The Childish Worship of Machines
Has No Future, and It Will Crumble
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
Real intelligence comes from one’s heart, and it includes spiritual intuition
The Independent Lodge of Theosophists rejects the Artificial Intelligence project. The first reason for this stance is that AI is not intelligent: it is merely based on supercomputer programs. The AI also constitutes a blind instrument for practices of manipulation and artificial domination of minds and the public opinion.
Part of a broader unspiritual view of life, Artificial Intelligence seems to be ideologically related to so-called “transhumanism”, which seeks to treat human beings as machines and as “post-human” beings, whose conception is monstrous. [1]
One of the goals of AI is to make humans unnecessary in countless activities which have a fundamental importance to our civilization.
Promoting mental laziness, it disregards the work and the talent of photographers, artists, painters and writers. It “produces” and circulates texts that are nothing more than a collection of meaningless ideas plagiarized from different places, and gives you fake images instead of true photos and works of art. It aims to replace human beings in the most diverse areas of culture. It seeks to make authentic thought irrelevant, as if machines or supercomputers were superior to citizens and people of flesh and blood.
According to theosophy and to every true religion and school of philosophy, human life must be preserved as a natural process, and it will indeed be preserved as such.
The worship of machines and weapons, as well as the dehumanization of human beings, constitute a central feature of the Nazi pseudoscience of Germany under Adolf Hitler. Erich Fromm correctly identified this.[2] Abortion, euthanasia, contempt for the natural environment and other forms of attack on the laws of nature are part of the same inhuman and materialistic philosophy that denies the divine realm of life while blindly trying to believe that the soul does not exist. The natural destiny of Nazism is to be defeated once and again.
Classical theosophy supports the authentic intelligence of human beings, and seeks to help awaken, or expand, divine intelligence in human minds.
Every form of true intelligence is inevitably linked to ethics, to respect for life, and to the law of brotherhood and equilibrium among all beings.
Theosophists work for the development of common sense. They know the importance of goodwill and mutual help.
Unlike the so-called “artificial intelligence”, authentic intelligence recognizes the existence and decisive importance of the spirit. It transcends the narrow, mechanistic world of things that depend on money and credit cards. Authentic intelligence is a living, organic and creative process. The childish naivety of worshiping machines has no future. The real understanding of life is irreplaceable, because it is born of the soul.
NOTES:
[1] For example, read the second half of the novel “Origin” by Dan Brown (copyright 2017). The work seeks to promote the dehumanization of human beings and demoralize the different spiritual and religious traditions. However, Dan Brown tries to protect himself through the Jungian tactic of deliberate ambiguity. He disguises his anti-humanist and anti-spiritual discourse under the elegant appearance of “love of science”.
[2] On necrophilia and the Nazi worship of machines and weapons, see for instance the book “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, by Erich Fromm, published by Fawcett Publications, Inc., Connecticut, USA, copyright 1973, 576 pp., especially pp. 31-32 and 380 et seq. The question of love of life versus the worship of death and machines is examined with equally great lucidity in several other works by Fromm. Among them, Über die Liebe zum Leben Rundfunksendungen herausgegeben von Hans Jürgen Schultz. (Of which I have the Brazilian edition, “Do Amor à Vida”, Jorge Zahar Editor, RJ, 1986). See also Fromm’s excellent book “The Heart of Man”, Perennial Library, Harper & Row, copyright 1964.
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The above article was published on the websites of the Independent Lodge of Theosophists on 15 September 2024. It is a translation from the Portuguese language text “Inteligência Autêntica é Melhor Que Inteligência Artificial”. The article is also published at the Theosophical blog in “The Times of Israel”.
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