Luke Lafitte - Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Spiritual Freedom and the Re-animation of Matter

Contents

Editors Note to the Reader

It is our practice to put any author asides in footnotes directly on the text page, which we have done in this book as well. However, we encourage all readers to also refer to the endnotes at the back of the book when citations are given, as these often contain fascinating historical and contextual comments from the author on the specific work being citedas opposed to simply being a page reference for the material quoted.

FOREWORD

What Science and Invention Might Yet Become

Jeffrey J. Kripal

This mega merger of super-sciences may transform who and what we are. It could transplant our senses into other entities, and then convert those entities into something else. It may alter millions of years of evolution that imbue us with wonderful and terrible traits.

RICHARD FEYNMAN

The theme of co-evolution between technology and humanity was advancing now at a rapid pace.... Feynman knew that our world and reality are merely mental constructions from the same book of spells.

LUKE LAFITTE

W ho writes like that? Well, Richard Feynman did. And Luke Lafitte does.

The following pages are spellings in both the linguistic and the entrancing sense of that double entendre: a vast arrangement of letters on the page to create words and sentences and so meaning, but also to conjure new future realities. Caveat lector. Reader beware. You are about to be spelled, hexed. But you are about to be spelled to get you out of a spell, hexed to get you out of a hex.

The sharp division that we pretend between the fictive and the real, between the present and the future, between the possible and the impossible, and, most of all, between mind and machine, wobble and waver in these pages before they finally threaten to disappear altogether. At the very end of the book, one gets this haunting, uncomfortable, and yet somehow ecstatic sense that things are not at all what they seem to be (the uncomfortable sensibility), and that weas individuals, yes, but especially as community and culturehave this astonishing power to change it all, alter some of its most intimate workings (the ecstatic sensibility).

But how?

Through technology.

Its not what you think. Lafitte is not arguing that you need another smart phone or shiny gadget. Nor is he arguing that future silicon chips implanted into our bodies will transform our collective into some kind of posthuman Borg. Thats precisely what he is writing against (as, by the way, were the writers who wrote the Borg). He is calling us instead to understand, to really understand, that each and every piece of human technologyfrom the prehistoric sharpened rock and hand-painted cave wall, through the ancient writing stylus and leaf palm, to the most recent promise of AI, the nanotechnology of the contemporary university lab, and the most powerful mathematical formulacan become so many indirect pathways to a near or far future enlightenment. That enlightenment comes down to this: it is mind that has produced the machine, not the other way around.

It turns out that we have it all backward, or upside down, or inside out. Consciousness is not an accidental by-product of random cosmological and now accidental biological processes, as we are asked to believe over and over again, as if the ideologues are not so sure of themselves, as if the evidence does not add up (it doesnt). Consciousness appears here rather as a force, field, or frequency, as fundamental to the cosmos as gravity. The brain does not produce consciousness. Consciousness produces the brain. There is no ghost in the machine, as Gilbert Ryle had it in the middle of the last century, but there is a machine in the ghost, if you can call consciousness a ghost (and you cant).

Indeed, for Lafitte, consciousness is not just a force of the cosmos. It is the Force. Think Star Wars. And Luke Lafitte is our Yoda, clinging to our backs as we run, sweat, and somersault through the dark forest, chattering away in our ear in oddly formed sentences to flip us, turn us inside out, wake us up from our long cultural dream so that we can get in touch with that Force, not to master it (thats more machine talk), but to become it.

Lafitte is certainly clear enough about what he is doing in this book. It would be all too easy to get lost in the stories, biographies, and movies he so lovingly recounts here, including the Star Wars scenes. But getting lost in them is precisely what this book is not about. Lafitte is telling us stories to remind us, to help us remember who we really are, to free us from our own self-created illusions and begin to take back the ultimate modern projection, the projection of mind into matter and machine, including and especially that most intimate of material machinesthe human body. The end result is a three-hundred-year American story of loss and recovery, of invention and realization, of material gain and spiritual awakening, of a new rebalancing or reconciliation of materialism and idealism. Matter and machine are not left behind or denied here. They are recognized for what they have always been: us.

It is all very gnostic for the author, gnostic in the sense that the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick used that most powerful of ancient and now modern words, particularly in his late novels after he (and his poor cat) were irradiated by some kind of radioactive pink light or palpable Cosmic Mind in the winter of 1974. Such a literally glowing gnosis for Dick was not really about his dead cat, who died quickly from cancer (are you freaked out yet?). It was about a direct knowing (gnosis) that such an illumination bestows, a spiritual-physical light that really and truly saves us.

Wait, what? Saves us? From what? And how?

Such a gnosis saves us, not by any bloody sacrifice or unbelievable deus ex machina (more machine talk!), but by shocking us into the memory of who and what we actually are. Salvation, in other words, does not and cannot come from outside us. It can only come from inside us. Dick, being a science fiction writer (there is that collapse of the fictive and the real again), imagined this saving secret identity as an extraterrestrial being from the stars, with three eyes no less, which he doodled in his private journals (not very well). Dick also wrote about this saving gnosis philosophicallyfor thousands of obsessed pages in his private diaries and published novels, in factas the Mind of all creation lying ahead of us, speaking back to us in dream, vision, and mystical experience, pulling us, haunting us, inspiring us forward into a grand future like some kind of giant Magnet mesmerizing everything at the end of time.

He was perfectly serious. In his most stunning lines, Dick even suggested that we are always mistakenly relating to this future being, who is really present here and now, as someone external, as God. I assume that he thought we did this because we will not allow ourselves to imagine that this superbeing is in fact our own future presence that we are presently worshipping as not us. To make the same point, Lafitte highlights a key Philip K. Dick passage in his own Phil Dickian book. Here is the passage:

I did not think I should tell Fat that I thought his encounter with God was in fact an encounter with himself from the far future. Himself so evolved, so changed, that he had become no longer a human being. Fat had remembered back to the stars, and had encountered a being ready to return to the stars, and several selves along the way, several points along the line. All of them are the same person.