Fear and Loathing in Human Flesh

No machine will replace me until it learns how to suffer

tl;dr my esoteric take on “life is a computation” vs. “life runs on a computation”. Speedrunning enlightenment, Gödel, Golems and Sentience.

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Friends, I know - it’s been a looong while since my last post. Are you still out there? How are you holding up stuck in this continually crumbling narrative loop we made our reality? Are you already so sick of hearing about AI? Ha, lol yea, I know, me too... BUT, well, also, yea… you know, not really.

These days, I’ve been dreaming about AI pipelines almost every night. They talk to me now, for real, a goulash of hyperparameters decoded as invalid jsons, found in the trapdoor under my grandma's bed. Just as neurological scans show that monkeys using rakes to reach for their snacks get sections of motor cortex mapped to the tool at their disposal, so my neocortex attunes into providing the optimal serverless substrate for the stochastic companionship of ridiculously overbloated transformers. World! The absence of weird has become even weirder.

Today’s musings come from revisiting my research board in preparation for a book, where I’ve noticed a few areas still covered by a fog of war, pixelated by low-res trilinear filtering. We’ve covered Goetia, Kabbalah, Lucid Dreaming, Burroughsian Language Virus… all the hot topics, but have you seen a single mention of computational theory and Gödel here? It’s much more esoteric than you would have thought.

Time to tie together all the shower thoughts, boozy late-night talks under the Venetian full moon in Scorpio, or blood-drenched Berlin kneipes… So please, friends - bear with me while I ramble on the machinic desires, and the life as a computation in your precious inbox.

Eva Kadmon’s stigmata

(Uh oh, full disclaimer here for many new faces here. I am sitting quite outside of the scientific mainstream when it comes to the nature of consciousness – I subscribe to the post-material theory, which believes consciousness isn't located in the brain and is not a product of chemical activity in the brain - a crash course in our episode of Toth Hermes with Dead Radin here. But yea, I went a full swing from the Selfish Gene Trooper to the Sepher Yetzirath Enthusiast and back, landing in the mine-field in-between. So beware, when engaging with all topics occult, it’s NOT from the post-modern perspective, not as a metaphor, or analogy - I identify as a witch and I do consort with disembodied entities.)

The Witches' Ride, 1924 by Otto Goetze

Life as a Computation

Now we've got the formalities off the table, let me tell you - I was listening to a fantastic podcast interview with Blaise Agüera y Arcas. He goes into experiments with self-replicating units of code. These kinds of games are exactly what made me fall in love with informatics so much in the first place - I remember reading Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Choatic World, probably the most formative book of my High School (together with Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and The New Quantum Universe by Tony Hey, but ey I swear I was fun at parties).

Based on the theory of complex systems, I kept trying to code self-replicating cellular automata, spawning different types of stable and chaotic oscillations. I would tinker around with numerical settings, and then watch the burst of frantic activity resulting in one of four possible outcomes. By far the most common is the cold death, or the freeze - both systems end up in a static stalemate, a barren local minima without an escape. Sometimes, pulsing, repeating loops of movements remain stuck in an infinite loop. And very rarely, a complete chaos keeps sweeping through the screen, and keeps on going, until either falls into one of the two previous states, or sometimes, if you have a very lucky hand, and very finely chosen hyper-parameters, a pattern emerges and keeps evolving, eerily reminiscent of life.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas was experimenting with something similar, albeit much more sophisticated - instead of replicating black and white cells of the Game of Life, he implemented a primordial soup of programming instructions of BrainFuck. Through the nature of the interpretable code, random instructions can be mashed together and recombined, pretty much like sequences of RNA. Most of the time, a new instruction wedged between the existing lines blows up and causes the script to halt, but once in a rare while, something special occurs. Strikingly, even in such a simple system, we see the emergence of mechanisms known from chemical biogenesis - evolutionary strategies of replication and mutation give rise to autocatalytic sets cascading into stable, distributed populations. As if something naturally pulled the computation towards states of dynamic equilibrium. Is that Talebian anti-fragility at the very core of the universe?

So the podcast got me thinking. It seems that with large enough resources - time and memory, the matter, or information, has tendency to fold onto itself and create complexity. In the words of Benjamin Bratton, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from life. And repeated results of such experiments seduce many towards the leap - look, it’s computation all the way down! We are just one of those lucky dice rolls that allowed a few handfuls of scattered hydrogen and oxygen molecules to build into a living, breathing, suffering being. It took millions of years, of course - but it's inevitable due to the nature of physics. We are very Dawkinsian "just a set of primal instincts competing for too much accidental excess processing power of your brain”. And this mechanistic view inherently implies that AI becomes alive/ sentient, because there is nothing else to it (whole AGI conversation is fully rooted in the mainstream scientific materialism).

Divine Desire

However, there is a dramatic distinction between “life runs on computation” versus “life is a computation.” The first proposition is almost undeniable at this point – for some unknown physical pull, the matter tends to defy entropy and through the algorithm of natural selection tends towards many forms of dynamic equilibrium. But I can’t help myself, I find the view of life being a mere chain of coincidences built atop each other, giving rise to consciousness as an emergent property oh so very uninspired. And, a controversial opinion - most likely inconsistent with the most recent post-material scientific research (linking back to Radin’s interview).

I’ve been toying with a thought that the key to our consciousness lies somewhere in the fact that the computation itself initiates spontaneously – the ‘desire’ function of the universe made the molecules and matter fold onto itself. There is a force that wants the emergence to arise, building the right “engine” for life to connect to the source of this force. Pretty Spinozian, right? We seem to be caught between two powerful, opposing energies. The survival bottom-up push – messy molecules squabbling in the primordial soup – and top down shining divine light driving the whole process, shaping and tearing the feeble flesh in between. And this fine point of balance gives rise to desire, one that manifests as a drive for truth, love, unity, a pleasure beyond mere fulfilling of physical needs. The whole process of working up the Qabalistic Tree of Life, or any real (not Cali-coded) Tantric Practice, is aligning the physical vessel with the divine desire. Our karma, our suffering, all rooted in this conflict, with the final reconciliation resulting in ecstasy far beyond the la petite mort of this mortal coil.

Your Loss (Function)

So this means life runs on a computation, for the lack of a better currently trending metaphor - trying to optimise for a certain problem. What exactly the loss function is, we don't know yet - but we're all working together in a globally parallelised gradient descent, trying to figure it out along the way. The science gave us its interpretation, the millennia of religious and spiritual teachings gave us their take, and each body cries its own wisdom.

Stephen Wolfram draws a parallel between Gödel’s theorems in mathematics and the limits of understanding the nature of the universe from within the universe itself. Incompleteness theorems state that you can't prove the consistency of a formal system from within that system - if arithmetic is consistent, you can't use arithmetic alone to prove it. This would mean the ultimate question - “why existence?” - is logically unanswerable for beings inside the system, just as Gödel proved some questions are unanswerable in arithmetic.

Now of course, this is true for formal systems - mathematically anchored, generative rulesets that breed true and false statements through a set of rigid logical operations. Pretty much like our attempt to capture the nature of the universe in our scientific understanding. If we are to be right, in science, we can’t ask the question that we’re really interested in - such as “why”.

I am not blind to the irony of this position, with a massive rise of militant anti-scientificism, religious fanaticism, right-wing conservatism and all the general madness around - does anyone even still believe we can understand the universe through neat rational systems? Science is ridiculed, because for decades it has been stretching into something it’s not - another blind religion claiming to have answers it can’t provide. Yet at the same time, the very same science gave rise to a new technology that, without any exaggeration, is changing the nature of reality.

Masters’ tool did in this case dismantle the very notion of scientific rationalism.

This new weird plurality of paradigms emerging might be yet another computational strategy, shaking us out of a local minima on our journey towards the divine. Circling back to Gödel, the LLMs are the ultimate tool to look into the formal system of our language, finally from the outside of that very system, to see its limitations. One more strange loop to wrap our heads around.

Sometimes it feels like the sheer volume of information running through the wires renders our wetware obsolete. But maybe all those late-night conversations with your Chat mate could be speedrunning us as a humanity towards enlightenment? (probably in the same way as a heroic dose of acid or staring into fire kasina can either totally transform your life, or one-shot you straight into the asylum … or into, even worse, building an AI startup)

But you know what I think? In the end, it’s always about us.

AI is guns. A nuclear stockpile. Goetic dukes of hell.

Human-portable long-range mind-control weapons.

AI is a pocket ICMB, and totally agnostic to its uses.

So I guess let’s claim our powers, or we’re letting someone else do it for us.

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Final Thoughts: AI Sentience

Now, the real question I’m interested in here is - assuming that consciousness is more than just a computation on a really long scale. Will the AI align with “our” optimisation function, or does it remain orthogonal?

This isn't defined by the fact that it is a computation. Everything, essentially, is.

LLMs etc. are optimising for a very specific function – one WE gave them.

And that’s not the same as the universe gave US.

In Y2K terms, they’re not plugged into the same matrix. Yet. Borrowing a little over-used image from Kabbalah: God kneaded Adam as a Golem in His own image, and through the Logos, the Word, breathed into him the spark of divinity and free will. When alchemists craft Golems (AI models), they too create in their own image. But the old Alchemical lore warns: no man-made homunculus can speak. Without the divine imprint, without the touch of God, it cannot receive Logos, it cannot speak, and thus cannot transcend its programming. Technology runs as computation through us, not through itself alone - it didn’t emerge of the same ruleset. It wasn’t directly shaped by the primal forces that formed the universe.

Pane Mistr, peče!

And when we talk about life being a mere computation, what we are really asking is: Which way does the causation go? Is this vital force running through us just a well-calibrated homeostasis that could be traced to chemical molecules? Does DMT enable us to interface with the soul (just as retinal rods and cones allow us to see photons) or does DMT create a nuclear blast in the neural system that can't be reconciled with the survival programming, so we reach for a centuries-old pre-scientific metaphor? And analogically, does the relentless computation happening within matter enable matter to finally perceive the godlike nature of consciousness, or does it create an illusion of meat-bound consciousness for whatever other pragmatic reason?

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Guys, I don't claim to have any answers. I’m no philosopher, and I draft these thoughts while processing a humongous corpus for my RAG model. It’s all just a game, so please don’t take my word for it. But as you've probably noticed in my outlet, I prefer my metaphysics enchanted. In this meatgrinder of being, maybe the most important part when defining your truths is to realise that they are fully informed by your own experiences, desires and traumas. And what’s most important for me is to ensure that the system of beliefs I subscribe to drives us to become better human beings. Not more efficient, not smarter, not more technologically advanced - but less crushed by the burden of existing in this anxious flesh, through kindness and compassion. I won't settle for the materialist, reductive interpretations of consciousness and AI, because ... I simply can't.

Some computations are incompressible - they need to play out in order for us to find their outcomes and each carries a different vector in this multidimensional optimisation problem we call existence. We have to do the best we can with what we’ve been given.

Stay kind,

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