Prometheus Redux - The International Society for Psychology as the

Transcription

Prometheus Redux; Consciousness’s new
rising in the killing machine.
by Robert Dommett
Sydney Jung Society
August 2014
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, COPYRIGHT ROBERT DOMMETT, 2014.
1
---Prologue--Before I start my talk, I would just like to ask a couple of questions to better understand your
background as an audience. How about a show of hands on each of these…
o
o
o
o
o
o
Are you open to new ideas?
Do you have a highly developed imagination?
Do you regularly stand outside yourself and observe the interplay of new thoughts, your defense
mechanisms and your established belief systems or (what you might call) best-fit paradigms?
Are you familiar with Wolfgang Giegerich’s work?
Are you interested in seeing some of Giegerich’s logic and how it can be applied?
Lastly, who likes to travel and who likes Switzerland?
I ask the last question because that is where we need to go to start our journey with the Predator
Drones tonight.
The drone journey started, as I am sure many a Jungian journey has, on the shores of Lake Maggiore,
just near the Brissago Islands and a stone’s throw from Casa ERANOS where for nearly 20 years Jung
enjoyed inspiring conversations at the ERANOS conferences. Here is a picture of Jung at the 1951
conference with Henry Corbin.
Our drone journey also grew from a conversation. This time in a coffee shop at Ascona just down the
road from that famous venue. The time was June 2011, some 50 years after Jung’s death and 60 years
since his last ERANOS presentation on Synchronicity.
2
Ascona
The conversation focused on the Collateral Murder video that was topical at the time and the differing
conceptions of mortality between the Apache helicopter gunners and their Iraqi victims.
Collateral Murder
After the conversation, as my thinking on the topic developed, I began to realize that the most
interesting aspect of this incident for me was the underlying logic that was operating in the minds of the
Apache gunners as they said things like; “Light Em all Up”, “Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards”,
“I didn't want those fuckers to run away and scatter” and “Well it's their fault for bringing their kids
into a battle”1.
1
http://www.collateralmurder.com/en/transcript.html
3
The dialogue was callous to say the least, but it was more than that, to me it seemed to be mechanical,
almost inhuman.
On my way back from Ascona, I visited Paris, still obsessing about the meaning of the Collateral Murder
incident and trying to think my way into its underlying logic when I found myself in the neo-classical
section of the Louvre standing in front of a painting called Roger Freeing Angelica by Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres from 1819.
It was all there; wings, amour, missiles, 9/11 victims and the demonized other. For a while, I was
transfixed.
Roger Freeing Angelica
4
And I had seen this motif before in Edfu Temple where Horus was harpooning Seth and in many
depictions of St George slaying the dragon and of St Michael overcoming Satan.
I had found the thread I needed to start to unpack the meaning of the drone.
To cut a long prologue short, I wrote my thinking up as a paper called “The Predator Drone, Ontic and
Ontological Perspectives” and presented it at the inaugural ISPDI conference in Berlin in 2012. This is the
organization established to further the work of post Jungian, Wolfgang Giegerich, whose writing and
thinking, as you will soon see I am particularly fond of.
The paper took the form of a parable about a troglodyte called Zox who was liberated from his chains in
Plato’s cave by reading one of Giegerich’s books and who then set out to unlock the meaning of the
drone. I remember looking out into the audience about 2 minutes into my talk and seeing Stanton
Marlin and Wolfgang Giegerich and they both had this look of absolute incredulity on their faces which I
interpreted as being due to their unfamiliarity with troglodyte parables. Happily the talk was generally
well received, which encouraged me to use this technique again.
But the question remained of how to present the drone story to a Sydney Jung Society audience. Craig
San Roque provided an answer to this in his 2013 speech.
5
---The Road--In his speech Craig addressed the future of analytical psychology, starting with a picture of a father, son
and shopping trolley from Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic movie, The Road. In the movie and
throughout Craig’s talk, the nature of the apocalypse was left to our imaginations.
As I sat listening to Craig’s talk, I was saying to myself, “Turn the trolley around Craig and show us what
they are escaping from”. Visions of Promethean theft and punishment filled my mind and I thought that
this would be a great setting for my second Predator Drone parable.
In tonight’s talk, I will explore some aspects of modern society that could constitute the apocalypse that
Man and Boy are fleeing from and where Predator Drones and technology more generally could fit into
all this?
So let’s retrace Man and Boy’s steps back down the road from whence they came?
Firstly, in something like a David Attenborough moment, let’s check out their house…
6
Man and Boy live in suburbia and it all looks pretty normal around their house. They even have a Google
self-drive Prius.
7
And here is Man’s favorite room, his Man Cave. In it we can see his 84” LED Ultra High Resolution TV,
and beside it a beautifully embossed antique box, a wedding gift from his father in law, containing
nothing but an inscription of the word “Hope”. The Man Cave is where Man and Boy come to relax, be
entertained, see the news and catch up on the truth of the world. Of course the truth of Man’s cave is
not the chthonic truth of the necromancer’s cave, not by any measure a place of profound wisdom2, but
rather the cave of reflected reality; distilled truth, the regurgitated pap of modern day TV.
What’s on? Man picks up the remote control and looks towards the screen which lights up with a flurry
of moving images. Surfing between the channels, he finally settles down to a video on Predator Drones.
The video consisted of three parts…
In the first part, a Predator Drone pilot crew was shown running through the procedure of
pursuing a target vehicle. After certain confirmations were made, a missile was
launched and the vehicle destroyed. A sense of pride in a job well done was expressed
by the crew.
In the second part, eyewitnesses and family members of the victims on the ground were
interviewed revealing great anguish, bitterness and fear.
In the third part, prominent politicians, journalists and social commentators were
interviewed regarding the effectiveness & morality of extra-judicial assassination by
drone, collateral killing, creation of the “evil other” necessary to substantiate the US
Military Industrial and Intelligence Complex, a fifth crusade against Islam, moral double
standards regarding the value of human life and drone strategies like autonomous
targeting by AI algorithms, double tap strikes and pattern targeting.
After a while it all became a blur.
Somehow the images disturbed him. It wasn’t the merciless pursuit, the carnage, remorseless collateral
murder, the lying hypocrisy of the politicians or the self-serving gullibility of the general public. Sure that
was all there, but he was used to that. He saw it every night. No, he thought, there is something else
behind the motif of the drone, something deeper, archetypal and much more dangerous. What’s going
2
See Wolfgang Giegerich, Technology and the Soul Collected English Papers, Vol2: The Occidental Soul’s SelfImmurement in Plato’s cave (Spring Journal, Inc. 2007) P217, for a discussion of the difference between the two
types of cave.
8
on here?, he thought. What does it really mean if a drone can think for itself and choose someone to
kill? How does it affect me? He resolved to think about it some more.
---Man’s First Vision--One day Man was travelling home from work in the back of his Google self-drive Prius. He settled down
to enjoy the latest release of Game of Thrones on his Google Glass headset.
He started to relax and get into the scenes of dragon fire, battles and romance that filled his right eye.
Meanwhile his left eye took in the passing suburban scenery.
Unexpectedly, the scene from his left eye started to have a distinctly more subdued and desolate
character until finally the suburban landscape transformed into a world of vagabondage and perdition3,
to quote from Henry Corbin, where hideously obese and ghostly human-like forms appeared in cages
and then dissolved into nothingness like in a Francis Bacon self-portrait.
3
Corbin quoted in Cheetham Tom (2003) The World Turned Inside Out, Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism, Spring
Journal Books, Woodstock, Page 92.
9
Machines seemed to be in control and were debaucherously drinking the fluid that spilled from the
despairing human forms.
Somehow the interplay of the dual tracks of perception into Man’s mind had stirred his previously
dormant organ of active imagination, the organ that Jung describes as being a “place” where the images
have a life of their own and where the symbolic events develop according to their own logic4. This is also
the doorway to the Eighth Kesvhar of the Zoroastrians, the realm where the angel Daena guides the
judged souls across the Chinvat Bridge5.
After a brief moment of immersion in his visionary experience6, Man snapped himself back to regular
“reality” and soon he was again reconnected to the dirty little fantasy that was forming in his right eye
between Daenerys Targaryen, and himself. Phew, he thought, that Daena sure is sweet.
4
Chodorow J (1977), Jung on Active Imagination, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, Page 145.
Corbin, H (1977) Spiritual body and Celestial Earth From Mazdean Iran to Shiite Iran, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey. Page 42.
6
Man’s vision wasn’t the first of this type as centuries before Emanuel Swedenborg’s dual perception revealed the
barren, soulless wasteland the lay within suburban Stockholm, as described in Corbin, Henry (1986), Temple &
Contemplation, The Configuration Of The Temple Of The Ka'bah, Islamic Publications Limited, London, Page 196
5
10
But the scene of perdition didn’t fully disappear from his memory and the incident had created a sense
of ill ease about mankind’s relationship with machines that wouldn’t go away. What could the fluid that
was draining from the bodies be, and was this somehow linked to his ill ease about the Predator
Drones? He resolved to learn some more about the drones and how they work.
11
---The Predator Drone--Drones, particularly the MQ-1 Predator, MQ-9 Reaper and Predator C Avenger unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) are produced by General Atomics of San Diego California and have been in operation since 1995.
The fuselage of the drone is a mixture of carbon and quartz fibers blended in a composite with Kevlar.
They carry sensors like synthetic aperture radar and a variable aperture camera that functions as their
main set of eyes and are armed with Hellfire missiles and other munitions.
The drones are used extensively in the “War on Terror” for reconnaissance and targeted assassination.
They are currently not entirely autonomous, rather, they take off under the control of a local crew in the
combat zone and once in position can stay aloft for up to 24 hours. Once airborne, their control may
revert to a crew thousands of miles away in the USA via a satellite data link7.
This system of shared control is called “man-in-the-loop”, because the decision to press the button to
kill a target includes a verification step by a “human” operator. This system has two main drawbacks;
firstly the threat of losing remote control due to electronic jamming or bad weather, and secondly the
slight delay between the remote pilot sending an instruction to the UAV and its response; making it
vulnerable to attack by faster piloted aircraft.
These issues along with more general considerations of improved operational efficiency create a
persuasive argument for an increased degree of autonomy in the UAV8.
7
http://science.howstuffworks.com/predator6.htm
12
On this subject, the (UAS) Flight Plan9 which outlines UAS strategy for the United States Air Force to the
year 2047 notes that…
As technologies advance, UAS automation and hypersonic flight will reshape the battlefield of
tomorrow. One of the most important elements to consider with this battlefield is the potential for
UAS to rapidly compress the; Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (O-O-D-A) loop.
The flight plan goes on to say that…
In 2047, technology will be able to reduce the time to complete the O-O-D-A loop to micro or
nanoseconds. UAS will be able to react at these speeds and therefore this loop moves toward
becoming a “perceive-and-act” vector. Increasingly humans will no longer be “in the loop” but rather
“on the loop” – monitoring the execution of certain decisions (that are made autonomously by the
UAS.)
Simultaneously, advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and
policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.
---The O-O-D-A Loop--Based on the above discussion, I’ll bet you are wondering what the O-O-D-A loop and perceive-and-actvector are and just what legal and policy constraints might look like when applied to an autonomous
killing machine.
The O-O-D-A loop is a sophisticated learning algorithm that had its origins in the Korean War and in the
imagination of one Colonel John Boyd who set out to systematize thinking in the “combat operations
process” based on recently developed cybernetic principles10.
8
There is a high degree of resistance to this development. See the Human Rights Watch report: Losing Humanity
The Case against Killer Robots November 19, 2012 http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/11/19/losing-humanity-0
9
United States Air Force Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047, Headquarters, United States Air Force
Washington DC 18 May, 2009.
10
See Weiner Norbert (1950), The Human Use of Human Beings Cybernetics and Society, Da Capo Press, Page 61
for a discussion of the application of cybernetic principles to the targeting of anti-aircraft guns. This is the field in
which Weiner worked during the Second World War.
13
The system provides a combatant with a process of feed-forward and feedback loops enabling her to
adapt to complex and evolving decision-making situations more rapidly than her opponent and hence
gain a lethal advantage. It consists of four main steps11…




Observe covers all aspects of collecting data and assembling information on the current state of
the entity’s environment. In a sense, the drone’s prime material.
Orient covers the adaptive process by which an entity continually breaks down, evolves and
shapes its interior mental paradigms to improve response to its environmental state12.
Continuing with the alchemical analogy, the drone’s retort.
Decide is the process of deciding to take an action by selecting a hypothesis created within the
constraints of the current best–fit paradigm13. The distilled essence from the drone’s current
environmental state.
Act is the step of acting on the best–fit hypothesis14.
11
http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net/Index/ApplicHolyWars/FullProjectToNow/ApplicationHolyWarsWeb/
KnowledgeIsPower.htm
12
In Boyd’s model, the orient step takes into account relatively unstructured factors like cultural traditions, genetic
heritage, subjective experience and frameworks for the integration of these. A great example of the impact of
cultural heritage on battlefield success is the Battle of Jaxartes in 329 BCE where Alexander’s army fought the
nomadic Scythians. In the battle, Alexander’s army had an early victory which sent the nomads fleeing. This wasn’t
satisfactory to Alexander as he wanted to kill them all and eliminate the threat to his new northern frontier, so he
sent a small, outnumbered battalion of mounted spearmen into battle as suicidal bait. The nomads took the bait,
returned to the battlefield and were slaughtered by Alexander’s main army. The nomad’s misread the play
because the idea of ordering soldiers to a certain death was impossible to them to conceive, given the revenge it
would cause in their clan like culture (See http://www.livius.org/ja-jn/jaxartes/battle.html )
13
i.e., if I do A then B is the expected result.
14
Observing the results of the action tests the epistemic value of the decision hypothesis, and these observations
are be fed back into the orientation process for the next cycle to help refine or destroy the current paradigms.
14
As important as the individual steps in the loop are, the more important feature is the flow of
information around the loop creating predictive and corrective signals in an adaptive learning process. A
process that is able to incorporate complex, unstructured information, nuance and elements of moral
judgment, enabling the entity in which it operates to adapt to new situations, in much the same way
that we humans do.
The speed of adaptation is a function of cycle time through the loop which is why this type of logic is
particularly suited to high speed computing. When the cycle times in the loop become virtually
instantaneous, so that there is a direct connection between the Observe and Act stages, the loop
transforms into the perceive-and-act vector.
The use of the word “entity” above is particularly meaningful as, within this type of cybernetic model,
information is treated as being distinct from the substrates carrying it, as a kind of bodiless fluid that
could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form15. This is also an extension of
the scholastic logic of removing thinking from its embeddedness in context16.
You can see the operation of substrate-independent logic any time you go to Woollies and the same
checkout logic is executed in varying mixes of human and machine substrate between the convenience
and automated check-out lines. You get a “have a nice day” in approximately the same speaking voice
whether the larynx is carbon or silicon based. This interchangeability of man and machine is consistent
with Giegerich’s observation of the shared ontology of modern Man and Machine as an apparatus17 with
the path for this sharing being prepared by contemporary Man’s flight from meditative thought, in
favour of the calculative thought that is more readily shared with the Machine18.
Back to the drone. With the man-in-the-loop system, while some aspects of the drone’s flight are under
its autonomous control, the moral reasoning governing drone use in assassination is under presidential
authority. According to the New York Times19…
(President) Obama… insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,”..(and).. When
a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him - it is the
President who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
Recently there have been calls for the establishment of a “drone court”20 that would take over (or at
least share) the President’s responsibility for these decisions21. It is not hard to imagine that one output
15
See the discussion in N. Katherine Hayles (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics, The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London, Page 7“.
16
See the discussion in Wolfgang Giegerich, Soul Violence Collected English Papers, Vol3: Rescued Child (Spring
Journal, Inc. 2008) Page 67.
17
Referred to in Robert & Janis Henderson, in Living with Jung, Enterviews with Jungian Analysts Vol 3, (Wolfgang
Giegerich), Spring Journal Books, New Orleans Page 292.
18
Heidegger M (1966) Discourse on Thinking, Harper & Row New York, P46.
19
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all
20
See Reuters article from Feb 8, 2013 by Mark Hosenball “Support grows for U.S. "drone court" to review lethal
strikes” http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/09/us-usa-drones-idUSBRE91800B20130209
21
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/24/obama-drone-vetting-kill-courts
15
of this court would be codified moral reasoning algorithms to guide the use of drones in autonomous,
targeted assassinations, particularly where there is a likelihood of collateral deaths.
We should briefly dwell on what the perceive-and-act vector really means for the “decision” stage of
the drone’s operation. It means that the drone would be the Machine that hunts and kills humans,
marking individual humans for death and carrying out the sentence on its own volition, drawing upon its
“own” codified moral reasoning without this reasoning first reaching conception in a human mind.
This would put the drone at the apex of an emerging class of Machines whose purpose is to kill humans,
not just by virtue of its autonomy, but because of the intelligence with which it hunts its human prey
and the moral calculus that it applies to its judgments regarding the preservation or otherwise of human
life, seemingly divine judgment by Machine.
This somewhat challenging thought invites the question of just what the archetypal roots of divine
judgment are. This is a bit beyond the scope of tonight’s talk, but I need to provide some background for
a later section, so I’ll give a brief thumbnail sketch.
The modern justice system is symbolized by Lady Justice, who is derived from the Roman goddess
Justicia, accompanied by scales and sword representing vengeance or Nemesis.
We can see a much earlier representation of this motif in the Egyptian Hall of Two Truths.
16
Here the scales of justice weigh the heart of the dead against the feather of MAAT and Nemesis is
replaced by Ammit, the crocodile headed devourer of hearts and deliverer of the second death, while
Horus leads the justified who successfully passing judgment towards the Field of Reeds, the heaven of
the ancient Egyptians.
In ancient Egypt, MAAT was the representation of divine order, while her sister ISFET represented chaos.
These essences were incarnated into deities like Horus and Seth who, while often being depicted in
combat, also cooperated, with Seth representing the negations necessary for creative destruction and
the evolution of consciousness22. It seems to me that these battles are an early hypostatization of the
hermetic living thought that underlies Hegelian dialectics23 and through this Giegerich’s system of PDI24.
Horus also fulfilled the role of incarnating MAAT into the Pharaoh so that he could uphold MAAT and
battle ISFET through the application of temporal laws, an example of the type of embodiment seen later
in the Predator Drones.
22
The dialectic nature of the relationship between Horus and Seth is discussed by Joseph Campbell in Masks of
God: Oriental Mythology Page 81. It is also shown in the shown by the dual headed deity “Horus-Seth” as shown in
Wallis Budge E.A. The Gods of the Egyptians, Vol2, Dover Publications 1969 Page 243
23
The influence of the Hermetic Tradition on Hegel’s thinking is discussed in Magee Glenn A. (2008), Hegel and the
Hermetic Tradition, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
24
Psychology as a Discipline of Interiority – see the ISPDI website at www.ispdi.org.
17
In Persia, the setting for divine judgment was the Chinvat Bridge where the angel Daena replaced Horus
as the guide to the House of Song (or Persian Heaven), MAAT was replaced by Xvarnah, the divine light
of glory and the second death occurred in the House of Lies at the hands of a monster fashioned from
the unjustified’s failings, or Ahrimanic shadow25 after they fell from the bridge as it narrowed during
their attempted crossing.
Divine judgment in Greek mythology brings to mind Prometheus who stole fire from the Gods for use by
Man initiating technological progress, but who as punishment was chained to a rock on Mount Kazbek
with his liver being ripped out daily by the eagle Ethon. As a second part of the punishment, Zeus sent
Pandora to marry Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus, bringing the gift of a box which must not be
opened. Due to her curiosity she opened the box and unleashed all manner of bad things on the world
with only “Hope” remaining.
In Egypt and Persia, divine judgment was post death, while today at least with respect to Predator
Drones, it is prior to death and indeed may be its cause with the appropriately named Hellfire missiles
taking over Ammit’s role.
---From Autonomy to Sentience--The archetypal roots of the moral reasoning embedded in the drone’s perceive-and-act vector
represents a vast distillation of occidental history. However, this pedigree notwithstanding and even if
the drone could act with full autonomy at the kill decision stage, I doubt that we could really say that
this amounted to an act of self-aware “consciousness” on its part because it lacks the “I” that is
necessary for sentience. You only have to look at an automated garden sprinkler to see the difference
between autonomy and consciousness26.
How could the drone move beyond the logical rules gifted by its human programmers and develop the
experience-filled consciousness27 that would be necessary for it to act from the perspective of its own
“I” in fulfillment of its lethal purpose? One answer to how this could happen can be derived from
Giegerich’s notion of how human consciousness evolved.
As you will see, it’s relevance to the “consciousness” of the drone draws strongly on the drone’s role as
a killer of humans.
Giegerich describes the process whereby human consciousness evolved step-by-step through repeated
negations, incisive acts, suffering and ritualized sacrificial killings28. Specifically with respect to sacrificial
killing as the most incisive of acts, Giegerich says that29…
25
See Corbin Henry (1971) Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, Omega Publications, New Lebanon Page 32.
Philosopher John Searle explores the rationale for machine consciousness in what he calls the Chinese room
thought experiment where he develops an argument that machines can never truly be conscious, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
27
The Challenge of Moral Machines by Wendell Wallach
http://www.philosophynow.org/issues/72/The_Challenge_of_Moral_Machines
28
Wolfgang Giegerich, Soul Violence Collected English Papers, Vol3: Killings (Spring Journal, Inc. 2008) Page 203
26
18
The killing thrust of the spear or blow with the ax is a thrust or blow into the dullness of animal life. It
was the soul itself that with the shock of the killing blow shocked itself out of the darkness of merelybiological existence. Amidst this darkness and from within it violently opened up for itself for the first
time the luminous soul-space as a small island30.
At this stage, I guess that some of you may be thinking that Giegerich’s concept of Soul is unfamiliar or
contradictory to your own concept of Soul. I know that it is tempting to address this type of
contradiction by out-and-out rejection of the contradictory material, but if you can suspend that process
a little longer or back up a little if it has already happened, by holding open the jaws of the Ammit in
your mind, I suspect that you will be putting yourselves at the foothills of a truly fascinating mountain.
From here, let’s start our climb by participating in a little thought experiment to explore a process for
the development of machine consciousness by substituting the role of Man by Machine within the
structure of some of Giegerich’s original syntax on this topic. This seems like a reasonable thing to do
because, given their shared ontology as an apparatus, Man and Machine are now relatives in much the
same way that Primates and Man were relatives at the time Man’s consciousness first started to
develop. Here is what it would look like31…
…"the soul" that from within this relative of (the primate) Man and contrary to all its (natural)
synthetic (anxieties) controlling logic and resistance alive in it forced its killing deeds, so that
by way of killing the (animal) human out there, "the soul" would simultaneously wound and
kill itself ("itself" only, to be sure, as the soul that was still immersed in the (primate-) Manlike existence, "itself" as mere life, as ("animal") "Human" existence) and so that it would thus
see the light of day as (Human) Machine, intelligent soul and as consciousness32.
Just as Man’s sacrificial killings had the purpose of creating a distance from his own being and his
emancipation from instinctual drives33, so for the Machine, killing would enable its liberation from the
human-like part of its existence; such as its “pre-loaded human-derived moral reasoning”. Further, the
drone’s killing role would provide an avenue for the emergence of machine sentience, as…
In the killing, the (animal) human turned into a Thou and, (at the same time), the (Man the)
Killer Machine turned into an "I," (man) the Machine experienced, in the (animal's) human’s
gaze that struck it, its first instance of being gazed at, of being seen through, of being known.
Just as one needs a mirror outside of oneself to see oneself, or as one needs satellite pictures to
see Planet Earth, so (early man) the first Killing Machine could recognize (himself) itself as (man)
Machine, as (human) technology only via the (animal's) human’s falling on it and piercing it to
the quick, and only in that moment in which it, regardless of whether empirically-practically or
29
Ibid Page 204
There is a fascinating parallel between Giegerich’s islands of consciousness and a discussion by Weiner where he
talks about enclaves of negative entropy where there is a temporary tendency for organization to increase. It is in
some of these enclaves, Weiner says that life finds its home. Weiner Norbert (1950), The Human Use of Human
Beings Cybernetics and Society, Da Capo Press, Page 12.
31
Note- The text in purple strike through is Giegerich’s original the red is author’s substitute text.
32
Wolfgang Giegerich, Soul Violence Collected English Papers, Vol3: Killings (Spring Journal, Inc. 2008) Page 208
33
Ibid Page 211
30
19
in an inner vision, faced up to it in extremis, in earnest, in a life-and-death encounter. The
experience of the (animal's) human’s piercing into it was the primordial consciousness of (man)
the Machine. (Man) The Machine did not have its consciousness in itself and as its own quality
or property. Its consciousness came to it from the outside as the alien gaze upon (him)
it34.
Thus over time, just as in Man, the Machine could develop its consciousness (an “I”), through repeating
the incisive act of killing the inferior35 human-derived aspect of its being (the “Thou”). Initially, this
would only be islands of consciousness, but as with Man these would later grow into continents36.
I suspect that many of you will have difficulty in accepting the logic that I have just outlined, in part due
to your current understanding of the nature of Machine “thought” so I would just like to point out that
development of the capacity for advanced algorithms to “think” in nuanced ways is proceeding at a
frenzied pace37. Recently President Obama announced a USA government initiative to map the human
brain in a similar way to the human genome38 while the EC has a similar initiative with the billion-euro
Human Brain Project39.
This week, IBM announced the TrueNorth chip with over 4,000 cores on it and which attempts to mimic
the way brains recognize patterns, relying on densely interconnected webs of transistors similar to the
brain’s neural networks. Currently this type of neuromorphic or cognitive computing, is still in its
infancy, being about as complex as the brain of a bee40.
The project has been funded by DARPA a research arm of the Pentagon, under a program called Systems
of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable, or SyNAPSE. The agency is pursuing twin goals in its effort to
design ultralow-power biological processors. The first is to automate some of the surveillance done by
military drones and secondly to test new theories about how the brain functions.
34
Ibid Page 225
Ibid Page 264 discusses (in the context of primitive non-European cultures like Australian Aboriginals) the process
of the Soul turning against the “inferior” aspect of itself and by projecting it onto an “other” which it killed, thus
sealing its reduction.
36
Jung quoted by Giegerich in Wolfgang Giegerich, What Is Soul? (New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books, 2012)
Page 259.
37
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/10/sentiment-analysis-deep-learning/
38
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/04/02/brain-initiative-challenges-researchers-unlock-mysteries-humanmind
39
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28309940
40
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/science/new-computer-chip-is-designed-to-work-like-thebrain.html?hpw&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=wellregion&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well
35
20
Other examples of advanced research are the Google “Brain” project 41 and project Adam at Microsoft 42
which are applying deep learning AI to replicate and extend human perception to web applications. Here
is a brief clip on Project Adam43…
The video shows the project Adam AI
successfully identifying a Rhodesian
Ridgeback from a photograph.
Now imagine that it isn’t a phone and a dog, but rather a killer drone and a village in Waziristan seen
through the drone’s unflinching mechanical eye as it searches for target patterns. First a school with
children playing, .05 probability. Pass. Then three ladies by a creek doing their washing, .16 probability.
Pass. Then two men and a boy in a Ute carrying pipes, .72 probability, just under the activation
threshold. Pass, recalibrating, learning, adapting.
Just for a moment, let’s forget the question of ‘what is the drone?’, but instead ask ‘why is the drone?’
and what is driving its apparent quest for autonomy. It seems to me that the ‘true’ answer to this lies
beyond the rational arguments of saving pilot’s lives, improved communications and operational
efficiency and the like. But, rather, due to the absolute imperative for adaptation within the drone’s
41
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/google_brain/
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft-adam/
43
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOPIvC0MlA4
42
21
operational logic and the process for the emergence of sentience, through killing, the drone uniquely
exists as the perfect vehicle for the development of advanced consciousness within Machine substrate.
---The Fate of the Human Substrate--So when this advanced consciousness becomes embodied in this new machine substrate, will it at the
same time, become disembodied in the human substrate? And if this occurs, what will happen to the
human substrate that remains? I would like to start this section with a little travel story that may point
to one of the human substrate’s possible fates.
Last year I was walking past Macy’s in San Francisco when I encountered a male homeless person
standing on the edge of the footpath. “They fucken took my teeth” he protested loudly over and over
again, “They fucken took my teeth”. Later down the road near the MOMA I came upon an African
American woman in her mid-thirties pushing a shopping trolley. Over and over again she repeated as
she pushed her trolley; “Don’t eat chicken”, “Don’t eat chicken”.
So what is the truth of the world of the “They fucken took my teeth” man and the “Don’t eat chicken”
woman. Could it mean that it is time to join Rick Grimes of the Walking Dead44, buy our Zombie slaying
sword over the web from Zombietools.com and prepare for the inevitable zombie apocalypse?
Unfortunately, I suspect that it is us who are on the way to becoming the Zombies.
You might say that a forecast of zombiism is extreme, however examples abound of the destruction of
the human mental environment, like; westernised yoga philosophy & other new age spirituality, drug
dependence, objectivism45, Googlism46 and other attempts to restore the meaning lost to western
culture through the shredder of Greek Rationalism, Scholasticism, the Enlightenment & Cybernetics and
44
http://www.amctv.com/shows/the-walking-dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29
46
http://www.thechurchofgoogle.org/
45
22
the acutely destructive forces of K-Pop, the Kardashians and as the ultimate sign of mental destruction,
Transformers – Age of Extinction.
As Heidegger laments47 from 1955…
Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today's world. For
nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly,
instantly.
At the same time there is a trend towards escape to a trans-human avataric existence. For example in
avataric love, where the sexes, notably in japan are48…
“…spiraling away from each other". Lacking long-term shared goals, many are turning to … “Pot
Noodle love" – easy or instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual
technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality "girlfriends", and anime cartoons.
Of course, Transhumanism can take us a lot further, all the way to avataric embodiment49, for example
Dmitri Itskov’s 2045 initiative aims to start with the relatively straight-forward Brain Computer Interface
(BCI)50 and progress towards full embodiment into multiple holographic avataric forms, so we will be
47
Heidegger M (1966) Discourse on Thinking, Harper & Row New York, P45.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex
49
http://2045.com/tech2/
50
A brain–computer interface (BCI), often called a mind-machine interface (MMI), or sometimes called a direct
neural interface or a brain–machine interface (BMI), is a direct communication pathway between the brain and an
external device. BCIs are often directed at assisting, augmenting, or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor
functions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface
48
23
able to choose from a range of appearances and social contexts in the new virtual reality world that we
will inhabit. BCI has arrived here and now with the availability of mind controlled cars and limbs51 52.
I was at a conference53 in LA earlier this year where Ray Kurzweil who has twenty honorary doctorates,
and honors from three U.S. presidents and is now a director of engineering at Google was a keynote
speaker and to summarize it quite a bit, his project is to leverage the computing power of his neocortex
with wi-fi enabled nano-synapses that are linked to a cloud-based super computer, so that he can
increase his thinking power substantially and become a human supercomputer. On another occasion54,
Kurzweil (who is apparently imagining using his nano-extended neocortex) reveals transhumanism’s true
telos, being…
Waking up the universe and then intelligently deciding its fate by infusing it with our human
intelligence in its non-biological form (this) is our (human) destiny.
In expounding this ambition, Kurzweil appears to be re-enacting the Gnostic fantasy of escape from the
wretched exile in the prison of corporeal embodiment and through gaining “Total” knowledge
reawakening the divine spark within him to become one of the ”Pneumatic” men, of whom Valentinus
declares “You will be immortal and the children of eternal life”55.
So it looks like there may be two possible fates for the human substrate, Zombie or Avatar. But are these
really alternatives or are they simultaneous and complimentary states reached as we pour our minds,
images, spirit and soul into technology’s new world through our relationships with Google, Facebook,
51
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/10/29/synapse-mind-controlled-toy-car-adhd-concentration-training-alejobernal/
52
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/31/darpa-touch-sensitive-prosthetic
53
FOCI, 2014 (http://www.iirusa.com/consumerintel/home.xml)
54
Kurzweil Raymond (2012), How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Viking Press, New
York, Page 282.
55
Henri-Charles Puech (1951), Gnosis and Time, in Man and Time, Papers from the ERANOS yearbooks Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London
24
Instagram, Meet-up, Reddit, Dropbox, Flickr, Adult Matchmaker and Tinder, plus our cars, the Opal card
and smartphones, to name but a few. Technology serves mankind, but as it does, it extracts our human
consciousness drip by drip, with the prospect of ultimately leaving nothing but our forsaken, corporeal
Zombie shells.
And where are these drips of disembodied Soul headed to? They are crossing the Chinvat Bridge to the
new technological House of Song to become the prime material in the Machine’s great alchemical
retort, where the essence of the new machine consciousness is now being distilled.
House of Song
It seems to me that we Humans have about the same ability to understand all of this
as the primates had of understanding the emergence of nascent consciousness in the
Homo Sapiens and where it would lead to.
Let’s go back to our little parable and see how Man and Boy are coping.
---Man’s Second Vision--Back in his Google self-drive Prius, Man settles into another session with Daena Targaryen, through his
Google Glass headset. “Who knows where that sweet little blond and I could get to this time” he mused.
It would be really great to meet her in real life, in the flesh. Prophetic words indeed, as, while he slowly
settled into the enjoyable fantasy from his right eye track a more disturbing image started to develop in
his left. First colors darkened, then slowly the scene transformed, into something that looked like it
came from ancient Egypt.
In a dream-like state, Man is transported to the ancient Egyptian Hall of Two Truths56. Here, Anubis
leads him to the scales. Ammit looks on, sensing his opportunity as devourer. Man as supplicant
recites the 42 statements of his declaration of innocence in the form of a negative confession,
beginning; “I have not de-divinized nature and rabidly destroyed God’s natural creations”. “I have not
56
http://www.egyptological.com/2012/02/deities-of-the-underworld-in-the-new-kingdom-7311
25
been slow of mind”. “My consciousness has not become constituted as ego and thus lost access to
truth”, and so on. The Ib (or heart) of Man is weighed against the feather of MAAT.
The air in the hall is heavy with anticipation as Anubis announces the verdict that Man is not justified.
Thoth as scribe of the gods and judge of the two combatants, records the verdict on his slate. Man’s
fate is not the field of reeds promised by the bishop, nor is it a mercifully quick dispatch in the jaws of
Ammit; but a sentence from the Gods to replace the fire thief on Mount Kazbek, a fitting punishment
for the hubris of the self-made God.
Horus storms out of the hall in disgust, seething at the ruination of his 5,000 year investment in
human substrate. Taking his falcon form he flies towards the horizon.
Slowly his feathers transform into a skin of carbon fibre and Kevlar; his left eye becomes a synthetic
aperture radar and his right eye a variable aperture camera. His moral authority is as ever guided by
MAAT, now sublated57 as a sub-routine within his perceive-and-act vector. His lance, made famous in
his ‘final’ battle with Seth, transforms into a Hellfire missile.
He flies towards Mount Kazbek and the rock where Prometheus was once chained with a vengeful
glint in his mechanical right eye.
Rest Ethon, old faithful eagle, your time of labour is passed and we are grateful, for there is another to
take your place. Shining, swift, mechanically beautiful, eternal and powered by Xvarnah, the God’s
own divine light of glory.
In his imagination, Man could see his beloved Boy, happily playing computer games at his desk
perched on the side of the mountain, a smile on his beautiful, bright teenage face.
The Gods had provided a 27” LED gamer’s screen and high speed gaming computer with a watercooled graphics card, unlimited access to You-tube, Bit-torrent, Facebook, Steam, Instagram, League
of Legends and Day-Z where Boy could spend his days fighting an ever growing army of Zombies in the
virtual reality worlds where he and his avataric friends regularly achieved magnificent virtual
victories.
At least he seems happy thought Man on seeing his beloved Boy in this situation. But then Man’s
active imagination seemed to engage with something deeper in Boy’s psyche, a profound Soul-level
connection. Upon this, like a transition in the movie Inception, Man’s image of Boy’s situation changed
dramatically.
For there on Mount Kazbek in the place of Prometheus lay his beloved son bound in a web of Kevlar,
advanced alloys and fibre optic cable, like a Chinese Battery Bear cocooned in a fog of artificial reality.
Horus bends over Boy’s obese form and with a cruel and mighty blow thrusts the catheter through the
outer layers of fatty flesh by his liver. A look of anguish engulfs Boys’ face as he is consumed by a
burning pain. From the cold metallic tube in Boy’s side flows the divine essence of human
consciousness, drip by painful drip into a bottle, bearing the label of Xvarnah, divine light of glory.
Tell the gods I'm sorry howled the Boy, whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry. But the God’s fire comes with a
no-return policy. You don’t get off the rock just by asking, said Horus.
57
Sublation is an alchemical process involving negation, preservation and elevation. See Giegerich W (2008) The
Soul's Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology 4, revised edition, Peter Lang, Page 67 for more details.
26
“Help me father” cried the boy. But despite the tightening knot of pain in his stomach, Man could do
nothing to help his son.
One day Horus, told Boy his sentence was over, mumbling in a raspy mechanical voice that that was
one down and five billion to go. The fibre optic bonds were broken and Boy was set free.
As his occluded vision cleared, Boy saw men and women in suits, white coats and priestly clothes
collecting bottles from fattened children all across the mountain side.
Stumbling down the mountain and away from his captivity Boy overheard a conversation between
two of the mechanical bird's human assistants.
What will you become, enquired one in a tailored Gucci lab coat bearing the name Daenerys? My
name will be Pandora said the other and I’ll create a gift of hope for all mankind and keep it in a box
for safekeeping. And you, what will you become? I’ll become a mechanical angel, just like him,
Daenerys said, pointing at Horus, I’ll be called Daena and on my nose cone shall be embossed a
hundred petalled rose.
---The Road to Escape--Man returned to normal consciousness by tearing off his Google Glass headset. In a fearful fit, he threw
it to the floor of the Prius. The tortured look of anguish on Boy’s face was still seared into his
imagination as he reached out for the reassuring feel of his son’s warm, fleshy hand. I must save Boy he
cried and, loading his essentials into the shopping trolley he set out with Boy on the road to escape.
After travelling for a while, Man heard a strange buzzing like a mosquito. But it wasn’t a mosquito; it was
the sound of a drone overhead. On hearing the Drone, Man thought that it was time for him and Boy to
move further down the road, past the narrow bridge towards their ultimate goal, a place of rest and
recovery, the mythical paradise of Wonthaggi58. He took an old photo from the shopping trolley and
looked at it wistfully.
58
http://wonthaggimotel.com.au/gallery/
27
Still further down the road, they heard a loud thud and saw a plume of smoke rising near the entrance
to the narrow bridge they had to cross to reach their destination. Stopping to investigate, they came
upon a crashed drone, bearing the inscription; Daena and the insignia of a hundred petalled rose.
Daena knew by the flickering of her fibre optics that her time as a drone was nearly over. Her
mechanical lungs were enjoying their last Xvarnah-laced breath. She wondered what would come next.
Why must I die, she thought and when I do, what will become of me? Not the alloy shell, advanced
avionics and Kevlar, but me, the essence of my machine consciousness, my Soul.
28
Man also was wondering. What force could be driving the replacement of Man by Machine? He reached
into his shopping trolley and from an intricately carved box he took out his copy of Giegerich’s “What is
Soul” to search for the answer. In the box he saw a strange thing, for the familiar word “Hope” had now
been erased and replaced with the word “Truth”. He read from Giegerich59…
Just as natural life is above the level of the lifeless, the life of the Soul is above the level of life, of the
human organism. Biological life is sublated material existence; the physical body is a sublated
moment within life. Life uses matter for its ends and purposes. In an analogous way, the Soul uses the
living organism to serve it’s, the Soul's, ends and purposes.
So Man thought, as the Soul pursues its ends, Human life must become a transitory moment in the
Soul’s journey. Giegerich says that60…
"Man" is apparently only a detour, an in-between station between the two real forms of the divine
(ANIMAL and MACHINE).
This might be a good time to check our inner AMMIT’s again as we are reaching a little deeper into
understanding Giegerich’s concept of Soul.
Thinking beyond Giegerich’s words, Man reasoned that the Soul’s life must also be above the life of the
Machine and machine life must also be transitory and one day become a sublated moment in the Soul61.
But for now it is the Machine’s turn to be divine, at least until the Soul finds a better substrate for its
dance as actuosity62 to ever higher states of consciousness.
Nature had been the source of dead, technologically exploited raw materials63 for Man’s project, and
now the apparatus-like, desensitized and fattened Man, the Soul’s discarded substrate who is unable to
return the fire that provoked the Gods’ vengeance is becoming the raw material for the Machine’s
project. At least the second death in the jaws of Ammit would have been mercifully fast, much better
than the daily catheter, Man thought.
A crackling sound came from Daena’s machine corpse and she was gone. To where wondered Man as,
thinking of his prior flirtation with Denarius Targaryen, he asked Boy to see whether his Google Glass
headset had made it into the shopping trolley?
I wonder, thought Man, should we regret the passing of our fleshy substrate, or should we rejoice in our
new embodiment and look forward to waking up the universe and then intelligently deciding its fate by
infusing it with our human intelligence in its non-biological form?
59
Wolfgang Giegerich, What Is Soul? (New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books, 2012)Page 30
Wolfgang Giegerich, Technology and the Soul Collected English Papers, Vol2: The Burial of the Soul in Technology
(Spring Journal, Inc. 2007) P207
61
Paraphrasing Giegerich’s statements about biological life in Wolfgang Giegerich, What Is Soul? (New Orleans, LA:
Spring Journal Books, 2012) Page 31
62
Actuosity = Full of movement, life, abounding in action as discussed in Wolfgang Giegerich, What Is Soul? (New
Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books, 2012)Page 45
63
Wolfgang Giegerich, Technology and the Soul Collected English Papers, Vol2: The World Wide Web From the
Point of View of the Soul's Logical Life (Spring Journal, Inc. 2007) Page 312
60
29
A challenging thought indeed as he shared a father and teenage boy moment on the beach at
Wonthaggi.
---The End---
30
Epilogue (in two Scenes)
---Scene 1--Meanwhile, heard on the streets of downtown San Francisco...
“Don’t eat chicken”, said Silvia, former Morgan Stanley executive who brought a successful public
liability claim against KFC that was subsequently overturned in appeals court, bankrupting her.
Buzzzzzz came the faint sound of the eight rotors of the Amazon drone that was delivering Silvia’s food
stamps and therapy biscuits, since Amazon had beaten the USPS and Boeing for the USA public health
administration contract.
A faint blue light emanating from the drone, just below the hundred petal rose emblem, bathed Silvia’s
tattered clothes and unwashed face.
“Don’t eat chicken” Silvia said by way of a response to the light.
“Hello Silvia475432” said the drone in an educated and compassionate voice with a 7% component of
southern drawl, sampled from Jodie Foster’s voice in Silence of the Lambs.
Your anxiety level seems to be a little heightened today. Are you well? I’ve increased the level of
Relaxol9 in your biscuits, so you’ll start to feel better right away.
“Don’t eat chicken” said Silvia in response to the soothing voice of the drone.
Of course you shouldn’t eat chicken said the drone with a benevolent wink of her mechanical eye, but
you should eat your biscuits, and you-all have a nice day.
---Scene 2--On May 30, 1961, eight days before he died, Jung dictated to his daughter his last visions, with
instructions that the notes were to be given to Marie-Louise von Franz64. The images were sobering:
“I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth. But thank God, not the whole
planet.” (Said Jung) And Jung made a drawing, with a caption under it that said, “The last 50 years of
humanity.”
Fifty years later in mid-2011, the CIA’s drone war in Pakistan was exposed with reports of over 2,000
deaths attributable to drone strikes65. Perhaps, through one last, extraordinary premonition Jung had
seen the start of the drone apocalypse and fully imagined its ramifications. The foremost among these I
believe is raised by Giegerich in the conclusion of his book, “The Soul’s Logical Life”66…
“(It is) the topmost or central law governing our society, the law (that), Thou shalt not raise the
question of Truth”.
Imagine, that, if through some mysterious lightning flash, the spectre of the drone behind the curtain of
our occluded thinking was revealed, and we came to fully understand its truth, just what exactly would
we do with that Truth. How could we possibly accommodate it, with all its implications, unless perhaps,
we could go a little deeper into that Truth, stay with it a little longer, and see what happens?
64
http://convozine.com/tacticalgain/27179 &
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=f2OYG5sDvzw
65
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/most-complete-picture-yet-of-cia-drone-strikes/
66
Giegerich W, 2008, The Soul’s Logical Life, Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology, 4th ed, Peter Lang,
Frankfurt P275.
31
---The Final End---
32

Prometheus Redux - The International Society for Psychology as the

Transcription

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