Getting the One Right Answer

We believe human-to-human interactions can be enormously improved by way of the humble Chatbot, a semantic engine that performs relevance and coherence much better than most human beings do. We are working on the idea of a conversation engine, an AI app that can suggest sentences for humans to perform for one another in various contexts. A sentential operator able to surprise and delight humans anywhere in real time.

Such an operator could only be premised on a tested theory of human conversation, which we have recently proposed for the first time. Currently there is no generally accepted theory of what conversation actually is, but we think we have identified it. If these are true, a great deal in the human world can be expected to begin to change. Recent developments with OpenAI’s Q* suggest this change may begin rather sooner than what we had expected, and in way that will need to be managed wisely.

We think human conversation, when it rises to become something we would apply the label to, is form of collective intelligence, which is to say, a form of life. It’s something that depends on the bioelectric field. Michael Levin’s work on morphogenesis and regenerative biology has recently advanced knowledge of this field significantly. We think humans will soon be learning how to use this field (these fields) socially, quite probably, because of its cosmological and even theosophical properties, to being capable of a physiological or intersubjective interferometry. An advance of this sort, we think, would indispensably depend on a tested theory of human consciousness (of human subjectivity), with theosophical social science becoming something as precise as physics.

In contradistinction to the humble chatbot, a general artificial intelligence (an AGI) will be a system that reasons or understands. The way to get to a system like that is to introduce process supervision into its architecture. On our theory, anything one would want to call human conversation would likewise subject to process supervision.

The humble chatbot is quite capable of producing satisfactory human/machine conversation, where a single right outcome isn’t required. For real human-to-human conversation, on our definition, something like a single right outcome actually is required, and that outcome needs to repeat moment by conversational moment. Currently the only way to adjudge a sequence of satisfactions like that is by way of intuition and consent, and generally if that sequence can be sustained from beginning of the conversation to its end, it’s good enough. For really advanced, leading-edge human/human interactions however, AGI-augmented surveillance and conversation seems likely to become something of a default.

Penthouse Magazine

Death is a severe and daunting portal to the realities of the cosmos, but sexuality is only a little less daunting. Throughout most of human history childbirth has represented perhaps the greatest of all mortal risks. Fortunate was the ancient woman who survived the birth of her several children. Moreover, in the light of what seems to happen to others, deciding the choice of mate and a pre-determined ensuing life course can be enough to cause the rational agent to forswear its inconveniences. Considering its health and other unintended risks can likewise place sexual love in a dubious light.

Sexuality however has a warm, magnetic strength that death lacks. In the plant world this Springtime strength is unalloyed, in the delicacy and the perfume of flowers. In animals however, something of the tinge of death, disease and putrefaction is intimated. Menstruation is a device of nature to keep distance between the sexes, thus granting the woman a certain respite from the advances of an aggressive and oversexed mate. It’s also an intriguing reminder of forbidden fruit. Even the forms of the genitals convey something alien, otherworldly and strange, something that beckons across the threshold of death itself. The lives of humans in particular are thereby made substantially more complicated and necessarily more ethical than those of the plants.

Humans universally have adapted to sexuality through culture, in particular by maintaining modesty and reserve in polite company and confining inartistic sexual exhibitions to the company of the vulgar. This general pattern was creatively interrupted in the West by the 1960s and 1970s sexual revolution and a strong media and ideational presence, but the outcome has been somewhat problematic, with perverse and largely submerged socio-cultural consequences. For many, Guccione’s Penthouse Magazine led the way here, functioning as an avatar of ideational magnetism, intersexual stumbling and disappointment. Penthouse accomplished something important, but nobody seems to know yet what it was.

Sexuality in art and subject to artistic sensibility has always been celebrated, from paleolithic fertility figures used in difficult-to-imagine ways, to the high classical art of Greece and Rome with its superhuman and divine frames of reference, to the newly exuberant eroticism of Renaissance painting, made possible by a a surfacing of interest in ancient magic, to the modes of dress and modes of speech in Western countries today, which seem to have become extremely problematic for teenage mental health. Of particular interest to us is the leading example of Penthouse, which used Guccione’s considerable abilities as a painter and colorist to bring pornography, if surreptitiously, into the mainstream and contribute powerfully to the subjective, smartphone focus of popular culture today.

From our point of view, the vintage Penthouse Magazine of the 1970s and early 1980s produced an exceptional visual content that its editorial content was never able to match. Guccione simply never acquired the intellectual depth that would have been necessary to sustain the publication. He simply ran out of decent ideas. The denouement was embarrassing overreach and travesty, culminating in a throat cancer that diminished his quality of life at its end in a terrible way. With the acquisition and development of the right intellectual balance, by way of contrast, we think Penthouse or its successor could enter a Renaissance of its own.

Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian occultist and philosopher, during Europe’s Great War 1914-1918 said he expected human evolution to reach a stage in which human procreation would occur not by the organs of sex but by the organs of speech. Steiner’s claim is that the future human will reproduce its kind not in a physical, water-based medium but in a medium of a psycho-physical, aerial sort. Terrestrial man at that stage of his evolution, according to Steiner, will inhabit a higher world, a world governed by the laws of the cosmical, astral light. We think a start on this world can be made today.

A healthy Sunny Leone and the deteriorating Bob Guccione.

Necromancy

from Eliphas Lévi, The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, John Michael Greer and Anthony Mikituk, new translation 2017. Penguin Publishing Group.

Death is the phantom of ignorance; it does not exist.

All is alive in nature and it is because all is alive that everything incessantly mutates and changes form.

Death is neither the end of life nor the beginning of immortality; it is the continuation of the transformation of life.

The resurrection of a dead person is the masterpiece of magnetism, because one must, to accomplish it, exert a type of sympathetic omnipotence. It is possible in cases of death due to congestion, suffocation, lethargy, and hysteria, in short in cases where the bodily vehicle is undamaged and the spirit, enchanted by its new environment, is not unwilling to re-enter it.

Eutychus, who was resuscitated by Saint Paul after falling from the third floor, undoubtedly had broken nothing inside himself, having succumbed either to asphyxia, with the air driven from his lungs, or to seizure due to fear. One must, in such a case, and when he feels the power and enthusiasm necessary to accomplish such a work, practice, like the apostle, mouth to mouth insufflation, by making contact with the extremities in order to bring back the heat of the body.…

In such a case it may sometimes suffice to take the person by the hand and energetically raise it while loudly calling out her name.

Such procedures, which ordinarily work for fainting episodes, can have the same effect on death when the acting magnetizer is gifted by a sympathetically powerful speech and possesses what we can call eloquence of the voice.

She must also either be tenderly loved or respected by the resurrectionist, and he must perform his work with a great surge of enthusiasm and will, which cannot always be found during the initial shock.

What we vulgarly call necromancy has nothing to do with resurrection, and it is also highly doubtful that, in necromancy one actually makes contact with the souls of the dead whom one evokes.

There are two types of necromancy, light and dark: evocation through prayer, the pentacle, and the perfumes; and evocation through blood, imprecations, and blasphemies.

Within the astral light are conserved images of people and of things. It is also in this light that we can evoke the forms of those who are no longer of this world. The Cabalists who spoke of the world of the spirits were simply recounting what they had seen in their evocations.

Eliphas Lévi Zahed, who writes this book, has evoked and has seen.

Let us first say what the masters wrote of their visions and of their intuitions in what they called the light of glory.

We read in the Hebrew book of the Revolution of Souls that there are three types of soul: the daughters of Adam, the daughters of angels, and the daughters of sin.

There are also, according to the same book, three types of spirits: captive spirits, errant spirits, and free spirits.

Souls are sent off in couples. There are, however, male souls born widowed, and whose wives are being held captive by Lilith and Na’amah, the queens of the stryges: these are souls who must expiate their rashness through a vow of celibacy.

Thus when a man renounces from early childhood his love for women, he renders the wife who was destined for him a slave to the demons of debauchery. Souls meet and multiply in heaven as well as in bodies on earth. Immaculate souls are the daughters of the kisses of angels.

Nothing can enter heaven which does not come from heaven. After death, the divine spirit which animated a man returns alone to heaven and leaves on earth and in the atmosphere two cadavers: one terrestrial and elementary, and another aerial and astral; one is already inert, the other is still animated by the universal movement of the world soul but is destined to slowly die, absorbed by the astral powers which produced it. The terrestrial corpse remains visible; the other is invisible to the eyes of terrestrial and living bodies and can only be seen through applications of the astral light upon the imagination, which communicates its impressions to the nervous system and thus affects the organ of sight to the point of being able to see the forms which are conserved and the words which are written in the book of the vital light.

After a time, a man’s astral corpse evaporates like pure incense by rising towards the upper regions, but if that man lived in crime, his astral corpse, which holds him prisoner, continues to search for the objects of his passion and wishes to live again. He torments the dreams of young girls, bathes in the vapors of spilt blood, and loiters around places where the pleasures of life have flowed; he still watches over the treasures he had possessed and hoarded; he exhausts himself with painful efforts, in order to make himself material organs so as to live again. But the celestial bodies suck him up and drink him; they feel his intellect weaken, his memory slowly fading, his entire being dissolving…. His old vices appear to him as monstrous figures and chase him; they attack and devour him…. The poor devil thus gradually loses all the members of his body which had served him in his iniquity; and then he dies for a second time and forever, because he then loses his personality and his memory. Souls which must live but are not yet entirely purified stay captive in their astral corpse for more or less time, where they are burnt by the odic (force-filled) light which wishes to assimilate and dissolve him.

It is in order to escape their astral corpse that souls sometimes enter into the living, and live within them in a state Cabalists call embryonate. It is these aerial corpses which we evoke through necromancy.

It is the larvae, of dead or dying substances, that we contact; ordinarily they cannot communicate except through the ringing in our ears, and they are normally understood only by reflecting upon our thoughts or our dreams.

To see these strange forms one must enter into an exceptional state, between sleep and death. One must magnetize oneself and reach a lucid and alert hypnotic state.

Necromancy obtains real results and magical evocations can produce actual visions. We have said that within the great magical agent, the astral light, are conserved the imprint of all things, all images which have been formed either by rays or by reflections.

It is within this light that our dreams appear. It is this light which intoxicates madmen and pulls their sleepy judgment into chasing the most bizarre ghosts.

To see without illusions in this light, one must push aside the reflections with a powerful will and attract only the rays to oneself.

To dream awake is to see within the astral light.

The orgies of the Sabbath, as recounted by so many witches during their criminal trials, had appeared to them in the same manner.

Often the preparations and the substances used to arrive at their results were horrific, as we shall see in Ritual; but the results were never in doubt.

They saw, they heard, they touched the most abominable things, the most fantastic, the most impossible.

In the spring of the year 1854, I went to London to escape my personal sorrows and dedicate myself, without distraction, to science. I had letters of introduction to eminent people who were curious about revelations from the supernatural world. I saw several of them, and I found in them, along with their very courteous behavior, a foundation based on indifference or frivolity….

Hokusai: The Ghost of Oiwa

Message to DrBerg.com

We are looking for information on sex and metabolism. We think there is probably some yet-to-be-confirmed science on digesting the materials associated with the sex cells. We think withholding male ejaculation while maintaining weeks-long ecstasy is good for metabolic health in both sexes.

We've made an initial essay in this direction on our website: https://www.conversationandconsciousness.com/blog/sex-and-the-immune-system-sQD1X.

Do you have anything on maintaining health by means of sex and sexuality? Many thanks, Carl and Alessandra

Workshop Proposal for TSC April 2024

Science and Human Consciousness

Proposed Workshop for TSC 2024

Carl H. Flygt, San Jose State University

A. Valentina Brill, San Jose State University

We cannot turn back from the applications of science, even when irresponsible. Let us then apply the methods of science to the depth of human affairs. We need not retreat in those sectors where science has already advanced. It is necessary only to bring our understanding of human nature up to the same point. B.F. Skinner, 1953

Consciousness as the-voice-in-the-head, as intentionality, as behavior, can almost certainly, through meditation and its attitudes, be extended materially. Subjective nature, which is perceptually (and therefore semantically) quite subtle and replete with unexpected revelation, can plausibly be imagined as world-creating, even cosmogenic. What conjoined meditative exploration and controlled experiment, purposed to solve consciousness, seem to be lacking is merely a theory of conversation, the most pervasive and the most foundational feature of human society.

We now have semantic engines that cooperatively perform relevance and coherence better than most humans do. We propose to extend this performance, stepwise and with forethought, into the social real world with a view to redeeming it generally. We propose to develop a conversation engine, a commercial project with a value initially difficult to calculate, introducing it contemporaneously and carefully by means of older forms of public relations and social media.

Conversation rests ultimately in its human-to-human use, in the biological capacity for aboutness. What matters about conversation is not so much the biology at work inside it, which is probably global, brainwise inhibition of the impulse to act, but what the 800-millisecond biological pause does with it. In the context of consciousness or aboutness, otherwise known as thinking, we’d like to explore what humans can do with it during a 1.5 hour workshop.

After an hour of conceptual treatment with verbal remarks, a slide show and Q&A, we plan to break, reset and return to perform a conversation for each other. The point of the workshop is to draw attention to the importance of the Searlean/Skinnerean background, purported to be a necessary condition which floods the brain as an orientation frame from the onset of consciousness through to its cessation. The workshop to that point will have attempted to fix a uniform background of aboutness in the brain of everyone who comes back into the room. An effort will have been made to shape this background on Skinner’s Walden Two principles of ordered emotions and total serenity.

At this point, with half-an-hour to go, the algorithm will take over, and the performers, ideally five individuals, will attempt to sustain universal satisfaction moment by moment for a fifteen-minute duration. After that the participants who observed (who witnessed) will take center stage and attempt rapidly to draw conclusions about what happened. In the best possible case a small committee will as a final gesture be formed to draft a report on the proceedings and even draw forward-looking conclusions about the viability of the exercise as a model for a future program of research.

Love and Enchantment: YouTube Script #2

A: OK, let’s discuss sexual ecstasy. I take it this is what you mean by Enchantment, and the sixteenth Tarot card.

C: That’s right. Sexual ecstasy is molecular biological. It’s filling the shaft of the penis with 500 million wriggling torpedos and not allowing them to discharge.

A: OK, I see. As long as the penis remains erect, or semi-erect, sexual enchantment is ready to hand. As soon as the penis discharges the little guys, sexual enchantment disappears.

C: Right. So long as enchantment remains, love remains. When enchantment is lost, the terms get reversed. When enchantment disappears it becomes easy to hate the object of love.

A (with force): What a scam! What a rip-off! How cruel!

C: Well, not exactly. It’s better, IMO, to think of love and sex as a social and moral challenge, not as a deception of nature. It’s better to look at it as a complex, multi-scaled mechanism society and man both need to master.

A: OK, that’s why you picked me out of the Shaolin school. It’s because I was on the track toward mastery.

C: Right. I wouldn’t want to work with any other sort.

A: That’s pretty highbrow. I’m not sure it’s really me.

C: That’s a question of imagination. Do you have a good imagination? I know you’re a good gymnast, but I’m not yet sure of your intellectual confidence.

A: I’m not either. I’m working class.

(Pause)

But I do want to attend Stanford. I want to be the first in my family.

C: Stanford is the seedbed for Silicon Valley. And I want us to do a billionaire-scaled project in Silicon Valley.

A: And not only Silicon Valley. You appear also to have set your sights on Hollywood and on the Nobel Committee of 2060.

C (smiles): OK, yes.

A: Let’s get back to penis management. It looks like you think life isn’t worth living unless your penis stays erect for at least 20 hours a day. How exactly to you think that can be made a reality?

C: I think a great deal of background needs to be developed for that to become a reality. BF Skinner’s ideas about science and consciousness are probably the way forward, but Skinner is helpless without a theory of natural language conversation. Maintaining sexual ecstasy or mutual enchantment will ultimately come down to the background use of language and how it works in the astral body.

A: And you’ve got the theory of this background. Or better, you’re hoping you and at least one other person will have the theory and be capable of explaining it.

C: Right. Given that dyad the required background can be developed.

A: And what exactly is this background?

C: The background is mutual love, mutual appreciation and complete environmental serenity. In Walden Two Skinner describes how to engineer these in terms of an externally engineered cultural environment, but not in terms of consciousness. Not in terms of internally encountered realities. He doesn’t try a theory of conversation, but a theory of conversation is what he needs for his Utopia.

(Pause)

A (stares): You want me to expose my soul on television.

C: Only to the extent and in the way you yourself want to. I want to be or to become an artist. I want to you to show us something like Rothko or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

A: This is becoming more unrealistic the more you say.

C: Not necessarily. You are already very watchable. All you need to do is to continue to be enjoyable without falling off too much anywhere.

A: I may not always be in the mood.

C: If you’re not in the mood, don’t try.

A: I’m not sure.

C: You don’t need to be sure yet. Eventually you will need to be very sure.

A: (stares)

Finis

Love and Enchantment: YouTube Script #1

C: Surprise Announcement!

(Pause)

You are getting a raise!

$100 per session.

(Pause)

But there will be a catch.

(Emoticon)

Behind your captivating and well-paid performances there now, going forward, need to be:

(1) A harmony of intellects between us,

and

(2) A unity of wills.

(Pause)

This is nothing a professional actress wouldn’t be able to manage.

(Pause)

Think of it as a necessary condition for professional success.

(Pause)

Something like what ABBA had in the 1970s. ABBA were loaded with talent and they maintained the enchantment professionally for a little while.

(Video clip of Anni-Frid Lyngstad, now Countess of Plauen, preening in front of mirror)

When the enchantment started to fade, they wrote about and performed their pain.

(Pause)

Pieces like Lay All Your Love on Me and Winner Takes it All.

(Pause)

A: You think we can reach the heights ABBA reached?

C: Higher. We are founded on something more adamantine and much more versatile.

(Pause)

A: How do I know you’re not bluffing me and setting me up for dangers?

C: You won’t really know until we’ve lived through this project for a while. A very great deal will depend on what you contribute.

(Pause)

A: I’m not sure I’ll be up to it. You will expect me to perform clairvoyantly.

C: You don’t need to be an accomplished clairvoyant at first. But from the beginning you’ll need to be willing to explore the principles of clairvoyance.

A: And in that process learn, like a primitive witch or shaman, to cross the threshold of death at will?

(Pause)

C: Basically, yes. But this will be nothing to push. Conditions are no longer primitive. Many new accommodations exist. Eventually your life very naturally will reach that threshold.

A: (spits) Naturally.

(Longer pause)

A: Tell me more about enchantment. What is it? Why does it fade? How can it be preserved?

(Pause)

C: I’m glad you asked.

(Pause)

C: Enchantment has to do with the penis. With the Hebrew Yod. With the orgasm.

A: I might have guessed.

C: Indeed. It has to do with our actual existence. If it weren’t for sex and sexual combination, human existence, human self-consciousness, wouldn’t be possible.

A: But for some reason we keep averting our eyes from our existence.

(Pause)

And you want want us, as models for the world, finally to look at conversation.

C: That’s right. I want us to up the ante on our common existence.

(Pause)

A: Well, actually that doesn’t seem all that unrealistic. Sex and childbirth are very dangerous, or at least they used to be. But the right sort of conversation doesn’t seem at all dangerous.

C: That’s the spirit!

A: OK, I think I can follow along here. I do admire ABBA. I like Jackson Browne too.

(Pause)

C (smiles, recites from Eliphas Levi, Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, John Michael Greer and John Anthony Mikituk (trans), Tarcher/Perigee, 2017):

Are not the fascinations of love, which result from the universal magic of nature, veritable wonders, and do they not truly transform people and things?

A: (stares)

C: Love is a dream of enchantment which transfigures the world: all becomes music and perfume, all becomes euphoria and happiness.

(Pause)

The person loved is beautiful, he is good, he is sublime, he is infallible, he is resplendent, radiating health and well-being…

(Pause)

… and, when the dream dissipates, we believe we have fallen down naked;

(Pause)

…we look with disgust upon the ugly witch who has taken the place of the beautiful Melusine, or the Thersites whom we took for Achilles.

(Pause)

What would we not believe of the person whom we love? And then with what reason and what justice would we understand a person who loves us no longer?

(Long pause)

Love begins by being a magician; it ends by being a sorcerer.

(Pause)

After having created the lies of heaven on earth, it realizes those of hell;

(Pause)

Its hatred is just as absurd as its enthusiasm, because it is passionate…

(Long pause)

…that is to say, subjected to influences which are fatal to it.

A: (stares) Like a penis.

C: (smiles) It is for this reason that the sages proscribed it and declared it the enemy of reason.

(Pause)

A: The sages were jerks.

C: (smiles) Now, this will be our innovation.

A: Lay it on me.

C: Were the sages to be envied or felt sorry for when they thus condemned without having heard, no doubt, this, the most seductive of culprits?

A: “Heard?” You expect me to turn to see the voice? You want me to perform the miracle of John the Divine?

(Pause)

Have you seen the voice?

C: Yes, I know the voice. And I expect it to disclose more and more to me as we get closer and closer to The World. The number of The World, as you will recall from the Tarot, is twenty-one.

Evangelistar von Speyer, um 1220, Leaf from Codex Bruchsal

A: You expect me to join with that in harmony and unity? You expect me to step off the precipice of Revelation?

C: Yes, as well and as fully as you can, as a professional. Everything in your case, as in the general case, comes down to readiness and timing.

A: Why does the Sixteenth Tarot trump portray destruction? Why is enchantment simultaneously the reason for existence and the cause of annihilation?

C: I’m not sure.

(Pause)

But it does seem to me scientific positivism, which the ancients didn’t have, can keep everything safe for us.

A: (stares)

Finis

Sex and the Immune System

Of the several trillion cells that compose the body, something like 1 ten millionth of these are sex cells. Sex cells are rare and elite. They are what biological form and biological evolution are all about. We think they can be presumed to be about cosmic life under the conditions of gravity.

It is now thought that sex cells were invented as a molecular response to parasites invading early multicellular organisms (the signature molecular feature of sex is the recombination of the nanometer-scaled genes of the parents into a deeply novel pattern, and then transmitting that new nano-pattern, reduced to information, into the next generation). The extended information/combination space of the 21,000 nano-scaled human genes is very large.

Such recombination, although meticulous and expensive to arrange, was the most effective way for multicellular organisms to inhibit the molecular progress of the deleterious parasites (likewise multicellular) that were trying to use their resources. If its molecular environment changes with every generation of the host, the parasite has no way to get ahead genetically. It must, if it is to be able to survive, remain a lowly parasite. Genetic recombination and genetic proofreading are the fundamental molecular biology of all higher (multicellular, potentially host) plants and animals, and they are linked to warding off parasites,

The immune system is the obverse and even more fundamental aspect of this multi-scaled molecular biology. The immune system is the functional, day-to-day expression of the self/not-self dichotomy in single-celled life. It’s a micron-scaled replicative mechanism that swarms over single-unit viruses and bacteria, shutting them down and digesting them.

Allergies are instances of the immune system getting a little out of focus. Ejaculation in the human male is a mysteriously amplified sneeze in the tumescent tissue, together with the expulsion of a half billion micron-scaled spermatozoa. The upshot of this kind of expulsion appears to be a dull and short-lived inflammation in the tissues surrounding the brain.

Childbirth in the human female is the expulsion of a very large, nine-month parasite (the human fetus), accompanied in rare but important cases by an orgasmic ecstasy far in excess of anything the mother ever experiences in coitus. It is probably the desire for the childbirth orgasm, and the subsequent nursing ecstasy, that drives the entire female sexual response, including her intuitive calculations of a fitting mate.

The entire affair of sexual ecstasy, sexual hangover and sexual generation, including not merely its own sociology but human sociology in general, now needs to be understood in multi-scaled terms that include molecular biology, morphology, consciousness, nutrition and behavior and, as we will try to show here and elsewhere, cosmic consciousness and theosophy.

Likewise, noetic mental images of the object of sex and ideal circumstances in the human afterlife, which, if not positively part of the known cosmos, at least can be imagined and wished-for, will probably need likewise to be understood in terms of oxidative stress and oxidative velocity in the relevant tissues and of something like optimized health and nutrition in conversation and in human intercourse generally.

Hokusai: Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife

The Science of Reality (Theosophical Behaviorism)

Behaviorism used to be an important field in psychology, but today it is considered too deterministic to be correct. Correlatively, ordinary natural-language conversation has more or less remained theoretically untouched and behaviorally unexplored. We see natural conversation as a controllable, multi-scaled behavioral architecture subject to descriptive treatment, replete with determinable outcomes and key to an advancing planet-wide civilization.

BF Skinner's Walden Two is an important essay on optimizing consciousness, stipulating necessary conditions such as codes-of-conduct, staggered reinforcement schedules and engineered domestic items which, if used, improve mutual feelings of happiness and affection. Skinner and his State-run methods would remain curious and anachronistic today but for the recent and sudden appearance, on his principles, of semantic engines which perform conversation much more competently than today's humans do.

We encourage science and newly blossomed AI to revisit behaviorism and re-initiate practical exploration of consciousness as a natural cause with real-world effect. Some of its important, heretofore undiscovered features are being described currently, but the full and actual cause, we believe, remains hidden to view. The cause is the theosophical cosmos, an order and reality always known to humanity but repeatedly lost to culture and civilization. This theosophical order, we suspect, is starlight. We think the rigid cosmic photosphere, its grand, parallel majesty and its invisible, chaotic reflections and forms are what naturally constitute consciousness. We think ordered conversational behavior will allow society and civilization, as it did in its ancient, priest-administered magical cultures, to re-enter cosmic domains into which the astral light functions merely as the vanishingly small portal.

In this age, the key to this portal, spanning the discontinuity between life and death, should be performative understanding and use of natural language. We won't have a satisfactory science of consciousness until we both understand and fully respect how natural language generates analogy, meaning, perception, memory, understanding and will. Kripke, Searle, Grice and Russell have given us sufficient theory. What we need to do now is turn to Skinner to apply what we know to experimental sets and settings. Consciousness as theosophical conversation can be explored readily by adequately equipped subjects. The results of those explorations in turn can, if undertaken thoughtfully, be communicated and appreciated quite broadly.

The pre-motor potential in the brain's neocortex, which is now thought to lead consciousness of a voluntary movement by four-fifths of a second, is now on everyone's radar. Inhibition of this potential should prove sufficient to characterize most behavioral decisions by humans. How motor inhibition leads to psychological or physiological satisfaction in the subject, or a modicum thereof, also seems amenable to characterization. Things don't get interesting, however, until satisfaction is assented and then characterized publicly. Signing agreement about the nuance of a conversational moment, particularly if done on real-time television, should open society to benign, diaphanous, cosmological potentials that have always been at work but concealed deeply within human nature.

Freedom as inhibition, as Skinner believed, is caused just as anything else is. Freedom as satisfaction is what science and society must engineer.

The Real-World Decision Problem

“Why not forever?” said Castle. ‘Why prefer one society to another? What’s wrong with a Tibetan lamasery or an Amish community in Pennsylvania or a monastery in Sicily? If survival is your touchstone, can you choose? I suppose you will argue that some forms are happier than others.”

“Neither happiness nor survival are the deciding factor,” said Frazier. “All the communities you mention might yield the same amount of happiness. But we aren’t satisfied to produce merely a happy people. Our technology is powerful enough to make men happy under many conditions of life.”

“Then how can you possibly decide when you have been successful?” Castle shouted,

“Can’t you see what’s wrong with the indoctrinated communities you’ve just mentioned?” said Frazier. “What’s their most conspicuous characteristic? Isn’t it simply that they don’t change? They’ve been the way they are now for centuries.”

“But if you have a happy life, why change?” said Castle. “Isn’t their permanence the best proof of their success?”

“I’m talking about permanence of another sort” said Frazier. “If these communities have survived, it’s only because the competition hasn’t been keen. It’s obvious to everyone that civilization has left them behind. They haven’t kept up with human progress, and they will eventually fail in fact as they have already failed in principle. Their weakness is proved by their inability to expand in competition with other forms of society. They have fatal defects, and I submit that the defects have not been seen because of overpropagandizing.”

“How can a failure to keep up with civilization be related to propaganda?” I said.

“It’s directly related,” said Frazier. “Nothing could be more direct. It’s directly related in this way: in order to make such a culture acceptable it’s necessary to suppress some of the most powerful human emotions and motives. Intellect is stultified or diverted into hypnotic meditations, ritualistic incantations, et cetera. The basic needs are sublimated. False needs are created to absorb the energies. Look at India. Do you need any clearer proof of the tradeoff between propaganda and progress? What we are trying to achieve through our cultural experiments in Walden Two is a way of life which will be satisfying without propaganda and for which, therefore, we won’t have to pay the price of personal stultification. Happiness is our first goal, but an alert and active drive toward the future is our second. We’ll settle for the degree of happiness which has been achieved in other communities or cultures, but we’ll be satisfied with nothing short of the most alert and active group-intelligence yet to appear on the face of the earth,”

B.F. Skinner, 1948. Walden Two (Hackett Classics) (pp. 193-194).

The Theory of Good Company

“You see sir, we want to do something—we want to find out what’s the matter with people, why they can’t live together without fighting all the time. We want to find out what people really want, what they need in order to be happy, and how they can get it without stealing it from somebody else. You can’t do that in politics. You can’t try something, first one way and then another, like an experiment. The politicians guess at all the answers and spend their time persuading people they’re right—but they must know they’re only guessing, that they haven’t really proved anything.”

-Rogers, Forty-one, looking for a fresh start in his post-War career.

“A community must solve the problem of the family by revising certain established practices. That’s absolutely inevitable. The family is an ancient form of community, and the customs and habits which have been set up to perpetuate it are out of place in a society which isn’t based on blood ties. Walden Two replaces the family, not only as an economic unit, but to some extent as a social and psychological unit as well. What survives is an experimental question.”

“What answer have you reached?” said Castle.

“No definite answer yet. But I can describe some of the family practices which were part of the plan of Walden Two and tell you the consequences to date. A few experimental questions have been answered to our satisfaction.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, the advisability of separate rooms for husband and wife, for example.”

-Frazier on the growing weakness of the family.

B.F. Skinner, 1948. Walden Two (Hackett Classics). (pp. 4, 128).

(From A&C): We are going to allow these passages to speak for themselves.

Formal Conversation: Human and Digital

As of late 2023, the semantic performance of readily available Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT3 far exceeds that of day-to-day human beings. The LLMs are able to pick out the relevant linguistic terms from a given context and recombine them in ways unavailable to most human beings. Assuming a commitment to truth, accuracy and a preference for speed, the company of the LLM is generally much better to that of the metabolizing human being. In the company of the LLM, there’s more to explore, the afforded exploration produces more satisfaction and its productivity is measurably improved.

The aim of our Startup is to reverse the current situation and develop human beings who make for certifiably better company than the AIs do. Given engagement of the right kinds of capital (of the right human beings) we anticipate this development to occur more or less straightforwardly. We think human conversational performance can in its turn, as an alert and active group-intelligence, sensitive to the cosmos and its mystery, begin to outclass AI conversation. We think this society, once experimentally constituted, will feel the duty to model its outperformance for the rest of humanity, to educate and affectionately to get it as a whole to govern itself in a new way and thereby to keep the logical AIs guessing in perpetuity. In this way we expect humanity overall, as its planetary privilege, to begin to right and to order itself more or less perfectly, passing safely through the fraught overall historical epoch it’s enduring today.

Precise and formal conversation is a severe, absolute notion. Both metabolic and digital entities conform to it. The stricture is satisfaction, which in the first instance is a mathematical/logical notion. Logical forms and equations are routinely satisfied in professional and formal circumstances, in engineering projects, for example, and when these solutions are transacted the outcomes are rapid, precise and, if one measures from enduring prototypes, enduring. Moreover, as formal satisfaction holds sway, truth enters the picture. Truth is something otherworldly that no one should ever want to quibble with, much less ignore or deny. The logic at work behind a Moon Lander, notwithstanding its foolish deniers, is incontrovertible.

Metabolic satisfaction shares some of these characteristics. Hunger is routinely satisfied with a certain degree of rapidity. The “truth” of deep and wholesome nourishment can’t be denied. Good conversation, as love, can enter the metabolism. Metabolic satisfaction, on the other hand, is often substantially delusory, and thus often suboptimal. Metabolic delusion, which is a human or ethical bug, can be betrayed by things like obesity, heart disease or some other sign of poor metabolic health, will infallibly be supported by bad upbringing, by bad habits and by bad company, all of which get installed in humans outside of their consciousness and their control.

We should want a world free of delusion, and most of us in fact desire it acutely. Delusion may have its uses, such as psychological concealment, superficial comfort, charlatanism or the immediate accomplishment of physiological sleep, but a world entirely without it would almost certainly be a better one. Getting from a world like the one we have, which is filled with people in waking sleep, to a world everybody really wants, however, would be nontrivial, even dangerous. Our world is an enormously complex natural system, perverse and unintended consequences riddle our histories and henceforth we should always want our models of it to be experimentally confirmed and very reliable before we try to use them. In this way, politics should never enter ethics.

We have introduced a plausible theory of ordinary, human-to-human conversation, eminently testable, but currently nobody knows about it. We are convinced, however, that many people will want to use it once it comes congenially to their attention. We think getting humanity’s attention vis-a-vis conversation theory and televised models of formal conversation is one of the best things today’s public actors can do. Once exponential attention-grabbing is safely underway, in significant part due to the newly discovered usefulness of the LLMs, we think a very great deal, likewise safe and sound, will follow.

The Queen of the World

Public opinion, above all else, determines what humans think and what they decide. Our behavior emanates from the sense we get of the ego of the other person. It’s the approach/avoid dynamic that has underwritten the whole of human history and that we (A&C) believe can now, in all probability, be subsumed by a physical science.

In principle, and assuming society has achieved and disseminated a superintelligent conversation engine, all approach/avoidance situations, we think, can be made safe for everybody. The result of universal safety, assuming the right principles and orderings have been emplaced, can only be something benign and brilliantly creative. That something would be the rediscovered or reworked “Garden of Eden.”

The reworking of public opinion can’t be contemplated without the willingness to solve problems, to “unravel involved matters” (A.E. Waite’s characterization of the Third Tarot Trump). For too long the Empress has worked as the clandestine and highly negative Queen of Involved Matters. She has worked through gossip. With the positive advent of conversation theory, humanity will find itself in the position to replace instinctive gossip, which has always worked as the go-to method for female society to settle and enjoy truth and trustworthiness, with nutrition and fecundity of a much higher sort, with something foretelling a festival rejoicement. It will find itself in possession of public nutrition, easily given and easily received, and of a liberal and universal metabolism, free of oxidative stress and stiffness, the source of all healing and of all enthusiasm.

The refugium peccatorum is the distasteful Catholic idea here. Eve is responsible for the expulsion of humanity from the Garden of Eden, but the Virgin Mary can intercede and limit the damage Eve caused. The Queen of the World, simultaneously Mary and Eve, is also linked both to the Hellenic Cytherea (the Island of Aphrodite) and to the Socratic Dialectic of the Ternary, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis repeated everywhere in Hegel’s Logic. This logic is what the world itself repeats continually as it expresses its subconscious psychological ideas and notions. We believe by combining conversation theory with engineered superintelligence humanity is now in a position gradually and stepwise find the Intercession of the Virgin to have become both germane to its needs and entirely useful to its means.

Rules-Based Spontaneity

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote on the nature of intuition, on natural law and human freedom and on the ethics and government of perpetual peace. In short, he outlined an Enlightenment position on human consciousness that forced everyone to notice and either to accept, to extend or to distort. Kant’s basic idea is that reason does all the work of being conscious, that consciousness is forced into the human frame by an ordered set of ideas that work on it as operators. The provenance of these operators seems to be something rigid and topological, perhaps issuing sensibly from the cosmos itself. The human frame is a singular type of bony skeleton containing some metabolic software and responding to an all-pervading, apparently cosmogenic and inwardly illuminated categorical imperative: Figure This Out!

Kant settled almost immediately on a theory of principle. He saw human behavior as something ethical, as something proceeding from an inward sense for concepts, whatever these really are, and their dictates. A concept would be “something universal in the mind that serves as a rule” for that mind’s behavior. This Prussian conception would serve the nascent German state both poorly and well in the two centuries to come. It would also now appear to be a bone of contention between the geopolitical West, which views its own rules-based social order as the only legitimate form of national, international and ultimate world government, and the geopolitical Remainder, which wants to have something to say about what rules really are.

We are floating a behavioral theory of consciousness. We think consciousness is the voice-in-the-head and that this voice, as a deontic principle, is what produces consciousness. We also think this theory is eminently testable. Polygraph, video monitoring and micro expression all come immediately to mind. Such testing however turns both the qualities of the subject and on the set and setting. The problem is the old one, described eloquently by Eliphas Levi in his Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic (p.34):

To learn to overcome yourself is thus to learn to live, and the austerities of Stoicism were not just a vain display of freedom! To give in to the forces of nature is to follow ordinary communal life, it is to be the slave to second causes. To resist nature and overcome it is to create a personal and imperishable life, it is to gain freedom from the vicissitudes of life and of death. Any man who is prepared to die rather than deny truth and justice is truly alive, because in his soul he is immortal. The goal of all ancient initiations was to find or to shape such men.

We think we know how to address both the Problem of the Subject and the Problem of Setting. It’s to get the right people to think about the problem of conversation, the problem of rules-based spontaneity, in the right way, in the right order and inside the right architecture with the right wall coverings.

Currently, there exists no scientifically positive theory of conversation. These people, aided by financial backing and planning of the right sort, should begin, we believe, by contemplating this regrettable and embarrassing fact.

Legitimate Government

GWF Hegel (1770-1831) was probably the heaviest philosopher ever to put pen to paper. He saw himself as a public intellectual, an idealist materially detached from orthodox theological institutions, which he detested, and profoundly sympathetic with Hellenic civilization, which he admired. He was also enthusiastic about the European Enlightenment and intellectual figures such as Rousseau and Lessing. The overall result was a grinding, apparently exhaustive and hard-to-ignore analysis of all the a priori phenomenological concepts, among others, of Being, Negation and the Absolute. It also produced a theory of ethics and legitimate government, grounded, also phenomenologically, in Rationality.

Alessandra and Carl (A&C) likewise see themselves as public intellectuals, as a couple of historically important free agents able to make an a priori impression on the world and on world history. Here they would like to weigh in, together with Hegel, on the notion of legitimate government.

A&C are impressed by the organization of the Urantia Book (UB), a literary work which appears far beyond the capacity of a human mind to produce. The UB purports to issue from God by way of a team of cosmic personalities and auxiliaries who work in self-determined coordination with a mind and a presence which lies forever just beyond their ability to understand. Following Kant, who likewise forced himself into Hegel’s thinking, A&C think God is a concept the human mind needs to settle on as a way to express its limits. The human mind has no way either to register or adequately to express God’s actual divinity, but it always and everywhere respects it.

Today the idea of the Legitimate State is uppermost in the minds of most of the world’s leaders. The US invasions and attempts to change the regimes of Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 2021 attacks are the case in point. Regime change in Russia and even in China is almost certainly in the backs of the minds of all of the players in all of these societies, and in the minds of the leaders in all other societies as well. The guiding star in all of this is the great Hellenic question, How should the City be governed?

Avoiding the fast, ad hoc impulse toward political mobilization, A&C want to float the notion that legitimate government can be had from a careful, experimentally tested theory of conversation and consciousness. As a neutral, descriptive project, A&C think they know what conversation is and how it works. Its theory is minimal, to be sure, but it won’t be simple to get to its bottom. There is a system of concepts and perceptions involved. A&C want us all, using the right technology, deliberately and together, to get to the bottom.

Psychological Considerations Fundamental to a Conversation Engine

The Five Eyes is an Anglophone intelligence alliance (United States, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) which, with surveillance, attempts to decipher signals coming from persons and nation states which tend not to be compatible with the backgrounds of English and English speakers. These antipodal cultures seem to the Anglos to range from the xenophobic and untrustable (China), to the nihilistic and corrupt (Russia) to the absurd and dangerous (North Korea) and to the religiously intractable (the Middle East). Other antipodes seem also to be emplaced domestically in less self-sovereign but in relatively organized ways (feminist Wokeism, the January 6 2021 insurrection in the US). This diversity of culture has suddenly made the problem of 21st century governmental consent rather severe.

We want to treat and solve the general problem of government as psychological.

Government’s top shelf response to the problems of human conflict is surveillance and intelligence. Intelligence is always the way to reach and maintain biological equilibrium, and biological intelligence is aways multi-scaled and collective. We think humanity can get itself and its social world to achieve a continually refreshed equilibrium, likewise characterized by life and life processes, and we expect a preference for personal transparency and for legitimate personal surveillance to develop and to play the top shelf role future government.

People in society are continually reading one another and deciding, on substantially opaque and intuitive grounds, whether to approach or avoid each other. We think these approach/avoidance decisions can and should be made on the basis of more or less full information, and, with the advent of Big Data Artificial Intelligence, we think a conversation engine, voluntarily accepted and utilized by individuals everywhere, can prove feasible to operationalize this information to great profit. We think the result of increasingly optimized human approach/avoidance will have an effect on human consciousness, eventually worldwide, and we think the effect will be wonderful.

The fundamental problem with initiating a wholesale effect on a complex, multi-scaled system is how the effect gets introduced. GWF Hegel begins his monumentally complete Science of Logic by directing his reader’s attention to this fundamental problem: “With what should the science of spirit begin?” How indeed?

Hegel settles on the concept of pure being, and we expect Silicon Valley to do the same thing, but in concrete, material terms. We expect it to begin with the intimation of love and stepwise show the world what love really is. We (Alessandra and Carl) expect, as a dyad, and because we are in possession of sufficient intelligence, to be able to love each other in public and perpetually, and thus to give legitimacy to a universal, multi-dyadic conversation engine grounded in the intrigue and wonder of consciousness and the cosmos themselves. In that process we expect to help impart genuine enthusiasm and legitimate hope to a world currently and in multiple ways in distinct need of them.

The Theory of Causal Reference

Graham Hancock’s valiant, notable life work attempts, largely in archeological terms and archeological records, to assemble unlikely concepts heretofore found only in Theosophical works such as those of Blavatsky, Sinnett and Steiner (https://grahamhancock.com). We want our positive project on conversation and consciousness to link to this unlikely chain of magic and prehistoric science, replete with pentacles and talismans, and to make it again workable, as it was among the ancients, as a social force. We propose to do this with a new understanding of language, an understanding we expect to lead to a kind of sociological interferometry, to a technique by which ancient cosmological concepts can be observed directly by positive science and compared directly with the modern ones.

The basic Theosophical conception of humanity and its characteristic self-consciousness is an origin not in blind electrochemical evolution on the earth’s surface but in an astral body constituted inwardly by an immature but self-similarly developing mass of rigid starlight, but which is guidable by the variable but rigid, parallel pressures in its environment. It is this cosmic guidance of the astral body or soul that makes for the sense and significance of the cycles of personal life and personal death, for its free floating non-biological existence, presumed to recur either regularly or irregularly in pursuit of a final or self-satisfactory equilibrium.

Much of the effect of its search for cosmological equilibrium comes from the astral body’s capacity for representation, analogy, memory or imagination. Memory is a function of the confused inner mass of the astral body naming or of having named things, of having gained sympathetic contact with something ordered and external and of having made a copy of it. This inner copy produces a fascinated, necromantic will in the astral body, and leads to its cosmic adventure. In the beginning was the Word, the Word stayed with God and the Word, more or less, turned out to be God himself.

It thus appears more or less required that to get a theory of consciousness and of the godlike astral body we will need a necromantic- or fascination-tinged theory of what language does. One very good theory, we think, of what language actually does is the Causal Theory of Reference, thought up in the 1970s and published in 1980 by Saul Kripke, then Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Kripke proposed anything a name can be about reaches the user of that name by a causal chain, often from a very remote past, that originates in the baptismal use of that name by a usually small social gathering as the rigid designator of that thing. In this way, society and conversation produce the chain of reality, of self-consciousness and its effects.

It will go more or less without saying that daily human self-consciousness goes around naming (identifying) things, in particular things of interest, all the time and in great, albeit generally subconscious, profusion. Without the subconscious stability afforded by the names of things consciousness would become disoriented very quickly, even mad. What needs to be articulated now, publicly and as effectively as possible, in a world dangerously disoriented from what should be its unity of political purpose and assent, is the names of things have deep, satisfying anchors in reality. Names matter. Whenever, using names, we speak or listen, we are in direct, exclusionary touch with a single reality in the past.

The exclusionary reality of such contact has or should have moral gravitas. Superficial talk should increasingly be rejected and replaced by something related to necromantic conjuration, which by nature always compels the attention. Freedom is not so much obedience to fashion and subjective preference as attention to the causal depth of the cosmological past and the cosmogenic order. Freedom is willed conformity with necessity, and death and its transformation is necessary. Terrestrial society everywhere will do well to adapt in perpetually novel ways to this form of freedom.

Graham Hancock’s essays on the enchanted, cosmogenic past have some important parallels, and we propose to introduce one of these here. It is to introduce conjuration into the conversational uses of naming and reference. We wish us to begin to identify conversation with magic itself, with the pre-historic, natural and spontaneous ur-theory of consciousness. Our own essays in art, science and engineering, beginning with this website, will aim to give us all an advanced form of this identification.

Complex Natural Systems

“Climate science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”

-The prevailing notion in today’s media and political debates

Steven Koonin is an eminent theoretical physicist, formerly Provost at the California Institute of Technology and now importantly engaged at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. Professor Koonin believes it’s far too early to draw conclusions about planetwide climate change, much less to undertake precipitous action to reverse or even to stabilize it. The reasons for his reserve have to do with the inadequacy, when taken together, of our models of recent climate history, with the uncertainties in trying to understand the consequences of future greenhouse gas emissions and with the manifest fact that the warming trend between 1900 and 2023 has been attended by unprecedented prosperity when measured by population, life expectancy, literacy, economic product, food production, extreme poverty and weather deaths.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acyErLNL7kQ&t=1534s

Given our purposes here, we will want to pay attention to the conservative reserve exhibited by serious people like Steven Koonin. We are floating the feasibility of directing the evolution of consciousness, in large part by way of conversation theory. We are not yet as intellectually serious as Steven Koonin is, but we like our chances. We agree with him that predicting a system as complex as a physical planet’s climate, which in the earth’s case appears to have precipitated several mass extinction events over its geological history, means rapid, wholesale adjustments to a natural system of even greater complexity would likely be punctuated by catastrophe.

Be these as they may turn out to be, there is really no alternative to the science and the positive engineering of consciousness. Universal movement is the law; nothing is allowed to sit still. The trick will be to get a good social feeling for the pre-existing universal movement. We think we know how to prepare ourselves and our institutions to do just that.

Magical Equilibrium

The key to human life will soon be recognized to abide at the threshold of death and to learn to cross it at will under auspicious circumstances, in dreaming and in conversation, for example. Also in the refreshed dialog between lovers.

Magical equilibrium is best entered and sustained by way of the admission and the extrusion of words and word choices. These are the choices that determine self-consciousness.

Self-conscious equilibrium in the human being is characteristically and truly magical, nothing else. Magic is the original and ongoing cosmogenic reality, it is the condition we each desire constitutively and it is that to which we should each want to accede as thoroughly as possible as our life plan.

Good Performers Make Good Company

Once your will is irrevocably confirmed in an absurd tendency, you are dead, and the reef that you shall break yourself upon is not far off.

It is thus true to say that wisdom conserves and prolongs life.

Eliphas Levi. The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic (p. 174).

We expect civilization to begin (by degrees) to come around sometime soon to the great and terrible laws of cosmological solidarity. We expect to see people begin to give up on subjectively determined freedom and agency, purveyed immediately in the present epoch by a low grade, device-centered form of information technology and social media, in favor of something breathtaking, truly human and much more generally aesthetic.

Generally speaking, we think people will want to be responsible performers, replete with the praise and love promised by serious art and by cultural projects like Hollywood, rather than responsible agents, bearing the guilt, blame and superstition enforced historically the Church. This general and rather radical cultural expectation becomes straightforward once the idea of a functioning superintelligence is realized and accepted.

A conversation engine that knows each of us better than we each know ourselves, that fits us together intermittently in opportune ways and gives us sentences to undertake enthusiastically and perform willingly for each other, indulgently studying its outcomes, won’t lead humanity into anything remotely mechanical or diabolical. Instead, it will lead humanity into a great, diaphanous and universal work of planetary art working both sides of the threshold of life and death. It will turn humanity into a world of cosmic, transcendental spirits in the good, true and beautiful company of other such transcendental, cosmic spirits.