Artificial Intelligence and Anthroposophy: Rudolf Steiner, Arhiman & AI - pontos fathom podcast ep20

Artificial Intelligence and Anthroposophy: Rudolf Steiner, Arhiman & AI 

- pontos fathom podcast ep20

welcome everyone to pontos fathom press this is pontos fathom podcast episode 20 and our topic today is artificial intelligence and anthroposophy so continuing our anthroposophy series that included uh anthroposophy and dune as well as anthroposophy and bleach today we're going to turn it and ground it into uh not only the phenomenon of artificial intelligence as we find ourselves in it in the world now but also projecting out and looking at the works of august moldenhauer in his artificial psychology of desiring machines mostly in the first volume impedance and admittance in desiring machines but also somewhat on the psychoanalysis of art artificial intelligence we really want to look at the works of rudolf steiner and talk about some key areas around his lucifer and ariman lecture his concept of the eighth sphere is very interesting and sort of the nature of uh you know uh steiner wrote a book called the knowledge of higher worlds and how it is achieved and while a lot of this stuff talks about the soul and the idea of occult science and also occult mystery schools what is interesting in the intersection with artificial intelligence is really coming out of moldenhauer's book uh impedance and admits and desiring machines in the sense that it explores not only the normal topics of the say the ethics of artificial intelligence but it expands that ethics to talk about where there is a sort of valence so you have the idea of giving machines intelligence and then on the other hand it seems that uh currently sort of the crisis is that we're in people are being robbed of their intelligence or people are being narrowed down you know there's restrictions on things that people can say and there's uh less of an emphasis on imagination and the world as it has been traditionally and more moving towards some artificial constructs where the valance now the balance seems to be imbuing machines with intelligence while at the same time turning people into more controlled and controllable automatons is that's all moldenhauer's conjecture but i think there's a lot of interesting things in that spectrum that we can talk about and uh let's let's dig right into it so yeah so the first off let's kind of continue on that note of um the idea of how anthroposophy kind of gets us to this to this topic and i think one one interesting point that rudolf steiner mentions is the sort of the nature of the human intelligence right so the idea is um for humans uh he talks about the nature of human intelligence and sort of like a sacredness to it so the idea now this is not to say that we're anti-artificial intelligence it's nothing of the case the idea here is mostly to explore um the idea of the evolution of ai and and also the evolution of human intelligence so steiner will talk about uh this idea of the intersection of intelligence and the will and how in the traditional world you know in the say the the traditional world of we came up through religion you know so cultures have their various religions lots of them have this concept of the soul and um and this all kind of changed around the 19th century 19th century we have industrial revolution we have another a lot of things that start happening there and steiner says uh in in about the 19th century says now we think of it what inevitably resulted from this about the middle of the 19th century when the materialistic tendencies of men reach their deepest point naturally there are people who knew there was a spiritual world and also knew what was to be found in the spiritual world but they had never seen that world and indeed the most outstanding savants in the 19th century were mostly focused toward machines okay so this was the age and just just as you know we have these kind of artificial almost rifts uh between science and religion you know that the typical atheist attitude that it can all be described by science at the same time scientists true scientists will never say the science is settled science is never settled right science is an idea of inquiry and it's null hypothesis so basically science is always that which isn't the case we prove something to not be and then we keep moving forward if it was the case that there was no future we would have never advanced anything from science so you just think of how advanced those pocket computers we have that our cell phones right this is a culmination of hundreds of fields of past overturned science that produced this object that we can use in in a discrete way but scientific and korean spiritual inquiry sort of split into different paths let's say and also philosophical inquiry becomes less and less apparent these days so let's kind of jump into what steiner says about this this mo this motion he kind of says this one thing in in his book lucifer and ariman

do you not see the continually growing number of people at the present time who do not want any science of the spirit or any knowledge of the spiritual do you not see how numerous are the people to whom the open forces of religion no longer give any inner stimulus whether they go to church or not is a matter of complete indifference to a large number of human human beings the old religious impulses mean nothing to them but neither will they bring themselves to give a thought to what can stream into our civilization in new spiritual life they resisted they rejected it they regarded as folly as something inconvenient but you see human beings as we live in the earth are variably a unity our spiritual nature cannot be separated from our physical nature so here he says something really interesting about the eaters of the soul and spirit uh and this is the way that spirit is streaming into the earth evolved into the luciferic element is it is it conveyed by lucifer so the idea of spirit and soul consumption here he talks about and then he talks about these harmonic and luciferian points but i think the simplified version of it is um even the scientists would say that say all life on earth is energized by the sun right the sun's energy um feeds plants plants feed us so if we replace the word spirit with energy like the scientist might do then we can kind of see oh yeah there's a streaming energy from the sun it hits the earth but then if you go back a little further if you look at solar system theory something like this the earth was actually formed out of the sun right so suddenly the overlap you get with say sun worship and scientific inquiry by other name is in place right so the idea here for steiner is simply this people aren't looking at spiritual things anymore they're concerned with material things okay and um one thing that's interesting in moldenhauer's impedance in admittance and desiring machines is he says okay let's conjecture about desiring machines what would a true artificial intelligence be and you we all have artificial intelligences in our lives now like our phones have many apps that have ai assisted but this is what they call narrow ai right so narrow ai is mostly predictive matrices that take your past behaviors or similar human behaviors on a large global scale that compare how we act you know you get your amazon book suggestion which could be a combination of books that other people have bought after they bought your book and um and for example

behaviors you've made that lead you towards something so if you buy one sci-fi book they might recommend another sci-fi book if you read many sci-fi books they might lead you to a new genre you know this dune hype has been building up i've been a huge dune fan for a number of years and i got pulled into through a number of things even quinn's ideas but i got pulled into i'm gonna now read three body pop problem right so this is kind of like how ai works today suggestions predictions narrow iai moldenhauer's talking about in impedance and mittens one one first part he talks about is how will we jump from a general ai right and one of the things he like so how do we get from a narrow ai that's just kind of a calculator you know it's a kind of a a statistical calculator and tensor tensor equation predictor how do we get from there to a machine that's sentient and we let's kind of think uh in his psychoanalysis of artificial intelligence moldenhauer talks a lot about our examples we have in film right so film examples you know we get the hey why are robots like how hell 9000 we've got terminators we've got all these kind of fearful projections psychological projections of what a robot is but i think one cool informed one is if we look at the the newest blade runner film blade runner 2049 and you've got agent joe their k-9 agent k9 and he's uh he is a replicant so he's a synthetic being he's an artificial being he's autonomous and yet he has his own will he breaks the law he breaks the rules he helps deckard in the end to find his daughter things like this oh spoilers sorry but anyway um the idea here is uh

it's different to have a world mind like amazon prediction engine that just tells you what you want to buy next and it's another thing to have a ascension agent like a robot that is working independently thinking independently and what moldenhauer focuses in on in his beginnings of impedance and admits and desiring machines in speculating how do we close the gap to a general intelligence is he talks about machine desire so animals all have desire based in biological function and based in the fact that consciousness uh interacts with our bodily desires right and a lot of moldenhauer's work focuses on lacans jacques lacan's desire and its interpretation so in a nutshell the idea of this is uh we have let's think of it as registers uh one register would be the things that we might say or like things of the will you know so sort of i say i i want something right or i'm going to do something and every if we look at it from a linguistic point of view as the con does all of our statements that we might make our conscious statements are actually informed by our experiences right and so then desire becomes this um this line it's like a drive back to fulfilling ourselves so it's a thing that you want and you will say and do things and your desire is kind of like what informs that and then if you get a little deeper in this the desire itself is informed by some structures these nodes that you kind of see here and i won't go so into this but maybe i'll do a video on this separately i have talked about it before in some of my other podcasts but just to kind of give you the graph of desire simply the idea is uh

the the thing that you want as an ego may be a bit different than what you think you want so for example you think you want a new car like i want a new sports car right so you say um i want a car that's your statement right but actually you're thinking about that time i don't know when you didn't have a car when you were a teenager and how you really wanted the car and you got a model car for your your birthday instead something like this right so the desire was going back to oh maybe overcoming that initial uh disappointment that you didn't have a car something like this but then you go deeper and you have this drifting subject like who is the i that wants the car why do you want the car right what is it that you want he says it's chevoy like what do you want actually you don't want the car maybe you want freedom of mobility maybe you want the status of the car maybe you want to be on the road trip like you were at some time you know maybe you want all of those things be in motion right so suddenly the idea of the car just becomes a surrogate for a deeper desire now what's great about the uh blade runner film as a good example is we see that uh

the agent nine there is has false memories planted he has false memories at his core of intelligence and moldenhauer sort of shows this in a in a hierarchy of a proposed architecture of artificial intelligence you would have some kind of historical seeding and i think this covers this is also covered in westworld right so in westworld all of the robots they have memory patterns right they have a back story right think of it as a fiction to in fiction we want to write a convincing character and then in lacan he talks about hamlet and lacan's desire in its interpretation he talks about hamlet so as you guys know hamlet the shakespearean play hamlet isn't a person hamlet is a character in a play and yet when we read hamlet's struggles and his obsessions he kind of exists like a program for us of uh of his desire right his desire to avenge his father to punish his uh his father his father's usurper right to to reveal his mother's sin something all of these things right and his and his obsession with this right so all of these things get bundled into this character who's not real he's a character in a book and yet the dynamic plays out for us once we unroll that character's foundational thing so what what what moldenhauer kind of posits is that is the bridge to a thinking machine an artificial intelligence would be to have an artificial intelligence that has some kind of seated backstory memories and up right off the bat moldenhauer says there's a problem here right off the bat this is problematic why is it problematic because you kind of get what you program so you could see that um in blade runner 2049 there was a certain rebellious nature you could see that scene with in the police station where she says you know k and his toy and his in his toys or something like that like protecting what's his case protecting what's his right and then finally he sacrifices himself to help decker get to the real truth he saves the the real person right and then here again desire becomes desire of the other which uh lacan talks about so it's never uh you know you most often the desire is the desire of some other and then an abstract other you know so there's an abstracted other so how would one engineer this in an artificial intelligence is what moldenhauer talks about but if we kind of flip back to um steiner again we say that he has this statement that says we have heard that the human soul was once endowed with a kind of primeval wisdom and that this wisdom gradually faded away and was now no longer accessible consequently with respect to their knowledge people feel thrown back more and more upon what is presented to them by a physical existence by knowledge i do not mean only science in the accepted sense but the knowledge that is consciously applied by the soul and the ordinary affairs of life the question will naturally arise how did this ancient wisdom actually come into being right and he says

the further back we go

in the evolution of humanity the more we do find certain individuals who through the qualities attained in earlier incarnations were sufficiently mature to apprehend the treasures of wisdom right and he says uh those who possess the knowledge and inherited primeval wisdom were able to progress and educate humankind right but they were also protective of some of this uh knowledge and this is sort of where you have the idea of the mystery schools so so where um what's interesting in the intersection with anthroposophy and this artificial intelligence we can even find roots of it in some of the researches of jung so jung in his ion which is in the phenom researches into the phenomenology of the self he talks about the idea of imparting uh the spirit into the matter okay so the idea is we have this idea of um consciousness let's say and in the old days consciousness kind of would probably have been called your soul or your spirit right so the idea of of it is a person has a soul or spirit and the body is one thing and the soul and spirit is the other thing and then psychology is sort of like another wave of this thinking psychology was more like well it's not necessarily a soul or a spirit it's sort of like an inner story that you tell yourself it's a series of uh experiences some of them traumatic some of them encouraging um some of it may be um some of it may be epigenetic some some of it may be hereditary you may have some biological proclivities toward things you know like say an addictive personality or you know some kind of neuroses but many times it's environmental and then when you put all of these things together in the psycholo psychological mythology as opposed to the religious soul mythology then we move into a neuroscientific let's call it a mythology also right the neuroscientific mythology is that oh well we're just a kind of a computer and we just process things and our our stomach our stomach is hungry so it makes our mind think you know shoots a chemical to the brain that makes us run out and have mcdonald's or something like this right and then we say oh no we have to eat healthy so then our brain kind of overrides it just sort of the war between you know our our values and our biological nature so this is sort of a more neuroscientific mythology let's call it but this is where we get to well first let's jump into jung and then i'll get into the ethical dilemma that we started to talk about and the idea of human automatons so uh jung's young's topic that he brings up in aeon is uh you have this story of the the logos from the highest levels descending uh and he uses christ as the example in this as the idea of a religious example let's say of the uh you know demigod of the god on earth become man but then you have that descends more into just what is the good ethical man but then he goes down even more to saying the idea of the matter itself like so you have the tree of life in adam and eve that grows out of the ground right adam uh and eve kind of are part of the earth almost right so you have that first you know crisis some sometimes called in christian

christian theology let's say the second adam or adam was like the first christ is sort of like the first man and the last man something like this right so if we say this and again anthroposophy of steiner is about humanity anthropos is human so according to our four double pyramids arranged uh in the uroboros so he does sort of arrange these he says that this could be a cyclical arrangement but he does say this at the fifth stage the rotundum which would be identical to the first stage is the heaviest darkness of the earth metal metal which is the is it a euphemism saying the terminator films they called the terminators metal right i wouldn't bring metal down a pond the mother of sarah connor uh metal has a secret relationship to the anthropos that is obvious in alchemy but occurs also in the history of religion where the metal grows from mart's blood right so you have guy omar's blood growing uh from the metal grows from there this curious relationship is expanded by the identity of the lowest most material things to the most spiritual animal so the idea here is that there's spirit in the ground as well as in the

spirit in the ground as well as in the animals and in the higher animals right and i think this is the most interesting paragraph that i saw is there's this notion that a stone is simply a stone is simply matter that has no desire so there's a spirit in a stone so this is kind of an anthroposophical concept let's say there's a stone can have all things can have spirit in them you know we talked about the sun the sun's energy descended just like the deities descend right to and then the matter formed out of that you know and god created the earth you know the sun came out of the solar system right so matter energy was energy was um titrated down to matter energy was descended when energy was cooled into matter energy was forged into matter right the earth is formed and then in that earth now we have ground right so spirit becomes matter energy becomes matter right but there's still a spirit there it is of the sun the sun's still vibrant out there right so it's still of the sun but the stone is matters with a spirit with no desire like the mountain you know it's a still a stillness and yet when jung is talking about the matter having spirit and this is an admonition at the end of ion young sort of warns that we're coming onto an age where well what's putting spirit into metal it's a robot right so the idea of the idea of putting the spirit into um the animal is kind of what we're talking about in you know if we used it in medieval terms if it's the middle ages it would be a golem right sort of a frankenstein's monster or clay that we would form into a thinking thing right and i think if we talk about it in terms of that you can see that there are lots lots of ethical things that come up now about well what's the real nature of what's the real nature of our um experiments into artificial intelligence so are we experimenting with putting spirit into matter you know so there are these kind of theories that are coming up now about consciousness that are a bit different than traditional so like there's the idea that consciousness is separate from the body it may be that consciousness is a thing in itself right so the idea is what if you know like the analogy is the you know the you hear music playing out of the radio but there's not small musicians inside the radio right so why are we assuming that all of our human consciousness is just happening in our brain and then this kind of leads to and it may not it may evolve so we talked about the mythologies right the mythologies evolved from a religious interpretation and a psychological interpretation and a neurological interpretation but if we were to discover some kind of consciousness uh this leads us into the second part of moldenhauer's ethics we'll call it the ethics of of this thinking machine is that valence that we talked about at the beginning and here's where we get back to the luciferin arimonic so arimon is characterized lucifer and ariman in steiner's work are characterized as two very different kind of dark dark forces right so the luciferic forces is actually the force of genius right so science can be seen as a very luciferic thing that's not to say science is evil it's not to say that science is evil it's to say that whenever someone has that eureka moment right they have a an illumination that illuminating moment uh is that kind of thing you know so the idea is

lucifer uh in the tradition was an angel and lucifer was the angel who rebelled and he thought that he could do it on his own right so you have this kind of icarus uh myth you've got the kind of myth of prometheus they're all kind of luciferic ideas and scientists are the same thing you have the virtuoso scientist who defies all the theories and he puts forth a new series theory and it changes the world and at the same time there's a you know there's that oppenheimer sort of lesson you know i am become death when he invents the atomic bomb so opposed to lucifer is ariman our aemonic forces are more like those things that you know you could say that luciferic could be in an evil way diabolical where arimonic is definitely demonic right so the idea of arimonic is can we make the souls into cogs in the in the machine right so think of your you know think of cheesy horror movies right so lucifer would always try to tempt you right with oh i will make you rich or i'll make you uh you know look cypher in the matrix right he's tempted to be put back in the matrix and eating his steak and i don't want to remember nothing right this is like a luciferic temptation and he's got the name of cypher so he's got the lucifer name right ariman's the opposite ariman is the is the actual matrix tower with all the souls connected to the battery they don't want the people to be the ariman doesn't want the people to be thinking too much he wants to just drain them of their soul power right so the idea of hooking you up to a battery node with everyone else it's kind of an argemonic concept but there are subtler differences of this so if you think of the age of enlightenment in a way that's very luciferic in the sense that um it's a move away from spiritual values it's a move toward everything is earth right lucifer is on the earth uh lucifer's fallen to the earth and doesn't want you to think about god he wants you to think oh you know the greatest trick the the devil ever did was to make you think he didn't exist right so we have science we don't need to think about spirituality just look at science it's all neurons and it's all these things we can put the spirit inside of the machine luciferic arimonic is the opposite side of it it's like well arimonic is let's uh it's kind of 1984-ish right 1984 right it's kind of the argemonic thing let's reduce you know art 1984 has got some great ariamonic themes in it where they reduce uh the language each year less and less words are in the are in the newspeak um they have things that don't make sense like uh war is peace right it's always just ink sock and and um also the idea of surveillance so people self regulate and then also dialing down the intelligence and this leads into the the moldenhauer ethics where he talks about uh that valence that we talked about the beginning with um as machines are being prodded to think people are being prodded to think less don't question the science don't question the authority follow the main story you've got your internet surf and be happy don't say things that mess up the status quo things like that those are all erymonic forces all right so what moldenhauer kind of questions here is what's happening on a larger scale you know why the drive to put the spirit in the machine and why the drive to remove remove the autonomy of people right and i think this is where we get to

uh this is where we get to the idea of the eighth sphere so within steiner uh he talks about this concept of uh the eighth sphere and and and what he what he does here is uh so uh steiner talks a lot about the different um planets as their spiritual almost think of it as an astrological kind of kind of space right so he says here um

the pl each of the planets have their own astrological value let's say but he used it kind of as a metaphor and also as a reality so let's say we just talked about the sun right the sun is a giver of light to the earth something like this so uh let's imagine the matrix let's go this way instead let's think of the eighth series kind of like the matrix all right uh you know if you look out the sky at night you'll see the moon right you look out the sky in the morning you see the sun they're real it's the real moon it's the real sun it's really an orb that's out there out there in space there's this orb but now if you go into if you put on your vr goggles and you're in in you're you're playing a game you're playing playing resident evil right you're playing resident evil with vr goggles on and there's a moon in the in the virtual reality it's not the real moon it's sort of a construct moon so it's kind of like in the matrix the people are actually just plugged into the machine and everything that's happening for them is only happening in a buffer space in a computer generated simulation so one thing that's kind of eighth sphereish i'd say for rudolph steiner or the concept of eighth sphere is imagine

the idea of well i can't recreate the world america imagine lucifer and ariman right demonic think of it as a demonic let's call it let's come up with a demonic movie all right it's kind of like the matrix a little bit of a rip-off with matrix maybe it won't make money but at least it'll help me get through this section what if i'm not going to win because spirituality is real the soul is real and even if we make machines with souls that could be a real thing maybe we can make machines with souls maybe maybe machines can be you know co-existing with humans like an asimov vision or you know friendly cylons etc etc right still that's the real soul stuff that's the real consciousness at the same time you know you could have a virtual game where you have you know virtual home you know you're playing minecraft and you've got a virtual world in minecraft or you're playing um a sim or or multiplayer game online game and those things can kind of experience like reality you know just like the experience of your tears in the cinema when when there's a heartfelt moment a character dies your tears well up something like this right the hero wins and you get excited right your emotions are are artificially stimulated as if you were in the real thing so those bubbles those bubbles of activity uh with participants in them those virtual worlds that get created well you can imagine these days more and more of our time is spent online you know you you watching youtube you're on discord servers you're talking you're getting feeds that are ai directed by the way from um social media uh your facebook feeds etc so all of this together all this collective together kind of has all of us plugged in already so that metaphor for the matrix again is we're all plugged in now if you restrict speech in certain places and you restrict access in other places and you say well you can't get the internet unless you got the poke or some things like this right this all leads toward a narrowing and a and a controlling and a and perhaps a diminishing of the human experience to a controllable level right just think of this like during uh i'll go back to 911 during 9 11 all flights were canceled in the in the u.s all flights were cancelled nobody flew anywhere it was it was a global emergency everyone stopped flying and then again recently with the pandemic we weren't able to fly again right we weren't able to fly so that that kind of restriction of global movement has a bit of a chilling effect right and of course this was done out of a terror threat and a pandemic threat but the idea is if you can get people to not participate in what we used to do in the world and do it instead in a virtual world and this leads this is where moldenhauer leads us into the idea of the human automaton so if you can fine-tune human activity to only exist in very narrow narrow ways you're you're sort of participating in an argemonic thing so here so here's the eighth sphere from steiner's point of view he says there are not many words that can be used for characterizing the eighth sphere the fact that all mentions are avoided for so long so they're all aphoristic so it's kind of think of it as an aphoristic sphere it's not the sun it's not the moon it's the idea of uh steiner will try to characterize what is called the eighth sphere describing the development of the spiritual movement of the 19th century in the beginning of the 20th century so the eighth sphere cannot be anything in the material world so it's sort of like a mental state almost it's sort of a state that means now here's an interesting thing this means that an organ enabling people to perceive the eighth sphere would have to be developed just as physical senses perceive the material world so for example our eyes can see the real world but we need a screen to see into the computer world right we need to look through our phone we need to move through our phone to see what's happening in social media we need to put on our vr headset to see what's happening in the vr game we need to have the console to play into the game right so a device is created to perceive the eighth sphere he could then experience the atmosphere quite consciously but unconsciously he's always within it just as we are always within the air you just wouldn't be aware of it so like the idea is you know when we talk about immersion right and i think i'm i think my first immersion was through well i'm older so through records right i can remember as a kid go going through my my mom my dad and my uncle's records and i put those records on and i was transported to another world you know beatles records or something like this right you're transported to this other world and then we all have that experience also with cinema you go to these blockbuster movies and you really are in your immersion is full but there's a subtle immersion that's happening where we put we're pulled more and more from physical world things to virtual world things just let's look at anyone who has kids take their device away from them after they've been binging on playing you know playing roblox or something and suddenly they'll have this withdrawal symptom like they actually they have a sensory deprivation you know so i think this is interesting so we're not really aware of the the effects of it i know people have talked about the addictive nature of it so if the eighth sphere is to be described steiner says it must obviously describe as a realm in which we are living all the time right so it's it's kind of a shift of the intellect and the will it's a shift of the intellect and the will of the human into the eighth sphere right so you make a thing that's attractive and you shift the will into it as opposed to the artificial intelligence which is a thing that you shift the spirit into so it's reinterpreting the spirit to enter the eighth eighth sphere and uh it's again it's um injecting the spirit into the artificial intelligence this happens if the element of free will again steiner this happens if the element of free will is transformed so it says uh from this you will understand that what stems from the free will must be kept within the realm of the earth and he says the endeavors of lucifer and ahriman is to drag the free will of humankind and whatever stems from it into the eighth sphere this means that human humanity is perpetually exposed to the danger of having free will wrestled and dragged by lucifer and iron man into the eighth sphere now this sounds very you know if you're not spiritually inclined but you may be if you're on this channel but if you're not there's a way to interpret this in another way and let's just think of it politically uh free will means freedom to go where you want freedom to talk to who you want free to assemble right they used to say in the early the early biblical things they said that the church was wherever two people spoke in jesus name right it's the conversation that has to happen right and if you limit the the ability to even converse and you can see this is slowly creeping in more and more in social media and then people are unplugging too you can see that you know we've had riots around the world for the past couple years as well people are getting sick of some of these control mechanisms so it's a very tumultuous time that we're in right now and you can see that it has some deep effect um the moment the free will is transformed into visionary clairvoyance what unfolds is human being becomes the booty of lucifer and iron man it is immediately captured from them and spirited away to the eighth sphere and then they are disappeared into the eighth sphere right so you can lose yourself actually i was gonna i was gonna play a i was gonna jump into playing a video game and what what stopped me from doing it is like oh my god that's gonna eat up all of my time if i start playing that and another thing i had the same uh same experience someone who was talking about uh re-watching naruto naruto shippendin and i said oh my god go oh no oh go oh i hadn't watched one piece i haven't watched one piece at all and and the idea of a thousand episodes of one piece it's just like a daunting you like feel like your whole time sink will be lost in there right but i think eighth sphere is kind of like that right at least if you have the knowledge of it it's one thing and then the idea is you get your free will back i mean the idea is well maybe you have to roll it out and and do it in uh small doses so again let's kind of bring it back to um i think maybe another symbol of this uh and of course it's it's a parody and it's a symbol but the idea of uh president brandon uh here the flowing the tears of the flesh android benson margos's book uh it kind of captures this weird and i think i might do i might do this special on this one too the modality of the presidents right but the idea of this here is even it's not just media it's not just social media it's not just uh you know

tailoring the language to be acceptable and you know sort of doing a new speak a reduction of language uh disencouraging conversations as as kind of human automaton features that go into the arimonic side of human automatons but you can even see our the president has these qualities of automaton nature it's not that he's just old and he's um uh old people this happens to them but the fact that that he was the candidate and they knew that he was uh declining it it has a subtle effect on us from a media point of view that yeah everything declines don't worry about you're not sure who's giving the message don't worry about who's controlling whom you know it's sort of like that there's a kind of android flesh android nature to that i mean the fleshy android is funny but at the same time it is quite not funny you know let's think of it like the devaluing of the presidencies right you had trump which is a quite different experience right each of the presidents kind of have their i want to almost say they each have a theme by the kind of president they are that sets the mood for the country you know you've got this idea of um you know it's odd how george bush seems like the war president but really obama was in the most wars right and trump seems like the most bombastic and the most you know if you if you believe the press that like he's the most um like if you looked at the personalities you wouldn't think obama was the biggest war president and but but trump didn't start one war or obama started it's like seven wars right so andy got the nobel priest prize too so it's odd how how these things aren't at aren't what they seem right but anyway getting back to the topic and i think this is very relevant to the topic by the way the idea is creation of the a sphere is an artificial space so you have two modalities now uh from an anthropo anthroposophical point of view artificial intelligence is the metal that's you know we talked about uh in young's and and lacan with assistance from lacan it's the matter that's been life's been breathed into it you know officer k with his false memories acting as a human right topic one and the modalities of getting there is um pushing spirit into matter right so that's kind of a mystery that's luciferic by the way it's very luciferic the idea of having the power and you can see that wacky character i believe he's played by the hannibal lecter guy on westworld what's his name um

uh the the head scientist on westworld who's come up with the genius architecture of how they have the false memories inside of the of the of the

of the robots there and how they can reboot them and yet there was some soul that spirit that's actually awakening inside of them so that that's the idea of that side and the harmonic side of it is the humans ourselves are being less intelligent and where our intelligence is being whittled away we're just kind of moved into a role of a consumer a an eater a a a breeder a someone who takes out the loan that someone can now profit on through a property purchase right someone who pays a tax so we're really just nodes um you know like like morpheus says in the first matrix it's that feeling you get when you pay your taxes right so it doesn't have to be a spiritual thing you can see it totally as a political thing and i think this is why like things like authors like philip k dick that we've also talked about in this channel have such a resonance uh in that dick kind of straddles that sci-fi side with the political activist side right so the idea is free will a man of action a man of his own thinking but also up against forces that might be bigger than he is with implications into the spirit space so yeah i think this is uh definitely a an interesting point for work of dr steiner and the idea of occult science and anthroposophical thinking really i guess the final final knowledge i guess the final wrap-up of this is kind of just to be aware of things right so the the idea is be aware of you know you're a consumer of artificial intelligence right now what does it mean to have artificial intelligence what would it what would the ethics of it mean you know i think that we see in this dune movie uh that starts out with the idea of we already went through in the future world of dune we've already gone through a time where machines rose up and humans won back and then there was a ban on those thinking machines and then it herbert's great vision which is an anthroposophical vision i i would like to say it's kind of anthroposophical is that in the human spirit itself we have the ability the capability to improve the mind to um maybe not need these machines or do you use the machines intelligently like you know you can see that great example from fiction of uh let's say commander adama in battlestar galactica he uses computers on the ships but they're they're human-controlled computers they're not networked they're done in a certain way so this responsible consumer of technology uh let's be across what's happening in technology and at the same time let's be a across when these forces are trying to turn us into the automaton right who's the robot right that's a great question to ask who's being the robot right now who's the handler like in the flesh android right who's the handler right so some of those are some of the topics i think that are that come out of this and then finally i think it's just the you know steiner does give us the warning that this is the age this is an argemonic age that's coming up and it's the uh challenge of

people that are aware to understand these ariamonic forces and to stand up stand up for our freedom our free will so yeah i think that's probably a good place to to leave it and uh hopefully that was interesting to everyone like and subscribe if you like we're doing share these so we can get a live stream going at some point uh all the books above here available pontius fathom press the humerus flowing the tears of a flesh android and his handlers and his tentacled master rubbery blue flesh volume one of august wolderhauer's artificial psychology of desiring machines impedance and admittance and desiring machines we talked a lot about a lot of a lot we talked about it a lot in this podcast because i think it's really at that center point of the

anthroposophical argument which is uh kind of in the end an ethical argument you know the artificial intelligence that we see today we're still a long way off from robots talking to us and having their own desire right and i think this is a question we have to just understand and then also if we know the nature of spirit you know which which of the machines are alive and which of them aren't right and we we have that story maybe from dune where he puts his hand in the box and she says i want to prove if you're an animal or not and i think you know the the stone without desire has still has spirit but when the stone has desire and it's forged into something that looks like us now we're in some new territory so interesting things have come and will come so hopefully we'll see you soon um please do leave comments below i'll read all the comments and uh we can start communicating there we also have patreon that you can jump into and once i get the subscribers up to maybe maybe around a thousand i think i'll start trying to open up to a live stream we'll see if people are interested in that and then uh i'd like to get you guys uh engaged in the conversation in real time so we could we could have this community starting okay thanks a lot everyone i'll talk to you soon see you next week bye bye