Artificial Intelligence in Biblical Terms - with Jordan Hall

right this new AI thing is even like more sort of whoa we're talking about intelligence itself man we're talking about something that is it's you know every day like you said like in three months it's just and so that feeling interior wow we're not prepared to deal with this you have to have symmetry between wisdom and power at a minimum and if we're looking at a magnitude of power over here let's just call it X then what does it look like to constitute something that has a magnitude of wisdom at least slightly more than x right let's just hold that as the problematic in the Bible there's literally a story like the story of Solomon is about that the story of Solomon is about God asks him what he wants if God acts as a Genie in this situation God says what is your wish Solomon what do you want one thing tell me what you want I'll give it to you and then Solomon says I want wisdom then what does he do he builds the temple he makes a technical space but he does it after he's asked for wisdom so because of it it's sacred it's a Sacred Space now we're in the opposite direction like now we're we basically made a deal with the devil we've got all these these things that are massively powerful and now we're like oh we should have asked for wisdom it's too late what do we do now it's like this is Jonathan Pedro welcome to the symbolic world [Applause] when it Kobe did it I was just like yeah you want to come here sure sure and so just basically been traveling Non-Stop and so how about you so what are you working on these days well a lot of my energy is now turning into the AI space yeah um you know my my sort of basic mode has been sitting at uh sort of a a high point watching I guess you could call it kind of global systemic risk or something like that which includes the way our individual and Collective mentality thinks about such things yeah um and all the different institutions and organizations and paradigms and models that we use to think about such things you can think about all those and just keeping an eye on it so like when covet came I sort of rotated to the Whiteboard and said oh Global pandemic expected in this time window check here it is now let's start watching how it plays out and so my attention sort of moves from a highly diffuse nothing particularly pressing going on and go back to the big picture to the oh one of the big things is happening so with llms popping last year and then in particular over the last six months a large number of people that I have collaborated with in the past have come in and said hey let's focus on this problem with AI so that's become quite uh dominant amount of time and attention over the past few months yeah and so and so for those that are watching this that's the reason why Jordan and I decided to to talk was to talk about the question of agency transpersonal agency the relationship with AI and all that so it's so so it's it's definitely an important thing it's weird I'm in the weird spot because in I've been talking about this problem for a few years now like the the problem of of AI uh and how it's related to to whatever to something like transpersonal agency uh and so now that it's exploding and everybody's talking about it I actually kind of I've actually stopped talking about it but I think this is the right this is the right time to to restart the conversation uh and so what is your diagnostic like what what do you see as the the situation because I don't know if you watched you I mean you talk to John ravaki he clearly has now made his position pretty clear and so I'd definitely like to hear yours yeah and he and I have talked about that I actually had an opportunity to meet with him over Easter nice particularly good timing um just before he created that video and we had a good institution about it so I have um sort of intimate Clarity on what he's thinking about radically intimate I don't know him that well than once but still well let me put it let me put it this way um thank you I'm Jonathan Pedro and I'm inviting you to participate with us in our retelling and our celebration of one of the most iconic fairy tales of all Snow White a beautifully Illustrated storybook Snow White and the Widow Queen places our iconic character at the beginning of eight upcoming fairy tales which will speak to each other and harmonize in surprising ways Snow White and the Widow Queen rekindles an adventure which will make you remember ReDiscover but also Marvel and wonder at our Rich Heritage of stories a Heritage that still has secrets to reveal even after centuries of being passed down to us in the past few decades we have watched many of our stories our fairy tales our myths become completely exhausted by efforts to deconstruct them to reinvent them and sometimes to even invert their original meaning it has come to a point where we've almost forgotten why we cared about these stories in the first place I firmly believe that for this reason it is now time to retell 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storybook mantelpiece for sure the prophets of this crowdfunder will be used to start a new Publishing Company symbolic World Press whose christening publication will be this very fairy tale series each book illustrated by world-class artists Jack and the Beanstalk Cinderella the valley little tailor and several more are next in line for publication all existing in the same world and all fitting together like a puzzle moving towards the final surprising resolution after all that there's no limit to what we can do it's time to reset the clock to retell our stories so please join us in this celebration and create Adventure golly How's It Go my basic mode is actually I think I've come to discover it's somewhat unusual um I don't yet know what my perspective is uh I sort of have an approach where I allow myself to really explore a very large space somewhat lightly and then what I do is I start to pull that in and see what shows up as strong or well supported or even Rich yeah and the initial move tends to be would you call it not radical but um well I guess liminal is the right term so for example the reason I reached out to you a while back and maybe a couple maybe a month ago yeah was I was increasingly getting the sense that let's just put it this way the proper way of actually contemplating this question at least meaningfully like a meaningful portion of it is theological yeah this is a theological question and you can notice that with some of the words that people use and people say we are like we're becoming gods or we're creating God or something like that and you're like well you're using that word but you're using it in a very uh we call it unprecise naive and highly disconnected from you know thousands of years of people really committed thinking about it robustly yeah maybe we should do something other than being naive and hubristic um maybe this is actually a theological question let's dive into it and so you popped into my mind as a somebody I've spoken to in the past where I found a a combination of we can communicate like it's not hard for us to communicate um and my sense is that you've got a both a uh I'd say a spiritual commitment to that side of things and actually a level of Life commitment to you exploring in that modality so hopefully we can have a generative conversation I hope so I think so I you know it's the thing that's been interesting in terms of thinking about this for me has been like for example like when we saw that discussion with I know you probably the discussion between Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson where he he basically you know brought up that term and said that the head of Google had literally told them that they're building a god like that this was this is what that this is the way they're conceiving of it so the idea that we're conspiracy conspiracizing about how the people even involved in this space are discussing this it seems we're not like this is this seems to be the mode of of language like you said that is being used even by the actors that are involved in the process probably not all the actors but at least some of the important ones and so one of the difficulties that happens is in terms of you know when you have materialists people that don't understand something like vertical causality or don't totally conceive of it uh what they end up with is the confusion between something like Authority and power you could say or intelligence and power right and I see that that's a confusion that is that that has been really pervasive is that just because something is very powerful doesn't make it a God the the notion of God or a god even in a pagan sense is related to principality that is it is something like more like a king it's something that gives form or manages form manages cohesion right gives is it's like the the top of a pattern that you notice right so it's like you see War you see that war has certain patterns and it has a kind of agency that you can't um avoid right it's like once the agency takes grip of you you can't just say oh well we could when you hear people say really ridiculous things like that like why don't we just all stop fighting like we just all stop fighting then War would end it's like oh yeah that's I mean that's obviously ridiculous you know once the once the pattern sets in it's like the same with the arms race like why don't we just stop the arms race let's just stop it oh great let's us whoever that is stop it uh you know there are ways in which patterns when they take get a grip on you they play out and so when we notice that then we see that there's a a way of like it reveals itself to us you know and that's where the a lot of the old gods that's what they are right they they are an agency that appears from above and that manages a certain amount of quantity like a pattern of behavior a certain space a certain cohesion of people like a local God or sometimes it's just the ancestors right the ancestors still there and and acts on us uh through his through the fact that we're have a common connection to them and that that he gives us identity so people confuse that with just a lot of power like and and this is this is what I this is what I think I hope that that confusion is true because when people if people say God the way that the ancient thought of it as a kind of principality that manages patterns over us and that we're kind of like you know for good or ill like you know we're this we're the puppet things of the gods or where the food of the Gods right uh if they see it that way then then I'm frightened beyond belief like if someone would say that we're building a God in the sense that we're building something that will rule over us that is just the that's the scariest thing ever and so I'm hoping that there's this confusion but we have to do we have to be able to dispel the difference between the the between something which manages from above and something which offers you so the difference between a God and a genie for example right so the genie in the bottle what it does is it offers you infinite potential to for you to give intelligence to it and so you it asks you a question what do you want you tell it to you you tell it what you want and then it offers infinite potential to realize it and because of that that's why you get the side effects too because it offers too much power for your wish like if your wish is something secondary like I want a bunch of money then it's like okay I'll give you infinite power to do that and then all the side effects of it play themselves out right so anyways that's something I just want to put that out there and see how you react to that well I mean the the first response is something like yes so I can say with high degree of confidence that some portion of the people who are working in the category of AI are talking about gods and the principality sense right and so your fears part of why we're talking um some part are talking about it in the sense of as you say like a genie and oddly enough like the genie metaphor you know Elias or utkowski's you know one of his primary concerns is that we are in fact accidentally creating a extremely powerful Genie and we're about to accidentally ask it to give us you know X not recognizing that when we ask for X we're going to get a whole lot of other stuff that we didn't actually understand we were going to get yeah yeah the paper clips problem paper clips to the sky is that right um and then the third piece and this is I think make a point of quite sensitive possibility uh you've heard I think we've even spoken about the notion of egregor or the specific moloch right moloch lives I would say right now at the at the upper edges is sort of the the frontier of thinking of the people who are coming from the materialist perspective top yeah they're noticing they're noticing this agency now like exactly and beginning to speak about it as such right and so there's like a Dawning awareness of wait a minute this is a whole category that we may need may need to be thinking about what do we do now right and so I think you've got uh I would call it almost like uh um again sort of spiritually naive and in some sense even psychologically damaged projection towards principality um you've got the um how would I say this one like perspective limited and I'm being I'm trying to be somewhere precise there around the notion of the genie right you kind of got two groups that are are are engaging in a reciprocal conflict the effective accelerationist types who say let's get to the genie as fast as possible because it can only ultimately deliver good things yeah and the sort of the thekowski care you know crew who are saying let's stop everything like literally unplug all electricity if necessary because the genie will kill us all perfectly right something like that and what's interesting is that that Dynamic is a dynamic is driven by a sort of a reciprocal closure in a fear of conflict but the space around how do we think about this question of a substantial increase in our agency without necessarily any relationship to our wisdom to be able to contemplate the consequences of that action and then you've got this other thing that's thinking about it in terms of okay let's begin to think downward agency or a higher form of agency with something like like Identity or personality or perspective or values of its own um and then of course you know the email I sent I specifically said can we add Angels into the conversation sure of course I mean I've obviously we we have to talk about these things I'm now there's no there's no one of the things I want to say about the moloch problem related to what you're saying that's important to understand and will help people notice what is happening is that you know people everybody talks about the agency of the AI right it's like does AI have agency does AI have Consciousness is AI a person can it become a person you know like even if you know even this is of course John breviki is right in there at this moment but what's what's fascinating about the AI the moloch problem is that it can help people notice that the real problem or the one of the main problems isn't the AI itself and its agency and its Consciousness it's it's the fact it's the the rapid acceleration of implementation the fact that people are blindlessly running towards implementation under a kind of agency that isn't in the AI like it's not it so the AI is acting on you but not through like Chad GPT like not to Chad GPT online not through like the actual uh interaction of software or whatever it's acting on you in a different manner that is not you know so it's it's important for people to understand that type of agency so it's like it's acting on you outside of its software right it's making you it's making you build a body for it is right it's it's like Sauron like you know using your desires and your desire for power to make a body for it uh you know and and using all our passions and all our desire for for riches and for you know for competition or whatever to to to have a body built for it so it can help people understand that the question is not just about whether or not the program or like the whatever is is conscious it's a bigger question than that right yeah this is this is a this is a key point so let's just sort of let's zoom in on that for a little bit to make sure it lands because it's a critical point um my friend Daniel schmachtenberger made something like that point talking with Beret maybe a couple weeks ago and I made something like that point talking to John vervaki last conversation around governance so let's just hit it in the in the the way I would say it is something like um yeah this notion of embodiment or incarnation that we know like in the mythologies and the stories things like inciting greed or lust for power or fear um is a an aspect of how this agency this sort of disembodied agency causes is that right you know let's say causes for the moment or even incentivizes causes humans to act in the world on its behalf yeah there you go that yeah that's a good way to say it yeah and so then the kind of work that you do when you're coming from those locations when you're being motivated by those kinds of things at the very least probabilistically tends to result in a furthering a deepening of the embodiment of this agency yeah so you can look at the history of history and notice when like you talked about war right there's a you can watch it you can see it happening now of course but you could actually watch it in say World War one and you can sort of notice the I remember the scene you invoked Lord of the Rings remember the scene where um they're at the Council of elrond and and all of the people start arguing and fighting and you can feel the presence of Sauron going yes that's it that's the thing you know war is just about to show up in this Council um Discord and conflict you know and so that's how it works and it has it always works in that way um and of course the opposite I propose is also true there's other forms of agency of this sort that activate and play with or play on other aspects of of human Humanity like love and integrity that produce and embody different kinds of agency that's the at least the hope that I'm putting out there that yeah yeah yeah no but you're you're right so I think it's important for people to understand the traditional difference between an angel and a demon for example like to understand why we have that difference and one of them has to do with what what you said one of them is the notion that like this grasping towards our desires right so it's like our fears our desires or whatever you grasp them and when you grasp them and you think that they're the thing like they're the thing that will that will provide everything for you right that's why addiction functions that way right it's like if I just you know just this beer is going to solve my problems right well you don't think that but we act that way right we act as if this thing is I'm gonna put all my desires and and my like my being into this thing because I think it's going to provide for me something that it's not capable of providing and so but when that happens that's when you you know that's when we we could say that the agency that's acting on you is something like demonic right that's why the demons in traditional lore are always connected to your passions right we say the demon of lust the demon of Envy the demon of greed right so it's like the demon of of these are the types of of agencies that are hooking into you that way right so and the the the and it right just like in Star Wars by the way like it's really interesting and so what happens is that when you give in to those you become a slave yeah you become a slave of that right when you when you give in to addiction addiction the best way to understand it right you know when you give in to addiction you get a little bit of consolation but then that consolation right away falls into a type of of slavery where you become a slave of the thing that that you think will will provide for you uh the the angel or the the good principalities what they do is they stack they always stack up towards the higher good and so first of all they they don't enslave you directly which is which why it makes it more difficult to do good right so it's like you you actively give your will up to something and that thing that you're giving up to is is lined up towards a higher good so you participate in something with a certain amount of effort and then that that that thing that you participated is aligned towards more and more so a simple thing a simple way to understand that is you know when you let's say you're digging a trench and you're you're digging a trench so that you know you can stop a flood that's coming and the reason why you're doing it is so that you know so that you can help your neighbor you know and that feeds into something that's higher so digging a trench will never become an addiction like you won't become addicted to digging trenches yeah it will it's an effort and it will scale into higher goods and so that's how Angels function and that's why angels are identified with virtues right we literally have certain category of angels that we call the virtues because they are the principalities of all that is good in human behavior uh and so they are a type of agency but they act differently and that's why it's so hard because this whole thing like that's why it's so difficult because the whole AI thing the way that it's setting itself up the way the technology and intelligence is connected now is is always devouring of attention right it's always a it's always parasitic it's always trying to get your attention in order to get money in the pockets of some of some people it's always trying to feed off of your intelligence in order to give power and money to to to to to certain forces so it's difficult and I and like I have a lot of sympathy for John uh who John ravaki who who has this dream of of giving birth to to these beings you know in a in a way that will that will uh bring about wisdom or whatever but what the forces I see behind the whole process don't seem to make it possible like it's you know it's it's the whole thing is in a system that makes Facebook and and Twitter and all these attention grabbing mechanisms all this intelligence devouring mechanisms that are trying to that enslave us to the power of others oh awesome okay I would like to give you hope all right well I thank you if you can how funny is that all right you ready yeah okay so the the first part I I would say and then I agree with you completely by the way um is something like all right this process and we're talking right now specifically the development of AI didn't just sort of begin out of nowhere we've been locked in a stream yeah of you know the process of civilization where the presence of at least two demons that I have spent some time thinking about moloch and Mammon um have been really playing a significant leading role in shaping how humans have behaving yeah um I don't have a really good name for how War works we'll just maybe just call it War but Ward's obviously been hanging about quite a bit also over the past say 10 000 years yeah there's also there's also there's also Venus or like yeah yeah a lot of this stuff yeah even like the early internet that's right like when when you know when John said it's either porn or the military I was like yeah that's it it's like yeah Mammon with Venus they make a good good make a good combo yeah the Mammon is the pimp that's right okay so that's a like we're catching on to something where there's been actually a very long stream right it's actually for most people alive who happen to happen to have lived an extraordinarily blessed life almost the entirety of your encounters have been actually had the Deep thumb print of these demonic forces right okay so that's where we are and you can just look at the particulars you're looking at the arms race as chat GPT hits and suddenly Google and Microsoft and Facebook oh they put all of their resources their money into or not all but a tremendous amount of their resources into the arms race on this front um and the psychological arms race you know how many people have suddenly just had their time and attention myself included focused on these things and people looking at all the different levels motivating the way that you articulated how do I make a ton of money tomorrow on this how do I avoid having my livelihood disrupted by this like those kinds of things you know so the those forces are important all right now hope um the the the thing let's see is that the right word like the thing or the aspects of reality that are connected with the Angelic are simultaneously always fully present and more fundamental right and so it is in some sense merely and uh anyone everywhere anyone everyone everywhere finding a way back into relationship with those forces that are always present and more fundamental grounding in them and then building that trench to use your metaphor or I'll say sandbags against the flood um with the adequate level of conviction capacity and there's one more thing there like I can't quite tell what it is to be able to start building that stack right so and we're in a moment right now and this is I guess why if I feel like leaping into this conversation was so um right where we're actually quite a liminal moment like the the particulars almost like the you know the early childhood development stage of AI has not act or the clay the clay is not set the clay of what this thing is going to be is still actually relatively malleable yeah um everything's awesome and the magnitude to shift to the genie area Direction the magnitude of the power we're dealing with is actually so large that it will I would say rake disrupt almost everything in at the institutional level including previous versions of itself and so the lead that open AI has May in fact be ephemeral um but more importantly the lead that say the United States dollar has may also be ephemeral in relationship with the potency that we're dealing with yeah so you know if we can get our act together and find some way to you know be on the side of the angels with enough with enough yeah to set this thing in clay in that direction then you know the good triumphs in the end yeah well I believe the good triumphs in the end like that for sure some people think I'm a doom and gloom guy but I really believe that the good triumphs uh let me tell you I want to tell you a story based on this like there's there's an image in in the Bible technology there's an image of technology in the Bible right it's basically you you find a a narrative line in scripture about what technology and civilization is and how it works yeah it and it's it finds corollaries in other cultures like it's not it's not independent it's not just this one thing it looks like what the Greeks thought about technology too and they're similar things and so right the technology in scripture starts as a compensation for lack so Cain kills his brother out of jealousy and then God pushes him away like excludes him from his presence and that alienation from the presence of God uh and the fact that he's alienated from other humans as well you know from from the future the other the other the other people forces him to build a city uh and so as soon as Cain is alienated it says right away the first thing he does is that he builds a city and then in his line all technology is in his descendants so if you follow the genealogy in Genesis you'll see that it's like his descendants build all the Arts and all the technology so music uh tent making uh you know uh like Agriculture and then also ultimately metal which really means weapons right which means also weapons as well so War making so you have this sense that and then that leads to a crisis uh and monster and monsters it leads to Giants and monsters and they're all these interesting uh uh Tech uh Traditions that are not in the Bible but that talk about how you know the time of Cain they made alliances with these demons and then created hybrids and mixture and and all kinds of of of kind of monstrosities uh and also necromancy and everything because it's like people people better start thinking about necromancy really fast because people think that that's a silly thing and necromancy is right on our it's right there it's like standing right in front of us right now so we have to start thinking about these old things that nobody wanted to think about anymore anyways that's a little parenthesis so so basically necromancing all this kind of chaos uh and also women putting on makeup also is really that's part of the yeah okay it's all comes together right you talk about Mammon and and Aphrodite and all that and that leads to the end of the world right it literally leads to the end of a world the flood comes everything is destroyed uh but Noah uses technique uses Science and Tech technique to survive the flood so God tells them and tells them how to build an ark that makes him survive the flood so that's a little Cosmo that's a little image of what how it works it's like technology seems to be based on lack and on you know a kind of a demonic relationship and then God Saves it in the end and transformed it and redirects it towards the good right so then we see different iterations of that in scripture for example the the Tabernacle the temple all these images of like space Sacred Space that are modeled in way that are modeled on the Garden of Eden become a kind of of technical supplement to the Garden of Eden but a way to return back to the Garden as well so that follows All Through the Bible and then at the end of the Bible in Revelation there are two images of civilization and technology that are put in contrast with each other one is the Beast so you have this Beast that comes out of the water and it is civilization because it has different heads of different animals which are in the other parts of the Bible are are used to show different civilizations so it's like the Babylonians the macedonians ETC and now it's like in one Beast all the civilization you know represented as this one Beast it may there's an image of it made that speaks and when people hear the image speak where they worship it they worship the Beast right and and and as they're worshiping the Beast then the Beast uh you know puts a number on them basically puts a number on them so that they can participate in the system like without that they can't they can't buy or sell or whatever right so that's that's one image of civilization right and on the on the back of the Beast also rides the right we talked about like Mammon and Aphrodite uh collaborating so the rides on the back of the Beast so it's like licentiousness and trade and and greed and all this stuff is what is what the Beast uses to to rise up then when it's in power it kills the by the way just so you know all this fun is gonna it could end at some point right so that's what image right but the other image is the Heavenly Jerusalem and the Heavenly Jerusalem is a city with a tree and water in the center right and the lamb the lamb that is like the sacrificial victim in the middle and then around it is this glorious wall that's made of gold and jewels and everything and so it's like it's an image of Technic of the tech of technique it's an image of the technical and then in and then all the nations of the world they basically gather their Glory up into this city and they offer it up to the land right they offer it up to something which is not a king with power but something which is giving something that gives itself is a good way to understand it and so it's like it's a different image so you have these two images it's really amazing these two images that represent like the the totality of of what these two these two narrative strains can what this narrative strain could give like these two opposites uh and so that's my motto for thinking about how it is that this can become so like if the Beast speaks right so if the machine speaks and it speaks with all this like all the horror behind it like all the the the desire for greed and lust and all this that stuff behind it then people will worship it but it will dominate them right it'll ultimately dominate them there's no way but if there's a way to have this technical thing as a place for us to gather all that is good into it right to gather all the good and to offer it up towards something higher then that is also possible I just don't see like at least now I don't see strains of that but but I mean maybe you can convince me differently oh well I can definitely tell you I see strains of it yeah I am having conversations two or three times a week with individuals who oftentimes frankly a little bit confused are finding themselves Guided by the most important piece is they find themselves guiding by something that is higher than themselves they don't necessarily know what they're doing or what that means but they are increasingly choosing to be acting in that way and they're noticing that as they do that certain sort of strains or tones become more and more consistent and more clear um you mean it's a Lurch right it's a hands reaching around but it's happening yeah let's see this what brings us to the point like how how one one might imagine that it was going to be thus right very few people have been holding a profound level of clarity and Purity in the context of say the past let's go with hundred years but we could go back again yeah thousands of years uh but again it's more fundamental right so it's like the space where things were so have been so confusing and so intense has almost like shaken certain things free and a number of people died by no means even close to the majority of those who are working in this space or certainly in the world are nonetheless endeavoring and so this gives rise to me too in careers actually let me back up I'm gonna step back because it seems to me there might be some utility um in sort of telling the story through a number of different languages so as to create a larger space for people to have an entry point to be able to get into the story um so A variation on the story that you told then this is literally the way that I've been telling it with how do I say buy my own crazy and not particularly well considered approach so this is just how it's been coming to me um you know this notion of Technology this notion of the capacity to use the faculty's inherent in humanity to foreground and optimize certain aspects of the larger whole at the cost of always breaking relationality with the larger hole this is the genie problem at every level um produces almost inevitably and and multi-dimensional arms race so agriculture produces an arms race as of course does military yeah in particular I've been calling it The Devil's bargain which is before I had any real set of the appropriate language to use so maybe it's a demonic bargain but it's a it's a deal right the deal is very straightforward yeah do you love if you play the game the way that I'm offering to play you get to win vis-a-vis your neighbors right and if you don't by the way here's the downside if any of them choose to take my deal you lose that's right that's the right way to see it yeah um and once you're on that once you're on that Arc you're you're going to be living the history that we've been living yeah it's just it's a one-way trip you know you're you exited the Garden of Eden you're now playing you know one you did a deal with the devil everybody's riding that trade until you get to the end now this raises the question of was it always already just a category error like was the entire Journey a mistake or is the journey actually part of something larger the entire journey of civilization yeah yeah that's the right I can't believe you're asking that question but if that's the question to ask right now yeah I mean it's a question I think is is quite probably quite reasonable to do perfectly yeah quite reasonable question and by the way I think more and more people will nod and go yep all right that's a valid question over the next Point that's right in the next next few months like yeah um all right so that's that part so so and we can if anybody wants we can I can play that style of language which is what the certain kind of Minds yeah and probably three or four other versions and they're all more or less going to have the same topological characteristics and typical story you just gave yeah so listening to the biblical story there's a bunch of things that come up I'm like oh yeah okay that's like I hadn't hadn't heard that part of that part had a different relationship now okay all right now I want to bring uh Michael in particular into the story um because I have a sense it's just like an intuition that there's a relationship like if I think about these two the beasts in Jerusalem right here in the middle coming from this direction right at the front is Michael something like that and so the what is the nature of that what would it look like to try to consciously or properly um choose to be in service to and to bring forth the principality of Michael which feels to me either a something I'm particularly oriented towards or B is a particular moment given the shape of the conflict yeah well the the this this is people aren't going to like this but the solution is that you have to not focus on Michael the solution is that you have to worship God like you have to you have to focus your attention on the highest good and that's when things lay themselves out almost automatically in the right in the right order if you try to bring about say Michael then you're you you might be surprised at what shows up it might not be him right okay but the difference between an angel and a demon too is that the Angels serve God right the demons are parasitic like all the way through so if you if you were to Endeavor to do so what I just articulated basically Michael the best case scenario is that Michael would go yeah that's right that's right you said something a moment ago that I think is actually let's make it it's like uh inscribe that um I'll just make it a proposition yeah where we live now it is extremely important to be carefully and different to the degree to which you don't like something utterly committed to what is in fact true and right and so okay fair enough people don't like the notion of you need to worship God if that is in fact what is true and right then that's we're going to need to do yeah uh so I'm going to allow myself to not be troubled by the fact that some portion in me doesn't like that because I am actually very clear that what is right and true has to be the guiding all right um by the way you've provided me personally with some of the best ways of thinking about it I think in the conversation you have with John around uh what was it like you had a A Narrative of talking about like the family dinner you know the communion and each one of these is a is a is a a pointer and the point is that you can then Orient you can notice you can be oh wait a minute it's a pointer what's the point in towards and then you can realize that it's pointing towards not something right because now we're getting into energy mystery but it's pointing towards an orientation it actually is a way to orient and all right so there we go um well that's pretty simple I guess we're done but everybody just needs to get over themselves and worship God problems that's right and then and then it'll all it lays itself out I mean I mean I I the worst part is that in some ways I know that that's true but it like but it also doesn't mean that we like it means it's that this is what's Difficult about being a Christian in some ways is we look at this story also this even this image of like self-sacrifice right right the idea that how can I say this almost the idea that if you if you accept to die like to a certain extent that that that will be the seed for the world like it will actually make the world exist and and I hate that like I hate I just don't want to do that I don't want to do that and so when I look at the stories I can see it like I can see that that's what happens and when you meet people that are that have a self a true self-sacrificial spirit you can see it in them right you can see that through their kind of desire to serve and to give themselves they become an opening for things to to exist right I I you know the simple thing is like I think about my Parish like my church Parish now we we for years and years nothing worked nothing worked and all it ended up taking was just a few people like just a few people that gave themselves without measure and and they and and nobody even really notices like I I mean some people do I noticed that everybody sees how everything's going well now everything is everybody is is everything is working well and you and you see there's this like secret is that there's just a few people that were willing to basically just give themselves completely uh and not think of their own uh their own selfish needs and so it seems like I mean maybe those two people that you said like if you have a a kind of remnant of tech people like a little core of them that that are like even you know the who's that Google guy who just quit his job or whatever like if there's a few people that that kind of make gestures like that where they they act in a self-sacrificial manner in order to to to show what's important uh and I think that that might be in some way the only way for for for a new body to find form yeah okay so let's let's hit on a very particular piece um I think the language actually I I used a language I I coined a term I called infinitesimal courage but I think the the more proper term is actually just spiritual war um which is let's go with Hinton and I don't know him at all right I don't know Jeffrey and I don't know I think I don't know the details of it either like I just saw that as a headline or whatever but this notion is going to be happening everywhere and it's more or less the same for every body which is to say this right so something happened he had a crisis of conscience some insight he's like whoa It's strong enough for him to pop from where he had been which is a pretty significant thing at the level of your interior like your your sort of spiritual place that guides your choices um however all of us have been subject to a lot of twisting and we've been engaging in deals with the devil at the micro and macro level for our whole lives all over the place yeah and so this creates all kinds of weird problems in the way that our choices are guided the way that we make our choices is quite torturous right um and so while he and by the way I literally just mean everybody while anybody may have had a transformational experience and had a reorientation of their spiritual interior by virtue of some crisis of conscience the job is not yet even vaguely complete yeah if you think you're done because you left Google and now you're kind of working at a non-profit you've probably still got like 85 percent of the work to go a lot of I think is actually a rectification of the language so people connect yeah yeah yeah yeah like when the word sin is what was always I'm doing it on purpose right I'm being a bit of a we can actually do a translation right now like what do you mean well what I mean is um sin is that separation from God right sin is to be um out of the continuity of contact with the the whole right yeah with this yeah with the thing that binds the thing that binds ultimately right and you can sin at different levels by the way you can you can sin you can sin in your company and you're acting against the the goal of your company and you're stealing from your company right you can send it at all kinds of levels at the same uh you know it's not just about God although that's the ultimate one but you know it just means that whatever you're involved in like whatever you're directed towards that you do you you redirect the attention and the and the uh let's say the resources to something that is that is not on the mark exactly you know and now what happens is is that you're this finely tuned instruments that it's a human has a bend in it right those resources got redirected to something that's not on the mark yes now your signal capacity should receive that signal of which is in fact the larger hole is off a little bit so to a tone for a sin is to do whatever is necessary to go back and repair those connections that had been broken or bent in the choices that were made in the past um much of which me in fact like you know this is part of the Christian story much of which is not going to be available to you as a human doing kind of like psychological work and much of it is actually requiring a lot more than you can deliver yeah certainly this is my experience so so the point right the point is almost as a message to everyone a lot almost everything as far as I can tell actually does land at the level of the spiritual transformation of individuals actually repairing and more and more coming together from that place supporting each other in that repair yeah becoming more clear on this directionality and and then maybe right then maybe there's enough right then maybe there's actually enough capacity to begin to do something that is coming from a very different orienting basis to say it kind of in a less uh theological language yeah and so let me let me I want to put out the the one case that like a case study that to me is very fascinating that is that the way that Elon Musk seems to be acting in this question like the way the way that he's acting and and I've been thinking about it quite a bit and it's you know in some ways like I I trust that at the outset he seems to have good intentions like I I want to put that out there like I don't know him but it seems like he has good intentions and that you know he warns against something and tries to prevent it from happening really but then when he reaches a certain like when it comes to a certain level then he thinks okay now I just have to fight it or I have to join it to fight it or I have to to create a version of it myself in order to fight this and that is something that I'm still curious about like how is that going to play out right and so because because he basically said that he in some ways is behind open AI like not completely but to some extent he's behind open Ai and then when open AI got sold to Microsoft he's like okay well now I need to start my own AI company right in order to basically balance out the arms race so that's what it seems like what it is it seems like it's there's an arms race and and he has that kind of cold war thinking that the best we can do is make sure that the arms race is balanced all the way through so that we avoid you know apocalypse uh and it's that it might if you think you you think I'm wrong when I perceive that that seems to be the strategy he's taken well let's section you just hit the word there at the end right what I would say is at the deepest level yeah is operating from strategy yeah not operating from Pure intent yeah okay so go back to the folks who are part of your Parish who have somehow been able to find a way to give themselves completely um and in some sense the choices that are being directed from a higher location my sense of it and I think that I have you know a variety of different perspectives I've also not actually met you know um is that at the bottom he positioned believes that he is he's making the choices himself Guided by his highest capacity to do strategy mm-hmm therefore that piece right the limitation of whatever his particular whatever's beneath his strategy whatever is ultimately guiding his choices is imprinted there's lack of purity of intent in the things that he produces and that plays out over time so in some sense the defection of open AI was was coded into its basic code because that was expressing itself through his his intent in spite of himself you might say yeah yeah and the only way he can get at it so every time he produces something because that thing is conserved at the bottom right it's like uh I give myself completely except for this part well okay well that part's the part that ultimately is going to play out and the thing that is produced something like that um that's my sense of it is I kind of and I've been looking at it yeah it's hard it's hard to it's hard to tell but it's also difficult it's also difficult to to to judge and to analyze because in some ways you know we have that like let's say I have that problem all the time like what what he's I you know I deal with that all the time but me it's like my wife my kids you know my my how I schedule my time or whatever and so I can see that I do that and that I pay the price for it let's say and then I have to create some compensation or whatever it's like the difference between myself and him is that his his position makes it that his decisions have massive world changing uh changing uh results right and that makes sense and to make it kind of like that double Loop of that problem of addiction is and he's in the place where his his decisions have such impact and import because the approach that he's taken the Strategic approach that he's taken has been successful that's right yeah so if you're sitting there at the top of that mountain going well shoot maybe I need to change something how I've been acting because if something on his shoulder going come on dude it's working it's like it's like I'm dead literally at the top of the mountain seems like it's working more than a lot of the other stuff that people are trying to do that's for sure that's for sure right so that's actually like almost the trickiest possible place to be yeah um and I don't envy that at all yeah by the way I have this thing everybody does so yes you know the degree to which I I would call it fall into sin to use that language um 40 or 50 times a day something like that I'm talking like at a macro level that I can do that's a good that's a good Orthodox cat you know like a good Orthodox Vision it's like I'm pretty much sinning every minute or every Everybody pretty much pretty much um okay fair enough okay that doesn't seem to be and it's unlikely I find it very very unlikely that I'm going to sort of reduce that down to close to zero anytime and say the next 50 or a thousand years um so we're gonna have to figure out how to make that work yeah that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and so all right so so what what's your what's your vision because what's your vision of this because you say you you meet people you you see in your surrounding people that are waking up you could say to the to the problem or that realizing also that there's some agencies playing through this that they maybe don't want to be part of they realize that the cat's out of the bag now what do we do how what is what are people's Solutions looking like what are they what are they doing are they are they networking together like is there a kind of secret society of uh of uh programmers that want to build a good AI like what what's going on so there is um and I would say there's there's actually two two versions of that okay um the first version is sort of the more trivial which is that there are many different uh secret societies uh let's get people because some of them are scientists some of them are programmers some of them are uh people who can martial resources um working on are aware of the let's just say are aware for example the difference between intelligence and wisdom yeah okay already that's something that's something yeah and are noticing the importance of actually grounding in wisdom in all ways like in themselves and also the things that they're trying to deal with and to bring that into the world all right so that's so there's yes there's a that's sort of a common tone that I'm seeing as a kind of a sign like oh you know you're you're oriented you get this distinction and you're noticing what that distinction means that the difference that difference makes and there's a collection there's a grouping or a binding and connecting and a kind of a networking and by the way it's interesting because I it it's just disparate right they're not connected into a meta group there's a difference and it seems like there's almost a reason for that like it's good or healthy or appropriate for them to be different or disparate at this point and then there's a second kind and I've I've been calling this the invisible conspiracy um I think they're better terms for it but it more or less well I mean I'll be very clean if you propose there's a transpersonal agency and that the proper way of making choices is to become attuned to and be able to be in service to that transpersonal agency then literally everybody who's doing that is part of a conspiracy um in the most in the most fundamental icon Spirit right they're actually literally inspired yeah they're coming from The Same Spirit yeah that's also happening now in some sense group one is a subset of group two maybe in some sense the people in group one are as I said more and more aware of that fundamental way as a or what's guiding their choices but not exclusively many of the people who are in group one are actually literally still saying no my mind can figure it out like I've worked my way through this I've got this term wisdom I can think my way through it um which you know everybody's got to go through their process yeah um but that second group is I think what's the more likely to actually be the thing that works if you think about it like it makes sense why that would be um so in that case it's a very unusual thing because now it's not strictly limited to competence or where you're working right the fact that you're a uh you make bread but you're part of the invisible conspiracy well you're part of the invisible conspiracy and that's more important like whatever whatever role you're playing is the role you're supposed to be playing it may be by the way that tomorrow you're going to realize that you're not supposed to be making merge you're supposed to be doing something else because the kind of the the way that I've noticed it where it's like I've seen it or it's visualized is um like that metaphor of an instrumentality mm-hmm uh I have to some degree a Clarity of instrumentality in myself right some uh Clarity of thought some relationality with my the way my body works Etc and that gives me some degree of Attunement to this transpersonal Agency for example and they and that's that kind of the spiritual clarification process like getting that more and more fully worked through and let's say for example you are doing the same kind of thing and then there's the we there's something about what's the process whereby I get a signal that orients my attention towards I should talk to Jonathan paggio about angels in relationship with AI That's a okay what a weird thing yeah what's even going on there like how is that happening well that's a different level like it's the same it's the spiritual Clarity or the Attunement process but it's happening at a large at a different level of of uh being there's actually a a a movement in my body if you think about it metaphorically if I think about like a stem cell the stem cell is going through at least it's actually going through three processes one is becoming a particular kind of cell right so that's the spiritual Clarity in yourself there's the coming into relationship and by the way literally the physics spatial temporal location a heart cell needs to go towards heart right brain still needs to go towards brain right it doesn't do any good to be a brain cell sitting around in the lower the lower intestine yeah um so that's like a re reorganization like a coordination like how do we find our right place which in this world doesn't necessarily mean physical collocation it means creating the appropriate relationality um and in the right order and so something like that so that's the second order that's like this one is me becoming the kind of song I'm supposed to be the second is me finding my proper location in a larger body of what is in fact incarnating through us uh and then the third is the reciprocal spiritual Clarity of that larger body right it becoming more and more clear in itself as it becomes more incarnated and you can imagine like the way that a baby is born first it like has to build a body yeah let's figure out how to actually run a body yeah and that is like that's a that's a loop um and I think as you yeah the kind of mystery of this question of technology is part of it like part of what's happening is we're also trying to discover how do we actually integrate Techni into this art incarnation in a fashion that is in fact so let's just call it appropriate like it's actually um well not sinful to use the other way of languaging yeah and that that's I mean I think what you're saying is is is right and that really does seem to be in my estimation the image of the image of the Heavenly Jerusalem like that seems to be what it is because it's not just Techni it's also civilization like that's being gathered up right it's being kind of gathered appropriately in the right in the right in its right place towards towards and so I mean it's this sounds how can I say this this sounds uh esoteric but it's not esoteric in the sense that you can understand it like just like cars are a great way to understand it like because cars have that problem where people worship cars right where people like fall in love with the car itself and will like dedicate their love and attention and you know you have the image of the the the the the recently retired gentleman who spends all this Saturdays watching his sports car right and so like you have this image of someone who like worships the tech uh and and just basically gives himself to it and then you have the idea that cars are great to do things like they're great to serve Higher Goals higher goods and if they were just a simple alignment problem it's just a simple if it's just a line properly then all the cut all of a sudden the carb can become a wonderful thing that serves the the good of what humans uh can accomplish yeah nice like what I was seeing there was actually two almost like a this shape yeah where the the that term like so love either the relationship of deep care or car right um if it's for car quad car ultimately as you say it's like it's demonic right if you're becoming addicted to something the whole point is your capacity for love is actually being pulled down yeah yeah and it could not be the car it could it could be car getting laid like just getting late of course exactly so it's like there are all those around exactly there's all these like secondary things that we engage with that that that don't provide enough to to sustain the world let's say and then but if if I if I take a different frame and I'll use Monastery or feed rolls you know there's there's if I would like look at the two guys like I look at the guy who's kind of building the cathedral and I look at the guy who sort of taking care of his Ferrari let's make it a very nice car and I'm like huh there's a lot similar yeah right there's a lot similar that's right that's right yeah well the difference is the guy who's building the cathedral is pointing up right the whole point is you say oh well the cathedral is an aspect of God's creation and therefore is perfectly due the full care that I can give it like even more care than you're capable of giving the car but as such right as an aspect of God's creation right and so if I'm in that relationship and the car happens to be of course you should treat everything with care yeah that's obvious like you should treat the tree in front of you and you should treat the kid that you is walking down the street in the dark everything should be treated with the utmost care because it's all part of God's creation okay now it's now you get oh well that makes like in some sense that makes sense by the way tricky hard to do but it's you know straightforward yeah it is right It's Tricky hard to do but it's straightforward because and it and it had the reason why It's Tricky and this is maybe a it's a simple key is because it's increasing power all the way through and it's like we don't deal well with that like when the when we have increase in power like that it's so easy to misalign because you all of a sudden you become superhero it's like you have all this capacity that you didn't have before and so all of a sudden like your Your Capacity to to to let's say accomplish your ill goals is increased too right it's like so if I have a million dollars in my bank account all of a sudden uh it's like oh wait a minute I can you know I can do all these great things for my family but I could also buy a whole lot of crack or I could buy a whole lot of whatever it is with that my addiction is where it is it and you know that right because people win win the lottery it usually ruins their life because it's like massive amounts of Genie power and but not well aligned so everything kind of falls apart and that's what tech is Tech is always just increasing power nice okay so let me glue these pieces together um we have a power we have we now have a power which is sort of clearly beyond our capacity or many people are aware of the of the possibility that we're talking about a level of power that is not the kind of thing that we're going to be able to deal with with the way we are actually I'm gonna back up one step I guess I just saw the the trailer for Oppenheimer yeah okay yeah I haven't seen it yet yeah and it feels like there was actually a legitimate raising in Consciousness uh like oh we don't actually know how to deal with this and when nukes showed up there was a oh boy we actually actually develop a new capacity to be able to deal with at all this level of power yeah and it's been touch and go right yes more on the go right now because it's like it's right at the door and nobody seems to be talking about it we seem to have a weirdly looking the other way we're like just forgotten that there are all these nuclear weapons and that there's literally a war with people that have them and we're bombing the Kremlin it's like what are we what the hell is happening right well that's that well okay well that'll be a different country that's a different conversation sorry well you can see like sauron's going here yeah remember that it's like um all right but this new thing right this new AI thing is even like more sort of whoa we're talking about intelligence itself man we're talking about something that is it's you know every day like you said like in three months it's just and so that feeling interior wow we're not prepared to deal with this and it's in and I would argue I mean I do in fact very specifically argue and we humans at this level in this way can't right it's not the thing we're not we're not the kinds of beings that have that capacity all right then I'm proposing that whatever is in the process of incarnating itself in this moment is and that's the thing right so it's it's both right so that you can look at it through the lens of well you know they can't say it sort of in a very uh legible fashion to more to my more sort of rationalist material spreads you have to have symmetry between wisdom and power at a minimum and if we're looking at a magnitude of power over here let's just call it X then what does it look like to constitute something that has a magnitude of wisdom at least slightly more than x right let's just hold that as the problematic and then there's there's in the Bible there's literally a story like the story of Solomon is about that the story of Solomon is about God asks him what he wants God God acts as a Genie in this situation God says what is your wish Solomon what do you want one thing tell me what you want I'll give it to you and then Solomon says I want wisdom and but then what does he do he builds the temple he makes a technical space he makes a city he makes a he makes a technical space but he does it after he's asked for wisdom so because of it it's sacred it's a Sacred Space and so it's like we tend to we now we're in the opposite direction like now we're we basically made a deal with the devil we've got all these these things that are massively powerful and now we're like oh we should have asked for wisdom it's too late like what do we do now it's like wait this is that scene from Monty Python remember like what is your name and then he's like the wisdom wait a minute I meant to say wisdom it's too late now power no no wisdom it's like yeah all right too late yeah so I don't know so but but I'm happy to see like I do think I do think that with that that good wins in the end uh but I definitely see a loop like there's a anyways I see a dark Loop let's say because because of course the problem with AI is that it one of the big problems now that we're that I've realized that just I just realized that in the last few weeks and my brother also kind of caught on to that I mean he's a genius just caught on to it right away is that there's a relationship between Ai and and now let's say absolute authoritarian systems oh yeah directly that is directly in the sense that within three months within a few months now you will not be able to be to tell between what's real and what's not real and you won't be able to tell whether I'm talking to actually talking to Jordan Hall or to an AI uh you know generated version of him and so we will need governments authorities to tell us what's real literally they will have to they will have to legit legit legitimate what is real and so so we're we basically like lined ourselves up to 1984 because we have to if we don't then we're going to we're going to all get destroyed by our incapacity to do to differentiate reality from from alive from imagination yep maybe maybe yeah you know it's like uh maybe well I think you shoot sorry I have to jump on another call um as you said it nicely a while oh yeah sorry you're not going to like this comma but right and the the the the sort of the dark piece of the loop is the well how dark does it have to get for you to get past the part the fact that you don't like it that's right and that's how that's how my life has worked right I've very rarely learned anything truly deep and meaningful without fighting as hard as possible not to for as long as I can get away with it foreign that's a great one if you have to jump on another call that's a great that's a great way to end Jordan that's that that's awesome listen I love this conversation this was great I really I really appreciate it and so we have to let's put it out and see how people react we'll we'll try to we'll try to get another one going soon yeah sounds good thanks for taking the time in all right all right bye-bye

Channel: Jonathan Pageau

Views: 68,311

Keywords: symbolism, myths, religion

Id: 3Fpy42cdoB0

Length: 71min 50sec (4310 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023