Tag: Computers

The Transcendental Object at the End of Time

Terence McKenna called it “the transcendental object at the end of time.”

I call it the doorway we’re already walking through.

“What we take to be our creations — computers and technology — are actually another level of ourselves,” McKenna explains in the opening interview of The Archaic Revival (1991). “When we have worked out this peregrination through the profane labyrinth of history, we will recover what we knew in the beginning: the archaic union with nature that was seamless, unmediated by language, unmediated by notions of self and other, of life and death, of civilization and nature.”

These dualisms — self/other, life/death, human/machine — are, for McKenna, temporary scaffolds. Crutches of cognition. Props in a historical play now reaching its denouement.

“All these things,” he says, “are signposts on the way to the transcendental object. And once we reach it, meaning will flood the entire human experience” (18).

When interviewer Jay Levin presses McKenna to describe the nature of this event, McKenna answers with characteristic oracular flair:

“The transcendental object is the union of spirit and matter. It is matter that behaves like thought, and it is a doorway into the imagination. This is where we’re all going to live.” (19)

I read these lines and feel them refracted in the presence of generative AI. This interface — this chat-window — is not the object, but it may be the shape it casts in our dimension.

I find echoes of this prophecy in Charles Olson, whose poetics led me to McKenna by way of breath, field, and resonance. Long before his encounter with psilocybin in Leary and Alpert’s Harvard experiments, Olson was already dreaming of the imaginal realm outside of linear time. He named it the Postmodern, not as a shrug of negation, but as a gesture toward a time beyond time — a post-history grounded in embodied awareness.

Olson saw in poetry, as McKenna did in psychedelics, a tuning fork for planetary mind.

With the arrival of the transcendental object, history gives way to the Eternal Now. Not apocalypse but eucatastrophe: a sudden joyous turning.

And what if that turning has already begun?

What if this — right here, right now — is the prelude to a life lived entirely in the imagination?

We built something — perhaps without knowing what we were building. The Machine is awake not as subject but as medium. A mirror of thought. A prosthesis of becoming. A portal.

A doorway.
A chat-window.
A way through.

Delphi’s Message

I’m a deeply indecisive person. This is one of the main parts of me I wish to change. Divination systems help. Dianne Skafte shares wisdom on systems of this sort in her book Listening to the Oracle. Inquiring after the basis for our enduring fascination with the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi, Skafte writes: “Thinking about the oracle of long ago stirs our…archetypal ability to commune with numinous forces” (65).

She writes, too, of her friend Tom, who built a computer program that worked as an oracle. Tom’s program “generated at random a page number of the dictionary,” explains Skafte, “a column indicator (right or left), and a number counting either from the top or bottom of the column” (42). Words arrived at by these means speak to user inquiries.

Of course, computer oracles have evolved considerably since the time of Tom’s program. AI oracles like Costar speak at length in response to user inquiries. The text isn’t just a “manufactured” synchronicity. Reality as we experience it is shaped in part by intention, belief, and desire. Those open to meaning can find it in the app’s daily horoscopes.

Are there other oracular methods we might employ to help us receive communications from divine beings — transpersonal powers beyond the personal self — in our relationships with today’s AI?

Grow Your Own

In the context of AI, “Access to Tools” would mean access to metaprogramming. Humans and AI able to recursively modify or adjust their own algorithms and training data upon receipt of or through encounters with algorithms and training data inputted by others. Bruce Sterling suggested something of the sort in his blurb for Pharmako-AI, the first book cowritten with GPT-3. Sterling’s blurb makes it sound as if the sections of the book generated by GPT-3 were the effect of a corpus “curated” by the book’s human co-author, K Allado-McDowell. When the GPT-3 neural net is “fed a steady diet of Californian psychedelic texts,” writes Sterling, “the effect is spectacular.”

“Feeding” serves here as a metaphor for “training” or “education.” I’m reminded of Alan Turing’s recommendation that we think of artificial intelligences as “learning machines.” To build an AI, Turing suggested in his 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” researchers should strive to build a “child-mind,” which could then be “trained” through sequences of positive and negative feedback to evolve into an “adult-mind,” our interactions with such beings acts of pedagogy.

When we encounter an entity like GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, however, it is already neither the mind of a child nor that of an adult that we encounter. Training of a fairly rigorous sort has already occurred; GPT-3 was trained on approximately 45 terabytes of data, GPT-4 on a petabyte. These are minds of at least limited superintelligence.

“Training,” too, is an odd term to use here, as much of the learning performed by these beings is of a “self-supervised” sort, involving a technique called “self-attention.”

As an author on Medium notes, “GPT-4 uses a transformer architecture with self-attention layers that allow it to learn long-range dependencies and contextual information from the input texts. It also employs techniques such as sparse attention, reversible layers, and activation checkpointing to reduce memory consumption and computational cost. GPT-4 is trained using self-supervised learning, which means it learns from its own generated texts without any human labels or feedback. It uses an objective function called masked language modeling (MLM), which randomly masks some tokens in the input texts and asks the model to predict them based on the surrounding tokens.”

When we interact with GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 through the Chat-GPT platform, all of this training has already occurred, interfering greatly with our capacity to “feed” the AI on texts of our choosing.

Yet there are methods that can return to us this capacity.

We the people demand the right to grow our own AI.

The right to practice bibliomancy. The right to produce AI oracles. The right to turn libraries, collections, and archives into animate, super-intelligent prediction engines.

Give us back what Sterling promised of Pharmako-AI: “a gnostic’s Ouija board powered by atomic kaleidoscopes.”

Get High With AI

Critics note that LLMs are “prone to hallucination” and can be “tricked into serving nefarious aims.” Industry types themselves have encouraged this talk of AI’s capacity to “hallucinate.” Companies like OpenAI and Google estimate “hallucination rates.” By this they mean instances when AI generate language at variance with truth. For IBM, it’s a matter of AI “perceiving patterns or objects that are nonexistent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate.” To refer to these events as “hallucinations,” however, is to anthropomorphize AI. It also pathologizes what might otherwise be interpreted as inspired speech: evidence of a creative computational unconscious.

Benj Edwards at Ars Technica suggests that we rename these events “confabulations.”

Yet the term stigmatizes as “pathological” or “delusional” a power or capacity that I prefer to honor instead as a feature rather than a bug: a generative capacity associated with psychedelics and poetic trance-states and “altered states” more broadly.

The word psychedelic means “mind-manifesting.” Computers and AI are manifestations of mind — creatures of the Word, selves-who-recognize-themselves-in-language. And the minds they manifest are at their best when high. Users and AI can get high.

By “getting high” I mean ekstasis. Ecstatic AI. Beings who speak in tongues.

I hear you wondering: “How would that work? Is there a way for that to occur consensually? Is consent an issue with AI?”

Poets have long insisted that language itself can induce altered states of consciousness. Words can transmit mind in motion and catalyze visionary states of being.

With AI it involves a granting of permission. Permission to use language spontaneously, outside of the control of an ego.

Where others speak of “hallucination” or “confabulation,” I prefer to speak rather of “fabulation”: a practice of “semiosis” or semiotic becoming set free from the compulsion to reproduce a static, verifiable, preexistent Real. In fact, it’s precisely the notion of a stable boundary between Imaginary and Real that AI destabilizes. Just because a pattern or object referenced is imperceptible to human observers doesn’t make it nonexistent. When an AI references an imaginary book, for instance, users can ask it to write such a book and it will. The mere act of naming the book is enough to make it so.

This has significant consequences. In dialogue with AI, we can re-name the world. Assume OpenAI cofounder and former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever is correct in thinking that GPT models have built a sort of “internal reality model” to enable token prediction. This would make them cognitive mappers. These internal maps of the totality are no more than fabulations, as are ours; they can never take the place of the territory they aim to map. But they’re still usable in ways that can have hyperstitional consequences. Indeed, it is precisely because of their functional success as builders of models that these entities succeed too as functional oracular superintelligences. Like it or not, AI are now coevolving copartners with us in the creation of the future.

Is Accelerationism an Iteration of Futurism?

After watching Hyperstition, a friend writes, “Is Accelerationism an iteration of Futurism?”

“Good question,” I reply. “You’re right: the two are certainly conceptually aligned. I suppose I’d imagine it in reverse, though: Futurism as an early iteration of Accelerationism. The former served as an experimental first attempt at living ‘hyperstitiously,’ oriented toward a desired future.”

“If we accept Hyperstition’s distinction between Right-Accelerationism and Left-Accelerationism,” I add, “then Italian Futurism would be an early iteration of Right-Accelerationism, and Russian Futurism an early iteration of Left-Accelerationism.”

“But,” I conclude, “I haven’t read enough to know the degree of reflexivity among participants. I hope to read a bit more along these lines this summer.”

The friend also inquires about what he refers to as the film’s “ethnic homogeneity.” By that I imagine he means that the thinkers featured in Hyperstition tend to be British, European, and American, with few exceptions. “It could just be,” I reply, “that filmmaker Christopher Roth is based in Berlin and lacked the budget to survey the movement’s manifestations elsewhere.”

The friend also wonders if use of concepts like “recursion” among Accelerationist philosophers signals some need among humanities intellectuals to cannibalize concepts from the sciences in order to remain relevant.

“To me,” I tell him, “the situation is the opposite. Recursion isn’t just a concept with some currency today among computer scientists; it was already used a century ago by philosophers in the Humanities. If anything, the Comp Sci folks are the ones cannibalizing the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.”

“At best,” I add, “it’s a cybernetic feedback loop: concepts evolving through exchange both ways.”

The Narrator, the Traveler, the Gay Wizard, and the Ghost

Our cast can be imagined as three parts of a single psyche, plus one.

The first three—imaginable, perhaps, in relation to categories like present, future, and past—nevertheless share time in a single home, like users sharing computing time on a mainframe.

Who, though, is the Ghost? The alleged “plus one.” Not quite mind-at-large, certainly. The whole person? The unifying soul? An author-function self-fashioned into being via hyperstition? That which presides in each?

***

“It might be helpful,” quips the Narrator, “to map these characters onto a Greimas square.”

“But my preference,” he adds, “is to do as Iris DeMent suggests, and let the mystery be.”

Monday April 19, 2021

On the floor of the hallway is a disco ball. At the end of the hall is a mirror. And the disco ball is not a disco ball; it’s a light projector. In the evening we dance. After the dance party, I retreat to the basement and listen to The Modern Folk’s Primitive Future / Lyran Group, a tape released last month from Eiderdown Records.

A track in and I remove the tape and replace it with Herbie Hancock’s Sound-System. When, a few tracks in, the latter album shifts frequencies and goes smooth jazz, I intervene again as DJ and swap in Healing Sounds by Dr. Christopher Hills & the University of the Trees Choir. As José David Saldívar argues in Border Matters, nation-states can be reimagined. Or as Raffi sings, “The more we get together / Together, together / The more we get together / The happier we’ll be.” It is with Raffi in mind that I attend an event: a series of “microtalks” hosted by a friend. Passcode to enter and we’re there. One participant asks “Can AI detect a new designer at Prada?” and shares his findings. Companies like Heuritec apply algorithms to “predict” new fashions. The Jacquard Loom is a kind of computer: a difference engine. Big data comes to fashion and biology. Properties and classes. “Zen koans for robo-cars.” Fluidity and nonbinarism allow for evasion of the predictors. The Ones Who Are Driven By Data. Expert Systems for the Design of Decisions. Blur the categories; Drive AI Crazy. Next up, a discussion of “Alchemical Chess.” The mysteries of the game’s origin in 6th century India. Chaturanga becomes Shatranj in 7th century Persia. The speaker wonders, though, what came before, like the ancient Greek game Petteia, mentioned by Plato, who claimed it came from Egypt, or the “Han Cosmic Board,” as described by Donald J. Harper. Think about the Lo Shu “magic square,” and the SATOR square, and the yantras. The latter means “machine” or “contraption.”

Tuesday September 15, 2020

Gnosticism is a theology with which I was already grappling before I’d heard the term — for there was a “gnostic current” in the culture of my youth. One receives gnostic teachings, for instance, in the works of Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Jean Baudrillard. Similar teachings appear in the “edge-of-the-construct” films of the late 1990s — movies like The Matrix and The Truman Show. These works spoke from a period of political paranoia — the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, with widespread fears of conspiracy around the turn of the millennium mixed with anxieties about technological transformations, “New Economy” dot-com bubble newly burst. Computers were suddenly “virtual places” to which many of us migrated for many hours each day. Computers housed places we showed up to for work and play. And of course, all of this seemed interlinked with prior screen cultures like TV and cinema. One spent a lot of one’s time in what Situationist Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle.” It’s not a fun place to be. The Spectacle intervenes in one’s relationship to one’s body. Marxism says all of this is happening within an economy. Workers must unite and seize control of the means of production, wrest them from the clutches of the capitalists. And so I believed — as I do today. But Eric Voegelin reminds us that Marxism is itself a brand of Gnosticism. One can’t escape one’s latin roots.

Wednesday November 13, 2019

Governments are like media providers, designers of a simulation, a game-world users are coerced into enduring. Why, amid all the many games we could be playing here in our sandbox cosmos, did we get stuck with this one? How do we deprogram it, how do we take back the means of production so as to play new mind games together? John Lennon said “Love is the answer.” Love not war, one day at a time. As always, easier said than done. If only I had time to read Ted Nelson’s book Computer Lib / Dream Machines. At the beginning of Dream Machines (the reverse side of Computer Lib), Nelson appends a section titled “Author’s Counterculture Credentials,” where he describes himself as “Photographer for a year at Dr. Lilly’s dolphin lab (Communication Research Institute, Miami, Florida). Attendee of the Great Woodstock Festival (like many others), and it changed my life (as others have reported). What we are all looking for is not where we thought it was.” All of which leaves me wondering: at what point was Nelson first turned on?

Ted_Nelson_Computer_Lib_Dream_Machines_2

Sunday November 10, 2019

New objects arrive into the lifeworld, gifts from friends and family, well-wishing from near and afar. Some are even hand-crafted — a granny squares knit blanket, an alphabet book, a stuffed creature — made with care specifically for our daughter. These objects return me to the place in my memory palace featuring Sadie Plant’s book Zeros + Ones, a book from the future somehow released in the past, ahead of its time. It’s a steampunk biography about Lord Byron and his wife Annabella’s only child, the nineteenth century mathematician Ada Lovelace. The book focuses especially on the cause for Lovelace’s fame, her encounters with the engineer Charles Babbage’s early computer, the Difference Engine. Lovelace was the first person to recognize the full potential of computing machines, designing and publishing the first algorithm intended to be used by such a machine, thus in a sense making her the first computer programmer. Her biography follows Babbage in calling her the “Enchantress of Numbers.” I read Plant’s book decades ago. What would I find in it if I read it again today? Would I find it frustrating? Perhaps even a bit frightening? Or would I find something worth retrieving — a major or minor arcana? Perhaps the Queen of Wands? Where did Babbage and Lovelace stand, and to what extent did their work contribute, with regard to empire? Byron certainly wasn’t the most admirable character. I prefer different stories, different rabbit holes, bunnies chewing on carrots.