the capacity for a sense of context the way humans do. A mind is not just a rational processing system. If we heed what neuroscience is telling us our ability to make rational choices is impeded by our brains because they activate reflexes and instincts out of context. This is why bias is such a problem. We are impeded from making rational merit-based choices because we act on reflexes laid own in our organic being at the dawn of human evolution. An observation from a text on cognitive science stays with me – we operating in the space-age with brains shaped in the stone-age.
And speaking of cognitive science here’s a damning insight about LLMs – words have no inherent meaning. We attribute meaning to them depending on our capabilities, intent and context.
All that said there are valid potential benefits from AI – we just have to stop calling it that. It isn’t intelligent – just rational in a boringly literal and stupid way. In human terms it is utterly psychopathic. It has no empathy, but it can be made to appear to be empathetic. Again, in human terms, it is a liar and a deceiver.
In The AI Con the authors make a good argument that the boosters of AI are of a common type in the USA – rich, white and male. They are also of a certain intellectual disposition that is grounded in materialism and seems to have a part dystopian and part idealistic vision of humanity. It’s a sci fi fantasy rather than a philosophically informed vision. The people involved are ‘tech bro’ types. Very rationally intelligent in one sense but seeming also to be on the autism spectrum or somewhat psychopathic in that there’s little empathy for humanity as a whole and more a preference for a certain class. Musk is such an example. Rather than devoting his efforts to addressing common human concerns he is devoting his efforts to escaping to Mars to save a few. This is more sci fi than anything real. Worse, he lacks the empathic and compassionate traits we consider desirable.
Is Musk and his ilk redefining human ideals and values as part of an essential step in our evolution toward a future human? Or do they reflect a deeply unhealthy and unbalanced divergence into fantasy?
What has ET got to do with this?
The YouTube video Senior CIA Officer: Even We Don’t Know What the Phenomenon Is has an interesting assertion about ET and governments. It is that after 70 odd years of engaging with the phenomenon of UFOs governments have no understanding of what is going on. Even more interesting is the observation that very sensible people in the know are flat out opposed to ‘disclosure’.
I know this was, to me, a random guy talking, but he makes more sense to me than all but a very few others. This may be my bias at play because I agree with his general line of thought. We must find our own relationship with the phenomenon once we decide it is real.
The point that I want to emphasis here is that here is yet another instance of profound uncertainty about something going on – but it has been happening for a very long time.
ET has had more than ample opportunity to tell us stuff, but they have elected to take a different approach. Strieber thinks his Visitors are predatory but generally benign relative to the overall population – maybe environmentally sensitive enough to not overtax the prey population?. The fact that they have tech and knowledge way beyond us and don’t see us as fit recipients of their knowledge may gall the hung-ho and vocal advocates for ‘Disclosure’ but it doesn’t surprise those with cause to be more circumspect.
There is a relationship between the tech bros pushing AI and the disclosure advocates in that both are seeing phenomena entirely on their terms – which are philosophically naive in my view. The AI boosters are making flat statements about AI which appear, on examination, just wrong. The Disclosure boosters have a naive tech focus. Both seem to share a materialistic outlook – which is limiting and distorting.
ET has occupied a presence in human consciousness for a very long time. It doesn’t occupy a space defined or dominated by technology but a space between our material reality and its metaphysical aspect. Materialism tries to draw everything into a focus of certainty rather than allow uncertainty to be the norm – and yet this is what scientific inquiry persistently points us toward.
Between science and metaphysics is a central zone of materialistic certainty that is, in a way, a form of sci fi. It has a flavor of science about it, but it’s fiction and even fantasy. On a grander scale it is what we call culture, and it is where we tell stories, including explanations and excuses.
Science and metaphysics are antagonistic only to materialists – it’s as if they pry them apart to insert themselves in an artificial space where they feel at home and comfortable in a warm bed of egotism and illusion. On a more sensible level they are the same thing. At its core, science is disciplined inquiry and nothing more. Metaphysics is the same. What distinguishes them is not the standard of discipline, but the methods employed. Materialists have an irrational bias for material science, which they then often practice badly. It wasn’t materialists who developed quantum science, remember. In fact, it wasn’t materialists who discovered most of the foundational laws of science.
ET has been loudly pooh-poohed by materialists because the ‘scientific’ position is that we are alone in the cosmos. Now, with the high-tech evidence from US Navy aircraft that scorn is being replaced sullen reluctance to confess to be playing catch up to those who have a more metaphysical perspective.
We are obliged to add ET to the list of things we have no definitive ideas about – yet. That list includes mind, intelligence and consciousness.
What we don’t know
We don’t really have a useful and acceptable notion of what intelligence is, or consciousness is. We don’t know what or who ET is.
But we have a choice about how to live with our ignorance – as a state of uncertainty in acknowledgement of presently incomprehensible complexity or as something from which we mine and endless supply of explanations and illusions of certainty.
It is remarkable how often our ‘go to’ reaction is to ‘explain’ something rather than figure out how to relate to it. The materialist sees reality as an it to be explained where an animist sees reality as a thou with whom to form a relationship.
There’s a cartoon from the 1950s which depicts a guy in bed with a woman of apparent ill repute in a motel room. The door has been burst open. There is a private eye with camera and behind him a furious wife looking like thunder. The guy blurts out, “But honey I can explain!” Faced with an utter crisis his in his relationship, the guy grasps for reason, not empathy. It is a profound cartoon. Guys, the target audience, will laugh, but not because it’s funny.
If we are realistic about the human condition, very few of us are aware of much on the spectrum of what is knowable – or, rather, what is unknown. Reason has been described as the light of a lantern a traveler is carrying while walking through a forest at night. There is a comforting glow which creates a sense of immediate local safety.
Our choices are to craft an atmosphere of psychological comfort which sustains our natural desire for knowledge and certainty because we tell stories that serve those purposes – or live like a sceptic – comfortable with uncertainty and open to experience. We can try to create certainty and safety as an absolute state, or allow that it has no more than an immediate utility.
At the moment our world is dominated by monstrous egos full of certainty about what they believe. Such certainty fills the world with perilous uncertainty and instability. On the other hand, living with uncertainty in a peaceful way generates stability and thus a kind of relative certainty that serves our deeper impulses well.
This can seem paradoxical but it’s not. If we attempt to extend knowledge beyond its proper function, we create tensions. We all know, when we encounter people who are full of certainty that what they believe is true, that the risk of conflict or disharmony increases.
The great sorry history of colonialism was fueled by certainty – disguised as curiosity and the mission of spiritual salvation. Certainties clash. Uncertainties harmonize.
We are all different
I have been doing a deep dive into neurodiversity after a conversation with family members. I have 2 nieces and a nephew with ASD. The term was developed by a sociologist in 1997 as a political term in support of people determined to create awareness of autism.
It has become a diagnosis with no neurological or medical foundation and the basis a contentious identity movement, which, while arising for no doubt legitimate reasons, has no legitimate medical basis.
It is another instance of how we create tensions and conflict by pushing certainties contra more informed and disciplined inquiry. There is certainly something going on, and language and stories have been invoked in service of whatever that thing is. But it’s not consistent with the intended meaning of the language and it’s not consistent with currently acknowledged medical science. Here is a source on the matter – from the Mad in America website.
The intent of the current passion seems to be an effort to see our existential crisis in terms of us being different rather than flawed and disabled rather than inadequate. That’s a genuine need and it may be that neurodiversity is the presently the only accessible framework to articulate that need.
In a way it is doing what Musk’s Mars dreams, and the tech bros AI fantasies are doing – providing a metaphor for a deeper existential drama. We must always be careful to give the metaphors we need to process our inner feelings the freedom to do so, while never erring in taking them literally.
Conclusion
On a global scale our world is filled with aching uncertainty because of the peril coming from over-confident egos.
So many commentators are declaring we are on the cusp of a new age. This is coming from tech bros and astrologers as well as ecologists and social commentators across many fields. It’s not a claim I doubt. But what seems to be up for contention is what form that change will take.
AI boosters are proclaiming a future predicated on materialistic fantasies. But as The AI Con argues this future is not designed for common benefit.
Reduction of human existence to the fantasies of materialists is a dangerous course of action because the focus is on tech rather than being human centred. The sales pitch is compelling only if you buy the vision. Don’t, without careful evaluation of the proposition.
If the anticipate transition into a new future is inevitable (which seems to be so) it must not be controlled or directed by materialistic fantasies.
Christianity reduced human existence to the cast of grand theological dramas in which monstrous egos (the tech bros of that time) dominated in self-defined virtue. The harm wrought was massive. World domination was the vision at any cost to the individuals who did not concur.
Many are wrestling with the notions of consciousness being fundamental to reality. Recent intellectual arrivals on this idea don’t represent a step forward so much as a recovery of deep insight that humanity developed probably at least half a million years ago. Animism arose out awareness of what is, rather than any ‘discovery’. Engaging with reality with a sense of uncertainty opens us to the possibility of what is there to be known. Engaging it with settled beliefs sets up tensions and distortions.
The roots of animistic awareness are important. Materialism developed the idea that reality is stuff as a reaction against the nonsense theology of Christianity. It was a psychologically immature reaction. ‘Your God isn’t real – so no gods are real, and nothing spiritual is real either.’ The early animists had no motive to see their reality as anything in particular, and their most urgent existential mission was figuring out relationships – with each other, living things to eat, living things that eat them, places, spirits and gods. Relationships are still the most important part of our awareness.
ET hasn’t been amenable to certainty. Theories that ET is an alien species from elsewhere in our dimension hasn’t delivered anything of value other that debates about who believes what.
The belief that Artificial Intelligence is a thing arises because materialism makes it possible. But we don’t know what intelligence is, let alone consciousness or even mind.
The belief that neurodiversity is real arises because of a need to make sense of an existential crisis felt by many people. The crisis is real, but the story explaining it is not, on current evidence.
We inhabit an uncertainty – which some insist is an illusion. Long before we understood that what we see is processed in our brains and hence only a representation of what is, sages knew this.
We form beliefs and tell ourselves stories out of necessity- to make meaning and form relationships. Psychologists tell us that we humans are fundamentally communal, and our wellbeing depends on the relationships we create and sustain.
And yet we are harming our capacity to maintain our wellbeing because we are responding to excessive certainty and rigidity because they seem to address a need we do have. We do crave and need a degree of predictability. We do crave and need a degree of explanation. But we also need to be able to live with uncertainty – just not chaos.
Those who market their solutions to our needs for predictability and explanation are acting not out of compassion but profit. So, more is better. It isn’t. We need safe havens in the swirl of uncertainty for balance – but not gated communities, palaces or fortresses. These bring rigidities that tighten things up and which lead to chaos.
AI, ET and neurodiversity are three things that reflect forms of existential crisis that are being distorted through rigid and unrealistic thinking for different motives and in ways that are not helpful. In our current social climate anxiety seems high – and for good reason. We do appear to be going through disruptive and challenging times. Our reflex might be to tighten up and grip harder, but it wiser to do the opposite.