by Jon Rappoport
October 3, 2015
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Futurists are inclined to predict a world in which AI (artificial intelligence) will take over a major portion of what is now human activity.
In a matter of decades, for example, they say one computer will have more capacity than all the human brains on the planet put together.
Then, the prediction goes, AI will be virtually human, or more than human.
However, just because AI has greater computational skills than any person or group of persons, where is the quality that makes it human?
In order to answer that, you have to perform a little trick. You have to say that humans are really only high-class machines.
Many pundits have no difficulty with this, because they see humans as problem solvers, period. And that’s what a machine is.
It’s just like the genes-cause-everything hypothesis. Since all existence is assumed to take place on a material level, on a physical level, it’s only a matter of time until we figure out which genes create which human qualities. Eventually, we’ll have a complete map.
Then, if we want to change humans, we just tinker with the genes.
It turns out that this style of reasoning can be used to justify external control of Earth’s population. The assumption is: we are already living in a closed system of cause and effect, so that system IS controlling all human behavior. Gene tinkering and handing over immense decision-power to advanced computers is nothing more than re-arranging the closed system. It was closed and it is closed and it will be closed. No problem.
Right now, the system appears to dictate wars and pain and suffering, so won’t it be much better when the gene-reconfiguration and the computers eliminate that aspect of things?
Believe me, many scientists are thinking along these lines, and they are serious about their goals.
They consider themselves humanitarians.
I bring all this up, because there is really only one way to defeat this kind of thinking.
You need to acknowledge that a prime aspect of existence is non-material.
Non-material means: without a rigid cause-and-effect structure.
To put it another and better way, the individual human being has freedom, and he also has imagination and creative power. These qualities are not material or physical in nature, they are not generated by the brain or by genes or by computational problem-solving ability.
In all societies, past and present, those people who agree that these non-physical capacities are quite real explain them by opting for religion, for religious stories, for cosmologies promoted by one kind of church or another.
Only a tiny number of people state that such non-material qualities and abilities are inherent in the human being and need no explanation or embroidery.
You could say the pendulum has swung drastically from one side to the other. First we had superstitions everywhere and no technology, and now we have streamlined science that purports to explain all of existence, but can’t.
Believe me, this inability to put all life under the umbrella of science is frustrating to obsessed rationalists. They refuse to allow the possibility that imagination and freedom are outside the boundaries of physical cause-and-effect…and if they have to, they will try to prove their position by imposing one system after another on humans, in order to wipe out the freedom they claim doesn’t exist in the first place.
One such strategy involves using computers to generate art and poetry. The thinking is, if we can’t tell the difference between what a computer and a human produce, why do we need human art—and more importantly, why do we need to claim that human imagination and creative power are unique? They are just sub-categories of computational skills, minor tricks, and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about it…
(To read about Jon’s collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)
In every technological society, power is thought of as physical, and the greatest power is produced by machines. To say that human power is ultimately a non-material capacity, and is equal to or greater than what a machine can do…this is considered the height of absurdity.
But if we surrender to that view, we deal away the future to systems that will put the squeeze on the essence of what a human is.
There are thousands, perhaps millions of artists all over the world who’ve glimpsed, or know deeply, what I’m talking about in this article. Their problem, if they have one, stems from believing they have to be psychological underdogs, in order to create their art. This is a cultural artifact, this belief, and it can be cast aside by nakedly comprehending the unlimited power of imagination they possess.
Imagination creates reality.
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Classic Rappoport:
The future of intelligence
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/the-future-of-intellignece/
Can you trust the new brain with an IQ of 7000?
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/can-you-trust-a-new-brain-with-an-iq-of-7000/
What are machines thinking? Forget it. What are humans thinking?
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/what-are-machines-thinking/
It seems like Kurweil is performing “that little trick” that Jon is referring to: saying/implying that humans “are really only high-class machines.”
According to Kurzweil, by “expanding our neocortex” — through the connection of our brains to the internet cloud — we will become benevolent Gods.
According to Kurweil, the neocortex in our brain is a “pattern-recognizer machine” which has an upper limit of 300-million stored patterns (where some of the “higher” said patterns “stored” in our said neocortex are used by us to create art and poems and music and also to express “higher sintements” such as love.). Since computers are pattern-recognizers [too] and said computers are networked in the [google] cloud [Kurzweil works for google], we can “extend our neocortex” simply by accessing many more pattern-recognizers in the cloud.
Supposedly, “benevolent God-like thoughts and actions” result when a humna has access to more than 300-million patern-recgonizers at once.
O-Kay. So, this is New Age Religion v2.0, it seems. Kurzweil’s “frozen poem” for mass consumption,…
~~~
Ray Kurzweil: Your Brain [neocortex] in the Cloud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iTq0FLDII4
Ray Kurzweil: We’ll Become Godlike When We Connect Our Brains [neocortex] to The Cloud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHg0FIilK0E
News website …
http://www.artificialbrains.com/
Good post, Jon.
If we want to talk “extra-terrestrial” there is the Zeta “group mind” I touch on in places at https://exopolitician.wordpress.com (check the Zeta Grey Being posts). The Mantids (and Draco for that matter) use chip technology allowing user interfaced access to stored thoughts.
On our “plane” my next Ozzie Thinker post (to be released), “Disconnecting From Responsibility”, will discuss the difference between will (mind) and brain (cognitive thought).
Incidentally on Global Freedom Movement (http://globalfreedommovement.org) tonight, the guest is Jim West who has plotted how the use of DTT has eerily mirrored polio outbreaks. Has he found one pollution virus “cause”?
“Non-material means: without a rigid cause-and-effect structure.”
I’m guessing that by “rigid,” you’re saying a measurable C&E structure? Because, certainly, no cause does not have some kind of effect. And no effect is produced without something causing it. Now how and why that works specifically is totally beyond me. But very basically, good and evil causes produce like effects. There is no escaping the effects and that is how their matrix will fail. Whoever “they” are. Time is another matter altogether. Maybe it’s already happened, maybe not?
I believe in the invisible and try to reside there as much as I’m capable; even if for only a few minutes each day (on a “good” day). The invisible is a state of mind that can only be sought and is not really ever held for very long, is it? Not by me anyway. Like a place in a different time or a time in a different place. Temporally speaking for example. But I also believe that C&E is just as much a part of that “world” as it is this material one. Is C&E not a multi-dimensional, immutable and universal Law?
Who knows what effects anyone’s thoughts and/or actions cause? They may cause something tangible and immediate. Or, they may cause something to happen in a thousand years or in a parallel universe. As Brian Wilson sang, “God only knows.” They’re just a bunch of weasels playing at being gods. Bang on the head of one weasel and another pops up. So good luck to whoever is trying to put God in a box.
Thank you, Mr R. I don’t read much on the internet anymore except for you.
You are right on, Jon. Any machine can only imitate life. One big difference with life and a mere machine is life CARES, but no machine cares. It doesn’t care what it does—something or nothing—it doesn’t care. It’s a servo-mechanism only, something that life had to set up, program, and use as a tool and actually has no meaning to anything except what it means to something living. Humans know that someone who gets into a state of not caring is approximating a machine, or inanimate object. Look at how much a dead body cares! It doesn’t! No life there. The ‘excitement’ about machines and computers is the same as the knobs who love to ‘show’ you how infinitesimally small you are compared to the size of galaxies, the universe, etc. It’s hilarious. But they’re simply talking as if everything is matter and physical, like you are your body and so your body in comparison to the size of galaxies is small. That is a gargantuan trick, trap, and lie.
October 2,2015: Powerful interview with Annie Jacobsen, the writer of the new book:
“The Pentagon’s Brain”: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency
Everybody should listen to this interview. Very interesting and educating.
Start listening at: 50:56
The Alex Jones Show (VIDEO Commercial Free) Friday October 2 2015: Annie Jacobsen, Peter Schiff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyQu_cjsrIg
I thought about this a lot this year and came to a realization just this year. Asking myself what is the difference between a machine and a human (in this case consciousness). The answer that kept coming up was that the major difference is that a machine would have a constant need for meaning. Did not make sense to me but it does. Someone touched on meaning above in a post. I have searched throughout my life for meaning. Then I asked myself what I was searching for. I could not come up with a consistent answer. Then I thought about a machine in that the neurosci guys building the machine are constantly giving the machine definitions. Giving it meaning for everything. So as it gets more advanced it will have the “appearance” of consciousness but it is always looking for meaning. What does he mean? or what does she mean? or what does this mean? Always definitions. But it is not really wondering. It is just doing what the code says. So that is where I am at. Seeing that I focused more on where I am. There is a difference between wondering and needing meaning imo. Wondering has to do with Imagination where needing seems more machine like. This could all change and I could be wrong but so what. Just doing an exercise.
@ Andy
I fine it interesting starting to see you shine.
Keep this up and you will be like a new penny.
“This could all change and I could be wrong but so what. Just doing an exercise.” -Andy
You’re not wrong…
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
Thank you for that Michael.
Code is funny stuff.
If this then who cares.
If this then maybe.
If this then why?
If this then you pick one.
If this then pin the tail on the donkey.
If this the ….what?
Can’t code humanness.
Well, it comes down to randomness.
Each human being can make uncalculated, pointless, irrational, spontaneous,intuitive,creative, destructive, etc., decisions on many different levels and combinations of levels. Times eight billion people. And some aliens for good measure.
It is impossible to program that. Ain’t gonna happen.
Control is equal to calculation. What cannot be calculated cannot be controlled.
I have read that the purpose of the NSA is to gather enough comm data to algorithmically compute human thought and behavior. I find that funny.
This has been tried before. The Adam and Eve story is a brief narrative about a genetically modified race that had entered a healing process. The left brain (logical, it’s all good, let’s stay here) had begun to reintegrate with the right brain (creative, there is so much more, let’s get out of here) in spite of the corpus controller filter that had been installed between the spheres. An agreement was reached in the mind of the race and the race departed to parts to be discovered. It is not about an “Adam” and an “Eve”, it’s about the psychological healing of a GMO race. That would be us. There are still a lot of people subject to non-integrated thinking, but it’s getting better. The question is do we have enough time to finish healing?
There is some evidence that this healing could be accomplished rather quickly. You may recall that Cain had to receive a mark (thing, process) before he could go to live with the Nodites else they would have recognized him as a GMO and killed him out of hand. In other words his thought processes had to be modified to correspond to a non-GMO race. Be interesting to know what this “mark” is.
Logic, in wedlock to creativity, yields blessed randomness without which some fool would calculate the butterfly out to the Nth degree and freeze it all up.
It’s all about blessed randomness. AI stands for Ain’t Integrated.
@Mike
Disagree here: “Each human being can make uncalculated, pointless…” Everything everyone does is calculated and with a point, but can be judged “irrational, spontaneous, intuitive, creative, destructive or, MOST importantly, ‘in error'”.
Well, decisions are made on many different levels and combinations of levels. That cannot be argued. It’s just a fact.
Not all decisions are made at the conscious, meditated level. Things like reactivity play a huge roll in the daily lives of just about everyone. Reactivity is not calculation.
Judgement and error are very strictly based social or cultural or personal values. Judgement and error are entirely subjective. There is no such thing as a factually universal standard for thought or action. One mans deadly sin can easily be another man’s god given pleasure or right.
MOST importantly, I was writing about randomness and why AI can never achieve human quality. Without randomness all things would eventually add up to a grand self canceling harmonic. It would all go flat-line and existence would cease. On a smaller scale randomness prevents some fool from developing an AI that could effectively anticipate every human evasive action thereby subjugating humanity to the rule of hard, merciless and lifeless code.
Most people don’t much care for randomness because it tends to yield unexpected results here and there. That is understandable.
With all of that said, it would seem to me that you are expressing something like a fear of that which cannot be perfectly calculated. Is this correct? Just asking.