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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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

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

Comments

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.