@donkeyherder

Meditations } 11-2

The more I've considered you request to write a meditation on aging, the more I've had to consider my own aging, my own growth and progress over the last several years, and that's been a really incredible mirror held. I feel like I have a lot of thoughts, and I'm going to attempt to verbalize them somewhat cohesively here.

The world we live in, the world that demands your dissatisfaction as its own pound of flesh, the world that cuts that pound away each time you offer it, that wold needs you to believe that aging is a curse. That world tells you that when you're no longer productive that you're garbage, that your life is over. That world tells us that children, who are not productive yet, are nuisances, inhuman beings who must be civilized. That world is wrong, and we all know that, but the more that I've considered this topic the more I realize just how subtly and deeply this message is woven into the fabric of our psyche, how much it affects us even when we think we *know* not to let it.

But this world also doesn't believe in Divinity, this world denies connection with the body, and this world especially denies connection with That outside the body, That outside the self, That which is the source of everything and which is in everything. And therefore we exist in a state of suspension, of purgatory, neither grounded in the reality of corporeal connection nor in the reality of divine consciousness. We exist as a rational mind tethered to a muscle suit, our lives going on always inside our heads, disconnected but feeling the effects of time on this suit and hating it, because we crave control and because the degradation of this corporeal form is something we believe we cannot control.

But this mindset is all wrong! We are not a rational brain suspended in a suit. We are, while we are on this earth, the entirety of our being: that means that we *are* our body, and you cannot separate your consciousness from that -- not yet. There will come a time, though, when it is time to separate. There will come a time when we all inevitably enter into a different state of being, and that is something we can prepare for, and we can accept that we do not have control over when that happens.

And we cannot escape the truth that our bodies experience the wear and tear of a full life, that our knees will ache and our skin will wrinkle, our hair will turn grey and our eyesight will diminish.

This is not a curse. This is not something to avoid at all costs and fear. These changes give us new opportunities: to hone our intuition rather than our eyesight, to meditate rather than hunt or play, to begin the journey inwards, to prepare for the next stage of existence.

And so it is for all things. Decay of the physical is inevitable, for the cycle of life must continue, and for that we must degrade and return to the Earth, we must make soil to nourish the generations of species which will grow above and in and around us.

It is just that humans, in our quest to control, seek to deny discomfort, seek to deny age, and we do not see the doors opening for us as others close, we would rather sit and shout at a closed door, bang on it with our fists and cause further damage to ourselves.

We must care for our bodies, as best as we can. But we must recognize that whilst that may lengthen the time during which we are able to enjoy the physicality of our bodies, the eventual loss of this physicality is not to be feared or denied, but to be accepted (hard as that may sometimes be) as a staging point for transcendence, for return to the source, as an opportunity to hone the skills we'll need to maintain our consciousness as we travel through different states of existence.

I'm fulfilling my #InfoSec related Toot quota for the week.
I kid.
Love you @jerry ​

Silicon Valley’s vision for AI? It’s religion, repackaged. by By Sigal Samuel (@sigalsamuel)

Suppose I told you that in 10 years, the world as you know it will be over. You will live in a sort of paradise. You won’t get sick, or age, or die. Eternal life will be yours! Even better, your mind will be blissfully free of uncertainty — you’ll have access to perfect knowledge. Oh, and you’ll no longer be stuck on Earth. Instead, you can live up in the heavens.
If I told you all this, would you assume that I was a religious preacher or an AI researcher?

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Mostly, though, the figures spouting a vision of AGI as a kind of techno-eschatology — from Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, to Elon Musk, who wants to link your brain to computers — express their ideas in secular language. They’re either unaware or unwilling to admit that the vision they’re selling derives much of its power from the fact that it’s plugging into age-old religious ideas.

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The influential ninth-century philosopher John Scotus Eriugena, for example, insisted that part of what it meant for Adam to be formed in God’s image was that he was a creator, a maker. So if we wanted to restore humanity to the God-like perfection of Adam prior to his fall, we’d have to lean into that aspect of ourselves. Eriugena wrote that the “mechanical arts” (a.k.a. technology) were “man’s links with the Divine, their cultivation a means to salvation.”

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This wasn’t tech for tech’s sake, or for profit’s sake. Instead, tech progress was synonymous with moral progress. By recovering humanity’s original perfection, we could usher in the kingdom of God. As Noble writes, “Technology had come to be identified with transcendence, implicated as never before in the Christian idea of redemption.”

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Transhumanists, effective altruists, and longtermists have inherited the view that the end times are nigh and that technological progress is our best shot at moral progress. For people operating within this logic, it seems natural to pursue AGI. Even though they view AGI as a top existential risk, they believe we can’t afford not to build it given its potential to catapult humanity out of its precarious earthbound adolescence (which will surely end any minute!) and into a flourishing interstellar adulthood (so many happy people, so much moral value!). Of course we ought to march forward technologically because that means marching forward morally!

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I recommend reading the whole thing instead of just these excerpts.