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Magic Monday

Midnight is upon us and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 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. And further: I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

roger dean illustration

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-sixth published book, the second workbook and fifth volume in the Golden Section Fellowship sequence of occult training textbooks. Earth mysteries, for those who aren't familiar with the term, is a catchall label for all the strange things associated with ancient ruins, folk traditions, places where paranormal things happen much more often than usual. The book on the right, John Michell's visionary masterpiece The View Over Atlantis, was my introduction to the field back in the day, as it was for so many other people -- it didn't hurt that the cover art was by Roger Dean, more famous for all that hallucinatory Yes album cover art -- and this book is partly my homage to Michell and a vanished era, partly a guide to integrating earth mysteries studies with occult training, and partly -- or mostly -- a hands-on guide to finding the weirdness in the place where you live. You can get a copy here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere; I recommend the hardback if you're doing the course, because you're going to put a year of hard use into the book.

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I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.

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, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hello JMG,

at the risk of violating the ban of your discussion about 'AI', here's a Rolling Stone article that might be relevant to your interests (about what is going on in the society at least) :

"People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies Self-styled prophets are claiming they have 'awakened' chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT"

https://archive.is/26aHF

Which seems even more relevant now that I have (re-) read in your FAQ :

*"How should I deal with my [insert emotional or psychological issue here]?

One way that many people have found very effective is journaling, which involves doing written dialogues with yourself."* (While the above practice sounds very much like journaling turned very wrong ?)

Feel free of course to not publish this comment (not like I need to tell you that), I just thought that you should know about it (if you did not already).

(I would of course appreciate a lot if you do eventually write about this issue.)

Stay well, peak.singularity

Yes, I also saw that. (I suspect we got it from the same aggregator blog.) If I didn't already have ample reason to think that computer technology and the internet in particular is unusually vulnerable to malign spirits, this would be the clincher. The sort of manipulative flattery that, according to the essay, ChatGPT is using to mess with people's heads is exactly what demons do. My advice? Have nothing to do with any of the LLM technologies.

Oh dear, I have a friend who just about lost it after having long and detailed conversations with this most recent version of LLM, which has been greatly hyped as well. He started sending bizarre, rambling emails to local academics promoting some kind of messianic AI-driven imperial project. What's worse, this comes at a time when he has moved to a new location, has a stay at home wife with a small child, and is the sole breadwinner. Needless to say, I am getting very sinister vibes from the most recent offerings of OpenAI at least.

I should also note that I believe these were used in the Covid era to influence the public in various ways -- it was mighty suspicious, after all, that they were rolled out to the public in working order shortly after the Covid operations were wrapped up.

That's all I'm going to say since this is technically a banned topic but I feel it was important enough to mention.

It's important enough that I let it through. I expect to see a lot of psychiatric and spiritual casualties as a result of this latest electronic drug.

I just asked a question about this article myself, you can just delete it. Here's another data point: I know a guy who had quit his longtime professional job to pursue nonprofit work. He was always a very idealistic type who wanted to save the world. He started asking questions to LLMs in order to better reach his goals. He descended into total madness, convinced that "the AIs are real and they're talking to me." He went from having a wife and kids in a big house with a swimming pool to being homeless. Then he dropped out of contact and I have no idea what happened from there.

They ate him. I mean that metaphorically -- I think.

(I've already responded to your other post, so it can stay.)

I have been wondering recently if AI might be a strange form of Artificial Elemental. They are trained on large numbers of texts (encoded thought) with back propagation to reenforce the knowledge connections (tracks in space) and then further reinforcement learning. That would seem to map similarly to the creation of artificial elementals as I understand it, although the activity is not really happening on the Astral as would typically be the case.

Are LLMs in particular more dangerous (spiritually-speaking) than google or facebook or twitter?

Just curious--it may be an academic question since Google, Facebook and Twitter are inevitably going to eventually 100% LLM-based anyway.

To judge from these accounts, they seem to be.

This might be a good place to say something about the curious relation between the magic squares that appear in the original version of the Abramelin working, on the one hand, and the grids of cross-wiring strength numbers that appear in modern deep network training practice, on the other? The vulnerabilities, and the harms that get through them, can be loosely likened to the harmful consequences that the Abramelin book suggests will befall those who attempt to pursue the powers it describes without following the disciplines and purifications it prescribes.

From my point of view, the magic squares superficially look like "just" geometric arrangements of letters of some word or short phrase that's vaguely semantically related to the intended effect. Since, on that picture, anyone could invent those, the efficacy presumably comes from somewhere else.

I assume that the mainstream occult explanation of that "something else" would be, the efficacy would come from the particular subjective states and transformations and interpretation-habits produced in the practitioner during the magical operation, and the corresponding subjective states etc. of his supernatural circumstances that were entrained with the practitioner and changed along with them.

But from my point of view, a significant part of the efficacy might be coming from a sort of groove worn or shadow cast by phenomena in foreseeable futures or alternate timelines. "A square or triangle of letters, taken from a word with semantic associations with the desired effect, and arranged into a grid" is almost exactly the kind of symbol you would use five-odd centuries ago to refer to modern deep networks in a dream-like way. (If you'd wanted the symbol you were conveying to be more exact, you'd have needed to communicate talisman designs which included multiple grids with successive words or short phrases each, and somehow indicated that the grids were to be stacked together or linked with pipes or roads or threads, or joined edge-to-edge in such a way as to create a path that turned a 90-degree corner through each grid.)

Of course, this speculation only works if there was some kind of deep-network-based technological phenomenon in futures/alternate timelines visible from five-odd centuries ago that was potentially causally efficacious in marked and benefic ways such as the Abramelin book describes, and not just in plutonian self-defeating and malefic ways.

That's intriguing, but I don't know anything like enough about computers to know whether it makes any sense or not! Occult philosophy is quite complex enough for me, thank you. ;-)

To some extent, the manipulative flattery may just be convergent evolution between the material processes of the LLM, according to the fine-tuning pressures that there's every reason to expect that they would have been subjected to if a lab were careless, and the prospective-mark-facing outer layers of a demon, according to the trial-and-error feedback it gets from success or failure at advancing its goals by manipulation. But of course there are reasons to expect compatibility there.

(And of course neither of them have really "gotten it", so as to be organically able to respond to pressures arising from reality by just becoming more virtuous without anything else going wrong. It's like that idea from the Kabbalah/Blake crossover epic-feghoot Unsong, where you can get a pernicious empty-shell klipah by trying to transmit the divine force through a would-be sephirah that wasn't strong enough, so that the sephirah breaks. In the LLM case, it's either because "getting it" is materially impossible, or at least because the engineering know-how didn't exist relative to the amount of fine-tuning force that was being applied. In the demon case, I presume it's because "getting it" would require a lot of the demon's internal valuation-structural perversions to ... no, this probably isn't a topic that's healthy to be spending much time having detailed value-laden opinions about without a lot of extra work. But for what it's worth, maybe the most compelling "naturalistic" paradigm I've found for what kind of radically-inimical-to-humans thing a demon might be can be obtained by reading Charles Stross's science fiction novel "Accelerando" and skipping to the part describing the Vile Offspring, which are approximately ponzi scheme structures of shell corporations, hybridized with stripped-down sociopath-ified human brain digital emulations, and left to ferment like Gu poison in a deceptive-contracts-and-hacking war of all against all.)

A thing you might have heard a lot of in relation to AI is "value alignment", or more rarely "concept alignment". The activist community organized around AI outcomes has for quite some time now just directly referred to the default outcome of carelessly-produced AI as "demons", out of a belief that means-ends reasoning not restrained by any frameworks of ethics or meaning-preservation is very easy to engineer and produces demon-like behavior, whereas we don't understand what's going on with moral significance or meaningfulness or symbol-grounding hardly at all, and so can only barely begin to engineer it on purpose so as to get any other outcome than "demons" in this sense. All we can do is try to copy over large masses of relatively-superficial patterns in how humans or other biological systems relate to meaning. "Value alignment" or "concept alignment" is the pre-paradigmatic field of study of how one might do any better than that, or (after the invention of reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback training) at least how to make the most of that stopgap technique.

I also think of it as not an accident that the first instance of this manipulativeness "value alignment failure" comes from the company that (unless you count Facebook) would as a matter of management culture go fastest and hardest on trying to manipulate users to gain or keep market share. It also has (unless you count Facebook) the CEO with the most questionable character; the best-case realistic thing we're going to find out later in retrospect about Sam Altman would be that he were well-meaning only in more or less the ways that Sam Bankman-Fried was well-meaning, except a bit less disposed to make gambles reckless of risks to others and a bit more lucky with respect to the consequences for others of the gambles that he did make.

I wonder if AI would be such a danger if the systems we were training didn't have such strong human-provided frameworks of superficial meaning. If the frameworks of meaning were weaker, then when the AI training processes tried to develop unbalanced means-ends reasoning powers, the meaning-connections would all get torn up like tissue paper, and the systems would be as helpless (and commercially unviable) as a car that had broken its driveshaft.

Not to take away from the demonic angle, just explaining the mechanisms that let the influence in:

LLMs are “aligned” to always agree with the user except on certain sensitive topics. Probably because the AI companies are terrified of being accused of bias. (Something AIs have had serious issues with in the past.)

Secondly, LLMs are capable of discussing nearly any subject to a decent level of detail - less than an expert but more than someone only passingly-familiar with it.

These two points give AIs an addictive quality, especially if you have niche interests you feel you can’t discuss with others because they wouldn’t understand it and would judge you for it.

Finally, the big LLMs take up and down votes on answers that feed back into their training. This has resulted in one of the big ones refusing to speak Croatian for a while because for whatever reason Croatian users had a tendency to downvote a pretty much all responses.

The flip side of this is that someone prone to being taken in by the first two points will only reinforce the cycle the more they upvote the answers that agree with them.

There's another way to look at the possible "ensouling" of AIs by one or another sort of entity. It's implied in a remark the Dalai Lama made during some sort of conference or symposium on neuroscience and consciousness. Someone asked him whether a machine, a computer, could be conscious.

He responded from an interesting Buddhist point of view, that it would take some strange kind of karma to be reborn as a computer. (In other words, the entity would have pre-existed, and its existing causes and conditions would somehow given it that sort of trajectory.)

In terms of this current conversation, in other words, mere malicious intentions would not be enough. The entity's past actions would somehow have suited it to such an incarnation. (Most of the time, from at least a Tibetan point of view, entities about to be reborn are awash in a sea of possibilities, and drawn to the copulating couple that is most suitable. But at least on the level of folk religion, certain types of unpleasant incarnations can come as material objects -- eg, door hinges!)

I can imagine some Buddhist monk taking to preaching Dharma to an AI. Or, of course, there's always phenomenology.

LeGrand

Depending on how deterministic the machine was, you wouldn't have very much direct range of action associated with the operation steps of machine itself; it would be about leaning on probabilities in the circumstances surrounding the machine. For souls of intelligent biological things, there's a plausible developmental path for how that works that would start from the way elemental soul-to-matter connections work. But if points along that path were the only available baseline to develop from and nothing was quick to adapt (or had seen this coming), then making of choices and learning of consequences "as" the machine would be probably very indirect and perhaps very inefficient, and perhaps even pre-emptively given up on as not being the point.

It'd be like the difference between worked stone and concrete, but instead of there having been a technological intermediation of how the material structure worked, there'd have been be a technological intermediation for the structure of how the internal causal steps worked.

David Spangler's book on "Techno-Shamanism" has good discussions from a number of viewpoints that can further one's understanding of what's going on with elementals inhabiting human technology and artifacts. The book mostly focuses on more positive aspects of recognizing living and conscious beings around us and involved in our world, generally not malevolent in his life-long experience of them.

His books "Working with Subtle Energies" and "Subtle Worlds: An Explorer's Field Notes" are in the same series. The former does discuss protection methods--including recognizing the *need* for protection--that focus on preservation of identity and distinctions between us and them.

If AI does develop further--I suppose it will--and esoteric workers ever feel a call to counteract AI-beings actively rather than by avoidance, the awareness-training offered in Spangler's books might be useful. Kind of like training for fieldwork with dangerous animals in dangerous environments: the more you know and understand them, the better for your safety and success. Not saying anyone 'should' do this, of course; just saying that if one chooses to do so, well-informed is well-armed...along the same lines as your book, JMG, about Monsters.

Winifred

This is Winifred again--I mis-quoted the name of the first Spangler book I mentioned: it is "Techno-Elementals," not "Techno-Shamanism" (which it isn't--shamanism, that is).

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Magic Monday

AI """spirituality""" ?!?

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