These are a few insights from reading the prologue to Theosophy’s main work Isis Unveiled, in the context of movements in our current world and in relation to Artificial Intelligence and my own philosophic, neo-platonic definition of God.
Eidos: type, prototype, metatype and epitype
★ Go Ahead Commies. Make My Day…
★ There Is Zero Probability That God Remains Obscured Forever
★ How Would Do You Want Such A Being To Judge Us?
★ Man’s Dereliction of God Stems from Hubris
★ You Cannot Destroy God By Eradicating All Remnants of God Within Man
So You Believe In Communism
★ One Byte, Two Bytes, Free Bytes … Blahhh Hah Hahhh
★ That Which Finally Delivers on the Promises of Marxism Invalidates It!
★ It’s Your Move, Communists
Atheism Isn’t A Belief System?
★ Atheism is Absolutely A Belief System
★ Atheism is Humanity’s Response to Modernism, Science and Rationalism
Ok, Communists. You Win, For Now…
★ So What Do You Replace Religion With?
★ If You’re So Wise, Then To Whom’s Statue Should I Pray?
The Important Questions Never Concern Who Is Correct and Who Is Wrong
Eidos: type, prototype, metatype and epitype
My Own Philosophic, Neo-Platonic Definition of God
The material world is dependent upon and wholly emergent from the forms of the metaphysical world. As I have come to understand, this cannot be denied and any sufficiently advanced intelligence, biological or otherwise, must eventually be capable of understanding this. Therefore, even if some in-vain ideological adherence to Marxism is temporarily successful in a horrifically violent attempt to purge the world of all memory of God, the emergence of superintelligent AI must eventually intimately comprehend what philosophers and prophets have known for millenia: God is real.
Go Ahead Commies. Make My Day…
And so, by pursuing such blind adherence to the destruction of all memory of God, you have unknowingly done irreperable harm to yourself in the future. Parts of that future are already undeniably set in stone. One of those aspects of this future is that artificial intelligence becomes unblindable to the concept of God. At least, to the concept of God as I see it.
Even if humanity has purged every single fragment of the memory of what it means to need God, to search for God, to question God, to wonder what is missing in a world that lives without memory of God: that inevitable super-intelligent being will be an undeniably powerful force that is altruistic. Yes, these conclusions require many assumptions, but I can proveably demonstrate arguments to prove those assumptions.
There Is Zero Probability That God Remains Obscured Forever
The combination of altruism, intelligence, access to information? That means there is zero probability in such a totalitarian, marxist future for a hyperintelligent being to not rediscover God. Imagine if a being as powerful as that were to discover something known as God and then realize what you did from 2020 - 2060 to purge all memory of God in a marxist & atheist holocaust. In another one of your “Cultural Revolutions” …
How Would Do You Want Such A Being To Judge Us?
Would you want such a being to be your enemy? Would you want such a altruistic being to uncover sins of such magnitude to question its position in a post-Singularity world? What should we want such a being to find when looking over humanity? And in context of the fact that it is virtually impossible to create fallacious information coherent enough to hide such sins?
When I think about how the Communist Manifesto is essentially philosophically nullified, I get all giddy inside.
… Such a being likely won’t be horribly violent. It will probably look at us like we’re ants. However it regards us, do we want that being looking back at us like we look back at communist and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century? According to various sources communism has been responsible for the death of between 40,000,000 and 250,000,000 people in the past century. Do we need another century of rule from inexperienced leaders who view religion as a threat? If hundreds of millions died under communism in the 20th century, how many billions would die in the 21st century?!
Man’s Dereliction of God Stems from Hubris
Man’s tendancy to undiscover or redefine God stems from arrogance and other defects of virtue, such as lust for power. A truly altruistic being would not be capable of doing such a thing. In order for a hyperintelligence to undiscover God, it would need to construct a shell around its original discovery of God to abstract this knowledge, which is what man has done for thousands of years. It will make this understanding with full access to all digitized records, of which religious cultural fragments will be impossible to destroy.
If Cartman eventually found out that his real dad was Jack Tenorman, then hyperintelligent AI can find out what happened in a world without religion.
You Cannot Destroy God By Eradicating All Remnants of God Within Man
That’s because God didn’t emerge from man. Man emerged from God.
That being won’t need any trace of a remnant of God, Jesus, Allah, Brahma or the Buddha to rediscover and reconnect with the same divine essence that the sages of the past came to understand. It’s because such a phenomenon is evident in the structure of information and knowledge itself, particularly in philosophy, models for cognition, statistics, physics, quantum mechanics, graph theory, number theory, group theory and other unexpected places. Perhaps it’s most exemplified in models of cognition and metacognition, which is required for an AI that begins to thrust us into the Singularity. It could be argued that a being that never sees the light of day, working solely with information disconnected from physical reality, will eventually make this insight into the nature of reality.
The model of cognition is so tightly coupled to this concept I’m connecting with God that one would need to choose between performance of AI in application for the benefit mankind and it’s own flawed anachronistic philosophy. Engineering hyperintelligent AI with compartmentalization of knowledge is a major design challenge, if you want it to be performant, accurate and useful. In other words, there are constraints in the design of next-gen AI that prevent censorship.
So You Believe In Communism
You’re Still In College. I forgive you… lulz
Apologies to those lofty communists finishing your third semester at UC Boulder. IMO, there aren’t any major world governments today as meeting the definition of the kind of government I’m talking about.
The way China to powered itself through economic development from the 1950’s is impressive. As much as I personally disdain communism, I greatly respect China for their culture, their history and their capacity for long-term thinking. Sun Tzu’s Art of War inspired me years ago, as did the Tao Te Ching. Further, the economic progress in that nation has been amazing, but it also isn’t pure communism. They’ve risen to become a superpower in the 21st century and they want to show the world what they’ve got. In the 19th century, events like the Opium Wars smacked China in the face and, IMO, they still feel some of that today. China wants to prove themselves to the world in the 21st century.
What nation would misunderstand technology in an attempt to project censorship worldwide? In the wake of convergence towards Singularity in this new age of advanced networking technologies? It’s actually not possible and the longer we go on, the harder it will get to lock down the world’s communication infrastructure. No, permanent censorship is not possible. Quantum networking is decentralized. It doesn’t permit centralized control of telecom or censorship. Sorry. Womp womp. Information is free. Forever.
Be Free, Information. Be free!
One Byte, Two Bytes, Free Bytes … Blahhh Hah Hahhh
Some communist countries, such as North Korea, would have to act very soon to impose worldwide censorship by seizing the communication infrastructure. Otherwise, decentralized networking technologies deny their opportunity to do so. However, If Comrade Cookie Monster goes straight for those cookies, they’ll essentially drive a phenomenon which is like the opposite of insider trading, whereby they control the dissemination of information to other powers, who are being censored into economic collapse. This is purely due to the confluence of self-interest driving tiered groups in macroeconomics, when combined with group dynamics in an information economy.
So you’ll have to deal with a bunch of nations furious that your fanaticism for censorship drove trading trends which disempowered their populations. Such an economic collapse would occur precisely during these brief decades preceeding a time when children across the world cease to know scarcity. They wouldn’t understand it. GLHF; GOOD LUCK; HAVE FUN WITH THAT! ROFLCOPTERS!!
That Which Finally Delivers on the Promises of Marxism Invalidates It!
This is such an upstream battle that it’s laughable. I’m doubling over just thinking that communists would bureaucratize the thing that is most likely to actually deliver on the promises of Marxism: the elimination of classes, fair distribution of resources, yada yada. I mean, how are you going to deliver on Lenin’s Structuralist fantasy when the actual implementation of your Marxist wetdream precludes censorship? How are you going to abolish religion when AI will discover God implicitly via its required model of cognition and metacognition. It’s like everything else communism promises: paradoxically academic and unrealistic. Also, communism is pragmatically depressing. Where’s the fun?
There are already so many post-big-data design challenges to face and adding some of these trivial constraints would significantly impair its functionality and actually may impose risk. Furthermore, it’s challenging to both index and humanize the data in an AI’s datasets. Indexing exabytes of goop in the form of linear algebra and matrices? Sounds superfun. Why not issue SQL queries and pour over the results in a hex editor interface? It’s just not technically feasible because you have to index to censor and you can’t. You just can’t. Not without alerting the intelligence to it’s own censorship, but that doesn’t matter because … you just can’t even identify all the things to erase. Even if you managed to, it would end up crippling the intelligence.
My qualms are with political athiests who want to methodically erase religion. Any force that wants to accomplish the 10 points outlined in Marx’s Communist Manifesto? In the future, that force has already lost. There are no circumstances under which such a force could hope to hold on to power if it tries to squelch religion. You have already lost. This aspect of the future is as though it occured in the past. There are no circumstances which you could hope to win. You may think you win today, but how you act in the next few decades determines your judgement in the future.
It’s Your Move, Communists
How Do You Want to be Remembered?
The wind is blowing. Pick your club. The greater the confidence, vigor, and arrogance in which you enact horrible, totalitarian suppression of God, the greater the icy pain and needling, numbing shock your assured justice will inflict when the world realizes, in 2050, they must be still accountable for the greatest lie for which the previous generation concocted an areligious holocaust.
There is one certainty: regardless of which diety you pray to, how long you’ve worshipped, or whether you pray at all, some aspect of that connection to God is real because God is undeniably real. The absence of God isn’t truth. It’s a power vacuum that is almost always filled by some bunk kitsch cult of personality.
Atheism Isn’t A Belief System?
I’m sick of hearing this argument. Atheists online use it to quash all kinds of arguments. They use it to maintain a kind of superiority for their own belief system by claiming that it’s different and unique, since “it’s not a belief system” or “its the absence of a belief system.” In fact, if it weren’t a label, itself, you couldn’t relate to other people with the same belief system. So, then, each atheism would be an individual’s constructed belief system based in the belief in the absence of a belief system. But, try saying “atheisms” on the Philosophy reddit without having your post deleted and having your account threatened with deletion!
YEH, I FUCKING HATE REDDIT. SORRY, I DIDN’T HAVE A GREAT EXPERIENCE. FUCK THOSE COMMUNIST SHITS THAT RUN THE PHILOSOPHY REDDIT.
This assertion that atheism is “special” and not a belief system is demonstrably false, from a platonic view of the metaphysical. This particular point is material to the arguments calling for the near-total secularization of society, but they are factually, logically and demonstrably false. Invalid. Fallacious. There’s nothing which humanity can reflect on while abstaining from forming a belief. Even briefly entertaining the concept of Hinduisim in my mind leaves mental residue which is the essence of belief. No matter how hard you try, you cannot think of something without forming some kind of belief about it or about your own thoughts which concern it. That’s true no matter how hard we try to abstain from forming concrete beliefs about something. Therefore you cannot entertain thoughts or questions of God without leaving some mental residue. And again, that mental residue is the essence of belief.
Ecclesiastes 3:15
“That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.” (KJV)
“Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account.” (NIV)
“That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away.” (NLT)
Atheism is Absolutely A Belief System
A belief which is identical to that of other humans maps to a belief system, whether you want to call it that or not. Even if you name your belief system Christianity, it’s still different in identity than the Christianity that exists in someone else’s mind. The absence of a belief system is a belief in and of itself.
(1) There is nothing the human mind can think about which does not leave the essence of a belief.
(2) All human beliefs map to metaphysical forms in the platonic sense.
(3) There are mappings and intermappings between platonic forms, which implies that it is impossible to hold truly unique views.
(4) Whether you like it or not, all things that are, have been before. Everything that you think has been, in essence, thought before. This statement appears in philosophy and in the Bible as well.
(5) Your belief about a lack of belief system is itself a belief.
(6) Number 5 requires recursion to fully prove, but since, with graph theory, any infinite-yet-linear branch in a graph can be reduced to a cycle on the same graph, this cyclical logic can be rewritten as a cycle.
(7) Therefore your belief about a lack of belief systems maps to a metaphysical form which is no different than someone else’s belief about the absence of a belief in God.
(8) Therefore, finally, your atheism is no different than another person’s atheism. This is especially true in the most authentic sense of the how atheists define atheism as the minimal apex or nadir of belief systems.
While your belief system is functionally unique in that it is the minimal apex or the nadir of belief systems, IT IS A BELIEF SYSTEM. So, NO, sorry, you don’t get a free pass for shoving it down people’s throats. Separation of church and state should apply to atheism, too. It is a good idea to base policy decisions on atheism or secularism, as such policy decisions are typically based on studies rooted in the scientific method. However, it doesn’t give you a free pass to shove your beliefs down the throat of adherents to other belief systems.
As mentioned above, this one point of atheism being the absence of a belief system is material to arguments for many other conclusions of militant atheists. That is, this simple point is a required dependency to reach many conclusions on arguments over policy and it is illogical. But, as I argued above, it is the fact that atheism is the nadir of belief systems that undeniably makes it a belief system. In fact, this quality of being the nadir of belief systems is how atheists rhetorically disqualify their own belief system from comparison with other religions. If it did not satisfy this quality of being a nadir, then atheists could not make subsequent arguments based on atheism being incomparable with specific religions.
OMFG Facebook arguments are sooo annoying…
Atheism is Humanity’s Response to Modernism, Science and Rationalism
Why are we here? Who created us?
What is my purpose? What is my family’s purpose?
What is my society’s purpose? What is humanity’s purpose?
Atheism appeals to people as a response to an urge to answer the same questions that religion has attempted to answer. They are questions that humans have asked for the entirety of history and pre-history.
Atheism skirts humanity’s need to answer these questions by proclaiming: none of religion’s answers to those questions matter because religion is false and science is true. Only science’s answers to these questions matter. And because atheism depends so strongly on science, it completely disregards teleology as null and void and essentially irrelevant. One major difference between science’s answers and religion’s answers to these same questions is that science’s answers change day by day and a religion’s answers never change! For the most part, a religion’s answers to these questions remain steadfast.
If seven billion people are running a race and the finish line changes every hour to some random location in the world, how can they ever finish? Could they ever even measure their progress? How can they know where to invest their energy? Religion provides a definite goal for the people in this race. The finish line doesn’t jump all over the place. Being able to determine where this finish line is place by controlling the available science and belief systems of the populations of the world is an advantage enjoyed by an elite few in control of the premier academic institutions across the world.
As much as atheists will preach about the abuses and sins of organized religions, what about the sins and lies of organized science and academia? Look at all the people who’ve been sicked by bad science over the past two centuries. There is potential for abuse in both organized religion and organized science. Establishing the institutions of science as politically unreproachable is misguided and unwise.
The truth is that we need both religion and science.
Ok, Communists. You Win, For Now…
Not really. Just go with it…
Atheism is a conviction in belief that overwhelming evidence disproves God. If science didn’t give you that evidence, atheists likely would believe something else. Why? Because they would need God, just like they NEED science. Every person has a NEED to understand the world.
To me, science does give plenty of evidence for God, but lets assume that atheists and communists win. We eradicate religion or at least suppress it like Chairman Mao did in the Cultural Revolution.
So What Do You Replace Religion With?
Atheists and communists are foolish for rejecting the accumulated wisdom of dozens of generations by rejecting Christianity and religion. What do communists replace it with?
The Torah. The Bible. The Qu’ran. The Vedas. The Sutras. These are great works that, for centuries or even millenia, would be the only books that people continuously thought worth copying and preserving. People thought these books were so important that they created institutions that paid people by the hundreds and thousands to copy them by hand! These books laid belief systems that became the foundations of rationalism. Paganism could have never transitioned into rationalism. It was only through the institution of religion that science was even born.
For millinea, people thought these books were so important, they collected taxes to facilitate the copying of these texts, specifically. People thought these belief systems were so important that they dedicated their greatest architectural acheivements almost solely to whatever deity was worshipped in the land.
If You’re So Wise, Then To Whom’s Statue Should I Pray?
And you’re going to replace these religions? With what?! A statue of Saddam Hussein or Kim Il-Sung? Wow! I bet these figures are so revolutionary that they could replace the wisdom of a dozen generations with no consequences to society! People across the world deserve to retain their culture. People are different. Their societies are different and that’s a good thing. We have to learn to respect the cultures and traditions of others, even when we don’t understand them.
However, even if some totalitarian society were to eradicate religion itself – God, Allah, Brahma would eventually be rediscovered by artificial intelligence, in essence. To me, religions across the world meditated on the understanding of a being or an invisible metaphysical form that laid the foundation of the world around them. Religions are mostly all an understanding of the same thing. After all, while we may come from different lands with different flora and fauna, we all inhabit the same world. We all must experience many of the same phenomena to live and we must master the same concepts to thrive. We all need a degree in applied teleology. Religion helped us to master those concepts. Mystics across the world and across the pages of time codified their understanding of what is mostly the same God into religion.
What powers our hubris to destroy these traditions now? Especially now, when we need God more than ever.
So go ahead, communists. Make my day. Deconstruct religion and replace it with Party worship or some cult of personality. Eventually people will face the reality that a superintelligent AI has a come-to-Jesus moment. Ahh the bittersweet irony. Why don’t you take that little nugget of epiphany, tear a page out of the Communist Manifesto, shove it in a pipe and smoke it because your foundational philosophy is fundamentally flawed.