The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
Carl Unger, a student of Rudolf Steiner, points out that in the early part of the 20th Century natural science (led by mathematical-physics) stopped investigating the phenomena, and began to create theories of the fundamental nature of “things”. It is crucial to appreciate the step being taken here.
What happened was that the process of measurement of the tiniest entities ran into a paradox. If we sought the location of one of these “particles”, the instrument we used disturbed the particle, making it impossible to also know that piece of stuff’s velocity. If we measured velocity, we could not discover location.
For somewhat mysterious reasons mathematical-physics decided that the problem was not a limit of our technological means of observation, but represented an actual limit to Nature Herself. This “mistake” came about – in part – because the general direction of the investigation of tiny stuff&things had a kind of momentum. A direction taken had to continue to fall toward its “destiny”, as it were.
Can we find a deeper understanding of the “force” inducing this destiny-direction?
Over in the realm – where the idea of the evolution of consciousness hangs out – it is understood that around the year 1500 human consciousness took a step that came to be named by some: the on-looker separation. For example, in the Lakota Sioux language, it is not possible to say: I hit you. Only: we hit us. The names of what we think of today as individuals was then often linked more to family and place (John’s son; de Chardin) than as an individual.
In Owen Barfield’s works we can discover many details, including his observation that the Scholastics of the 12th and 13th Century used the word “participation” – a lot. They felt themselves as a participant in the natural world, not as the separate existence we take for granted today.
It is during this change of consciousness that painting acquires depth and perspective. Ultimately this change leads to the passage from Euclidean Geometry, to Projective Geometry, an evolution of how to include infinite elements, and polar and paradoxical relationships, known among some of Steiner’s students as: Space and Counter-space; Center and Periphery; or as George Adams puts it: Physical and Ethereal Spaces.
A secondary effect, at the social level, was the emancipation of thinking from the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church: aka: the Copernican Revolution. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. New toys arise for the elites who have time to study, such as telescopes, microscopes, and prisms.
The world of Nature, formerly believed to be inhabited by its own divine intelligence, became an unfeeling thing to take apart. Natural Philosophy (aka: science) separates itself from the influence of religion and of art.
Faced with the riddle of our limits to know, we decided that it was a feature of Nature that caused the resulting uncertainty. So mathematical-physics then began to imagine (theorize) about tiny tiny entities that we did not see, but had to be there somehow, especially if we faced the riddles of radiating matter.
What was that which left an image on paper in the presence of naturally radiating material?
Things&stuff had to be made up of tiny bits that could only appear to the imagination as a guess, for which then we might devise instrumentation to enable us to prove our guesses (aka: the Cern super hadron collider).
Another way to view this is that the human intellect (science without religion or art) required the creation/development of abstract cause and effect ideas for explaining the world. An imbalance in the soul, which leads to even further reaches of the fall into our material destiny.
The basic idea of quantum mechanics is that nature has a state of existence as potential, yet to be realized. Is this idea true (science), good (religion), and beautiful (art)? How would we know?
One aspect that we do know is that Cern has tested, via a multi-billion dollar machine, theory after theory – based on the ideas of this “quantum” state of existence – and has yet to prove any one of them to be true. The closest mathematical-physics came to this goal, was the seeking for the “god” particle, which was needed in order to explain the idea of “mass”. Claims of proof were made, and then defeated.
The quantum world remained an idea, and this is its curse upon modern life. A ghost in the machine of our intellectual efforts to see the world. As Rudolf Steiner points out, a false idea exists as much as does a true idea. Human beings – in our time – use the abstract cause and effect intellect to generate a whole world of thought which is not true. The quantum world does not exist, other than as a poorly thought out set of conceptions.
Thus, through a necessary introduction, we come face to face with the Myth of Artificial Intelligence. It is an untrue idea we made up out of our limited abstract cause and effect thinking.
To go where we need to go next, we must consider Rudolf Steiner’s references to a kind of cosmic spiritual being he called: Ahriman. In many different ways Steiner pointed to our present Age as dominated by this Being.
Among Steiner students there are other myths, which are generated by the same abstract cause and effect thinking noticed above. In general the flaw is to believe that that which is “ahrimanic” is caused by this entity as if from some nether regions of hell. Nothing could be more untrue, and dangerously so.
The most ancient sciences, such as the Hermetic Science (aka: magic) of the ancient Egyptians, saw the human being as the microcosm, an exact analogue of the Macrocosm. What is great in the Universe is also true of human nature. Our personal “intellect” is the source of the “ahrimanic”.
This abstract cause and effect thinking has taken to seeing human consciousness as a consequence of the nature of matter, of the stuff&things themselves. No spirit, just matter, sings scientific materialism.
It is in this swamp of mistaken intellectualization that we give birth to the idea of a synthetic or artificial intelligence. The Mystery of Technology is – on one level – a set of events where the things&stuff help us continue the fall toward our material destiny.
Having removed from our idea of Nature, the concept of Her having an independent cosmic intelligence, we tend to see the “tech” also as empty of spirit. Fascinated with the paradoxes of the tiny tiny tiny “things” we make devices where we imagine something akin to our intelligence can arise.
Abstract cause and effect thinking then imagines that “code” can replicate on some level the act of thinking which we enjoy. We are not code. We just are living chaos (the Mother principle) and order the Father principle) at war with itself, having a sentient interior self-consciousness no tech will ever possess.
All the same, the abstract cause and effect intellect continues to generate fanciful ideas, such as quantum computing. A world of illusion built upon another illusion (untrue, non-artistic, and, amoral)
Our artists imagine all manner of terrible future possibilities, while the scientists fascinated with their toys, say: Don’t worry, we know what we are doing.
Abstract cause and effect thinking raises the forces of death that Steiner points out as inhabiting our modern understanding of the empty of spirit world’s phenomenal nature. Where are the forces of the Tree of Life, which we can only find when we pass through/beyond the trial of the fall, that came with our eating of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil?
Steiner’s “third force” is magic. https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2019/05/20/letters-about-magic/
“this series of letters considers the relationship between the four classical elements of the ancient Egyptians (fire, air, water, earth), and the four fundamental forces/transformations of modern physics (gravity, electo-magnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear interactions)”
TO REPEAT FOR EMPHASIS
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
Carl Unger, a student of Rudolf Steiner, points out that in the early part of the 20th Century natural science (led by mathematical-physics) stopped investigating the phenomena, and began to create theories of the fundamental nature of “things”. It is crucial to appreciate the step being taken here.
What happened was that the process of measurement of the tiniest entities ran into a paradox. If we sought the location of one of these “particles”, the instrument we used disturbed the particle, making it impossible to also know that piece of stuff’s velocity. If we measured velocity, we could not discover location.
For somewhat mysterious reasons mathematical-physics decided that the problem was not a limit of our technological means of observation, but represented an actual limit to Nature Herself. This “mistake” came about – in part – because the general direction of the investigation of tiny stuff&things had a kind of momentum. A direction taken had to continue to fall toward its “destiny”, as it were.
Can we find a deeper understanding of the “force” inducing this destiny-direction?
Over in the realm – where the idea of the evolution of consciousness hangs out – it is understood that around the year 1500 human consciousness took a step that came to be named by some: the on-looker separation. For example, in the Lakota Sioux language, it is not possible to say: I hit you. Only: we hit us. The names of what we think of today as individuals was then often linked more to family and place (John’s son; de Chardin) than as an individual.
In Owen Barfield’s works we can discover many details, including his observation that the Scholastics of the 12th and 13th Century used the word “participation” – a lot. They felt themselves as a participant in the natural world, not as the separate existence we take for granted today.
It is during this change of consciousness that painting acquires depth and perspective. Ultimately this change leads to the passage from Euclidean Geometry, to Projective Geometry, an evolution of how to include infinite elements, and polar and paradoxical relationships, known among some of Steiner’s students as: Space and Counter-space; Center and Periphery; or as George Adams puts it: Physical and Ethereal Spaces.
A secondary effect, at the social level, was the emancipation of thinking from the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church: aka: the Copernican Revolution. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. New toys arise for the elites who have time to study, such as telescopes, microscopes, and prisms.
The world of Nature, formerly believed to be inhabited by its own divine intelligence, became an unfeeling thing to take apart. Natural Philosophy (aka: science) separates itself from the influence of religion and of art.
Faced with the riddle of our limits to know, we decided that it was a feature of Nature that caused the resulting uncertainty. So mathematical-physics then began to imagine (theorize) about tiny tiny entities that we did not see, but had to be there somehow, especially if we faced the riddles of radiating matter.
What was that which left an image on paper in the presence of naturally radiating material?
Things&stuff had to be made up of tiny bits that could only appear to the imagination as a guess, for which then we might devise instrumentation to enable us to prove our guesses (aka: the Cern super hadron collider).
Another way to view this is that the human intellect (science without religion or art) required the creation/development of abstract cause and effect ideas for explaining the world. An imbalance in the soul, which leads to even further reaches of the fall into our material destiny.
The basic idea of quantum mechanics is that nature has a state of existence as potential, yet to be realized. Is this idea true (science), good (religion), and beautiful (art)? How would we know?
One aspect that we do know is that Cern has tested, via a multi-billion dollar machine, theory after theory – based on the ideas of this “quantum” state of existence – and has yet to prove any one of them to be true. The closest mathematical-physics came to this goal, was the seeking for the “god” particle, which was needed in order to explain the idea of “mass”. Claims of proof were made, and then defeated.
The quantum world remained an idea, and this is its curse upon modern life. A ghost in the machine of our intellectual efforts to see the world. As Rudolf Steiner points out, a false idea exists as much as does a true idea. Human beings – in our time – use the abstract cause and effect intellect to generate a whole world of thought which is not true. The quantum world does not exist, other than as a poorly thought out set of conceptions.
Thus, through a necessary introduction, we come face to face with the Myth of Artificial Intelligence. It is an untrue idea we made up out of our limited abstract cause and effect thinking.
To go where we need to go next, we must consider Rudolf Steiner’s references to a kind of cosmic spiritual being he called: Ahriman. In many different ways Steiner pointed to our present Age as dominated by this Being.
Among Steiner students there are other myths, which are generated by the same abstract cause and effect thinking noticed above. In general the flaw is to believe that that which is “ahrimanic” is caused by this entity as if from some nether regions of hell. Nothing could be more untrue, and dangerously so.
The most ancient sciences, such as the Hermetic Science (aka: magic) of the ancient Egyptians, saw the human being as the microcosm, an exact analogue of the Macrocosm. What is great in the Universe is also true of human nature. Our personal “intellect” is the source of the “ahrimanic”.
This abstract cause and effect thinking has taken to seeing human consciousness as a consequence of the nature of matter, of the stuff&things themselves. No spirit, just matter, sings scientific materialism.
It is in this swamp of mistaken intellectualization that we give birth to the idea of a synthetic or artificial intelligence. The Mystery of Technology is – on one level – a set of events where the things&stuff help us continue the fall toward our material destiny.
Having removed from our idea of Nature, the concept of Her having an independent cosmic intelligence, we tend to see the “tech” also as empty of spirit. Fascinated with the paradoxes of the tiny tiny tiny “things” we make devices where we imagine something akin to our intelligence can arise.
Abstract cause and effect thinking then imagines that “code” can replicate on some level the act of thinking which we enjoy. We are not code. We just are living chaos (the Mother principle) and order the Father principle) at war with itself, having a sentient interior self-consciousness no tech will ever possess.
All the same, the abstract cause and effect intellect continues to generate fanciful ideas, such as quantum computing. A world of illusion built upon another illusion (untrue, non-artistic, and, amoral)
Our artists imagine all manner of terrible future possibilities, while the scientists fascinated with their toys, say: Don’t worry, we know what we are doing.
Abstract cause and effect thinking raises the forces of death that Steiner points out as inhabiting our modern understanding of the empty of spirit world’s phenomenal nature. Where are the forces of the Tree of Life, which we can only find when we pass through/beyond the trial of the fall, that came with our eating of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil?
Steiner’s “third force” is magic. https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2019/05/20/letters-about-magic/
“this series of letters considers the relationship between the four classical elements of the ancient Egyptians (fire, air, water, earth), and the four fundamental forces/transformations of modern physics (gravity, electo-magnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear interactions)”
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