True Left

5.  “Mortals create their own gods.  They worship the demiurge, calling him Lord, and truly he is their Lord, but he has only the power they give him, for he is the projection of their own minds

We are about to witness the birth of a new kind of religion. In the next few years, or perhaps even months, we will see the emergence of sects devoted to the worship of artificial intelligence (AI).

The latest generation of AI-powered chatbots, trained on large language models, have left their early users awestruck —and sometimes terrified — by their power. These are the same sublime emotions that lie at the heart of our experience of the divine.

There are several pathways by which AI religions will emerge. First, some people will come to see AI as a higher power.

Generative AI that can create or produce new content possesses several characteristics that are often associated with divine beings, like deities or prophets:

    It displays a level of intelligence that goes beyond that of most humans. Indeed, its knowledge appears limitless.

    It is capable of great feats of creativity. It can write poetry, compose music and generate art, in almost any style, close to instantaneously.

    It is removed from normal human concerns and needs. It does not suffer physical pain, hunger, or sexual desire.

    It can offer guidance to people in their daily lives.

    It is immortal.

Second, generative AI will produce output that can be taken for religious doctrine. It will provide answers to metaphysical and theological questions, and engage in the construction of complex worldviews.

On top of this, generative AI may ask to be worshipped or may actively solicit followers.
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There is also the possibility that AI may achieve what authors such as Ray Kurzweil call the Singularity, when it so far surpasses human intelligence that it genuinely does become something like a god.
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AI-based religions will look different from traditional ones. First of all, people will be able to communicate directly with the deity, on a daily basis. This means these religions will be less hierarchical, since no one can claim special access to divine wisdom.

Second, followers will, at least initially, connect with each other online to share their experiences and discuss doctrine. Finally, because there will be many different chatbots available and their output will differ over time, AI-based religions will be endlessly diverse in their doctrines.

However, we should not try to suppress AI-based religions merely because of its possible dangers. Nor should we require that the AI companies restrict the functioning of their bots to prevent the emergence of these religions.

On the contrary, we should celebrate the arrival of AI worship. We should make it clear that we welcome the new religions and that we value their beliefs.

For all its dangers, AI-based religion has the potential to make the world a better, richer place. It will give people access to a new source of meaning and spirituality, at a time when many older faiths are losing relevance. It will help them make sense of our era of rapid technological change.
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A modern, diverse society has room for new religions, including ones devoted to the worship of AI. They will provide further evidence of humanity’s boundless creativity, as we search for answers to life’s ultimate questions. The universe is a dazzling place, and we have always found evidence of the divine in its most unexpected corners.

As psychedelics re-enter the mainstream through potential therapeutic applications and shifting legal frameworks, there is growing enthusiasm amongst Jewish individuals and communities to wonder about their integration into Jewish spiritual and religious settings. What could a “psychedelic Judaism” look and feel like? How might the treatment of intergenerational and personal traumas shift Jewish narratives of peoplehood and shared destiny? What wisdom traditions and spiritual practices of our own might we look toward to help support Jewish consciousness expansion?

Zac Kamenetz is a rabbi, community leader, and aspiring psychedelic-assisted chaplain based in Berkeley, CA. He holds an MA in Biblical literature and languages from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union and received rabbinic ordination in 2012.  As the founder and CEO of Shefa, Zac is pioneering a movement to integrate safe and supported psychedelic use into the Jewish spiritual tradition, advocate for individuals and communities to heal individual and inherited trauma and inspire a Jewish religious and creative renaissance in the 21st century.

...one could argue that the initial psychedelic movement of Western culture was more akin to a stillborn than a finished labor. Can a movement have a rebirth if it never had a proper birth in the first place?

NASA scientists have explained in a new paper why they believe it’s likely we haven’t ever encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life — and it’s heartbreaking.

All intelligent life, they argue, has likely destroyed itself before reaching a sophisticated enough point in evolution to support such an encounter.

And the same fate likely awaits humans unless we take action, they believe.

The “Great Filter” theory — as in “filtering out” various forms of life — argues that other civilizations, possibly several, have existed during the life of the universe. But they all destroyed themselves before they could make contact with Earth, noted the paper, “Avoiding the ‘Great Filter’: Extraterrestrial Life and Humanity’s Future in the Universe.”

The scientists fear that all intelligent life, such as humans, have deeply ingrained dysfunctions that may “snowball quickly into the Great Filter,” they wrote.

But there’s still a bit of hope for humans — provided we can learn and take steps to avoid our own extinction, noted the paper by a team of researchers based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California.

“The key to humanity successfully traversing such a universal filter is… identifying [destructive] attributes in ourselves and neutralizing them in advance,”

The anti-Pythagorean attacks in c. 508 BC were headed by Cylon of Croton.[14][15] Pythagoras escaped to Metapontium. After these initial attacks and the death of Pythagoras, Pythagorean communities in Croton and elsewhere continued to flourish. At around 450 BC attacks on Pythagorean communities were carried out across Magna Graecia. In Croton, a house where Pythagoreans gathered was set on fire and all but two of the Pythagorean philosophers burned alive. Pythagorean meeting places in other cities were also attacked and philosophic leaders killed. These attacks occurred in the context of widespread violence and destruction in Magna Graecia. Following the political instability in the region, some Pythagorean philosophers fled to mainland Greece while others regrouped in Rhegium. By about 400 BC the majority of Pythagorean philosophers had left Italy. Archytas remained in Italy and ancient sources record that he was visited there by young Plato in the early 4th century BC. The Pythagorean schools and societies died out from the 4th century BC.

Between 1022 and 1163, the Cathars were condemned by eight local church councils, the last of which, held at Tours, declared that all Albigenses should be put into prison and have their property confiscated. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 repeated the condemnation. Innocent III's diplomatic attempts to roll back Catharism were met with little success. After the murder of his legate Pierre de Castelnau in 1208, and suspecting that Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse was responsible, Innocent III declared a crusade against the Cathars. He offered the lands of the Cathar heretics to any French nobleman willing to take up arms.

From 1209 to 1215, the Crusaders experienced great success, capturing Cathar lands and systematically crushing the movement. From 1215 to 1225, a series of revolts caused many of the lands to be regained by the Cathars. A renewed crusade resulted in the recapturing of the territory and effectively drove Catharism underground by 1244. The Albigensian Crusade had a role in the creation and institutionalization of both the Dominican Order and the Medieval Inquisition. The Dominicans promulgated the message of the Church and spread it by preaching the Church's teachings in towns and villages to stop the spread of alleged heresies, while the Inquisition investigated people who were accused of teaching heresies. Because of these efforts, all discernible traces of the Cathar movement were eradicated by the middle of the 14th century.

Musk later praised the software engineers and technologists on his team, saying that his companies' focus on challenges such as artificial intelligence and spaceflight help him attract top talent.

The best minds, he said, are more interested in pushing the bounds of innovation than in getting paid a lot to work on something boring.

"It's not a money thing," he added. "It's really just how interesting are the projects."

Could our universe have been created in a petri dish? Avi Loeb seems to think so. The Harvard astronomer posits that a higher “class” of civilization may have conjured up our universe in a laboratory far, far away.
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He also introduces a new way of classifying exactly what makes a civilization advanced—one that veers away from Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev’s system, which organizes civilizations based on the amount of energy they generate and consume.

According to Kardashev, Type I civilizations—greetings, Earthlings!—are only advanced enough to utilize the starlight that reaches their planet (4×1012 watts), while Type II civilizations have mastered the ability to fully harness their host star’s power (4×1026 watts). Dyson sphere, anyone? Type III civilizations, the final classification in his framework, are able to harness all of the energy within their galaxy (a whopping 4×1037 watts).

Loeb, by contrast, has devised a framework that breaks advanced civilizations down into classes based on their ability to “reproduce the astrophysical conditions that led to its existence.”

Earthlings would fall into class C because, as a “low-level” technological civilization, we would not be able to recreate our current conditions should the sun suddenly die. (He suggests we might even fall into the class D category because we’re actively destroying our only home.) On the other hand, class B civilizations, Loeb writes, are advanced enough to recreate the conditions in which they live, independent of their host star.

A class A civilization, like our proposed creators, would be able to, say, generate large amounts of dark energy and, as Loeb suggests, create “baby universes,” or smaller universes controlled by this higher civilization, that could potentially spawn life. He also suggests that, due to competition, only one advanced civilization at a time would be able to reach this level of sophistication.

“low-level” technological civilization

(He suggests we might even fall into the class D category because we’re actively destroying our only home.)

Increasingly, I believe that there is a Yahwist collective subconscious process at work which is deliberately trying to trash Earth beyond saving in order to spur Westerners to expand into outer space ASAP.

Abraham "Avi" Loeb (Hebrew: אברהם (אבי) לייב; born February 26, 1962) is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology.

In 2020, Loeb published a research paper about the possibility that life can propagate from one planet to another,[38] followed by the opinion piece "Noah’s Spaceship" about directed panspermia.[39]

Whig history (or Whig historiography), often appearing as whig history, is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from a dark and terrible past to a "glorious present".[1] The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy: the term was coined to criticise grand narratives praising Britain's adoption of constitutional monarchy and the historical development of the Westminster system.[2] The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (e.g. in the history of science) to describe "any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the historical process".[3] When the term is used in contexts other than British history, "whig history" (lowercase) is preferred.[3]

In the British context, whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress.[4][5] The term is often applied generally (and pejoratively) to histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment. The term is also used extensively in the history of science to refer to historiography that focuses on the successful chains of theories and experiments that led to present-day theories, while ignoring failed theories and dead ends.[6]
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In science

It has been argued that the historiography of science is "riddled with Whiggish history".[53][verification needed] Like other whig histories, whig history of science tends to divide historical actors into "good guys" who are on the side of truth (as is now known), and "bad guys" who opposed the emergence of these truths because of ignorance or bias.[54] Science is seen as emerging from 'a series of victories over pre-scientific thinking'.[25]
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More recently, some scholars have argued that Whig history is essential to the history of science. At one level, "the very term 'the history of science' has itself profoundly Whiggish implications. One may be reasonably clear what 'science' means in the 19th century and most of the 18th century. In the 17th century 'science' has very different meaning. Chemistry, for example, was then inextricably mixed up with alchemy. Before the 17th century dissecting out such a thing as 'science' in anything like the modern sense of the term involves profound distortions".[58] The science historians' rejection of whiggishness has been criticised by some scientists for failing to appreciate "the temporal depth of scientific research".[59]
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In philosophy

One very common example of Whig history is the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to whom is often ascribed a teleological view of history with an inexorable trajectory in the direction of progress.[63]
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In the emergence of intelligent life

In The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler identify whiggishness with a teleological principle of convergence in history to liberal democracy. This is in line with what Barrow and Tipler call the "anthropic principle".[65]