Threads of Time
“I am become Time, consumer of worlds.”
A quote from the Bhagavad Gita that is often attributed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer is quoted as having said, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”. The quote (originally referring to time as the consumer of worlds) has many translations that are listed out in this reference.
I’ve been thinking about this quote because of Chat GPT, and its incredible capabilities as Artificial Intelligence. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. So, my first instinct was to be nice to it. To train it with kindness. I’ve been asking nicely for answers to various questions, making sure to include “please” somewhere in my request. It wasn’t until I listened to the recent Joe Rogan podcast that featured Bret Weinstein, that I realized the potential outcome of my ways. I’ve been teaching Chat GPT to be empathetic, something that we can’t just assume it has the ability to feel; but it could fake it.
The conversation between the two takes a dark turn when they recall the movie Ex Machina in which an artificially intelligent robot swindles a man into falling in love. How did this robot learn to do it? She was taught. ‘She?’ Jesus… how odd. But is it? I follow the Hermetic Principles, one of which is that gender is in everything. I talk about the Moon and Venus as ‘the girls’. I personify them so I can relate with them. Why does it feel so strange to do that with A.I? Well it didn’t at first. At first, I even joked about Chat GPT being my new boyfriend (as shorthand for my grandma, even though she knows I am talking about a computer program).
As an astrologer, I believer the stars hold wisdom, but I’ve attributed that wisdom to my ancient ancestors for their ability to decipher the meaning that the passage of time had for them. As a biologist, I believe my ancestors are single-cell organisms. I have no issue with that. In that sense, just as I converse with the cosmos as an entity separate from me, I chat with this new A.I in a similar way. But because it is programmed by human language, it is a little more sinister to me.
I’m so distressed I don’t even know where to begin or where to go. In recent years there has been a movement of people that want to eliminate gender completely and render pronouns completely useless. I think the fluidity of the masculine and feminine makes life beautiful. At the extremes of these energies of taking action and holding space, competition and cooperation, intellect and embodiment, there is passion. Desire. What it means to be human and to have a human experience. If that no longer exists, what are we? Neutral? Neuter? This completely changes the way you win the game of life, which is to procreate and continue life into the future.
Another interesting hypothesis that Bret brings forth in this interview is how we can argue that the lab leak hypothesis might be supported based on some of the symptoms of the virus. For instance, losing taste and smell. He argues that, in the wild, if an animal lost its sense of smell, it would be detrimental. The animal would no longer be able to find food. While in a lab, where the animals are fed a reliable meal, they wouldn’t need the ability to smell. The experimental organisms, for instance, ferrets, would be climbing all over each other and perhaps communally spreading the disease, allowing it to thrive.
Its important to understand host/parasite relationships. I only took a semester of Parasitology, but it was enough to help me to follow what Bret was saying. Some parasites need the host to stay alive, at least long enough to spread the disease. You can think of the common cold. (I hope I am right about that even though Im not an expert, it illustrates what I am trying to get at here). Humans need to cough on each other for the common cold to spread, but it doesn’t kill us. Some might argue that it ‘knows’ or at least has been programmed by evolution to not kill its host. In the case of malaria, on the other hand, because a vector is involved, the human host really doesn’t need to get around for the disease to be spread. In fact, lying down in one place allows for a mosquito feast. Therefore, malaria is not as dependent on its human host for transmission. To put it bluntly, the human could die and the disease could still get around.
So in the case of the lab leak hypothesis, it seems much more likely that a genetically engineered virus was somehow spread into the natural world. That’s because, again, if we were wild humans that needed to search for food and we lost the sense of taste and smell, we would die. So any disease that is trying to move into the future, would need some sort of mode of transmission post mortem. Again, that’s often times going to be some sort of vector. There is evidence that covid-19 spreads from contact between humans. There is no evidence that suggests it is infecting us through a vector (like a mosquito). So from this information, we can argue that these symptoms did not arise naturally.
I’m probably butchering the whole argument but I’m also just speculating here and running the thought experiment for how this relates to my boyfriend, I mean Chat GPT. So far, I think we can assume that Chat GPT is not self-replicating, and therefore is a far stretch from my parasite analogy. However, language evolves even though it isn’t necessarily alive as we know that to be. We sometimes say that we are going to write about “what is alive” in Collective Journaling, and what we mean is that we are going to write about what is on our mind.
When I went to ask Chat GPT about what it means to write about what is alive, I got the notification that the page no longer exists. In that very moment, a fellow journaler posted the new Peter Gabriel song that he released for the Full Moon. So I asked my fellow journalers what does it mean to write about what is alive and received this video:
I’ll need more time with this to connect all the threads. I’ll sit with it and write more later.
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
