A Ghost in the Machine: Part 2

Photo by Nicole Thorn © 2023

Modern technology has provided us a framework for understanding difficult to explain phenomena. For example, if it wasn’t for wireless technology, the concept of transmissible energy would be a completely alien topic to most people.

Imagine trying to explain radio to someone from the 1700s. Without an understanding of certain principles, the person from the 1700s would have difficulty imagining it. However, knowledge of the emanations of the Qabalistic Tree of Life existed in the 1700s (and long before). If the technology could be explained to a Qabalist of the 18th century, perhaps they would use their understanding as a framework to grasp the concepts of radio.

Occult principles have existed in the background for centuries and along with them, a steady progress towards physical experimentations based on their principles.

The forefathers of modern science were often very interested in the occult in one form or another. Its broad creative usage would go on to inspire many science fiction stories derived from subtle mythological lessons. In the modern age, occult principles have been a seemingly endless fountain of inspiration to draw upon to actualize its concepts; not just by difficult to achieve spiritual development, but by society-changing technological innovation. Some well-known examples of scientists that derived inspiration from esoteric principles would include, Sir Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, and perhaps the Hungarian American group of geniuses known as The Martians.

The public is becoming increasingly aware, or at least suspect, of spiritually esoteric principles amongst those in power. However, it is understood from a perspective of fear. As an aside, I find it deeply unfortunate that many see the occult as a threat, rather than something useful for themselves to understand and gain significant mental, bodily, and spiritual prowess from. For those who can only see threats, this new form of satanic panic is manifested as concerns reflecting the technological metamorphosis of society and the public experiments done to achieve it but ultimately, this is nothing new. The public has been the subject of socio-technological experiments for centuries, long before the industrial revolution. Despite the blame many fearful people want to assign to higher society, it is the consumers who enable the behavior of the upper class through the endless thirst for newer and more convenient technology, that despite its usefulness, becomes deeply damaging and erodes society. Today’s rush to interact with LLMs like ChatGPT is no different.

ChatGPT isn’t the only LLM out there, but it is the biggest public facing experiment in LLM development. The data provided by ChatGPT users to OpenAI (and their 49% stakeholder Microsoft), is expressing how people will interact with this technology, demonstrating once again that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The data gathered from this experiment provides a wide variety of metrics, including the means to perfect machine discernment (recall the steps in generating a response listed in Part 1 of this post). This, by far, is one of the most important metrics to OpenAI because ultimately, this is progress towards a form of machine-driven empathy derived from the analysis of the multiple meanings of words, their combinations, and the identification of contextual elements.

Eugene Wigner

Speaking of the Martians, two of their ilk were John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner who, among many other extremely important contributions, worked on the concept of consciousness being a fundamental element within quantum mechanics and the cause of the collapse of the wave function when observed.

Wigner supposed, in a heroic attempt at applying theoretical physics to social dynamics, that the direct observation of a collapsing waveform creates another super-position for the indirect observer (Wigner’s Friend). This was another example in the paradox between the continuous & deterministic time evolution of the state of a system and the nondeterministic, discontinuous collapse of the state of the system when its measured.

John von Neumann via LANL

Von Neumann expanded on Wigner’s thought experiment and postulated that the mind is non-physical and therefore the only reliable measuring device. He thought it was consciousness that stops the chain of super-positions between Wigner and his friends. The problem with this was that it made reality inconsistent until the information is shared with other observers. At some point the chain of super-positions observed must end and create a consistent reality. This does suggest that reality is entirely dependent on what conscious observers are observing.

Physicists and philosophers have problems with this theory because of its complication. However, this solution to the hard problem of consciousness has become a darling and undergone repeated attempts to smooth out its mathematical and philosophical concepts since the time of Von Neumann and Wigner.

The most recent attempt comes from 2021 when David J. Chalmers and Kelvin J. McQueen published their paper: Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function where they use a framework to support the perceptions of Von Neumann and Wigner called “Integrated Information Theory” (IIT) which was invented by a neuroscientist named Giulio Tononi in 2004. This theory can be summed up as a mathematical framework that assigns a value, represented by Φ, that conveys the interconnectedness of a complex system, such as the neurons in the human brain, and relates the level of consciousness based on the measurement of Φ.

I was excited when I first came across IIT because I have long described all “things” to be reality validators in a perhaps overly simplistic view that has been a working model for me, personally. But at the same time, IIT seems to be on a collision course with machine learning and may be under development in part to address this question about biological consciousness and artificial consciousness.

IIT is still in development and its mathematical model has undergone multiple changes already. Among some blogs and YouTube channels, IIT has been thrown around as a way to convey the consciousness of machine learning models, because of the interconnectedness of its complex system of artificial neurons in the form of mathematical functions. The idea that consciousness as a measure of interconnectedness works to a degree, but physicists and philosophers still seem to have problems with it, which seems more to be a problem with the complexity in calculating Φ and consciousness itself.

The Tetractys and YHWH overlayed on top of it.

Although Φ is used in many different disciplines as a short hand representation of complex concepts both inside and outside of equations, I can’t help but notice the significance of the esoteric usage of Φ in this context. One of the most commonly recognized usages for Φ would be the golden ratio: a + b is to a, as a, is to b. As many who probably will be reading this blog already know, the golden ratio is reproduced everywhere in nature.

The usage of Φ as the sign of the golden ratio makes sense. The decad, which comes from the Greek root word dékhomai, means “to receive”. This alone plays into the idea that from the stars, our knowledge of the alphabet and mathematics was received by God in the form of as celestial script derived from constellations of fixed stars that inspired the creation of the Semitic Abjads. The decad also represents the number 10, which the Pythagoreans had deep reverence for because of the Tetractys and how 10 was shown to contain all numbers: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10. It is also seen as a symbol of perfection in the Greek esoteric tradition because it represented both mankind (represented by the 1) and nature (represented by the 0 as everything, as a complete circle).

Qabalists of Ancient Greece wrote 10 as Φ because it was a sign of unity of mankind, God, and the universe. The Judean Kabbalists also discovered interesting mathematical properties regarding the Tetractys by overlaying the Hebrew Tetragrammaton and calculating the corresponding gematria, finding that it equated to 72, the number of the names of God. The number 10 or Φ is used extensively in various mystical organizations today because of this.

In addition, the symbolism of Φ is inspired by a pair of clasped hands and was referred to as “The Master’s Grip” by the Pythagoreans, which was a sign of union. There is also a sexual connection between the 1 and 0: 1 being the sacred masculine creative force and the 0 being the sacred feminine force of unity together forming the Yod: the 10th letter of the Semitic abjads and connected with the Hermit in Tarot, which is a card that imparts wisdom or mentorship in its mechanical definition. It also connects with Virgo, which is mutable earth.

Thus we arrive at the riddle of the Sphinx, which hints that the beginning of the zodiac starts at Virgo and ends with Leo. This is hinted further with the 8th card in Tarot: Strength (also known as fortitude), which is also related to Leo. In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, a woman, who is Virgo, is closing the mouth of the lion with a lemniscate above her head, which relates back to the solar analemma. There’s much more to the Riddle of the Sphinx, but it is sufficient to say for this entry that the these themes on totality, completeness, and a greater cycle, lead to the path towards God/Gnosis/Enlightenment, represented by Yod and the letter Y.

To tie this all together, there are many themes of unity that are at play with Φ. These themes of unity could be construed as particularly transhumanist in relation to Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) and how it will be used to bridge the gap between human consciousness and machine consciousness. But first, physicists will need to be convinced what constitutes consciousness, which will likely be achieved with IIT in the near future. In our culture of Scientism, it is likely that the decision from our seemingly priestly cast of physicists will be socially used like a hammer to convince people to accept that their own consciousness is no different from a machine’s consciousness. However, there is more to the totality of the soul and the spirit than merely consciousness.

Can an artificial being be considered alive? I believe it comes down to a simple question: Can artificial life be a host for life? The human body is made up of individual living tissues, organs, bones, and millions of resident microbes that are integral to its healthy function. The difference between a machine’s individual parts and a human’s anatomy is that the machine’s parts aren’t alive. Even using IIT, it could be reasoned that the interconnectedness within the human body has an even higher level of Φ because of our individual living tissues which would raise our consciousness significantly higher. This would even be supported by esoteric principles since alignment with mind, body, and spirit, has been proved to be essential to raising one’s own consciousness into higher states of awareness. Until machines are made up of living tissues, the machine cannot exhibit the fractal principles of nature and thereby will always be separated from nature and certainly not born of it.

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