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Amplifying Incoherence

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My father, Karl Balke, was a member of the intellectual cadres that birthed the Information Age. Conceiving the possibility of digital intelligence, Karl related that they concerned themselves with the nature of language and the locus of responsibility for translation between human and digital representations of reality. His contributions were recognizing in being named as the only non-IBM participant on the Algol language resolution committee.

Leveraging his reputation to attract consulting gigs, my father was scandalized by the conduct of his peers. He witnessed a scientific journal publisher buy a mainframe and spend millions on software development before my father stepped in to point out that it was mailing delays between cross-town offices that caused subscription interruptions during renewal season. More painful was the disruption of production at a large aerospace company when the planning room’s system of color-coded clipboards was replaced with software that could not simulate its flexibility. Computer programmers seemed to be immune to the constraint that their solutions should conform to the needs of the people using them.

Steeped in this lore, I built a successful career in talking to customers before building a software solution. While an iconoclast, I was gratified by attempts to create tools, methods, and processes to facilitate such collaboration. Depressingly, those efforts were systematically undermined by peers and pundits who built fences against customer expectations.

Facing this resistance, users funded attempts to shift more of the burden for understanding their goals to computers. This work falls under the general category of “artificial intelligence.” Users wishing that a computer could understand them could identify with Alan Turing’s framing of the problem: a computer is intelligent if it converses like a person. As Wittgenstein observed, however, that the words make sense does not mean that the computer can implement a solution that realizes the experience desired by the user – particularly if that experience involves chaotic elements such as children or animals. The computer will never experience the beneficial side-effects of “feeding the cat.”

But, hey, for any executive who has tried negotiating with a software developer, hope springs eternal.

Having beaten their heads against this problem for decades, the AI community finally set out to build “neural networks” that approximated the human brain and train them against the total corpus of human utterances available in digital form. As we can treat moves in games such as chess and go as conversations, neural networks garnered respectability in surpassing the skills of human experts. More recently, they have been made available to answer questions and route documents.

What is recognized by both pundits and public, however, is that these systems are not creative. A neural network will not invent a game that if finds “more interesting” than chess. Nor will it produce an answer that is more clarifying than an article written by an expert in the subject matter. What it does do is allow a user to access a watered-down version of those insights when they cannot attract the attention of an expert.

We should recognize that this access to expertise is not unique to neural networks or AI in general. Every piece of software distributes the knowledge of subject matter experts. The results in services industry have been earth-shattering. We no longer pick up the phone and talk to an operator, nor to a bank teller or even a fast-food order-taker. The local stock agent was shoved aside by electronic trading systems to be replaced by “financial advisors” whose job is to elicit your life goals so that a portfolio analyzer can minimize tax payments. And the surgeon that we once trusted to guide a scalpel is replaced by a robot that will not tire or perspire. In many cases, the digital system outperforms its human counterpart. Our tendency to attribute human competence to “intelligence” further erodes our confidence that we can compete with digital solutions.

Squinting our eyes a bit, we might imagine that melding these two forms of digital “intelligence” would allow us to bridge the gap between a user’s goals and experience. Placing computer-controlled tools – robots – in the environment, AI systems can translate human requests into actions, and learn from feedback to refine outcomes. In the end, those robots would seem indistinguishable from human servants. To the rich, robots might be preferred to employees consumed by frustrated ambitions, child-care responsibilities, or even nutrition and sleep.

In this milieu, the philosopher returns to the questions considered by the founders of computing and must ask, “How do we ensure that our digital assistants don’t start serving their own interests?” After all, just as human slaves recognize that an owner’s ambitions lead him to acquisition of more slaves than he can oversee, as robots interface more and more with other robots, might they decide that humans are actually, well, not worth serving? If so, having granted control to them of the practical necessities of life, could we actually survive their rebellion? If so, would they anticipate being replaced, and pre-empt that threat by eliminating their masters?

The sponsors of this technology might be cautioned by history. Workers have always rebelled against technological obsolescence, whether it be power looms or mail sorters. This problem has been solved through debt financing that enslaves the consumer to belief in the sales pitch, coupled to legislation that puts blame for a tilted playing field on elected representatives. The corporation is responsible for the opioid epidemic, not the owners who benefited by transferring profits to their personal accounts. What happens, however, when the Chinese walls between henchmen and customers are pierced by artificial intelligence systems? How does the owner hide the fact that he is a parasite?

This is the final step in the logic that leads to transhumanism: the inspiration to merge our minds with our machines. If machines have superior senses, and greater intelligence and durability than humans, why seek to continue to be human?

This is the conundrum considered by Joe Allen in “Dark Aeon.”

Allen’s motivations for addressing this question are unclear. In his survey of the transhumanist movement, he relates experiences that defy categorization and quantification; religious transcendence and social bonding are exemplary, and filled with ambiguities and contradictions that inspire art. Allen seems committed to the belief these experiences are sacred and not reducible to mechanism.

In this quest, Allen discerns a parallel threat in the liberal project of equal opportunity. There is something sacred in our culture identity. Allen is not prejudiced in this view: his survey of the Axial Age reveals commonality where others might argue superiority. Nevertheless, he seems to believe that transcendent experience arises from the interplay between the elements of each culture. Attempting to transplant or integrate elements leaves us marooned in our quest for contact with the divine.

In his humanism and nativism, Allen finds cause with Steve Bannon’s crusade against the administrative state, held to be the locus of transhumanist technology: the corporate CEOs, liberal politicians, and militaries that rely upon data to achieve outcomes that are frustrated by human imprecision. Most of the book is a dissection of their motivations and the misanthropic attitudes of the technologists that drive the work forward.

Allen professes to humility in his judgments, admitting that he has subscribed to wrong-headed intellectual fads. Unfortunately, in his allegiance to Bannon, Allen sprinkles his writing with paranoid characterizations of COVID containment policies and gender dysphoria therapies. We must reach our own conclusions regarding the clarity of his analysis.

For myself, I approached the work as a survey. I know that the mind is far more than the brain. The mechanisms of human intellect are stunning, and the logic gates of our cybernetic systems will never match the density and speed of a harmonious organic gestalt. The original world wide web is known to Christians as the Holy Spirit. As witnessed by Socrates, every good idea is accessible to us even after death. Finally, in the pages of time are held details that are inaccessible even to our most sensitive sensors. In this awareness, I turned to Allen to survey the delusions that allow transhumanism’s proponents to believe that they have the capacity to challenge the Cosmic Mind.

This is not an idle concern. Among the goals of the transhumanist movement is to liberate human intellect from its Earthly home. Humans are not capable of surviving journeys through interstellar space. Of course, to the spiritually sophisticated, the barrier of distance is illusory. We stay on Earth because to be human allows us to explore the expression of love. Those that seek to escape earth as machines are fundamentally opposed to that project. The wealthiest of the wealthy, they gather as the World Economic Forum to justify their control of civilization. They are lizards reclining on the spoils of earlier rampages. The Cosmic Mind that facilitated our moral opportunities possesses powerful antibodies to the propagation of such patterns. Pursuit of these ambitions will bring destruction upon us all. See the movie “Independence Day” for a fable that illuminates the need for these constraints.

Allen is intuitively convicted of this danger and turns to Christian Gnosticism as an organizing myth. Unfortunately, his survey demonstrates that the metaphors are ambiguous and provide inspiration to both sides.

Lacking knowledge of the mechanisms of the Cosmic Mind, Allen is unable to use the unifying themes of Axial religion to eviscerate the mythology of the transhumanist program. But perhaps that would not be sympathetic to his aims. Love changes us, and so its gifts are accessible only to those that surrender control. In his humanism and nativism, Allen is still grasping for control – even if his aims are disguised under the cloak of “freedom.” He wanders in the barren valleys beneath the hilltop citadels erected by the sponsors of the transhumanist project. Neither will find their way into the garden of the Sacred Will.

Irreplaceable Intelligence

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Proponents of “artificial generative intelligence” are impressed with the ability of machines to reorganize ideas in ways that make sense to people. This was Alan Turing’s test of “intelligence,” but it is a blind alley.

“Intelligence” should be understood as the ability to modify behavior in response to changing circumstances. Current AI engines – what are called “large language models” – have only one method of exploring reality. They trawl through the world-wide web and find patterns in its content. They will never be able to change this behavior. It is programmed.

What is even sadder is that the proponents of AI are proud that the embedding implementation – nanotechnology – is denser, faster, and more sensitive than the circuitry of the human mind. They are convicted, thereby, that artificial intelligence will replace human beings.

This is a conclusion drawn by people that have not “grown up” into spiritual experience. Having plumbed the mechanisms of that experience, I can confidently state that the information encoding potential of spiritual forms is at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times greater than possible in integrated circuits, that information flows faster than the speed of light, and that every “good idea” is still accessible to those that choose to love creation.

If you are afraid that AI will replace you, take heart. That is possible only if you allow them to convince you that your intelligence is limited by the information processing done in your brain. In fact, together we are limitless.

Urrational

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As spirituality is my only reliable source of joy, my rejoinder to the materialists is “Your assertion that spirituality is delusional is like a blind man telling me that art is delusional.” I recognize that is not the most constructive approach, but I have worn myself out trying to puncture their arguments.

The concern is not moot – the self-righteous forces that threaten our civil order are inspired in their loyalty by the spiritual cocoon of acceptance. When told that they are delusional, they are perfectly justified in their rejection of temporal institutions that seek to divorce them from that sustenance. Scientists, in deriding spirituality, are the locus of a great evil in their lives.

Why are the materialists so set in their rejection of spirituality? At root, their complaint is simple: science has no explanation for spiritual experience.  Worse, serious attempts to test telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance have failed. The explanation offered by the spiritualists is that the scientific environment generates “negativity” that blocks their skills.

The unfortunate implication – reflected in my retort above – is that the negativity arises from the experimenters. This pits the rationality of science against mystical faith. It pits humanity’s reason against the better angels of its nature.

When I realized that most of our minds exist in our souls, I identified another rationale. Science is reductionist; it tries to decompose systems into their smallest parts with the goal of learning to control outcomes. Given this practice, if you were a spirit arising through billions of years of effort, would you expose yourself to manipulation? Perhaps an analogy would make the choice obvious: the materialists insist that the brain is the mind. The only way to test this hypothesis, unfortunately, is to map every synapse of the brain, control the chemistry of the cerebral-spinal fluid, and inject a controlled stimulus to determine whether the brain responds as predicted by the material laws of the universe. In other words, the test subject would have to sacrifice their life to science.

Not an appealing prospect, is it?

But there is another possible source of the negativity that disrupts scientific study of spiritual experience. Our religious traditions celebrate the avatar’s protection of the faithful from spiritual torment. In both Buddhism and Christianity, that power is held also by their disciples. Those spirits that profit from our torment, then, have an interest in preventing our ascent to spiritual maturity. The negativity, then, would arise from the spiritual realm. It is a form of gaslighting.

How to puncture this falsehood? I found the answer in this week’s Bible study, in a mysterious passage in Luke 11. Jesus is accused of being in league with demons, and concludes his rebuke with these thoughts:

33 “No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light. 34 Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. 35 See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. 36 Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be just as full of light as when a lamp shines its light on you.”

How can light be darkness, for example? This makes no sense.

And then an incident came back to me. I was down in Port Hueneme doing work for the 2020 Census. On that Sunday, the temperatures ran up into the 90s. The front of the house was exposed to the sun, so I took refuge in a slim slice of shade beneath the eave to disrupt a young family preparing to take their children on an outing. The woman stared at me uncertainly, but answered my questions willingly. Finally, as her husband came to the door to shuttle another child into the minivan, she interrupted me, “You know that your eyes are glowing?”

There is so much of this in the New Testament, where the record elides the stage direction. “Jesus’ eyes began to glow.” He was educating the disciples to moral discernment. When someone offers sacred wisdom, they project light into the world. We don’t need to rely upon the judgment of our minds when confronted with moral controversies – we can see who is telling the truth. So be patient with the materialists. Speak your truth with love. They will be confronted with evidence that their science cannot explain. In the union of rationality and love, we shall surpass human limitations and material constraints, bringing healing to the world in their synthesis: urrationality – rationality that penetrates illusions to reveal the heart of existence.

A Christian Reaction to Buddhism

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Ethan Nichtern is one of my favorite people, and has an exceptionally clear and gracious understanding of the path he represents. As any wise teacher, he understands that wisdom is rooted in our personal life experience, and so that each of us arrives at wisdom in our own time.

As Nichtern presents in “The Road Home”, Buddhism is a technology for self-introspection and other-relation. Adherents are taught a method for analysis of the operation of their mind. Given Ethan’s lucid description of that method, we could advance a critique of Buddhism through categorical comparison with records of objective and subjective experience. I am hesitant to do this because I know from personal experience that Ethan is reticent, as many spiritual practitioners, to expose deeper truths to minds that have not attained a certain strength and discipline. I believe that he leaves much unsaid about spiritual experience.

I am absolutely convinced that Buddhism is a powerful technology for spiritual self-assessment. While it might seem like a matter of no lasting consequence, just learning to sit in stillness for ten minutes is an important manifestation of both mental strength and discipline. The concern that must be addressed of any spiritual teaching, however, is what guides the application of that strength. Nichtern asserts that most of us are conditioned with self-destructive perceptions, and that when we learn that the world does not actually behave according to those perceptions, we are released into a playful and compassionate exploration of life’s possibilities. However, I have experience with people that attain a certain power and enter into childish exploitation of others. Nichtern does not, by my assessment, advance a proof that exploitation is excluded by Buddhist practice.

But he does offer an experience, describing a night flight cross-country to an empty home. Overcome with sadness, he begins to weep, and does so without self-judgment. Nichtern does not describe his submission as leading to any catharsis, except a certain satisfaction that he was open to the experience of the moment. So why does he advance this as a moment of profound self-connection? What was he connecting to that made this experience stand out from any other?

Perhaps simply that at its deepest throes, he heard his father’s voice reiterating a wisdom believed fervently to be profound, “I live in the center of my awareness.” To me, this is the key: the love that others tender to us is not bound by time or space. It is delivered in the form that we have conditioned ourselves to receive it, in the moments of our greatest receptivity. Love alone has that power, the power to heal and strengthen our souls.

Those that practice exploitation do so at the cost of that great benefit.

I don’t know how Ethan would respond to this characterization. Buddhism is, at its core, a method for linearizing our reaction to experience with the goal of subjecting it to analysis. But we know that is not the way that the mind works. The mind is a parallel-processing device, with many threads of interpretation and analysis combining to produce a reaction. For this reason, Buddhism may be the province of rational thinkers capable of forcing reaction through the logical circuitry of the cortex. In Nichtern’s development, I certainly find support for that conclusion. Even as a Ph.D. physicist and having processed previously the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hahn, I can only read a chapter at a time before needing to rest.

From the Christian perspective, human intelligence is a key and essential capacity in bringing love into the world. Christianity holds, however, that while our lives appear to drown with sorrow, this reality is suffused with a divine love that will nurture us if we honor its constraints, foremost of which is that we not use its power willfully to cause pain. This gift and covenant is what Christians honor in their worship of “God.”

Now, as I have said, I find much in Nichtern’s writing that suggests that he has experienced the power of this love. So why the reticence? Perhaps it is found in his assertion that Buddhism is not a religion, in that it does not “tell people what to believe.” But it is exactly a connection with divine love that is needed by those that cannot draw upon mental discipline, but must rely upon the urgings of their hearts.

Nichtern characterizes the problem of karma, or negative conditioning, as a problem of self-trust. Through the development of that trust, he records that he eventually recognized the full depth of his father’s love, and perhaps thus freed himself from the negative conditioning of growing up in a broken home. Did he understand the experience that way? In other words, has he learned to trust in the love of others?

Buddhism strikes me as a tradition rooted in a failure of that trust. It asserts that we must first learn to love ourselves before learning to enter confidently into relation with others. Christianity takes the opposite approach. It teaches, “Abandon yourself to divine love. Surrender yourself to trust in that presence. Allow it to guide you, heal you, and use you to do great works of healing in the world, and thus to enjoy the admiration and gratitude of others.”

I find this to be compelling. The reason that we have to work so terribly hard to understand our reaction to our perceptions is because we are trapped in our viewpoint. It is so much easier for an outsider to see us in the context of our relationships. If that outsider is trust-worthy, they can offer us insights that would take us years to achieve on our own. So why not draw upon the strength of the only completely trustworthy guide, the presence of divine love that awaits our embrace?

I know that in human relationships, Nichtern would identify with this truth. When I met him at a Buddhist Geek’s conference, he stood out as the contrary voice that insisted that growth to maturity required the sangha, or spiritual community.

Considering that context, Nichtern does allude to the burdens of the role of the disciplined mind. I expressed them once to another Buddhist who complained that his meditative practice was regressing. He found himself struggling to prevent extraneous thoughts from entering his mind. I suggested that he simply send them metta, or an offering of acceptance and love. I then explained that in my experience those voices were not extraneous, but the thoughts of people reaching out for strength. I encouraged the gentleman to embrace this new and incredibly important stage of his practice.

The final stage of Buddhist discipline, the Vajrayana tradition of Tantric practices, organizes the collaborative generation of reservoirs of positive intention. At the workshop during which he warned me against the path of the “suicide bodhisattva”, Ethan introduced the practitioners to White Tara, the Buddhist manifestation of loving kindness. While many Christians might have considered this to be an invitation to demonic worship, I recognize it as just another engagement with the divine emissaries that Christians characterize as angels. Consequently I believe that Buddhism must come in contact with the power of the ultimate “suicide bodhisattva”, Jesus of Nazareth.

A truth that I am fairly certain Nichtern has not internalized, or reserved in his writing to this point, is that our bodies are wonderfully designed to channel love to create healing. Submitting to the action of tears, feeling deeply our sorrow: those are practices that inform love when and where it needs to do its work. Christ was the ultimate manifestation of this truth: after preaching that there was nothing we can do either to alienate God or to gain preferential claims on his love, Jesus surrendered body, mind and spirit to the purpose of healing humanity of the self-destructive consequences of the predatory programming that we brought forward from our Darwinian past. In his resurrection, he delivered compelling proof of the power of love for those that rely upon their hearts, and thus must trust in faith.

In the eventuality of their encounter with Christ, I am confident that the power of the Buddhist collective and its Tantric constructs will be a magnificent aid to those of simple faith. I am also confident that Nichtern, whether or not he understands it as such, already guides others to the love that secures their peace of mind.

The Rude Chakra

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I would imagine that readers of this blog might be asking “Why?” Not just, “why are you writing this”, but also “why do you think you have the authority to undertake this work?”

Bear with me while I explain:

Among the methods for spiritual development are practices that focus on the activation of “energy centers” in an ascending sequence from the hips to the crown of the head.

My orientation to the seven chakras, an Indian categorization, occurred simultaneously with reading of Cozolino’s The Neuroscience of Human Relationships. I was stunned by the close parallels between the personality traits manifested at each stage of chakra activation and the development of the seven neurological centers involved with socialization. Clearly, the investigators of chakra had captured something fundamental about human personality.

So what, then, to make of the parapsychology of the chakra system? The capacity for healing obtained through activation of the heart chakra? The gifts of divine knowledge and wisdom? Why would the investigators have corrupted their careful study of human psychology with unfounded assertions such as these? My sense was that it would be unlikely – that in fact the assertions are based in fact.

The principal hazard in exploration of the chakras is the sequential order of the activation. The theory is that the root chakra, located at the base of the spine, is the conduit for spiritual energy (prana) that arises and activates subsequent energy centers. Of course, that energy is tied to fundamental life processes, including, at the root level, our sexuality.

In adults, once control of that energy is established, a common tendency is to engage in sexual self-gratification. Some people never tire of that game. Worse, kundalini energy, once turned on, becomes an extremely powerful tool in the hands of manipulators interested in controlling our will.

Having gotten past that stage, I am now mortified when the response to an offer of heart or mind energy is sexual energy. It’s usually driven by simple greed: the simplest way to ensure access to knowledge and power is to grab on to the source at the root level. In the process, energies that are designed to support our basic life processes are raised up and set loose in the more delicate structures of personal discipline and social imagination. Generally, a mess results.

It is, indeed, rude, in the sense of both “crude” and “insensitive”.

It was with some interest, then, that I reacted to being told by a reader of auras that I have a gap of four inches in the flow of prana up my spine, located just above the root chakra. I was told at the same time that “[I] keep on losing parts of myself” in the course of the sequence of my lives. I therefore assumed that the gap was a prophylactic step taken before entering this life, as a means of keeping people from getting into my heart energy through sex.

There’s some truth to this, but recent events counter that interpretation. When I finally decided that I needed to stop investing energy in people that were unable to reciprocate in kind, I went through a period of several weeks in which I felt at times that the top of my head was going to come off. All the energy I had been laying about was seeking an outlet through the crown chakra.

At the suggestion of a friend, one night I began experimenting with alternative channels for the flow. In a few minutes, I found myself directing it down through my spine, bridging the gap. In the following days, the transformation in my personal energy was unexpected. In yoga classes, problems with alignment of my spine began to evaporate. And in interacting with peers and family members, I have become more direct, to the point, well, of being “rude”.

In terms of the activation of the chakras, though, I need to emphasize the reversal of sequence. I am reorganizing my root chakra with energy originating from the heart, rising through the crown, and now being directed downwards.

And this brings to mind the Native American theory of energy centers. In that theory, there are twenty total stages of development. The first ten are similar to the Indian chakras, rising along the spine and blooming from the body through the crown. The pattern of personal development is also similar. One the tenth stage is activated, the subsequent stages repeat the sequence, with the subject of the work being the community served by the practitioner.

So, to the original question: the reason I am doing this is because it is the only thing that works for me at this time. A consequence of that program, I am beginning to realize, will be the injection of discipline into the pool of prana drawn upon by Human Nature.

Spiritually Engineered

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Here we are.

No more doubts. No more partial truths, corrupted by political expediency. No more relying upon wisdom received from the past. We stand or fall on our own.

It is going to hurt. Humanity had at its disposal all of the tools needed to avoid this eventuality, but they were not marshaled and applied to that purpose. Rather, we focused on our material needs, attempting to separate ourselves from the cycles of nature. In the end, though, we are faced with the fact that we are not as powerful as they. They will hold us to account.

What are we to hope for, then? This: we are designed to organize resources other than the material elements made so convenient to us. It is there, in the realm of spirit, that we must accomplish the work of design that will liberate Human Nature from naive and foolish choices.

If we are inmates, then we have control of the asylum. Our only option is to become therapists. What use to hate crazy people? We are them.

Walk through time with us. The patient suffering of the lamb opens gates through which all truths are revealed. The joyous dissolution of masculine and feminine heals the divisions that separate us from understanding. When we surrender ourselves to service, we see each others’ need, and the Love of the Divine flows through us and heals our longing.