Anderz

ACIM says that all minds are connected. This means that transcending the ego is about moving into a collective mind. That's a monumental evolutionary leap. As an analogy, comparing the ego to the collective global mind is like comparing a single cell in the body to the whole human being. If we would remain as only an isolated self then that means a false kind of awakening where we actually still are trapped in ego consciousness.

Another thing I came to think of is that the ego is usually reluctant to give up control. One key is to have an integral perspective which means that the ego-self will be preserved. It's just that the thinking mind needs to radically shift and the practice of trusting the universe instead of the ego is just a temporary tool. The idea is that the personal willpower is activated again at a higher level of awareness.

I now got inspired by listening to Marianne Williamson, and even though she didn't say exactly the same as came to my mind, the idea is the same. One simple practice is to trust the universe instead of trusting oneself! Isn't that flawed logic since we are a part of the universe? No, not in the experiential sense from our ego perspectives because our egos experience themselves as separate from the universe and have a second order knowledge only. Second order here means the manifested universe and first order is the intelligence which is the source of that manifestation. The ego only recognizes the second order reality and trusting the universe here means to trust everything except the ego. This then removes the block to the first order intelligence. The ego is that block and it's one's own self, at least in the non-enlightened state. I will practice relaxing my own thinking and deal with situations in the moment instead of doing my own planning.

I wrote in some other thread that meaning depends on context. And if we look at all-that-is as a whole it has no larger context to give it meaning, so from that perspective reality lacks meaning. However it seems to me that the universe is pulled into higher and higher orders of structures, and prior structures give meaning to the new structures emerging, and actually also vice versa. And within reality there are lots of contexts giving meaning to things, events and to our lives.

No way it's a cult. Just look at how members on this forum disagree with Leo about all kinds of things. I myself disagree with some things Leo has said. For example the nature of time is a big one. I have learned a lot of amazing things from Leo, but him being a cult leader, haha, no.

The ego doesn't want to transcend suffering. As ACIM says, the ego is insane. It sees suffering, subconsciously and correctly, as a protection against increased numbness. And numbness leads to death, so the ego sees suffering as a savior, again subconsciously and not as something the ego is aware of on a conscious level. And also, the ego only thinks in dualistic terms and only understands polar opposites and believes wrongly that suffering is necessary as a polar opposite of pleasure. Suffering serves a necessary purpose but we are meant to grow out of suffering, not remain dwelling in suffering forever. We will still be able to suffer after transcending the serious kind of suffering the ego experiences, similar to how we can suffer when failing in some non-serious video game.

Is A Course in Miracle integral? No, at least not much. Then what about Spiral Dynamics value system Turquoise, does that include ACIM? No, because in vMeme Turquoise the idea of human suffering as inevitable is cemented into the belief system. So what is needed is an integration of both ACIM and Spiral Dynamics stage Turquoise. Something that rips the whole fabric of our reality asunder yet at the same time preserves the valuable things in our civilization. A new earth, basically.

The article I quoted earlier about UBI being insufficient - such as for truck drivers losing their jobs - admitted that a UBI will solve poverty. That's a huge deal! When people are in poverty that's detrimental for mental, emotional and even for physical health. Removing poverty improves the health and the well-being of the whole nation. And psychologically it makes people feel safer and more secure, even people who have jobs because if they become unemployed the UBI is a decent additional social safety net. This improves the overall health in society. And also, yes it's true that a UBI will be insufficient in many cases, but it may be enough for downsized low cost living even when people lose their jobs, especially with accelerating technological progress improving price/performance for products and services over time. Heck, they have even started using 3D printers for building houses!

A Course in Miracles seems to me to be about a complete shift in how we think, feel and experience the world. I believe it's about accessing the deeper intelligence of the universe which is blocked by our ego identification. Miracles are a tool for accessing the deeper intelligence. Leo has an excellent presentation about this universal intelligence in this video: Except for Leo's concept of time his description of the deeper intelligence is accurate I think. (I think of time as only being in the present moment and time always flowing forward.)

ACIM talks about love vs fear. My theory is that fear causes numbness, not suffering directly. And the suffering is a response to the increasing numbness. Fear as Bruce Lipton has explained it causes cells in the body to wall themselves off and shut down, which when the fear is chronic causes a deterioration of biological tissue. That's the cause of aging! And we have a lot of chronic fear, and the fear is constantly cultivated by the ego. As I defined it earlier, fear is confusion turned into protection. Reality is never confused as a whole, and the ego confusion is therefore sin (an error, missing the mark). Fear causes tensions in the body and mind which give rise to more confusion that the ego turns into fear, which in turn causes more tensions and more confusion and so on in a vicious circle. Love is wholeness in harmony. What is needed for salvation a realization of the ego fear trap and allowing love to dissolve all that mess, suffering, numbness, confusion and tensions.

@TheAvatarState Looking at the big picture even artificial intelligence is a product of the universe, not something separate from it. The universal intelligence will as I see it "pull" AI into higher levels of intelligence just as it pulls the fungal network described in the article into its structure. From that perspective artificial general intelligence is something inevitable I think. The key issue is the time frame for when automation really starts to replace jobs on a massive scale. True artificial general intelligence may take a long time to develop, even with the accelerating progress of technology. Or it may happen very soon! Already within a few years. Because there can be leaps of progress such as narrow machine learning suddenly becoming more general with some new approach.

@TheAvatarState It's true that especially in the hard sciences the idea of intelligence is very narrow. Or as Eckhart Tolle said: "The only thing IQ tests show is your ability to solve little puzzles. Intelligence is so much vaster than that." And Leo made a great explanation of the deeper intelligence of reality in the video I posted. Nevertheless I still believe AI can learn general intelligence by interacting in complex environments, similar to how a human baby learns through experience. Edit: Artificial intelligence can be seen as a third order structure. The first order structure is the foundation of reality which I believe Leo is absolutely correct about that it is intelligent. Enormous intelligence! And the physical manifestation of our universe is the second order structure. AI is a third order structure since it is a product of us humans, and when the AI starts developing its own products and services that's a fourth order structure! All of that is driven by the first order intelligence producing higher and higher orders of structure.

@CreamCat Yes, I was thinking about the short term effect of automation. I was surprised how advanced China already has become in terms of technology. And the long run means only decades! Because of the exponential progress of technology. For example it didn't take 1,000 years to go from the early computer games Pong and Space Invaders to today's sophisticated 3D games. It only took decades. It took 50 years for the phone to become mainstream. It only took a few years for smartphones to become mainstream. There is a tremendous acceleration of technological development going on. So yes, very soon, historically speaking, all countries will have to deal with automation. What may happen however is that governments put a break on AI development such as refusing to make self-driving cars legal or delaying the legal process. And also, many seemingly simple jobs humans do are actually very difficult to replace with automation (a plumber or a psychotherapist for example). The big wave of automation could be a decade or two into the future and not something imminent, politically speaking. We will see. China surprised the west with their recent progress, and the same can happen with automation.

Andrew Yang has influenced Marianne Williamson who now is talking about "a tsunami of automation coming to America". Donald Trump is probably doing the right thing when focusing on job but already within a few years it will turn out that outsourcing jobs from the U.S. was a smart thing to do. Why? Because look at China today where they are starting to have robots making robots! Massive automation will be much more problematic for China than for the U.S. when it comes to technological unemployment.

Ray Kurzweil said that we always tend to raise the bar for what is considered intelligence. When Deep Blue beat the best human chess player, then people said that it's just a program, not intelligence. And when IBM's Watson beat the best human players in Jeopardy people said that it doesn't count as intelligence. And probably the same thing with AlphaGo and AlphaStar. It's tricky perhaps to define what intelligence is. (Leo has a video about intelligence but I don't remember that he gave a formal definition). Nevertheless, emulated intelligence will be possible I think, and even as Ray Kurzweil said simulated emotions for robots that are as convincing as real emotions, and conscious behavior without being able to tell whether the AI has real consciousness or not. The AI will appear to have consciousness, intelligence and emotions. And maybe even have those things for real! There is no method today that can test for the presence of consciousness. Testing for intelligence seems like an easier task, such as using a Turing test, but people will likely dismiss even that. What is needed is a formal and valid definition of intelligence or people will argue about it endlessly.

@TheAvatarState I agree that technology alone is insufficient. Previously I thought a technological singularity would solve everything, but then I started to think about the level of consciousness. I agree that we need to develop higher levels of social development (such as Spiral Dynamics second tier) along with immensely powerful technology. As for artificial intelligence always being mechanical, I believe we will have general artificial intelligence fairly soon. Yes, today AI is still narrow, yet general algorithms I think are fairly easy to develop with simple rules where the AI learns by itself in rich environments and simulations, similar to how a human baby learns through experience.

No, that's precisely the underestimation of exponential progress that I mentioned even experts do. We are used to think linearly yet when it comes to technological progress and indeed even evolution itself, it's more like this: "An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history." - https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

Ray Kurzweil has the optimistic view that technology will be integrated gradually with us humans so we will experience the progress as something taken for granted in everyday life. For example smartphones have changed a lot in society and that is already within a decade. And even with the progress accelerating (which Kurzweil has shown it has done throughout history) we will continue to adapt very quickly and use its benefits. There are of course dangers, such as classified AI development in military projects, but Kurzweil pointed out that even the invention of using fire was a double-edged sword. And my view is that evolution is pulled by an intelligent universe and not some random process, so there will be no terminators or any Skynet. Although it will require vigilance and international regulations and agreements probably, to prevent AI from becoming dangerous. And I think of a UBI as a temporary transition tool, not as something we will be stuck with further into the future. Check out the Zeitgeist movement for ideas about how to transcend the need for money in society.

Aha! Even our thoughts are of course also second order reality structures. ACIM says: "2 There is no need to shrink from illusions, for they cannot be dangerous. 3 We are ready to look more closely at the ego's thought system because together we have the lamp that will dispel it, and since you realize you do not want it, you must be ready." - https://acourseinmiraclesnow.com/course-miracles-chapter-11-v-dynamics-ego/ ALL thoughts have a false foundation when we are in ego identification. There needs to be a change at the very source of the thinking process.

@Scholar Whoa, I missed that part of the article I quoted from. It's true that for example self-driving cars may take much longer to become reality than at first expected. There are many edge cases where the self-driving cars today fail. And also the legal issue, that can take many years to solve. And in general with automation, one expert said that blue collar jobs are often more difficult to replace by robots than AI replacing white collar jobs, because the difficulty with dexterity and physical movement in complex environments. But yeah, to say that technological unemployment will likely never happen, as the article did, that's definitely false I think. And the technological progress is exponential which even experts often fail to take into consideration. Plus leaps in progress can happen such as when machine learning suddenly became very powerful in recent years, and the next leap I believe is machine learning becoming general (today it's basically only about mindless and narrow learning from huge data sets).

I looked up what ACIM says about the physical body and found this: "Perceiving the body as a separate entity cannot but foster illness, because it is not true." - https://acourseinmiraclesnow.com/course-miracles-chapter-8-vii-body-means-communication/ The physical body is a second order structure that Leo talked about. In my hypothesis the first order structure is information. And all information is manifested as a wholeness, so yes on the first order level the body and the external world are one and the same. That's potentially a very powerful realization! Because who knows what amazing healing capacity awakens when tapping into the intelligence of the first order level of reality. The ego is itself a second order structure so we experience only second order reality when we are in ego identification.

Here is a new article from 3 hours ago: "Basic income can’t do enough to help workers displaced by technology Basic income can end poverty, but it can’t save truckers from being replaced by driverless trucks. ... Imagine you’re a truck driver, a Teamsters member. You’re 45, you’ve been driving trucks for a couple decades now, and you’ve gotten your salary up to $70,000 a year. You’re the sole earner in your family; your spouse is a stay-at-home parent for your two kids. Now imagine that you’re laid off. Your company is firing its drivers and instead buying self-driving trucks from Otto. There aren’t any openings for truck drivers anymore, as the whole industry is switching over. You’re screwed. Then the federal government swoops in and says, “GOOD NEWS: You and your spouse are each going to get $12,000 basic incomes. So instead of $70,000 a year, you’ll get a whopping $24,000. That’s good, right?” No. That’s not good. That might provide a decent benefit to fund your subsequent job search, but it doesn’t let you stay out of the workforce and pay your bills. You need something more." - Full article: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/10/18/20919322/basic-income-freedom-dividend-andrew-yang-automation

It can be useful for people on the left to look at some pro Trump information just to get a perspective. Here is a good pro Trump presentation regarding the FISA report:

So what does Five Eyes have to do with Horowitz' FISA report? The answer is this: "Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives ... Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said." - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/13/british-spies-first-to-spot-trump-team-links-russia Maybe there will even be something mentioned about Five Eyes in the FISA report. Isn't Five Eyes also useful for national security? Only in a messy way because lack of transparency results in a schizophrenic situation between governments and citizens where phony fronts are presented to the people while shadowy operations such as Five Eyes go on in the background. It's an unsustainable situation long-term.

Here is a massive hearing about FISA: As I see it, FISA is valid and useful for national security. What is a bigger issue however is what is called the Five Eyes program which as I understand it allows for example GCHQ to do surveillance legally on U.S. citizens. Edit: Yes, looks like I was right about that: "The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries".[6] Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY has been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens.[7][8][9][10]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes