#is it biological? esoteric? environmental? who knows

[sealrock]

me: hector is part of a small percentage of garleans that have psionic powers to compensate for their inability to manipulate aether, but it weakens greatly with age and causes immense mental strain

also me: *falls into a deep rabbit hole of paranormal pseudoscience and marvel/dc comic power scaling wackiness in an attempt to explain why and how that is in the ffxiv universe, but suspension of disbelief is thrown out the window*

[gr8gollygrace]

Small Wonders by Barbara Kingsolver - Notes + Thoughts

Main Themes: Environmentalism, Poverty, parenting, feminism, American political and cultural climate surrounding 9/11

Images + Symbols: Climate Change, Homelessness, gardening/farming, nature

much of this novel discusses the American cultural and political climate directly before and after 9/11, as this book was first published in 2002

Small Wonders

"A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves--" pg. 9

"The hard boundary between the haves and the have-nots is still defended with armaments, but now it is also bridged by a dancing, illusory world of material wants. Passing through every wall are the electronic beams that create a shadow play of desire staged by the puppeteers of globalized commerce," pg. 11

"It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life." pg. 19

"Small change, small wonders--these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life. It's a workable economy." pg. 21

This is the first essay in the book, and it really sets the readers' expectations for the themes of the rest of the novel: touching on parenting, environmentalism and poverty in America

Knowing Our Place

"Protecting the land that once provided us with our genesis may turn out to be the only real story there is for us. The land /still/ provides our genesis, however we might like to forget that our food comes from dank, muddy earth, that the oxygen in our lungs was recently inside a leaf, and that every newspaper or book we may pick up(including this one, ultimately, though recycled) is made from the heart of trees that died for the sake of our imagined lives." pg. 39

"I have a place from which to tell my stories. So do you, I expect. We sing the song of our home because we are animals, and an animals is no better or wiser or safer than its habitat and its food chain. Among the greatest of all gifts is to know our place." pg. 40

this essay really helps to create emphasis on placemaking as an influence to Kingsolver's work.

Kingsolver grounds place from a biological standpoint, and appeals to the esoteric animal desires of human beings

Setting Free the Crabs

"When the cute wild things charge down the fence around my garden and bury their faces in my watermelons, they're not cute anymore; then they're the /un/cutest damn ugly things I've ever laid eyes on." pg. 63

"This is not to suggest that it's wrong to love a cat or a dog, or to sell or buy pets, or to lobby for animal rights in the form of better treatment for cats, dogs, veal calves, or lobsters about to be put into boiling pots, but these concerns do not make an environmental case. They make a spiritual case, and animal-rights activists are practicing a form of religion, not environmental science." pg. 69

this essay is an endearing story about Kingsolver's daughter refusing to harm or displace a hermit crab from a beautiful shell

Kingsolver explores the difference our society places on domesticated animals v wild animals - often favoring the needs of domesticated animals before thinking of the way humans are destroying wild habitats

A Fist in the Eye of God

"When agricultural companies have purchased, stored, and patented certain genetic materials from old crops, they cannot engineer a crop, /ever/, that will have the resistance of land races under a wide variety of conditions of moisture, predation, and temperature. Genetic engineering is the antithesis of variability because it removes the wild card--the beautiful thing called sex--from the equation." pg. 101

"I'm a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the door of creation not with a lion tamer's whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship: a temple, a mosque, or a cathedral. A sacred grove, as ancient as time." pg. 108

this is another essay grounded in biological fact, and explores the need for wild genetic diversity, especially amongst our crop systems

Kingsolver also explores the intersection here with poverty which is often exacerbated by predatory promises made by big agricultural manufactures

Lily's Chickens

"Somewhere near you, I'm sure, is a farmer who desperately needs your support, for one of a thousand reasons that are pulling wool out of the proud but unraveling traditions of family farming." pg. 116

"Gardening is the best way I know to stay fit and trim, so during garden season, when it's up to me to make the earth move, I don't waste hours at the gym. Eating this way requires organization and skills more than time." pg. 126

"I'm lucky I could help make my daughter's dream come true. My own wish is for world enough and time that every child might have this: the chance to count some chickens before they hatch." pg. 130

This story is maybe a little less severe and outlines the beauty and use of gardening and learning where your food comes from

The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don't Let Him In

"I purposefully spend a few weeks each year avoiding national and international news altogether, and attending only to the news of my own community, since that is the only place I can actually do very much about the falling-apart-things of the moment. Some of my friends can't believe I do this, or can't understand it." pg. 141

"I also believe it's possible to be so overtaken and stupefied by the tragedies of the world that we don't have any time or energy left for those closer to home, the hurts we should take as our own." pg. 142

The One-eyed Monster is a stand-in for a TV, Kingsolver outlines the problem with television as access to influence people to want more and to not be satisfied with less.

Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen

"I vowed early on to give you more choices than I had, so you could learn self-control in a safer laboratory than I did. . . I've spend so much of my life stitching together the answers to the hard questions that it;s natural for me to want to hand them down like a glove, one that will fit neatly onto an outstretched little clone hand. I try sometimes. But that glove won't fit. . . the answers will work for you only when you've stitched them together yourself." pg. 149

"By concentrating on what I could do to make things better for people who were worse off than me, I taught myself to feel significant. Word by word, day by day, I revised the word /stupid/ out of my journal." pg. 154

"So begins the longest, scariest, sexiest, funniest, smartest, most extraordinary conversations we know. Cross your fingers, ready, set. Go." pg. 159

this essay outlines many of the fears of growing up as a girl, the desire for parents to make their dreams come true in their children, and how children inevitably have their own dreams

Letter to My Mother

"I understood this to be all your fault. You made me, and I was born a girl. You trained me to be a woman, and regarding that condition, I fail to see one good thing." pg. 165

"I am a woman lost in the weary sea of waiting, and you are the only one who really knows where I am. Your voice is keeping me afloat." pg. 174

"You looked happy /because of me/. . . I know exactly how you felt. I am your happiness. It's a cross I am willing to bear." pg. 175

I have felt this sort of resentment towards my mother for making me the way I am, but I realize that it is a gift, not a curse to be me

I do love that the essay ends with Kingsolver and her mother rekindling their relationships

Going to Japan

"What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it." pg. 179

Flying

"What I do believe is that the losers of all wars are largely the innocent, and we are a nation at war--we have been for many lifetimes, reinforcing or inventing reigns of power that mollify some and terrify others in many lands, for many reasons." pg 189

"Of all the fates I can imagine for myself, no legacy leaves me colder than that of bitterness and hatred. I would rather be forgotten entirely than held in any way responsible for the vengeful loss of a single life, let alone thousands of lives, or any historic moment of jingoism or ethnic hatred." pg. 193

this essay follows directly after 9/11 and speculates on why Americans or American government can rationalize waging war for centuries

these sentiments are echoed in the essay "Stealing Apples" and "And Our Flag Was Still There"

Household Words

"I've spent hundreds of pages, even whole novels, trying to explain what home means to me. Sometimes I think it's the only thing I ever write about. Home is place, geography, and psyche; it's a matter of survival and safety, a condition of attachment and self-definition." pg. 196

this essay wrestles with the American shame of homelessness, and what it means to be home

Taming the Beast with Two Backs

"The language of coition has been stolen--or really, I think, it's been divvied up like chips in a poker game among the sides of pornography, consumerism, and the medical profession." pg. 225

this essay made me think of Audre Lorde's "The Uses of the Erotic" and how pornography takes the erotic and makes it for profit

Stealing Apples

"Others still are trying to find a place in between, a place of honest living where they can abide themselves and one another without howling in the darkness." pg. 233

"When fear rules the day, many minds are weak enough to crack the world into nothing but 'me' and 'evildoers,' and as long as we're proudly killing unlike minds over there, they feel emboldened to do the same over here." pg. 237

And Our Flag Was Still There

"Our nation was established with a fight for independence, so our iconography grew out of war." pg. 242

God's Wife's Measuring Spoons

"We're the theater of the street, the accurate jow of children's hearts, the literature of tomorrow's wisdom arrived today, just in time. I'm with Emma Goldman: Our revolution will have dancing--and excellent food. In the long run, the choice of life over death is too good to resist." pg. 250

Kingsolver, Barbara. Small Wonders. Harper-Collins Publishers, 2002.

[davidhalpin-blog]

An Interview with Gary Lachman.

   Gary Lachman is one of today’s most respected writers on esoteric and occult topics. His many books -- including Madame Blavatsky, Swedenborg, Jung the Mystic, and Rudolf Steiner -- have received international acclaim.

His latest work is The Secret Teachers of the Western World and later this year he will release a biography of the writer and philosopher Colin Wilson.

Gary has appeared on many television and radio programs and is an adjunct professor in the Evolution of Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies. A founding member of the band Blondie, he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

    Hi Gary, and thanks so much for taking the time out to answer some questions for our readers here at Occultum.net.

Gary, if I could ask you first of all how your upcoming Colin Wilson biography is coming along?

 I've just finished proof-reading Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. It turned out to be much longer than I had anticipated, about twice as long in fact. Wilson had a long life and he wrote an enormous amount. His work is packed with ideas so there is a lot to write about. I've tried to keep an even pace between telling his story and exploring his ideas, but his life was so much his work that the two blend together, so it is a kind of biography of ideas.  It will be coming out at the end of August along with a new edition of The Outsider that I've written an introduction to. Both are marking the 60th anniversary of The Outsider's publication in 1956. 

 I was struck by the line at the end of Dreaming to some Purpose where Wilson writes, “I see my task as a writer to explore, and at times create what Rhea White calls ‘exceptional human experience’.”  In your view, what will become Colin Wilson’s most important legacy?

 I think Wilson will be recognized for developing an important philosophy of consciousness and for what he calls his "new existentialism," an analysis of human experience based on meaning and purpose, rather than the negative conclusions reached by Sartre, Camus, and other "old" existentialists. Wilson spent his entire life trying to penetrate a central mystery of human existence, what he called the "paradoxical nature of freedom." Human beings crave freedom more than anything else, but when we get it, we often don’t know what to do with it and it becomes a burden. This was something Wilson’s “Outsiders” experienced, and he devoted his life to cracking this riddle. He found clues in the work of Abraham Maslow, Edmund Husserl, Gurdjieff, and many others, but it was his own remarkable ability to synthesize these and add to them his own insights that make his work so important. One of his central themes, what he calls “Faculty X,” is, for me at least, a true recognition of a kind of “power” we have that we are not aware of having. It is a kind of power over time, an ability to grasp the reality of other times and places, instead of being stuck, as we usually are, in a very limited present. It is a kind of inner freedom and spaciousness that stretches out over time and history.

      Throughout the ages, occult thinkers seem to have gravitated towards places where they can preach and experiment with their ideas away from the masses and within communities receptive to their philosophy. In this social media age do you think our next generation of radical thinkers will be the owners of Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, or is physical human contact essential for new thinkers within the esoteric movement?

 There are aspects of esoteric teaching that are said to be able to be transmitted only from a teacher to a student, from one person to another. I would think this is true in the same sense that any good or inspiring teacher conveys something of his or her own charisma or personality to the student. And in some schools this idea goes even further, with a special kind of energy or force passing from one to the other. This may be true. I can’t say I’ve experienced it, but I have read accounts of those who have. But such teachers are not easy to find and one has to be wary of poseurs. But the main ideas of what we may call esoteric philosophy can, I think, be conveyed on the printed page – or I guess computer screen these days. There is of course a difference between knowing intellectually and knowing experientially, but one can experience ideas as real, living powers, and they can have an impact on one as powerful as any sensory experience. I believe that what is important is to use our minds, to think actively, to feel ourselves as active agents trying to understand our world rather than passive recipients of sensory data. The internet makes an enormous amount of material that would be difficult to find available, but it is also crowded with a lot of rubbish. We need to develop our powers of discrimination accordingly. Many people join groups and embrace a teaching in order to avoid the inconvenience of thinking for themselves. Many think themselves out of any experience, feeling they “know it all.” Personally I tend to be solitary. It’s nice to socialize, either in the real world or online, with people who share your interests, but the real work gets done on one’s own.

     During an interview for Caretakers of the Cosmos with Miguel Conner a couple of years ago, you spoke about the importance of human interaction and repair, and the whole idea of Tikkun. There still seems to be a lack of traction when it comes to this concept. Is this fundamentally due to materialistic egotism or something else entirely?

 The idea of tikkun or of somehow “repairing” the world has been around for some time but as you say it seems that in recent times there is little evidence of its efficacy. Well, I can’t argue with you about the obvious problems facing us in the outer world, environmental, social, economic and so on. The world is in a mess and there doesn’t seem to be anyone cleaning it up. I think Isaac Luria, the Cabbalist who developed the notion of tikkun, would agree, but I think he would point out that the world has been in a mess since creation– that, in fact, creation itself is a mess, or at least has a few kinks in it that God or whoever is responsible didn’t manage to sort out. That’s why we – man – appeared, in order to correct God’s mistakes. How good a job we are doing is at least debatable. But the work of tikkun is not the same as major operations to protect the environment or to limit greenhouse gases, as important as imperative as these may be. It is more of a kind of inner work, in which each of us, on encountering the sparks of the divine that were captured by matter at the beginning of the world, are able to release them, so that they can return to their source. In doing this, our own souls are released too. It is a way of recognising the spirit in others, in all things. If enough people were to practice it, then we would be able to work on the obvious repairs that need doing in the outer world. We can only hope they will.

     The mystic philosopher Evelyn Underhill seems, like Wilson, to be quite overlooked within today’s esoteric community. I was struck by the cutting edge work of neuroscientist David Eagleman and his observations with respect to the restrictions of our biological senses and perception of ultimate reality. Underhill, Henri Bergson and, indeed, Aldous Huxley, all seem to have come to this conclusion long before we had such an advanced scientific understanding. Is the awareness of our biological limitation a higher, instinctive knowledge that comes from the mystic experience, in your opinion, or simply the result of a particular existential stage?  

  Yes, Evelyn Underhill’s work deserves to be better known. I first read her years ago and recently went back to her classic Mysticism when working on my most recent book The Secret Teachers of the Western World. I’ve visited her grave in the cemetery at Hampstead Parish Church a few times; A. R. Orage, editor of the New Age and a student of Gurdjieff, is buried there too, also the philosopher C.E. M. Joad. It was Bergson who first pointed out that there are very good evolutionary reasons why we don’t have mystical consciousness all the time. If we had, we wouldn’t have evolved. Our brains, Bergson saw, do not produce consciousness, as some contemporary neuroscientists and philosophers of mind believe. Our brains are filtering devices for limiting the amount of reality into consciousness, for reducing the amount of consciousness available to our individual psyches. It is not, as the old existentialists and materialists of all sorts have said, that the world is meaningless. Far from it. It is positively overflowing with meaning, so much that if we were aware of it, we would be stopped in our tracks – which is exactly what happens to people who have mystical experiences or for whom for some reason the veils obscuring real reality are parted, and they truly see. In order to deal with the world, we need to limit the amount of information competing for our attention. So, Bergson argued, the brain evolved into a kind of editor, siphoning off “irrelevant” information and only allowing, as Huxley said, enough to enable us to get along on this planet. What seems to happen in mystical experiences is that for some reason, this filter is removed, and Reality appears in all its glory. That the filter was developed by the force behind evolution as a necessity suggests that as we become more capable of grasping and assimilating this excluded reality, our filter can ease up and allow more reality into our awareness. All spiritual exercises and disciplines are aimed in some way at achieving this. There is no sense in being overwhelmed by mystical experience. We need to be able to grasp it, to understand it. Then slowly we will be able to absorb more reality and then we can do without out mental filters more.

    I really enjoyed your Steiner biography and found your accounts of his willingness to understand opposing viewpoints very admirable. It seems Anthroposophy itself now encompasses many diverse ideas. What do you think Steiner would make of how his work is perceived today?

 I’m sure Steiner would be pleased to see that the results of his practical work have grown immensely since he first laid down the basics of Steiner education, architecture, farming, medicine, therapies and so on. In that sense, his is probably the most successful esoteric teaching of the modern age. And I’m sure he would also be pleased to see that his more philosophical work, aimed at epistemology and the phenomenology of consciousness, has laid foundations for thinkers that came after him, such as Owen Barfield and Henri Bortoft. Bortoft, who sadly died a few years ago, especially focused his work on Goethe’s ideas about “imaginative knowing,” the kind of phenomenology of consciousness that emerges from his work on plant morphology. Steiner started with this and with it developed his ideas about “supersensible perception,” a perception of the inner world, of spirit. I think he could feel gratified that his work was being carried on in new ways and in new directions.

     It seems one thing we tend to forget about esoteric philosophers is their broadmindedness and willingness to embrace new knowledge. In many cases it is the followers of a particular path that create the dogma as opposed to the founder. Do you think this has happened to Jung, for example, and what would Jung himself have made of the Nag Hammadi texts? Although he was alive for their discovery, he seems to have pre-empted so much we have learned about Gnosticism since then.

 Yes, the followers of a thinker or teacher can often be more royal than the king. Believers tend to want to protect their guru, which is understandable, especially in a time when teachers like Jung and others were subject to much criticism. It is unfortunate that what begins as a new, creative, vital current of ideas and insights can easily turn into a dogma and set of rules. This is unfortunate but it seems almost inevitable, and people like Swedenborg and Bergson and others have cautioned about it. Bergson talks about “dynamic” and “static” religion, and how the one transforms over time into the other. One thing I always do if I am speaking to a group devoted to one particular teaching, say Steiner or Jung, is to talk to them about others, include them in the conversation. We really don’t need to protect our little camps, but to find common ground among them. For example, Jung, Steiner, and Swedenborg all had what we would call “visionary” experiences – Jung’s “active imagination,” Steiner’s “Akashic record,” Swedenborg’s trips to “heaven and hell.” All were different, yet all shared certain similarities, all took place within what Henry Corbin called the “imaginal world,” an inner yet objective dimension of reality. So what can we learn if we compare their experiences and the means they used to have them? And Jung, you know, has one of the Nag Hammadi codices named after him. I’m sure he would take argument with some of the ways in which our understanding of Gnosticism and the Gnostics has developed, but he would be glad that we were still bothering about it. There is always a tension between wanting to maintain the original vision and exploring new avenues of thought. Dogma and routine is the hazard of one; losing sight of the original insight is the other. Each can help keep the other alive and vital.

      Thanks so much for answering my questions, Gary. What can our readers expect from you in the near future in terms of books and projects?

 I’m teaching an online course for the California Institute of Integral Studies on The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, and I’ll be working on a book with that title in the coming months, and lecturing and giving talks here in London and elsewhere.

 Gary’s latest book is The Secret Teachers of the Western World and is available from amazon here.

http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Teachers-Western-World/dp/0399166807

  © David Halpin for Occultum.net 30/05/2016

[roguenewsdao]

Citizen Sophia, Blockchain, and the CFR Convo

"Technology has always been a double-edged sword."  -- Ray Kurzweil, November 3, 2017.

During the last few days, we've been witnessing a shift of power in Saudi Arabia as a young heir proceeds to clad his power base in iron. However, only two weeks prior to the recent political purge in the Kingdom, another shift in power took place in the same land. But this time the shift came from the animatronic mouth of a pale-skinned, multi-color-eyed female Android named Sophia. The robot became the first of its kind to be granted actual citizenship.

The women of Saudi Arabia were not amused.

Admittedly, the granting of citizenship to a robot is a bit of a public relations stunt. Prince MBS put on a good show to express his seemingly sincere desire to pull Saudi out of the 7th century and attract investment of new technology into the Kingdom. Let us not forget the multi-billion-dollar data surveillance center that was launched earlier this year when President Trump joined King Salman and other visiting dignitaries at the "glowing orb" ceremony [linked here]. Would Riyadh like to become the desert version of Silicon Valley?

Sophia is the creation of Hanson Robotics, Inc., founded by Dr. David Hanson. She is futuristic in every sense of the word. Sophia is learning how to be human via her interactions with real people. This feature of AI is mentioned further down in this blog in the statements made by Ray Kurzweil. Robots are designed to somewhat mirror what they witness in real people, not unlike what a real child does as it matures to adulthood. Now, immediately, you can see what the dangers of that would be. Who gets to decide which humans the robot will study as its mentor? How will it know how to decide between Virtues and Vices? These are some of the challenges facing the AI engineers and topics that are regularly debated.

Another facet of Sophia's new life that should interest the regular readers of Rogue Money is that her artificial intelligence protocols were built on blockchain technology. According to Hanson's website:

Hanson Robotics is partnering with SingularityNET, a platform for the decentralized AI economy. SingularityNET is the first protocol for combining AI services with a global, blockchain-based market, and will soon be powering the minds of Hanson Robots. For more information please visit www.singularitynet.io.

SingularityNET bills itself as "a platform for the decentralized AI economy - the free and open market for AI technologies, built on smart contracts." The link between this coming transhumanist robot era and the nascent blockchain technology is very revealing.

As regular readers of Rogue Money know, our Mr. W. has been advising us that we are witnessing the systematic dismantling of the old Rockefeller PetroDollar Empire by that other great cabal, the Rothschild powers-that-be. Naturally, we all connect the Rothschilds to the international banking priesthood, and we connect banking with money and debt. This question has been rolling around in my mind, "What role is the Rothschild Empire playing in this coming cashless cyber age? Can it be that they are actually destroying money?"

The more I thought about it, the more it has occurred to me that what this banking priesthood is doing is what they and their predecessors have always done: create whatever tool is necessary in order to keep moving their transhumanist football down the field. For many centuries that tool has been monetized debt. But just as their forebears moved society from a system based on the exchange of precious metals by weight to a fiat, state-minted model, that priesthood of today can just as deftly move society from the fiat model to a cryptocurrency blockchain model.

In the excerpts of a recent conversation between Google engineer and "Singularity" dreamer, Ray Kurzweil, and members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), we are already getting hints that the #BigData and #4IR vision of the future is actually one where our current concept of "money" has become obsolete. It does appear to me that mankind's dependence on debt for his means of daily living is now being moved to a dependence on an ethereal super-network of universal intelligence.

Here is Kurzweil's conversation and a few of his statements that stood out to me.

"We Are Going to Merge with This Technology"

On November 3, 2017, Ray Kurzweil participated in a dialog and Q&A with members of the Council on Foreign Relations. A transcript of the hour-long conversation is available [linked here]. Below is the full video of the conference. 

Near the beginning of the episode, Kurzweil mentions a conversation he had recently with Christine Lagarde of the IMF. Lagarde was pointing out that AI is fun and wacky and all, but you can't eat it, can you? Kurzweil retorted politely that such a thing is coming. Once again, Kurzweil repeated the year 2029 several times in this video (a year that has its own roots in an Esoteric Hitler belief that Super Humans would make themselves known in 2029 to save the world. See also my Bee In Eden video at the end of this page.)

Here are Kurzweil's words with hints that the price of this technology will eventually be reduced to nearly Zero (making money obsolete?) In other words, today you can buy a smartphone for $75. A few years ago, it might have cost $1,000. So, today, the cost of that information technology is practically nothing. The same thing will happen in all areas of information technology, like, 3-D printing.

I’ll mention just one implication of the law of accelerating returns, because it has many ripple effects and it’s really behind this remarkable digital revolution we see, is the 50 percent deflation rate in information technologies....   Coexistence of free, open-source products—which are a great leveler—and proprietary products. We’ll print—we’ll be able to create food very inexpensively using 3-D—vertical agriculture, using hydroponic plants for fruits and vegetables, in-vitro cloning of muscle tissue for meat. The first hamburger to be produced this way has already been consumed.... 

That’s been a key prediction of mine. I’ve been consistent in saying 2029. In 1989, in the age of intelligent machines, I bounded that between early 2020s and late 2030s. And in the age of spiritual machines, in ’99, I said 2029. 

As you might imagine, many audience members asked questions about the safety of such a technology. How are we to prevent The Terminator from becoming reality? Even Kurzweil, for all his ubiquitous optimism, betrayed just a hint of trepidation. It wasn't really a fear, but an acknowledgement that, yes, we must tread carefully. 

Here is my collection of Kurzweil's statements that I found noteworthy:

Technology has always been a double-edged sword. Fire kept us warm, cooked our food, and burned down our houses. These technologies are much more powerful. It’s also a long discussion, but I think we should go through three phases, at least I did, in contemplating this. First is delight at the opportunity to overcome age-old afflictions—poverty, disease, and so on. Then alarm, that these technologies can be destructive and cause even existential risks....

And finally, I think where we need to come out is an appreciation that we have a moral imperative to continue progress in these technologies, because despite the progress we’ve made—and that’s a whole other issue. People think things are getting worse, but they’re actually getting better and we can talk about that. But there’s still a lot of human suffering to be overcome. It’s only continued progress, particularly in AI, that’s going to enable us to continue overcoming poverty and disease and environmental degradation, while we attend to the peril. And there’s a good framework for doing that....

The number of people who have been harmed either accidentally or intentionally by abuse of biotechnology so far has been zero.... 

But when you have so much power, even with good intentions, there can be abuses. These technologies are very powerful. And so I do worry about that, even though I’m an optimist. And I’m optimistic that we’ll make it through. I’m not as optimistic that there won’t be difficult episodes. World War II, 50 million people died. And that was certainty exacerbated by the power of technology at that time.... 

This is the most peaceful time in human history....

My view is not that AI is going to displace us. It’s going to enhance us.

An audience member named Alana Ackerson asked how this new technology affects us as spiritual beings, how it affects our "lens" on what it means to be human. Kurzweil went on to say:

You can say that Evolution is a spiritual process, bringing us closer to God. 

And the other implication that spiritual—and really where that title, “Age of Spiritual Machines” comes from—is what is this—what is spiritual? It’s really a word for consciousness. Our whole moral system, our sense of values is that consciousness is the precious thing. That’s the sort of underlying debate in animal rights. Conscious entities are what’s important. Non-conscious entities are only important insofar as they affect the conscious experience of conscious entities. So who and what are conscious is a key question. And that’s the underlying question in animal rights. That’ll be the question when it comes to the AI.

Kurzweil then went on to express his beliefs that human beings have already left their biological nature behind:

So I alluded to earlier, we are going to merge with this technology. I’d say we already have done that to some extent. Medical nanorobots will go inside our brain, connect our neocortex to the cloud. So your smartphone, even though it is itself a billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer I used when I was an undergraduate at MIT, it multiplies itself again a millionfold by connecting to millions of computers in the cloud. We can’t do that directly from our neocortex. We do it indirectly through these devices. We’ll do it directly in the 2030s. And not just to do things like search and translation directly from our brains, although we’ll do that, but to actually connect to more neocortex.

So people say, oh, we’re going to lose our humanity. Well, if you define human as being necessarily purely biological, I think we’re already not purely human anymore, because we’re not purely biological anymore. And we’re going to become increasingly nonbiological. But that’s who we are. I mean, that is the definition of a human, the species that changes itself, it creates tools, it goes beyond our limitations.

Kurzweil then went on to mention the word "de-bias," as in, we will need to teach the robot to rid itself of bias and prejudice even as it's learning to create its own behavior by observing other humans.

There’s a major effort in the field—it’s going on in all the major companies and in open-source research as well-to debias AI, because it’s going to pick up biases from people if it’s learning from people. And people have biases. And so to overcome gender bias and other types of—racial bias, that can actually be a goal. As humans, we pick up biases from all of the things we’ve seen, a lot of it’s subconscious. We then learn, as educated humans, to recognize bias and try to overcome it. 

Near the end of the conference, people were wondering how do robots fit into the world of nation-states. Perhaps the audience was already thinking about Sophia's newly granted citizenship status. Kurzweil dropped a big hint on where Transhumanism is taking mankind in that area. Now you can see how this fits into my idea that this revolution may be rendering money obsolete. That is, if individual national sovereignties no longer dominate mankind's social order, then certainly all authority structures under that level have also lost their importance.

People really are increasingly identifying as citizens of the world. And I think over time nation-states will becomes less influential. I mean, I think we’re on that path.

At the end of the Q&A session, Kurzweil left the audience with these closing remarks:

But intelligence is inherently uncontrollable. 

You know, if there’s some entity that’s more powerful than you and I and it’s out for our destruction, the best strategy is not to get in that situation in the first place. And failing that, the best next strategy would be to get some other AI that’s even more intelligent than the one that’s out for you on your side. 

[AI] is emerging from our civilization today. It’s going to be an enhancement of who we are. And so if we’re practicing the kind of values we cherish in our world today, that’s the best strategy to have for a world in the future that embodies those values.  

Ray Kurzweil certainly gives us a unique view of the future. "Unique" is an understatement. His statement like "today is the most peaceful time in human history" might cause some readers to do a double-take. However, observations like that tend to reinforce what we have already seen about these Elites who rule over us: they are simply not touched by the Matrix that is imposed on the rest of us. We've seen this over and over again with other areas of our accepted way of life: Banksters, Military Contractors, Big Pharma, and now, Big Data. These are the puppet masters not the puppets. Individuals within their ranks might come and go. But, overall, those sectors are not subject to the same Law and Government, nor are they effectively touched by the whims of economic highs and lows, as are the rest of us. The pitfalls that touch us never touches them because they exist on a plane above that daily din.

And yet, even above those four sectors flows those pervasive, ancient religious beliefs about attaining ultimate creative power and universal mastery. I had to smile that the citizen robot was named Sophia. I haven't really seen an official explanation of how she got that name. So, in conclusion, I will close with these thoughts from the article on "Gnostic Sophia" in Wikipedia. I'd like to think that this is the reason.

Gnostic Sophia

Per some very general statements on the tenets of Gnosticism, this article [linked here] says this about "Sophia":

Almost all Gnostic systems of the Syrian or Egyptian type taught that the universe began with an original, unknowable God, referred to as the Parent or Bythos. According to some Gnostic texts, the crisis occurs as a result of Sophia trying to emanate without her syzygy or, in another tradition, because she tries to breach the barrier between herself and the unknowable Bythos. 

After cataclysmically falling from the Pleroma, Sophia's fear and anguish of losing her life (just as she lost the light of the One) causes confusion and longing to return to it. Because of these longings, matter and soul accidentally come into existence. 

The creation of the Demiurge is also a mistake made during this exile. The Demiurge proceeds to create the physical world in which we live, ignorant of Sophia, who nevertheless manages to infuse some spiritual spark or pneuma into his creation.

It would appear that the Transhumanist movement is indeed trying to bring mankind back full circle to the ancient understandings of the source of Matter and Soul, all mixed in with this idea that mankind really has been his own creator from the beginning. Looking at AI from that vantage point, it makes sense that Citizen Sophia has returned to her roots in Saudi Arabia, midway between Egypt and Syria.

My contact information with link to my Karatbars portal are found at my billboard page of SlayTheBankster.com. Listen to my radio show, Bee In Eden, on Youtube via my show blog at SedonaDeb.wordpress.com.

[global-times-blog]

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