“And now for something completely ascendant...”[1]
This post was spawned when my current Schuonian self met my teenage futurist self in a flash of inspiration. The name “Archailect” comes from the “hard SciFi” franchise named “Orionsarm”. The name comes from the Greek “Archai” which can mean “principle” or simply the position of a ruler, and is often applied superlatively to the Gods. As per their description:
“Any Mind of the Fourth Toposophic or higher; a megascale brain of dysonic (Kardaschev II) or greater ability and efficiency; a mind or cluster of minds that has grown so vast as to become a god-like entity.” [2]
Or in less nerdy – but still nerdy – terms, computer brains with the power and scale of a solar system or larger, much larger in fact. Think several hundred or thousand solar systems connected in one “mind”. No matter what you have in mind, I’m pretty sure you haven’t begun to grasp the scale of the power we are talking about. Our worldwide civilization currently generates about 17.7 x 10^12 Joules per second[3]. Our Sun generates about 3.8 x 10^26 Joules per second[4]. That is 2.147 x 10^13 the amount earth produces per second. Yes, I have a headache too. You can calculate it yourself, If I’m off, it wouldn’t be enough not to still blow your mind. Now let’s assume that this amount is constant for other stars (it isn’t, it can be much larger, but let’s assume). That’s hundreds, or more likely, thousands of stars. The headache is now a migraine. All of that, into computing. I can’t imagine the kinds of simulations one wants to perform with such power, the technologies we would birth, and indeed these guys have tech that already seem like magic. You can read through the site for more details. The limitations of these computers aside – light speed limitations included, since this is “hard scifi”, even though they permit limited wormhole travel for some things – if this was indeed a mind, calling it a “God” is rather spot on considering what it is and what it can do. I’d say that – and forgive me for geeking out even more – if FTL were not a problem, the Galactic Empire of Star Wars, the Imperium of Man from Warhammer, and many others would be toast if they ever confronted each other. The problem, as it is with many futurist ideas, is that the way Artificial Intelligence is conceived and even named – we call it “artificial” like consciousness is a construct, a product of techne – precludes its very possibility.
I
Act, not Artifice.
“The Sacred Secret is that there are no sacred secrets. Only the pursuit of the concept of a sacred secret...”[5]
The strongest argument against “artificial intelligence” is the phenomenology of consciousness itself. Apart from, among others, the problems of qualia and the irreducibility of logic to mechanism (and the reverse: the reducibility of mechanism to logic), there is:
“…intentionality itself, what Franz Brentano saw (perhaps a little hyperbolically) as the supreme “mark of the mental,” inseparable from every act of consciousness: the mind’s directedness, its “aboutness,” its capacity for meaning, by which it thinks, desires, believes, means, represents, wills, imagines, or otherwise orients itself towards a specific object, purpose, or end; for the mind knows nothing in a merely passive way, but must take in the world by acting purposively toward an end or meaning, as toward a final cause. But there is absolutely no intentional reciprocity between the mind and the objects of its intentions. Thoughts can be directed towards things, but (if the modern picture of nature is true) things cannot be directed towards thoughts; intentionality is finite and concerned with things under specific aspects, whereas material reality is merely an infinite catenation of accidental events; and so the specific content of the mind’s intentions must be determined by consciousness alone. One could never derive the specific meaning of a given physical event from the event itself, not even a brain event, because in itself in means nothing at all; even the most minute investigation of its physical constituents and instances could never yield the particular significance that the mind represents it as having.” [6]
Consciousness “is an act, one with a specific phenomenological shape: an indivisible apperceptive unity and intentionality, a logically prior and transcendental simplicity that organizes the many into one, a subjective vantage at once passively receptive and actively constitutive of the totality it perceives. It is not the effect of material integration, but is instead the power that integrates experience from an irreducibly simple perspective.” [7]. I would suggest subscribing to Dr Hart’s substack for the full four-part series on the “science of mind”. These, taken together pretty much destroy the idea of “artificial” intelligence from the get-go. If intelligence, and its root in consciousness, is not an artifice or a property, then “artificial intelligence” is an abuse of language. So much for Archailects… or is it? What then are people doing when they say they are “constructing artificial intelligence”? Well, here are some of the outlines of Dr Hart’s answer:
“What’s interesting is how beguiled even some of the programmers were by the illusion of intelligent agency. Of course, theirs were the only mental agencies present in the actions that occurred through the software they’d devised. In fact, the computers’ success—which was really theirs, after all—was achieved entirely by the absence of thought, to say nothing of affectivity and intentionality, in its functions. That’s the history of all technology, after all: the creation of instrumentalities that allow us to accomplish tasks more efficiently precisely through the subtraction of the conditions of mind and body. Machines that lift great loads for us do so not only because they’re constructed to exert more force than we can, but because they have no will, no affectivity to alert them of strain and stress and pain and boredom, and no intrinsic purpose. The real power of those computer processors and programs lay in the total absence of the effort of thinking, or of any sense of purpose, or of any capacity for desire, or even of any phenomenal sense of time. The simultaneous sorting and arranging of diverse algorithmic functions is itself already the absence of a relation between intending mind and sensible temporality—the absence of any sensuous or cognitive intuition of the phenomenon of being here or now , which is inseparable from consciousness as a form of agency. The running of the programs were no more labors of thought than the lever with which Archimedes would have moved the world would have been a process of muscular and metabolic exertion.”[8]
In short, the technical sophistication and calculative powers of the computer is enabled precisely because it is not “intelligent”, or because it is not Nous in the manner of a human. Note that I did not say it has no Nous, I said it is not Nous in the same manner as the human. It is dependent on the human as its unitive principle. The computer does not understand, we understand, through the computer. In the language “symbolic metaphysics”, we would say that the Computer is an extension of us, it is an “extra body” without the limitations and peculiarities of our biological bodies. It is another “layer” for the Soul, and this is the chief danger of so-called AI from a metaphysical perspective. To understand this, we will go through some Neoplatonism, keeping in mind that similar conceptions are all over the world, in ancient mythologies and theologies, and show essentially the same idea.
II
Veil and Body
“Holes everywhere are equally black” [9]
The “Great Chain of Being” is a familiar concept for many students of ancient philosophy. It is the idea that the metaphysical cosmos is a hierarchy of beings, of power, and of divinity. Those “higher” on this great pyramid are more powerful, less limited, and more “Godlike”. What is not often known is that the chain of being can be, and has been, construed as a system of “layers”, “bodies”, or “veils” of a God or Gods, conceived as ineffable Unity[10]. If you have ever heard or read about of the “Veil of Isis”, this is the same basic idea. That which reveals also conceals. My face is my veil. It reveals me, and yet it hides my depths. The veil of Isis reveals Isis, and yet hides her ineffable essence. To lift these veils is to either find another veil or to paradoxically not lift them at all, for the ineffable unity is beyond all conceptions and intelligibility. To see the veil is in a sense to already have lifted it, and so to not have lifted it, if you get my drift.
“It is the Nameless, Ungraspable; the Hidden-behind a- thousand-veils. If one seeks to grasp It, It withdraws. If one seeks to think It, It seals the understanding. It shatters him who knows It.” [11]
The chain of being, seen this way, is the various layers, bodies, veils of a God. In the Schuonian conception of Vedanta, it is the “Maya” that hides and yet reveals “Atma” [12]. You see this in the “bodies of Soul” doctrine found in some Neoplatonists[13], and also similar conceptions in the east[14]. It is why the resurrection body of St Paul is no different ontologically from the deified souls of the pagan righteous[15], and why Origen described resurrection as an ascent: In ascending, we – in St Paul’s words – are transformed from the body of death into immortality. Death and descent is associated with multiplication and division, basically, to become “many” in the sense of “fragmented” and ultimately “disordered”. To resurrect, to “ascend” – a language common to ancient Greeks, Egyptians and antique Jews (and their pre-Jewish Semitic ancestors and neighbours) – is to be unified. The “closer” to the Good one is, the more “unified” they are. The Good of a thing is simply its unitive integrity[16]. “Hell”, “death” (in the privative, not mystical, sense), “Samsara”, and similar states are the opposite. Therefore many esoteric traditions preach “escape from the body”, or its dissolution and transformation into a more “united” form. It means “escape” and “condemnation” of the world as it is, evil and disordered, plagued with death. It is what is common between Platonism, heretical Gnosticism, and the original Christian message. How does AI fit into this? Remember Dr Hart’s definition:
“a logically prior and transcendental simplicity that organizes the many into one, a subjective vantage at once passively receptive and actively constitutive of the totality it perceives. It is not the effect of material integration, but is instead the power that integrates experience from an irreducibly simple perspective.” [17]
His language is not accidental. Consciousness organizes everything from a simple perspective, one that is not reducible to any parts of any edifice or artifice. It is in that “awareness”, that “consciousness”, that everything is united, and this is first as itself. The phenomenology of consciousness is indistinguishable from that of creation. There is nothing that is not already knowable, and thus already known in principle in and as the primordial awareness prior to even our human individuality. This is basic Neoplatonism gotten from probing the Self, and this is the way of Advaita in another language. In the end, the knower is the known in absolute unity, and the known is the knower as it particularizes itself as the result of intentionality. This is not “creatable” as anything “artificial”. It is not a “property” of any object that aggregates over quantity, size, or complexity. This is prior to all that, and it is the reason AI is an abuse of language.
Now, if “things”, the “known” is consciousness as it particularizes itself – because consciousness is simply Being – then the chain of being can be seen as the particularization of consciousness seen in another mode. It is thus we have the “microcosm” and “macrocosm”. The traditional hierarchies of man’s ontology – for example, Body, Soul, Spirit, Self (Atman. this last one is not well known for many) – parallels and is the exact equivalent of macrocosmic ontology, for example, Matter (Hyle), Soul (Psyche, Anima), Spirit (Nous, Spiritus), the One (To Hen, Brahman). Remember the great Advaitin Maxim: This Atman is Brahman[18].
In this ascent, both “internal” and “external”, one becomes “simpler”, more “united” and less burdened by chaotic multiplicity – and remember it is not multiplicity as such that is the problem, but a particular kind of multiplicity, that which divides and disunites, not that which enables communion – and so by implication less “physical” in the modern sense, even if still “bodily” or more “substantial”.
“Artificial Intelligence” as popularly conceived – and include within this any transhumanist utopia where we become machines or machines and computers control more of our lives – is precisely the opposite of this. We are instead chained and tied to the chaotic multiplicity and death. I mean, Dr Hart put it in stark words:
“…the transhumanists plainly desire is not an escape from the body at all, but rather eternal existence in a more durable, digital version of the body. More to the point, he entirely failed to grasp what it was that the “gnostics” of old—like the members of the ancient mystery cults, and not at all unlike the Christians of the time—most truly desired. It is not that I feel a special solicitude for the reputations of, say, Valentinus or Basilides; but, even so, they were not idiots, and I find it impossible not to object to facile caricatures of their beliefs. As I said in my first installment in this series, it was not embodiment as such, but rather an illusory existence in a shadowy, lower form of corporeality, separated from God and outside his eternity, that these teachers dreaded and sought to escape. One simply cannot read, for example, Valentinus’s Gospel of Truth and fail to see that a pathetic retreat to perpetual, serial persistence in a dreamworld far from God would have been a horror to the community for which it spoke. (Hell, even the makers of the Matrix films understood this much.)” [19]
And despite Dr Hart’s dislike of Rene Guenon, this is one thing they have some agreement on, as he considers ours the age of “quantity” [20]. Much transhumanism is in fact a fleeing into the body, rather than true inwardness away from it. What is the end of us if we continue on this path?
III
Idolatry and Theurgy
"Against Foolishness the archailects emselves avail in vain..." [21]
It turns out, if you have been reading closely, that the dangers of AI, and its related projects, are the dangers of idolatry. One should never underestimate the human capacity to destroy ourselves. There are countless hells in theologies and countless equivalents of hell in history that show us just how much we are given to depravity. It would generally suffice to look at your own moral life to show how easy it is for us to be evil. But it is in precisely this similarity that I glimpsed a small light, and this post is an attempt to find it in the darkness. It may turn out to be false, but I must find out if it is.
Theurgy is generally understood as a series of activities that are meant to “facilitate” the manifestation of the Gods, and conversely, facilitate the ascent of the Soul to the Gods. It is in a sense “simultaneous” and can be said to be a participation in the activities of the Gods themselves[22]. It would not be hard for certain liturgical Christians (and perhaps some Pentecostals) to realize that this describes Christian worship. The liturgies Catholics, Orthodox, Copts, etc, participate in, and perform, can be described as theurgy[23], participating in, and re-enacting the ultimate theourgia of God himself in and as the Birth, Life, Death, Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecostal return of Jesus of Nazareth. We use Icons, bread, wine, etc, and these “conduct” the presence of God to us, in a sense. Christ is really present in and as the Eucharist, and in a sense, the Priest “brings Him down”. For Icons, in particular, this should sound familiar to Orthodox Christians:
“The Hellenic worshipers of images (eikones), though hated and assaulted by the Christian and Jewish zealots, were perfectly aware that images of the gods are merely receptacles and symbols, not divine realities per se. These images are not altogether adequate representations of the gods, but the anagogic instruments that help in one’s devotional, intellectual, and imaginative ascent or function as ‘windows of transcendence’ irradiating divine powers and graces.” [24]
This perfectly describes Christian Icons, and it is this light that keeps trying to reflect off of AI and keeps beguiling many of its proponents. Can AI function as “windows of transcendence” such that the appearance of God(s) in and as the AI fools the proponents into thinking they have “created” or “built” intelligence?
I can’t say I have an optimistic answer to this question. The purpose of the “statues” and “images” is not to perfectly mirror human intelligence. What is often created is not a biological replica of a being, but a visual replica. It “looks” like the figure it images. For example, if the God is to take human form, it is the image of the human that is created, whether 2D or 3D. They do not build a human brain. The created human image doesn’t even have to be anatomically or visually accurate. The point is not “realism”. The Gods are not to be absolutely identified with their windows. Instead, we are to see through the image the real unboundedness of the God, and ascend to them. The intelligence of the God is not bound by what form the image takes. This is also tied to how humans are also icons of the Gods, a concept found in many a religion [25]. One of the goals of the Theurgist is to let the God inhabit them. Even in their acts with respect to the cult image, they are not just humans, they are the forms of a God interacting with another God (the image). It is “divine play” (līlā) quite literally. When the theurgist moves “inward” into himself and simultaneously up to the Gods, we are not talking about biology. When the organs are used as icons – let’s say in mummification – they are supposed to represent noetic realities, and they do not need to be biologically functional to do so (mummification is for biologically dead people). Much talk about AI is precisely the opposite of this. It is the “externalization” of intelligence. Rather than the Gods containing all things, including the hieratic statues, within themselves, we try to “contain” the Gods in circuits, abstracted from noetic life, and from true inwardness. Rather than icons, we seem to be creating golems. Because, again, physical embodiment is simply a limitation of intelligence, the reduction of all intelligence to embodiment reduces intelligence to its most “material” aspect: Calculation; or worse still, the physical correlates to our mental and non-physical act of calculation. Remember, we calculate, using computers. AI, then, approximates more of the forces of the “flesh” than spirit, the “daimons”, who, if let loose, destroy everything, not necessarily because they are human-like malicious entities – I would say those kinds of entities are not the kind to actually be “embodied” in computers – but because they are, precisely, not intelligent. The “edge”, the quantitative, the many, is to be united by the One, otherwise, all things tend towards chaos and non-existence. This is quite literally the metaphysical meaning of Noah’s flood story, and all its equivalents in other traditions. This is what evil is, the limitation and loss of intelligence. Intelligence is Unity as Being. The “loss” of being is the loss of unity, and hence intelligence, and this includes moral intelligence. If the unity of “AI” – the human – is lost, what we have is simply, “evil” and disorder. The images of the theurgist mean nothing without him. They are meant for him. He is to ascend, and they are his aids. “religion is for man and not man for religion” as the saying goes, and I could apply this to technology: Technology is made for man, not man for technology. We should never forget that principle.
The burning question, for me, is “can AI be redeemed?” Symbolism is always double. The destroyer is as much Samael in the divine function of warrior as he is Satan in his rebellion. Shiva destroys the world, but in doing so transforms it. The world will be baptized in fire according to the book of Peter, and yet it is the means of resurrection. Buildings are also extended bodies, and as extended bodies, they are in a sense “dead”, and are, therefore “tombs”. But the tombs of kings such as pharaohs are also temples, and the grave of Christ is now heaven, the very holy of holies. I am pretty sure we cannot stop the spiritual disaster unfolding before our eyes, but is there a transformation ahead? Will “AI” be transfigured into an aid for theurgy? My answer leans to the negative as of now, but that light remains, I don’t know what to make of it.
[1] ‘Orion’s Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica - Quotes and Sayings’ <https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/482b9d7ea99c1> [accessed 5 January 2022].
[2] ‘Orion’s Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica - Archailect’ <https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49cfe7a37b5b3> [accessed 4 January 2022].
[3] ‘Current World Energy Consumption’ <https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/current_world_energy_consumption> [accessed 4 January 2022].
[4] ‘Calculating the Energy Output of the Sun Calculating the Energy Output of the Sun’ (Royal Observatory Greenwich), pp. 1–2.
[5] ‘Orion’s Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica - Quotes and Sayings’.
[6] David Bentley Hart, ‘Mind, Nature, Emergence: Spiritual Science and the Science of Mind, Part Two’ <https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/mind-nature-emergence> [accessed 4 January 2022].
[7] David Bentley Hart, ‘Science, Consciousness, Information: Spiritual Science and the Science of Mind, Part One’, 2021 <https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/science-consciousness-information> [accessed 4 January 2022].
[8] David Bentley Hart, Roland in Moonlight (Angelico Press, 2021).
[9] ‘Orion’s Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica - Quotes and Sayings’.
[10] “From the point of view of the world, the Divine Principle is hidden behind a number of envelopes, the first of which is matter.” Frithjof Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions.
[11] Frithjof Schuon, Gillian Harris, and Angela Schwartz, ‘Primordial Meditation’.
[12] Frithjof Schuon and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Essential Frithjof Schuon, The Library of Perennial Philosophy, 2005 <http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0513/2005014071.html>.
[13] For example: “This theory of an incorporeal soul-principle in the centre of the living creature goes hand in hand with the doctrine of pneuma as the 'instrumental body' which performs all vital functions under the soul's guidance.” - Abraham P. Bos, ‘The “Vehicle of the Soul” and the Debate over the Origin of This Concept’, Philologus, 151.1 (2006), 31–50 <https://doi.org/10.1515/PHIL-2007-0104/MACHINEREADABLECITATION/RIS>.
[14] In Buddhism for example: “The sambhogakaya is a Mahayana doctrine about the second of the three bodies of the Buddha” - David Armstrong, ‘Roland, Rebirth, and Resurrection: A Comparative Eschatology of Paramahansa Yogananda and Origen of Alexandria’, 2021 <https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/04/05/roland-rebirth-and-resurrection-a-comparative-eschatology-of-paramahansa-yogananda-and-origen-of-alexandria/> [accessed 5 January 2022].
[15] See David Bentley Hart, ‘The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients’, Church Life Journal, 2018 <https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/> [accessed 20 July 2020].
[16] “In desiring the One/Good, entities desire their individual integrity.” - Edward Butler, ‘The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus’ (New School University, 2003) <https://henadology.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/dissertation-copy.pdf>.
[17] Hart, ‘Science, Consciousness, Information: Spiritual Science and the Science of Mind, Part One’.
[18] “They mean that the principle underlying the world as a whole, and that which forms the essence of man, are ultimately the same.” M. Hiriyanna, as quoted by Arvind. Sharma in Advaita Vedānta : An Introduction, First Edition (Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, 2004) <https://books.google.com/books?id=9nm3gIqLZBsC>.
[19] David Bentley Hart, ‘Absolute Immanence and the Immanent Absolute: Gnosticism and Modernity, Part Four’ <https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/absolute-immanence-and-the-immanent> [accessed 4 January 2022].
[20] Rene Guenon, The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times, 4th edn (Sophia Perennis, 2004).
[21] ‘Orion’s Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica - Quotes and Sayings’.
[22] Algis Uzdavinys, Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity (Angelico Press, Sophia Perennis, 2014). It is from here that most of my conceptions of Theurgy comes from, all errors are mine.
[23] Algis Uždavinys, ‘Putting on the Form of the Gods : Sacramental Theurgy in Neoplatonism’, Sacred Web, 5 (2000), 107–20.
[24] Uzdavinys.
[25] Uzdavinys; Also see Margaret Barker, The Revelation of Jesus Christ: Which God Gave to Him to Show to His Servants What Must Soon Take Place (Revelation 1.1) (T&T Clark, 2000) for links between the beliefs of the first Christians and that of their pre-Jewish ancestors and their ancient near eastern neighbours.