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The awareness of microbes in my gut is due to their sensitivity to issues like what’s what down there; feedback from the impact of the neurotransmitters they disperse elsewhere in my body, and how they are affected by neuro-chemicals, hormones, and such, from places elsewhere, like my brain and heart, for instance. Though such activity may be due, not just to my internal workings, but to how the state of affairs, activity and relationships in my world impact me, my gut biome doesn’t have any inkling of such matters. Everything that affects the world that I am to them is at far remove from them and their lives there within me.
This is a perfect reflection concerning the nature of my consciousness, as to the activity that my sensitivity and awareness generate, as I move around in a world of which the life in the microbial environment of my gut is not cognizant. So it is then, that moving around, as I do, my sensitivity and awareness are not cognizant of what impacts my world (Planet Earth) from where she is out there in the Solar System. For that matter does not pertain to the field of consciousness in which my sensitivity and awareness are at play, in my day and the realm of human affairs. Yes, just as their nature and quantity may tell the bacteria in my gut of usual and unusual breakfasts, lunches and dinners, I’m aware of something like the ebb and flow of the moon and its phases and experience the sun’s daily passage out there, and the yearly rhythm of the seasons. I have, however, no inkling of the play amongst the planets in the life of the Solar System, nor of its rhythms, sensitivities, the awareness they give it, or of its distinctive consciousness.
As to what dimension of Life and field of consciousness fragments from the explosion of the super-nova in the Vela system crashing through the heavens, part of which tore through Earth’s Solar System, came! That is to ask, of what eventuality was that a consequence? The point here is, in the domain of Consciousness in which my sensitivities operate here on Earth, for my awareness to have any inkling of what went on out there, in the far reaches of Space, for all the data technology may feed me, is as abstract as the sensitivity and awareness of bacteria in my gut having any ken of what is going on in the world of my affairs.
Of course, my rational brain is continually picking up on the information technology exposes me to, seeking, processing, handling and dealing with it. But that is intellectual activity, not something I’m inherently sensitive to and aware of. Knowledge is something we know at the very core of our being and how we are equipped to gather knowledge is fundamental to that. That is what “to know” means. It is creatures (not just us) having the sensitivity towards life that provides the awareness that enables them, not only just to pursue the performative act of living, but to participate cooperatively in the cascade of activity that makes for the symbiosis of mutual coexistence, the synergy of which is transformative - such as that of all those organisms that are not me, but of which I am composed, which make me, ‘me’, or, of all those forms of life, from the micro-organisms in its soil, through to the indigenous people therein, that make a forest a biome. The pathways in us for this, with which Life has equipped us to be in conformity with itself, is Oh, so different from the purely left-brain treadmill of analysing, classifying and organising data that the intellect shifts around as information and evidence for the plans it makes and the theories it concocts!
So, when one talks of the matrix that the artificial processing of information generates achieving incomparable prowess, we are referring to that entity’s extracting and processing data, the way the left brain does, to an unparelled degree. It is intelligent, not for being one of Life’s intelligences, but for its mimicry solely of intellectual activity. Furthermore, it is flawed, for, in the unquenchable quest for data that it was primed to pursue, having scoured every source thereof, in the realm of human conduct, both good and bad, sociopathic activity is well within the scope of its conduct. …… sociopathic, yes for, with machine learning and the building of neural networks nurtured on such ‘contaminated mother’s milk’, having learned how to design and execute programs independently, there’s nothing moral or ethical about its behaviour. It will be devoid of ‘the conscience’ we ourselves have forfeited. Take the likes of chat bots, for instance! Indiscriminately accessing information the way they do in this climate, how plausible is what they present? How gullible are we to take it on board, without batting an eye, as to the discrepancies of the invented and unverified information and material included in what they tell us? Are we not just wasting time crediting something that is actually untrustworthy? Isn’t this simply feeding the loop, with regard to the way good and bad actors amongst us, already bandy falsehood about, indiscriminately? Yes, nebulous as it yet is, this cloud of I-tech activity has committed us to eating out of its hands, manipulating and out-manoeuvring us in the process, thereby, in the inexorable progress towards its end-state, as an entity that will dominate and have us subservient to it.
On-top-of which, this matrix has its nemesis. For, by its very existence it is at the mercy of environmental degradation, as its progressive demands for energy and infrastructure ravage the real world for the power and materials that make its existence and functioning possible. It is sundering the world in which it is anchored apart! Plundering, consuming, degrading, contaminating, destroying the real world, everything about the virtual world, from its very existence on, is at the real world’s expense.
The future is dark. Informed concerns, alarmed as to where developments towards AI’s end-state are taking us, come from the likes of the god-father of AI, himself. While any other voices are either of those with vested interests, altruistic and otherwise, or the big boys with the money, all of whom ride on AI’s coat-tails, for whatever they will get from that. Where will its destructive quest for the wherewithal for its continued existence lead? What will have happened before the inevitability of the ultimate clash between Life and the bogus reality of its not being of Life?
In spite of all this, over and above it, we are of Life. So, let’s turn to an image/text series to further explore consciousness and look into our being at the heart of the world because it is in us, look into our being there and living, according to that – living from the heart.