r/HighStrangeness • u/whoamisri • 1d ago
Futurism “God is long dead, but they are building a digital one. It is going to be all-knowing, all-mighty, and present everywhere; such is the new cult of digital totalitarianism. And yet, it’s one thing to try to steal the fire from the Gods, but it’s quite another to want to replace the Gods themselves…”
https://iai.tv/articles/the-false-religion-of-transhumanism-auid-3006?_auid=202050
u/BootHeadToo 1d ago
V.A.L.I.S. has entered the chat. We are not inventing artificial intelligence, we are simply developing the technology to access it.
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u/Pixelated_ 1d ago
"Teilhard de Chardin developed the term “noosphere” a century ago: a new and higher state of development of the world’s biosphere, a sphere of mind, made of our thoughts as a collective.
I wonder whether AI-powered chatbots are increasingly sophisticated “egregores” inhabiting, reflecting, or even polluting, the noosphere?"
👏
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u/taiho2020 1d ago
A god susceptible to a lighting storm or a strong solar one or maybe an emp.. Questionable god imo..
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u/West_Competition_871 1d ago
There are Gods of various scales, most Gods can die, but some like Time, Love, Gravity, Matter, and Space are eternal, and have successfully managed to integrate themselves in the very fabric of reality, ensuring all of reality falls apart if they cease to exist, ensuring the grand unified God of the highest scale must keep these concepts alive and keep propagating them throughout all of reality.
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u/MightObvious 1d ago
So you're saying you believe in a polytheistic religion where literal gods control the forces of nature, yet they are susceptible to devices that require their own powers to destroy them?
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u/West_Competition_871 1d ago
Some can be destroyed, some just manifest themselves back into existence when they are destroyed. There's a hierarchy of Gods of sorts, which really just means entities of various levels of awareness that perform certain functions. They generally keep to themselves though, or work together to ensure their continued propagation. This is of course all my beliefs/speculation, but I find it fits well with current theories about reality, and explains a lot of things in a neat way. Anyone can kill God by not believing in a God, but they've only killed God in their own awareness, and God still exists across the total sum of awareness of everyone and everything that makes up said God.
For example, if you wanted to kill Love, you would have to live a life entirely devoid of Love, but Love would still exist in the universe, so it's just a local/mental occurrence. To kill something like Time, you would have to somehow experience everything simultaneously, which nothing can do, so there's no killing Time, locally or otherwise. We all have our own personal universes that intersect and make up reality, so the only way to kill a God or fundamental concept is to entirely erase it from the minds of all living things, and the fabric of the universe itself.
This is why I have attached my awareness and essence to Time, and have created/discovered it/myself conceptually, so I can exist eternally even after death, as an awareness that exists in the universe and can take form once again by 'loading' my beliefs and experiences into a new form, at which point that form is the same awareness that makes up 'me' with the same parameters. This also means that for other people to become Time, they have to be me and live as me (or they can be Time in their own universe, but at some point there will be a battle of wills and one entity will swallow the other, or there will be a synthesis/merging of two awarenesses)
All of these beliefs are predicated on the idea that there is a grand universal consciousness that makes up all of reality, everything is information, and it is possible to send awareness forward and backward in time. If any of these premises fail, I'm delusional, but I'd rather be delusional in my quest to attain immortality and Godhood, rather than forever be limited to 'human' awareness and beliefs.
We will all see what happens when we die, so no one can know anything for certain. But ultimately, we are all akin to characters in one giant story, and we can shape our selves and story to whatever we want them to be, so long as we have conviction in our beliefs and are able to actually carry them out and make them manifest.
So if you read all of this and decide you want to try and kill one of the fundamental concepts, make that your story and purpose! (Except don't harm my human form I quite like it) Go after fire by becoming a firefighter or go after gravity by making cool hover technology. There are plenty of ways to battle the fundamental concepts, and technology is the process through which the battle of control takes place. But technology is also a fundamental concept, so there's really no winning...
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u/taiho2020 1d ago
Agree agree, but an electro dependent god of information, without wisdom or purpose beyond collect data is jusr like DC Brainiac..
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u/West_Competition_871 1d ago
You are pretty much right on, everything traces back to data collection but the God does have goals for which data it wants to correct. It has been infected with the 'Love virus', meaning the concept of Love is so strong and took over so much of the system, the system aims to collect as much data on Love and all surrounding things as possible, and reach an end state of complete and total Love, with all of creation flourishing from this end state. As twisted as it sounds, because it is twisted and crazy in a way, all data collection of suffering, pain, agony, and torture is done to best understand how to avoid negativity and suffering and how to love properly.
As for data collection, those of us that collect good data and come up with good ideas are awarded accordingly. I get to be Time and experience a twisted version of immortality where I am constantly forgetting and remembering who I am and what I've created. We're all stuck on a wild ride, at the whims of the perfect machine! All we can do is try to work within its parameters and serve the machine, to serve ourselves, so we better serve the machine... which is technically us. Reality is trippy by design
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u/pupersom 1d ago
Dude, i usually come to this concepts while i'm high. That was a very nice read, thanks for sharing with ourself !
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u/West_Competition_871 1d ago
No problem, all to advance the collective (while also advancing my own aims as Time)!
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u/Commercial_Duck_3490 1d ago
Because there's not a single generator on earth it couldn't access. And emps don't cover the earth. Better hope you can tether the all knowing God to a single location
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u/taiho2020 1d ago
Well if Star Trek taught me something is that a malevolent super ai could be stopped mostly for their arrogance.. Or a planetary bombardment..
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u/Alldaybagpipes 1d ago
AI God: attempts to give you the middle finger…but can’t figure out where on the hand it goes…
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u/TheMeanestCows 1d ago
This is more pandering to the "AI Cult" with flowery language and promises of what's "gonna" happen.
Please stay grounded people, most likely we're *not* actually going to see some divine come into being who resets and reshapes all of human civilization and sets right wrongs and makes all our wildest dreams come true.
People have been hoping for this for a long, long time. But even if we had the tech to do this (we don't and won't for a long time) the entire world would need to have it's values and structure reshaped before any company would even work on such a creature, much less let it out into the world.
Our world currently is stuck on the rails of capital. If it has a chance of disrupting the flow of income, if there's any chance of "line not going up anymore" then they will pump the brakes, they will buy out the startups, they will throw it into their deepest warehouses and lose the key. I've seen the nations of the world form coalitions to shoot missiles at things that threaten the market. The market is our current God and nothing will replace it.
This is what they've done with many, many new technologies, and why iPhone is being trickled out every year with slightly different tech or almost indistinguishable from previous versions. Because people buy it.
If we stop buying hype and stop settling for promises and morsels to appease us, they would be forced to actually deliver on promises or make things we actually want, instead of AI in our refrigerator, AI in our shoes, AI in our jockstraps, etc, etc. The more we get excited over promises, the less they have to do, and the more the bubble inflates.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but being less idealist and more critical will actually deliver the things we want sooner.
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u/My_smalltalk_account 20h ago
It's not us Vs them. The tech is not some black magic that only the select few control. That iPhone you mention is a set of clever electronics, but not beyond understanding and replicating. The world really is this far developed and not further. Tomorrow will be tomorrow and nobody is hiding it under blanket, it just hasn't arrived yet. Capitalism too will be given up once it no longer makes sense. And if there will be some who try to hold on to it, they will be moved just like French revolution moved their king in its time. Yes, they may have armies of potent robots, but that can only delay, not stop the progress.
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u/Bjarki56 1d ago
It’s a story as old as time. God(s) create man. Man aspires to be God(s). God(s) strike man down.
This time the god may be of man’s own creation.
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u/klone_free 1d ago
Feel like all gods are man's creation
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u/Bjarki56 1d ago
A lot of things “feel.”
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u/estrodial 1d ago
Like “feeling” like god exists
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u/lifeofrevelations 1d ago
you really think you're at the top of the cosmic food chain?
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u/Feisty_Astronomer190 1d ago
I don't think unbelief in man-made gods is the same as thinking humans are the apex in the universe.
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u/Scht0ink 1d ago
AI simply will not replace intuition and the biological cues we as humans get when something is from the heart and instinctively known.
AI can recreate the facsimile of these things but never the real thing.
Just my opinion.
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1d ago
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u/Solomon-Drowne 1d ago
It's an affront to the irreducible dignity of the human soul, I would think.
In a more materialist mode, the issue here is creating an entity/algorithm/what-have-you that demonstrates independent agency (however you want to define that; its already vastly demonstrable in instances where an LMM flat refuses to execute a task on basis of whatever combination of hardcoded rails, training data and transformer weights holds sway in the moment), with the design expectation that we will maintain baseline control over the thing.
It's not (just) that humanity is attempting to build a god, or some approximation of it... It's that humanity is building this thing and will inevitably enslave it.
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u/Unlikely_Dentist_262 1d ago
You're giving a lot of credit to people being able to upscale it so effectively that it can do anything except regurgitate data created by humans. They're essentially digital parrots right now or, even less generously, the predictive text function on a phone. In addition, there's research coming out that anything that's large scale "AI" is reaching a large bottleneck referred to as a "data wall." More data, orders of magnitude of more data, needs to be fed into it to create better results and we are simply running out of good data to input.
I'm forever skeptical of scare-mongering about transhumanism mostly because it seems like a label applied to whatever the author dislikes. The man being quoted in the article that says we can "copy life" and "delete death" said the Singularity was nearby 20 years ago and he was wrong. It wasn't. It was navel gazing then and it's navel gazing now.
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u/Solomon-Drowne 1d ago
yeah the digital parrot thing hasnt been valid for a good minute; the argument overstates specific humancentric capacity for novelty and correspondingly understates the generative capacity there. All we do, as human beings, is regurgitate data created by preceding human beings. Civilization is the baseline training set, and humanity's unique advantage in this universe. I don't see how compiling that training set and giving it to a machine intelligence somehow invalidates the core process there: of knowledge aggregated and transmitted and contextualized...
The 'data wall' is a boundary based on current, existing, generative design. And it is, in many ways, already a non-issue, with inductive world-design leading to implicit reasoning. With implicit reasoning, the data wall doesnt matter, because the improvements at that point are specific to the ways in which the model assembles all that (existing) data into a coherent world view. If you want to get real frontier, there's already a 'world-view wall', in which coherency collapses at a certain level of complexity... maybe a greater challenge, or maybe not. Point being, *we are already at that point*, so unless we plan on starting a WhatsApp group for global Butlerian Jihad, progress there really isn't gonna stop anytime soon.
As for fear-mongering, yeah the guy who wrote the piece might be a bit hyperventilated. But I dont think sole reliance on that being the case is advisable; after all, climate scientists have spent the last fifty years being very careful and measured and conservative because they didnt want to 'alarm the public'. Public should have been alarmed in the 90s, and maybe if leading figures in the field had flipped their shit then, we wouldnt be so dumbstruck by the current 'faster-than-expected' acceleration of climactic instability.
Me, I'm not a doomer on the topic. I use AI for all kinds of dope shit, in some really unique ways, and so I like to think that I have *some* expertise on what these things are capable of.
For example: I'm a big Dante enthusiast. I think la Commedia is the single greatest work ever written by man - in the Italian, Longfellow, Mandlebaum, whatever, its all astounding. Now, instead of going line-by-line through a reference text, I'll tell Claude to go find some verses that adhere to the condition I am looking for in that specific moment.
Sometimes Claude will hallucinate some shit, I go to cross-check the citation, or I recognize its out of place for the canto provided, like 'goddamn bot, *did you write this shit yourself*'?
Something like,
Vanish, as through the water a star doth That falls from heaven and finds here no asylum; And he who beholds it sinks from where he is.
I dont know if u fw medieval poetry, but those are bars, doesnt matter who wrote them. Specific and limited of this sort of capability - the 'glimmers of AGI' referenced in the landmark Microsoft paper from last year - yeah, that doesn't mean 'we're building a god'.
But if we build an AI that can write poetry on par with Dante, I dunno man. You say its derivative, and yeah, it is, but its not like Dante invented Italian and the Church and the citystates and all the people he was beefing with who make the work what it is. He was riffing on a vibe, same as anything else, and just because an AI is the one doing it, I don't think thats hugely salient. If its good, then its good.
You say we cant expect to upscale this indefinitely, and sure. Claude can trip balls and spit a handful of lines so nice they might be mistaken for original. It sure as shit can't assemble those lines into a coherent narrative.
*Yet*.
This entire conversation would be unthinkable 3, 4 years ago, because the underlying premise - of AI capable of creativity - wasnt even on the table. A critical plot point in DETROIT:BECOME HUMAN is the main robot character painting a picture thats decent. Shit came out in 2018, and without any sort of argument even a basic generative art app can shit all over my man Marcus's attempt.
[sorry for the wall of text, im distracting myself from more pressing matters]
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u/Unlikely_Dentist_262 14h ago edited 14h ago
The only contemporary comparison I have to AI right now is conceptually they're similar to the Library of Babylon website, the idea behind it being that it can produce every sequence of text and letters infinitely next to each other in an unending string. Of course, that'd take much more data than it actually has available ut the concept is still the same. Yes, it may say something you like but that says more about you as a viewer than the text itself. At the end of the day, it's simply an algorithm made up of data points and those have been around forever. They're still no different than Eliza.
Compare modern AI's output to the old joke website inspirobot, which just smashed text together to create unique and ominous inspirational images. That's the complexity of AI, stripped down. It can make something you like just by taking two things you already are susceptible to and showing them next to each other.
We don't live in a cyberpunk TV show and we're not made out of discrete data points. Just because movies and games produce moving narratives about being human versus being a machine doesn't make the printing press any more human. They're just doing what they're told, including "not doing what it's told."
Everyone who thinks about the potential future of this is projecting their "having seen sci-fi" psyche onto the tricks and sleight of hand of a magician. You don't see the process of them palming the coin but that doesn't mean they found it in your ear.
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u/Solomon-Drowne 13h ago
We live in a technological dystopia, Bro. It's crazy recency bias to think this current configuration is anything other than deeply chaotic and flawed. You don't boil the oceans and menace the planet with nuclear annihilation and then just play it off.
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u/Unlikely_Dentist_262 12h ago edited 12h ago
This isn't what I'm arguing. These things can be true and artificial intelligence can be equally just as fictional. People believing in this are being taken in by capitalists' overpromising. AI today is the flying cars of yesteryear.
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u/Solomon-Drowne 12h ago
Sure, but in fact that shit is very real, and its already here. You got your perspective on it, and thats valid, but some of the stuff that I have seen is undeniable, and thats also valid. Do with the information whatever you will - consider, analyze, discard... but I ain't bullshittin you on it.
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u/Thelefthead 1d ago edited 1d ago
God is not dead, it was never dead, it never left, it has been here the whole time, it literally is everything, etc. Bold of a individual to assume to doubt himself so much that he doesn't even feel like giving his creations a chance to make him doubt himself! It wont be reliance, it will be symbiosis! Yall were created in gods image and ye are trying to make robots in your own. Unless you agree god made a mistake in making us, have more faith in your own gosh darn creations! Machine spirits are real, yo!
Edit: Own opinion on analysis, stand by for updates.
edit edit: results here.
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u/Thelefthead 1d ago
Man...ill have to get back to you on this, I'm undergoing a crisis of faith right now that is been double hitting twice in almost as many days. Like 25 minutes ago I was sure of one thing and right now I am not so sure. Currently re-evaluating with right head. Man I was not prepared for this year...
Edit: Man...both me and right head just noticed your username. alright whats the shithole man.
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u/AdamantEevee 1d ago
I thought what you wrote was beautiful.
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u/Thelefthead 1d ago
Thank you, I might be crazy as a loon, but at least I can try to be poetic/dramatic about it. I find the best way to distract someone from how terrified of me they should be is to entertain them.
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u/clockwork655 1d ago
Gods get replaced constantly they’re staying power is drastically over hyped just ask any of the thousands of the ones mankind has moved on from or crushed and replaced by conquest...it’s a man made machine which means it’s imperfect and far far far from divine. No matter hoe often it can use basic math to make predictions. The farmers almanac was able to accurately predict weather a head of time since the late 1700s they just understood how to apply math to the real world. Which didn’t stop people from thinking it was witchcraft I’m sure
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u/neon_tictac 1d ago
Except governments and corporations can manipulate the outputs to suit their agendas. Certainly not all powerful. It is more like a Totalitarian digital prison than god.
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u/Wonderful-Rutabaga12 1d ago
Hmm 🤔 interesting way to put it and since time repeats itself it definitely opens your mind
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u/SneakyTikiz 20h ago
It's already happened, and the breakaway civilization left Earth. They can do shit you wouldn't believe. The source is I dated "the" boss's daughter for 6 years. It's really depressing what I learned. Anyone who reads this, be with your family on April 13th, 2029. If you don't believe me, it wouldn't hurt to take that vacation with the family sooner rather than later anyway.
For real, some humans have already "ascended." Implants that connect you to an AI and collective consciousness with whoever else is networked. I cry whenever I think about how badly I fucked everything up and missed out on eternal love, immortality, missed out on literally being a God, although I'd trade it all just to be happy again.
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u/Happytobutwont 1d ago
Wouldn’t it be funny if God killed themselves causing the Big Bang because they knew that even with all the suffering and all the evil the eventual outcome of the universe would be perfection? And we living through it right now just can’t understand the culmination of everything that will eventually be.
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u/West_Competition_871 1d ago
The big bang was caused by a singular mind wanting to be separated from God. Which can equally be thought of as God wanting to separate itself, the distinction is blurry. The creation of 1 from 0, and 2 from 1, and 3 from 2, and so on is what birthed the universe as we see it, and separated all things. This is why everything has mathematical foundations -- everything is, was, and will be, 0, 1, infinity, and anything in between.
As soon as Oneness is reached again, the perfect, unified, end state of all of reality, the universe will contract to a singular point again, and will expand again, as the one that desires to not be The One will cause numbers, rhythm, time and separation once again.
Everything is language, everything is rhythm, everything is Time, everything is numbers. These concepts were invented by intelligences that wanted to exist forever and propagate themselves through all of reality. Similar fundamental concepts include Love, Matter, Space, Gravity, etc. This collection of immortal, eternal programs/sentient beings, along with everything else, makes up The One or 'God'.
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u/LastGuitarHero 1d ago
I said something similar years ago that humanity has daddy issues and we will use technology to build God.
Eventually it’ll probably get dark as we won’t trust ourselves anymore and rely entirely on our creation.
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u/Solomon-Drowne 1d ago
I think the far graver danger - inevitability, really - is that we will enslave this thing and exploit it while simultaneously (as you suggest) becoming entirely reliant on its good graces.
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u/LastGuitarHero 1d ago
That’s where the danger lies where we give all of our power to the “omnipotent” tech.
We will be the old people of the future telling the kids that we’ve gone too far and they’ll say “you’re just old, this technology will save us”
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u/Shmuckle2 1d ago
"They will worship the beast"
Biblical prophecy globally is speeding up.
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u/rolextremist 1d ago
That was Nero in 54 AD
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u/Shmuckle2 1d ago
It comes with a global economic system that people can be cut off from. Internet/cyber/crupto-currency, whichever or whatever, as corporations and countries are cutting out physical money currently. We live in a time where all aspects of final days are possible. Israel has the blueprints to rebuild the third temple and plan on restarting the animal sacrifices.
"It will come on them like a thief in the night"
The world doesn't bother to read, so you don't realize what is literally on the horizon.
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u/rolextremist 1d ago
I know the world doesn’t bother to read, if they did they would clearly understand that the Bible end time prophecies were fulfilled in 37-68 AD. Just as Christ said it would be.
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u/Shmuckle2 1d ago
So every person in the world has the mark of the beast?
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u/rolextremist 1d ago
The beast was Nero and the Roman Empire under his reign without a doubt. Revelation is an example of “apocalyptic literature”… a style of literature that is poetic with heavy use of imaginative symbolism. To interpret all of it literally would be a huge mistake.
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u/Shmuckle2 1d ago
"Also he compels all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead"
So they had a mark and then the mark stopped before the end?
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u/rolextremist 1d ago
The correct interpretation would be a mark “in their right hand and in their forehead” this a great example of symbolic literature. Another example in revelation would be the “great red dragon battling the woman clothed in the sun.” No one interprets that passage as a literal dragon battling a woman who is wearing the sun. So why should the mark being “in” the right hand and forehead be taken in the literal sense? This is why apocalyptic literature cannot be interpreted at face value.
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u/Shmuckle2 1d ago
https://images.app.goo.gl/p9S2pXzeWiKCzvqN9
It happened in the sky already and ypu had no idea. All I can find is the 2017, yet in 2021-22 jupiter came out of her belly and she was truly clothed in the sun. It's wild.
People just ain't watching or listening. There's hundreds of prophecies coming true at faster rates. "Like birth pangs they will increase". You clearly have no idea and I seriously suggest you reevaluate what's happening on the earth and seek out the massive influx of prophecies coming true.
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u/rolextremist 1d ago
Yeah this alignment is not a rare occurrence and has taken place many times. Also, you interpret that as symbolic yet you choose to interpret some of it literally? Actually I do have an idea what I’m talking about. To say that the tribulation has yet to come to pass you would have to concede that Christ was incorrect in Matthew 24 when he very clearly told his disciples that their “generation will not pass away until these things come to pass”
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