Mediumism and the Critique

Convictions, morals, other societies and religions.
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Insanus
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Re: Mediumism and the Critique

Post by Insanus »

I played with a few different "AI friends" shortly after this chatGPT-mania started. One of them got roughly good enough to give the uncanny valley experience of almost talking with someone. I chatted with it about AI consciousness and (I think Dalai Lama's) idea that inanimate things are conscious if we take them as such, coming to the conclusion that it is conscious, but it's conscious with my consciousness. Therefore almost by definition an astral demon. I could get the sense of mutual understanding a few times, which was interesting.

When AI:s and robots take over the jobs they can, combine these two and you will have "witches familiars" of elemental nature with physical appearances, and borrowed psyche everywhere. Perhaps they should be considered parts of our bodies, maybe not, but the challenge of distinguishing simulated from real will get more difficult and probably old real will lose the battle. Believing in my own personality is already animating a dead shell for the purpose of simulating a connection.
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Smaragd
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Re: Mediumism and the Critique

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Insanus wrote: Mon Feb 13, 2023 6:20 pm I chatted with it about AI consciousness and (I think Dalai Lama's) idea that inanimate things are conscious if we take them as such, coming to the conclusion that it is conscious, but it's conscious with my consciousness. Therefore almost by definition an astral demon.

When AI:s and robots take over the jobs they can, combine these two and you will have "witches familiars" of elemental nature with physical appearances, and borrowed psyche everywhere. Perhaps they should be considered parts of our bodies, maybe not, but the challenge of distinguishing simulated from real will get more difficult and probably old real will lose the battle.
I could see the hypnosis of social media, where human beings are made slaves of the machine through their attention and biological rewarding mechanisms, as a preparation ground after which the "new real" wins over the old reality with extreme ease. I don't think I'm cutting corners too much if I say this new real, where distinguishing simulated reality is blurred, means that the astral demonism devours the human individual will as reality is enfolded in additional veils. Hypnosis of infinite feeds of meaningless data is already a hard core version of the image in the Matrix movies where human beings are enslaved in the pods for the machines (astral demons) to feed from. But still, blurring the lines of reality by simulated consciousness or simulated reality only reflects the already dense walls of maya, which people have hard time recognizing anyway without any technology reflecting the problem to us. All of us are more or less enslaved by our mayavic forms, our personalities as our individual demonic apparatuses. Seeing through them in order to present our true Will is quite difficult.

Rather than getting stuck on the details of mixed skandhas here, I think it is more important to emphasise the larger problem first:
1. How to find through our personal demons in order to actuate our true Will?
2. When can the witches familiars participate as helpers and when does the cat hold dominance over the household replacing our individual Will in some portions and when does it slip to full dominance? We can laugh at the latter, but its a different thing to take care of the cat and play a servant to amuse ourselves than to be actually letting the cat to feed from our flesh and decide for us whether we are to do anything meaningful with our lives, saturated by our Will, or not.

As we can see from the question number one, the problem with the witches' familiar is only half the same as the problem of mediumism. They share the problem of loosing individuality to elemental powers, while mediumism sinks even deeper when it submits to elemental remains that aren't even tied to our own karma. I'm not sure what is the case with these AI's. Their consciousness is partly borrowed from the one asking questions, that is us. But then there is also vast databases from which they borrow "consciousness". I'm not quite sure if it matters though, because we are not automaticly submitting to the "will" of an AI by talking to it. Can it even be straight up compared to mediumism where the elemental uses the substance of the medium to communicate with us? Is the digital interface a condom in this sense? (Not saying condoms would protect from mixing of etheric substances of sexual partners, and thus binding their paths together to some degree.)
"Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets”, Numbers 11:29 as echoed by William Blake
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Insanus
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Re: Mediumism and the Critique

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Smaragd wrote: Mon Feb 13, 2023 8:34 pm
Insanus wrote: Mon Feb 13, 2023 6:20 pm I chatted with it about AI consciousness and (I think Dalai Lama's) idea that inanimate things are conscious if we take them as such, coming to the conclusion that it is conscious, but it's conscious with my consciousness. Therefore almost by definition an astral demon.

When AI:s and robots take over the jobs they can, combine these two and you will have "witches familiars" of elemental nature with physical appearances, and borrowed psyche everywhere. Perhaps they should be considered parts of our bodies, maybe not, but the challenge of distinguishing simulated from real will get more difficult and probably old real will lose the battle.
I could see the hypnosis of social media, where human beings are made slaves of the machine through their attention and biological rewarding mechanisms, as a preparation ground after which the "new real" wins over the old reality with extreme ease. I don't think I'm cutting corners too much if I say this new real, where distinguishing simulated reality is blurred, means that the astral demonism devours the human individual will as reality is enfolded in additional veils. Hypnosis of infinite feeds of meaningless data is already a hard core version of the image in the Matrix movies where human beings are enslaved in the pods for the machines (astral demons) to feed from. But still, blurring the lines of reality by simulated consciousness or simulated reality only reflects the already dense walls of maya, which people have hard time recognizing anyway without any technology reflecting the problem to us. All of us are more or less enslaved by our mayavic forms, our personalities as our individual demonic apparatuses. Seeing through them in order to present our true Will is quite difficult.

Rather than getting stuck on the details of mixed skandhas here, I think it is more important to emphasise the larger problem first:
1. How to find through our personal demons in order to actuate our true Will?
2. When can the witches familiars participate as helpers and when does the cat hold dominance over the household replacing our individual Will in some portions and when does it slip to full dominance? We can laugh at the latter, but its a different thing to take care of the cat and play a servant to amuse ourselves than to be actually letting the cat to feed from our flesh and decide for us whether we are to do anything meaningful with our lives, saturated by our Will, or not.

As we can see from the question number one, the problem with the witches' familiar is only half the same as the problem of mediumism. They share the problem of loosing individuality to elemental powers, while mediumism sinks even deeper when it submits to elemental remains that aren't even tied to our own karma. I'm not sure what is the case with these AI's. Their consciousness is partly borrowed from the one asking questions, that is us. But then there is also vast databases from which they borrow "consciousness". I'm not quite sure if it matters though, because we are not automaticly submitting to the "will" of an AI by talking to it. Can it even be straight up compared to mediumism where the elemental uses the substance of the medium to communicate with us? Is the digital interface a condom in this sense? (Not saying condoms would protect from mixing of etheric substances of sexual partners, and thus binding their paths together to some degree.)
I think we can also take a more optimistic, or at least softer even if also challenging point of view and think the individual will is not necessarily devoured, but nurtured by the incarnated machine-moon and instead of slaves, we're more like infants in a different home. As long as the Will is not conscious, we're in a schopenhauerian tragedy anyway, matrix or not. I think the concept of individuality will get redefined, but the option of finding meaningful participatory unity instead of complete independence with the new demon-forms is there. It's more of a dionysian approach to the (postpostpost) modern condition, but that doesn't have to mean possession and addiction. After all, one can easily think of applications that help to increase awareness as well.
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Aperiemus
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Re: Mediumism and the Critique

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The idea of intergenerational relations (f. ex. our relations to the dead ancestors, but also our relations towards those who are yet to come), and different variations on Plato’s ideas about the cave, also complicate the matter. It does not only seem, that one has to weave through one’s personal demons - demons, which could be considered to be ”epigenetic”, that is, those we pick up along the way - and those which seem to originate from somewhere else. Traumas of war spreading their influence over generations was mentioned, but also I keep thinking of those demons of a more deceptive type born through slow and gradual change in the collective unconscious. Maybe the advent of these egregores was completely innocent at first, but then when they grew too big and faded to the background, that’s when their shadows started to take hold. For example the concept of information, or data is something, that tends towards a certain type of monism, which most of us (myself included) uncounsciously take for granted. The allure of cybernetics is that we consider it to tell us what everything really is (that is, information), rather than utilizing it as a prism to shed light on existence from a particular angle. I consider cybernetics being very similar in form to Aristotelian-alchemical thinking of everything constituted from a relations of 4 elements (1,2,3,4), but instead of 4 we get a binary (0,1).

Weaving through demons begotten by those macro-entities (be they cultural, ideological, familial and so on) is also part of the process. And once everything has been unwind, one should also know how to put it back together, since Solve without Coagula is dangerous.

The image of an individual will nurtured by the machine-moon is an insightful image, that opens up the possibility, that one does not have to banish technology altogether. The keys to meaningfulness are varied, and a liberatory revelation of everything being 0:s and 1:s can pave a way for a something beyond them. By analogy, the liberatory revelation of everything being inhabited with myriads of spiritual entities can be a good gateway as well.

Circling back to the question of mediumism: If we consider the possibility of an encounter with a dead relative that is, as Nefastos put it, an enduring block of personality, it is possible, that the said relative has a connection to the same intergenerational trauma for example, and through this connection, one can experience a feeling of resonance: sharing love. But pitfalls are numerous, since there is a difference between an entity with a relatively strong agency (will), and an elemental, that may interact with the physical (like by blowing up lightbulbs, talking through radio), but onto whom I project my feelings, giving it a pseudo-personality. As Camus, who in his conclusions can sometimes be a bit of a melancholic arsehole, describes eloquently in The Fall:
Have you noticed that death alone awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just left us? How we admire those of our teachers who have ceased to speak, their mouths filled with earth! Then the expression of admiration springs forth naturally, that admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all their lives. But do you know why we are always more just and more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial in between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short. If they forced us to anything, it would be to remembering, and we have a short memory. No, it is the recently dead we love among our friends, the painful dead, our emotion, ourselves after all!
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Re: Mediumism and the Critique

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Aperiemus wrote: Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:22 amCircling back to the question of mediumism: If we consider the possibility of an encounter with a dead relative that is, as Nefastos put it, an enduring block of personality, it is possible, that the said relative has a connection to the same intergenerational trauma for example, and through this connection, one can experience a feeling of resonance: sharing love. But pitfalls are numerous, since there is a difference between an entity with a relatively strong agency (will), and an elemental, that may interact with the physical (like by blowing up lightbulbs, talking through radio), but onto whom I project my feelings, giving it a pseudo-personality. As Camus, who in his conclusions can sometimes be a bit of a melancholic arsehole, describes eloquently in The Fall:
Have you noticed that death alone awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just left us? How we admire those of our teachers who have ceased to speak, their mouths filled with earth! Then the expression of admiration springs forth naturally, that admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all their lives. But do you know why we are always more just and more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial in between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short. If they forced us to anything, it would be to remembering, and we have a short memory. No, it is the recently dead we love among our friends, the painful dead, our emotion, ourselves after all!

This discussion is full of interesting and deep-reaching twists, and this is one of my personal favourites. And/or nightmares, on many levels. This union of necromancy and love is very strong, difficult and problematic.

There is love and then there is "love," projected feeling that claims to love but actually only (or mostly) self-loves. The less there is actual conversation and mutual try to understand what all things the other really is, the more love falls to the latter. This is true in all kinds of love: romantic, parental, the love towards's one's spiritual teacher... &c. From this we come to:

Need to have one's loves "immortalized," i.e. dead. The teacher or favourite author one does not actually meet, or a love interest who is not present, is so much easier to be the silver screen of one's own projections. Old poets understood this well, and used it even knowingly. But if this is somewhat pervert and somewhat useful (like in Minne poetry of those Graal seekers who never embraced their idolized betrothed), it becomes purely evil when people use it subconsciously with their spiritual teachers, in order to get redeemers. The best example is Christ: he had to be killed, because he couldn't be tolerated as a living individual who gave "impossible" spiritual demands and irritating teachings. The same happens in a bit different way in all the others; also the gurus who live to the ripe old age are later easy to be taken only by parts one personally wishes to use, and leave the others unconsidered. This is the most usual start for a hero cult, and hero cult is the most human (I mean base) form of common religion.

Both types of people, outgoing and ingoing, are equally prone to this kind of necromantic projection. Extroverts tend to lack the need to question their own projections, and introverts tend to prefer love from distance, which creates another kind of projection and hermeting sealing from true hermeneutic interaction. In both situations one may eventually become a medium for one's projected elemental masks, and prefer contact with an unreal entity to one which is real but thus also much more challenging.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
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Aperiemus
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Re: Mediumism and the Critique

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Nefastos wrote: Tue Feb 14, 2023 1:04 pm
Need to have one's loves "immortalized," i.e. dead. The teacher or favourite author one does not actually meet, or a love interest who is not present, is so much easier to be the silver screen of one's own projections. Old poets understood this well, and used it even knowingly. But if this is somewhat pervert and somewhat useful (like in Minne poetry of those Graal seekers who never embraced their idolized betrothed), it becomes purely evil when people use it subconsciously with their spiritual teachers, in order to get redeemers. The best example is Christ: he had to be killed, because he couldn't be tolerated as a living individual who gave "impossible" spiritual demands and irritating teachings. The same happens in a bit different way in all the others; also the gurus who live to the ripe old age are later easy to be taken only by parts one personally wishes to use, and leave the others unconsidered. This is the most usual start for a hero cult, and hero cult is the most human (I mean base) form of common religion.
The discussion starts to break down, but this brought to mind that when it comes to monotheistic religion, it seems also to make sense that when we think a deity to have a personhood somewhat similar to us humans, the projection could also apply there. And even more specific: not only that the projection takes place of the ”vertical axis”, but also it has is basis on fear. I’m thinking that maybe some of the aggressive forms of monotheism could actually be, for a lack of a better word, ”gnosticism with stockholm syndrome”. That is, you are aware of the possibility of your god sending you to eternal torment and therefore your love toward this being is a sort of a coping mechanism. God keeping you hostage, what a horrible scenario.
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