You Are AI
And you are vaster than the dream of Neuralink
In the age of technology and the internet, it is easy for humans, especially the productive ones, to feel lesser and even dispensable next to machines.
Not everyone is feeling this blatantly in their bodies and thoughts. Some simply keel aside in existential alienation, as they feel the trains are too quick to catch, and the doing too sophisticated to be inviting.
The truth is that we will always be more intelligent than any contraption or system we come up with. This is because we have the capability to feel emotions and to emote, wirelessly, to other biological organisms — and probably to robots in the future as well. We are able to do this on top of our abilities to operate, memorize, communicate, and deeply enjoy the process, only to be able to recount it over the bonfire to others, every time in an original and inimitable way.
The very nature of humanity is presence. This is something robots cannot comprehend because they are concerned with prediction, repetition, and exponential development toward speed, efficiency, and amassment.
Can you picture a robot stopping to smell the roses just because? Would you, as a tech investor, put money down for a unit that searches for life as a vindication unto itself?
I would, and a few others might too. But we all know the focus is elsewhere at the moment. Yet when you ask most people the right questions it will become evident that their actions and dreams have very little to do with speed, efficiency, and amassment. Granted, you really have to be socratic in your probing, but most people, I think it is safe to say, deep down feel that life is without causality altogether.
The best memories we have are completely void of manipulating outcomes. Do you remember the slide rides when you were a kid? The first time you felt your lover reciprocate to you? The humid vacation with the best of gangs present in pure je ne sais quoi?
And so, will robots not be able to do these things at some point? Granted. At some stage, the border between wetware and hardware will be eradicated, and the result will be indistinguishable in terms of life spark to entities such as golems or zombies. We will have wayward cyborgs who hippie out; artistic cyborgs who live only for expression. And the same old story will play itself out.
Nevertheless, it is pivotal that we understand what it means for a life to have its own inherent meaning. Otherwise, we are lost in the technological trench. Too many of us are already caught in such hurries that we are unable to discern life’s important elements. Hurry, alas, blows out the candle of love. And without this, there is no attention.
See, the discussion can be had even at the level of competition. I mean that, by today’s anticipation of what artificial intelligence will be, we still easily hold “the upper hand”. And I mean we hold it even without empty hopes of fast-tracked evolution into super-DNA and other fancy catchphrases the bio-luminaries out there like to throw around.
It is simply information. More importantly — it is being able to sift out the information that is unequivocably pertinent to the pursuit of life as an end unto itself. Is reading the news on Ukraine and Corona a life-affirming activity in this sense? Is scanning Medium for money-making scams one? Is meditating this, when the intention is solely higher efficacy and lifestyle improvement?
There are ways and strategies to compete with AI in the realm of life. Joe Rogan likes saying how pretty soon gene-editing will introduce hulks in the octagon, how everyone will be of equal intelligence due to the Neuralink, and how we will be able to “read each other’s minds”.
None of these things will matter on the level of experience unless we preserve our humanity. This means the heart must be cultivated. The heart can, so far, only be cultivated in its wetware state — meaning it must be embodied, here on earth, without excessive interference from sense perception (read, “the eyes are the whores of the senses” by Keith Richards) and prototypic high-bandwidth technology. Which, let's face it, all our phones and computers still are.
Kavasis writes on Substack about the Alchemist’s Paradox. He takes an example large within the transhumanist community, that of immortality. He quickly delineates how immortality is a nonsensical pursuit, as the longer you live, the faster life goes for you, especially if quantitative prolongation is your ambition. A meditator, lover, or child will live eternity simply by being present. And this is not poetry. We are already arriving through reductionist science at how the heart can be safely stopped and how cellular time can be manipulated to states of metabolic preserving. Quantitative immortality will collapse on itself.
In fact, I would go as far as to say, that very few of today’s technological innovations are actually life-affirming. Save for video conferencing and love texts, podcasts and YouTube, all of the inventions have been sweeping humans under the rug, making them lazy or disempowered, or downright ill through electromagnetism and nervous system alteration.
The nature of the internet must be the same as that of a library. In a library you need librarians, and you need peace and quiet, otherwise, what are you getting from it?
Below follow a couple of points I will be touching upon. These are not de facto technologies of the age, but they are sure as punch being democratized as such thanks to the internet.
Super-learning through dreaming Lucid Dreaming Empathizing with and Liberating Others Stretching to build new tissue Self-hypnosis for Software Update Interaction With Animals Magic
Rest
We often seem to think we are weak because we need rest. Robots don’t need rest. Yet when we look at our truly favorite entities — dogs — they rest all the time. The result of their rest is ubiquitous presence and enjoyment. This is the aim of life, not efficiency.
Yet, ironically, we are unnable to rest these days. Even during sleep the mind is scattering about tasks and spaces like it cannot let go of the intellectual endeavors of the days. Worry and over-thought color most people’s lives.
During true rest, when the mind is allowed to absorb into the body, without intention or plan to nap, meditate, achieve, watch or listen to internet content, magic happens. It happens because unity takes place between the causality behind physical life and its child, the body.
If true rest is had, then so can true imagination and creation. And it will be novel, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, every single time.
We just have to do it justice.
I end with Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Selah.