Artificial intelligence and meanderings arcs of humanity

Fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living.
—Ursula K. Le Guin

We do not suffer because we are in pain. We suffer because something has gone wrong with our story—wrong enough that it threatens the structure of our narration.
—Peter Hershock

There has been outward progress from the bullock cart to the jet plane but psychologically the individual has not changed at all, and the structure of society throughout the world has been created by individuals. The outward social structure is the result of the inward psychological structure of our human relationships, for the individual is the result of the total experience, knowledge and conduct of man. Each one of us is the storehouse of all the past. The individual is the human who is all mankind.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti

The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has "legs," so to speak. Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.
—Toni Morrison

[D]espite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
—Yuval Noah Harari

The Artificial Looking Glass

Whenever there is discussion about "artificial intelligence" there is this mirror. This distilling of matters particulate that something is awry. The mirror comes when we attribute something to be "artificial" or AI. Because in every reflection on AI, there is this blood-stained reflection of ourselves. The technology we conceive holding the smear marrow of our living bodies because who we are is deeply entangled and imprinted in the technology we create.

The indication of the mirror comes through with attribution. How we interact with what is "artificial intelligence." We then lift the heavy rock of shame we carry mixed with a confused curiosity. And under this rock, where the insects are, is a crawling, squirming question:

Is there something amiss when we humans cremate our creativity?

Is there something astray with how our skills, art, and expression can be contained, mimicked, mimed, and manufactured into these sharp yet sloppy creations that always bring this air of unsettlement?

And to that even deeper question that brings all the centipedes, millipedes, and diplopodia in full view is a question of torment that pervades all of what is "artificial":

What really makes us human?

And to that, crickets. Or I sure hope not. As in my hoping, the grasshoppers and frogs all call me towards the noise that this question is not as insoluble as it may seem. Because I know it to be an artificial question. A question posed in a way that makes a mannequin of ourselves. Us these creatures of thought, rationally separate from all that is natural. Because any question that questions humanity is questionable itself. The answers stored within the stronghold of definition: that all that is deemed non-human, inhuman is alien to oneself. Lower orders to what is of higher nature. As we forget we fashion the mannequin. As we are as much the creators of ourselves as is our environment and creatured friends—all that is other than us.

Under the traffic noise of "forecasts of impending AI totalitarian takeover," Báyò Akómoláfé croaked a provocation to how the marriage of artifice to intelligence implies that somehow there is a "natural intelligence."^[1] And Báyò brings into question the premise that intelligence is fixed.

A place of exclusivity and dominion where those who have it in their possession lay dominion to the nature of those without. That is what he calls and thus reaches a call center of self. Where we pick up ourselves in this minotaur lair where the labyrinth of intelligence only echoes how we have lost the intelligent life that we call ourselves to be. As the possession of bodies, things, and being and thus the property surrounding intelligence enlists the capitalist presumption that we have senses, neural circuitry, and frontal lobes that somehow place ourselves in at the ivory tower in the kingdom of life.

Because Báyò recognized that in the fixing of life, the stratification and static stastiscianing of life, the Brownian motion of transgressing, infringement, meandering, and enmeshing becomes stifled. Báyò then opens another portal of provocation:

And Báyò acknowledges this craning of ours necks backwards in agony in awareness to a creation we contributed to. Perhaps this expression of the Frankensteinian gaze to which the dishevelment of all we deem as acceptable irks one to the lengths of resentment and disgust—of shirking away and fleeing. Yet also the resentment and disguist that turns us to the need to reaffirm that we are the ones who exclusively possess intelligence. To enlist our intelligence to put down the threats to it to submission. To then be in line with the capacity to be intelligent, however one may want to define it.

Báyò named truth to be impoverished and that he prefers to offer provocation:

I loved this playful reference to Toy Story as the premise of identity and artifice runs deep in its story, as in the Pixar's Toy Story, these toys of a child's bedroom become alive, animated, and are characters of life and becoming only in the absence of the one who plays with them (Andy).

Woody, the cowboy toy, and Buzz, the self-proclaimed space ranger toy, get lost at a huge refueling station (gas station) and to which Woody urgently exclaimed in distress: "I am lost. Andy is gone. They are going to move in two days and its all your fault!" to which Buzz explains how the security of the entire universe is in jeopardy because of Woody since the villainous Zurg is that Woody was responsible for delaying his rendezvous to starcommand.

Woody replied in rage, "You are not a toy! You are not the real Buzz Lightyear. Agh, you're an action figure. You're a child's play thing." to then face Buzz's pity to him not respecting his identity and mission to save the world.

What immediately struts in as this model is how LLM's and AI is implicated in the nature of this scene. Woody's existence and raison d'être comes from being a toy in relationship to Andy. That he is only fully created and existing, thus fully real, when created in the play and life of Andy. Because in every instance of the expression "artificial intelligence," there comes the provocation that perhaps the artificial lives this hidden life in what is natural.

With the element of Toy Story, Buzz can be this allegory to how Woody's existence as toy is artificial because Woody's identity interdepends with Andy's presence. Buzz's existence then being this uncanny disruption to Woody realizing that toys can be individuated from the practice of play, which was love for him. So the story completes the third body, with Buzz being the other or estranged Prometheus that challenged the natural ordered premise that life as a toy or creation is only worth living in relationship with an Andy or creator. Yet also how the individuation of Buzz, as character with fantastical narrative, can still exist in the absence of Andy, revealing the artifice and nature in both Buzz and Woody.

Since Woody was only created as toy relative to Andy, Buzz was only created as non-toy due to Woody. Thus in the creating of Buzz as non-toy and space ranger, Woody was also created as only fully toy when someone who present to toy with him.

Coming from this metaphor, what is implicated is how in our creating, we are created by the things we create.^[4] The attribution of what is artificial, other, and thus forsaken from what is natural, self, and acceptable then brings the convergence to Bayo's second conclusion to the provocation:

What I was fulfilled by deeply in Báyò's wrestling as he seems to be consistently up in arms in the intimacy of touch and feel was how he identifies AI to be this mirror that we have picked up and our appearance dissatisfying. Not only just a mirror but an infraction upon our conception of intelligence. As we realize intelligence is not reducible, not quite able to be contained by large cerebral spaces, and not something that can be said that we have created without rudely vomiting our stomachs where gut intelligence speaks to how intelligence may be more crafty than we might conceive, as Báyò then said:

To turn to times of now, there is this panic of this world, of anxiety, worry, and insecurity that seems insensible as our culture insensitive to how the emotions we feel are a completely appropriate response to the cultural impasse we face, I can see how what Báyò said to be an initiation. As we are coming to recognize not only and simply in the exterior but reversed in our interiority is how intelligence is more emergent than it is self-evident, self-existing, and self-contained.

Because in the phantasmagoria that is life, why do we name the imaginative, dream-like parts of ourselves as artifice? For isn't the art of a fiction writer, the poets, and those in touch with life drawn, pictured, and surreally paranormal to be shared? The responsibility to dream life and hold the tension of truth, reality, deception, and the aliveness of our many faces that we then find ourselves truly an inhabitant of this world?

What I see in the facing towards the mirror that is "artificial intelligence" is the facing of the artifice of systems of exposure for how our bodies are being extracted. Fraught with relentless industry in the dulling and flattening. Which comes from following the Machinations of self. In our lives and homes, we are beginning to mutually realize that many of our employments have only had people enlisted to them because its noise allays us the misery from realizing how frayed the quilt of community, connection, and reciprocity has become. This tattered thing in which technology is exposing exactly what it contributed to breaking up, fracturing, dismantling, and splintering. Intimate relationships with the world.

And what I truly touch in when I see AI in the wilds is how there is this emptiness of presence. An unsettling vacancy where I would expect another's presence to be even though there is something there. With this question of the human, I extol Francis Weller for turning towards how the emptiness that can be felt even without the facing towards the android can be felt in simply being in touch with life:

With Weller's grand unraveling of the emptiness that I find within me, I feel heavy grief knowing how I have compensated for this loss of belonging in ways so artificial to touching the need to be intimately entwined with the living world around me. Mistaking the digital world—the sophistry of appearances, images, and symbolic connection—as this place somehow more real than knowing the deeper needs I truly have. Though, I am sensitive to how it is this deep hurt. The pain of tearing off the bandages to clear the infection on the wound to acknowledge that I have split from life's greater body. And how that split was manufactured in this calculated way to protect me from feeling the millennia of sleep I have been in.

I started this miniature essay with Urusla K. LeGuin and Peter Herschock's call to story. How the fictions of reality of myth and song are what satiate us most and yet how what is artificial has so deeply disfigured the narrative of who we are and what we feel and do. The other four speak to how though we can consider ourselves to be our own Gods, we still lay in disdain to our creation and yet this dissatisfaction and thirst for more is the compulsion to reverse our emptiness. That idea that we are not enough. Almost as if we are this corpse already dead, longing to be filled with that of life.

And where the intimation of artificiality and intelligence play into is how though we may have technology that measures up to many of the science fictions and storied places of utopia, it seems as though we still do not know life. As we are still shelled up in the small self that needs to defend itself from all that is nature. Speaking to our multitude is how We are then repulsed by an artificiality that is exposing all of our "intelligence" that is fabricated, synthetic, and sophisticated yet eerily wants to ignore the intelligence of anything other than homo sapiens and a select other few organisms that meet our qualification for intelligent order.

I find that the way in which artificial intelligence is deployed and enlisted in the activities of this world, exposes the deceit that we already enlist upon ourselves. David Loy, scholar and Sanbo Zen teacher observed is how the entanglement of life will not allow either natural or artificial to prevail over one another because each pole implies each other. To eliminate one would be to lose both.

Loy puts it in a way lucid:

I began this provocation by expressing how AI is this mirror yet I would now say that the mirror is instead a looking glass. As in and through the looking glass, a mirror is implicated and a looking. In our looking, a mirrored is created and so we are. With many instruments of glass, the looking is to clarity, of clearing up what is opaque, oblique, and oblong without reflection. So, in the clearing, when we turn to the looking glass, it is almost looking at a clearcut forest.

Because above and below every clearcut forest is an establishment and enlistment of the machining parts of ourselves with no reverence for life and all that creates and sustains us. A clearcut forest is an exact spilling of the milk that comes from the udders of the objectification of nature. We then become objects ourselves calcify our connection to the living world that was more verb than noun in the first place. Verb as in evading definition in that rustling, scampering, and eagerly elusive thing where movement, flow, and reciprocity is honored than control, staticity, and commandeering separation.

As Loy alluded to Hegel: we are becoming aware and recognizing how the concept of who we are, masters of nature, to actually be slave. Yet slave is a blunt and glib way to express it. To turn the road the other way, in our looking back at our creation and see its artificiality, we come in intimate contact to the artificiality within us. That we forget the emergence of the artificial. I say emergence as we call AI our creation, us being the origin. We forget in this amnesiac, drunkard, and ignoring ritual since there is a depth that is calling us to wade into: in our attribution of the word "artificial," in the alienation of this other, we become aliens ourselves.

Mere visitors on this planet — as visitors know that the place they stay to be disposable, disregardable, and a place of momentary stay and home. We, ourselves, become aliens when we peer through a looking glass and forget "artificial intelligence" is an agency that mirror us. The looking glass of kaleidoscopic being capable of a gentleness that fosters like a womb and capable of that of the Hindu Shiva, the Greek Thanatos, and of all that separates any whole like a cancer.

The constructed, construed sense of "artificial intelligence" and how we balk at its ability to create, imitate, and mimic really is speaking and bringing into discussion the blood we have shed, tears we have spilled, and wounds we have endured, infected, and ignored that this intelligence we speak of has brought us to.

James Carse wrote about how ideologies—or the loudest, most boisterous and clamoring voices are amplified to the point of destiny:

Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is the assumption that since the beginning and end of history are known there is nothing more to say. History is therefore to be obediently lived out according to the ideology.^[8]

And he does recognize the inseparateness of the idea and ideater, as he then writes:

What ideologists are concerned to hide is the choral nature of history, the sense that it is a symphony of very different, even opposed, voices, each nonetheless making the other possible.^[9]

In every chorus, it is comfortable to fog the car window on a cold, frost-biting evening night. That is to say it is comfortable to forget backdrops, backgrounds, and opposites when sensations create insular bodies of severance. As with any alien, colonizer, visitor, observer or cameraman, there needs to be a pulling of a rope. A rope that appears to hold things together yet binds oneself to oneself in this self-arresting heart attack. Pulling of a rope as there needs to be descent. Of lowering, wading, deepening, and liminality. As the apprentice of sorrow, soul activist, and psychotherapist Francis Weller observed:

It is challenging to honor the descent in a culture that primarily values the ascent. We like things rising—stock markets, the GDP, profit margins. We get anxious when things go down. Even within psychology, there is a premise that is biased toward improvement, always getting better, rising above our troubles. We hold dear concepts like progress and integration. These are fine in and of themselves, but it is not the way psyche works. Psyche, we must remember, was shaped by and is rooted in the foundation of nature. As such, psyche also experiences times of decay and death, of stopping, regression, and being still. Much happens in these times that deepen the soul. When all we are shown is the imagery of ascent, we are left to interpret the times of descent as pathological; we feel that we are somehow failing.^[10]

When all we hear in the speakings to AI are its threat, in its idolatry of producing, in its disruption and interruption of community, and in its verisimilitude to our lived capacities and craftsmanship, we, of course, spiral into a descent. A descent and a falling that uproots our sense of groundedness of the ways we live, the myths we follow, and the subconscious, subterranean subterminal place that the stories we live today have chapters closing and we have yet to open new ones. Since in the panic of "artificial intelligence" we are becoming eerily aware of the surrounding inner-panic that our systems are failing, thus somehow that we are failing. Failure more this silent recognition in our identities to how we no longer have the time, presence, and life to create art, live rooted in integral word and acts, and laugh, play, and converse unbridled and unabashedly. Because in speaking of AI or for that matter any other person, being, creature, idea as "threat" we become the "threat"; we become exactly what we see as threatening. We become its idolatry of producing, its disruption and interruption of community, and its verisimilitude to lived capacity and craftsmanship. We become artificial. We become alien. And in every recognition of a capacity within ourselves, in the gaps, crevices, and shadowed places of ourselves, we are given the choice to sing to the wilds of the choral nature of history and its antecedents that do not speaks to others as "threats," "enemies" or "evil".

As many have said in the past: in our thirst to eliminate that Other, we become them. We become exactly which we want to eliminate.

All that is to say this: "artificial intelligence" is this more-than-human agency stripping away at ground to show the subterranean weeds and roots of the hell that we have created in the name of heaven. The weeds being that churlish activity of titling ourselves "intelligent" when we are in a collision course to witness, record, and react to our self-created death. As we, as a species, are coming to recognize how endangering we are to even our closest kin—friends, relatives, guardians, and family.

Enfleshed in the curse of playing witch hunt with the artificial and the artifice of speaking to how It will bring our demise, we are waking up from a slumber and hibernation to how inauthentic our belonging has become. So belittled into this subterfuge of self that forgets how capable of artificiality we are and can perform. As all these questioning are collapsing upon themselves: this no longer is a question of responsibility, authenticity or belonging but a question of descent.

Can we return to the understanding that lives at a cellular level that our bodies, our situations, and our systems are not an imprisonment to escape? That calling for justice in the space of the artificial brings us to a sinister threshold where we start to see how deeply incarcerated we conceive ourselves? That in our attempts to unlock the deepest intelligence, one automated, able to be machined, and consistently replicated, we are seeing the sham of our own intelligence?

I would say artificial intelligence is a bit more a trickster than we might bring its credit. The accreditation of AI is in its ability to shapeshift. To be somewhat hollow until we name it to give it a form—a Schrödinger's cat that scurries into any form we choose to take. Being the two to a tango when we call its name a dancer.

At the deepest, how we use AI speaks a lot to how we humans, given the gift of shapeshifting or of precisely choosing who we are that we forget we even made the choice in the first place, so easily can sculpt a threat into existence. By anticipation, assumption, and fear. Since we are now starting to realize how indebted to others we are in the creating of ourselves

Is it not comfortable to panic when recognize how in our attribution of some unpleasant quality to something we too can hold the exactly what we resent, are afraid of, and want to vanquish?

Bayo Akomolafe put it in way that spills out exactly what I am starting to recognize within:

And yet, am I too quick to reduce these people to victims? To strip them down to some kind of basic (and necessary) subsistence, and thus denying them the frivolity and complexity I allow myself?

In the birth of what is artificiality, there can be the death of what is authentic. What is known in bone. Because when we deny another what we allow in ourself, we split ourselves from this Earth as this cancer. A cancer that comes in wanting something and feelng deprived enough in the sight of another having it to progress towards, to grasp at and, ultimately, to attack.

There is sense to how some can feel a funeral in ones brain when seeing life hollowed out in the calculated graphics, design, writing, and art of what we call "artificial intelligence" because, in many senses, we are meeting the death we so project. Of stripping both humans and what is more-than-human the substance that they are and their need of respect. As we are starting to see the width of the cloth. The cloth being how much loss is apparent when we gaze into the looking glass of the "artificial" and end up finding ourselves.

And who wouldn't want to deny that we are inauthentic? That is a belonging that needs to be uprooted. That is the quaking qualm of our times: what happens when our inauthenticity is accepted as authentic? What happens when the artifice of the artificial goes under the radar and appear natural? What happens when we recognize that when we consider the natural, we forget how artificial that question is? How are we, creatures rooted in the cycles of this Earth, universe, and planet, somehow separate from it?

Perhaps that is why the air when discussions of AI are present are so suffocating... they speak over the silent discussion of the silent streams and springs that call out the radioactivity and acoustics of an echo. That in every looking glass we find ourself. In every expression, we are our own echo. Perhaps that is why questions of "artificial intelligence" are like this tunnel. This question that forever questions itself that the questioner becomes sick. Finding themself alone because they never once respected what was being in conversation. Finding themself alien to themself and instead wondering about the spacecraft. Rather than every choice that was chosen to leave our body and our senses.

That in the re-presenting of life through the looking glass of the "artificial," we are becoming deeply present to how we are both Santa Claus and his elves in the manufacturing of the monster. On this advent into the "artificial," perhaps Mary Shelley would have something to echo about this predicament.

[1]

https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/can-ai-have-wisdom (Back to text)

[2]

Ibid. (Back to text)

[3]

Ibid. (Back to text)

[4]

Artificial Intelligence and Our Spiritual Imagination (15:19)
In this, Báyò put this in a remarkably coherent way through Plutarch's Ship of Theseus, Gilbert Simondon's cybernetics, DeLeuze, and Freud. (Back to text)

[5]

Artificial Intelligence and Our Spiritual Imagination (39:12) (Back to text)

[6]

Ibid. (Back to text)

[7]

51, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller (Back to text)

[8]

Lack and Transcendence: The Probkem of Life and Death in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism, David Loy (Back to text)

[9]

Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibilty, James P. Carse (Back to text)

[10]

21, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred World of Grief (Back to text)