When intelligence, as in IQ, reaches a certain point if it is not complemented by intuition it turns in on itself and becomes destructive. It is not the stupid or the average who destroy civilisation and true culture. It is the bright and brainy who have failed to develop intuitive vision because they have stunted their spiritual growth who do this. And the reason their spiritual growth is stunted is because of wrong motivation. That is why I say they have stunted their own growth. Their intelligence has led them to over-estimate themselves and their capabilities and they have pushed away God. They do not realise or will not accept that they are dependent on God for everything. Earlier this week I had an operation to remove a cataract on my right eye. Lying on the operating table with my eyelids taped open I knew I was completely in God's hands - and the surgeon's, of course! But the point is we like to think we are independent and while to a certain extent we are, in reality we rely on God for everything from the air we breathe to the functioning of our heart and lungs and even our ability to think. Everything comes down to our Creator upon whom we are more reliant than even children are on their parents.
There is a proper developmental progression if it is not interrupted. Our knowing faculties should advance from instinct to intellect to intuition. Each one takes over from the previous and builds upon it. Each one is more conscious and wider ranging than the last. If this process stalls or fails to proceed as it should then the negative qualities of whatever capacity is the highest at that point become apparent and take over. Looking at the last 150 years (a random figure but not without some substance) this should be obvious. In all fields there has been spiritual deterioration and destruction. We think we are more compassionate than our forebears and we may well be but that is because we have removed our focus from the spiritual plane entirely to the material. Therefore we may be more concerned with the realities of that plane but we are correspondingly less concerned with higher planes. Physical suffering arouses our compassion but spiritual darkness leaves us unmoved. Ultimately, as Jesus demonstrated and as the early Christian martyrs showed, it is spiritual darkness that is the greater evil. This clearly doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to physical suffering. The point being made here is simply that when you deny the spiritual you place more importance on the material but then greater evils may pass unnoticed.
The intellectual phase is that time when we are furthest removed from God and Nature. We live without proper reference to either of them as should be obvious from our behaviour today, our behaviour on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum one should say. It is currently more obvious on the left what with all the woke nonsense which is a specific denial of the reality of natural laws and ways of being, never mind the laws of God. But the right without God has desecrated the Earth in its pursuit of money and power so one can hardly say it is much better. All these people have intelligence (though in the case of the woke, not much) but no intuitive connection to reality. Some of them might think they do but that is because they mistake wishful thinking for intuitive vision which a prejudiced mind finds easy to do.
It was probably accepted by the spiritual powers that be that human beings would temporarily desert God as they developed their own faculties of thought and agency. This was perhaps necessary but it should only have been brief in duration. If humans had been motivated by an honest search for truth it would have been brief. Unfortunately, many of us were not well motivated. The inner corruption of stronger souls led many of them to reject God and weaker souls followed in their wake. This has led to our current state of spiritual apostasy. The only solution is for us to move beyond mere intelligence to intuition but we must make sure it is genuine intuition and that requires humility and a certain love of truth or else our future state will be worse than our present one.
What can remove the cataract on our spiritual eye? The surgeon's knife is faith which means openness to God.
My most cynical answer would be a Carrington event. As i watch the recent AI craze unfold from the sidelines it becomes ever more clear that people working on/ with all of this stuff are generally full of concepts and utopian visions that never really match what they feel they can actually predict. More importantly it tends to sound very anthropomorphic most of the time; inserting words like wisdom and compassion, or even intuition into the discussion without a whiff of an explanation how these things could translate to an AI system.
ReplyDeleteOf course advanced models emulate/ replicate what they have been 'fed' but at what point does the whole ordeal became autonomous, or even conscious? (that dreaded word no one can pin down).
I keep wondering, why is that question even interesting?
I've heard it said several times, and experienced it once or twice, when intelligence crosses a certain threshold it can become qualitative in nature rather then quantitative, the world literally looks and feels different. There is a holistic sense about everything you encounter that goes far beyond 'more computational ability' - yet many extremely intelligent people continue to insist that 'stacking more processing power' will lead us to some kind of fantastic future.
The vision lacking there stems from the idea that everything we interact with must be explainable within the currently accepted framework of 'what reality is' - or maybe the next 'update' of that concept, after a large scale overall agreement. All of it speaking to this irrepressible notion that modern science 'has to be capable' of explaining literally everything we experience, which is a bit silly considering how few discussions we've had about the possible mutability of physics, just to start with.