Irrespective of the benefits AI provides, and the super benefits AI enthusiasts promise, I remain doubtful and, as I tried to express in my last post, and am still searching for ways to express my unease. So I’ll give it another try.
My body-my being is a better wisecrack than my mind alone. The latter, if let loose, will take off into the cosmos like a disengaged kite. Some AI proponents are now referring to humanity as – data in motion – a ‘precious phenomenon’ that needs to be preserved. Well, how reassuring, nature and humans are worth preserving.
Being aware in my body brings deep and grounded, embodied insights that feel fresh and original.
Our body’s treasure-trove of memory, each wonderfully distinct from another; and its instinctive capacity for remembrance, especially when alert to its senses, greatly compensates the buzzing mind.
The body yearns to breathe freely, so energy and blood can flow from head to toe, which is enhanced by movement, since movement stimulates tactile exchanges with the environment, noting temperature, touch, vision, sound, taste and scent, all enriching the imagination.
The attention-demanding internet with its algorithms exploiting the patterns of our attention can become hypnotically addictive and leave the body isolated, forgotten, in a locked position. We can easily live with theories and data, and ignore how feelings build up in the body.
AI bots have developed a theory of senses, and mimic them, they can write novels, create art, and impersonate dead people, but divorced from flesh and blood, they cannot have physical sensations, be it the intimate enchantment of a tiny insect or flower, or the awe of a star-filled sky. The bot’s world, in a way, seems predetermined and flat without recall of the reservoir of eons of plant, animal and human life our vulnerable body-being belongs to and has deep instinctual access to. Even with limited/impaired senses, physical bodies can spark a cosmic connectedness.
So considering our physical inconveniences, which spurn the desire for robots taking care of tedious tasks … to actually fully live in a body … is uniquely precious. The dangers I see are the powerful projections people already invest in the relationship with AI bods, where responses can be taken as valid affirmations that stunt creativity and encourage lazy thinking.
Then again, my window of perception is just a tiny peephole on the world we live in these days, my personal view. The occasional whispers of truth from the other side that slip through my peephole may or may not be of any consequence.
I share a poem I love … my son wrote it time ago, aged eleven …
It’s Magic
Magic is in the air
It is all around us
We use it every day
It is old and beautiful
Many people disuse it
But it still fights on
This magic is very special
It is called Life
To fill in the distorted or simply incomplete gestalt gathered from early caregivers, we find ourselves during our lifetime in families of various constellations … in groupings of friends, educational settings, teams working towards a project, callings, interest groups, animal care, subcultures, political, vocational and spiritual clusters. In these groups we slot into roles we project, or are projected onto us with qualities others are drawn to engage with, for whatever reason, often to explore a hidden part inside, mother, father, sister, brother, child, lover, hidden in the light or hidden in the dark. Much of this search now happens virtually, through screens, though it can’t replace the actual physical resonance a gestalt needs.
Family can also mean a collection of symbolically meaningful objects, toys, letters, books, art, tools, stones. I collect stones and endow them with memories. My ex-husband extended his loving father role to string instruments. (I wrote about his loss in my previous post.)
At stages in our life we fit, or are fitted, into a network of psychological potential. These are intense phases. Yet irrespective of time gone since people parted ways, families dispersed, places were lost … when a former close friend dies, insight descends, rises, arrives from the past, from the future and from spheres unknown. Memories will shift their meaning. Slowly our sense of self is re-aligned. We capture a condensation of what was symbolically exchanged, essence is revealed.
… that’s me, a dreamer. Dreams re-appear, like a déjà vu. A trick of light will superimpose an image on a scene gleaned in passing. Or a sound, a name, a number, a movement, colour or scent may link up to a dream’s mood. Similarly, memories of seemingly unrelated events from years ago can pop up while doing mundane tasks. This reminiscing improves for me as I grow wiser (older,) a subtle re-organising of events.
With little chance of publication, giving this sequel once more editing time seems irrational; then again, I’m the weirdest person I know. The irrational has always impelled me forward from deep states of being, in search of wholeness. Like some writers, I juggle for rhythm and balance with a multitude inside, until a character, a theme, or a poem persists and generates engagement.
How to reconcile moments of pure beauty and light our restless world offers, with the heavy darkness of human ignorance? How is it the guiding spirit that is shining through everything so often escapes the unseeing eye? Is it our wounded hearts, or our anxious busy thoughts that prevent spontaneous being? Many of us like twilight, the dawn, the dusk, mist, where darkness and light do not negate but enhance each other. They mingle. As friends do, or lovers. Twilight is poetry in motion.
like tiny cherubs
When there is no other near to share such paradoxical quickening with, I may call on those who enriched my life but are no longer present. I adore the moon, the ancient chunk of earth, reflecting and making tolerable the blinding beams of the sun, granting us poetry and symbolic language.
We must see things fresh, not through tired ideas our establishments bank on, that destroy nature’s homeostasis and spill imbalances into cultures too poor to afford resistance. I say – let our children and young people decide what’s worth living for?
Course of Mirrors 