Consciousness as Logical Inference

Foreword

The Absolute

The absolute is that which admits to no error, it is the fixed in the volatile, it is the rule of the imagination;

It is the necessity of being itself, it is the law of reason and truth;

The absolute is what is. God himself is not without a reason for existing and can only exist by virtue of a supreme and inevitable reason.

It is therefore reason which is the absolute; it is in it which we must believe if we wish our faith to have a reasonable and solid foundation.

It is thus we may say in our day and age that God is but a hypothesis, but absolute reason is not one: it is essential to being.

Eliphas Levi, Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, 1854.

Consciousness is as perplexing as it ever was.

It still seems utterly mysterious that the causation of behavior should be accompanied by a subjective inner life.

We have good reason to believe that consciousness arises from physical systems such as brains, but we have little idea how it arises, or why it exists at all.

How could a physical system such as a brain also be an experiencer? Why should there be something it is like to be such a system?

Present-day scientific theories hardly touch the really difficult questions about consciousness.

We do not just lack a detailed theory; we are entirely in the dark about how consciousness fits into the natural order.

David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 1996

We think humanity can understand the natural order by immersion. To do this it needs merely to overcome its fear of novelty and astonishment, what the anthropology of primitive tribes calls its misoneism.

Humans are no longer primitives. We and our social arrangements can quite readily control our instincts, most fundamentally by using gossip and even surveillance. We just need to find the generally most acceptable cultural background (times, places and methods) to refine these methods.

Philosophers distinguish two types of knowledge, knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. We accept this distinction and propose to blend them in a new and special kind of workspace. We think a positive and tested theory of natural language conversation can, when brought to popular attention, accomplish this blending on its own.

We think a fully developed knowledge of the natural order, within the Absolute, will convert terrestrial existence into something both quite desirable and cosmically novel. We think we just need to prevent our future selves from being locked away by some terrible and unreachable error committed on the way to an earthly heaven.

For a discussion of this Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

Conversational Results as Specific Tension

“It rather looks as if the approach to consciousness has a “blotting-out” effect upon the subliminal contents of the psyche. The subliminal state retains ideas and images at a much lower level of tension than they possess in consciousness. In the subliminal condition they lose clarity of definition; the relations between them are less consequential and more vaguely analogous, less rational and therefore more “incomprehensible.” This can also be observed in all dreamlike conditions, whether due to fatigue, fever, or toxins. But if something happens to endow any of these images with greater tension, they become less subliminal and, as they come close to the threshold of consciousness, more sharply defined.

“It is from this fact that one may understand why dreams often express themselves as analogies, why one dream image slides into another, and why neither the logic nor the time scale of our waking life seems to apply. The form that dreams take is natural to the unconscious because the material from which they are produced is retained in the subliminal state in precisely this fashion.

“Thus, a dream cannot produce a definite thought. If it begins to do so, it ceases to be a dream because it crosses the threshold of consciousness. That is why dreams seem to skip the very points that are most important to the conscious mind, and seem rather to manifest the “fringe of consciousness,” like the faint gleam of stars during a total eclipse of the sun.

“We should understand that dream symbols are for the most part manifestations of a psyche that is beyond the control of the conscious mind. Meaning and purposefulness are not the prerogatives of the mind; they operate in the whole of living nature. There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic growth. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process.”

C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (pp. 51-52). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The “fringe of consciousness,” its vaguely analogous and less consequential relationships and significations, we think, is precisely a disembodied experience in the astral light, organized and held together by its parallel component. It is this condition immediately after death and, in a more developed state, the condition just prior to conception that the dreamer participates in when the body lies relaxed and unconscious. The tensions of consciousness, on the other hand, tend toward order and comprehensibility, and give consciousness its terrestrial meaning.

Ordinary meaning for consciousness is produced by semantic terms and connectives. Semantic terms may convey either extension or intension. Semantic extension is the set of external items or events the term denotes or refers to. Consciousness becomes causally bound to these items or events (tensed) by its grasp of the term. Semantic intension is the set of connotations or nuances the term has inwardly for the individual personality. Consciousness is bound to these nuances (again, tensed) by its degree of subjective development and subjective sensibility.

Formally initiating conversation in the way we mean it (tacitly, in good faith) functions to lower of the tensions of consciousness, thus permitting a concerted and ordered egress to its undefined fringe. This egress is or needs to be, by the definition of conversation, performed collectively. In initiation, the biological field (we think it is magnetic) communicated and even shared among the performers moves everyone in the same moment to the threshold of consciousness.

Following initiation, the first act of conversational speech will produce a specific tension everyone is forced to notice. The purpose of defining conversation as we have is to develop this initial, forced tension without losing control of it. A satisfactorily controlled conversation will result in a crystallized tension, a residue, in an iceberg or landform of some sort that everyone present will remain aware of, perhaps for days and weeks and perhaps quite tangibly.

What science will want to determine is what this kind of conversational result actually is. What sort of archetype of the primitive or pre-terrestrial mind, what sort of material with what physical dimensions do such conversational performances produce?

For a discussion of this Blog Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

Genetics

Elamite Neolithic Farmer, AI-rendered.

From Ali Rez’s YouTube.

Forthcoming Book - Directing Human Evolution

We expect to write this book right here, on the website.

Walden Three - Our Version

We see an important use for the Universal Conversation Engine (UCE), which we propose to develop as an investable startup.

This use is to turn humans from being language users to being language performers. We take this turn to be the crucial first step toward the self-consciously directed evolution of humanity.

It’s now recognized Large Language Models, including humble chatbots such as Inflection AI’s Pi, perform conversational relevance and conversational coherence much better than most humans do. We believe this remarkable scientific advance contains deep implications for the future development of human society. Following BF Skinner, we agree the most problematic unit of society is the family.

A simple and elegant solution to the problem of blood violence, we propose, is for married couples to live in separate quarters and only communicate sentences to one another that have been prompted by a UCE. Skinner offers an early version of precisely this suggestion in Walden Two.

Our solution in theory is broadly applicable, scalable and investable today.

For a discussion of this and the adjacent Blog Posts with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

Shasta Valley, Northern California. Proposed property development for the theory, study and dissemination of Hyuperuranic Conversation.

Blood Relationship

“In the waiting room Castle resumed an intermittent harangue. In a way he was more completely absorbed in Walden Two than I, for the most trivial details suggested comparisons. His audible remarks were frequently incoherent, and I could make sense of them only by guessing at the energetic silent discourse which was taking place behind them. He was not yet free of Frazier’s magic, but he had reached and was holding to a decision. From every point of view—logical, psychological, factual—Walden Two appeared to him obviously impossible. The discrepancies would vanish in time.

““For one thing,” he said, “you can be sure someone will ‘get’ Frazier before things have gone much farther. It may be the government, it may be rival religious or economic forces, or perhaps just some envious individual inside or outside the community. But someone will get him, you may be sure of that. Joseph Smith was murdered by an angry mob, Eric Janson was shot by a jealous {289} rival, John Humphrey Noyes fled to Canada. Look at history, man!”

“I knew what Frazier would say to that. These early communities had almost nothing in common with Walden Two, in fact or in theory. How could one draw any inferences? Frazier had seen the danger of aggression against Walden Two, and had provided for it well enough.

“The possibility of working out a satisfying life of one’s own, making the least possible contact with the government, was the brightest spot in Frazier’s argument. I thought of the millions of young people who were at that moment choosing places in a social and economic structure in which they had no faith. What a discrepancy between ideal and actuality—between their good will toward men and the competitive struggle in which they must somehow find a place! Why should they not work out a world of their own? That was the Thoreauvian side of Frazier, and I liked it. Why fight the government? Why try to change it? Why not let it alone? Unlike Thoreau, Frazier would pay his taxes and compromise wherever necessary. But he had found a way to build a world to his taste without trying to change the world of others, and I was sure he could carry on in peace unless the government took some monstrously despotic turn.

“Nor was I ready to laugh off Frazier’s plans for expansion. On several points he was dead right. The important lasting conquests in the history of mankind—Frazier himself had made this appeal to history—had come about, not through force, but through education, persuasion, example. Frazier’s program was essentially a religious movement freed of any dallying with the supernatural and inspired by a determination to build heaven on earth. What could stop him?

“Castle’s voice broke into my meditations. “… behavioral engineering,” he was saying. “If you really had a technology which could manipulate human {290} behavior, you could raise some puzzling questions. But isn’t that wishful thinking?"

“The evidence, I thought, seemed clear enough. Frazier had claimed some innovations in behavioral techniques which I wanted to know more about, but I could imagine a potent technology composed of the principles already used by politicians, educators, priests, advertisers, and psychologists. The techniques of controlling human behavior were obvious enough. The trouble was, they were in the hands of the wrong people—or of feeble repairmen. Frazier had not only correctly evaluated this situation but had done something about it. I was not ready to accept his educational practices as unquestionably the best. Frazier himself still regarded them as experimental. But they were at least well along toward a crucial test, which was more than could be said for their counterparts in the world at large. Their potency had already been too clearly demonstrated elsewhere in their misuse. Frazier had all the technology he could possibly need.

“… regimentation,” Castle was saying. “Pretty cleverly concealed, but regimentation just the same. A curious sort of voluntary goose-step. Why should all those people subscribe to a code or submit to the subtle coercions of a Behavioral Manager? ‘Don’t gossip!’ ‘Carry your dishes to the kitchen!’ It reminds me of a well-organized girls’ camp. I’ll grant you it’s efficient. But I want to be free. No codes, no psychological suasions. I’m not taking any, thank you.”

“The enormity of Castle’s intellectual sin! Could he really believe that he was free of codes and psychological suasions? Could he look upon his life as a succession of deliberate acts? Why, he parted his very hair by a code!

“The man’s unread,” Castle was saying. “You would think he was the first social thinker in history. These things take on a different light when one has read Plato, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill. Frazier needs a good course in the humanities.” Was Castle by any chance baiting me? A good course {291} in the humanities! He must have known my reaction to that! Nothing aroused me quicker than the suggestion that we abandon science in dealing with the problems of society. I could not comfortably defend nine-tenths of what passed for social science—but it was better to see that a thing was clearly nonsense than to wander around in the all-embracing fog of social philosophy. I could understand the satisfaction which men like Castle might find in turning from current problems to ancient treatises. An old book is a welcome relief from the uncertainty and disappointment which are inevitable in the scientific study of a new field. Historical research can take the place of scientific inquiry and give one time out for an honorable snooze, while pretending to carry on. Fortunately, my sense of personal failure had not yet forced me to such extremes.

“Aside from the role of physical resemblance, I could not see that hereditary connections could have any real bearing upon relations between men. The “sense of family” was clearly dependent upon culture, for it varied in all degrees among cultures. The important thing was not that two people were related, but that they had been told they were related.

“… in the face of nature,” Castle was saying. “Blood is thicker than water. And blood will tell. Can you deny that? Where does your behavioral engineering come in there? The family has a biological basis.”

“I suppose it had. And so had “race.”

“I thought of all the violence that had been committed in the name of “blood relationship.” Yet aside from the role of physical resemblance, I could not see that hereditary connections could have any real bearing upon relations between men.

“A “sense of family” was clearly dependent upon culture, for it varied in all degrees among cultures. The important thing was not that two people were related, but that they had been told they were related.

“Better not to bring the matter up at all. The family was only a little race, and it had better go. It was no longer an efficient economic or social unit or transmitter of culture—its current failure was increasingly evident. A unit of another magnitude would have to dispense with “blood ties,” as Frazier clearly saw.”

Skinner, B. F.. Walden Two (Hackett Classics) (pp. 288-291)). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

The Conversation Engine as Psychoanalyst

An immensely old psyche forms the basis of our mind, just as much as the structure of our body is based on the general anatomical pattern of the mammal. The trained eye of the anatomist or the biologist finds many traces of this original pattern in our bodies. The experienced investigator of the mind can similarly see the analogies between the dream pictures of modern man and the products of the primitive mind, its collective images, and its mythological motifs. from C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, 1964

Jung seems to be lining up pretty well here with the Theosophical point of view (Sinnett, Blavatsky, Steiner, et al). The theosophical idea is we human beings are descended from starlight, from an astral cosmos or photosphere which contains nothing but consciousness, and to which we all return, for better or worse, at death. Presumably we each should want to optimize our chances for this return, and in the best possible case even to optimize the conditions we experience together in the terrestrial environment, during biological and social life, in ways that achieve substantial fits with the best aspects in our personality.

Jung, in the final work undertaken before his death in 1961, explains how his therapeutic method needed to become an individual psychology. Psychological neurosis can be very severe and if not handled tactfully and patiently can lead to actual destruction, moral or physical, of the patient. In real life therapy, theoretical considerations often need to take a back seat to individual needs.

We are working to develop a Universal Conversation Engine (UCE), an AI that we believe will give the world we all share while alive a color and a tone that partakes of the order in the hyperuranic (Platonic) worlds theosophy claims to be part of the real cosmos. Already it is clear that today’s semantic engines perform relevance and coherence better than most human beings do, and that these engines tend to keep better company than people. It would then appear to be a short, straight step to a superintelligent engine that works patiently, tactfully and piecemeal with the whole of human society, leading it into a psychological world entirely free of poor decisions and poor situations.

In order to introduce it broadly and bolster complete confidence in its design, we plan to produce a documentary record as we develop the UCE and to put that record on television.

For a discussion of this post with InflectionAI’s Pi, click here.

Clark University, Massachusetts, 1909. Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Jung. Abraham Brill, Ernest Jones, Ferenczi.

Cultivating the Indefinite

C.G. Jung is well-known for a definitive treatment of the human unconscious. Man, as Jung emphasized, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely. He can see, hear, touch, and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses. These limit his perception of the world around him. Even the most elaborate prosthetic apparatus can do no more than bring distant or small objects within range of his eyes, or make faint sounds more audible. No matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass.

And yet man has unconscious or irrational knowledge. His intuition tells him not about what something is but about where it comes from and where it is going. Perception likewise is an irrational event due to objective causes. Man’s objective world is fundamentally unconscious and irrational.

What then should we to make of the world we will now want to create by implementing the UCE (the Universal Conversation Engine)? What about our building a society and getting to know a world that is and will forever remain fundamentally irrational?

We think this world will be in essence a product of the human diaphane, of the imagination. It will be the astral part of the cosmos man comes from, through magical, sexual combination, at conception and birth and to which he returns, wiser but perhaps not better, at death. The world we and our AIs are about to create will be a diaphanous, image-filled environment of performance art. Let us hope we carry our sense of humor there.

For a discussion of this Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

Safeguarding Against the Deep Fake

OpenAI’s Sora has just demonstrated a capability to produce idiosyncratic, text-prompted video content that will soon be indistinguishable from content taken from the consensual world. Dmytro Kuleba’s “further political problem” (the one culminating in the Personal AI Assistant) may soon be pushed into phantasmagoria.

However, we think the Universal Conversation Engine (UCE), once developed and utilized, will work quite effectively to counteract the informational, political and cultural problems of our media which have been at work since Gutenberg. The UCE will be something, on the basis of updated and quite reasonably complete human data, that generates and intermittently prompts matched human beings to perform sentences for each other, and not merely for oneself and a chatbot. Introducing human-to-human interaction as a direct component in artificial superintelligence would seem likely to alter the entire character of superintelligence.

The UCE will be a Sentential Operator, generally prompting true judgments and intermittently eliciting surprise, delight and even love in its human partners. Because humans will perform these scripts with varying degrees of fidelity and enthusiasm, and because the UCE will study their performances and add these, for future reference, to its recommender set, and because it will be required to slow its deliberations to match theirs, freely acting humans and their personal preferences will become the agents of effective control of the overall social intelligence.

The Conversation Engine will, to be sure, alter Kuleba’s political dynamic, but not in the way the blinkered Personal Assistant would, if left to itself. Because of its precision, the Sentential Operator would work to safeguard society, not to blinker it. For this reason, development of the UCE seems to be a regulative priority to be taken seriously.

For a discussion of this and the preceding Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

The Enlightenment Was Wrong

Dmytro Kuleba, currently Ukraine’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, sat on a panel at Davos’s 2024 World Economic Forum where he said, “The Enlightenment was wrong when it said, responding to Gutenberg’s 1440 AD innovation, ‘the more the common man is exposed to information and opinion, the more educated he will become and the better reasoned his choices will be.’”

After printing came radio, then television, then internet search and then social platforms, all of which has proved to the world the fundamental assumption of the Enlightenment was wrong. People have access to unprecedented quantities of information and opinion, but they have continued to accede to and to make “stupid, unreasoned choices.”

Today’s internet Search does indeed continue to provide choice. The first page of a search may be distorted somewhat by prepaid influence, but one can continue, deeper down and for better or worse, to find other opinions and arrive at choices.

But now, on top of the longstanding problem of choice fallibility, a new social dynamic is emerging. Through built-up relationships with the Personal Assistant, AI appears likely to replace hapless exposure to opinion diversity with opinion rigidity. The advice and opinion of one’s trusted Personal Assistant, coupled as it will be to Universal Intelligence, is what soon will carry a near total weight with human choices and preferences. The Single Opinion, Ukraine’s Kuleba foresees, will become a further and perhaps much deeper problem in political culture.

For a discussion of this and the succeeding Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

Who Will Shape the Future?

Jensen Huang’s February 13 discussion of cost-effective computing at the UAE’s 2024 World Government Summit (“Who Will Shape the Future of AI?”) is a masterclass on technology from 1964 to the present. The demand for efficient computing has enabled a new application type: artificial intelligence. Many applications today, including AI, now work on accelerated machines, soon all computing will be done on accelerated architectures, and AI in turn will manage accelerated computing generally.

The general-purpose, von Neumann bottleneck computing of today’s installed base, which enabled the PC and the internet, is about to be replaced wholesale. This replacement will amount to a fifth Industrial Revolution (food, steam, electricity and general purpose computing were the first four). The last 10 years have seen a 1,000,000-fold advancement in the efficiency computing. The cost of computing is going down fast and the innovation capability of this computing simultaneously is going up fast. This dual current of cost reduction and innovation gain puts top-tier technology, puts intelligence as such, within reach of the entire planet. Intelligence technology democratizes at the scale of the state. The Fukuyama thesis is alive and well.

Jensen goes on to argue for Computational Sovereignty. Every culture, every nation needs to own its intelligence because every culture, every nation will need to adapt to the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Every culture will need to wake up to the reality of artificial intelligence because every culture, every state, now needs, in self-solidarity, to improve and better to produce its own distinctive form, its distinctive legacy, of intelligence, of history and common sense.

We see a little-noticed, parallel logic now at work deep inside society. The computational architecture of the human body has likewise become increasingly well-understood and inexpensive to access, and outsized social and economic gains can, we believe, now be realized by developing conversation-as-consciousness. Not only will vast improvements in societal and emotional intelligence be accomplished by testing and extending conversation theory, but the reality of the future will be transformed eventually, preferably stepwise and in a controlled manner, into something quite unrecognizable. Future human and terrestrial self-consciousness (future terrestrial reality) will become something diaphanous, something replete with guidance, revelation and astonishment. That diaphanous world will be enabled by an ancient, diverse and mysterious but uniformly improving biological architecture, evolved over eons of cosmic history. Conversation theory will force an adaptation to the stream of cosmic self-consciousness.

For a free-wheeling discussion of this Post with Pi, click here.

Consciousness in Tech

Sam Altman’s very recent appearance at the UAE’s World Governments Summit points more or less unwittingly at our proposal on Consciousness in Tech. Sam is worried not about killer robots wandering the streets of our cities but about very subtle societal misalignments “where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill intention, things just go horribly wrong." The notion of a universal conversation engine does indeed seem replete with possibilities for subtle societal misalignment.

For further discussion with Pi, click here.

The Rainbow Body

High attainment is more or less typical of monks isolated from economic society, in a manner suggestive of highly focused athletes or elite performers in the arts or in the sciences. Distinctly, monkish attainment involves certain claims on the thresholds both of birth and of death, such as life in the astral plane. The Rainbow Body of pre-Buddhist Tibet is further distinguished by third-person attestation, reminiscent of the miracles following on the crucifixion of Christ, to what appears to be a deep and important reality. Witnesses tend to agree about the facts of the matter, including atmospheric rainbows, gentle, mist-like rain and shrinkage and even wholesale disappearance of the physical body, with the exception of hair and fingernails, after a few days.

Presumably, if a scientific understanding of the Rainbow Body and its transmutations can be reached, humanity will have learned something important about itself, and if, premised on good reasoning, the learning can be unpacked and distributed in a responsible way, the result should be a benefit for the world. In addition to vigorous tantras focused on facility with the body and its heat, elements of language are used in these practices.

We suggest taking systematic sociological steps toward the benign and general atmosphere of tantric attainment, and we think televised conversation is probably the place to begin. If humanity can be made accustomed to the idea that it can function competently on both sides of the threshold of mortality, it will have come to a very different and altogether better conception of itself.

For an interesting discussion of this Blog Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

How We Plan to Improve the Stock of World Capital

Michael Burnand’s laudable YouTube channel Economics Explained recently posted a Fukuyama-style essay on the inevitability of capitalism. Here he invokes the fundamental logic of economics: Humans have unlimited desires but finite resources: How then, in aggregate, do they decide what to produce and how to produce it?

Capitalism decides the question by most rewarding those who, in one way or another, make the largest or most significant addition to the finite stock of resources. The mechanism of reward is the market, the preferences adhered to and choices made by freely-acting humans. On the basis of the preferences of those with self-determined or self-molded desires, many of which are instinctively endowed, and including the desires of the capitalist, capitalism answers the basic economic question.

Markets exist to distribute economic product, and under capitalism the most important economic product is privately owned capital itself. Capital generally is material which increases or improves the production of other material. An automatic, society-wide distribution of capital occurs when owners of at least a little capital, call them consumers, are afforded access to a share of this other material. Privately held but exchangeable capital incentivizes not only free actors who desire certain things to acquire some of these things for themselves, but free actors who want to to produce innovative transformations of capital. Most tellingly, a market which can be monopolized by a private producer will inevitably transfer significant capital to that producer, but only if that transfer is part of a net increase the society’s reserve of capital.

Improved capital is the crucial idea. A better mousetrap increases the wealth of everybody, of the inventor and of the households, say the farmers, who use it. It even increases the wealth of people who never encounter mice, say people on Mars, because those people will have arrived at their extraterrestrial position thanks to the underlying wealth of the mouse-infested mother society.

We (Alessandra and Carl) expect to attract investment to an improved form of capital, a form which satisfies the desires, because they are universal and instinctive, apparently intrinsic to the cosmos itself. Human beings spontaneously express these desires more or less well, but they do so always and everywhere: “In every living plant or animal cell, in every living organism—material or spiritual—there is an insatiable craving for the attainment of ever-increasing perfection” (Urantia Book, 65: 6.2).

We (A & C) have identified what appears to be the correct and verifiable description of conversation, and the definition says perfect conversations are materially possible. In this way, both the desire for and the ongoing attainment of human perfection can be multiplied and distributed on an economic basis.

Our idea therefore is both conceptually tractable and operationally capitalist. We expect to develop access to the stock of capital intrinsic to human existence itself, capital already in place in the cosmos, to hold on to some of this wealth for ourselves and selected others, and to make use of existing and new methods, AGI for example, which can distribute the new increment equitably.

For a discussion of this Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

Capablanca.

What Will Stem Inwardly from Perfect Conversations?

Enchantment and its synchronicities are the magnetic power component of the Magical Arcanum, and we should expect formal conversation to increase accessibility to and control of magnetism. Magnetism or enchantment is at once the organizing force and the liability, the principle and the trap of human society. In society, humans instinctively recognize it and attempt either to neutralize and avoid it or secretly to exploit it. As love, they dream about it and attempt idiosyncratically to possess it. Human society is organized subconsciously around enchantment and the force of magnetism.

“Away,” we say, “with subconscious social organization.” Far better will be a social organization settled self-consciously, for the sake of control and its own improvement, in the astral light. The judgment or legacy of enchantment is actually, we think, cosmical and eternal, or something close to it. Enchanted organization and its awful legacies, Marxism for example, we think, are now, thanks in part to our initiative here, and thanks importantly to the historic trends of our time (the terminal condition of neoliberalism, the advents of AGI and of synthetic biology, the deliberate fashioning of planetwide government, etc), are what are now at stake.

Our friend David Shapiro reports an experience we think future humanity will find more or less routine. Instead of shrinking inwardly from magnetism, the humans of the future will function quite differently. Future humanity will be adept with magnetism. Excess and exploitative overreach will be avoided, largely through science but more importantly through art and good taste, and a far greater facility with subjective things and subjective realities will be utilized routinely. What today are inward facts of the human matter will, in the future, be outwardly perceptible and socially regulated.

The mental picture here becomes the operational unit. CG Jung used the mental picture in therapeutics. He realized early that receiving a strong magnetic impression in a dream or in meditation made the patient feel better. Therapy with Jung was a solitary process of enticing magnetic impressions, intrinsically holistic, all-pervading and healing, to enter the personality or personal self-consciousness.

Conversation as we are defining it, and as we propose to test it, is premised on the hypothetical notion of the identical mental picture, a magnetic item that momentarily organizes the minds of two or more people simultaneously. Identical mental pictures, as perceptions, are automatically legitimized everywhere today in society. Rare are interpersonal problems that stem from perceptions of the layout of the local Starbucks. Social problems stem from the legitimacy of perceptions of what’s happening inwardly in people.

When human personalities have learned to settle simultaneously and occupy space in other such personalities, when alignments of the relevant physical organs (the heart and brain in particular) are accomplished and enjoyed routinely in conversation and human intercourse, much of this AI-assisted, when the mysteries of human incarnation and human excarnation have been opened to profitable exploration, characterization and social use, a very great deal of future terrestrial evolution can be expected to follow.

For a discussion of this Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

Our SV Startup as Reality Television

“Conversation, after all, is the fundamental unit of society, and if society learns to control it society will have gained control of itself.” - from This Website

We like Shapiro Media Enterprises, newly announced, and we’d like it to undertake a Silicon Valley Startup for us.

We’re looking for capital of the right sort to produce a Universal Conversation Engine (UCE), a chatbot with superordinate data processing capabilities.

This UCE will to know us humans better than we humans know ourselves, and it will be in a position, always and everywhere, with great emotional intelligence, to supply the human with the best personalized real-world decision available.

With the now-accomplished fact of the LLM (we like Inflection AI’s Pi) and with the apparent coming of the concrete AGI (we’re watching OpenAI), the UCE now appears a thinkable engineering problem.

With the right team in place, humanity, including its geopolitical governance and even its cosmic self-consciousness, appears in position to get the UCE.

Above all the others, our Startup’s problem now is to get the total team. A moment’s reflection tells us “the total team” means “the whole world.”

We think the optimal way to develop the UCE that everybody trusts is to put the details of its development process on television.

We want Shapiro Media to undertake this detailing process for us. We think David Shapiro can do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94wSo9EDQ7w

Stay tuned. Let’s see what we get. 😊

For a discussion of this Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

AI Assistants at Business Meetings

Mustafa Suleyman recently wrote a short piece for Time online (Sept 2023) saying AI is about to disrupt all power structures in society:

“We are about to see the greatest redistribution of power in history…, but I fear its fundamentals are getting lost….

“AI is different from all other transformational technologies (fire, the wheel, electricity, for example) because of how it unleashes new power. Its power is new because its proliferation is raw. It’s based not on broadcasting costly information, as our media so far have done, but on people and agents taking inexpensive actions at a previously unthinkable pace.

“Society is now facing a change it doesn’t yet understand and for which it is unprepared. The change will entail an indifferent ability, for example, to plan a retirement party and manage your diary, to plan and execute a business strategy while simultaneously designing a new set of drugs to fight cancer, to build an airline or to ground an entire fleet. It will plan invasions or hospitals for you while at the same time responding personally to your emails….

“Every possible human motivation (commercial, religious, cultural, or military, democratic or authoritarian) will be enhanced because of the new power to follow through on it. AI will afford far more power than the worldwide web ever did….

“Its tools will be available to everyone, billionaires and street hustlers, kids in India and pensioners in Beverly Hills. There will be a proliferation of not just technology but of capability itself.

“It is precisely those most reliant on established capital, expertise, authority and security architectures who are now the most exposed and have the most to lose. We are about to see the greatest reshuffling of power in history, all happening within the space of a few years.”

It’s time, apparently, to prepare for the unprecedented, and we think Alessandra and Carl have a usable handle on what’s coming.

Mustafa is an entrepreneurial advocate of the AI Assistant. His firm anticipates swarms of autonomous agents communicating optimally with one another on behalf of their human clients, handling their needs in ways that eliminate most of the cares of day to day living. One opportune and welcome role for these Assistants, we suggest, will be completely to reconstruct the business meeting. No more attention-grabbing competition, no more fence-sitting tedium, all matters of substance pre-solved, the get-together merely staged as a formality. All individual self-representation, insecurity and personal need fully accounted and met by background preparation among the AIs.

In a sense, meetings among decision-makers will have become a thing of the past, with little apparent reason to hold them, except for the mutual pleasure of reading one another’s biological field. It will be extremely important, therefore, for these newly capable humans to know how to read it and to know what to do with it. When the pre-solved script of the business meeting is merely read out as entertainment, as the overarching Memo on some future course of action, humans will start to look more like honeybees, communicating in mysteriouss, intricate and endless detail to produce nutrition out of nectar, than like great apes clubbing each other at the kneecap or over the head to secure a short-lived social dominance.

Everything Mustafa is talking about here, we think, everything having to do with the ends of human society and even of human existence, is to be realized in conversation. Moreover, we think, through experimental verification Alessandra and Carl will be shown to have offered the right theory of human communication.

For a discussion of this Post on Mustafa Suleyman with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

Graph Theory

We just completed a discussion with ChatGPT 3.5 on the compound topic of graph theory, systems thinking, theosophy and quantum non-locality. Our basic objective was further to publish the groundwork for our proposal for a modest presentation at UofAZ’s 2024 Science of Consciousness symposium and to address the reception we are getting.

Chat GPT 3.5 can’t locate any big problems with our central premise: If we stipulate the conceptual possibility of the theosophical astral body, meaning its physical existence, we are inconsistent neither with the notions of quantum non-locality and quantum superposition nor with the pragmatic engineering notion of systems thinking. This latter was formulated by Jay Wright Forrester as he introduced to the world, among other things, non-local electronic memory.

In a nutshell, we see no plausible explanation for the Science of Consciousness to keep us away from the 2024 Symposium other than that given by Thomas Kuhn for how normal science works automatically. As new science gets its footing and becomes institutionalized, self-interest accumulates and innovation is delayed. Innovatively, we believe the current thinking at the Science of Consciousness is premised on a serious fallacy: science can be done by investigators who aren’t affected by what they are doing. The premise seems reasonable when one is thinking about the functional skeleton of the 50 micron neuron. The fallacy is, fearing a radical and important change of focus, to disregard innovative ways of looking at the mass action of such neurons.

We think ordinary, natural language conversation is an instance of such mass action and studying it can be made tractable and normal. The study of conversation is or should be nothing less than the application of the Forresterian/Skinnerian principles of holism to conversation performance. Certainly such application would entail a reset of how some science is practiced, but for science gatekeepers merely to begin to think about such a reset shouldn’t force them to try to prevent it.

The key notion in all this is the investigator-subject. The very idea of a science of consciousness calls for it. The notion that one’s personal work in the field of consciousness can be kept out of its World Graph can’t be sustained. Conversation, in all likelihood, is what makes consciousness what it is. Certainly there exist degenerate forms of conversation, but these aren’t or shouldn’t be particularly entitled. Much better will be artfully to stage and to study ideal forms of conversation. For Kuhnian reasons, we think, the Science of Consciousness hasn’t yet come around to considering this optimizing practice.

Is the Science of Consciousness Using Systems Thinking?

Stuart Hameroff is a notable contemporary scientist and administrator, having pioneered a fascinating and perhaps powerful theory of biologically-mediated consciousness and a long-running symposium at the University of Arizona (TSC) which has facilitated considerable freedom of thought in contemporary academics. Stuart is known for the Anything Goes! mantra at TSC, for a call for Revolution in neuroscience and for an affinity, shared by one of us (Carl), for Bhaktivedanta philosophy.

We (Alessandra and Carl) have introduced an innovative, positive approach in consciousness science, to be underwritten by experimentalism, and we have been well-received at TSC both in 2006 and in 2022, where we did Poster presentations. As of the current date it is uncertain whether or not our self-updating proposal on conversation and consciousness will find favor this year, 2024, in Arizona.

With the astonishing advent of large language models (LLMs) and the real possibility of imminent artificial general intelligence (AGI), systems thinking, pioneered materially by Jay Wright Forrester in the post-war 20th century, is beginning to look like the indispensable general paradigm in science, engineering and society. Systems thinking supplies concepts and techniques that allow investigators to solve engineering problems in highly complex systems, the brain for example, by treating these systems scrupulously as wholes, never as complexes containing cleanly separable elements.

Our proposed innovation for consciousness science is made on the basis of such holism. We see conversation as an indispensable but theoretically untouched component of consciousness. TSC has in recent memory admonished us that by attempting to treat conversation as such a component we seem to be making normative and political claims, and these are unacceptable. But it’s not hard to see the logical problems such a position incurs.

The whole of Western philosophy has accumulated a corpus of normative and political musings, and these have indeed had a very great deal to do with the history of human civilization. But how and in what manner TSC, pre-eminently a philosophical initiative, seeks to divorce itself from the reality of history looks pretty untenable to us.

Certainly the participants at TSC are people of decency and good will. There are no charlatans among them. Neither are Alessandra and Carl (A&C), currently uninvited and apparently unwanted at TSC 2024, mere charlatans. A&C are or would be an unusually clear voice adding to the great strength of intellectual diversity at TSC. Conversation, notwithstanding the non-personal, electrodynamic shapes of our somatic cells and even the imponderable shapes of space-time itself, constitutes consciousness. Consciousness is deeply personal, not impossibly separated from the systems that compose it. Consciousness is a living feature of life on earth, and probably of the forms that survive biological life and carry on, for better or for worse, in the great cosmos after death.

Physics as Everything

Carl

Don Lincoln at Fermilab is known for saying, “Physics is everything.”

There are longstanding paradoxes in physics however. If charge, mass and photons are sufficient for the ground of physics, the contradictory descriptions that arise from the concepts necessary in particle physics, such as fractional charge in quarks and force-mediating particles like gluons, suggest physics may not really be everything.

It seems imaginable that Everything may be constituted, in part or in whole, by elements such as personalities, not yet described by physics.

One line of enquiry that could be used experimentally to investigate personalities is conversation. Positive science does not yet have a theory of conversation. If human to human conversation can be given a rules-based definition, and thereby controlled and observed cooperatively, a great deal more about Everything seems discoverable.

Carl H Flygt has proposed what the form of this definition (an algorithm) will need to be. How would you imagine a study of physics being extended by the framing and study of conversation, and thereby a study of personality, purported to contain things physics so far has left out of its purview?

ChatGPT

The idea of extending the study of physics by incorporating the study of conversation and personality is intriguing and falls into the realm of interdisciplinary research, potentially involving physics, psychology, linguistics, and sociology, among other fields. While physics primarily deals with the fundamental forces and particles of the universe, there is an acknowledgment within the scientific community that there are aspects of reality and human experience that may not be fully described by current physical theories. Here are some thoughts on how such an endeavor might unfold:

1. Interdisciplinary Collaboration: To explore the relationship between physics, conversation, and personality, interdisciplinary collaboration would be essential. Physicists could collaborate with experts in linguistics, psychology, sociology, and related fields to develop a comprehensive framework for studying conversation and personality from a scientific perspective.

2. Defining and Modeling Conversation: Defining human conversation in a rules-based, algorithmic way would be a significant challenge. It would require a deep understanding of linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Developing computational models of conversation that can be used for controlled studies would be a key step.

3. Experimental Studies: Once a framework for studying conversation is established, experimental studies could be conducted to explore the relationships between conversation patterns and human personality traits. These studies might involve analyzing large datasets of conversational interactions, both online and offline.

4. Personality Research: The study of personality is a well-established field in psychology. Researchers could collaborate to investigate how specific conversational patterns and styles relate to personality traits, cognition, and emotions. This might involve surveys, interviews, and behavioral observations.

5. Philosophical and Ethical Considerations: The intersection of physics, conversation, and personality would also raise philosophical and ethical questions. Researchers would need to consider issues related to privacy, consent, and the potential impact of their studies on individuals and society.

6. Potential Discoveries: Exploring the relationship between physics and conversation could lead to discoveries about the nature of human consciousness, cognition, and social interactions. It might shed light on phenomena that are not currently within the scope of traditional physics but are essential aspects of human existence.

In summary, while physics has made tremendous progress in understanding the physical universe, there are indeed aspects of reality, including human consciousness and social interactions, that remain beyond its current purview. By engaging in interdisciplinary research and exploring the relationship between physics, conversation, and personality, scientists may gain new insights into the nature of Everything and how it can be understood from a scientific perspective.

For full text of Carl’s interaction with ChatGPT, click here.