very lonely species

The problem is when scientists then say, “Ah, that means we are nothing but machines.” So, they turn a statement they assume for pragmatic reasons into a statement about the reality of the world. And, that is when I come into problems with them. People who do that are usually the ones who do not believe that human are narrators...

I always like to think that robots will be our future partner species. In a way when you look at humans, we are so desperately lonely. We look desperately for animal intelligence by trying to communicate with chimps and dolphins. And, at the same time we look for extraterrestrial intelligence. So, in a way, we are a very lonely species. And, for me as a theologian, that is because we lost our relationship with God that was started at the beginning. So, it makes sense that we would try to build a species that would be our partners and friends...

(T)he best way to build an intelligent machine is to build it in accord with a human newborn, and like a human newborn let it grow in intelligence with its interaction with humans. And, so those robots can only become smart if they have interaction, and that’s exactly how a human baby eventually becomes a smart grownup.

An insightful Interview with Prof Anne Foerst on Groks Science, covering robot intelligence, human narrative and species loneliness. Previous observations here and here. Our growing relationship is an outcome of the physical needs of the fragile organism, an objectively-occurring, always-arising facet of embodied existence. Nothing changes our essential reality and interior process.  

blue splintered plastic

Accidental art. Urban installation. Created over centuries. Various materials: tarmac, brick, concrete, and paint, with placed objects (pieces of blue splintered plastic chip shop fork). Various performers, all unknown. Site specific: intersection of Henry and Malinda streets. Place: Shalesmoor, an area off the centre of Sheffield, UK. Post code: S3 8UL. Map: take a walk around. More: here

global cultural phenomenon

This account of three of The Beatles taking LSD with two of The Byrds in LA 50 years ago this week marks a significant moment in the mass cultural breakthough of non-dual thought and practice in the West that occurred two years later (48 years ago this week), when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi gave a talk at the Hilton hotel on Park Lane in London. That event, attended by all The Beatles, triggered an eruption of this kind of discussion on mainstream Saturday night TV, that brought concepts into public discourse of a kind that had previously only been known among a small cognoscenti, but have been a part of our world ever since (with occasional popular waves like the widespread uptake of Mindfulness today).

Perhaps the chief event during the LA Acid drop was George Harrison hearing Dave Crosby playing Indian raga style on the single guitar they had between them (they were in the bathroom at the time, all of them, hiding from the armed security guards hired to prevent fans overrunning the house they were staying in), and recognising an artistic fit for his growing spiritual sensibility. Crosby and Roger McGuin in their previous incarnation as the Jet Set had practiced at World Pacific studios where their manager worked as an engineer, and where Ravi Shankar, the great Indian maestro, recorded. Crosby's raga prompted an enquiry from George that led to him investigating the source material, buying a sitar on his return to England, and introducing the sound (an elementary riff played as if on a guitar on the song Norwegian Wood) on The Beatles next album (Revolver, released Aug 1966 – 49 years ago this week).

But it also led to him meeting Ravi Shankar and travelling to India to study with him. While in India, George, along with his then wife, Pattie Boyd, were introduced to Indian spirituality by Shankar, who considered the philosophy a vital underpinning to his musical approach. They met teachers and practiced physical yoga, partly because it was necessary for the posture required to play the sitar effectively. But it was back in England that Pattie Boyd, who worked as a model and had met George while playing a small part in The Beatles first film, A Hard Day's Night (release in July 1964 – 51 years ago last month), began to pursue a dedicated practice in order to realise a deeper personal understanding. At that time, London had many centres that studied and practiced in the Indian traditions, but none were as active in promoting the message as the Spiritual Regenaration Movement founded in 1957 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. 

Maharishi was a disciple of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati the head of the Jyotir Math, a monastery in northern India founded in the 8^th century by Adi Shankara, the great teacher who established Advaita as the principle school in the Vedanta tradition (as propounded in three key texts, the Upanishads, the Baghavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras). According to Advaita (literally translatable as non-duality) the idea that we exist as separated, competing individuals in a world of material objects, is a delusion caused by ignorance of the reality, and creates suffering, the endless dissatisfaction of desire. From its perspective the world of form arises from the formless ground of pure consciousness, and everything that appears in the world has its root in consciousness. Realising the reality – which eliminates the sense of isolation and fear, ends yearning for the objects of the senses, and brings blissful fulfilment - is the goal of human life, and turning inwards to recognise this truth is the end of a natural process that governs the cosmos (known as Karma).

Maharishi thought that the post-2^nd World War world, dominated by the West, which was then locked into a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, had drifted so far from the truth that it needed a rescue mission, and so he stripped out much of the potentially alienating cultural accoutrements of Indian spiritual practice, and presented a key component, meditation - and in particular, mantra meditation (the repetition of a sacred sound in order to lead the mind off of its deluded thoughts and allow its core reality to emerge naturally) - as an accessible pursuit. He then began a series of world tours in 1958 that by 1967 saw him established in many countries, including Britain, and able to command respectably sized audiences for his talks. His London supporters used to advertise events in The Times newspaper, one of which caught the attention of Pattie Boyd one Sunday at home in Surrey. She subsequently attended a course at Caxton Hall over a weekend, received initiation and became a practitioner of what is termed Transcendental Meditation.

That was in February 1967, while her husband was away touring with The Beatles. She then inspired George enough for him to recruit the rest of the band into attending the famous meeting some months later in August of that year. The Beatles were such a huge global cultural phenomenon that every action they took was recorded by the international media. The event at the Hilton, and what followed (The Beatles flew to India to study at Maharishi's ashram, along with a retinue that included the Hollywood star Mia Farrow, and influential folk-rock musician Donovan) represented a moment when ideas about spirituality, consciousness, the non-dual nature of the universe and our purpose in life - held as revealed truth in all cultures throughout history, yet long dormant in the West, where spiritual traditions had lost sight of their own essential message - forcibly reasserted itself as a field of cultural enquiry. It is remarkable to see the form it took in 1960s British society, and allows us to look more objectively at current circumstances, and how similar debates are structured around these issues today.

pic from here

nano-gloop of pure information

(Spoilers!) Is Scarlet Jo emerging as the poster girl for Transhumanism in mainstream cinema? That's the second film I've watched this year where she becomes the mythical, tech-assisted transcendental consciousness of materialist dreams (we prefer to catch them late round here). Following her inspired voicing of the sentient Operating System in Spike Jonze's Her, that sees her 'character' expand into infinity in the third act, in Luc Besson's Lucy she enacts a similar denouement after an accidentally imbibed superdrug boosts her mind beyond its bodily limits, becoming a kind of nano-gloop of pure information sucked from global digital connectivity (which is portrayed as a good thing, by the way).

Transhumanism, partly an over-excitable projection of the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (see recent Wire article for a sober update of progress), represents the emergence of a natural human yearning for cosmic completeness in a secular culture which has colonised even spiritual discourse (see this most obvious example). It accompanies a widespread interest in Meditation and its decaffeinated cousin, Mindfulness (with or without physical yoga, with or without the technical assistance of an app), the emergence of antidotal practice in the face of the stress and anxiety of modern, urban life. All of which provides a fertile ground for a deeper emergence of ideas about the nature of reality which expose the entirely limited nature of materialism as a presiding philosophical discourse.

Added: from here: "In this vision the Internet and web are just the first rung of a ladder that leads to neural implants, sentient computers, nanotechnology and eventually the Singularity, that mystical moment when progress happens so quickly that all of humanity's problems disappear"

Pic from here

achieve a higher morality

From here, a summary of Transhumanism (a dream of spiritual perfection delivered by technology): 

"(A) network of beliefs that people can/ will - sooner-or-later/ and should: 
1. Always be happy - never suffer (except insofar as they wish to)
2. Never be ill, never age
3. Never die - there will be no ageing (see above) and death will be infinitely postpone-able - the person will be open-endedly repairable or restoreable - death will be reversible
4. Be able to improve intelligence, personality, strength, capacity for pleasure etc - beyond anything yet attained by any human
5. Be able to change sex, make new sexes, abolish sexual identity and the need for sex itself - or redefine and modify them endlessly
6. Wholly detach reproduction from sex - be able to make babies,perfect babies, without intervention of parents - to bring them up perfectly without 'need' for families
7. Go beyond historical levels of human wisdom, goodness - achieve a higher morality (which will be effortless and universal)"

See also here

metaphorical landscapes

Just caught up with Interstellar (warning: link contains spoilers and massive pisstake). I prefer to wait several months until the hype dies down on these movies, watch them free from too much cultural noise. It's a typically materialist epic in which the earth rejects the human race, withdraws its food supply, and dumps acres of dust over the American Midwest home of the main characters, prompting them to look for a new planet to live on. 

So, drawn by mysterious signs sent across time and space, the hero sets out to overcome all obstacles, external and internal, before finding himself (SPOILER!) in a place beyond our conventional space-time limitations. Here he is able - through a channel of love to his daughter, who is still back on earth several years before he left (you have to get past the logic) - to lay the path he himself has subsequently followed to where the human race can find their salvation. Which raises interesting questions about current materialist thinking and how it's reaching for meaning beyond limitations imposed by its own viewpoint. 

Focussed exclusively on exterior measurable qualities of the world, and regarding human intelligence as essentially formed by a unique combining of atoms (consciousness is not discussed in the film), these characters are led to construct metaphorical landscapes out of speculative reasoning around theories about the nature of time and space that deny the conventional (Newtonian) frameworks materialism conducts its day-to-day business within. The film ultimately proposes that love (between father and daughter in the key narrative device, but discussed elsewhere in the film as a potential impersonal guiding material force) is the key to our ultimate salvation, trumping, for instance, one character's insistence that the survival instinct is all we have. 

Love is one of the great imponderables for materialist thought. It cannot be explained away by science. Sure, the bond between partners, family members, between tribes, societies, nations, races, species etc, can be analysed in terms of Darwinian natural selection, but none of that explains where that deep conscious self, opened up to purely unthinking benevolence, comes from. The way love is discussed in the film, suggests that discourses outside of the purely materialist and secular are providing the ground for a resolution of the central conflict raised, even if it is just-out-of-reach of conventional explanation.

Pic from here

constant feedback loop

From Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humanity, in the Guardian:

“I don’t take capitalism and neo-liberalism for granted. I teach all these 20-year-old students and they were born into a capitalist world. It’s the only system. There’s no alternative and nobody can even imagine that there could be. But I remember the time when these things were really hotly contested.”

Could just as well be talking about materialist realism. Also:

“When people talk about merging with computers to create cyborgs, it’s not some prophecy about the year 2200. It’s happening right now. More and more of our reality exists within computers or through them... we will see real changes in humans themselves – in their biology, in their physical and cognitive abilities. It was the same with the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago. Nobody sat down and had a vision: ‘This is what agriculture is going to be for humankind and for the rest of the planet.’ It was an incremental process, step by step, taking centuries, even thousands of years, which nobody really understood and nobody could foresee the consequences.”

Not for how our brains respond. They are clearly deeply effected by exposure to constant digital stimulus, hooked into a constant feedback loop of desire and its unsatisfaction. But that doesn't change the essence of being human. Maybe it even causes a quicker than traditionally-conceived breakdown of tolerance for delusional consumerist contentment.

Ultimately, though, this has to be seen as an impersonal process playing out beyond our control, with its naturally-arising antithesis built in. Look at how we are simultaneously turning to interior experience, witnessing our own minds at work. Learning how to process stress and anxiety, recognising what depression is, and by doing so, affirming the presence of a deeper ground of being that remains stable beyond the fluctuations of desire. 

Pic from here

unpredictably dangerous rogue

No one's judging robots just yet. But would we judge one fully-tooled up with artificial intelligence and able to develop its own responses? Probably not. We'd say, No, it's acting according to its complex programmed logic, however refined that's become. And that's on us. Wouldn't stop us terminating it as an unpredictably dangerous rogue element in society. But we wouldn't actually apply moral judgement to it. We'd continue to reserve that for human behaviour (over a certain age and with observable functionality). Even though human behaviour is probably not that different.

ongoing drama

Channeling the psychedelic left confluence of exotic spirituality with popular oppositional anarchist politics, Patti Smith at Glastonbury brings the Dalai Lama onstage for a birthday celebration and a speech about compassion, and then sings People have the Power to the crowd. This of course exposes the hopeless confusion of that particular radical strand that goes back to Patti's friend and mentor, Allen Ginsberg, and his kind, and is kept alive in Britain almost single-handedly by Russell Brand. One of Buddhism's central characteristics is its belief in Karma, that great underlying driving force of the cosmos, that moves everything according to its implicit law. Every single organism is driven by it, just part of the big ongoing drama of creation. That may emerge as left wing activity, but it may equally emerge as its opposite. The universe is indifferent. Not that the crowd are likely to have shared her political views if these figures are accurate, despite the efforts of the organisers and the festival's regular speechmakers. 

utopian dream

From the Open Source Nano Replicator Initiative, another pitch for the end-of-suffering utopian dream that materialist realists can't function without. Same God's-kingdom-on-earth pitch as the religious millenarianists, the externalisation of spiritual enlightenment. See how detailed it is: 

several changes that the existence of a nano-replicator would bring to the world. They include:

• The end of poverty
• The creation of abundance & utopia
• The end of crime through the removal of greed
• End of financial and resource driven wars
• The end of money as we know it
• The end of energy problems throughout the world
• The end of government as we know it

destroy our sense of individual self

"For the secularised mind, meditation fills a spiritual vacuum; it brings the hope of becoming a better, happier individual in a more peaceful world. However, the fact that meditation was primarily designed not to make us happier, but to destroy our sense of individual self – who we feel and think we are most of the time – is often overlooked in the science and media stories about it, which focus almost exclusively on the benefits practitioners can expect." 

That this statement appears in an article in the Guardian (newspaper of the UK  liberal bourgeois worldview) is a sign that the widespread understanding of mindfulness/meditation is under scrutiny from from an informed spiritual perspective. The widespread emergence of mindfulness/meditation (and physical yoga) practices in western society over the last 50 years or so (really since The Beatles met the Maharishi at the Hilton Hotel in London one summer evening in 1967) can be seen as an antidote to mass existential anxiety, arising as traditional life modes are superseded by a global materialistic outlook. This anxiety is underpinned by an economic system rooted in atomised individualistic drives, so it's not surprising that meditation is presented from this atomised materialistic perspective, and widely supported by the kind of corporations that drive the economic system, part of the incorporation of people into the underpinning bourgeois materialist lifestyle. 

pic from here

invested with complex functionalities

UK TV Channel 4's new series, Humans (Sun nights @ 9pm), has got people's attention. It's a drama with Robots, or Synths as they are termed in the show, and its subject matter is the usual concern about artificial intelligence (AI) threatening the social order. One character, a concerned professor, even makes a speech about the singularity. It's that kind of script, plenty of inter-human relationship problems but underwritten by big ideas, not the least that of affection between humans and machines (see here for some preliminary notes on the general subject).

It's a growing concern in popular culture, as movies like Her, Ex Machina and Transcendence demonstrate, but its becoming an issue in economics and politics too. Thoughts about the great "decoupling" of workers from production are stirring debate about how our current economic structures are going to support idle populations. (It could also be viewed as the deeper question prompting current interest in the Citizens Income, which has advocates on the liberal Left see EC730 and libertarian Right.)  

For this blog, however, the main question is how our culture deals with the nature of consciousness, and what discussion about AI reveals about the dominance of what I term, materialist realism. That robots are becoming a feature of our landscape is obvious, but fears that they will come to rival us, as conscious organisms in a competitive power game, is clearly a projection of our own drives onto what will be simply usefully functioning adjuncts to our world. 

Artificial limbs activated by brainwaves is just one way the human body is becoming enhanced by robot technology, but consciousness in this instance remains with the human. Under material realist presumptions, consciousness is only the interaction of certain forms of insentient matter, so, for materialist realists, consciousness might just as easily develop in a machine that has been invested with the complex functionalities of a human kind. 

From our perspective, this is a complete misunderstanding of what consciousness is, but provides a useful context for the kind of discussion that places this fundamental question of human existing in a popular framework. We need a much more sensible approach to metaphysics to grasp the nature of our own sentience, of which consciousness is the foundation, and allay fears about future wars with machines that betray present time confusion and ignorance. 

pic from here