Merkabah

[Nyarlathotep]

I'd like to show you one of the core principles of chaos magic, namely the fourth principle. I'll throw in it here and elaborate on it

4. Deconditioning. The Chaos paradigm proposes that one of the primary
tasks of the aspiring magician is to thoroughly decondition hirself from the mesh
of beliefs, attitudes and fictions about self, society, and the world. Our ego is a
fiction of stable self-hood which maintains itself by perpetuating the
distinctions of ‘what I am/what I am not, what I like/what I don’t like,’ beliefs
about ones politics, religion, gender preference, degree of free will, race,
subculture etc. all help maintain a stable sense of self, while the little ways in
which we pull against this very stability allows us to feel as though we are
unique individuals. Using deconditioning exercises, we can start to widen the
cracks in our consensual reality which hopefully, enables us to become less
attached to our beliefs and ego-fictions, and thus able to discard or modify them
when appropriate.

It can be either arguement for, or against, hell since it's chaos we're talking about it can be both

 

[Skarekrow]

I'd like to show you one of the core principles of chaos magic, namely the fourth principle. I'll throw in it here and elaborate on it

4. Deconditioning. The Chaos paradigm proposes that one of the primary
tasks of the aspiring magician is to thoroughly decondition hirself from the mesh
of beliefs, attitudes and fictions about self, society, and the world. Our ego is a
fiction of stable self-hood which maintains itself by perpetuating the
distinctions of ‘what I am/what I am not, what I like/what I don’t like,’ beliefs
about ones politics, religion, gender preference, degree of free will, race,
subculture etc. all help maintain a stable sense of self, while the little ways in
which we pull against this very stability allows us to feel as though we are
unique individuals. Using deconditioning exercises, we can start to widen the
cracks in our consensual reality which hopefully, enables us to become less
attached to our beliefs and ego-fictions, and thus able to discard or modify them
when appropriate.

It can be either arguement for, or against, hell since it's chaos we're talking about it can be both

Thanks for the posting!
I always appreciate the contributions of other’s to this thread.
I have read many such things about chaos magic, but this line of thinking precludes many other arenas of esoteric beliefs.
The dissolving of the ego is one of the core ideals of Buddhism, Christianity (arguably…certainly early on), and has been recognized as the source of much psychological and spiritual suffering.
People like Eckhart Tolle have become the anti-ego Gurus adding their own ideas to the original.

It’s good to maintain an open mind for sure, to watch that your own beliefs firstly aren’t just wishful thinking, but you have sound reasoning behind why you have your own beliefs…like it or not, I don’t think one can truly live totally ego-free…we can strive toward that goal, and sharpen our focus and recognition of negative ego-driven self-destructive patterns…but ultimately I believe even our ego serves a purpose for the experience that is this lifetime.

 

[Skarekrow]

That was pretty interesting. It's nice to see an article on reincarnation that takes a middle ground. Most either provide dubious evidence to their claims and insist it exists or just dismiss it entirely. The subject's a fascinating one, but I haven't come across many writers who seek to elucidate without inserting opinion as fact.

There is one thing though. While Carl Sagan did say that further study should go into Stevenson's claims, he didn't really take reincarnation any more seriously than other spiritual topics. He was very skeptical towards the idea, but not closed to the possibility it might exist. That's quite a bit away from being an advocate.

Yeah, I myself am not convinced that EVERYONE reincarnates…or anyone for that matter.
If you believe that there is a collective consciousness of some sort…which has some pretty solid proof behind it that there is something going on there.
If we all are just drops falling back into the collective pool each time, maybe certain experiences (as many reincarnation people have died violently or suddenly) are able to break through the filter (presumably the brain) for a time while the child is young and the brain hasn’t fully formed and blocked out that realm of experiential data streaming in.

If we are more than just part of a collective consciousness and we have something like an individual soul then the idea of reincarnation makes more sense.
Which also means that this may not be our last trip around, which is a bit depressing to think you get to die just to be born in some dirt floor hut in India somewhere and live another lifetime….ugh. *shudder*
Personally, I think we have a soul, but there is also a collective consciousness that we can tap into…I think we are given a choice to reincarnate or not.
Guess we’ll eventually find out…and perhaps while you are still young, you will realize that, only for it dissipate as you grow.

 

[Skarekrow]

[MENTION=5667]Jacobi[/MENTION]

This is the epitome of all the “inspirational” memes you see floating about out there…hahaha.
That being said…fuck peanut butter nazis.​

 

[Tin Man]

[MENTION=5045]Skarekrow[/MENTION] That reminds me of a Cracked article where inspirational photos are changed for honesty.

 

[Skarekrow]

@Skarekrow That reminds me of a Cracked article where inspirational photos are changed for honesty.

Read through them all…those are awesome!

I like the one that just says - “Hipster Bullshit"
Hahahaha

 

[Skarekrow]

I’ll have to pick up this book.

SOUND AS A BELL

Steven T. Parsons and Callum E Cooper (editors).
Paracoustics: Sound and the Paranormal.
White Crow Books, 2015.
​

This collection of papers by the editors and a number of contributors covers several areas of sound and the paranormal, after general discussions of the physics and psychology of sound.


The first area of discussion are the various knocks, raps and imitative sounds encountered in haunted houses; in many ways these, rather than visual experiences, constitute the essence of the haunting experience and a number of examples are given.

There had always been a discussion as to whether these are subjective or objective sounds, and an area which has not been explored properly is whether some of these sounds are actually internal body sounds that the brain normally filters out.

Some of the raps are objective because they have been recorded; and in his paper Barry Colvin compares these sounds with normal percussive raps, and seems to show that they have different acoustic properties.
This seems like an excellent area for experimental study.


Whether the alleged paranormal voices reported during the Enfield poltergeist belong in this section is rather doubtful.
Perhaps they belong in the next chapter dealing with raps, voices and other sounds heard during séances.

Here perhaps the role of fraud is more prevalent, for example in the case of trumpet and other forms of direct voice mediumship.
For years that was the opinion of most members of the SPR.

Raps of course were at the heart of the story of the Fox family which led to the birth of spiritualism.
I suspect that the two girls at the heart of this had accomplices, or rather were themselves accomplices in a hate campaign directed by a young woman named Lucretia Pulver and her friends against her former employer.

The next area covered is that of various forms of Electronic Voice Phenomena and the editors provided a very comprehensive and balanced summary of this, though they could perhaps have added cases of alleged EVP involving aliens rather than spirits, such as those recorded by Phillip Rogers, the partially sighted musician and ufologist back in the 1960s (I can’t say that I found these very impressive, the aliens sounded more like little children, or someone imitating little children).

There were also cases of alleged radio communication with aliens back in the 1950s.

​

Related to these are telephone calls from the dead, a topic first raised by Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless.
As with many of these anecdotal reports it is hard to know which of a number of possible explanations might apply; the story is just being made up; the sequence of events as become distorted in memory, empty lines and random calls are misperceived; the calls took place in dreams or dream like states or the recipient was the victim of a prank.

Ufology also has its anomalous telephone calls, reports of which can be found in the works of John Keel, Brad Steiger etc.

Among the odd things reported over the phone is phantom music, which leads into wider discussions of that topic by C R Foley and Melvyn Willin, the latter discussing its role in out of the body and near death experiences.

This music, which the late Scott Rogo called NAD, can range from the disquietingly eerie or even threatening, to the transcendental.
It is interesting to note that a number of paleoanthropologists believe humans possessed vocal music long before abstract language, so there is something very primal in this.

Of course all music emerges from the human mind, and perhaps this music of the mind can only be imperfectly reproduced by physical instruments.

These musical sounds are however only part of the sounds heard during OBE/NDE and these should be compared to those heard during aware sleep paralysis and in general hypnogogic/hypnopompic states.

They might be compared with sounds heard during UFO experiences, as documented by Dan Butcher in his Reference Book of UFO Sounds which actually compares them to those in Out of Body Experiences.

Jack Hunter then discusses the role of music in generating alternate states of consciousness.

A rather different approach to sound and the paranormal is the study of the role of infrasound in producing uncanny feelings and experiences, a study pioneered Vic Tandy and continued by co-editor Parsons, who provides a discussion.

Some of the original papers are reproduced as appendices.
It is a pity that the original paper as reproduced here breaks off in mid-sentence on p209 (the following page being blank).

Needless to say much of this is of a technical character.

Sadly there is no index but despite this, this will be a most useful book for anyone interested in psychical research. -- Peter Rogerson.

 

[Skarekrow]

Surfing the Subtle Planes of Reality
(Ego Restricted)

Mozart is reported to have said to Emperor Joseph, “Forgive me Majesty, perhaps I am vulgar, but my music isn’t.”
He also confided to friends that he did not know from where his music came but that it never came to him in parts, rather he received it in its fullness.

The parts would be assigned later — that, he recognized, was the hard work along with rigorous discipline and study.
He said that absolutely no forcing could be applied to receive his sublimely inspired music.

In fact, he declared, “Love, love, love is the soul of genius.”
And, perhaps, most revelatory, “The music is not in the notes but in the silence between them.”

In his own way Mozart was giving us clues about access to the subtle planes of reality and harvesting their riches.

1. Humility is required: he enters into the music and receives it. Since it is already complete, the ego cannot claim ownership.
2. Resolve and skill are needed so that the fullness which has been received in the subtle domain can be expressed and experienced through the appropriate harmonization of its parts in the more concrete level of reality.
3. No coercion can be applied to access the treasures of the subtle planes. It is more like falling in love.
4. Crude energy has a vibratory density whose wavelength blocks the space where silence can be experienced — subtler vibrations reveal deep worlds of silence.

One thing is clear: if ego is restricted from entry to the subtle planes, intellect won’t take you there either — just as intellect won’t help you fall in love.
As Einstein famously noted, “knowledge is limited. Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

He viewed imagination as a kind of subtle substance that encircles the planet.
This kind of imagination is a field you enter into — like Einstein as a sixteen-year-old boy riding his bicycle and imagining himself riding a beam of light.

What blocks that participation mystique in the subtle imagination is being imprisoned in a false sense of separateness which he refers to as an “optical delusion of consciousness.” Einstein exhorts humans to experience themselves as one with all life.

So we can affirm that access to the subtle planes requires an experience of wholeness and a way of knowing that goes beyond the limited platform of the rational mind –integrating gut, heart and brain.

Now that we have some clues to accessing the subtle planes, what do we find once we have gained entrance?
We find immediately and dramatically the separation between subject and object dissolves: the observer and observed become one.

You enter the reality described by the mystic Meister Eckhart, “The eye with which you see God is the same eye with which God sees you.”
This is by no means a disembodied or monochromatic dimension: feast on a color spectrum a thousand times more vivid and spectacularly brilliant than the physical one.

Smell fragrances and flower essences that awaken states of being and refine desire.
Experience taste merging with sound and feel the touch of light arousing the deepest love imaginable.

And all poured into frequencies profoundly kindred and mysteriously familiar.
Nor does this plane of reality require you ingest anything more than the resonances of your own heart’s central core — where the subtle planes begin.

But the subtle planes are more than a high level sensorium of unified frequencies, they are the fiery birthplace of visionary embodiment, fierce truth and beauty’s incorruptible emergence.

This is where action can find its soaring courage and art can inspire our collective evolution.
Once you walk through the subtle mirrors of unifying truth there are multiple ways to bring it back.

This is where an artist like Marika Popovits (www.marikapopovits.net), who paints states of consciousness in the context of cosmos, experiences as she paints what she calls “the motion of the infinite as one” expressing itself as “the one hand that moves” on the canvas.

As with Mozart, it is the universe which delivers its beauty to her as she becomes not its interpreter but its skillful instrument.

This ability to commune with the truth of the universe by accessing the subtle planes of consciousness is how a brilliant scientist and cosmologist like Ervin Laszlo (www.ervinlaszlo.com) integrates so gracefully science and spirituality. Laszlo, who started out as a classical concert pianist, has written 75 inspired books and over 400 scientific papers.

His knowledge has a revelatory radiance that is clearly touched by Source.

Finally, when one surveys the life and work of Barbara Marx Hubbard (www.barbaramarxhubbard.com ), one is pulled into awe, reverence and amazement at her ability to stay in communion with a living vision and become an incarnate field for the expression of its energy.

Barbara embodies what she refers to — in her eighties — as “vocational arousal.”
She is literally aroused by the subtle planes.

She enters into the future of her central theory of conscious evolution and becomes that future rather than merely pointing the way to it.
Before he died in 1969, Meher Baba left a map that indicated three levels of the inner planes of the subtle and many other planes of reality beyond that.

He predicted that collectively humanity would eventually gravitate to the entrance to the subtle planes guided by “the free and unhampered interplay of pure love from heart to heart.”

Is this a dream in a world so seemingly captured by the crude and unsubtle?
Can love prevail?

I say get your surf boards out.
It’s a beautiful day in creation.

Let’s learn to ride the wave of our true becoming.
Let’s go to the solar heart of our true nature as conscious beings.

Because I can assure you the Universe is saying transform or get wiped out.

 

[INFJ16]

[MENTION=5667]Jacobi[/MENTION]

This is the epitome of all the “inspirational” memes you see floating about out there…hahaha.
That being said…fuck peanut butter nazis.​

Seeing that you had tagged [MENTION=5667]Jacobi[/MENTION], I was sure it would read something like: "If someone ever tells you that you're putting too much peanut butter on your bread, stab them with the spreading knife. You don't need that kind of negativity in your life." I was surprised at the mild: "stop talking to them"... a better (safer and more legal) alternative I'm sure though.

 

[Skarekrow]

Seeing that you had tagged @Jacobi, I was sure it would read something like: "If someone ever tells you that you're putting too much peanut butter on your bread, stab them with the spreading knife. You don't need that kind of negativity in your life." I was surprised at the mild: "stop talking to them"... a better (safer and more legal) alternative I'm sure though.

Once it goes through the sociopathic, psychotic, and paranoid filters of his mind…I think he probably reads it as such ^^.








:bounce:

 

[Skarekrow]

 

[Tin Man]

Seeing that you had tagged [MENTION=5667]Jacobi[/MENTION], I was sure it would read something like: "If someone ever tells you that you're putting too much peanut butter on your bread, stab them with the spreading knife. You don't need that kind of negativity in your life." I was surprised at the mild: "stop talking to them"... a better (safer and more legal) alternative I'm sure though.

Dead men tell no lies. They also don't tell you how to properly butter your toast. So in essence, you have stopped talking to them.

 

[Y0u]

Dead men tell no lies. They also don't tell you how to properly butter your toast. So in essence, you have stopped talking to them.

It's always the simple solutions that work best.

 

[Skarekrow]

An interesting take...

Why "Intelligent" Computers Are Dumber Than Your Ten-Year-Old

A mounting fear that science fiction may turn into reality came to light recently.
Three brilliant physicists (Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, and Frank Wilczek) joined with a noted computer scientist (Stuart Russell) to worry in public about what they termed "superintelligent machines."

In an April 19 Huffington Post article, they take a familiar sci-fi theme, machines that turn on their masters to destroy humankind, and tell us that computers are coming dangerously close to acquiring such a capacity.

I found myself smiling through most of the article -- the gap between fiction and reality seems pretty wide right now -- but that's just the kind of complacency the authors are worried about.

What if weapons of war are completely automated and turned loose to name their own targets?
What if the current trend toward high-speed computer trading on Wall St. is perfected to the point that machines can manipulate the world's economy?

Those two possibilities pose dangers that do, in fact, seem to loom as real possibilities.
But I wonder if the term "superintelligent machine" doesn't beg the question.

Is any machine intelligent to begin with?
Despite the vogue for Artificial Intelligence (AI), I think no machine is intelligent or ever will be.

The four authors rest their case on a sentence that strikes me as wrong-headed: "There is no physical law precluding particles from being organized in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains."

A lot of assumptions are packed into this sentence:

1. Our brain is what makes humans intelligent.
2. Thinking is the same as computation.
3. Thoughts can be broken down into bits of information.
4. If a computer has as many bits of information as the human brain, it can compete on an equal footing with the human mind.

These assumptions are bywords in the AI field, but that doesn't mean they hold water.
At the very least, each statement meets with serious push back when examined carefully.

1. Our brain is what makes humans intelligent.

Right now there's a worldwide discussion of how the mind is related to the brain.
This, the so-called "hard problem," hasn't been solved.

It's been a perplexing problem for at least 2,000 years, challenging the most brilliant philosophers since Aristotle and Plato.
You can't solve it by cutting the Gordian knot and saying that "of course" the brain is the same as the mind.

So the first assumption has no basis in science.
We can only say that mental processes have a parallel in neural activity.

That's like saying every note in a Mozart symphony can be played on a piano.
Yes, the piano has all the notes, but it took a mind to dream up the symphony.

2. Thinking is the same as computation.

This is a favorite assumption of computer scientists, as it has to be since otherwise the whole field of AI collapses.
Computers compute.

They do nothing else.
But it has never been shown that the human mind only computes.

When a ten-year-old says things like, "I don't want to go to bed," "I won't eat that sandwich until you cut the crusts off," or "That video game is for little babies," he's expressing human traits known as will, desire, opinion, and capriciousness.

These aren't the products of computation.
Neither is wishing, hoping, dreaming, persisting, refusing, rebelling--the list is endless.

3. Thoughts can be broken down into bits of information.

This is another assumption that must be true if AI is to exist--but it's not true.
One only needs to look at linguistics, which tells us that any sentence communicates not just its literal meaning (i.e., its information) but tone of voice, mood, implicit bonding with another person, cultural contest, and past associations.

"I love you" can be sincere, ironic, sarcastic, deeply emotional, superficial, or code for the next act of espionage.
Connotations count just as much as literal information.

It won't do to say that a computer can tweak all of these connotations into other bits of information, because that's not how language works.
We grab the whole meaning all at once (as a gestalt, to use a technical psychological term), which is how we need only a glimpse of a friend's face to bring up an entire relationship--our minds don't break the relationship down into computational bits of information.

4. If a computer has as many bits of information as the human brain, it can compete on an equal footing with the human mind.

This assumption is the source of worry from the four scientists, but it depends on the three preceding assumptions being true, and they aren't.
A computer, no matter how large its storage capacity and how swift its speed, will never think a single thought.

It's dumber than our ten-year-old in countless ways, because every child is the product, not of computations, but of experience, and experiences are created and processed by the mind.

I'm not claiming that questioning these assumptions means that super computers can't be put to evil uses.
They certainly can be, from hacking into the power grid to stealing identities, to setting off nuclear weapons for all anyone knows.

These evil deeds are extensions of evil human intentions, just as a gun is an extension of the intention to kill someone.

As for the most common sci-fi speculation, that computers will learn to become independent of their programmers, taking on a will of their own and driving their own agendas, all I can say is "hmm."

Bad intentions and sloppy controls may be enough, one day, to make super computers act as if they are independent.
But that "as if" covers a lot of possibilities one side or the other.

One thing is certain: the human mind will always be ahead of computers when it comes to thinking, because no computer has ever had a thought or will have in the future, no matter how much good or bad they wind up doing.

 

[Skarekrow]

 

[Skarekrow]

“I just have this phone because I like small phones.
It’s not really a good symbol of conservation.

Conservation isn’t some huge sacrifice.
It doesn’t mean you can’t have nice things. I’ve got a nice flat screen TV at home, great furniture, a sauna, sporting goods, and all the clothes I can wear.
Conservation just means that you aren’t constantly getting rid of perfectly good stuff to replace it with stuff that you don’t need.

A perfect table is perfect for hundreds of years.
You don’t need a new one every couple years.

Our culture is called ‘materialistic,’ but that’s not even correct, because ‘materialism’ implies that we value our possessions.
And we don’t.

We get rid of them, then we destroy Africa to get more shit that nobody needs.
There’s no more pressing problem right now than the depletion of the earth.

The earth can tolerate a lot of punishment, but if there isn’t a change in the way we consume, there is no way it can survive.
We will gladly give money help people in need.

But we can’t equate the act of conservation with helping billions of people for generations to come.”


~ From the Humans of New York series ​

 

[Skarekrow]

(Photo: 'Humans of New York')

“I’m homosexual and I’m afraid about what my future will be and that people won’t like me.”


​

 

[Skarekrow]

Dept. Of Evil: 'All Of You Must Die'​

WASHINGTON, DC–In the latest in a long series of ominous public pronouncements, the Department of Evil released a statement Monday demanding that all residents of the United States must die.

Dread Secretary of Evil Hammond S. Reynolds told reporters that they, too, must die.
​

"Yes, all must die," Dread Secretary of Evil Hammond S. Reynolds said during a press conference in Room 1228 of Washington's Robert C. Weaver Federal Building. "There shall soon come an accounting in which all will fall before the Grim Reaper as wheat in winter, as lambs under the knife. Soon all necks will feel the steely bite of our soul- thirsting axe, wielded by the unforgiving iron hand of the Department of Evil. Thus spake I, Dread Secretary Reynolds."

The dread secretary then took questions from the assembled reporters.
Although the Department of Evil has not yet announced the exact timetable for the death of all, it recommends citizens make their peace with doomed relatives and spouses immediately, as the hour of their ending draws ever nigh and will be upon them as soon as the necessary funding has been authorized by the House Appropriations Committee.

"This budget approval is merely a pitiful, niggling formality, for soon we'll be free to swarm across the land draining the life-pus out of all you quivering mortal worms," Reynolds said. "Doubt us not: Come the wintertide, you all shall die, and die you will. Sorry, I meant 'must.' Die you must!"

Originally established by an act of Congress in 1953 and granted broader powers and funding in 1986 under the second Reagan administration, the Department of Evil has been an occasional source of controversy.

Its 1993 And The Streets Shall Run Red With The Blood Of The Innocent initiative was highly criticized at the time by moderates, who thought the department's agenda overly harsh.

An official from the Department of Evil described their 2007 strategic action plan at a conference in January.

​

In 2004, an ambitious plan to seed the clouds with blood and then rain excruciation down upon the thrice-damned didn't even make it past a Senate budget committee, which criticized the plan as poorly conceived.

And last year, the department received a stinging blow after Congress voted to allocate only one-third of the money requested to swell the ranks of its deranged, barbarous demon cavalry.

Despite those recent setbacks, a DOE spokesbeast said that the dread secretary remains confident that his department will prevail in the end.
To publicize their current mission, the Department of Evil distributed to media outlets a ring-bound portfolio titled "You Shall All Perish Screaming 2007," which provides estimates and logistics detailing how everyone will die, a line-by-line budget breakdown, and an addendum apologizing that the document was not printed in human blood.

The full text is available at evil.gov.

The "All Must Die" initiative, the highest-profile program proposed by the DOE in recent memory, came under almost immediate scrutiny from politicians on both sides of the aisle.

"I don't understand why we still even have a Department of Evil," Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said. "It's a Cold War holdover, an artifact of the '50s that has outlived its usefulness. Mr. Reynolds has done as good a job as any recent dread secretary, but as afraid as I am of him, I believe his talents would be better served at Education or Agriculture."

"Once again, Mr. Reynolds wants to throw money at the everyone-dies issue–in this case, $11.43 billion," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) said. "This is a waste of taxpayer dollars to do work best left to the private sector. It's high time for the DOE to be absorbed into Homeland Security, where it belongs."

At the press conference, Reynolds refused to disclose his reasons for proposing that all must die.
"Question not the dread secretary, insects!" said Reynolds, rearing back his mighty head and bellowing as a powerful crescendo emanated from the department's enormous Gothic pipe organ.

"First, the bandwagoners in Congress seek to derail our plans or committee them to death. Now, the mindless blood-bags who populate this teeming nation wish to know why they must perish. I will respond with the same answer we have always given: Despair, groveling vermin, and may your deaf, blind God forsake the United States of America! We're done here."

 

[Y0u]

An interesting take...

Why "Intelligent" Computers Are Dumber Than Your Ten-Year-Old

A mounting fear that science fiction may turn into reality came to light recently.
Three brilliant physicists (Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, and Frank Wilczek) joined with a noted computer scientist (Stuart Russell) to worry in public about what they termed "superintelligent machines."

In an April 19 Huffington Post article, they take a familiar sci-fi theme, machines that turn on their masters to destroy humankind, and tell us that computers are coming dangerously close to acquiring such a capacity.

I found myself smiling through most of the article -- the gap between fiction and reality seems pretty wide right now -- but that's just the kind of complacency the authors are worried about.

What if weapons of war are completely automated and turned loose to name their own targets?
What if the current trend toward high-speed computer trading on Wall St. is perfected to the point that machines can manipulate the world's economy?

Those two possibilities pose dangers that do, in fact, seem to loom as real possibilities.
But I wonder if the term "superintelligent machine" doesn't beg the question.

Is any machine intelligent to begin with?
Despite the vogue for Artificial Intelligence (AI), I think no machine is intelligent or ever will be.

The four authors rest their case on a sentence that strikes me as wrong-headed: "There is no physical law precluding particles from being organized in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains."

A lot of assumptions are packed into this sentence:

1. Our brain is what makes humans intelligent.
2. Thinking is the same as computation.
3. Thoughts can be broken down into bits of information.
4. If a computer has as many bits of information as the human brain, it can compete on an equal footing with the human mind.

These assumptions are bywords in the AI field, but that doesn't mean they hold water.
At the very least, each statement meets with serious push back when examined carefully.

1. Our brain is what makes humans intelligent.

Right now there's a worldwide discussion of how the mind is related to the brain.
This, the so-called "hard problem," hasn't been solved.

It's been a perplexing problem for at least 2,000 years, challenging the most brilliant philosophers since Aristotle and Plato.
You can't solve it by cutting the Gordian knot and saying that "of course" the brain is the same as the mind.

So the first assumption has no basis in science.
We can only say that mental processes have a parallel in neural activity.

That's like saying every note in a Mozart symphony can be played on a piano.
Yes, the piano has all the notes, but it took a mind to dream up the symphony.

2. Thinking is the same as computation.

This is a favorite assumption of computer scientists, as it has to be since otherwise the whole field of AI collapses.
Computers compute.

They do nothing else.
But it has never been shown that the human mind only computes.

When a ten-year-old says things like, "I don't want to go to bed," "I won't eat that sandwich until you cut the crusts off," or "That video game is for little babies," he's expressing human traits known as will, desire, opinion, and capriciousness.

These aren't the products of computation.
Neither is wishing, hoping, dreaming, persisting, refusing, rebelling--the list is endless.

3. Thoughts can be broken down into bits of information.

This is another assumption that must be true if AI is to exist--but it's not true.
One only needs to look at linguistics, which tells us that any sentence communicates not just its literal meaning (i.e., its information) but tone of voice, mood, implicit bonding with another person, cultural contest, and past associations.

"I love you" can be sincere, ironic, sarcastic, deeply emotional, superficial, or code for the next act of espionage.
Connotations count just as much as literal information.

It won't do to say that a computer can tweak all of these connotations into other bits of information, because that's not how language works.
We grab the whole meaning all at once (as a gestalt, to use a technical psychological term), which is how we need only a glimpse of a friend's face to bring up an entire relationship--our minds don't break the relationship down into computational bits of information.

4. If a computer has as many bits of information as the human brain, it can compete on an equal footing with the human mind.

This assumption is the source of worry from the four scientists, but it depends on the three preceding assumptions being true, and they aren't.
A computer, no matter how large its storage capacity and how swift its speed, will never think a single thought.

It's dumber than our ten-year-old in countless ways, because every child is the product, not of computations, but of experience, and experiences are created and processed by the mind.

I'm not claiming that questioning these assumptions means that super computers can't be put to evil uses.
They certainly can be, from hacking into the power grid to stealing identities, to setting off nuclear weapons for all anyone knows.

These evil deeds are extensions of evil human intentions, just as a gun is an extension of the intention to kill someone.

As for the most common sci-fi speculation, that computers will learn to become independent of their programmers, taking on a will of their own and driving their own agendas, all I can say is "hmm."

Bad intentions and sloppy controls may be enough, one day, to make super computers act as if they are independent.
But that "as if" covers a lot of possibilities one side or the other.

One thing is certain: the human mind will always be ahead of computers when it comes to thinking, because no computer has ever had a thought or will have in the future, no matter how much good or bad they wind up doing.

2,3, and 4. The brain's operations are physical. Therefore, they can be approximated with another sufficiently detailed and at least as complex system that approximates the operation of the mind. Then again, it would be a whole lot easier to have a person. There are probably learning algorithms or series thereof that would make it more useful for tracking data patterns through immense databases, and serving as basically an informative librarian at the world's central library brought to you wherever you are. I suppose once we understand how our brain's work well enough, the interaction of emotions with what we think, and some of the natural predispositions that seem to be a part of human development, one could build a supercomputer super a.i. to make a genius look plain ol stupid. Chemical switching of modes can be described through bit data. The meaning we experience in language is derived mostly experientially, ie in relation with things that we experience. Words have no meaning until you understand what somebody is talking about.

The picture represents the impetus for most learning.

 

[Skarekrow]

2,3, and 4. The brain's operations are physical. Therefore, they can be approximated with another sufficiently detailed and at least as complex system that approximates the operation of the mind. Then again, it would be a whole lot easier to have a person. There are probably learning algorithms or series thereof that would make it more useful for tracking data patterns through immense databases, and serving as basically an informative librarian at the world's central library brought to you wherever you are. I suppose once we understand how our brain's work well enough, the interaction of emotions with what we think, and some of the natural predispositions that seem to be a part of human development, one could build a supercomputer super a.i. to make a genius look plain ol stupid. Chemical switching of modes can be described through bit data. The meaning we experience in language is derived mostly experientially, ie in relation with things that we experience. Words have no meaning until you understand what somebody is talking about.

The picture represents the impetus for most learning.

Well, here’s hoping that the zero point event for AI opens a new age of enlightenment for mankind.
That we are able to utilize a computer that could in effect eventually become infinitely more intelligent than man…to solve some of the problems that have vexed man for some time now.
Surely, we could cure cancer…end world hunger…employ free cheap nonpolluting energy…
Hell…it probably could map out for you step by step how to survive as a species.