(Part 1)
MAN AND HIS POWERS
The Invisible World
God is Power, and He created everything as powers. Whatever these powers work on, it also becomes a power and aligns itself with corresponding forces. Beyond this life, there exists an innumerable multitude of beings, whose numbers our arithmetic cannot calculate.
Yes, rejoice. We are not alone; I assure you that an invisible world exists, filled with worshipful beings, logical unto themselves, expressions of eternal divine bliss and majesty. They live in happiness, for they are fulfilled by the light-bearing and Divine energy of God.
We often wonder why we cannot adequately explain events that happen in our lives, both internally and externally. This is because most of us are unaware of the constant influences and effects that the invisible world exerts upon us, and whether these influences originate from higher or lower ranks of beings.
We cannot avoid a crucial question, the answer to which every person who walks the path of self-awareness should know:
"What is the correct and safe way to study the invisible world and its powers?"
And the answer is:
"Only through man's powers and their manifestations in the visible realm."
Then everyone can easily perceive and understand that through mankind, both good and evil are fully capable of expressing themselves—either the cold darkness of the lower beings or the Divine light of life.
Evil has never appeared in this realm as an autonomous entity to torment the world, but in all cases, it has incarnated and expressed itself through man's powers, using him as a vector. This happens both on an individual and collective level. Likewise, forces of light are also expressed through man and his powers, both individually and collectively.
Since everything is power and expresses powers, each person must always be fully aware of what powers they manifest and what powers are expressed through them at every moment of their life, so as not to become a servant and an expression of those who are enemies of their soul, and by extension, enemies of all humanity.
In this way, every person we meet, whether they know it or not, manifests a small or larger part of the invisible world. This does not mean, as some naively might think, that man is a passive being without free will, at the mercy of the invisible world, whether of good or evil.
On the contrary, man is a conscious and willful expression of the forces he chooses to manifest, possessing within himself the power and authority to express the perfection of the Blessed Being, the Divine image of God. And mankind's glory does not stop here. Man does not merely manifest powers but also embodies them and shapes his entire being according to the forces he has expressed, both internally and externally. He is thus an incarnator of what he has expressed.
At every single moment, every expression of words or actions, both internally and externally, they are all instantly projected into the spiritual realm, presenting themselves to ranks of beings with similar spiritual qualities. Whatever is of higher quality is projected and offered into the inner essence of the divine and radiant beings. But if it is of lower quality and unclean, it is then projected and given into the inner being of terrifying dark beings.
Every person has beside them an ally of good and an ally of evil. The same applies to humanity as a whole. The power that determines which of the two allies will act in our lives is the inner quality we possess as spiritual beings. Suppose the inner quality of a person or a group of people is in a state of spiritual purity. In that case, this person or the group of people are taken up by the alliance of luminous beings, protected, guided, and unified, merging into each other’s worlds, to the point where man expresses himself in the worlds of higher beings, and, these luminous beings express themselves in our world through man.
And, if the inner quality of a person or a group of people is in a state of spiritual coldness and impurity, then, they are received by terrifying spiritual beings of cunning and malice. Merging into each other’s worlds, they reach the point where humans express themselves in the world of lower, dark beings, and these beings express themselves in the human world.
This is how individuals and entire nations operate.
Only when man is spiritually perfected does the opposing side—the ally of darkness—withdraw from the inner heaven of that person’s soul, unable to find a place to stand. Through this victory, man experiences the inner freedom of his spirit because no opponent can strike him internally. Then the invisible battle for this person's soul shifts from their inside to their external surroundings. The opponent now tries to strike them indirectly through proxy forces around them, from both their close and distant relationships, their loved ones, or even strangers.
In the case of someone spiritually deadened, the ally of light withdraws from the inner heaven of their soul, unable to find a space to stand within them. Through this defeat, the person experiences the night of hell, unable to receive inner help, illumination, or strengthening...
Thus, they sink entirely into the likeness of unilluminated beings, and upon them is expressed the absence of the Divine Spirit. The inner ally of light that departed now moves externally, seeking in every possible way to send a little light to that person's soul.
Learn to see every person you meet as a force expressing various types of powers, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Also, observe what powers you manifest at every instant of your life.
Translated by me from the book "ΑEΝΑΟΝ - Φυσικός στο Φως" (pages 120-122), Panagiotis Panagopoulos
I guess pancognitivism is a much better term for describing the computationally embedded functions of intelligence and cognition, avoiding the usual metaphysical pitfalls of panpsychism.
I'm not focused on panpsychism (in the sense of the hard problem), so I won't push it - it's pancognitivism that I argue strongly for - but, just for fun, I think there are 2 assumptions in the above that could be loosened. First, are you sure you can imagine minimal variants of consciousness - truly basement-level, enough to make conclusions? No one says electrons should have *complex feelings*. We're asking about the smallest version here. We find it very hard to imagine what it's like to be each other, and it's nearly impossible to do a good job with people who are not neurotypical, tetrachromat humans, bats, or the forthcoming cyborgs (humans with synthetic implants and novel sensory-motor architectures, higher IQs, etc. etc.). I think we should have extreme humility over our ability to visualize what the truly minimal version of it might be, not to mention about whether formal models such as "encode" are good ways to think about this question at all. As for the binding problem, it's only a problem if you assume that all of the intelligences in your body are merged together into your 1 big, top-level mind and they cease to exist. If you don't assume there's only 1 tenant in your body, at one scale, then there are other options where the binding problem isn't as bad. There are still important questions, but it's not the same. More on this maybe next year.
@NathanielLugh If you swapped the "device" for something else, like the "life-giving whole", I would concur, and I'd likely add that, in a sense, computational irreducibility makes this possible
What keeps your soul in materialistic blindness is attachment to material possessions, status, desires, fear of change, loss, suffering, pride and ego, hatred, unforgiveness, ignorance, and dishonesty.
In today's modern world, without many of these things, you would likely be a beggar. So, in a sense, you need to lose it all to find the light.
It's contradictory to everything we've been taught since we were born.
If you remove all five senses, that person will be practically in a coma, unable to maintain their state of awareness. Conscious thought patterns that generate awareness of the self are the result of microtubules oscillating at different frequencies, responding to different qualia.
The mature love of the soul is the power that leads the human mind towards life and a truly conscious experience!
If one denies this power, then whatever he may say about the interiority, or what feels like and what doesn't, the redness of the roses, and every grand idea explaining what constitutes conscious experience, everything is rendered empty talk, irrelevant, useless. All is reduced to mere survival algorithms encoded in the geometries of trajectories within the multiscale competency architecture of the physical. Then your reason will have no other option but to admit that in essence you are no different from a lifeless, unconscious ball rolling downhill.
Take care, beloved human being, what path your reason is carving and what its deepest quality may be, for the river — your soul — always responds with a perfect yes, whatever you may say, whichever path you may choose to trace. The innermost quality of your reason and what you say may become the murderer of the divine nature of your soul. Yet, it may also become the creator, the true bridge through which it is united with the power of the soul.
If consciousness isn't reducible to mere physical gradients, this means it should be able to move against them by overcoming the survival algorithms operating within the causal landscape. The question then is, where does it draw its power from? Because the power it needs to oppose them can't originate from within the physical.
The issue here is that both AI and biological consciousness, despite their different substrates at the level of intelligence—the navigation capability in latent spaces as a problem-solving mechanism—share the same physical principles of computation. In both cases, computations are encoded in the geometries of trajectories in their respective latent spaces. The difference lies in the fact that AI, in its computational trajectories, traces statistical morphisms along homotopic paths on relational structures geometrically encoded by humans on various informational manifolds. AI doesn't generate these structures; it only navigates them. In other words, multimodal AIs are traversing the same homotopy-type paths in their latent spaces because those paths that preserve meaning are already statistically encoded in informational manifolds that humans train them. In that sense, intelligence requires gradients to perform computations. In the case of AI, the gradients are provided by humans, but in the case of human consciousness, the gradients are generated by the causal structure. But if we reduce consciousness to mere gradient descent, then we should also accept the irrelevance of interiority, anything thst follows gradient descent is basically a ball rolling downhill, or a particle tracing a worldline. To assume that any intelligent system wether artificial or biological that follows a gradients is truly conscious is false. In this view, the logical thing to say is that conscious experience is the inherent capacity of being to establish a relation to gradients through intelligence that is not reducible to the gradients themselves.
We all want to know the "why" and the "how" in our limited lives. But our ignorance will always remain infinitely greater than whatever we'll manage to understand. We overcome and rise above our ignorance only through love, as the refusal to sever relational paths in our being with everything there is.
It rains life, and our reason carves paths, channeling this water of life into a stream. And behind it the subconscious follows with immence power carving deeper and wider channels forcing reason to continue in the direction it has chosen. The small stream becomes a great river that divides humanity's intellect.
We stand on the side of knowledge, asking "why" and "how." On the opposite side of our lives are the endless sunlit valleys of the spirit and wisdom.
All those who crossed and lived on the other side of life shouted to all of us, their fellow human beings, that everyone who wishes can overcome this great obstacle and cross over onto the other side of this river of life. Did they say "how"? No, they didn't, nor did they ever reveal the way.
You ask what consciousness is. It is everything. It is the rain, all the water, the entire river. And the river "the soul" flows on, always giving its perfect yes, its vital power, to all its faculties, allowing them to exist within it.
On the opposite side of our lives, wisdom doesn't have to ask "why" or "how." For wisdom knows only one thing: It sees everything through love!
Why is there something rather than nothing? What is consciousness, and why is there subjective experience at all? What is time? What am I, what is you? What can we know, and how? What is truth? Why is the universe intelligible at all? What is the meaning of life and everything? Why can we ask all these questions in the first place? Why are we asking all these questions in the first place?
The mathematical description of a cognitive trajectory (the computation) is categorically different from the subjective experience of undergoing that trajectory.
The issue here is that both AI and biological consciousness, despite their different substrates at the level of intelligence—the navigation capability in latent spaces as a problem-solving mechanism—share the same physical principles of computation. In both cases, computations are encoded in the geometries of trajectories in their respective latent spaces. The difference lies in the fact that AI, in its computational trajectories, traces statistical morphisms along homotopic paths on relational structures geometrically encoded by humans on various informational manifolds. AI doesn't generate these structures; it only navigates them. In other words, multimodal AIs are traversing the same homotopy-type paths in their latent spaces because those paths that preserve meaning are already statistically encoded in informational manifolds that humans train them. In that sense, intelligence requires gradients to perform computations. In the case of AI, the gradients are provided by humans, but in the case of human consciousness, the gradients are generated by the causal structure. But if we reduce consciousness to mere gradient descent, then we should also accept the irrelevance of interiority, anything thst follows gradient descent is basically a ball rolling downhill, or a particle tracing a worldline. To assume that any intelligent system wether artificial or biological that follows a gradients is truly conscious is false. In this view, the logical thing to say is that conscious experience is the inherent capacity of being to establish a relation to gradients through intelligence that is not reducible to the gradients themselves.
@robertwiblin The core of the skeptical argument, at least for me, lie in the challenges to computational functionalism that in turn arise from the disanalogies between brains and (silicon, digital) computers https://t.co/OWd3FVz9LU
Anil Seth is correct. But the interesting observation here is that knowledge, on a fundamental level, isn’t stored only as plain words. It's information about reality's invariant structures that gets geometrically reshaped into multiple abstract manifolds.
this is an interesting point in the new ted chiang piece – no one really claims that alphafold is conscious, or that sora or midjourney or dall-e are conscious
The substrate changes but the fundamental principles of physical computations and how they generate structures of meaning by geometrically encoding information in these manifolds largely remains the same. Otherwise LLMs they wouldn't be able to produce outputs that are predictive of relational structures that remain meaningful to us.
IMHO their computational trajectories trace statistical morphisms along homotopic paths on relational structures geometrically encoded by humans on various informational manifolds. They can be seen as microscopes that can zoom in on these manifolds with increased resolution and identify gaps or hidden relations.
The temptation of the philosopher is intellectual pride. They ask questions too wonderful for humans to know. They drown in the sea of worldly wisdom and forget the raft of noetic prayer.
Complex physical systems impose gradients on the energy landscapes of their latent spaces, forcing their subsystems to navigate them. These diverse forms of physical "minds" solve problems by hiding computations within the geometry of the trajectories they impose on their subsystems.
We tend to conflate the richness of problem-solving capabilities in physical systems that perform computations as evidence of conscious interiority. True consciousness, although it follows gradients doing computations in its physical instantiation, isn't reducible to mere physical gradients.
If it were, it would resemble a ball falling downhill. And no one can argue that a rolling ball is truly conscious. Same for these complex organizations; the fact that Ford Company imposes its own internal logic and pursues goals doesn't mean that it is a conscious entity.
Life is raining down... and as it rains, reason moves forward, carving a path across the plain, forming a stream. This is your reason.
Behind the stream of your reason follows the subconscious, with greater force and momentum, pressing reason onward and compelling it to continue along a path, the path of its own choosing.
The subconscious does not determine which path reason will follow; it merely records and stores information about the path reason has chosen. Through its power, it urges and compels reason to keep advancing along the course it has traced.
Further behind comes the unconscious, the great messenger that carries and announces its messages to the soul, reporting the boundaries gained by the human powers, their breadth, their depth, their height, and their spiritual content. In other words, it describes the whole of existence with perfect numerical precision.
The unconscious becomes an unceasing voice continually declaring: this much I am, this is what I am, this is how I exist. Pure consciousness, the soul, is everything. It is the rain, all the water, the entire river. And the river — the soul — flows on, always giving its perfect yes, its vital power, to all its faculties, allowing them to exist within it.
AENAON, page 655