The fact that we don’t see that adapting 100% to the consensus reality is something that is always going to be injurious to our mental health has drastic consequences, naturally enough. The consequences are profound and penetrate every aspect of our lives, and yet at the same time this is something we have next to no insight about. The Generic Mind – which is are collectively agreed-upon way of seeing things – has zero acknowledgement of the harmful effect of social adaptation on our mental health, but then again this should come as no surprise since the GM can only come into existence in the first place when social adaptation has taken place. The GM is hardly likely to doubt its own basis.
The Generic Mind is the ‘socially-adapted mind’, naturally enough. It could hardly be otherwise. It has no interest whatsoever in the individual – as far as the GM is concerned the individual, or ‘individuality in general’, is something to be cured or corrected as soon as possible and if this proves to be impossible, something to be attacked and driven away. It might sound somewhat strange to say this but we can see this principle at work in small communities wherever we go – possibly not in all of them but certainly in most of them. The GM takes over and as a result of its dominance, as a result of it taking up a position of authority, we all have to fall in with it. We either have to fall in with it or put up with being regarded as being untrustworthy by everyone else in that community. Furthermore, in a small community, getting on with things and being able to make some sort of living for ourselves means that we have to be accepted to some extent or other and so we simply can’t afford not to cooperate with the generic or collective mind. This is of course a principle that we’re all very familiar with, even though we may not be thinking of it in these precise terms. The principle that we’re talking about here might be called ‘the principle of fitting in because it is a pragmatic necessity to do so but nevertheless making ourselves stupid (or stupider, as the case may be) as a result’ and there is no one who has ever worked for a company or large organisation who does not understand the truth of this statement. We get top marks for our uncompromising commitment to the team, for our enthusiastic adaptation to the organization, but we also get to wear the Dunce’s Cap; we get to wear the Dunce’s Cap and sit in the corner for exactly the same reason we won the prize for team spiritedness…
There’s no way around this – the generic or group mind can never be genuinely intelligent but only ‘mechanically intelligent’ and creating a genuinely intelligent group of people may be counted as one of life’s great impossibilities! This is more than just a little bit similar to the contemporary problem of how to engineer AIs so that they can become conscious – what were essentially looking at here (stripped of all the complicated jargon) is a bunch of rules that will hopefully produce consciousness as an end result and so it’s all about finding the right rules (or the right combination of rules). This is the problem of creating a self-aware AI in a nutshell and the important thing to note about this problem is that it is completely impossible to solve;– which means of course that isn’t a problem at all and we shouldn’t be wasting our time with it! There’s no way that a bunch of rules can simulate consciousness, just as there is no way that a combination of algorithms (no matter how cunning) can produce genuine (which is to say, fluid) intelligence. This isn’t hard to show, it’s just that we’re too preoccupied with looking down the microscope of rational thinking (which is based on rules) to see the bigger picture (which isn’t based on rules). Not everything is based on rules, and the big picture – which is to say – ‘the Whole Shebang’- certainly isn’t!
For intelligence to be truly fluid) rather than being mechanically guided every step of the way just like a cog in a machine is mechanically guided) there can’t be any rules. Rules are the furthest thing from ‘fluid’ there is and no combination of rules can overcome this problem – there’s no freedom in rules (since it is the lack of freedom which makes rules into rules) and so if it is freedom we want then we have to get rid of the rules rather than accumulate more and more of them – we have to throw them all away, we have to jettison every last one of them. ‘Free movement’ (or ‘perfectly fluid change’) cannot occur in accordance with any static framework of reference and what this means that is that it can’t take place in relation to any frame of reference since all frameworks are of necessity static. Free movement / fluid change is really just another way of talking about ungroundedness therefore and there is no way that we can engineer ungroundedness or purposefully bring it into existence in order to serve some particular purpose. Any attempt we make to deliberately change things is always going to be a grounded attempt, after all – it’s always going to be grounded in our ideas, in our model of reality, our framework of reference. Thought manages to paint the world in definite or black-and-white terms purely because it is grounded in some theory or other, some model or other.
It is not in the least bit surprising that we don’t see this clearly (or even at all) – our whole way of investigating phenomena is to assume some sort of ground (without paying attention to the fact that this is what we’re doing) and then getting on with the serious business of conducting the investigation. We have to be standing on firm ground first, in other words, and if there isn’t any firm ground to stand on then we have to invent it ourselves. We talk about ‘free thinking’ but in reality there is no such thing – all thinking is grounded thinking, all thinking is unfree thinking. As a result of this invisibly constrained way of looking at the world we ‘see everything backwards’ – we see the default state of things as being the state of non-movement, the state of nada, the state of ‘nothing worth-while happening’, and so if we want something good to happen then we have to bring it about ourselves. We have to ‘artificially instigate’ it, in other words. This is of course a classic illustration of the cosmological Bottom-Up paradigm, which is the paradigm that says that nothing worthwhile can happen unless some external force makes it happen. The more effort we put into it the better the results will be and – by the same token – the less effort we make the less interesting and less worthwhile the outcome is going to be. The Bottom-Up cosmological paradigm – we need hardly point out – is what informs the story of how God created the world in Genesis. We owe a tremendous debt to God because of the phenomenally good job He did, especially given the unpromising materials He had to start off with (which was essentially‘nada’). A lot of effort and ingenuity went to the creation of the Universe therefore, and we ought not to forget it…
We are therefore casting ourselves in the role of God (to some extent) when we set ourselves the task of creating a genuinely conscious AI. This is not of course a new objection but it is still one that’s worth looking at closely. We are starting off with what is pretty much rubbish (i.e. we’re starting off with ‘mere mechanical processes, which are ten-a-penny and not on this account worth a damn) and we dare to hope that on this doubtful basis we will be able to pull off the Ultimate Trick of ‘turning everything into gold’! Whilst our ambition is to be commended, there is necessarily something more than just a little bit ridiculous about our endeavour – or rather there is if we are prepared to take the Top-Down paradigm into account. Although we don’t realise it, when we try to create an AI that is genuinely conscious (or an AI that is genuinely intelligent, for that matter) what we are trying to do here is create a situation where there is ‘free movement’ (or ‘fluid change’). Because of our way of looking at things we imagine that this can only happen as a result of long and arduous effort in our part; we imagine that this can only come about as a result of skilful artifice on our part. This is the Bottom-Up paradigm, after all. What we can’t see however (because we’re operating on the basis of the BU paradigm) is that fluid movement or ungrounded change can only come about when we stop interfering, when we refrain from trying to ‘make things happen that aren’t already happening’. As we said earlier, we’re seeing everything backwards.
What we have here is the difference between positive and negative philosophy in a nutshell – the philosophically positive Bottom-Up paradigm exhorts us to try ever harder to achieve great things and this has the effect of putting the responsibility squarely on our own inadequate shoulders, whilst the via negativa (or ‘negative approach’) counsels us in an altogether more subtle way – the via negativa counsels us not to get in our own way and so to let things happen as they will, and it reminds us that it is the universe which is intelligent, not us. The whole of everything is not only ‘the only thing that is intelligent’ it is also the only thing that is real and this is the ‘holographic’ or ‘Anaxagorean’ Paradigm. Perfectly free and unobstructed movement (which takes no effort) turns out to be the greatest thing there is – it turns out to be reality itself, it turns out to be David Bohm’s holomovement. ‘Unproduced unitary movement’ turns out to be nothing other the ‘principle of mobility’ spoken of by the alchemists as Mercurius, the spirit of the world. Reality isn’t something that has been created no matter what we might believe when we subject the chapter of Genesis to a literal reading; the very notion of ‘creating reality’ is absurd – what is real can’t be created because that would make it a mere construct, and manufactured thing, and artificial and therefore false situation. Anything artificial is always false after all – our constructs can never be any more than a reflection of our limiting ideas, and as such they can only ever be a trap. We always value the ‘made thing’ (which is where we have control) over the prior situation where nothing has yet been made and this is the consequence – as we keep saying – of the Bottom-Up way of looking at things. As the Buddha has said in the well-known passage from the Nibbana Sutra however, “If there were not that unborn, unbecome, unmade unconditioned, you could not know an escape from the born, become, made and conditioned”. Our problem is that were we to acknowledge the non-dual source of everything then we would also have to acknowledge that our constructs are only our constructs (and our ‘made-up world’ is only a ‘made-up world’) and that doesn’t suit us. We want to be trapped by our own device, in other words. In the artificial world that is made by thought there are no genuine possibilities but there is nevertheless the appearance of possibilities, the appearance of potential progress that can be made, but this is all one hundred per cent solid delusion with not even the slightest little trace of truth in it. There is no potential for anything in the artificial world.
When we try to create consciousness by dint of our own efforts and cleverness then we are trying to create the only thing that ever did exist and the only thing that ever could exist! The irony is even greater than this however – the harder we work at creating consciousness (or trying to understand it, for that matter) the further we depart from it. This is a marvellous irony to be sure, albeit one we in the West are particularly unlikely to appreciate. It’s a joke at our expense, after all. The same holds good for ‘the creation of reality’, which is essentially what we started off talking about, although this may not be completely obviously. The ‘new and improved’ form of reality that we seek to create is ‘the way we all say things are’, ‘the way the collective says things are’, which is the Socially Constructed Reality. The way the individual sees things is disregarded as being subjective, unverifiable, and therefore unreliable, whilst the viewpoint that we all agree upon is seen as being beyond reproach, precisely because we have all agreed upon it! We’ve made our own reality – which is the standardized reality that thought creates – and then – having done so – we declare the non-standardizable to be taboo and outlaw it. Or as we might also say, all things are born of chaos, but because we fear chaos we make sure to demonize it. We’re no longer in control when it comes to chaos and that’s got to be a bad thing!
Our attitude – as always – is based on seeing the original or prior situation as not being anything particularly amazing or wonderful in itself, but nevertheless capable of being greatly improved. Our civilization ever in pursuit of what we might call ‘new and improved forms of reality’ (or, as we might also say, in unconscious pursuit of what Jean Baudrillard refers to the Hyperreal) which means that we are actually in full retreat from reality. ‘Improvement’ is always a retreat from the real when it comes to the psychological sphere of things – improvement is a kind of code word meaning that we have succeeded (apparently, at any rate) in making the world accord with our standards for its. The everyday mind sees the world in a Bottom-Up way and so it cannot but look at things in terms of the absolute necessity for improvement, in terms of us having to somehow fix or resolve the chaos that is inherent in life. We are convinced that we are improving life by managing and standardizing it and we are convinced that – on this account – we have never had it so good. This is the myth that we cling to – the myth that we are embracing reality and forging our way ever closer to the heart of it, when actually – if the truth were told – we couldn’t runaway faster if we tried. Our divergence (and subsequent drastic disconnection from) the Root of All Things, which is unitary in nature, into the fractured and conflicted world of thoughts and ideas and concepts is what we are pleased to call ‘progress’, but this is purely and simply because we are seeing things in a back-to-front way. ‘Civilization’ is really just another word for insanity, as Michel Foucault tells us. What we make ourselves is ‘the way of error’ and – although it is the only thing we trust and promote and approve of – it is also our absolute nemesis.
