This reminds me of a podcast or book review from maybe 8 years ago about grace and how gracefulness was one of the most difficult issues for robotics and is uniquely human, particularly in it's fluidity.
Gibson is correct about resonance with our 'world' and the problem of AI and sentience not unlike the 'hard problem' of consciousness. The continuity or flow with our experience is in consciousness, which is all there is in experience. There would be no experience without consciousness. It has nothing to do with time, which is just a concept, an overlay in thought. We, consciousness, is timeless. Thus idealism as a concept itself is closest to our experience, all is Mind, consciouness and its infinite manifestation. How you or Gibson seem to define idealism here is more solipsism, that reality is merely a projection of an individual mind. There is some truth to this of course since, for most, experience is defined by conditioned mind, but this is an overlay in thought onto our experience which does not actually alter reality itself as if anything could. True idealism is the recognition of our infinite nature as consciousness or Mind. What I am and everything is, is the same. Only consciousness is conscious. As it is said in Advaita Vedanta, "I am that , you are that, all this is That.
Yes Gibson here is only being used to set the framework for perception on the physical plane, not as a metaphysical guide on the ontology of the realm. And while I agree that the notion of Consciousness being primary has both logical and empirical standing, we will show here in this series that the metaphysics of Idealism (and not just a Berkeley style personal Idealism but the entire Kantian paradigm that rules modern thought) don’t hold water when it comes to logical and empirical proof but are merely beliefs (which is totally fine! But not the point of this exercise) and why the image of the real world is important, as is duration which is our actual experience for without duration (time) we have no novelty and hence no free will so are back into the deterministic model that the Age of Scientism feeds on. ✌️
Mike, I’m reminded of the old saying for the traveler seeking directions from a farmer on a country road, “You can’t get there from here”. I’m totally with you on the impossibility of AI sentience, pointing to the nature, complexity (and simplicity) of perception, and the totality of the human experience which has nothing to do with states or a sequence of states of the brain, like frames in film making. Clearly, we are more than this. Our direct experience of the primacy of consciousness is key here, and cannot be held as truth alongside the concept of matter. What is this “image of the real world” you speak of and what place has time or duration in understanding the reality of the realm? Memory does not require time. Whatever is re-membered, that is reconstructed or re-assembled in thinking is in the present. To hold to concepts of time and space, past and future, locality is to feed the pernicious and Godless arguments of materialists and globalists, just stories of an imaginary separate self and the religion of scientism.
I had an email conversation with our good friend Steven Young on the nature of this realm, and the fundamental understanding of what we are made of, earth, air, fire and water. Everything else, as we know through Steven’s work related to modern chemistry and particle physics is literally made up, atoms, genes, dna, gravity, relativity, quantum everything, matter and dark matter, etc, etc. He writes in his book, A Fool’s Wisdom, “Electrons, protons, neutrons are all conjecture, they are invented in the human mind and given as technical explanations for the elemental phenomena of fire, air, earth and water. Quantum particles are mathematical in nature, they do not exist outside of the imaginal realm of concepts and ideals. They are not part of creation, they are not things in nature. They are hypothetical, unobservable and cannot be isolated or used to build anything. To clarify, earthen materials do break down into grains of varying shapes and sizes which can be viewed under a microscope (like salt cubes and sand), and there are repeating geometric harmonic structures in crystals which give them their colour and form, interacting with specific wavelengths of light. But the power contained in the substance is diminished at smaller and smaller scales. When it comes to matter, less is actually less.”
I asked him, “Steven, I continue to dive deeper, now revisiting Hermeticism, and the core principle, "As above so below". It is clear to me that there is nothing material in the universe or our experience. Air, earth, fire and water are not made of matter, all is Mind, Nous, spirit, consciousness. Matter and Mind/mind are not two, non-dual. We interpret or conceive of matter as some thing distinct, other or separate in creation, a fallen state, but it is only a state of mind, and by extension the senses. As William Blake said, "‘Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses." And from Hermes Trismegistus, “The truth is: Light and life is God and Father, whence Man is begotten. If, therefore, you realize yourself as being from life and light and that you have been made out of them, you will return to life.” I wanted to ask your view on this. Reading Genesis, Chapter 1 is a description of God's creation, air, earth, fire and water, and Chapter 2, and beyond, is after "the fall" into ignorance. The ignoring of our true nature. The body is more than earth, it contains all the 'elements', it is the totality, the image and likeness of God. "He who knows himself, knows the All." There is no place for the finite in the infinite. It seems we can no longer even refer to matter, any more than we can refer to water as H2O.”
Steven replied, “Good stuff! Yes indeed, the first Hermetic axiom is 'all is mind', so matter would indeed be a form of mind. The living body is not just earth, you are correct it has all the elements mixing and blending within it harmoniously, like the universe in miniature. The word prefix 'di-' means to 'split in two', so when we die we split in two - the air and fire (our soul/essence) goes up, back to the heavens (the sky), and the water and earth (our corpse) goes down, back to mother nature. And yes, calling water H2O does not help us in any way. In fact I think there is no benefit to invoking atoms and molecules at all when explaining things, they are purely pedagogical.”
So, we must return to what is primary, essential, our direct experience, Consciousness is all that is, e-ternal, out of time, unconditioned. And what is seemingly conditioned, colored by experience, thinking, sensing and perceiving never loses its unconditioned nature. There is only the present, here and now. We are that Presence of awareness itself. We cannot hold both matter and spirit as real, a paradox, and not sink into double think and the grip of scientism. We saw this throughout the scamdemic, so many spiritual seekers running for the jab. As Steven notes, to die, split in two, to die to the reality of our being. We do not inhabit states of mind or body, we are not data that can be reconstructed out of a kind of machine memory, via reductionist AI modaling. We are both modal and amodal and neither. Perception, cognition, as it is normally understood by neuroscience is all about the unreality of the realm, at best how conditioned mind in-structs or structures its world, but nothing more. Without this understanding, forgetting who we truly are, we are lost to the passing fads of modern thought, scientism, transhumanism, and its stories, enchantments, born of the belief in otherness, separation, materialism. This understanding is the source of the unending discovery. “When the search for God ends, the [endless] journey in God begins.”
So Mike, do not equate my views here as some kind of new age spiritual by-passing, that demeans our ‘physical’, experience, it is the opposite. Understanding the true reality of the physical or material does not change or deny our experience but elevates it. Probably best said by the 7th century Chang master, Fa Tsang, “When we awaken, the illusory itself becomes the real, so that no other reality remains.” - Ed
Yes agreed that the primary ontological reality comes out of Mind but the abstract categories and constructions of Idealism don’t hold water for me anymore. I’ve found Bergson’s metaphysics to be more in line with reality as it both honors consciousness as the active force of reality within a continuous, undivided duration that results in the creative evolution of consciousness, while also recognizing the outside world and matter as a concrete reality that can actually be experienced…that isn’t just confined to deterministic particles (Physicalism) or only accessible via ideas and thus not truly approachable for its actual out there realness (Idealism). Instead consciousness is in all things, and because duration, like a symphony of music that can’t be broken up into parts, is a continuous flow of consciousness that we are also a part of as is everything else (but not locked into this framework of just moments of the present) we can have novelty and thus free will. This is what separates us from the synthetic, the artificial. Ironically, physicalists and proponents of Idealism would reject this idea. All in the end becomes fatalistic because either time doesn’t exist, there is an omnipresent consciousness outside of time or we are locked into a spacial cause and effect reductionism. This to me doesn’t fit into my experience of novelty here and is exactly what Bergson aims to explain in his metaphysics as does someone like Percival. This is why time does matter :) and why I’ll continue to explain in more depth in upcoming Substack as I feel this is super important to not only highlight why AI is nowhere close to actual consciousness but also why notions like Simulation Theory lack any true metaphysical weight. 🤙
This reminds me of a podcast or book review from maybe 8 years ago about grace and how gracefulness was one of the most difficult issues for robotics and is uniquely human, particularly in it's fluidity.
Amazing start Mike, thank you. Have enjoyed those points and have been nodding along. Resonate! 💙💜
Gibson is correct about resonance with our 'world' and the problem of AI and sentience not unlike the 'hard problem' of consciousness. The continuity or flow with our experience is in consciousness, which is all there is in experience. There would be no experience without consciousness. It has nothing to do with time, which is just a concept, an overlay in thought. We, consciousness, is timeless. Thus idealism as a concept itself is closest to our experience, all is Mind, consciouness and its infinite manifestation. How you or Gibson seem to define idealism here is more solipsism, that reality is merely a projection of an individual mind. There is some truth to this of course since, for most, experience is defined by conditioned mind, but this is an overlay in thought onto our experience which does not actually alter reality itself as if anything could. True idealism is the recognition of our infinite nature as consciousness or Mind. What I am and everything is, is the same. Only consciousness is conscious. As it is said in Advaita Vedanta, "I am that , you are that, all this is That.
Yes Gibson here is only being used to set the framework for perception on the physical plane, not as a metaphysical guide on the ontology of the realm. And while I agree that the notion of Consciousness being primary has both logical and empirical standing, we will show here in this series that the metaphysics of Idealism (and not just a Berkeley style personal Idealism but the entire Kantian paradigm that rules modern thought) don’t hold water when it comes to logical and empirical proof but are merely beliefs (which is totally fine! But not the point of this exercise) and why the image of the real world is important, as is duration which is our actual experience for without duration (time) we have no novelty and hence no free will so are back into the deterministic model that the Age of Scientism feeds on. ✌️
Mike, I’m reminded of the old saying for the traveler seeking directions from a farmer on a country road, “You can’t get there from here”. I’m totally with you on the impossibility of AI sentience, pointing to the nature, complexity (and simplicity) of perception, and the totality of the human experience which has nothing to do with states or a sequence of states of the brain, like frames in film making. Clearly, we are more than this. Our direct experience of the primacy of consciousness is key here, and cannot be held as truth alongside the concept of matter. What is this “image of the real world” you speak of and what place has time or duration in understanding the reality of the realm? Memory does not require time. Whatever is re-membered, that is reconstructed or re-assembled in thinking is in the present. To hold to concepts of time and space, past and future, locality is to feed the pernicious and Godless arguments of materialists and globalists, just stories of an imaginary separate self and the religion of scientism.
I had an email conversation with our good friend Steven Young on the nature of this realm, and the fundamental understanding of what we are made of, earth, air, fire and water. Everything else, as we know through Steven’s work related to modern chemistry and particle physics is literally made up, atoms, genes, dna, gravity, relativity, quantum everything, matter and dark matter, etc, etc. He writes in his book, A Fool’s Wisdom, “Electrons, protons, neutrons are all conjecture, they are invented in the human mind and given as technical explanations for the elemental phenomena of fire, air, earth and water. Quantum particles are mathematical in nature, they do not exist outside of the imaginal realm of concepts and ideals. They are not part of creation, they are not things in nature. They are hypothetical, unobservable and cannot be isolated or used to build anything. To clarify, earthen materials do break down into grains of varying shapes and sizes which can be viewed under a microscope (like salt cubes and sand), and there are repeating geometric harmonic structures in crystals which give them their colour and form, interacting with specific wavelengths of light. But the power contained in the substance is diminished at smaller and smaller scales. When it comes to matter, less is actually less.”
I asked him, “Steven, I continue to dive deeper, now revisiting Hermeticism, and the core principle, "As above so below". It is clear to me that there is nothing material in the universe or our experience. Air, earth, fire and water are not made of matter, all is Mind, Nous, spirit, consciousness. Matter and Mind/mind are not two, non-dual. We interpret or conceive of matter as some thing distinct, other or separate in creation, a fallen state, but it is only a state of mind, and by extension the senses. As William Blake said, "‘Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses." And from Hermes Trismegistus, “The truth is: Light and life is God and Father, whence Man is begotten. If, therefore, you realize yourself as being from life and light and that you have been made out of them, you will return to life.” I wanted to ask your view on this. Reading Genesis, Chapter 1 is a description of God's creation, air, earth, fire and water, and Chapter 2, and beyond, is after "the fall" into ignorance. The ignoring of our true nature. The body is more than earth, it contains all the 'elements', it is the totality, the image and likeness of God. "He who knows himself, knows the All." There is no place for the finite in the infinite. It seems we can no longer even refer to matter, any more than we can refer to water as H2O.”
Steven replied, “Good stuff! Yes indeed, the first Hermetic axiom is 'all is mind', so matter would indeed be a form of mind. The living body is not just earth, you are correct it has all the elements mixing and blending within it harmoniously, like the universe in miniature. The word prefix 'di-' means to 'split in two', so when we die we split in two - the air and fire (our soul/essence) goes up, back to the heavens (the sky), and the water and earth (our corpse) goes down, back to mother nature. And yes, calling water H2O does not help us in any way. In fact I think there is no benefit to invoking atoms and molecules at all when explaining things, they are purely pedagogical.”
So, we must return to what is primary, essential, our direct experience, Consciousness is all that is, e-ternal, out of time, unconditioned. And what is seemingly conditioned, colored by experience, thinking, sensing and perceiving never loses its unconditioned nature. There is only the present, here and now. We are that Presence of awareness itself. We cannot hold both matter and spirit as real, a paradox, and not sink into double think and the grip of scientism. We saw this throughout the scamdemic, so many spiritual seekers running for the jab. As Steven notes, to die, split in two, to die to the reality of our being. We do not inhabit states of mind or body, we are not data that can be reconstructed out of a kind of machine memory, via reductionist AI modaling. We are both modal and amodal and neither. Perception, cognition, as it is normally understood by neuroscience is all about the unreality of the realm, at best how conditioned mind in-structs or structures its world, but nothing more. Without this understanding, forgetting who we truly are, we are lost to the passing fads of modern thought, scientism, transhumanism, and its stories, enchantments, born of the belief in otherness, separation, materialism. This understanding is the source of the unending discovery. “When the search for God ends, the [endless] journey in God begins.”
So Mike, do not equate my views here as some kind of new age spiritual by-passing, that demeans our ‘physical’, experience, it is the opposite. Understanding the true reality of the physical or material does not change or deny our experience but elevates it. Probably best said by the 7th century Chang master, Fa Tsang, “When we awaken, the illusory itself becomes the real, so that no other reality remains.” - Ed
Yes agreed that the primary ontological reality comes out of Mind but the abstract categories and constructions of Idealism don’t hold water for me anymore. I’ve found Bergson’s metaphysics to be more in line with reality as it both honors consciousness as the active force of reality within a continuous, undivided duration that results in the creative evolution of consciousness, while also recognizing the outside world and matter as a concrete reality that can actually be experienced…that isn’t just confined to deterministic particles (Physicalism) or only accessible via ideas and thus not truly approachable for its actual out there realness (Idealism). Instead consciousness is in all things, and because duration, like a symphony of music that can’t be broken up into parts, is a continuous flow of consciousness that we are also a part of as is everything else (but not locked into this framework of just moments of the present) we can have novelty and thus free will. This is what separates us from the synthetic, the artificial. Ironically, physicalists and proponents of Idealism would reject this idea. All in the end becomes fatalistic because either time doesn’t exist, there is an omnipresent consciousness outside of time or we are locked into a spacial cause and effect reductionism. This to me doesn’t fit into my experience of novelty here and is exactly what Bergson aims to explain in his metaphysics as does someone like Percival. This is why time does matter :) and why I’ll continue to explain in more depth in upcoming Substack as I feel this is super important to not only highlight why AI is nowhere close to actual consciousness but also why notions like Simulation Theory lack any true metaphysical weight. 🤙