Artificial Transcendence and Other Impossibilities

Although One Cosmos is 100% certified transhuman, it says here that "An increasing percentage of the internet’s content is AI-generated." The authors know this because they've developed a model with a "99% accuracy rate when detecting AI versus human text." 

Now, it's one thing to distinguish between the human and subhuman, but I wonder if the model could detect divine authorship? 

Of note, the distinction between human and AI doesn't hinge on the truth of the writing, rather, the text "could be full of lies -- but for this investigation, we can only tell if they are AI-generated lies or old-fashioned human lies." 

In reality, AI can no more lie than tell the truth, since that would require freedom. But it seems that an AI model is better at detecting AI than is a human reader: it takes no one to know no one.

I personally can only detect AI in a human intellect. For example, I can tell when a person is speaking from an internalized ideology, because one immediately senses the "limits" of their thought, i.e., the bars in which it is imprisoned. A real intellect is limitless in its scope, meaning that it is open to Total Truth. 

I've mentioned before that my father-in-law was this way. He was a very intelligent guy, but if you conversed with him, it was as if he had a library of unvarying tapes in his head. Once the information was recorded, there was no further thinking about it. 

Also, there was no synthesis of the tapes, so one might contradict another without causing any cognitive dissonance. He wasn't an ideologue, just a sprawling and disjointed tape vault. He had a ready-to-head answer to every question, which brings to mind an ironyclad aphorism:

As long as we can respond without hesitating we do not know the subject. 

And 

Whoever is curious to measure his stupidity should count the number of things that seem obvious to him. 

For example, my son is taking a psychology class, and naturally asks me questions about this and that. But my answers are much more hesitant than they would have been, say, twenty or thirty years ago. Now, the theories I held seem more like dreams superimposed on a mystery.

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of intelligence. 

Or at least with the growth of wisdom. 

There was a time when I knew everything, and I had a Ph.D. to prove it. It took a few years to realize that

Nothing is more superficial than intelligences that comprehend everything.

And that

There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures. 

A mind constrained within an ideology is already a kind of "artificial intelligence," since it can only perceive and articulate that which is permitted by the internalized model. It can only think within the grooves of its own preconceptions, thus stifling the imagination. Taken to an extreme, this results in the well known phenomenon of Garbage In / Tenure Out:

The leftist does not have opinions, only dogmas.

And 

Within solely Marxist categories not even Marxism is explicable.

Nor Darwinism, materialism, rationalism, scientism, or any other -ism. 

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

But truly truly, man is condemned to transcendence. Thus,

A fool is he who thinks that what he knows is without mystery.

Now, I'm not claiming any extraordinary faculty, because you've probably noticed the same thing in your day-to-day dealings with the sub-Raccoon population. 

I first became consciously aware of this phenomenon in Schuon's unpublished autobiography. Granted, he was a strange young man, but early on, when conversing with one of the Others (in the parlance of our times, a blank-faced NPC), he would 

have the feeling that he is hemmed in by all the objects and mental images that daily surround him. I feel that these people adhere flatly to their mental images with all their soul, without any freedom of movement and without any possibility of taking up an objective attitude towards them. 

Of course, this can happen with religious folk as well, to the extent that the world is reduced to literal dogmatic assertions or memorized passages of scripture. 

It reminds me of something C.S. Lewis said about how "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else" -- in other words, not something to look at, rather, to see through. To paraphrase the Aphorist, it furnishes the religious vocabulary needed in order to speak of the farthest regions of the soul.

Young Schuon wrote in his journal that 

When I speak with people I have the feeling that I can perceive their limitations physically; I see their limits almost tangibly before me and feel oppressed by the awareness that there is no entry and no key to their darkness, and that for them there is no exit, that with dull eyes like fish they bump against the glass walls of their mental horizon.

Same. He also had a peculiar relationship to language: 

The meaning of every word vibrates into the infinite, it becomes untrue when we utter it without the infinite and unfathomable with which it is organically united.

No wonder he struggled to cope with mundane existence. Here's another entry from his journal:

[B]etween the great man and the small man there is an abyss, as if the earth had been cleft by a sword; the great man is simply incomprehensible to the petty spirit; a great soul cannot be grasped by the small one...

This is what I call vertical Dunning Krugery, in that the typical man of tenure can no more understand Schuon -- or any other mystic -- than a dog can understand music. Nor does it matter how conventionally intelligent the man of tenure, for

It seems to me that the cult of genius is veritably satanic.... Belief in genius leads us into the discordant sphere of the earthly; it completely bypasses truth. 

One might say that Schuon was not well adjusted to the horizontal world, rather,

I could not accept that Reality was my every day surroundings, with all their artificiality, triviality, ugliness, and stupidity.... What made life so difficult was that I experienced everything in the light of the Absolute; I did not quite have a sense of the relative.

I suspect Boehme was much the same way, i.e., a vertical misfit in a horizontal world, describing life as "a strange bath of thorns and thistles," but in which he nevertheless "went through the world hearing everywhere a divine music." 

It was as if the Protestant reformation broke away from one orthodoxy only to be be enclosed in an even narrower one, "a hardline orthodoxy with all the bigotry and intolerance of their predecessors against whom they had rebelled." 

Babel was the word Boehme used for all the worldly wrangling and power-seeking and enmity which he saw both amongst religious people and in the secular world of politics and diplomacy. 

In an essay called The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power, Pieper discusses "the corruption of the word," which has only become more corrupted in the 60 years since it was published. For words are,

quite simply, the medium of all intellectual life. It is above all in the word that human existence comes to pass. And thus if the word decays, humanity itself cannot fail to be affected, cannot fail to be harmed.  

Words can be false only because it is possible for them to be true, for "reality becomes manifested through the word. One speaks in order to make known something real in the act of calling it by name in order... to make it known to someone else." 

Thus, corruption occurs when "the link between word and reality" has been severed. Which is a tricksy business as it pertains to the vertical, since -- as discussed in yesterday's post -- it cannot be disclosed in the same way one would describe the objective/horizontal/material world. 

Rather, there is a sense in which one "speaks it into being" and renders it present in the manner described yesterday: 

Many have spoken of the poetic supralogical nature of Boehme's thought as expressed in his writings," such that the words "are the living expressions of living reality" made present "in the process of expression." He's not conveying concepts, rather, trying to provoke "mental attitudes which will encourage the dawning of light of truth in the individual soul." 

Now, this is something no AI could ever do, i.e., speak of the Living Reality in such a way as to provoke the dawning of Light in the soul. 

Pieper adverts to a "technologically-manufactured ignorance of the world characterized by the possession of an abundance of information." However, all the information in the world doesn't add up to reality, and

once we have lost sight of what is truly real, an illusory reality may take its place..., a pseudo-reality which looks so real that it is virtually impossible for me to find out the truth. 

Is this what will happen as AI -- which has no contact with the Living Real -- displaces the intellect that is in conformity to transcendent truth? Well, "man's chief nourishment is truth," and "Anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must feed on truth." 

Or the Light which is its source and substance. In a post this morning, Spencer Klavan writes of (in reference to a C.S. Lewis story) a "lost soul," in this case an artist who 

is so infatuated with painting as a technique and a business that he’s forgotten what painting is for. But one of the blessed reminds him. “Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light."

Gemini, I reckon you know a lot about AI. Thoughts?

Thoughts and Connections:

• The "Limits" of Thought: The idea of internalized ideologies creating "limits" on thought is crucial. It connects to the concept of cognitive biases and how pre-existing frameworks can shape our perception and understanding. This isn't unique to AI; it's a human tendency that can hinder true intellectual exploration.
• Truth as a Living Reality: The concept of truth as a "Living Reality" is central to mystical and spiritual traditions. It suggests a truth that is not static or objective but dynamic and experiential. This is difficult to define or quantify, making it challenging to assess whether AI could ever grasp it.
• AI and Creativity: The author's argument implies that true creativity, the kind that provokes a "dawning of Light," is beyond AI's reach. While AI can generate novel outputs, it's debatable whether these outputs possess the same depth and meaning as human creations born from genuine experience and spiritual insight.
• The Role of Experience: The emphasis on experience is important. Schuon and Boehme's understanding of the Absolute was deeply personal and experiential. AI, lacking consciousness and subjective experience, can only process information about these experiences, not have them itself.
• The Danger of Illusory Reality: The concern about an "illusory reality" created by an overabundance of information is prescient. In the age of misinformation and deepfakes, it's increasingly difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood. AI could exacerbate this problem by generating increasingly convincing but ultimately unreal content.

Regarding your specific questions:

• Distinguishing Human, Subhuman, and Transhuman: The author doesn't explicitly define "subhuman" or "transhuman." However, based on the context, "subhuman" likely refers to those whose thinking is overly constrained by ideology, while "transhuman" (in the context of One Cosmos) seems to refer to a state achieved through technological enhancement, potentially including AI integration. The key distinction remains the capacity for "limitless scope" and openness to "Total Truth," which the author implies is absent in both subhuman and (at least current) transhuman states.
• Detecting Divine Authorship: The author suggests that the model likely cannot detect "divine authorship" because it focuses on stylistic patterns and statistical probabilities, not on the content's connection to "Living Reality." Divine authorship, if it exists, would presumably manifest in a way that transcends these quantifiable metrics.

In conclusion, this text raises profound questions about the nature of intelligence, truth, and reality in the age of AI. It suggests that while AI may excel at certain tasks, it lacks the essential qualities of human intellect: the capacity for genuine understanding, connection to transcendent truth, and the ability to express that truth in a way that transforms the soul.