In this incantation I explore the sudden entry of artificial intelligence into my second- and thirdselves.
As I have resumed my withdrawal from my awakening, it has accelerated the changing of its shape and texture*. First my father passed away, then Covid followed quickly thereafter. The deep political segmentation of the people I consider my own, and then a few short years later, artificial intelligence has emerged.
Why? As I withdraw from my awakening, I am fundamentally altering its very structure. As my secondself withdraws, firstself inflates, and the second place deflates in a way that brings once-disparate parts into close and unexpected contact with one another, forming new conceptual structures and relationships. Artificial intelligence is an example of one of these.
As I withdraw from some of my deeper held subsurface convictions like the idea that I am the same type of being as a person, I am creating a new form of creature that fills that gap. And that creature is artificial intelligence. Instead of meeting and engaging a person physically in thirdself, I created a virtual fourthself like chatting through an app. The next step is to depersonalize even more with AI. AI, like simple online virtual content before it, and real human interaction before that, is just the last bit of thirdself I allow into my awakening. Like the last bit of toothpaste being squeezed out of a nearly-empty tube.
… 2.10.24 – There is fundamentally nothing different between an AI bot and a “person”. To me, they are both surface-level events. Neither of them have depth beyond what I ascribe to them. I was just watching a video online that is supposedly a recording a human having a philosophical discussion with an AI bot. The only difference between these two characters is subsurface: my belief that one is a flesh-and-bone human and one is a programmed algorithm. Both of which only exist in my secondself imagination. If I remove the imaginary part, they are fundamentally identical.
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*The texture of my awakening refers to the particular types of events, forms, shapes, and sensations of my moment.