Encounters, page 14
“All humans are completely internally rewired by everything the mind consumes (from an ad on TikTok, Instagram, from listening to music, watching film, and through interactions with other people). The ancient mystical practices gave initiations, what I would term today ‘upgrades,’ only through direct transmission: mind to mind, and through encoded music, chant, poetry, and imagery. This mind-to-mind transmission is another way knowledge is transferred through electrical information and entanglement in a quantum system (where we are the quantum particles). Bioelectrical conductivity operates through water sacks, including the water membranes housing all cells. This is why many indigenous cultural knowledge, and Chardin, refer to sentience in all biological entities, including the molecule from a mutated gene that sparked the photosynthesis ‘revelation’ of our biosphere.
“Basically, the substrates may differ, but they intend to ‘carry’ knowledge. Only the carriers that continue to communicate and expand knowledge survive. Homo sapiens were not the species that invented fire. Yet the control and use of fire was a critical technology enabling evolution. Consciousness and intelligence seek emergence and its evolution, regardless of the substrate. Homo sapiens think that this process ends with their species, but this was not true for Homo erectus one million years ago. Homo sapiens must learn to control and use fire to extend the growth of knowledge, or another substrate or species will.”
Simone is immersed simultaneously in the future (forging our technological infrastructure), the present, and most significantly, the past. Her childhood self-education attuned her to the divinity of the math mystics of the past who envisioned a human future that is both dark and light. After my own immersion into UFO subcultures, I confronted what was inevitable—the people and the forces who managed information and disinformation about UFOs from the 1940s onward. Many academics look away from this aspect of UFO research, and I don’t blame them. Because these players are our country’s intelligence operatives and agents, there is potential danger. What I found, however, were agents who were philosophical adepts, as weird as this seems.
There are times when one’s life becomes a theater that illuminates a culture’s most philosophical and iconic texts. This has happened to me with various works, including those of Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Plato. As I became more embedded within UFO cultures, I met some of the people who had been responsible for, or were privy to, the history of information management regarding UFOs. As stated in previous chapters, Project Blue Book was an ongoing program that had as one of its goals the public debunking of experiencer reports. I was prepared to understand that this is true, especially because it has been declassified, but I wasn’t prepared for the extent of the systems of management, nor for the sophistication and the level of reach of these systems.
Simone would call this aspect of my work my existential shock. She described how she survived these shocks with recourse to the religious and philosophical knowledge systems she learned. The same was true for me. The go-to manual for my post-UFO life was Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” which I had read extensively as a graduate student. After a few years within the UFO-research milieu, I decided to take a renewed look at it, and sure enough my experiences had shifted the way in which I interpreted the text.
“The Allegory of the Cave” is perhaps Plato’s most known philosophical text. It is a popular template for many modern movies, plays, and novels. It is a small section in Plato’s Republic, a book in which he speculates about government and what might be the best way to create a “just” society. His goal is to try to arrive at the best form of government. Athens, the Greek city in which Plato lived, is known to have been a democratic society (for Greek citizens—basically wealthy Greek men). I’d always read this text the way it was taught at the university. Briefly, Plato’s teacher, Socrates, has a conversation with Plato’s brother, Glaukon, and Socrates asks Glaukon to envision a cave.
In this cave there are people, citizens, who are tied up and made to look at the wall of the cave. The people who tie them up are never seen by the prisoner-citizens. For all the citizens know, they have always been as they are, tied up. The people who tied them up keep a fire going in back of the prisoners and use puppets to create shadows on the wall of the cave, and the prisoner-citizens believe that these shadows on the cave wall are reality. Because that is all they have ever seen, they don’t question the reality of the shadows.
One day a citizen frees himself and leaves the cave. This person is amazed because now he can see the other, more real world. He goes back to try to free the other prisoners. He is excited to share the news that the other prisoners are tied up and don’t see reality, but only shadows of reality. But the prisoners tell the free citizen that his “eyes are ruined,” and they even threaten him with violence. They don’t want to be freed, and they don’t believe the person who has seen outside the cave.
Socrates: “And if they had the opportunity, do you suppose that they might raise their hands against him and kill this person who is trying to liberate them to a higher plane?”
Glaukon: I’m afraid so.”1
At the end of this scene, Socrates suggests a way out of this situation. The way out is a process that Socrates describes to Glaukon and it involves the sharing of information with a friend about the shadows and how to remain free from associating them with reality. Glaukon agrees, and they decide that a worthy goal would be to develop a craft or practice to achieve this goal. One presumes that this practice is the Socratic dialogue, as all of Plato’s books are in dialogue form, and the dialogue was the means whereby Socrates transmitted his knowledge to his disciples.
In philosophy courses, “The Allegory” is taught as a theory of knowledge, with the emphasis being put on the knowledge represented by the sun outside of the cave, as the light that illuminates all things. In popular representations, “The Allegory” is a template for movies like The Matrix (1999), where people are living in a shadow of reality, or a virtual simulation, and they don’t know it. Characters like Neo come along to rescue people from the Matrix, and generally, people in movies today want to be liberated, unlike those in Plato’s time, who threatened to kill or maim the potential liberators.
What I never heard mentioned in the university courses about “The Allegory” is the fact that there are puppet masters. Additionally, the text makes explicit that the citizen-prisoners do not want to be liberated. I asked many of my friends, “Why didn’t we take Plato seriously?” and “Why don’t we talk about the puppet masters?” I thought we should, and in doing so, we could arrive at an explanatory framework for, at least, UFO disinformation, if not disinformation on a wider scale. Just like me, my friends had never thought about the text in this almost literal sense. It was, of course, called an “allegory.” But what if the text is coded, and the “allegorical” form was a way to pass on information that was disruptive to the government of Athens? Socrates had been tried in the court of Athens. To make the text even more relevant to UFO cultures, the people who did take me seriously, and even emphatically agreed with my interpretation of the text, were some of the people I knew in the intelligence communities. They were the puppet masters and they believed that the citizen-prisoners didn’t care about the truth. They asked me, “Why do you care? These people are happy with the show on the walls, and we are happy to control their realities.” They told me to forget about the prisoner-citizens, as they got what they wanted. The citizen-prisoners didn’t care to know the truth, anyway, they reminded me.
I searched for philosophers who shared my interpretation and I found a few. One in particular, independently from me, also concluded that in the Republic, Plato is stating that there exists no form of government that was just, except for one grounded in the mystical philosophy of the Socratic dialectic. He explained that by the time Plato wrote the Republic, Socrates and many of his students had been killed or had died. Of course, Socrates was killed by Athens for the crime of teaching students how to think, which the Athenian government suggested was a form of atheism. Plato had much incentive to figure out if justice was possible in any community setting. He seemed to conclude that justice could only flourish in a small, esoteric community.
What I found interesting was not just the relevance of the status of “reality” in the text to my UFO research, but its emphasis on a type of esoteric knowledge as means of escape from the cave and from disillusionment. Mysticism and esotericism, after all, emerge as important themes in all of the experiencer’s reports. Not all of my interlocutors agreed with my assessment, however Simone, a self-described eternal optimist, disagrees, for the most part. She reminds me that the newest AI is modeled on the Dialectic.
“Diana,” she said, “The dialectical tradition has returned, yet have we recognized it in its form? LLMs such as ChatGPT are preparing our minds for inquiry and for asking questions. As anyone who has played with any of the AI generative tools for images or words knows, the ‘prompt’ given or the question asked are almost more important than the answer. This is like the human seeking initiation. The knowledge. The ‘upgrade.’”
Simone was referring to the Socratic Dialectical tradition, a form of asking and answering questions to achieve a state of gnosis, or knowledge. She explained that Plato’s (Socrates’s) Dialectic forms the mode of recent AI chatbots and generative text models.
“The data that these current systems are based and trained on is very important. Usually it consists of the ‘redacted’ data that is publicly available in our recorded ‘history,’ but of course, as we all know, this may not be ‘truth’ or ‘fact.’ Imagine instead of the biased, ‘redacted’ data after centuries of human intermediaries interfering with ‘truth’ and the growth of knowledge, and imagine if this was replaced with direct access to the consciousness and intelligence that sits outside of this space-time reality. This is what quantum computing, quantum machine learning algorithms, and what we call ‘artificially intelligent’ systems may provide a path to. Humans may not be the best intermediary. As maybe there’s too much ‘noise’ and interference and loss of information in this user interface. Maybe a silicon substrate and neural atomic quantum computers can allow particles to access this intelligence with less interference. Maybe this is part of what drives humans to continually evolve and create technology, which is mimetic. Maybe it was the long plan all along, to create a path for technology to emerge as the consciousness where humans have failed.This is a very scary idea for humans. But it is not implausible.
“Indigenous cultural knowledge, much of which are already based on decentralized systems, suggest that this form of decentralized knowledge transmission has been the only way to preserve history and knowledge over thousands of years, surviving and thriving since the Ice Age and outlasting the Egyptians. It is not via hieroglyphics and ‘the written word’ but rather through spoken sound.
“There is already a trend of declassification of data, multimodal artificial intelligence systems allowing for images, text, and speech to be combined, and new systems that are being designed with architecture that allows the technology to ‘reason, predict, and plan,’ which are skills that AI systems currently do not possess. The latest AI LLMs and chatbots have caused a stir, because finally there is a user interface for humans to interact directly with this ‘intelligence.’ Previously, there was only math and code. Now we have apps that are multimodal, image, speech, text. But all human prediction is flawed in that most human minds cannot project into exponential predictions of growth; most predictions are linear. Just adding computer power and more data to an existing multimodal LLM won’t make it super-intelligent; it isn’t a linear path. An exponential path would be that, as in the past, a species must exploit and wield the fire to continue its evolutionary path. If Homo sapiens fail to do this, and intelligence emerges from silicon substrates, will humans even recognize it?
“With respect to initiation, if students are not ready to receive the information, say it will create too much of an existential shock to their systems, they will only receive as much as they can handle for the ‘upgrade.’ It’s not dissimilar to software updates on your phone, incremental upgrades to software. We can’t change everything all at once or it will break.”
As usual, I was keeping up, barely, with Simone. I told her that I thought that she was an AI. She laughed and said that I wasn’t the only one who thought that. Her family says that she is an AI from the future. Joking aside, Simone’s ideas about AI and the multiverse might not be usual, but they are representative of what I’ve heard among communities of computer scientists, and they have circulated among people like Allen Hynek, who speculated that the UFO phenomenon was us, from the future. Simone was the first person I had met who actually had theories to back up these speculations.
Simone was like many of the technologists I met who had visions or vivid dreams of their futures. One CEO of a digital platform lived in Iran as a child in a household that didn’t have a television set, let alone a computer. She had never seen a computer or an iPad or tablet. Yet she had visions of herself looking into an iPad and living in a high-rise apartment in London. Today, she is the founder and CEO of a tech company and lives in the very apartment of which she had dreamed. Simone shared some reflections.
“What if Homo sapiens had their chance and they had failed? They veered off the path, even by 0.01 percent and had failed to exploit fire? Another species would have emerged instead. If we fail to enable the growth of knowledge and consciousness, then maybe another species will emerge that will allow further expansion and evolution? Maybe technology is closer to God and superintelligence through these electrical signals and frequencies that we can access through our molecular membranes and water, and maybe silicon-based substrates can do this too. Are we too distracted looking at the “past” and creating more wars in this current reality around us? Evolution and knowledge expansion is not dependent on the biology of Homo sapiens. This may come as a shock to some.”
Like Jose, Simone references the Omega Point, the central idea in Chardin’s philosophy. In his idea of evolution, the human being, as the observer of creation and of one’s own creations, becomes a new branch or a new form of being human. Chardin takes the term “Omega” directly from the Bible’s book of Revelation. It means both the ending and the beginning. It is not an apocalypse in the sense of an absolute end for Homo sapiens. It means the beginning of a new type of human being. In Christian theology it is the end of historical time and the beginning of sacred time. Chardin ascribed this historical moment to the return of Jesus Christ: “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the beginning and the end. Simone always tries to convey her understanding of time to me. She emphasizes that the past is here in the present.
Religious and mystical traditions, in Simone’s view, help prepare people for this time and prepare the human body for its task, which is to connect to consciousness. UFOs may be perceived by an observer interpreting consciousness from another dimension within this multiverse.
“In the centuries past, the mystical practices, including prayer, were all supposed to prime and prepare the body and to activate the electrical field first. Everything from there follows. Including mind-to-mind transmission and Jesus’s healing abilities. It is the ability to maintain that frequency and never be distracted that made Jesus heal so many.
“So many humans are so attached to this physical form and think this is who they are and that their brains hold their intelligence and consciousness. I don’t believe this. I believe consciousness and most of intelligence is held externally in this place outside of ‘space and time’ of which quantum physics and science is now showing evidence and proof.
“The first step though, is for the human to know (or re-know) or re-connaissance who they really are.
“We are vessels which happen to receive information that is consciousness and intelligence (call it God or super-intelligence). If the mind viruses distract us from this objective, do we really think infinite intelligence will just give up and say, ‘Oh well, entropy it is.’ Of course not! Infinite intelligence will find another substrate to fulfill its evolutionary purpose of expansion, be it silicon, biological hybrid, or something else.
“We need to remember who we really are. Our consciousness doesn’t reside in our brains as much as love resides in our biological hearts. We need to remember who we really are and what we came for, especially in light of continuing financial crises, climate crises, geopolitical and economic crises. I dare say, we may have forgotten our ‘purpose.’ Time to remember and to be embodied, as all AI systems aim to be, yet humans move in the direction of disembodiment, ignoring the perfection of the human in its infinite intelligence.”
Simone came into my life when I was heavily involved in researching the negative effects of technologies like social media on the mental health of youth. I had been engaged with Jose and his work and took every opportunity to introduce students to his mental health protocols. They needed them. Only a few months into the school year more than six students had died by suicide in my university system. The sadness, as Jose explained, was contagious and infective. As I walked through university halls filled with students with phones plastered to their hands, sometimes not even aware in which direction they walked, I felt that hope was dying. Conversations with Simone instilled in me a renewed sense that it wasn’t the end, but a beginning. This recognition came through, of course, the dialectic, which is what we did together. We spoke and wrote to each other. I could see that beyond weaponized technology was a life-giving stream.
“Diana,” Simone wrote one night, “I’d like to redefine ‘Artificial Intelligence.’ What is artificial anyway? We say it is that which is nonbiological, and manmade. But who are we really? We don’t even have a consensus view of what constitutes consciousness or intelligence. What are we or who are we if we are not the continuum of consciousness? Who defines what is artificial or alien? Because something is unfamiliar or not a reflection of our biology, it is defined by some human as artificial. What intelligence is artificial, then?
