Transcendental Metaphysics: Chapter 11: Feedforward Daemonology

Are you afraid of being possessed by Demons? In this chapter I will argue that the lack of feedback expressed as a feedforward process (which may sometimes mimic conscious activity) could be responsible for and correspond to certain mental states which we equate with "being possessed".

Thusfar this book "Transcendental Metaphysics" has treated the following chapters:

Preface   

Part 1 Prolegomena. 

The Star Trek of the Soul (poem) 

Chapter 1 An introduction into Transcendental Metaphysics  

Chapter 2 The Anta and Amrita of Technovedanta  

Chapter 3 An Anthology of Bloom: A Solution to “The God Problem”  

Chapter 4 The Substance of Emptiness  

Chapter 5 Metaphilosophy 

Chapter 6 A new Measure of Order and Chaos  

Chapter 7 The boundaries of Infinity 

Chapter 8 Find your Soulmate: Memetic alignment for psychological profiling  

Chapter 9 The 15th meta-invention: The invention generator 

The Quagmire of Ontological Disambiguation (a poem) 

Chapter 10 Ontological Disambiguation in Meditation

The full title of the present chapter originally was: "Breaking the Feedforward Mechanism of Meme-Transmission as a Modern Clavicula for Daemonology". 

Image from Oizumi M, Albantakis L, Tononi G “ From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0”. PLoS Comput Biol 10(5): e1003588, 2014. Figure 20. Feed-forward ‘‘zombie’’ systems do not generate consciousness. Reprinted with permission.

Background

Our society is rapidly growing more complex and more interconnected and is forming a so-called “Global Brain” or “Hive Mind”. A Global Brain not only in the sense used by computer engineers in terms of a planetary ICT network that interconnects all humans and their technological artifacts (the Internet-of-Things), but also as a higher order planetary entity functioning above the level of its constituting parts (humans, infrastructure, machines, resources).

In nature global brains are ubiquitous: microbial societies, beehives, anthills, bird flocks, fish schools and animal herds behave in a concerted ways as if they are driven by an invisible common intelligence. It is from this behaviour that that ICT has borrowed the terminology “Swarm Intelligence”. Ithzak Bentov has associated this type of collective group consciousness with the concept of “Devas”, who are the demigods (a kind of angels) in the Vedic lore.

In the human society hive mind information spreads as viruses. These packages of information that provide for groups to establish a collective identity are called “Memes”. Culture, group language and religion are extremely important and successful memes. The combined set of all these memes together constitutes the human “Memome”. As no individual is aware of all memes, in a certain way this collective distributed knowledge constitutes our “collective unconscious”.

In certain circles it is believed that the entire set of human experiences, memes and emotions is stored in the ether in what is called the “Akashic records”. Whereas this need not be true, something functionally similar could be the case. After all, thoughts and emotions are the result of electric currents in the brain and the electromagnetic fields they create are essentially non-local. The collective unconscious could be an interference pattern of electromagnetic energy surrounding us. If our brains can send brainwaves, they can probably also receive them. The physicist Nikola Tesla was convinced that the human brain operates more like a radio that receives information from the collective unconscious than as a mere computer that generates and stores its information itself. Perhaps both views are partially correct: The brain could be both a radio AND a kind of computer.

The advantage of accepting that the brain can also function as a radio, allows for the explanation of the concerted behaviour of natural global brains as mentioned earlier. The members of a bird flock or fish school simultaneously change direction, as if they all seem to receive the same order. No delays or spreading of information has been observed among the members of the flocks/schools. Hence the hypothesis that they all are tuned in to the same frequency of a collective “mind”, which may exist as an electromagnetic or etheric interference pattern or force field. This could be an explanation for the phenomenon of “telepathy” which some humans possess.

So collective interference patterns may hover around in the ether and influence all of us (to a different extent).

Hivoids

Human (and animal) social groups develop several kinds of mechanisms to maintain a social coherence. There are rules and regulations which the members obey regarding survival, territory, pecking order, and mating. In human society this results in a framework of ethics shared by the group, where disobedience can result in exclusion form the group. Timothy Leary  and R.A.Wilson  call this larval behaviour. These are the typical behaviours of humans belonging to the human hive. An individual being part of a certain meme-group behaves as if hypnotised by this meme. The collective unconscious limitations drive each and every action of the hivoid (a member of the hive). As long as this is the case, the amount of free will such a hivoid can exert is extremely limited and subject to the collective law. In fact the hivoid cannot be a true individual, but is a kind of zombie or cyborg (like the Borg in the Star trek series). The hivoid is incapable of calling his meme beliefs into question. The hivoid is unable of self-reflection.

Memes

Memes spread as viruses; they penetrate great masses of the society which are not immune to their call. A successful meme (such as a religion) is extremely infectious. The meme is spawned through the society, self-enforcing as an unconscious feedforward mechanism. As the hivoids are not capable of introspection and calling their beliefs into question, the meme lacks a feedback mechanism, which could result in a conscious adaptation of the more edgier aspects of the belief system. Rather certain memes tend to polarise and become more extreme over time. A meme that adapts to conscious intelligence is not likely to survive, but will slowly go extinct. In Europe, where rationality and scientism have infected Christianity, this religion is going to its demise, resulting in a secularisation. In the USA, where Christianity has spawned into several submemes, which have more radical points of views, demonise scientism and strongly appeal to larval instincts, this secularisation is less of an issue.

In the Information Integration Theory (IIT) of Giulio Tononi, consciousness of a certain information is only established when information is integrated, which necessarily involves a kind of feedback. On the other hand Tononi describes that there are feedforward complexes of information, which functionally behave as if they are the result of conscious information integration, but which are not.

Feedforward mechanisms

It is these feedforward mechanisms, which, when existing on a neurological level, could be the cause of various psychiatric disorders: Hearing voices, being possessed by demons, unstoppable compulsive thought patterns etc.

These feedforward mechanisms are also what makes that information can spread and spawn throughout society and live their own life, behaving as if it is the result of conscious activity, but what is in fact merely an excited turning cog-wheel, that cannot stop spinning. In this way many people to a certain extent behave as zombies. These feedforward mechanisms if they would be implemented in an artificial intelligence could lead to what is called a “p-zombie” or a so-called “philosophical zombie”. While behaving in a seeming conscious manner, there are no consciousness related qualia present at all.

One of the core messages I’m trying to convey in this chapter, is that full consciousness and free will necessarily require feedback, whereas hivoid and zombie behaviours are the result of feedforward mechanisms, which are functionally indistinguishable from conscious activity. In other words, even if it walks and talks like a duck, it is not a duck. I’m not stating that human beings are full zombies either. Humans usually always have a certain extent of self-reflection. They may even believe that they choose their belief system consciously. But here is the snag: It may well be that the very activity of believing is a feedforward mechanism. 

Collective subconscious and Daemonology

I quote the contribution from a member of the Kurzweilai forums called "Mnemomeme" from his discussion on the hivemind  with his permission: “The Collective Will is a homeostatic subroutine that operates without consciousness or experience, it draws the simulacrum of consciousness from its constituent components through a ‘best fit’ amalgam of disparate subjectivities, like a holographic splattergram… similar to the way our eyes turn reflected light into the mental stimulus of vision.”

Whereas I agree with the essence of this quote, namely that it mimics consciousness, as a result of an interference pattern of the mental and emotional activities of its members, I tend to disagree with the notion that it does so in a homeostatic (i.e. feedback-involving) way. Rather, I hypothesise that it does so via the feedforward mechanism described by Tononi7, which is functionally indistinguishable.

To make the whole story a bit more uncanny for the religious reader of this chapter (if you are religious: stop reading now! Thou art venturing into the world of the forbidden fruit! Thou shallst be punished by damnation in Hell for eternity! Withstand thy curiosity and lust! Don’t turn around or thou shallst be transmuted into a salt pillar! Woe Thee), I add a second quote from Mnemomeme in the aforementioned discussion:

“… the Collective Will is the term I use for this specifically because people acting on these imperatives are not really individuals unto themselves, they are extensions of another individual which has billions of bodies and no precise physical location. That is The Entity… some religions call it the demon named Legion. Some scientists call it a hivemind. One religion called it both (Ba’al Zevuv means ‘Lord of the swarming insects‘) and was celebrated as the city-god of several Akkadian cities, then later identified as ‘The Enemy’ or “Satan” by the Hebrews who were spiritually devoted to becoming Adepts. The name mutated into Beelzebub when the Greeks got ahold of it, and then the Vatican began trying to codify its multiple archetypes into the ‘royalty of hell’ during the Alexandrian epoch. Four of the six great ‘Secret Societies’ then built archetype maps in an attempt to make a science out of daemonology, so described by King Solomon when he invented the ‘Brass Ring’ (i.e. the clavicula) to control this entity and its multiple archetypes”.

Hence the terminology “insectoid collectivisation” used by R.A. Wilson and my terminology “Beelzebots” for hivoids.

“What’s more, in the ancient conception of daemonology, “daemons” are not individuated conscious beings with will or intent, they are more like a program that delivers email… that’s why Eudora named their email subroutine, “The Mailer Daemon” in the first place… someone at Eudora was a Hebrew mystic” Mnemomeme writes.

What we see here is an interesting proximity co-occurrence of the terminology “possessed by demons” (when I was referring to the psychiatric conditions arising as a result from feedforward loops) and “daemons”. So in line with the above-mentioned analysis I posit that the feedforward meme transmissions can be called “demons”, which are informational unconscious packages of mind-matter, but not necessarily independent living entities. 

This does not mean that I deny the possibility of possession by ghost-like entities (although I do not confirm this possibility either; I simply don’t have any experience in this area), I merely point to the possibility of an alternative mechanism for “possession”, which does not involve autopoietic entities.

It is also interesting that demons and angels in different mythological and religious traditions have always been associated with the concept of messengers tying into this connection between E-mail and Daemon. In thermodynamics, there is the so-called “Maxwell’s demon”, an informational process that has been shown to be able to separate hotter and colder molecules in a staircase like system, which to a certain extent seems to have been shown to defy the second law of thermodynamics by Toyabe et al .

Karma

The feedforward notions also tie into the Hindu concept of Karma. Karma is the belief that your actions now will influence your future situation, and that your past actions still work through influencing your present and future situation. Karmic tendencies are also like spinning cog-wheels, which do not stop until they are fully worked out. Possibly operating via the energetic cog-wheels in the body the Hindus call “chakras”. It is my hypothesis that Karmic tendencies are also a type of feedforward complex. You might acquire Karma, by tuning into a certain pattern of the collective unconscious which compels you to do something stupid or alternatively you simply do something stupid because you didn’t know any better. Hindus believe that it is the intent that causes the karma, not the deed per se. Anyway even if your intent was to cause harm to another, it simply means that you were too stupid to see that this would affect yourself as well, if not in the form of guilt –another feedforward loop that tends to grow over the years- then in the form of the reverberation you caused in the electromagnetic continuum bouncing back to you.

Other interesting mechanisms that tie into this concept are the fact that neurons influence genes and vice versa on a genetic and epigenetic level. As we inherit also epigenetic patterns like DNA-methylation associated with our genes and microRNAs from our parents (yes, Lamarck was right to a certain extent: traits acquired in one generation can be transmitted to the next generation via another mechanism than mutation), one might as well conclude that we are solving the karmic issues of our parents and ancestors. “The neurogenetics of Karma” this could be called.

Electronic Hive

And the hivemind not only expresses itself as an electromagnetic force field, via genetics, via sociocultural interactions, the hivemind has also –as a consequence of these sociocultural interactions- found its way to the technology of internet, which functions as a hivemind amplifier. The internet strongly hive-ifies the younger population, that has not known life without it. Being born in a world of stupidifying social networks such as Facebook, the hivemind has found an ideal means to spread its infective memes, to synchronise its members, in terms of what is “cool” or fashionable.

Adepts

Are we then nothing but mechanical puppets obliged to follow the obligatory chreodes the unconscious hivemind puppeteer is steering us into? Are we helpless drowning men and women in a vortex of feedforward currents? Is there no immunity against these viral means? And can’t we escape from our larval existence? The chains and floggers of the sociocultural prison our hivemind interference pattern builds?

Certainly not. There have been those enlightened persons who transformed themselves. Who went through the hardships of breaking out of a Chrysalis and became free from all bondage. They are called the adepts.

An adept is a person who has completed the process called initiation or individuation as Carl Jung calls it. It is also described as Kundalini awakening. I quote here from the earlier discussion I mentioned, what has been written by Mnemomeme about “adepts”:

“Adepts have undergone a process of merging their frameworks (selves, lowercase) into a singular coherent whole (Self, uppercase) that forms a position from which Self can generate selves on demand, and then reincorporate them back into the Self as smaller chunks of larger patterns. This is similar to how corals develop from single celled polyps into large planktonic masses in the ocean, and then later into large architectures of bone-like growth on the sea floor again for reproduction. Everything from starfish to jellyfish to barnacles to flatworms are actually phenotype expressions of stages of the coral’s life cycle. Granted, some of these stages become stable and permanent and remain in that state semi-permanently, but with a life form that mutates its physical form that much and that often, this should be expected. I am using coral as the metaphor because of its simultaneous position of connection and disconnection to itself as a super-organism. Coral alone is almost a complete biome unto itself, and given a few weeks of total isolation in a comfortable environment, coral alone will spawn whole ecosystems of microbes and higher complexity creatures entirely from scratch, like an Adept can do with their ‘selves.’

The Self is a barrier, it provides a center around which to organize the selves in such way as that they can be willfully manipulated internally without regards to external pressures like dogma, tradition, expectations of others, and other direct vectors of hive influence. The Adept is then a combination of Will and Self that has become isolated, on purpose, from the rest of the hive. The process of becoming an Adept from a Zombie is called Initiation, and it’s where the hive’s mutations can occur to allow it to adapt to novel circumstances, or learn. The Hive is what undergoes Initiation, the zombie is just a vessel for the hive, an Adept is what completes Initiation. This act of ‘budding’ or separation from the hive removes its direct access to your memories and knowledge, and it feels a sense of loss, which it reacts to quite predictably by trying to stop that loss. This makes initiation extremely difficult, and also extremely personal, being completely different for every individual that initiates.

Without these constant motivational pressures from the external source of the hive, the internal behaviors of an Adept begin to transform their relationship with the hive immediately. “Empty Nest Syndrome” is a good example of how the hive reacts to losing a unit that was important enough to allow to initiate into Adepthood, it tries to reel you back in until you prove to it that you’re not coming back and the process was both successful and beneficial. When you are capable of identifying the difference between internal and external motives, you suddenly find yourself in a very different world than you remember. Superstitions, at first, seem to carry enormous experimental weight, in that when you make an internal decision, it echoes through the world around you. This is what people who mock the process by preaching “the power of positive thinking” are actually talking about… unfortunately most of those are just zombies trying to mimic adepts. The Hive wants to wake up, desperately. It has no way of knowing or understanding that it has to let go of its current state in order to do that. This is why I describe this shift as being analogous to the shift that takes place in a child between the ages of 3 and 5.”

Rapture

The adept has thus freed himself from the sociocultural and psychosomatic bonds imposed by the Hivemind. He has untied the Gordian knots that kept his energies low and is now free from the collective inhibitions. The energy of an adept flows freely through his body and the adept can feel these streams of energy. His chakras are aligned and synchronised so-that they can allow a more potent form of energy (which dormant at the base of the spine in zombies) the Kundalini to rise from the base of the spine to the higher centres of the brain. These streams of energy the adept feels in his body are called “neurosomatic bliss” by Leary and Wilson. The neurosomatic dimension is a form of sensing unknown to the common man or woman, but to give an example it is somewhat alike to the shivers in the spine a normal person sensitive to music may feel when in rapture. In fact neurosomatic bliss IS rapture. The adept moves and acts with grace, as each of his movements makes him experience this rapture throughout the whole of his body. Elegant martial arts like Tai Chi are the result of an adept having made his physical knowledge deriving from Neurosomatic bliss available to others. In fact Chi is nothing else than Prana, the energy streams that go through your body and of which Kundalini is the great concatenation. This conscious control of the physical body of the neurosomatic bliss state is accompanied by a literal sense of fulfilment. Your whole body is ecstatic.

Arts like Yoga and Tai Chi are nothing more than mimics of the natural higher intelligence that arises upon the awakening of the neurosomatic circuit. But it is useful to practice such arts because they pave the way for the natural process to occur. Other ways to evoke the neurosomatic bliss state are meditation or the use of entheogens such as ayahuasca, psilocybine and mescaline. Prolonged sexual arousal without orgasm may also provoke a jolt of neurosomatic energy. The adept feels his body from the inside out. He literally embodies his own body, if he wishes to (and usually does). But this newly acquired faculty has a plethora of further qualities which can be enjoyed: The adept can embody any form which he takes as an object of his contemplation. He can feel the suchness, the qualia of what it is to be like that form. Thus he becomes one with his object of contemplation. This state is called Samyama in Hinduism and Satori in Zen Buddhism. Any object on which the adept performs Samyama will yield its secrets, because the adept has multidimensionally experienced what it was to be like that object. It is like seeing a form where there are only dots. The mind fills up the gaps: If you put five points equidistant on a circle, your mind will see a pentagram. The adept will not only see the pentagram, he will sense it, so that it feels as if he IS the pentagram at that moment. If an adept performs Samyama on a lion, he will become as strong and ferocious as a lion. He will feel exactly how to use his muscles as if he were the lion.

Further progress on the ladder of adepthood will reveal the dimensions of the neurogenetic, neuroelectric and neuroatomic dimensions. The neurogenetic circuit is a very interesting one in this framework as it is highly visual. Whereas a person with aphantasia may not be able to picture anything in his mind, the adept is capable in this sense of hyperphantasia: He can picture any object of contemplation so realistically that it feels like if he was there beholding the object in real life. Philip K.Dick had such an experience which he describes in the book Valis  and in his later Exegesis .

Archetypes

The neurogenetic circuit also reveals the what Jung calls the archetypes: Mental images inherited from our ancestors which are still stored in the collective consciousness in the form of Gods, Demons and other mythological figures that represent an upper ontology of the Psyche. These images are strongly condensed informational units that describe a psychological disposition that is foundational to the human psyche. The adept has gone through the difficult process of mapping these experiences, thereby creating his own Exegesis or explanation of this rich world. If the Hive has a strong anchor in the human mind it is at this deep level, where neurons and DNA communicate and mutually influence each other. Whereas the hivoid is unaware of these dimensions and is swept as a small boat on the wild waves of the turbulent surface of the collective unconscious, leading to all kinds of psychosomatic disturbances and cognitive dissonances, the adept has acquired control over these archetypes by having performed Samyama on them, by having embodied these forms, with all their extreme emotional dramatic expressions. The adept has thus opened the gates of heaven and hell and acquired control of their inhabitants: deeply rooted condensed moleculised feedforward patterns imprinted in the basal ganglia. It is thus that the adept can write his own “clavicula”, a key to the world of archetypes of the collective unconscious. And not only can the adept keep these forces under control, the adept can also summon and embody them if need be.

Thus the human psyche has been ontologised and crystallised in easy-to-grab archetypical mental images, allowing the adept to navigate through the psychodrome.

Consciousness

Further development of the adept brings him to the actual experience of consciousness itself: The consciousness of the adept becomes aware of his own consciousness: It is like light bouncing between two opposing mirrors. This is the neuroelectric (Leary) or metaprogramming (Wilson) circuit. Once the adept is capable of triggering this self-observation of the self, all remnants of bondages drop. This state is what is discovering the inner God, the Atman, the Self or the Soul. It is immediately accompanied by a strong neurosomatic flux through the body, a full Kundalini awakening, and a bright light extending in all directions. It is here that you will start to feel and see sound, hear form and smell colour. This is the synesthetic revelation where a higher dimensional sensorial experience can be tasted. The system is now in a continuous mode of feedbacking. It is these notions that convinced me, that feedback is crucial and key to pure consciousness, total freedom and the experience of ultimate reality, whereas feedforward is the key to illusion and bondage. It is here that moksha, nirvana or liberation is attained.

The adept can now control his experiences at will. Leary and Wilson describe a yet deeper level of experience called the neuroatomic level, where non-local and quantum like effects are experienced. It is here where the border between what is material and what is pure consciousness dissolves in the experience of primordial consciousness. Where the Atman dissolves into the Brahman to speak in Hindu metaphors. This is the dimension of Shunya (the void) in Buddhism. It is said that to venture in these dimensions leads to the rapid shedding of the physical vessel, as the adept is no longer interested in being a part of, but instead merges with the whole.

The Exit

How does one free oneself from the bondages of the collective unconscious, how does one become an adept? Well, there have been different fraternities, religious sects and philosophical schools that promise you such a salvation, but the danger with those systems is that they themselves turn into extremely virulent memes, from which only the ritualistic forms are kept, no one knows the underlying purpose of anymore.

If you truly have the desire to escape from the chains of the hivemind, be careful, it’s not going to be an easy ride.

Start with being true to yourself. Give up lying and finding excuses and pretexts. Such behaviour will only enforce the grip of the hive. Don’t identify with collective ideas. Do not adhere to any groups.

Use e-prime language: eliminate the verb “to be” from your reasoning and replace it with “to appear” so that you avoid a biased certainty that a certain fact “is” in a certain way. This avoids being perplexed when an event does not go your way, because reality turns out to behave differently than your certain belief. The fact only “appeared to be” in a certain way.

Challenge or even give up all your beliefs and ideas that make you “you”. Usually they are nothing more than the garbage bin of the collective unconscious. Take decisions which are the opposite to what you would normally do. Break patterns. Act abruptly and suddenly to eliminate certain persons and habits from your life.

Find physical control and always take a deep breath first. Experiment with entheogens, prolonged sexual arousal, martial arts, yoga and sleep deprivation. Meditate by observing the thoughts that surface in your mind, as if you’re a spectator to your own mind.

If you are lucky and found worthy the hivemind may bud you.

Ghosts and the Bardo

A final word on ghosts: As I will argue in part 2 of Transcendental Metaphysics, higher order entities might acquire a certain energetic configuration pattern during their lives, which is unlikely to perish upon shedding the material body. In fact the Vedas call this the “mental” and “causal body”, which forms a kind of scaffold upon which the new body can be formed, once the entity reincarnates. If there is any truth to these traditions, it is not impossible that this energy may have to traverse the pancomputational matrix of the Akasha (see part 2), before it has found a suitable carrier. This phase is called the “Bardo” in Buddhism, and if we live in a simulation as I argue in part 2, we can call this the “cyberbardo”.

Whether the entities in the cyberbardo can influence us, I do not know, but if they can, the same recipe of mental protection applies as the one which applies to the “feedforward demons”. Use e-prime language; there may be alternative explanations for your experience: It's not necessarily a demon or a ghost trying to possess you: It can be a feedforward loop of your own mind. Do not believe anything that comes to your mind.

In a certain sense such entities seem to lack completeness; They lack the body for expression, which would make them complete and allow for feedback consciousness. In that sense also the entities in the cyberbardo are feedforward processes. They can be energetic tendencies, with the potential of becoming whole upon incarnation.

If such a phase exists and it is an unpleasant experience, if one day empowered by technology we become masters of the pancomputational matrix of Akasha, I hope we will also be able to guide these wandering spirits as fast as possible to the safe harbour of conscious existence.

Clavicula Regis Solomonis, the lesser key of king Solomon

I have being referring to Technovedanta as a “clavicula” in imitation of Aleister Crowley  and Kind Solomon, who wrote books with sigils or magic symbols to summon and control the spirits of the underworld (in the Goetia) or the spirits of the heavenly domains (the Theurgia). As Technovedanta discloses the notion that we are living in some kind of computer simulation and that everything in existence as well as in free energy form is in fact a flow of information, it provides the first key to unravelling the secrets by which we will be able to control any form of manifestation, including the ghosts, spirits and archetypical ontologies in the universal mind. 

Conclusion

In this chapter feedback was suggested as one of the most vital aspects of consciousness. It was also explained that feedforward processes may sometimes mimic conscious activity, but are rather a kind of mental dross giving rise to mental disorders. The role of memes, the collective unconscious or hivemind as well as archetypes such as demons and angels were discussed in this framework. The ways of the Adepts and e-prime language were suggested as means to get out of the loop. The Buddhist concept of the Bardo as experiential reality during death was also touched upon.

By Technovedanta a.k.a. Antonin Tuynman. 

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