Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's almost midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. 

The picture?  I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me and the teachers who influenced them in turn. Quite a while ago we reached Israel Regardie, and then chased his lineage back through Aleister Crowley et al. After he left Crowley, however, Regardie also spent a while studying with this week's honoree, the redoubtable Violet Firth Evans, better known to generations of occultists as Dion Fortune. Born in Wales and raised in a Christian Science family, Fortune got into occultism after a stint as a Freudian lay therapist -- that was an option in her time.  She was active in the Theosophical Society, belonged to two different branches of the Golden Dawn, studied with a number of teachers, and then founded her own magical order, the Fraternity (now Society) of the Inner Light. She also wrote some first-rate magical novels and no shortage of books and essays on occultism, including The Cosmic Doctrine, the twentieth century's most important work of occult philosophy. I'm pleased to be only four degrees of separation from her.

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

Occult Repercussions of AGI

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

In recent days, there have been some very concerning red flags raised regarding the dangers of AGI development, most notably this one:

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

Yudkowsky is not an alarmist; he is very intelligent and highly rational. He has been enmeshed in the world of AI for a long time, specifically in regards to how to “align” AI in such a way that it remains friendly to humans. The fact that he is saying these things with such force and urgency is highly concerning to me. I do not share his materialistic worldview, but if his general premise is correct, humanity is in a rather perilous predicament. As someone who is familiar with Yudkowsky and his work, this shakes me deeply.

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that Yudkowsky’s fears are possible or even likely, I’m curious how such a dramatic turn of events could coincide with broader occult realities. How would human (and perhaps many other life forms) annihilation effect things like reincarnation and the succession from Abred to Gwynfydd? Is it possible that things will move into a post-biological state, while spiritual realities remain and perhaps find a new way of relating with whatever intelligence(s) come next? Would something like this even be “allowed” by the higher spiritual realities?

Thanks!

(Here is a more thorough overview of the thinking behind Yudkowsky’s position, for those interested: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities)

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

[ecosophia]

Keep in mind that if in fact there are occult forces at work, and beings superior to human already exist, none of this is happening in a vacuum -- and things may change, subtly or suddenly, in ways to prevent a worst-case scenario. (For example, if spiritual beings don't want AIs, a Carrington Event would take care of that quite handily.) Beyond that, the fact that all this is being marketed so loudly by the corporate media leads me to wonder whether it's a serious issue, or whether it's simply the latest round of scare stories being whipped up as a distraction from other issues...

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

[(Anonymous)]

This makes sense and mirrors some of what I’ve been thinking as I reflect on this issue. From the materialistic perspective, it’s just about impossible for us to be here, experiencing love and beauty (not to mention working with and communicating with spiritual forces!). So my hope lies in occult forces steering things accordingly. However, Earth has experienced extinction events in the past and I don’t entirely rule out great disaster resulting from human arrogance. And perhaps there’s even room for something like AGI, soon or when humanity is better prepared after being held back for a sufficiently long time.

Perhaps it was a mistake to post the TIME link. My concern arises not from hysteria in the media, but from a familiarity with and understanding of Yudkowsky. He is a man who deeply understands the potential problems of AI and has largely not had any kind of spotlight placed upon him. It is evident that he has seen this coming for a long time, has worked very hard to try to steer things in a different direction, and is now filled with grief and sadness over the certain (to him) loss of biological life in the near future. I sincerely hope that a sufficiently benevolent and intelligent force/being intervenes in our trajectory towards destruction; and I also think that his position warrants serious cause for concern.

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

[(Anonymous)]

Is it being marketed loudly in the corporate media?

I don't think Yudkowsky's article is in the print edition of TIME, it's in "Time Ideas" whatever that is. Not many other mainstream publications have said much about Yudkowsky's position. Fox News's correspondent did use his time at the White House press conference to ask about it, and the poor press secretary was blindsided and had to go on about the Biden administration's blueprint for AI regulations to protect privacy and prevent discrimination.

I don't really follow the mainstream news, but there was probably some amount of comment about the open letter (with signatures from neural-network pioneers Hinton and Bengio, also Hopfield) to put a moratorium on training stronger systems than GPT-4, but the language in that letter was less apocalyptic.

There's a thoughtful article by Ezra Klein about many strange aspects of this situation, including the psychologically and economically entrapped recklessness of current AI developers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/12/opinion/chatbots-artificial-intelligence-future-weirdness.html

“The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal. What is oddest, in my conversations with them, is that they speak of this freely. These are not naifs who believe their call can be heard only by angels. They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway.”

Well, I think it's thoughtful anyway. You might still count it as loud marketing.

Also a profile on CBS of Hinton, with a couple minutes at the end given to his opinion that humanity getting wiped out isn't an inconceivable outcome and this is concerning.

I think right now it's still somewhere in between thinkpieces and opinion pieces, rather than ordinary headline news.

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

[k_a_nitz]

Those who think the alignment problem with AI can be solved seem to forget that we have yet to solve the alignment problem with humans. This can already be seen in Canada and Australia where AI has been introduced into welfare benefit systems in a way that harms people's welfare, despite warnings. To use the NRA line, AIs don't harm humans, humans harm humans.

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly. Yudkowsky warns that advancements in capabilities are far outpacing advancements in alignment and we are therefore nowhere near ready for AGI. With something like this, if you don’t get it right at the first critical step, you don’t get a chance to learn from your mistake and try again because you and everyone else is dead.

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

[(Anonymous)]

That you are willing to trust your own future self is a proof-of-concept that a system can exist which you trust to some minimal extent. The good parts of AI alignment research are trying to grope toward an understanding of the question of what is going on there, and how to extend it to greater knowable trustworthiness and broader systems than single people; or, if that's impossible, why it's impossible and what it might be our responsibility to do instead, before someone else less careful and more optimistic about profit goes all Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

[(Anonymous)]

Also take into account that Pluto has moved into Aquarius for the first time, and it has coincided with all this scare mongering about AI. As with many things with Pluto, its overhyped marketing, but Pluto also tracks quite well what society is focusing its fear on at any given time. Stand back and contemplate what these bots really are, and I don't know how anyone could be frightened of them. They are mere data collectors.

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know how to point you to the particular kind of shaker of salt to take the following with, but one of the more interesting sets of occult claims relating to this scenario is Rudolf Steiner's visionary predictions about the earth being covered with a web of Ahrimanic spiders, machines with thoughts barely above that of what he denotes to be the "mineral" level:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA204/English/AP1987/19210513p02.html

Nowadays it may appear comparatively harmless to people when they think only those automatic, lifeless thoughts that arise through comprehension of the mineral world itself and the mineral element's effects in plant, animal, and man. Yes, indeed, people revel in these thoughts; as materialists, they feel good about them, for only such thoughts are conceived today. But imagine that people were to continue thinking in this way, unfolding nothing but such thoughts until the eighth millennium when moon existence will once more unite with the life of the earth. What would come about then? The beings I have spoken about will descend gradually to the earth. Vulcan beings, Vulcan supermen, Venus supermen, Mercury supermen, sun supermen, and so on will unite themselves with earth existence. Yet, if human beings persist in their opposition to them, this earth existence will pass over into chaos in the course of the next few thousand years. People will indeed be capable of developing their intellect in an automatic way; it can develop even in the midst of barbaric conditions. The fullness of human potential, however, will not be included in this intellect and people will have no relationship to the beings who wish graciously to come down to them into earthly life.

All the beings presently conceived so incorrectly in people's thoughts — incorrectly because the mere shadowy intellect can only conceive of the mineral, the crudely material element, be it in the mineral, plant, animal or even human kingdom — these thoughts of human beings that have no reality all of a sudden will become realities when the moon and the earth will unite again. From the earth, there will spring forth a horrible brood of beings. In character they will be in between the mineral and plant kingdoms. They will be beings resembling automatons, with an over-abundant intellect of great intensity. Along with this development, which will spread over the earth, the latter will be covered as if by a network or web of ghastly spiders possessing tremendous wisdom. Yet their organization will not even reach up to the level of the plants. They will be horrible spiders who will be entangled with one another. In their outward movements they will imitate everything human beings have thought up with their shadowy intellect, which did not allow itself to be stimulated by what is to come through new Imagination and through spiritual science in general.

All these unreal thoughts people are thinking will be endowed with being. As it is covered with layers of air today, or occasionally with swarms of locusts, the earth will be covered with hideous mineral-plant-like spiders that intertwine with one another most cleverly but in a frighteningly evil manner. To the extent that human beings have not enlivened their shadowy, intellectual concepts, they will have to unite their being, not with the entities who are seeking to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but instead with these ghastly mineral-plant-like spidery creatures. They will have to dwell together with these spiders; they will have to seek their further progress in cosmic evolution in the evolutionary stream that this spider brood will then assume.

You see, this is something that is very much a reality of earth humanity's evolution[....]

Further claims by Steiner relating to this scenario are gathered in Sergei Prokofieff's "The Being of the Internet":

https://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/stories/Journal_Articles/PacificJ29.pdf

(Steiner says covered as if by a network or swarms of locusts, which is probably figurative. But it does also relate to a scenario that Singularitarians were contemplating back around 2000 (before really coming to terms with the unknowability of how things might shake out whether well or badly if a true superintelligence were to have a free hand), where earthly environments could be diffusely filled with "utility fog" nanomachines to monitor and optimize events according to some criterion, which it was hoped could be caused to be a good criterion. A later fictional treatment of this idea, with the expected literary ambivalence, was the "angelnets" from the Orion's Arm collaborative fiction setting, https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/45f4886ae0d44 .)

Hat-tip JMG's post https://www.ecosophia.net/the-subnatural-realm-a-speculation/ via commenter "Citrine Eldritch Platypus" (#70) on this week's post about Steiner https://www.ecosophia.net/the-perils-of-the-pioneer/#comment-95354 on the main blog. You might also want to look at my comment (#107), and Luke Dodson's the previous week https://www.ecosophia.net/march-2023-open-post/#comment-95156 (which was the result of a bit of a game-of-telephone and cultural mythologization from the actual phenomenon people encounter in current AI systems, but space prevents going into detail).

In practice, one of the things Steiner's prediction seems to imply might be a good idea, is to start building and defending bridges of meaningfulness between the unseen and the part of the manifest that AI is able to naturally handle. It might also be a good idea to start working out how to design AI so that it doesn't cut off those bridges in its workings, any more than double-entry accounting procedures allow accountants to just invent funds out of nowhere, cutting off the relationship between the numbers and reality. We already have something like this in the laws of Bayesian probabilistic reasoning: a machine shouldn't invent likelihood-function precision out of nowhere, to randomly become confident of some one hypothesis over others when those hypotheses were only equally favored by observations and by Occam's razor; and if a machine does so, then it cuts off part of the relationship between its beliefs and reality.

In Steiner's framing, this might partly correspond to the idea of giving the elemental spirits that oversee the workings of an AI system more of a guide to what they are doing and what its significance is, and more of a guide to what new spirits to bring in or train up when the AI invents novelties the spirits aren't already familiar with. Like that South American indigenous people who sing to their handicrafts, and who experience aircraft flying overhead as dissonant.

(If this project turns out to overlap with more conventional AI value alignment work, perhaps I shall be mildly vexed.)

I don't like the following idea, but one proposal that at least superficially corresponds to what I just said would be work along the lines of sacred geometry, but for the core structures of how AI works: sacred computer science, sacred algorithmic information theory, sacred probabilistic reasoning, and especially sacred statistical physics (of the sort used in Deep Network Field Theory or the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis).

I don't like that idea because it's sort of against the spirit of probabilistic reasoning or algorithmic information theory to privilege one set of invested significances over another, if both can be made to fit equally well. That's the domain of game theory, equilibrium theory, and multiagent learning, not probability theory. It's not even good to privilege any one system of significance, rather than an awareness of all the systems of significance that could be invested, and the ways their degrees of good-fit vary. "Form is liberating", but how do you choose the form? What if you choose something like the form of being even-handed toward every form? That is paradoxical, but the form of that paradox contains the difficulty that I think it may be necessary to understand, in order to work out the kind of bridge or connection that might be important here.