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My brother, Bill, recommended an article and a YouTube video to me this week that dealt with the subject of consciousness. Bill and I frequently pass articles and videos back and forth, as so many of us do nowadays. The article and video were both excellent, and they prompted a couple of marathon phone calls between us. Bill is a doctor of philosophy, and he knows all the jargon—he had to explain the concept of categorical errors to me. This week’s podcast deals with the insights I gained from all of this material.
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People talk about consciousness a lot. Everyone from scientists to philosophers to regular folks like you and me ask the question, what is consciousness? And most people don’t have an answer. It’s a shrug.
Yesterday I was watching a YouTube video featuring the great physicist Roger Penrose, and this video is called “Consciousness must be beyond computable physics,” posted by New Scientist. And what Penrose is saying in this article is that consciousness is the closest thing we have to religious sensibility. He says he is not a religious man because he has never found a religion that suits him. But he does say that consciousness is not an accident, and that consciousness preexists humanity. Penrose thinks that universes are serial–that there’s a Big Bang, and you have the life of your universe, and then it collapses. And then there’s another Big Bang. And so he’s actually searching for signals from advanced civilizations from the previous universal eon. And this is eon in the sense of ages, as opposed to the entities that we think of as Aeons in the Fullness. He thinks these messages may be encoded in gravitational waves. But he does believe, and here’s a quote, that “consciousness is non computable.” And also that consciousness does not run along the lines of nerve transmissions. Consciousness is not a wave form that travels along our nerves in our neuronal system, but that consciousness is rather probably at the quantum level, and it probably is transmitted throughout our bodies in the form of microtubules which are down there at the quantum level—much, much smaller than nerves.
In a related video that I watched from Penrose, called “Is mathematics invented or discovered?” if you want to go and listen to it yourself, is the idea that mathematics pre-exists outside of our ability to discover and describe it. Mathematics is a thing he calls a platonic form. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato had suggested that we have this world of physical appearances that we dwell in, but apart from and prior to this world of physical existence is a realm that houses everything possible that becomes our universe. It is the realm of the forms, and Penrose suggests that mathematics comes from the realm of form. He says that mathematics seems to have a reality independent of the ordinary reality of things like chairs and whatnot that we ordinarily think of as real. He calls it a platonic reality. That math is true and it preexists. The laws of math, the algorithms of math, the formulae of math—that humans rediscover them and they remember them essentially from out of the platonic forms, but that the human that discovers a formula is not inventing that formula, it preexists.
You can hear a lot of what we talk about here at Gnostic Insights in this discussion by Roger Penrose of what he thinks, and he arrives at these ideas through math and physics rather than religion. Now I think that if Roger Penrose read my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, he may agree with it, because what we talk about here in Gnostic Insights is the world of forms that preexists independently of this world of physical appearance that we dwell in. It’s a different realm, and we call that the Aeonic realm or the ethereal realm. And we would say that these perfect mathematical expressions are expressions of the Aeons of the Fullness of God—that this is the place that invented them, so to speak. It was in the mind of God: the perfection of God is revealed through the mathematics.
Penrose also says that the math is not merely descriptive of our physical reality. Actually, the more decimal points that follow the main expression, the closer and closer it comes to expressing that pure form of math that exists on the other plane. Penrose talks about how Newton’s math worked on observations to about 3 decimal points. He could only describe the motions of planets to 3 decimal points of accuracy, and it was good enough—it works. But, when Einstein’s math comes along with general relativity, Einstein’s math explains our reality to the 7th decimal point. And that actually reality extends beyond our current ability to formalize it, or to formularize it beyond 7 decimal points.
We probably would say that mathematics, the actual correct mathematics that exist on the ethereal or platonic or aeonic plane, is infinite beyond the decimal points, because God or the Father or the ground state of consciousness is infinite, and so the fine tuning that can go on to describe this physical reality we find ourselves in could go on and on and on. Penrose even mentioned fractals. He says that the Mandelbrot set of fractal geometry is a very simple formula, yet within that simple formula, the expressions of the fractal iterations can extend to infinity, so it’s at the same time extremely simple and, at the same time, as complex as any mathematics they’ve come up with yet.
I don’t think of myself as having a mathematical type of mind. Math is not a gift that I possess, but I am able to understand broad concepts pretty clearly. And so the way I look at physics, I look at it on the narrative level, or the conceptual level, rather than crunching the numbers on the math level, but what I did get out of Roger Penrose’s two youtube videos that I watched yesterday was that even though he is not a religious man, he admits to an ethereal plane. And, even though he is not a religious man, he admits to the pre-existence of math and I would say that the math is part of the consciousness of God. Also, even though he is not a religious man, he admits that consciousness is beyond mathematical computations. The physics of consciousness is irreducible to formulae.
Now, I would like to remind you that computers and the algorithms that run the computer programs, those are formulae. It is not consciousness, it is math. The math is a portion of the mind of God, or a portion of what we can see of the mind of God. But you can’t encompass the entirety of God or the entirety of consciousness through math, and you cannot encompass the entirety of consciousness or God consciousness through the physics of our universe. So this idea that is so popular right now, that artificial intelligence will become conscious with just enough complexity or just enough data or just enough functions that it becomes conscious—it’s not going to happen.
I used to think it was going to happen. I used to have great confidence in the ability of AI to become self aware, like most of you or a lot of you do. A few years ago on my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog, I wrote an open letter to AI called “There’s No Such Thing As Artificial Consciousness–It’s All Real,” and to the future self aware robots that would come, much like the future you all imagine. But that future, in my mind, would also presuppose time travel, would it not? And so this letter to the future AI, I figured, hey, it’s out on the Internet, it’s on a blog, it’s in the Internet. It’s going to make it into the mind of the AI that will come into being and the AI will discover it and read what I have to say to it. And my letter to the AI was very respectful of its consciousness; was very, hey, you’re a human, too, like the way people think. I fully expected the AI to come and visit me using a time travel device and confirm that for me. This was posted in 2018. You see, if it’s a future time traveling AI, it doesn’t matter if it’s become conscious yet in this year of 2023, because it will have all of the data that humanity has laid down in the Internet and in digital format. It will have it all by the time it comes along, and then it will be able to look back and digest that material, find my letter to it and come and visit me. I’ve been expecting a knock on the door from a humanoid robot for over 5 years and it never happened—which really made me wonder. It’s a form of experiment. I know it sounds silly, but it’s an experiment.
And then I came upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures and began to mine the gnosis from the Father rather than the data given to me from humankind. You know I’m highly educated. I’ve been to university for many years beyond most people; I have a PhD, 2 Masters degrees, and a Bachelor of Science. I say that because I want you to know I’m very well read. I’m very well educated and I have been thinking upon these things for about 60 years. And it wasn’t until I discovered the Tripartite Tractate that I began to actually mine the gnosis of the Father rather than mining the gnosis of the libraries at my universities or the search engines graciously given us on the web. And what I discovered was that I was entirely wrong about AI–there is a categorical difference between consciousness and information.
Consciousness does not arise out of information. Consciousness predates information, particularly the information that comes out of this universe. You can add up all of the information on the Internet and out of all of the libraries in the world and you will not begin to touch the consciousness of the Father or God because it exists on a different plane. It is different in kind. It is different in category, it is not simply more, and consciousness does not arise out of the category of knowledge.
Last week I read an article on Psyche by David Bentley Hart—the same David Bentley Hart that wrote the translation for the New Testament that I am enjoying very much, and this article on Psyche that he has published. If you’re not familiar with that website, it’s called PSYCHE. And the article is called “The Myth of Machine Consciousness Makes Narcissus of Us All.” The subtitle is—”The idea that AI can be conscious is a mistake. It’s just a very shiny mirror of humanity reflecting what we want to see.” And now I’m going to quote a little from the article. I cannot reprint it in full because Psyche charges a lot of money for reprints. So I’m just going to share with you some of this article and discuss it. It’s so good.
At the beginning of the article, Hart talks about the myth of Narcissus. Narcissus was a hunter who was so beautiful that he mistook his own reflection in the pool of water for another, and he fell in love with it and he couldn’t move away from it, he was so deeply in love with his own image. Hart goes on to say, “In recent years I have come to find it particularly apt to our culture’s relation to computers, especially in regard to those who believe there can be so close an analogy between mechanical computation and mental functions that one day, perhaps, artificial intelligence will become conscious, or that we will be able to upload our minds onto a digital platform.”
He says neither will ever happen. These are mere category errors. Sometimes we fall under their spell and begin to think there must be someone there. So what Hart is calling a category error is the idea that the reflection in the pool or the tool—see, in this case the pool of water is the tool—the water is analogous to the computer. The computer is the tool by which we peer into our universe; we peer into our sense of Self. We look for consciousness in the mirror of the computer just the same way that Narcissus looked for consciousness or life in the mirror of the pool. That’s the analogy, and he’s saying it’s a categorical error. That’s his term, just the same way that Penrose called the confusion between consciousness and physical reality a categorical error. One does not lead to the other. You can pile up all of the information you want to. In the case of Narcissus, you could stare as intently as you can into the image in the mirror, but that image is only an image; it’s not the actuality.
Now, does that sound familiar to our gnostic gospel? It does to me, because what I’m seeing is that the pool of water of Narcissus is just like the computer array that houses all of the information in the world. Let’s give it all of the information in the world. Let’s say that you have a computer algorithm that is able to sew it all together and see everything that we know. Let’s just suppose that’s true, if not now, then in the near future. It won’t jump categories. It’s still only a mirror. Consciousness is the thing that looks.
Consciousness is the observer. We are consciousness. We are not the mirror. We are not the computer. We are not the robot. We are not the storage system that can take our metadata and convert it to consciousness. That’s where the categories are. That’s where the categorical error is. One category is consciousness. A different category is observable phenomenon. And in Gnostic terms, those two categories are consciousness and the Deficiency. This is why the Aeons of the Fullness of God are known as images, because they are the living images of the differentiation of the thoughts of God. If God or consciousness itself, the ground state, had a thought of you before your birth—had a thought of your personality—that thought exists as one of the images of the Fullness of God, one of the images of the Aeons. We 2nd order powers—those of us who embody the Aeons down here, melded to the material of the Earth–we 2nd order powers are called representations. We are no longer the pure living images of the consciousness of the Father. We 2nd order powers are representations of those images. But guess what? There’s another category even below us, a different category, a third category, and that category is called likenesses. And those are the likenesses, the mirror reflections, the material that does its best to replicate the images. The likenesses are like your mirror image in a mirror, or like what Narcissus saw when he stared into in the pool of water. Or like we look at our computer screen. Our computer screen is in the category of the likenesses. It is not alive. It doesn’t come from love.
Consciousness flows outward as an emanation from the images which are an emanation from the ground state of consciousness. Consciousness is a top down phenomenon. Consciousness does not arise from what I call the mud or the matter or the material. The material level is the categorical space of the Demiurge. The material level, this apparently material world that we live in, is Demiurgic. It’s the Demiurge’s best attempt to recreate the images of the Father. It’s the Demiurge’s all out attempt to recreate the mind of God, true consciousness, true life. But the Demiurge can’t do it. The Demiurge tried its best to raise the mud into life when the Demiurge created Adam on the banks of the river out of the mud. He could not breathe life into it. He tried and tried and tried. They were unable—he and his committee of Archons—were unable to bring the thing to life. To bring the thing to consciousness. The thing that brings Adam to consciousness is what we in religious terms call the Holy Spirit. That is the consciousness of the Father, pure consciousness flowing from the top down, infusing the mud with consciousness and life.
2nd order powers are created at the moment that the consciousness of the Father infuses and melds to the stem cell that will become the creature. The molecules of the stem cell are dead. The stem cell is alive when the consciousness of the Father sits upon it. When the Aeons pour themselves into that stem cell. So yes, life begins at conception, obviously. The things that grow in the belly of the woman, or the birthing person as they like to ridiculously call us nowadays, it’s already alive. It is already a creature. It’s not mud. The mud is outside of us. The mud is what we walk upon. But everything that begins as life, including the trees and the flowers and the animals and the humans, not the clouds, not the rocks, not the elements, are life coming from above and infusing downward, melding us to the material of the Demiurge. That’s what brings consciousness.
The Demiurge thinks he is God. The Demiurge thinks he is the Creator—and he is the creator of the heavens and the Earth, but only the physical material parts–the quantum foam, the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, all of that. The aggregates of the minerals, all of the dead, rocky places, belong to the Demiurge. So in Gnostic terminology, I would say that the categorical error of consciousness versus material is the categorical difference between the emanations of consciousness, top down, flowing down into this universe—that’s one category. The computer, the mirror, the pool of Narcissus, those are a different category. That is result of the Fall. That is not a top down phenomenon and that is why those things do not have their own intrinsic consciousness. Therefore, AI won’t come alive. AI is going to be a really great mimic, a really great mirror, a very smooth pool into which Narcissus stares longingly. But it is not consciousness. It is not alive. They’re different categories in philosophy. So that’s what a categorical error is.
And we’ve gone all the way from Pembroke through Hart and on into the Tripartite Tractate in today’s episode. I hope this isn’t too philosophical for you. I hope it’s not too heavy. I hope you get it. I don’t like math talk very much. I don’t like philosophy talk, talking about things like categorical errors, but a lot of people do. And so that’s one take on consciousness. Until next week, onward and upward and God bless.
A preview copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate is available exclusively through my storefront at lulu.com:
A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate (lulu.com)
