AI ist Tot: Theory of Mind, LLMs, and Insights from Non-Dual Śaiva Tantra

Excerpts The function of the ordinary, feeble means of knowledge is to make apparent some previously unknown fact. Therefore, these are neither useful nor capable of establishing Awareness, which is independent, undivided, and continuously revealing itself. As it is said in the Trikasāra (‘The Essence of the Trinity’): ‘If a person desires to step on the shadow of his head with his own foot, he will find his head will never be in the same place of his foot.

somewhere in the world

At the onset of the financial crisis of 2008, somewhere in the world, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto was binding the chaos and the order, the private cryptographic key with the validation of the public ledger. Bitcoin, the timechain, and “proof of work” were born to secure a decentralized network and its digital property, not through the brute force of the bullet or the bomb, but through the pacific, electromagnetic properties of bit-flipping, of converting electricity into cryptographic computation to verify, to validate—all without any trust whatsoever in the network’s participants.

ethical AI

Like a virus, ethical problems can infect the decisions and actions produced by Artificial Intelligence, leading to unintended real-world consequences for the humans who ostensibly should benefit from more fair minded processes within the plumbing of an unbiased, disembodied algorithmic process. But AI systems, as a technology, are an extension of the human body-mind apparatus–like a spear or a vessel for water. As such, AI systems are forged by the human body politic within the fire of a collective consciousness (and unconsciousness).

gradually, then suddenly

We are practically inept when it comes to sensing exponential growth, until, all at once, the thing that had been at the margins is suddenly ubiquitous.

reaching a unity point

Helming a sailing vessel is very much a meditative practice. In sailing we tune our physical and mental awareness to the flow of the sea, to the whimsy of the wind, to the sensations within the body arising from contact with the sailing vessel herself. We reach a unity point—sea, wind, mind, body, vessel—and then the state of flow arises. We develop the elegant ability to be with what is, to respond in alignment with our essence nature.

Commentary on Bacchylides Ode 3.15-47: For Hieron of Syracuse (468 BCE)

Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? …Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed, Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench: this is it That makes the wappen’d widow wed again; …Come, damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds Among the route of nations, I will make thee Do thy right nature. —Timon of Athens, IV.

on the commercialization of spirituality

After stripping away the commercialization of spiritual awakening, of balancing the cakras, which, in New Age speak is pronounced “shakra,” of creating your own reality, of raising your vibration, what is left? Yoga is about wanting your own life instead of someone else’s—living with reality—about realizing what is there in plain view of your everyday experience: the immediacy of being, this embodied experience. Central to the unfolding process of yoga is the augmenting of access to your innate power of autonomy (svātantrya-śakti) which goes hand-in-hand with abiding in your own essence-nature.

destruction operator

There is a direct relationship between attachment to the stagnant status quo and the corresponding increase in force (pain) of the destruction operator. Lean into change, into the unknown, for it is the only sure bet.

a stronger container

At some point, the grosser (as in the opposite of subtler) practices fall away. There’s less technique, less doing, and there arises more of the ability to drop into the pure ground of being. But we all have to begin somewhere… We are bio-electrical beings. Consciousness resides in every cell. The mind is in the body. It is literally true. Through the practice of yoga, we develop the body-mind’s ability to handle inner intensity.

śakti

glimmering she effortlessly slinks into corporeality gladdening the silence the sinewy parts utterly she expires manifesting as the deathless words she commands

7 scorpions and a shaman

Doi Saket, Thailand—My little thatch-roofed hut was situated in a wetland populated by two mud-covered water buffalo and a colony of scorpions. I encountered seven of the black arachnids during a month-long stay. The seventh one stung me on the hip during the witching hour. It felt like an injection with a hypodermic needle, the aching pain of the venom colonizing the muscle. The owner of the land took me to see the village shaman over a period of two days.

all we have left to eat is tomato paste

All we have left to eat is tomato paste. We are eating it with salt….We are ready to kill ISIS ourselves with knives, or by biting them, because we are in so much pain.¹ As of this writing, the Iraqi Security Forces and the Kurdish pesh merga (“those who face death”) are launching an offensive from the ruins of ancient Nineveh on the banks of the Tigris to wrest control of western Mosul from Da’ish (to use the pejorative Arabic acronym for the Islamic State or ISIS).

babylon

See the ruins of Babylon: mud bricks lie clumped in heaps, faint outlines of an ephemeral empire, perpetually dissolving sand castles enduring a higher tide. We grasp at its former physical form like Plato’s subterranean prisoners who evaluate shadows on a cavern wall. A vain replica of the glorious double gate of lapis lazuli (the original was stolen and re-presented in a far-flung museum) lies open to the northern horizon, where presently a new Babylon—Baghdad—is groaning beneath the tyranny of quotidian violence.

it was dusk

It was dusk. Already the stars were revealing themselves, boiling on the summer horizon. I would be allowed fifteen minutes at the summit of the citadel; the policeman kept my passport as collateral. This was Kirkuk, Iraq, July of 2008, in the fifth year of the war. We were there to film in a city being pulled asunder by vestiges of the former regime and by the ensuing sectarian melee among Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmens, and Arabs.