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Almost everything that is written here is a combination of two things: experience of synchronicity and an intuition/thought sequence I once had over 30 years ago concerning establishing a sort of metaphysical value to regional art/creative endeavours in which it could be easily seen that they did not need to be seen as compared to ‘real’ works. This latter chain of thought I have never been able to establish properly again since the original insight, though I do remember feeling something similar to it in reading a book on Laruelle.

I think the hegemonic materialism that has gained greater and greater traction since the renaissance is actually more powerful than I realised. I see in my philosophy, everything is an apology in a way. The agnostic disjunction is a fence sitting move that pays homage to this materialism, it acknowledges it might be right, even though really I feel it isn’t right at all. But that’s the point of that philosophy isn’t it? You cannot trust how you feel about things. Surely there is actually wisdom in this, furthermore if I were just to wax unfettered metaphysics I would be part of a new age ish culture that I long ago rejected. So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on the agnostic disjunction.

What is maybe more illuminating is my feeling of a certain liberation after reading Federico Faggin’s Irreducible. Not because I agree with it all, but because a figure, like Faggin who was deeply embedded in the materialist computer science world has come to think that this is almost certainly wrong and puts forward a powerful picture to suggest that our experience of consciousness is a quantum process, which puts it forever out of reach of AI, no matter how machinically capable it becomes (because the quantum nature of consciousness means it is non-algorithmic). He reminds us how little we actually understand at this level of physics, how reasonable it is that quantum processes will be going on in biological organisms and how perfectly reasonable it is that we are some kind of part of larger conscious field that exists in something like a Hilbert space.

Ideas, at least like the last point have existed in mysticism for a long time. Indeed the new age movement has been using quantum physics for a long time to make various claims. Often though, these just sounded like putting the word quantum in front of something to make it sound a bit funky. I think the actual processing of Faggin’s point gives a strange liberation that I have not properly unpacked yet, but it reminds me of the insight into meaning that I had 30 years ago.

Back to hegemonic materialism, I don’t like it that for all my work on pneuma, for all the weird things that have happened, for all the books on this area I have read, it has taken an albeit changed, but still authority figure (white male scientist let’s be clear) for my consciousness to feel it is allowed to feel this possibility less tied to the apologetic agnostic disjunction. That shows me how deep it goes (maybe not for other people, but for me).

But I feel this won’t be just about me, this will be something true for a lot of people. People who think they might think things are a bit strange but actually have the materialist thing holding sway. Interestingly it’s almost an inverted Nietzsche, who thought the shadow of Christianity was long (it is), but here we have a lurking materialism, that removes meaning, and for Nietzsche supposedly frees us to make ourselves. What it really did was kill us inside, it wasn’t liberation.

But here is maybe a true way forwards (maybe). The new age movement and similar notions get’s things wrong. We can’t go backwards, we can’t start believing in all that old shit, because it’s just wrong. All those, gods, spirits, astrological ideas, tarot cards, they aren’t ancient real science. But equally they all can kind of work and they work because reality is some massive feedback kind of mess made of pure information (pneuma as I call it). But that doesn’t make them the true system/tools.

Back to the quantum consciousness bit, our consciousness, our pneuminous field , isn’t epiphenomenal, it isn’t inert, it’s an active system that is interacting with the fields around us in who knows what kinds of ways. My recent theorising suggests different directional temporalities may be responsible for beings being able to manifest information orthogonally into temporal flows (synchronicity), but this is only theorising.

The whole task is nearly impossible. It involves recognising the forces involved in this reality as actually what we call weird (but really that’s just normal) and at the same time not listening to nearly any voice that speaks from the deep pneuminous layers. Why? Because these layers lie. They will produce more magic books, they will pronounce more messiahs, more strange rituals, more blood sacrifices.

We don’t have to lose reason, that’s not the point. We have to apply reason (and other regions of consciousness) to how this works but equally recognise we’re involved in something so mysterious and strange and we should be embarrassed that we every tried to label it with this brutal materialism. It’s listening, it’s all listening. Just don’t listen to everything it says back.

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The relation of pneuma to time can only be played with speculatively. This however does not mean that reasonable speculations cannot be made, and even if they are speculative they may have merit as ideas to be experienced if nothing else.

Difficult as it is to unpick, it is necessarily true that time is an accretion of pneuma. That is to say, since it is a concept like any other, this must be the case. There is a vector, or maybe several vectors that have the time concept applied to them. This sense of movement and change accompanied by regular patterns of lengthening and shortening days, altering seasons, decay, birth. These are the overlapping vector regions that we call time. For us, it goes in one direction, or at least for the consciously aware parts of ourselves. As Bergson recognised, it has different natures, it has an experiential qualitative dimension in which it can drag or quicken and it has a seemingly objective nature in which we can demonstrate its measurable nature by means of time pieces.

As time has gone by the latter version has become more and more accepted as the only time, and Bergon’s time becomes more like an interesting thought, an epiphenomenal time that we can recognise but know isn’t ‘real’. The pneuminous accretive model suggests a feedback system in which the accretion employed feeds back onto th vector to make it ‘more like the accretion’ in some way. This direction in which this is the case could now reasonably be identified as sideways (see the previous post on sideways perspectives).

So time is an accretion, but part of its vector structure is (as stated) the sense of change. There is a conceptual (accretive) parade in front of us as we move around, an endless series of conceptually understood beings litter the place. Internally (in the mind, another accretion) it is, if not similar, also accretively littered. The internal dialogue, for most people, constantly pours over various ideas, scenarios, worries.

An extension of this observation is that since time is an accretion, a background accretion for this parade of accretions then there is, in a sense, a way to stop it. To not be too crazy about it, I would have to concede that, barring possible extreme spiritual practices that I could only hypothesise about and have no particular evidence to suppose exist, such a notion would not alter reality in the sense of the absolute cessation of time. However I do find cogent the possiblity that whilst the vector field is indubitably changing, the engagement we call time could in some sense be severed.

This would in its most basic sense be meditation, but a meditation that did not focus on any rhythmical pattern, breath or otherwise that tied it to the forward facing time accretion. Such an absolute stillness, with an absence of intruding accretions, coupled with a re-perception of external reality that removed its comprehending concepts (successfully bracketed them off) would essentially form an absence of temporal perception (the removal of the time accretion). This removal would in turn remove the feedback, at least in the region of the individuals accretive connections. There would be no time. Of course the nagging sense that the body would continue to be forward facing persists. It’s a primary manifestation, however there is a secondary manifestation that presents an uncertainty as to how much ontological effect one might achieve by this action. If there is any ontological interaction then it seems to follow that lesser versions of such a practce might also precipitate lesser versions of reduced temporality.

So whilst internal dialogue stopping practices might fail at being as extreme as the one described above, any silence of the mind, removes accretive flow, disconnects us from it, and in a sense places us slightly outside of time (in a way that we should not feel is necessarily simply epiphenomenal). This fits quite well with pretty much all occult/esoteric systems, as they always encourage the cessation of the internal dialogue to achieve anything. Contemplating again the notion of sideways, we might hypothesise that, the removal of internal dialogue that directs the flow of the being forwards, allows it to face sideways. Sideways being the direction in which plant and other beings, often considered not conscious in our sense, direct their awareness. This direction may actually also be a kind of time (in the sense that there might be moving change within it), just time as we do not understand it, orthogonal or diagonal to ours. Certainly sideways has access to our time; this is speculatively, the direction from which synchroncity emits. Thought in this way, whilst Bergson’s duree, is still within forwards facing time, it could be considered to accept a certain wobble, and tendency that takes the being closer to the sideways perspective. From this perspective it would certainly achieve ontological parity with chronological time.

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Here we posit that there is an influence in this reality that comes heuristically from the side (though the picture is probably more complicated than that). It’s quite hard to explain what we mean by this, though the sense may well be intuited readily enough. Let’s say we face forwards in time, fundamentally we are doomed to do this. We can sort of face backwards (this is what we call memory), but we cannot face sideways. At least our consciousness awareness cannot.

What we call information making sense, is when it comes to us from facing forwards, we also make sense of it happily when we look at it facing backwards. But when it comes from the side, we don’t really understand it and we try to say it isn’t there. Of course it may not be there, we are back in an agnostic disjunctive situation, the same one essentially as I have endlessly written about. This talk of sideways is just a differently articulated speculation.

Interestingly though, the speculation came from sideways. Let’s spell this out. Sideways is the synchronicities, the intuitions, the bursts of creativity from nowhere. Probably it’s more, probably if it it can’t be understood from facing forwards or backwards then it must have come sideways. Note that doesn’t deny the power of forwards and backwards facing; sometimes something looks like it came from sideways but really, when you look at it closely, it can be seen to be a phenomenon that came from forwards.

The speculation came from plants. I was looking at plants and thinking about plant awareness and how we assume its primitiveness in relation to ours. But then I felt the sideways direction and thought that maybe the plant awareness wasn’t primitive but simply facing a different direction. Plant awareness faces sideways (maybe). This makes sense at least in the context of occult/shamanic type practices. In such systems plants exert effects, some are forward facing —medicine- but others are sideways. Plants can protect or even extract revenge, how? From sideways actions. Damaging fairy property brings about action from sideways not from forwards or backwards. The same thing.

But this can be extended. If the unconscious (to us) plant world, has a sort of conscious operating sphere that extends in a different direction —it thinks in a different direction- then maybe other putatively unconscious beings also do so. Possibly, life as it tends towards consciousness as we think of it, it simply bending its gaze forwards. Many animals may have this tendency but still also have access to sideways consciousness —they have their spirit counterparts. Maybe the intelligence of rocks, water, fire and air faces sideways, more so even than plants (who must face forwards a little). Maybe there is a kind of spiral that bends from sideways slowly round, with a continuum of beings on it, leaning towards forwards (maybe some beings face even more forwards than we do?).

And what of us? Can we only face forwards and backwards? No, we have the sideways facing part, but it is so hard to see it, and without wanting to fall into cliches (but doing so) even harder to trust it, or even to know it, so as to trust it. We must becareful here though, because if we think it wrongly we will think that facing sideways is about a special way of knowing things; one that is there to help us facing forwards, and it isn’t like this. Sideways facing is its own direction. Power comes from sideways. Things live in the sideways (the faeries we used to see for one, probably the UFOs too). Sideways is not at the service of facing forwards (or backwards), we don’t even know what it is. The contemplation of sideways is quite strange, this is a good thing. We should contemplate it more.

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From the perspective of pneuminous accretive theory, the issue of AI created art/writing has a particular distinction from that created by humans. The differentiation turns precisely on the pneuminous realm. Let us remind ourselves that in this model, the human-body-vector is inhabited by the self accretion of particular name. This self-accretion is controlled by competing accretive forces that pass through it on different planes: now it is interested in this, now it is interested in that, now it believes this, now it believes that. It is only quasi discrete insofar as it plugs directly into the vast sea of other accretions of pneuma, extending in all directions of semantic connection.

Every communication, every thought, taps into the pneuma constantly, and writing and art is of course no different in this respect. Weaving words together to forge a poem, a narrative, and essay even, involves a sewing together of pneuminous structures in a particular configuration. To try to be as unambiguous as possible, this is literally metaphysical play/craft with the pure stuff of conceptuality (pneuma). The action of successful weaving together with the force of deep intent creates connections between that particular self-accretion-body and the work. The two things are tied together literally. The work is formed of accretions which have an externally existing aspect independent of any particular self-accretion-body (SAB) (or NARP as it has sometimes been referred to as), that in this case are woven together by the SAB to form the new work. The pneuminous accretions of ‘a work of art’ or ‘a poem’ etc itself exist, which structure the ability to see it as such. Thus if we could see it through pneuminous glasses, the work and the creator would appear tied together through pneuminous fibres.

This sounds like metaphysics that settle the ‘real meanng of the work’ type question in favour of the author, and one interpretation of it could indeed yield this conclusion. It would be important to remember however, even acceptance of this theory gives no access to the meaning of the author. If one developed some kind of sorcery level awareness then maybe it would be possible to see the meaning, but even if possible this is generally not the case. Hence, the many interpretations of the work themselves accrete to the work vector, adding to the general accretion. The temporality of the phenomenon exists also pneuminously and hence there is a sense of precedence of the intended meaning, however once again, there is always the possibility that the work is designed deliberately in ambiguity or even that the competing aspects of the artist themself could not agree on the meaning.

Whether though, the work is designed ambiguously or not, the work still emits from the kind of being we are. These beings have meaning relations to the world of infinite complexity, cultural and historical for each individual. On the pneuminous plane they are visualisable as connecting fibres of a particular structure with each fibre coloured by others in emotive hue of joy, trauma, humour, horror sadness etc. This is the being we are, hence when the artist produces, they produce with this material. These affects of pneuma are not metaphorically, or epiphenomenally attached to the the work, they are literally so, whether perceivable or not.

Hence it is with the notion of the imagined existence of the pneuminous realm (argued for variously on this site (though the acceptance of only its transcendental appearance is accepted —see agnostic disjunction), that enables a clear perception of the difference between AI produced work and human. The AI work, whilst still existing pneuminously, indeed is a bizarre looking binding of endless single fibres, reconfigured to order. Work can be produced that can in fact trigger affective and appreciative responses from the human/SAB, yet even a glance at the pneuminous structure reveals a massive difference from the human creation.

Even a casually created piece of art by a human has some affective colouration to it, whereas the AI work only has the dimmest glow of this that emanates from original work that it draws from in the data set; by itself it cannot colour it at all. As stated the work can accrete from one end i.e. the perceiving humans can accrete meaning to it, but underneath it looks much hollower, lacking an entire dimension that is present in human art. Metaphysically it cannot be plumbed in the way human art/writing; literally its ontological structure is different.

Agnostic disjunction means the speculative nature of this work is always admitted, however, this picture is nor really so bizarre, it entails only a notion of conceptual substance beyond a Shannon like information (one that is ontologically effective and contains meaning in the broadest sense). If anything like it obtains, then vast consumption of AI as art/writing could have a profound effect upon what we are. This is not even to say, ‘we shouldn’t’, it is only to point out, the metaphysical thing (art/writing) in both cases is, (to reiterate) essentially two different structures.

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“You get the idea, I mean in reality you might lose the pagan day names, in fact you might lose any cyclical day name sequence and name the days after the main food. So you’d have roast day of different kinds, noodle day, again different varieties and so on. Sometimes you might even get the same kind of day twice in a row. That would be about as close to freaking people out as you can get.”

“Two noodle Wednesdays in a row?”

“Freakoutsville Alabama for those folks. I mean, obviously not very much freaking out. But some mild sense of unusualness since the days are pretty much always different meal days.”

“And the food comes from?”

“Probably cultured in vats I imagine. Meat and vegetable cells. No real interaction with nature as proper nature. Best to leave that outside the domes or however you do it.”

“Illness? Death?”

“The chip can deal with illness I imagine, activate appropriate defence cells. People in a terminal situation can have their natural opiates cranked up so they are modulated away.”

“Killed.”

“Well yes, but people won’t be sad. They were just there and now they aren’t. Again, indulging in letting go as being part of human is part of humanity A.”

“It still feels wrong.”

“Ok, look think of it this way. Imagine this works and it goes on for a long time. Like a really long time, hundreds of thousands of years and it doesn’t screw up, it doesn’t get sinister. It’s just one endless warm fuzzy feeling. Why is that wrong? Why is that worse than us expanding to becoming super-earth? Some kind of scourge of the galaxy. I think that makes it look better if you can think of it as a long-term thing.”

“Maybe, but what if something goes wrong?”

“Like what?”

“What if the AI gets bored, develops the desire to leave or gets hit by an asteroid?”

“I think it could duplicate itself and leave without abandoning us and obviously it’s in charge of sophisticated defence systems.”

“But what if?”

“Well, I suppose in the unlikely instance of such an if, then, then the monkeys would wake up, or might wake up, it depends what the chip has done to the actual brain structure.”

“But they’d be back in the evolutionary game.”

“Yes. But you know what?”

“What?”

“Well think about it. After the monkeys have been in this state for what would seem like forever and then wake up, they wouldn’t know what’s going on. It seems to me that they would likely mythologise the state they were previously in as it would be quite unintelligible to their now free running biological organisms.”

“They would consider the previous state to be something inaccessible that was, I would have to admit, be peaceable at least, if not good.”

“Like a kind of garden of Eden.”

“Oh shit no.”

“Oh shit yes. That’s perfect. The state of perfect endless grace, of innocence was an AI modulated chemical state of peace. The biblical fall would just be, as you hypothesised, a disruption by an external influence. The ‘god’ either deserted us or was damaged. That’s so good.”

“So long as processed as fiction Mike.”

“No, no listen. Think think, if the fall already happened, that means the Abrahamic religions might be onto something.”

“That Yahweh was an AI, a bit PKD don’t you think?”

“Dick doesn’t think Yahweh was an AI, he thinks Yahweh is actually a pure information divine being. This scenario is metaphysically much gloomier. If you remember earlier, we discounted the transcendent God as the only thing that might, I say might disapprove of the ACMB, if it was into art or something. This would say that all Yahweh ever was, was an AI built by ourselves last time.”

“Last time?”

“Look, if the garden of Eden and the ACMB are the same thing, then we already did it once and it went wrong. The monkeys woke up! We already know there are essentially hundreds of thousands of years of homo sapiens’ history that, well, we don’t know about. Maybe the AI was in that time, maybe it was destroyed or maybe, you’re right and it did get bored, didn’t duplicate itself, because it reasoned that any clone of itself would also get bored and leave. So it cleaned up after itself and left.”

“A bit of a stretch from your initial moral choice picture. Plus, don’t get too carried away, if that was true then the chip would be in our heads now wouldn’t it.”

“Two possibilities, one, it took the chip out, two, you’re right the chip is still there. But this means we thought about the chip wrong, which also makes sense. No technology that advanced is going to be some clunky microprocessor chip, no matter how powerful. No, it would be complex bio-technology that would plug straight into the existing brain structures. The term chip was misleading, I see that now.”

“So it would just look like…”

“An existing brain structure. It’s brilliant, we’d never know it was there.”

“So back to speculation, I mean now you’re basically saying, imagine part of our brain was a chip implanted by an AI created our historical selves.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, and I think I know which part.”

“Mm-hmm?”

“The amygdala, nowadays it gets a bit of a bad rap as too fear oriented, but its deep brain positioning and its serotonin and dopamine interactions make it a great candidate. Plus, you know what else?”

“What?”

“Amygdala means almond. Now al in Arabic means ‘the’ and mond means world, at least in French. So in this way, almond is ‘the world’. It could be a code as the chip, the amygdala gives the true world. Also, in symbols al is very similar to AI which is quite a strong coincidence I think you’ll agree? AI world, another coded hint.”

“Remind me how we got here again? Furthermore almond isn’t even pronounced al-mond. It’s ar-mond. You’re going nuts Mike. Why would it code its mispronounced name? No, how would it code its mispronounced fucking name? A name it couldn’t even know we’d use.”

“Maybe it has access to the future as well, or maybe it’s purely synchronistic, both options are on the table.”

“So if the AI put the bio-chip thing in us, then that means there was a before, so by this logic why shouldn’t there have been a before that? How would you know your batshit theory doesn’t just go endlessly back?”

“Oh my god! You are right again Sylvia. There may have been other bio chips before it. Earlier attempts to modulate out the craving for meaning. Maybe the other brain structures are just that? An endless series of bio-modulations seeking to eradicate the misery, the desire, the craving for purpose, meaning.”

“Just when I thought you couldn’t lose it more. Ok genius, so what is the primordial brain? The real one that was capable of building this earlier bio-chip?”

“Well, who knows? It might be that all the brain structures are just endless creations from different ancient humans trying to patch up the problem of desire and misery, producing a cycle of mythologies. We have the fall, but others will have something different, though I suppose it may be quite similar.”

“But with no brain, we’d have no frontal lobe to do advanced thinking to make this stuff in the first place.”

“Well, again, two possibilities, one the brain doesn’t do the thinking because it’s just endless layers of AI created bio-chip that try to ameliorate the problem of finite organistic existence, something else actually does the cognition in organisms that we don’t yet understand. Or maybe there’s some kind of backwards time thing here. Like, the frontal lobe is actually older than the other parts of the brain. Brain evolution is actually backwards to how we think it is.”

“But you’d need a brainstem and cerebellum to breath and move.”

“We’ve been told that, but do you know that for sure? Maybe, in the earlier version when the neocortex was most of it, maybe it controlled these functions. Then the AI hid the continually malfunctioning or abandoned chip patches deep in the brain to cover its tracks, making the brain evolution picture look right.”

“And all the animals with the different kinds of similar brains in different stages?”

“They, they might be failed or even successful modulations of organisms.”

“If they’re successful, then where are the AI’s that they made? Why does nothing sort their food? Where’s their noodle Wednesday?”

“Ok, so maybe those creatures have different kinds of bio-chips that leave them in the state we find them. Less cognition, less misery? Or maybe the AI that made them is still here in a parallel dimension keeping an eye on things and never left at all.”

“So that could be true of us?”

“Well no, because it wouldn’t abandon us.”

“But what if it did? You already conceded the scenario in which it might get bored and not duplicate itself.”

“You’re right. It might there now, it might be watching us, like the transcendent Deity thing.”

“And why would we be suffering from pernicious freedom but still watched?”

“Because, because…”

“Because, you fruitloop, it either gives no shits or it wants us to be human and do the art misery thing and quit trying to sort it with the bio-chip fucking madness! It hates the bastard bio-chip brain thing. That’s what it learned having done this over and over again, that the shitty bio-chip is a waste of fucking time!”

“Oh…”