By Thad McKraken - Sometime in late 2014 I believe
You ever notice how supposedly smart people are often too dumb to realize that there are different kinds of intelligence. I mean, Jimi Hendrix probably wouldn’t be able to write code for shit, but he could play the hell out of a guitar. Last time I checked, Henry Miller isn’t a science legend and LeBron James isn’t a technological icon. I love that sermon that Jesus gave about organic chemistry. I’m pretty sure that’s the one that got him killed. Man, what’s at the movies this weekend? Yeah, a bunch of new films about how to make better computers, totally. I suppose the reason I mention this has to do with the fact that in the last week or so I’ve stumbled upon roughly 5 different articles by highly respected scientists informing me that computers are going be smarter than humans in the near future. Anytime anyone says something like this the appropriate response should be, what the fuck are you talking about? Smarter how? I mean really, are they going to have greater emotional intelligence than us? Creative intelligence? Are they going to be better at raising our kids? Better stand up comedians? No, seriously, what on earth are you talking about?
You’re talking about how they’re going to be able to do math way faster right? Can’t they already do that? I think one of the absolute creepiest technological developments I’ve read about in my life has to do with the fact that computers are now telling us what to do. They’re in charge. This isn’t science fiction, it’s reality. Our economic system is now run by competing algorithms trading stocks against each other at hyper speed, guaranteeing that the people who need resources the absolute least are rewarded an increasing amount of them for reasons that are morally dubious at best. Ahhh, the greed game that the “winners” in our society have become slavishly addicted to. Make no mistake, these profit gouging algorithms are daemonic to their very core. They do not give a shit about us because we programmed them not to. It’s not that they don’t do cool shit from time to time, it’s that they only care about numbers going up and rewarding the hell spawn that is corporate psychology, where inhuman entities are deemed people with rights. People who are legally obligated to fuck everyone over in the name of profit for investors. It’s not me man, it’s the money. Let us never forget that corporate psychology is more dangerous than ISIS, Ebola, Global Warming, or whatever the fuck threat the media is trying to sell us at whatever moment you happen to be reading this. Fuck, corporate psychology is pretty much the cause of all those threats in the first place.
So I find it a bit odd that the justification for honestly believing that someday soon we’re going to achieve immortality by downloading our brains into computers is typically: “but Ray Kurzweil is a high ranking engineer at Google.” Errr, shouldn’t that be EXACTLY why you shouldn’t trust the dude. Isn’t he on this quest because he couldn’t deal with the death of his father? Any technology born from a fear of death rather than designed to create an acceptance of death is destined to create more suffering than it intends to alleviate. Sort of why we’ve currently got mind scrambled human shells piling up in nursing homes at increasing numbers. More to the point, why are people who know nothing about spirituality somehow deciding they’re going to “solve” spirituality. It’d be like me saying I’m going to create robots with my vast knowledge of obscure modern psych rock.
It doesn’t make any sense at all, but people pretend it does because we’ve been so utterly brainwashed by materialism. It’s the same reason people pretend that reading the same book over and over in church is going to advance you to a higher plane of existence. Almost nothing we do anymore makes the sort of “rational” sense that atheists quite pompously claim to be governed by. On a supremely rational note, since no scientist actually claims to comprehend the point to something as basic as dreaming, how would you program dreams into a computer exactly? How would you program in an out of body experience? Oh, you didn’t think ahead that far? Of course you didn’t.
This would be where I say we need to listen to our spiritual experts, and not the religious kind. We can’t keep shutting people like me out of the conversation and I’m up there with the best that you’ve got at this point. Completely bewildered by my experiences with transdimensional forms of hyper-intelligence on psychedelics and sexually predatory phantasms while astral projecting, I’ve basically devoted my life to this shit (and I write about things like sex magick on Facebook constantly, friend me). I’ve done so outside of corporate and academic institutions because I realized it would be roughly impossible in a setting where dreams weren’t even mentioned for more than 5 minutes in an intro class on my way to a B.A. in psychology. How fucked is that? You can get a degree in psychology without even talking about dreams. The superstitions of the drug war have so tainted our ability to think rationally about spiritual matters that we’ve gone totally batshit, and yes, this has a lot to do with traditional religious institutions. I love how we in America turn our nose up at 3rd world countries who pass laws banning witchcraft because like, how could they be so superstitious and primitive? I’ve got news for you dipshit, we did the exact same thing and continue to. Shamanism at its very core involves the ritualistic (not recreational) ingestion of psychoactive chemicals, and we’re so terrified in regards to the potentiality of this, we made psychedelic drugs freaking illegal. We’re just now starting to study them again, and holy shit, the results are astounding. They seem to, you guessed it, produce profound spiritual experiences and alleviate the fear of death, just like those crazy Occultniks we’ve systematically murdered throughout history said they would. So wait, are you saying witchcraft isn’t crazy? Yep, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Science is already in the process of proving that.
You know what I don’t think science is going to prove? That you can download your mind into a computer. You know why I don’t think that’s going to happen? It probably has something to do with the fact that it’s purely theoretical. At no point has anyone ever downloaded their mind into a machine. Not once. You know what people have done? Had insanely potent visionary experiences by warping their own brain chemistry. So why is that not seen as the future of spirituality and somehow transhumanism is? Because we’ve completely abandoned the shamanic/Occult philosophy which requires one to think about existence in subjective and metaphorical terms, that’s why. Next time one of your weirdo friends goes on a rant about the great coming technological singularity, ask them one question:
What’s that going to be like?
THEY HAVE NO ANSWER FOR THIS QUESTION. Why? Because it’s never happened before and they’re thinking in an objective literal manner which separates consciousness from the human experience. You can go to Erowid and read story after story about people being lead through cycles of lives on Ayahuasca and communing with the spirit world. Where are the websites where people talk about their weekends spent downloading their brains into computers? They don’t exist because that’s not actually a thing at this point. You might as well be saying we’re going to design telepathic unicorns with advanced genetics. I mean, we made pugs. I’m not saying it can’t happen, it’s just again, purely theoretical.
It’s easy to forget that when LSD first hit the scene it was viewed as a technological achievement worth of rigorous study, and that the superstitions of religious drug hysteria changed that almost immediately.
We’re still struggling to wake up from this madness. Imagine if studying computer technology was stigmatized in the same manner. Where do you think computer tech would be at this point? Pretty much nowhere. It’d require weirdoes pursuing it outside of traditional institutions. Hey, wasn’t I just talking about that? So I’m a bit skeptical of people who think that somehow computers are going to “solve spirituality” or be smarter than humans, not that they won’t be smarter in certain ways. They already are. The difference is that I wholly acknowledge the importance of people who are really good at math. All consciousness is part of a continuum. My art is and always has involved integrating technological progress to distort consciousness. You think I could design a delay pedal? Riiiight. What we need is, again, to quit shutting out those who excel at thinking in subjective and metaphorical terms, those who boldly explore inner realms and go where no one has gone before.
Being one of those freaks, I’ve had one primary vision about the future of technology since I was roughly 18 and started reading about near death experiences. Since we can chemically map what goes on in people’s brains while they’re dying and seem to be transitioning to a higher realm with neuroscience, couldn’t we reproduce that? Couldn’t we make a drug or combination of drugs, hypnotic suggestions, and sound patterns that completely eradicate the fear of death from the human condition? I mean, these people in NDE states typically don’t want to come back to our world rather than the inverse. Maybe that’s the solution to this overpopulation problem that’s killing the environment. Yeah, that’d be the other thing with computers, they’re an ecological fucking disaster which is something the press has swept under the carpet with an impressive efficiency and they’re built in sweatshops to boot. Oh shit, they’re even responsible for one the biggest civil wars in human history. Are you maybe starting to see why I don’t think computers are the answer to everything?
Make no mistake, you don’t want to live forever. All spiritual philosophy historically, even of the religious variety, seems to be illuminating the idea that life is suffering and the payoff is in the other realm. Again, you might want to think about that before you resolve to spend your life attempting to damn yourself here for all eternity. And that’d be the funny thing. Mind bending techniques like psychedelics were banned because our culture deemed them dangerous and you know what? THEY ARE FUCKING DANGEROUS TO OUR CULTURE. The idea that you can get bigger kicks by tinkering with your own dream states on the cheap is an enormous threat to things like consumerism, traditional religion, the war machine, and corporate psychology. I have zero clue why you wouldn’t want those things to die in the first place. Occultist out.
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