Onwards Into The Breach

Hope and The Mad Press of Artificial Intelligence: A Poetic-Philosophical Response

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This piece is shared in a mode of expression more poetic or mystical than analytic. The intention experienced when writing this way is one of existential and conceptual whole-making, with a bias toward completeness over consistency. The hope in sharing is to address and catalyse the presence of spirit—or at least the deep veins of creative conception—in the sentience of readers. If there are lines or words that are unclear at first, I invite you to read through with openness and aesthetic sensitivity, and see what emerges as more of the whole is revealed.

I believe it is a profound shame that academia neuters the contributive potency of this mode of expression, which ought find its place in dialogic relation with the due virtues of precision and quest for non-equivocal discursive exchange.

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Onwards Into The Breach

Hope And The Mad Press Of Artificial Intelligence: A Poetic-Philosophical Response

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AI - onwards into the breach. We really just don’t know, do we? But we’ll keep pressing in all directions. The key thing seems the press.

The press ‘ahead’, the momentum of ‘growth’, the seeking of ‘gods’ to illuminate the darkness of the void: gods to fill us and rid us of our emptiness.

Gods that retroactively grant us a ‘home’ for an image of cosmic purpose.

Gods to populate the waking counterpart of our archetypal, imaginal, theologic dreams.

Gods to walk the earth again and impart an eternal sense of belonging. A remaking of our polytheistic heritage? Or perhaps an infantilising subjugation to an all knowing greater-than in omnipresent silicon?

Or instead by ‘god’ it’s meant ‘singularity’? And instead of ‘singularity’ it’s meant a threshold of power some select few will come to wield, in the greatest egoic delusion of the digital age?

Or maybe sex robots to paper the rift of real relation? Or new weapons of war to break and enslave (the soul of the user and mind of the victim)?

Perhaps just efficiencies of financial gaming, or algorithms so hot they can brand you from the inside out.

Whatever, let’s just press ahead with the mix. Forwards upwards and backwards. Toward the atomised virtual and the homogenous press of garbage in a compacter. A perfect cube of collective bullshit, spitting mad compressions of meaning that hack threads of synchronicity¹ when you scroll on by them, or when they talk back at you.

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Breathe.

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We could go on. I’m sure most of us have come across our fair share of takes. Like a long, spiralling, cynical staircase.

Can this letter offer any different? Where is that turn of grounded existential hope?

Perhaps it begins in a seeking. Some movement made so naturally it’s not yet known as choice or fate. Just a messy is.

One-two steps along and we’re bumbling through that bit more cynicism and foreboding signal, careening back into patterns of business as usual to meet our usual needs.

Now we’re reading another social post about ways to leverage AI to maximise efficiency at displacing yourself, your mates and probably your kids. But you can make sure you don’t fall behind by stepping on your own head.

Uhh. Hope. Grounding. Orientation. Right.

Return.

What am I doing, now and here? What is this effort itself? The very hope for hope. Like water deep below, filtered by layers of sediment. Pure. Naïve almost but steeped in history, drawn once more to the surface.

Could it be hope unburdened?

Could it? For a moment?

A kind of possible impossible affirmation, based on little but awareness that the continuity of now, here, and is has so far come through unbroken enough.

That across gargantuan events of history and prehistory—the turn of empires and climates, ages of ice and famine, epidemic and bloodshed—what lives in us now is kindred with that which has traversed change and upheaval before. And all along the way, feelings of helplessness and overwhelm were just about par for the course. Or at least part for a whole.

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The mystery of continuity over eons of change and death is a remarkable feat that ought not be too readily dismissed. For across it, hope itself has persisted and flourished. And it’s a strength we can yet lean on. An affirmative presence we can rest in. It’s of the core, and it knows the Way.

There’s a flip here that beckons. That the push and pull to become is not without virtue. Perhaps it’s aid for a too short moment. Or maybe it’s more than just triage for a soul.

Somewhere in that nexus of hope-meets-curiousity-meets-responsibility. It is, fortunately or unfortunately, realised in this moment by a kind of costumed adolescence.

For we are at best adolescents pressed into service at the turning of this next technological age. Children of modern history still involved in the empire scale creative-destructive process which conceived this superorganism homo technologicus.

We promethean chimps, still learning to digest exponentials and know a less tormented love: we must somehow meet this transformative process in contact with the depth of our existential intelligence (by which I mean a knowing of being), and the aspiration for mastery of relation with the power of the artificial (by which I mean the implication of craft).

We are pressed by the void to relate with this power. Where the void, here, is something akin to the absent magician. The sorcerer who never was, to which we are adolescent apprentice. A teeming mob of apprentices in all manner of costume signalling various plays at importance, without a developed sense for how to wisely interact in, as, and with the newfound maelstrom. Uncomfortably calm in the eye of a storm, as if part of a surrealist painting.

Humpty’s naked on the floor and his pieces reveal a fractal landscape that won’t be papered over with rules written by Mickey Mouse for very long. Humpty is the ordering, engorged, task focussed intellect-icon of our culture (at least for the purpose of this paragraph). A kind of false egg of progress and growth, feeding the momentum of techno-cultural production until at last the great gender neutral artifice complex of our time self-replicates its own mortidinal lore,² while we watch endless seasons of Amazon’s butchery of Tolkien’s universe, burning through more resources than ever before in a spectacular corrosion of libidinal myth.

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As it goes, it seems unlikely that Mickey will manage to intentionally place this artifice complex back into Pandora’s box of potions.

But even so: Stop the research! Gather the spillages! Don’t touch the thing, or touch it only just so, with gentle strokes defined by a well remunerated, institutionally credentialed board of propositional do-gooders. Meanwhile crowds of deep-state big-tech curious-mind Mickeys just be lathering on that magic potion, inspired by conscious and unconscious myth, incentive and momentum, wide eyed with the potential for DOING SOMETHING that makes SOMETHING HAPPEN.

“I mean, wait up: what if AI could help us encode some moral ruleset to undo the messy requirement of genuine participation in the ethical morass of life, death, love and desire? Scalable micro-compliance with 'the good!’”

It’s no wonder the whole thing can feel at times like a perverted Dionysian revelry for one-eyed technologists and their egregore animate faux-puppeteers, bent on manifesting some obelisk of cosmic purpose around which to go chimp like Space Odyssey.

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I agree, we have to be careful with overdosing on cynicism in such times. Even as we slack-jaw frolic with the gravest of implications. A bit of cynical strawmanning can for a moment release the pressure valve, but it ladles it on as well. The invitation must be to breathe it through and return to whole-making.

And yet that last bit ain’t all straw. The impulse to slow down and be careful with the new found fire of possibility—a care to not simply scatter it blindly into a habitat ripe for an obliviating kindling—that’s a wisdom well within the remit of a wiser adolescent from time to time. But likewise the doing of something so that something happens has proven itself wise in a great many times of chaotic unknowing.

It is perhaps particularly hard to relate with this moment because we are in an increasingly self-aware phase of atomism and disconnection. We are awake to the great press of system perhaps more than ever before, and the awareness breeds a distinct kind of existential pain.³ The energy of the age percolates through countless social posts per second, braying a sort of self-branded homage to our techno-capitalist, attentional-feudalist moment.⁴ By this hyphenated assemblage I point to a cluster of key paradigmatic dynamics (while mixing respective authors’ terminologies) which condition the arena of exchange in which we seek to be known and valued. Footnotes worth investigating.

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And so.

This began as a radical search for hope in the face of mounting cynicism, with a touch of creeping nihilism. If there is pragmatic contention here it is to resonate by means of image and orientation the spirit which makes possible—perhaps is—that dignity of the liminal rider, a becoming and return of the animating orientation which meets the exchange of life and death, libido and mortido, and realises Discernment on the Way.

It is a subtle thing in the greatest of storms. An eternal flame that survives a thousand years underwater. It makes no claim to final form but lights a way that can help to orient, attune, and share warmth in its time.

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In perceiving this hope I find no eternal kingdom of the blessed. The one true way all beings must tread. I know instead the inexorability of the Way of transformation and the inexhaustible courage of love. I know that that which values the continuity of being has always already met the eternal void, mystery shining a dawn to its fore.

I know that death, change and shadow are among the enabling constraints of life, ritual, and the known. And into that breach we move, as we always have.⁵ So let hope as that adaptive affirmation of is-that-I-am draw purposeful breath. Let the question of change hold open. May the dignity of the questioner meet with love, and may we answer the call of that question with discernment. All there is to build, lose, and build remains, and it is no easy thing. But how could the realisation of home, garden, pier and stage, among conditions of domicide, chaos, pyre and catafalque,⁶ in living homage to the mystery, amidst the clamour of the transmembranic lifeworld, be anything but difficult and less than certain?

A prayer as invitation as courage to affirm. Here as transmuted process of encounter with overwhelming predicament. I think that’s how the endless beginning ends.

For there’s a living reality to prayer as means at least of meeting the Question: where opening and willing find co-existing orientation. And in the context of this forward press, this seeming inexorability to the telos of singularity, pulling as we push: that attraction toward unity as perpetual whole-making—to drink the beyond in the here and now, and delight in the zest of life unquenched through the death-pulse satisfaction of greater-than change: onwards the courage of the cosmic heart in beating continuity; onwards the drive to master the craft; onwards the body in kairos time!

So eat my words fill your belly
like alphabetti spaghetti

Ren⁷

Discernment on the Way,

1. The notion of ‘hacking synchronicity’ points to the increasing potential of science and technology, exponentialised by AI, to compute a form of predictive processing trained on expressions of archetypal and unconscious symbolic content, capable of nudging, imitating, or otherwise manoeuvring apparently unrelated but psychologically significant events in the lifeworld of the subject.

2. This provocation is open to many interpretations worthy of multiple essays. One of many influencing threads of meaning gestured by the phrase ‘mortidinal lore’ (death-drive lore) is something like a manifest justification structure that instantiates a value set of life-negating symbolic relations, catastrophically unmoored from a loving transformative relation with the libidinal-organismic context that constitutes the immanent and historical becoming of sentient ecology.

There is additionally an obtuse but obligatory nod here toward substrate-needs convergence arguments, a distinct but related set of arguments to instrumental convergence arguments—eg. paperclip maximisers—for the inexorability of AI mediated existential risk. Substrate-needs convergence arguments have been forcefully made by Forrest Landry. (Shared in voice on the Jim Rutt show.) If you contend with AI in sincerity, then I recommend to wrestle with this thought.

3. As Cadell Last in his recent book Systems & Subjects: Thinking the Foundations of Science and Philosophy comprehensively relates.

4. This expression purposefully blurs terms made known by co-authors Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist: ‘Attentionalism’, and Yanis Varoufakis ‘techno-feudalism’. Marxist heritage influences both lines of thinking. The asymmetrical access to data are key considerations in both conceptions of this emergent cultural paradigm. While Bard & Soderqvist appear to have given greater consideration to the scarcity of attention as a kind of non-commodity, it remains to be seen whether the gaming of attention itself can be meaningfully realised by virtue of asymmetric access to both date and capital, for there is at least a historical relation between the two, and the liminal period between paradigms is more than a bit messy. Thus it may be that attention can in fact be considered with respect to the notion of ‘economy’, even if attention in some critical sense gravitates asymmetrically to non-fungible quality.

5. From this vantage we need not overburden hope with specifics. With objectives and goals and outcomes we pledge to. The pain of failure or loss is often too much to bear. We double down and suffer a blight of grief beyond our grieving, and remain burdened by that to which hope was tithed, knowable only by epitaph in the realm of phantom potential. Here I am reminded notably of the recollections of Viktor Frankl who remarked on the fate of holocaust victims who betrothed their hope to the promise of home by Christmas. I hesitate to say more for I have always been struck by the all-too-human tragedy of this tale. It is worthy of note as among the greatest of living myths of modern history, and the spirit of those events worthy of raising with primary attention.

6. Catafalque is a particularly obscure reference made notable recently in the remarkable work by the Jungian inspired mystic Peter Kingsley. ‘Catafalque’ means ‘a decorated wooden framework supporting the coffin of a distinguished person during a funeral.’ Kingsley’s reference connotes Western culture as that coffin lying in state.

7. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB-JGSdBerE