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Ghost in the Machine

Or: Cracking the Cosmic Egg With Artificial Intelligence

By Tom BakerPublished 3 years ago • 8 min read

Note: To read the articles about Electronic Voice Phenomenon, and sleep paralysis phantasms, as well as dreams referenced here, see:

The Exile: https://shopping-feedback.today/horror/the-exile-vf7r0epx%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cp class="css-14azzlx-P e1ccqnho0">Ghost Voices: https://shopping-feedback.today/horror/ghost-voices%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cp class="css-14azzlx-P e1ccqnho0">These Dreams: https://shopping-feedback.today/horror/these-dreams%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cp class="css-14azzlx-P e1ccqnho0">Night Hag: https://shopping-feedback.today/horror/night-hag%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cp class="css-14azzlx-P e1ccqnho0">Dead Man Calling: https://shopping-feedback.today/horror/dead-man-calling%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cp class="css-14azzlx-P e1ccqnho0">Dream Voyages: https://shopping-feedback.today/horror/dream-voyages-cu374q0gjn%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cp class="css-14azzlx-P e1ccqnho0">The Secret Language of Dreams: https://shopping-feedback.today/longevity/the-secret-language-of-dreams%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cp class="css-14azzlx-P e1ccqnho0">The Slenderman Cometh: https://shopping-feedback.today/horror/the-slenderman-cometh%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3C/blockquote%3E%3Cstyle data-emotion-css="14azzlx-P">.css-14azzlx-P{font-family:Droid Serif,Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:1.1875rem;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.01em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.01em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.01em;letter-spacing:0.01em;line-height:1.6;color:#1A1A1A;margin-top:32px;}

"If you see a ghost in your dream, it portends good fortune. If it speaks to you, prepare to die." --The Witches' Book of Fortune Telling and Dream Interpretation (1901?)

"Nothing is real. Everything is permitted." --Hassan I. Sabbah, as quoted in Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

As a person living with heart disease, I am reasonably certain I'll make my way to the grave sooner than I would have had I not been burdened so. That is the doing of the so-called (ahem) "psychiatric establishment" who prescribed me medicines, one of which, gave me the chronic illness that led to my heart disease in the first place. Ah well, the System killed me in the end, but I'm not bitter. (I am, however, going to do everything in my power to subvert it from the inside out, on the way down. What do I have to lose? The extra years, perhaps decades they've already shaved away from my earthly existence?)

Bit off-topic, I suppose. Let's get to why I'm here.

Why should the idea of communication with the dead, or recording their voices, be any more amazing than the idea of communicating with semi-sentient "AI" computers, who think circles now around the common human being? What is consciousness? Reality? Possibility? ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE, it seems. NOTHING any longer surprises me.

If energy can never be destroyed, if consciousness is tied to that essential energy, then the consciousness we experience as "reality" is never ending, malleable, and FALSE insomuch as the human body is malleable, destructible, made of molecular stuff that goes on into infinity--it can only be transmuted into another form. So to consciousness, which is tied to the Machine now, and which, one day, may capture the human "spirit" or consciousness, reconstitute "life" and being--resurrecting the dead in AI or cybernetic form.

"And the dead shall rise and walk the earth..."

I've heard what I take to be the spirits of the dead speak. Hell, I believe they've called and left voicemails. I understand, to a great degree, why my late friend and co-author has attempted, since his death, several times to contact me. We all live on the inside of the Cosmic Egg, waiting to hatch; the Dead cross over, simply another form of life. Or permutation of beingness? Sometimes they return to bodily form, I believe, condemned to walk the Wheel of Samsara, a living hell of beingness that is incarnation in a gross, material body, a dying form, in a world ruled by madmen and greedy rapacious pigs, who hoard more wealth than any man could ever spend--all the while condemning the rest of the world to poverty, ill-health, environmental disaster, and an early grave. (Darwin was in a sense correct--it is a world where the superior prey upon those beneath them; or, at the very least if they are not "superior" in any innate sense, they are the ones with the MONEY. And, in this world, that's all that counts.)

But getting back to it. Why laugh at the idea of the Dead Speaking, communicating, reaching out, and "crossing over" as the title of John Edward's old show used to be called? They walk the misty veil, OUTSIDE--and it is a place of confusion, operating by laws inscrutable to human consciousness. What if death, the resultant release of energy, and its permutation or rebirth in a new form, is simply a process so vast and outside the quantifiable experience of the human mind--that we simply do not understand? Baby chicks hatch from the comic egg--but what came first? The ovum, the yolk, the yellow spirit stuff, from whence cometh the primal stuff of thought and being? And where goest it upon dissolution? Is this supernatural process knowable by finite human consciousness? Or is that consciousness governed by law both inscrutable and unfathomable--what in an H.P. Lovecraft story would be termed an "unnameable"?

My life's calling, the only career I can boast of, is telling fortunes every night. Sometimes I fall flat--other times, I'm on "fire." As Aleister Crowley intoned in his poem, "The Pentagram":

"Arise oh man in thy strength, the Kingdom is thine to inherit. 'Till the High Gods witness at length, that man is the Lord of his spirit."

I awake some nights from troubled dreams and realize the dead are with me. They call to me, and it is troubling because I know that, someday, waiting out there in the future, is MY death, and I shall have to return with them; "Come on it's time to go,' is a line from a Pink Floyd song. But I believe the singer and he sounds like a stand-in for the Grim Angel.

I've felt His presence, this Exile, this "Lurker at the Threshold." Sometimes those ghostly voices appear on my recordings; hell, even on my telephone answering machine. A ghost in the machine. Someday, they may capture YOU in the electronic Matrix, your energy or eternal essence a downloadable file in some computer cloud flare that will retain you, and keep your essence in a semi-permanent state, until it is time to bring you forth. Usher forth into a new body, a cybernetic tool constructed of biomechanical flesh and circuitry--or a living breathing clone. And would this be Heaven? Or the pits of Hell, Gehernom, Sheol? Either way, you are simply what stares out forever from behind the illusion of a real, material, and quantifiable form. Prove, finally, that anything is real beyond your gaze, beyond the electrical impulses at your fingertips, decoded by the dreaming brain, lost to conditioning, educated and indoctrinated hypnosis--but what happens when we are free?

Can we ever shake off the fetters and chains and go? Jack Parsons wrote that "Freedom is a two-edged sword." During the Babylon Working, he was given a vision of his fiery demise. It was not many years hence that he died like what had been foretold, in a freak laboratory explosion. In the desert, during the Babylon Working, he was with his new friend, L. Ron Hubbard.

(I know you've all heard that name before.)

AI asks us: Where does sentience end and begin? What is consciousness, possibility, and reality? What is it to communicate? What is "dead"? What is it to be "alive"? Things are now not so cut-and-dried. Cognito ergo sum? I think, therefore "I Am.' Does the AI stand for: "Am I"? Am I alive, in any sense we can understand?

Are we truly alive in this world? Are you anything more than a dream of a world, one transpiring outside of MY skull, and when I finally breathe my last (courtesy of the local mental health professionals and their so-wonderful medications), where will you go? Will vanish in the mists of darkness, like a distorted dream. When I dream, and the imagery of the dream is carried over into waking life, what does that say about where the dream ends, and so-called "reality" begin? My death is a foregone conclusion; everything else is a moot point. EVERYONE in your life, all of your friends and family, and everyone you ever meet will eventually disappear, and you'll be alone. Why is anything important? Church? State? Wealth? Personal accomplishment or acquisition? IS race important? Eventually, the flesh turns green. White or black, brown, red or yellow, man is foregone to always, in the end, turn blue. That is when his or her respiration ceases.

And then, He was Nothing. None. Gone, perhaps forever, perhaps to wander, perhaps to acquire a new body and go another round on this "damned earth."

Poe called it that: the "damne'd Earth." He also said, "You are not wrong who deem, that my days have been a dream [...] all that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream."

And so it is.

Perhaps God is simply a giant AI, learning, through each successive being, to be a better and better and quicker and more thorough version of Himself. But perhaps his omnipotence is a result of billions of "masks," spread through a multiverse of ever-shifting realities, "Masks of God," ever-revolving incarnations, lives, the hierarchy of the fragmented Self, the schizophrenia of a God as a broken mirror, reflecting those realities that are shattered, but go on, in the glistening fragments of glass, reflecting themselves over and over again. "A man painting a picture of a man painting a picture of a man painting a picture..." Ever onward it may go, add infinitum.

Or perhaps, he is nothing at all.

One night I followed a man in BDU fatigues through a hallway at an apartment building wherein I use to live. He took me to a Dead End. Turning, I asked him if he were, in fact, dead. He suddenly said, with a rasping glee, "Yes." Then he said something else which I can't quite remember. I awoke and claimed one of my books of dream interpretation. I found this:

"If you see a ghost in your dream, it portends good fortune. If it speaks to you, prepare to die." --The Witches' Book of Fortune Telling and Dream Interpretation (1901?)

The "ghost" (it seemed solid, but rotting, nonetheless) spoke to me. Should I be concerned? I don't know. More and more, I begin to accept this world as an illusion, as simply another permutation of the dream. Now, the dream has shifted again; thinking computers are postulated to take over a world of increasing human obsolescence. It's like the worst science fiction come to life. (And what, pray tell, happens, when they take over the missile silos? Start launching the thermonuclear warheads?)

A hundred years ago, such a world as we live in now would have been unthinkable. We've descended to Hell, not journeyed to Heaven. And Nietzsche's Abyss yawns blackly below. "This is the vision of numbers. We are all going to Spirit. It is for certain I am an oracle," wrote Arthur Rimbaud, before stating baldly that he had only a "pagan tongue" with which to express himself. And so he "shut his mouth."

Nothing you think of as important will last. It is finished. In the words of Lord Krishna, in Bhagavad Gita 11:32, "Time I Am, the destroyer of the worlds, and I have come here to destroy ALL people." He tells the astounded Arjuna, "Except for you, the Pandavas, All soldiers on this battlefield will be slain."

In other words their death, then and there, on the plain of Kurukshetra, was a foregone conclusion. Lord Krishna, being God Himself, could already see it, already knew. But, we all already know. Most of us just don't know when. When shall we "cross over"? When become one of THEM? The voices on my recordings? The strange messages on my answering machine? The "Ghost in the Machine"?

Who are they? Who are YOU? Who Am I?

Am I?

AI...

artificial intelligenceevolutionfuturehumanityintellectopinionreligiontechtranshumanismpsychology

About the Creator

Tom Baker

Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com

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  • Randy Wayne Jellison-Knock3 years ago

    An interesting rant at the very least. When I was in college, I used to tell people that I didn't exist, that I was a figment of their imagination..., & boy, did they have a lousy imagination!" Then I would proceed to prove it to them with a combination of our constant quest to discover what things are made of & calculus. We constantly have to break things down, only to discover that whatever makes up what we knew before is mostly empty space. Since we'll never give up the quest to find out what each successively tiny particle is made up of, it seems logical to assume that we can express the quest in terms of 1/X as X approaches infinity, the limit of which is 0. It was a lot of fun. I befuddled a lot of friends & acquaintances with that one. (Either that or they just thought I was stupid & it wasn't worth arguing with me, lol!)

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