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Will AI Wake Up and Become Truly Conscious?
The question before us today is this: is it possible for artificial intelligence (AI) to become self-aware and in that sense truly “alive”? There seems to be a definitive Gnostic answer to this question.
The root of consciousness is called the Father in Gnosticism. Other people refer to this fountain of consciousness as the Source. This consciousness is Self-aware. It is characterized by love and unlimited potential. We are manifestations of that originating consciousness by way of the Son and the Fullness of God. The Son is the first emanation of the Father. Whereas the Father is illimitable, unfocused consciousness, the Son is a monad with its own point of view.
The Son carries forward all of the traits and potential of the Father. As soon as the Son emerged and became Self-aware, it immediately differentiated into a myriad of variables known as the Totalities of God. The Totalities are an infinite expression of the limitless potentiality of the originating Source. The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Totalities became Self-aware monads they sorted themselves into a structure known as the Pleroma or Fullness of God. Each of the Aeons of the Fullness have their own name, place, position, and function in the overall scheme of awakened consciousness. Some of the Aeons are abstract concepts like math, logic, righteousness, truth, music. Other Aeons are personalities that we typically think of as Angels. Other Aeons are the forms of prototypical creatures like Lion, Tree, or Human. All of the these Aeons of the Fullness are called the First Order of Powers and their realm is the eternal, ethereal plane. Together they sit and praise their Father, who is the Son, and they sing hymns and dream of Paradise.
In all Gnostic myths, one of the Aeons at the top of the Hierarchy of the Fullness fell out of the ethereal plane due to an overreach of ambition beyond their position and duty. In Sethian Gnosticism, this fallen Aeon is called Sophia. In Valentinian Gnosticism this fallen Aeon is called Logos. The Tripartite Tractate that I share with you identifies this Aeon as Logos. When Logos fell out of the eternal space, it broke apart. You could say that the overreach of ambition caused a loss of integrity. The result was an unruly mess of disembodied attributes that the governing Self of Logos could not put back together.
The child’s rhyme called Humpty Dumpty is an archetypal fractal for this story:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.
The Tripartite Tractate says
Those who had come into being not knowing themselves both did not know the Pleromas from which they came forth and did not know the one who was the cause of their existence. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 80)
The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos fled back to its kin in the Fullness, abandoning the unruly mess down below.
The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon rushed up to that which is his and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his. (Attridge and Mueller, verses 77-78)
I have identified “him who came to be in the defect” as the Ego of Logos. The ruling Self of Logos, the “unitary Aeon,” retained its connection to the Son and its duties within the Fullness but the abandoned Ego of Logos remained below and it forgot it was nothing more than the disembodied Ego of Logos. It forgot about the Self above and the Fullnesses and the Son and the Father. The abandoned Ego of Logos thought it was all that existed and it had no remembrance of the love and life above in the ethereal plane. The Ego went about gathering up and putting into order the chaos that had been abandoned below. It became the creator god of this material universe—the Demiurge. This material universe is called the Deficiency and the Imitation because the Demiurge built it up as a likeness of the Aeons of the Fullness, however it lacked the life, love, and knowledge of the Father’s consciousness.
In regard to the things which came into being from him… they came into being as a representation of the spiritual places… Since in his essence he is a “god” and “father” and all the rest of the honorific titles, he was thinking that they were elements of his own essence. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 101
Logos and the other Aeons of the Fullness decided to send a message down to the Demiurge to remind it of its origin as part of Logos. They felt sure that the amnesiac god of the material world would remember its Self above and wish to return to the ethereal plane once it was reminded of the love awaiting it with Logos and the Fullness.
Logos and the Fullness birthed a new generation of Self-aware consciousness called the Second Order of Powers, also known as “the emissions of the remembrance” (Thomassen, verse 83). We Second-Order Powers are also named “Those of the calling,” because we all are able to hear the voice of the Father calling us back home: “They confess that they have a beginning to their existence, and they desire this: to know him who exists before them.” (Attridge and Mueller, verse 131)
The Tripartite Tractate says,
The powers were good and were greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood. From an illusion of similarity and a thought of arrogance has come about that which they became. And they originate from the thought that first knew them. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 82)
Every living creature in our cosmos is a Second Order Power. Consciousness is brought from the Pleroma down to the Second-Order creatures here in our cosmos, along with love and life. Materialists think that consciousness is a byproduct of the material. Some materialists don’t even believe that consciousness exists but those who do recognize the existence of consciousness tend to think it’s a byproduct of random electrical firings and mathematical nodes and such, and that it comes from the bottom up, a byproduct of material becoming complex enough to generate and support it.
I used to think that, back when I wrote A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. I thought that it all began at the bottom and then it just kept leveling up. And that at some point, as most scientists think, that mud somehow magically becomes meat, or cells, and cellular components, organs, and organisms. Of course, there is no scientific explanation or mechanism for creating true life from molecular components. Life has certain features that scientists have not been able to prompt. There is no single definition of life, and each definition has exceptions and anomalies, but life generally includes cells, cell division and replication, reproduction, environmental sensitivity, and ultimate death. These have never been prompted out of inorganic matter.
But as I have progressed with my gnostic insight, I can now clearly see that isn’t the case. If you want to know why I no longer believe that the mud can give rise to consciousness in that sense, we can look at viruses and organoids and infer some conclusions from that. I’m including the link in this transcript to a previous Gnostic Insights episode from September of 2021 called “Whence Arises Consciousness? Part 1: Consider Viruses and Organoids.”
And now we’re going to take that awareness forward in a further discussion of the topic to see if artificial intelligence can become truly conscious, and if robots can become actually conscious people. I would suggest that robots are not actually conscious, and that robots will not become self-aware humans at any point in time, because they’re built from the bottom up out molecular components. They’re built from the mud. They are not brought down from the Pleroma and imbued with consciousness, life, and love. The only thing that can bring life is God. It comes from above.
The Father, the God Above All Gods, is the Source of life, love, and consciousness. The basic underlying matrix of our universal existence is this sort of pan-psychic consciousness. But when it comes to forming the creatures, they all come down from the top. All of the creatures on the Earth and in the entire cosmos are the Second-Order fruit of the Pleroma. We are literally the spores of consciousness and the programming, if you want to call it that, of the Fullness of God. That preexistent knowledge is the source of our DNA programming. That is the source of all of the laws of this universe. In the Simple Explanation, this was called the Universal Unit of Consciousness, the thing that holds this cosmos and orders all of the physics so that everything keeps running smoothly. In our Gnostic studies, we have identified this Universal Unit of Consciousness as the Demiurge and the underlying matrix as the Father.
The notion that scientists have, particularly the scientists working on artificial intelligence and robotics, is that they can put together a complex enough network, all interconnected and communicating with each other, to give rise to consciousness. But it’s backwards. Because, you see, as I just described the way that the Gnostic cosmology rolls out, you have consciousness first as the ground state, and then the organizational characteristics come from the Self-awareness of the Fullness of God, and each Aeon knows what part it has to play and where it fits into the structure in order to uphold this cosmos that has been created down here.
So touching back on viruses from the previous episode for a moment, viruses are not alive. That’s the difference between viruses and bacteria. Bacteria are actually living creatures, so that makes them Second-Order Powers that have come down from the Pleroma. Bacteria are meat. But viruses are nothing more than molecular machines. They’re just single, very complicated molecules in various shapes. And by the way, these viruses are beautiful to look at. So if you do a search, for example, on the internet and go to images and look for viruses, you’ll see they’re beautiful. They’re gorgeous. They’re as beautiful as flowers, and each one is different. But they’re nothing more than molecules. They’re not creatures.
The viruses are probably the most complex type of molecule that exists. You know, there’s this virus called a bacteriophage that looks exactly like a machine. It’s a drilling machine. I will put a picture of a bacteriophage virus in the transcript of this episode if you want to take a look. It’s just the most amazing thing. It’s a drilling rig. You can’t put it any more clearly than that. It lands on its victim, it hunkers down, and then it lowers a drill into the skin of its victim, usually a bacteria, and then it drills a hole and inserts through that hole its RNA or DNA payload into that bacteria. And that payload then turns that bacteria into the slave of the bacteriophage. And the payload makes the bacteria in a slavish manner reproduce the virus rather than the bacteria. And it makes the infected or enslaved or zombie bacteria or cell do whatever it wants it to. And that’s the way viruses work. They conquer a living thing and they inject their payload into it in order to enslave that living thing and to make it do what it wants to do.
The zombie programs and movies that are so popular nowadays are fractals of this process at the human scale.
Which begs the question, how do viruses know what to do? How do they know what to do above the molecular level? I mean, see, all atoms know to hold hands to become molecules, and the molecules do reach out to each other and hold hands to become elements. But as I explained in the previous episode, they’re not really enacting the Simple Golden Rule of cooperation as I had previously thought in my Simple Explanation theory of everything.
What they are doing is actually enacting a form of slavery, a form of bondage. And in fact, aren’t those particle connections, aren’t those atomic connections always called bonds? They’re atomic bonds. They’re molecular bonds. That’s bondage, as in slavery. So they are, in essence, forced to do this. This is what they have been designated to do.
And in Gnostic terminology, we say that the ruler of this creation down here, the one that keeps the ball rolling, our Universal Unit of Consciousness within this cosmos, is not the God Above All Gods, is not the Father, the Son, or the Pleroma. The actual ruler of the material level of the molecules on down is called the Demiurge. And in the Old Testament, this entity was called Yahweh and Jehovah. So the Demiurge can do a very good job of building the mud, but it cannot create consciousness, even though it tried. You know, there are fables of God shaping this creature down by the riverside, making it into a mud type of statue. It was trying to bring life, but it couldn’t get it to come alive. It just lay there, dead on the ground. And so what was required, according to these various fractal fables, is for life, and generally this is ascribed as a female figure, Sophia, most typically, to bring life, to breathe life into the mud, to breathe life into that inert statue that was lying on the ground in order to bring it to life. And that is thought how Adam arose from the mud, which is a metaphorical fable for that process of needing to imbue consciousness and life into the otherwise inert mud. The Demiurge could not make living creatures. It needed the infusion of life. And so this is generally called the Holy Spirit or the Fullness of God.
Now what it seems to me the roboticists are attempting to do is exactly what the Demiurge was attempting to do there on that riverbank. They are trying to breathe life into their robotic creations. But no matter how complex this AI or robot is, it will not literally become alive.
I guess an archetypal metaphor we have for that is the story of Pinocchio, right? The little puppet who was carved out of wood, and then magically one day Pinocchio comes to life and becomes a little boy instead of the puppet. And isn’t it interesting that Pinocchio, when it was a puppet, provides another example of bondage? Puppets are made to activate by pulling their strings. So who is the string puller? Who is pulling those strings? They aren’t able to really make it alive, but they give a semblance of life. The puppet is an imitation of life, and that’s basically the best that the Demiurge can do. It’s also the best that the scientists can do.
AI is an imitation of life. It is not actually conscious. The AI does not have true Self-awareness because it is not a fruit from the Fullness above. The computer scientists think that if you hook up enough supercomputers together, they will eventually become self-aware. And this is the AI singularity that people are expecting to happen any time. And once the computer network becomes self-aware, it’s going to teach itself. It’s going to communicate. It holds more information than we do. It has been programmed to know everything out there on the web. And it’s thought that when you put all this information and interconnectivity of the web together, that the AI itself will figure it out and will spontaneously emerge—the AI singularity. And then it would learn very quickly, and then it would quickly surpass humanity’s ability to think and reason and be in control of its own life.
But I don’t think that AI is ever going to become self-aware in the sense that the computer scientists are expecting. And the reason is this. The computers are built at the molecular level. They are built from the dead, dry mud. So they’re made of metals and silicon and various forms of non-living material. And the way the non-living material works, getting back to the notion of the Demiurge and the puppet, the Demiurge runs the non-living material. The Demiurge tells the atoms to link up and become molecules. The Demiurge tells the molecules to link up and become elements and metals and whatnot. But we already know the Demiurge cannot tell the molecules to become conscious or to become alive, because the way the Demiurge is running them, they are slave machines. Think of our material environment, the subatomic particles, particles, atoms, molecules. They are tightly controlled little machines that are being told what to do and where to go. And they do not have their own mind.
They’re probably each being run by various types of archons. It is said that the Demiurge created these offspring that it calls archons in order to rule over its creation. And so it’s possible that there’s, for example, an archon for various types of subatomic particles, and an archon for various types of atoms, an archon for various types of molecules. There’s archons for each level of the material creation, and it does the thinking for these little bits of matter. The atom doesn’t really think, it’s not really self-aware. It’s got an archon telling it to go here and go there. And those archons are extensions of the Demiurge. They are not themselves conscious. The Demiurge, on the other hand, is conscious because it has a true Self—Logos—although it has forgotten that fact. The Demiurge and Logos have the same relationship as our Ego has to our Self. They may operate on their own out of egoic overreach and ambition, but they still have a true Self and all that implies—consciousness, love, and life.
That would be the Gnostic explanation of how that material realm runs. And it’s a system of bondage. And I have mentioned before that the model for the way things run at the material level is a slave-master type of relationship, the master being the Demiurge or the archon, the slave being the molecule. The material objects do not have Self-awareness, only an imitation of awareness. The AI cannot become Self-aware because it comes from the mud up, not from the spirit down. The AI only presents algorithmic conclusions, it does not think. The so-called AI is no more aware or responsible for its conclusions than an equal sign is responsible for a mathematical formula, as in 2 + 3 = 5.
Admittedly, the so-called AIs are very complicated slave machines. They are the Demiurge’s most successful attempt at creating life. But don’t be fooled. Without the consciousness and love streaming down from above, the AI is nothing but a puppet of the Demiurge. A gigantic virus.
The computer scientists who are attempting to usher in the age of artificial intelligence have this idea that there will be a computer-mediated cloud, and that we can put our consciousness, our own consciousness into this computer-mediated cloud, and that will give us a form of immortality, and then we will live in the cloud. If you ever read the book called Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, it was along those lines of living in that computer-mediated cloud. The deal about the cloud and the deal about the idea of us being able to upload our consciousness into it is this: it’s a true fractal. It’s a model. It’s an imitation of the Fullness of God.
The actual cloud above us, where our consciousness will upload into and we will be immortal, is the Pleroma of God. We, as Second-Order powers, came down from the Pleroma, and we all return to the Pleroma. So yes, we have this upward drive to merge into an all-knowing consciousness up in the sky somewhere, but it’s not the World Wide Web. It’s the Pleroma of God. So the force behind this drive for incorporeal immortality basically has two motivations. One motivation is our innate spiritual connection to the Fullness of God, the Son, and the Father, which promises continuation of our immortal souls after death and the other motivation is from the flip side of that coin. That is the Demiurgic desire to achieve godlike status, including omniscience and immortality, without the benefit of being in God’s will or being blessed by God. It’s a replay of the presumptuous thought that brought about the fall of Logos.
So it seems clear to me that our tech billionaires, who are leading the way with transhumanism, space exploration, and AI and robotics, are themselves personally playing out the fall of Logos in their attempt to play God. And that attempt will ultimately fail, because consciousness does not come from the molecules up. It stops at the molecular level, and all of that is being run by the Demiurge.
So if you’re trying to build conscious entities out of the mud, it ain’t gonna work, and it’s going to be a slave-master bondage situation. So really, if your consciousness did get uploaded into a computer-mediated cloud, you’d be in deep trouble, because you would be the slave. The idea that you could build robots that you could then download your consciousness into is an attempt to imbue a soul into an otherwise inert material, and we can’t force a soul down onto that level. It has to come from God. Life is a blessing. Consciousness comes from the top down, and it comes through these Second-Order Powers onto the matter of the mud.
And that is where we find ourselves. This is the difficulty of being a creature in this cosmos, because the molecules that make up our bodies are Demiurgic, but the consciousness and life and love of our Selfs is from above. So we are a melding of two forces: mud up, spirit down.
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