Lewis Ungit Substack, 3/23
A group of my friends sat in the dark candle-lit room with their fingers on the Ouija Board planchette. The creepy attic setting heightened the tingle of fear I think we all shared as they tried to conjure a spirit. Disturbing answers followed. Was there a spirit in the room? The board said, yes. Was it a good spirit or a bad spirit? The spirit said bad. After a few more questions like that, one of the girls got freaked out, turned on the lights, and the experience was over. Later, we debated if one of the kids was intentionally guiding the planchette or not. The materialist in me concluded that it had to be the case. But today, I wonder. It is certainly possible that it was one of the kids guiding it. But I am also much more open to the idea that other entities interact with our world. And I am much more disturbed by the idea of a group of kids in a candle lit attic trying to contact them.
Compare this experience to that of kids playing Monopoly in the family living room. From an external perspective there are many similarities. Both have a board. Both include lettering and pieces being moved around. Both have kids surrounding a table. But we all see the obvious difference. Unless you are a hardcore atheist, kids sitting around attempting to conjure spirits is in a different category than kids sitting around trying to build hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place.
It is this parallel that I had in mind as I started to write about the subject of Artificial Intelligence. Imagine one person sitting and playing the video game Pac-man. You click on the arrows and the little yellow shape works its way around the course avoiding ghosts and collecting fruit. Now imagine another person sitting at a computer and typing in a prompt such as: ‘write me a poem about recovering from grief,’ and the computer then responds with a beautiful poem that makes him cry. Both of these situations have the appearance of being the same. Both are a man at a computer hitting keys that lead to results. The question at hand is if they belong in the same category (such as Monopoly and Sorry!) or if they belong in different categories (such as Monopoly and Ouija).
On the surface, this question is ridiculous. All programs are simply directions that however elegantly designed are no more conscious than a long ‘choose your own adventure‘ book. I’ve written on how consciousness can’t come from a computer. With that being said, consciousness can’t come from the Ouija board either. The question is not whether the physical things – the board, the planchette, the circuit board, the monitor or the keyboard – are supernatural. The question is whether physical things manipulated the right way can conjure non-physical things.
When a witch gathers together the eye of newt, toe of frog, fur of bat and tongue of dog, and places them in her cauldron while chanting ancient incantations, it will not do to say, “None of those things are magical. The eye of newt came from a dead lizard. The toe of the frog came from a frog in the pond, and the bat fur is from a flying mammal, and the tongue came from her own dead dog. Therefore nothing supernatural is happening here.” Magic is more than its component parts.
Now, of course, it is a completely fair question as to whether magic or the occult are real things. If you are an atheist your answer is probably no. And many Christians, while on paper believing some of it might be real, in practice also agree that whether it is a Ouija Board, a witch in the forest, or an AI, no supernatural thing is happening.
And I once would have classified myself in this category. But then I wrote ‘The Return of the Dragon’, a book about what happens when people take psychedelics. And in writing that book, I realized that there is good evidence – scientific via quantum theory and dark matter, philosophical, and theological – for the existence of another dimension and that further there is real evidence that entities of some sort live in that dimension and are able to be contacted in a variety of ways.
I realize that is a big step. Perhaps go read my book if you need more of a case to be made. But if you are not atheist you should at least be open to the idea (and even if you are atheist but hold to quantum theory and dark matter you should be open to it). And once you acknowledge the possibility then you should consider how it is that people throughout human history have claimed to have interacted with these entities.
Let’s suppose that there really are interdimensional entities. Call them angels. Call them demons. Call them elves. Or just call them aliens. But let’s suppose they exist. And let us suppose it is possible to contact them. Further, let’s suppose occult practices (mediumship, witchcraft, etc) at least in some cases are able to connect our own dimension with the other dimension.
Now… let’s get back to our question. A man sits at a machine and asks it to tell him a poem. It tells him a poem. He cries. Another man asks for a joke. It tells him a joke. He laughs. Another asks him to do a job for him. It does the job. He relaxes. Another tells the computer to insult an enemy. It insults his enemy. He gives a wicked smile.
But any computer programmer would say that AI is simply making choices dictated by the computer program. And this is true. But in the same way, a Ouija board is simply following the laws of physics. Perhaps neither contact the other dimension. But this again discounts the occult and the fact that it always uses the physical and the mundane.
But the question is whether an outside consciousness (demons) can use that vessel to influence the world. The whole idea of the occult is that you can use things from this world to contact the next. Often they do use complicated processes where the human mind can’t dictate the outcome. Things like Ouija boards, Tarot cards, psychedelic drugs, rhythmic dancing, etc. allow the occultist to disconnect himself from a controlling role and allow other forces to dictate the outcome. The atheist will always say these unpredictable outcomes are simply the result of chance and natural laws. But if we do not approach this like atheists we have to at least be open to the idea that some other entity might use the uncontrolled environment to let his voice be heard.
So is it possible that tech and AI could fit into this category?
Occult Origins – Tech and Psychedelics and Visions and Dreams
I have written in depth about how technology grew up next to the occult. I would invite the reader to go read that and come back. But perhaps a quick recap is needed.
We often think of science and the occult as opposites but in fact from the beginning they have overlapped, interacted, and practitioners of science have also been practitioners of the occult. For example, Alfred Russel Wallace known as a co-developer of the theory of natural selection would bring up spiritualism with anyone would listen. Pierre Curie, physicist and husband of Marie Curie, followed a medium around and believed in both her abilities and in the underlying claims of a spiritual realm containing entities. One of the pioneers of quantum physics, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli knew that the quantum physics he helped discover would return spiritualism to the world that was once ruled by atheistic and deterministic paradigms. Jack Parsons was one of the most influential figures in the history of the American space program, was one of the principal founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and also helped found the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He also was part of a strange cult, took part in sex rituals, worshiped Egyptian deities, and incorporated a range of Eastern and Western Mysticism into his life. Another thinker who believed in the occult was the great Swiss psychologist and psychotherapist Carl Jung. Jung, who was friends with Pauli, had a life-long fascination with the occult. He believed in spirits and paranormal phenomena, and wrote scientific treatises on the subject. He researched parapsychology, astrology, alchemy, and spirit communication. And finally, CERN, the popular acronym for The European Organization for Nuclear Research (In French, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world and also has been involved in numerous strange pagan rituals including the grand opening for their Gotthard base tunnel (the longest and deepest in the world), in which they conducted a very strange and seemingly pagan opening ceremony. At one point in the ceremony, a topless woman wearing a bird head and wings was flown via cables over the heads of nine people dressed as construction workers (that represented actual workers that had been killed during the construction of the tunnel). In 2016, a video surfaced that showed people dressed in black cloaks in front of a statue of the Hindu deity Shiva that stands in the CERN courtyard (yes, a pagan idol stands in the courtyard) apparently stabbing a woman as part of a human sacrifice.
There is also a long list of scientists and tech leaders made their seminal discoveries while in trances or dreams. For example, In 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev developed and published the periodic table, where chemical elements are organized based on their atomic and chemical properties. He tells the story of how he discovered this breakthrough,
“I saw in a dream a table were all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction seem necessary.”
A more recent example is Larry Page, founder of Google, also discovered his breakthrough in a dream that he had in 1996. When he was a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, he was struck in the middle of the night with a vision: He had somehow managed to download the entire Web and just keep the links. He later said,” When a really great dream shows up, grab it!”
Other examples of discoveries made in trances and dreams are: Niels Bohr (quantum physics), Friedrich August Kekulé (discovery of the structure of benzene), and René Descartes (analytical geometry).
In addition to dreams and occult practices, the role of psychedelics in the development of modern tech is remarkable and well documented. During the 1960s and 1970s, an organization called the International Foundation for Advanced Study conducted studies to determine if LSD could enhance creativity and problem-solving. They administered doses to engineers, architects, and scientists who were somehow “stuck” in their work on a particular project. Subjects reported increased abilities to visualize problems and determine solutions. This discovery was followed by many tech leaders utilizing these sorts of drugs for specifically this purpose. In his book, How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan has an excellent discussion on how the tech world used drugs to gain insights and help creativity. He writes,
“… the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers. “You had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three dimensions, hold it all in your head. They found that LSD could help.”
Later he writes, “I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.”
These certainly matches accounts from figures no less than Silicon Valley titans Steve Jobs and Bill Gates reporting LSD’s use and benefits. Steve Jobs once said that taking LSD was one of the “two or three most important things” he ever did in his life. “I have no words to explain the effect the LSD had on me, although, I can say it was a positive life changing experience for me and I am glad I went through that experience.” said Steve Jobs.
The role of psychedelic drugs in bringing technology as we know it is undeniable. It was frequently used, given credit by tech pioneers, and still used today. So if it is true that psychedelics help people contact the other dimension (as is my argument in “The Return of the Dragon”) it must be acknowledged that tech was in some ways born in that other dimension. So by dreams, visions, or psychedelic drugs, tech was born.
AI Creepy Results
Artificial intelligence has long been considered the future of technology. Since the 1960s, the creation of computers that are capable of learning has fascinated programmers and science fiction writers alike. Computers have managed to learn some things well. Computers can now win at trivia games like Jeopardy! and at board games like chess. But in recent years, computers have entered more creative fields like art, composition and conversation.
ChatGPT, Bing’s Chatbot, and Bard are now able to produce answers to questions that seem human. Ask the chatbot to compose a poem, it can compose a poem. Ask it to write an essay on World War II, it can compose an essay on World War II. Similarly, there are AI art generators such as Hotpot AI and DALL-E that can produce striking art with a series of prompts.
But something that has struck many people who have looked at much AI generated art is how creepy it seems. It might be beautiful in a dark way. The Colorado State Fair unknowingly gave an award to this piece.
And while it does have a certain shallow beauty to it, it also has a creepy aspect to it. Perhaps it is something like the uncanny valley phenomenon. But whatever the cause, it is not limited to this picture. Much of AI art has this dark feel. Consider this one.
At first glance, this looks like a photo but then you look at the hand. Six fingers. You look at the blond woman’s left side. Another hand? You look at her eyes. Something seems off. You look at the brunette’s neck. Something seems wrong. Creepy. Here is another.
Like a photo but…too many teeth. Weird skin blotches/bruises/tatoos. Six fingers again. We live in an era that (thankfully) is kind to people born with birth defects but many ancient cultures viewed people with too many fingers or strange markings as spiritually marked – often as demonic.
Which brings me to the story of Loab.
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I can note two things about AI:
One, it has no life in it so that it can only express itself in a lifeless way, and
Two, it has no humility and no restraints.
Oh there’s a third thing: it isn’t human in any sense or even a life-form and it is not self-aware: no identity.
It’s still a computer program.