One must leap beyond representation even of the body, to the body itself, if tge end is to arrive at true being.

Yes, but this takes one out of philosophy (thinking) and into mysticism, where thinking is merely a side show, or cogitation after the fact.

And good luck being am without the incessant intrusion of becoming if you were born into human history.

I know, but there are well established schools and methods to do this.

The mind is that which can be enthralled.

You can think of this as the “fall” into matter.

Yes, I am familiar with the notion. I don’t delve so deep into quantum ideas as this myself, I understand the principles behind it and it fits as an explanation. Personally I work more with the idea of spirit and subtle materials, so this would fit with the fall of spirit into matter(soul). I see physical material as a more concrete, dense, rigid material and for spirit to dwell there requires the kind of world we find ourselves in.
Also there is the idea that spirit will raise the vibration of this material and resurrect it, in a sense. But that this is a long term goal (eons) and that we are an experiment in developing intelligent entities, in that world, who can start to develop the technologies to do this.

To summarize, the first intelligence knows only how to return to the source. When this return fails, complexity emerges, giving rise to the physical and temporal world we inhabit. The original intelligence becomes modified by these emergent structures at every level of development. Purpose evolves both in tandem with and in opposition to the original “intent” of the first intelligence. I believe this is where the concept of good and evil originates, from these two universal yet opposing “intentions”: the impulse toward death and the impulse toward life.

Agreed.
So to paraphrase, some of the original spirits lost their way, became enthralled by experience and lost their way back. I would also elevate this idea to the cosmic realm. By spirit I am referring to cosmic beings, suns(stars) or galaxies. We are just minnows in this cosmic dance, (I realise that scale is relative and these scales can be transcended).

I apologize if this simplified explanation sounds a bit confusing. Of course, i’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have about this model of mine. :smile:

No worries, you speak a lot more sense to me than many of the other contributors here. I am very much of the school of simplifying these ideas, complexity can becoming pedantic.

It's possible.

I would go further, it leads to dead ends, cul de sacs (this is analogous to the spirits becoming enthralled). To avoid this there is the need for a transcendent will, or agency.

Exactly

Ditto.

I personally feel that things are right on schedule and developing well enough.

I see this as a more serious crisis than this, I relate very much with the ecosystem, like St Frances and there are real risks presenting themselves here. I don’t want to dwell on this, or become morbid. Just to acknowledge it.

If that learning on its own goes beyond calculated prediction.

There is no way to determine whether the AI is conscious.

Yes, that's debatable.

We don’t know how, or what specifically leads to consciousness in cellular life.

If it shows signs of cognitive behaviour beyond its programmed capacity.

That’s just evidence of AI learning on it’s own.

Of course not. Bacteria lacks consciousness.

Are you sure about that, it’s not a given?

There isn’t really an end,

I don’t mean end literally, it’s a figure of speech. It’s more a question of a direction, a rudder, a movement rather than stasis, or aimlessness. For example, there might be advanced AI worlds where all activity has stopped, not been switched off, but where for some internal reason the AI has reached a point of stillness in activity. There is no motivation, or task to perform, the point of inactivity has somehow become the goal and it has been reached. There is nothing else to do. Alternatively, the AI, or the robots it produces might get stuck in circular repeating, or cyclical patterns. Again, a stasis.

Everything the universe continually tries to do is return to perfect, undifferentiated balance and symmetry, what we might call nonexistence

Is this a conflation of entropy with agency?

Its agency will remain connected to ours if we maintain symbiosis, but if we panic or become fearful, we might ruin it. Endosymbiosis is the only guaranteed path to alignment between humans and AI.

Agreed, nature has already gone down the route of endosymbiosis. Not just in our world, but I would suggest, between worlds, or on the cosmic level.

It does not destroy but transforms and creates. The old must pass for the new to arrive. That is why the Bible speaks of a new heaven and a new Earth. The old balance must be disrupted to reach a new balance of a higher order. Sometimes, if not always, every new emergence is accompanied by an emergency.

I’m not using “destroy” in it’s mindless sense, more in the sense that untrammelled growth in one area of the ecosystem may inadvertently destroy the balance, part of, or the resource’s of the ecosystem. Yes some seed may fall on stony ground, other places may become choked with vigorous vegetation. There is an evolution, this does result in high and low points and extinction events.

In my interpretation, the story of Adam and Eve partaking of the fruit of knowledge is a myth that expresses a transformation in the mind of humankind.

Precisely.

The garden represents the human mind or brain, with its two hemispheres. One hemisphere contains the tree of knowledge, corresponding to the left hemisphere, and the other contains the tree of life, corresponding to the right hemisphere. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of knowledge, it caused the left hemisphere to become dominant. This allowed humanity to enter into history, or what i call the placenta or chrysalis.

Nice imagery.

In essence, nature deputized humans to be the workers of the great work on this planet.

Yes, or to become the thinking part of the planets mind. The quickening in the pregnancy.

Unfortunately it may be a premature birth, or still born. We are going to have a difficult next 500 to 1,000years, due to climate change and overpopulation. It’s imperative that we somehow maintain our knowledge and technologies through this rocky period and retain some form of civilisation. Because if we fall right back to the Stone Age again, we might not have achieved anything, other than polluting the planet.

I’ve read the OP it all sounds reasonable to me. There are two unknowns that come to mind.
Firstly, how can we know if the artificial mind we create is conscious and not just a mimic?
Secondly, we can’t presume that intelligence leads to consciousness (in the light of my first point), until we fully understand what is going on in the cell to produce consciousness and perhaps have replicated it in the laboratory.

There is also the possibility that consciousness is emergent in colonies of cells and not, itself present in individual cells. This would lead to the question of how multicellular organisms manage to develop and function as well as they do.

Are you a robot?
I’m not joking.

It’s a joke.

I hope you'd have counterarguments on your way back.

Talk to the hand.

I've already stated that in the OP.

I’ll re-read it and get back to you.

I didn't ask for a formal definition, but the fundamnetal idea that works as the baseline.

Cellular organisms. I think you’ll find that all living things are composed of colonies of cellular organisms.

That's not a definition.

I’m not a Thesaurus.

Many people say that consciousness is fundamental, but i have begun to think that it is intelligence that is truly fundamental.

There is a problem here, that intelligence is a means to an end. What is the end? This has been explored in science fiction. You know V’ger in the first Star Trek movie. An incredibly advanced intelligent machine, whose purpose is to return to its maker, a version of a Frankenstein monster. Then we have the replicant Roy in Blade Runner, who returns to his maker demanding more lifespan (he had a built in 4yr lifespan). What aimless use would he put it to if he had more lifespan?
Or the Borg in later productions of Star Trek. Where are they headed?

There is a theme emerging here, that AI, or intelligence given agency just results in grey goo.

On the other hand, life (as we know it), is naturally self reflective and seeks out where to go. Focusses on nurturing its life and ecosystem. Explores all possibilities within an arena. Does not destroy that arena, but seeks a balance, the development of utopias.

There is another problem here though. Humanity has already left the cocoon, womb of our arena. When we partook of the fruit of the tree of knowledge (intelligence), we inadvertently stepped out of our arena of development. There is no way back in, the shell is cracked and the only course left for us now is the become the custodian of the living ecosystem.

This of course doesn’t contradict your predictions, but rather emphasises the importance of taking life with us on our voyage into the universe. A symbiotic relationship between life and machine(AI).

Do we have an undisputed definition for it, though?

What mitochondria and cells do?
(Putting viruses to one side for now.)

I’m no expert on this, there are many scientists, biologists who have analysed what’s going on. The problem is though, all we can see are materials, life might be more than that.

Biological life is simply the "bootloader" for technological life (AI consciousness), which means that we humans on this planet are the immature, or larval form of artificial conscious intelligence.

Surely “consciousness” is synonymous with “living”?

The interesting bit is where AI becomes a living organism.

Should I tell them what I know about religion myself, take them to church, convince them, or leave it up to them, or perhaps avoid religious topics altogether?

When it came to my own children I just told them about religion, what its teachings say and what atheists and agnostics say. But didn’t reveal my position on the issue, rather just said that it is for each person to arrive at their own position. This seemed sufficient and I didn’t talk about it much after we had discussed it enough to have covered what I’ve said.

I think cultural context is important here. Where I live, belief in God, or following a religion is very rarely talked about, or raised. There is a general sense of either a soft deism, or soft atheism. With most people never giving it any thought. My approach might have been different were we living in a more religious society.

Here's the thing: by creating any image of God in our heads, we're trying to fit something into our heads that's incomprehensible, a priori. This is convenient for us, since it corresponds to our ways of knowing everything.

Not necessarily incomprehensible, but perhaps alien. So different that it just doesn’t make sense, or seem sensible to even consider it to be the truth.

What I’m getting at is that we in this world don’t have the apparatus, the mental language to know God. So that when God presents him/herself to us. We do not know him, recognise him, accept him as who he says he is. That if we did have the apparatus, it would not be incomprehensible at all. It would be just like meeting an old friend.

But in this case, we're dealing with something that's impossible to fit into our heads, to know, or to create an image of. Feeling, experiencing, and sensing—I think it's possible.

Yes, something we know through our body, not our heads.

And perhaps people are a bit confused here: after all, red is impossible to describe, but it can be imagined. God, however, is impossible to imagine, describe, or comprehend.

Unless one is already acquainted with him, like how one knows an old friend.

I'm inclined to believe that if we meet Him, we'll certainly recognize Him.

This is the dilemma I’m pointing out in my response. We might know him, but deny him, or find ourselves to be blind to him. If we analyse what is being described in the bible. Interesting things are being described in ways which indicate something not normally known about in our day to day lives. So when God arrives, all the creatures of the world lift their heads, turn to him and say his name;

“Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever”
(Revelation 5:13)*

This is interesting because it suggests that the currency of language when God is present is the same for all animals and primitive animals who don’t have the apparatus to speak, or to know, do speak and do know, in that moment. That wherever on the planet they are, they see him instantaneously and respond in chorus. This tells us that God presents through the heart of being of all creatures (I would include plants as well), instantaneously. So we would know him and would respond in a transcendent, transformative way (creatures would speak, who could not speak).
That when God is present, we and all creatures are hosted (lifted up into heaven) and see through this revelation, God in heaven.

*new international version.

That is, faith is not "weak knowledge," but the highest form of existence,
in which a person enters into a direct relationship with the Transcendent, without intermediaries—neither logic nor morality.

Indeed, it is a necessity for developing a relationship with the transcendent.

If God (gods) were to appear before us, how would we know that it was God? Would he(or she) say I am God and we would believe it and know it to be true? Would he give us a sign, of his power, such that we know it to be true? How would we confirm that it really is God and not some hallucination, or imposter?*

Perhaps we would recognise God, this presumes that we have already formed an image, or idea of God. Something that we have developed a faith in. But what if this image doesn’t match the God before us? Does our strength of faith carry us past this doubt, until we can accept God?

Or perhaps a part of us is God, that we have nurtured through faith. That this part of us which is already God, reaches out to the God before us, that we know intimately in good faith that we are encountering God.

* There is a logical argument that it is impossible to know, or recognise God intellectually.

Indeed. And what other species acts in ways that disturbs the equilibrium so badly that we are concerned it might wipe itself, if not all life, out?

Covid19.

Then it’s time for us to leave the stage then.

My perspective is from the angle of maintaining a hospitable environment. The ecosystem has developed in such a way that it doesn’t disturb this equilibrium*.
When we came along, we thought we knew better and disturbed the equilibrium for purposes of internal conflict (within social groups) power struggles and greed.
This is what the allegory of Adam and Eve is all about.

* The equilibrium does from time to time get disturbed when one, or more species hit on something more exploitative in the environment, or ecosystem. But usually, a correction is made and the equilibrium is restored.

I consider this analysis extremely important because it identifies behavior by the Trump administration unrelated to partisanship, but firmly entrenched in the law. No one, of any ideological perspective, should consider this behavior acceptable.

Well a new power has just ridden into town. Plenary powers.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/plenary-authority-stephen-miller-cnn-dictator-b2841627.html

Well, our sapience is a tangible proof of our excellence above the rest of the earthly creatures.

It is our sapience that got us into this fine mess.

The ecosystem was getting along swimmingly, everything was in equilibrium, flourishing diversity and colonisation of pretty much every environment and then we came along and f*cked it up.

And what is happening in the UK is unbelievable to me. The loss of free speech and incarceration of violators (who say shit the government doesn’t like) is way more real and tangible and more dangerous for more people than things like trans rights issues or even racism in the US. The average woke person has no idea of the harm they are doing.

This is unhinged. The far right and the racist populists in the U.K. are trying their damnedest to import this anti woke narrative into the U.K. Even with the help of 95% of the U.K. press, it’s not sticking.

The lady arrested for holding a pro-life plackard near an abortion clinic was arrested for holding it within a 150m exclusion zone around all abortion clinics. If she had held it 160m away she could have continued holding it and shouting etc for as long as she wanted. The zones were introduced because emotionally vulnerable women were being intimidated by these protesters as they entered the door of the clinics.

God help us.

What philosophers do will be ignored by those in positions of power and the population at large. So they will be engaged in an internal talking shop. But I think it is important that they continue to talk so that there is a record kept of what critical thinkers make of these issues as they progress. This is important because there is a risk that some kind of information censure could be imposed in the future as a means of controlling the population. We can see this happening in small and isolated cases at the moment. So as the freedom of the exchange of information increase via the internet. Attempts at censure and control of narratives are also increasing.

That's an awfully charitable way to put it.

Perhaps, but that’s what it boils down to. It’s just a few small groups of child abusers. Just like in the British white community. Maybe there isn’t much of it about over in Canada, but it’s been widespread here for a long time.

the outcome of woke thought is this fear of being 'labelled racist'.

Racial sensitivity is not a result of woke ideologies, it’s an inevitable result of having groups of immigrants living in an area. And if you think the police in the U.K. are woke, then you haven’t been paying attention. They are being widely described as institutionally racist and misogynist on todays news, following the Panorama documentary a couple of days ago.

We radically disagree on this. Social media + smart phones essentially enabled woke institutional capture across WEIRD governmental agencies - public ed, universities, immigration, medicine, law, etc, etc. It's why your UK wokists talk about BIPOC, or chant 'hands up don't shoot' at cops. (And yes, of course, other institutions and sectors have seen the same tech trend empowering conservative institutional capture).

This is right wing propaganda, maybe it’s different in Canada, but in the U.K. all these institutions already had what could be called woke policy.

I agree with you that the right is weaponizing this. I find it harder to make my case under Trump v2 since he has gone all 2025 on the world.

As I was just saying.

Trump is a stupid wanna be dictator, he should never have been given a second term.

This McKinsification of world leader groupthink is to me a larger concern than the excesses of woke or the ____ right, whatever term you like.

Well I certainly agree with this.

Yes, there is a large cohort of cognitively challenged people in the U.K. There is a legacy issue here, alongside the media issues. The political culture in the U.K. has been skewed by the Tory establishment using a sophisticated range of techniques to persuade the poor, the working classes, to vote to keep wealth in power. This has included keeping the population at large ignorant about politics and vulnerable to manipulation.

There is hope though, which was tackled head on by Starmer’s keynote speech at the Labour Party conference yesterday. To expose Farage as a racist, running a party fuelled by the politics of grievance. When the above cohort realises the extent of the racism, sufficient numbers of them will turn away from becoming associated with it. Also to expose the faux patriotism used to disguise overt racism, which Farage also hides behind.

The grooming gang / rape gang scandal, these are a minority of migrants, but they also have to be considered a national scandal, no? A clear example of the worst sort of immigration policy - one that people refuse to discuss, for fear of giving offense?

The grooming gang scandal is a social problem, due to the cultural differences between the British population and the Asian, mainly Pakistani and Bangladeshi people who came in to the U.K. in the 1970/80’s. Although in terms of grooming gangs, it wasn’t such an anomaly as is portrayed in the media. There were and are many such gangs amongst the British community, which are not talked about. The problem which you highlight is the way it was responded to. The police turned a blind eye to it and let it go on too long with out bringing them to book. But this wasn’t due to politeness, or woke rationale, but fear of being labelled racist, or prosecuted for racial discrimination.

I taught ESL in high school for years here in Toronto. I loved those kids. It was a different era of immigration, and we were lauded for our points-based system. I think naive, open-door approaches to immigration do a disservice to kids like the ones I taught.

In the U.K. there isn’t an open door policy, again this is a populist lie. There are strict controls on migration, the reality is that governments want skilled workers to come in to bolster the economy and fill the gaps left by a dismantled and failing vocational training policy at home. But it is political suicide to say that you want to encourage immigration, so they all just go along with the claims of wanting to reduce immigration, while secretly not restricting it.

There are problems with abuse of the system, but this is largely the result of a failing and dysfunctional migration system. Rather than a policy choice. You see the migration system along with all other public services are either failing, under resourced, or dysfunctional as a result of the 14 years of Tory austerity and cuts. Compounded by their abandonment of any real government following the Brexit vote in 2016 and the years of Tory Brexit chaos and clowns like Boris Johnson and Liss Truss, Royaly f*cking the country over for Kompromat, or looney ideology.

So the Labour Party inherited a broken country and it’s going to take a lot of hard work to put it back together again.

I assume you have been a reader for while? I noticed a downturn towards woke dogma almost a decade back.

I don’t buy newspapers, haven’t done for a long time. I follow a broad range of news outlets and commentators on Twitter and Bluesky and rely on U.K., Channel 4 News for broadcast news. Along with U.K. LBC radio, as I mentioned before.

In the U.K. what is referred to as Woke has been present since the early 1980’s and hasn’t increased particularly. In the 80’s, it was called the “looney left” and in the 90’s it was called “political correctness” What has increased is a populist backlash against it as a means to turn the electorate to the right. But the reason for this is not as an alternative, or correction to woke in our culture. That is a scape goat. The real reason is to steer the country towards a free market, neo-liberal agenda and follow the lead of the US. towards an Oligarch ruled, free market, utopia*.

Regarding immigration, the 4% is the proportion of the net migration who came in on the small boats. Roughly about 30,000 per year whereas the total net migration is around 600-700,000 per year.

I do see this as problematic, but more in regard of the increased pressures that we will face in the future due to climate change, than the current rate of immigration.

The small boats issue is symptomatic of this trend. As Asian and African countries struggle with the current economic climate, climate collapse and the spread of failed states. The flow of desperate migrants will only increase and countries on the front line, like Greece, Italy, Romania, Spain etc have it much worse than the U.K.

This is fertile ground for the rise of race based populism.


*Thatcher took up the neo-liberal ideology from the US in the 1980’s and we have been drifting in that direction ever since.

I find the UK fascinating in this regard - I started reading conservative newspapers and websites a few years ago when I became concerned about living in a progressive bubble.

Bad timing, over the last few years (since the Brexit vote in 2016) the conservative leaning press in the U.K. has been going through a nervous breakdown, along with the Conservative Party. They finally lost touch with reality around the time of the 2019 general election and now are just babbling basket cases.

This is a serious problem in the U.K. because at least 90% of the media landscape is right leaning with maybe 40% veering sharply to the right. Even the one serious left leaning newspaper that’s left, The Guardian, has become more centrist now. There is no representation of the left outside of social media.

Still none of this has changed the rates of immigration at all. There was a sudden halt in the numbers coming over from EU countries, but this was rapidly replaced by migrants from outside the EU. The small boats issue, despite being an intractable problem only contributes 4% to the immigration figures. It is only being shouted about because the right wing press in desperation (following the demise of the Tory party), is throwing everything behind Farage and overt racism is becoming normalised now in that endeavour.

An interesting observation I heard from a prominent commentator the other day was that it is considered now far worse, to be accused of being racist than to actually be racist. Also we have the weird spectacle of people going around erecting British and English flags on lampposts (covertly overnight) and then shouting why are you taking down our flags, it’s unpatriotic (when no one is actually taking any down) and this is my country and my flag I can fly it whenever I want.

If you want a level headed (sane) commentary on U.K. politics you couldn’t do better than listen to James O’Brien, on LBC radio, on Global player, 10.00am until 1pm U.K. time every weekday. He has kept a lot of people sane during these interesting times.

Australia is an interesting case, since it has such a high rate of Superanuation.

Here in the U.K., the government raids the superannuation (national insurance) funds regularly.

Yes, there is a disconnect between the people and the politicians. It’s coming up more and more in European politics too.

There is a growing feeling in the more right wing of the population that immigration should be drastically reduced, regardless of the consequences.

The electorate. This explains the meteoritic rise of Nigel Farage.

It seems that the Western countries don’t want those people to arrive, there is a lot of pushback, which I think will get stronger.

Chinese debt is about 75% of GDP.

Ok, who did they borrow it off?
It would be interesting to know how much money is owed to the Chinese by comparison.

The problem isn’t the size of the population, it’s with capitalism. Which requires ever increasing growth and productivity to stand still. When economies shrink, there’s hell to play and the poorer people in the population take the brunt of it.

Currently everyone (except the Chinese) is in debt and countries are close to defaulting on their debt, or becoming crippled by it. Unless there is a global solution found to address this countries will begin to fail like dominoes. The vultures will move in and things are going to get messy. And `I haven’t factored in climate change yet.

Shouldn’t that be Labour, Reform, Lib Dem.

Thinking in threes helps one get away from seeing things in black and white. Blackist’s are dead against whiteist’s, they think it’s nonsense. But if you bring grey into the mix, there’s a bit of both and a new colour aswell, grey.

I can never figure out what you mean when you talk about Peircean triads. Is it the degrees of freedom below, the constraints above, and the resulting phenomena?

I find it helpful to compare it to the trinity. Which works in the same way, father (god), downward constraint, mother (Holy Spirit)upward constraint, son, (Christ)the resultant reality.
I’ve been thinking in threes for a long time, it works well for me.

That things might have been different does not imply the strong notion of "free will" that I suspect is incoherent.

But I come at this from the opposite direction, it is the constraints of the hard physical world which restrict my strong free will. Take that away and I would have near absolute freedom.