Philosophers, being simple-hearted and not devoid of passions, tend to highly value their ability to judge and even single it out in a separate category of beauty.
No price seems too high to them, including evading the question of how their point of view really relates to the concept of the universal, and whether they have gone too far in striving to observe the totality of the rites of their corporation. But, one way or another, there was once a hope that the truth, or at least the shadow cast by the truth, would emerge from their reflections, points of view and judgments in an emergent way.
However, what is happening today makes me doubt that we can talk about such concepts as “judgment”, “ability to judge”, “point of view”, “self-righteousness” (“sui juris”), or, in the broad sense, “wilfulness”.
At that sudden moment when the human brain was hacked by artificial intelligence and human abilities to create the best of the worlds from scratch were nullified, it turned out to be impossible to “live on your own”.
Spinoza in the Political Treatise wrote that everyone is self-righteous, “sui juris” “insofar as he can repel any violence, avenge at will for the harm done to him, and in general, insofar as he can live at his own discretion.”
Rituals for the End of the Age of Judgment
Let’s remember this «live on your own». In that sudden moment when the human brain was hacked by artificial intelligence and the human ability to create the best of the worlds from scratch was nullified, “living on your own” turned out to be as impossible as walking in the park, crossing the striped ribbon on the playground, staring in amazement on faces in masks knocked down on the chin. Schrodinger’s mask — it is, and it is not.
The rituals of the end of the era of judgment turned out to be rather tasteless, and today Kant’s reasoning about the beauty of the beautiful is hardly of any significance.
It would seem that the beautiful has become even more beautiful than the former beautiful, since the private interest in any possession of the alleged beautiful has also been nullified. There is no more lust, passion for having a landscape or an experience, and everything that does not belong to the situational settings of the virus as a digital platform.
The virus has become a digital platform, allowing judgment and distributing it for the collective assimilation of the connected swarm.
Formerly, the power of one person over another was possible in the case — as Spinoza wrote — when one keeps another bound, «deprived that another person of tools for self-defense or escape, or so tied him to himself with good deeds that that person prefers his supremacy to his own and wants to live better at his command than at his own”.
Such a person was called alerius juris — an alien — but he could become wayward again, sui juris, and thereby return to his natural state, as soon as he still found ways to escape — in case of holding the body, or by an effort of will to free himself from fear or hope, which kept his spirit in captivity.
Not so today, because the digital platform of the virus does not provide any options other than the immediate response of the swarm to today’s instructions according to the latest charts and published numbers of infected. The daily publication of the number of deaths proves the deadly seriousness of the new instructions, restrictions, prohibitions and regulations of punishment, although no proof of seriousness is needed to carry out the necessary rituals for the virus to stay in the world.
The fact is that there is no one and no need to prove anything, the ritual of nullifying self-righteousness turned out to be only a recurrent reproduction of oneself.
We could say that in this way the person himself, divorced from Sophia and excluded from the field of content and meaning, turns into a declaration of his own weakness.
A person ceases to be alien, alerius juris, because alien right provides, firstly, the power of another person, and secondly, the potential possibility of returning to the state of nature sui juris.
Particularly interesting is this new era of the Digital Leviathan as a platform for Russia, as the final overcoming of the split. The eternal Russian question about the choice between faith and truth, about what comes first, righteous deeds or a set of rituals, was resolved.
The truth is connected to the collective antenna and grounded, faith is turned into a schedule of allowed walks.
How did it happen? It so happened that artificial intelligence — let’s finally say this expression — became the Digital Leviathan, the virus became digital platform, the final state, and the final solution.
Artificial intelligence in Russian
What is artificial intelligence in this context? In Russia, there is a definition of AI, institutionalized in federal law 123 on the application of artificial intelligence in the city of Moscow. It sounds like this: AI is “a set of technological solutions that allows simulating human cognitive functions (including self-learning and finding solutions without a predetermined algorithm) and obtaining results when performing specific tasks that are at least comparable to the results of human intellectual activity.”
This understanding of AI is recursive in the sense that it defines AI through itself, because AI, in this understanding, is created in the image and likeness of a person.
If we forget about recursion, then this understanding becomes absurd in the sense that AI, a concept with a large field of uncertainty, is defined through a person, another concept with an even greater field of uncertainty. For thousands of years, philosophers have argued and continue to argue about what a person is, and hardly made much progress in answering basic questions.
Although there is a way out: you can limit a person, make a machine out of him or her, which, in fact, is happening. Then, as it may seem at first glance, the field of uncertainty will also narrow — although this is a very superficial idea.
One way or another, it is this recursive and absurd definition that officials at round tables on artificial intelligence find when they go to Google or Yandex, that’s why it is basic. The non-alternativeness of this definition, now protected by law, makes it generally accepted for the human swarm that is being formed today.
There are alternative definitions that eluded Leviathan, and one of them was given by Shane Legg, one of the founders of the Deep Mind Lab. It was his lab that created the neural network that beat a human in the game of Go, and they recently released the world’s most advanced text-writing program as open source.
According to Legg, intelligence is the ability of an agent to set goals for itself and solve various problems in a changing environment. If this agent is a person, then the intellect is natural, and if the agent is a machine, then the intellect is an artificial one. It’s simple, and we will use this understanding of AI.
Some philosophers believe that artificial intelligence is not only technology, it is also an ideology. But this definition is also incomplete. Artificial intelligence also includes an ideological component, but it also includes much more.
Noosphere-Leviathan
Vernadsky wrote about the noosphere, but today it turns into its frightening side, showing us the image of Leviathan.
To imagine a monster that has also absorbed the human mind, we will have to open the forbidden parks of our own judgments. We must understand that the Moscow branch of Leviathan is now overseeing its parks, and any judgment, any point of view can experience the collapse of the quantum function the moment this Leviathan looks at what is happening.
The new digital Leviathan oversees the human swarm, which has become part of the viral digital platform, while the swarm, the virus, and the platform for the information, media and economic spread of the virus are also part of the Leviathan.
In a world where man has become part of the environment, where the expanded Umwelt has swallowed up Dasein, to use Heidegger’s terminology. Dasein disappeared completely, so we can talk about the collapse of Dasein with the appearance of the digital Leviathan. We return again and again to recursion, to Leviathan overseeing himself.
Elohim and Ahuramazda
Let’s realize how much our digital Leviathan is like the biblical one.
We see Leviathan in the book of Job, which appeared after the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. According to some researchers, the Jews retained their identity, opposing the cruel, inexorable, but just Jewish god Elohim to the kind and wise ancient Iranian god Ahuramazda, whose name in the Ancient Iranian language meant “the lord of thought”, “God establishing thought”.
Leviathan in the book of Job is a manifestation of the Jewish God, his instrument, a moral agent, created by the will of Elohim and acting independently, but under the complete control of God.
When the suffering Job begins to doubt Elohim and even tries to argue with him, he shows him the terrifying Leviathan as his tool, a creature that Job cannot resist.
God uses the power of the monster to show how weak and insignificant Job is, and no correct behavior can bring Job relief from suffering until he completely submits to the will of the Elohim.
Elohim, not the blessed Ahuramazda.
The root of the Hebrew word “leviathan” means “twisted” or “twisted” – and here comes to mind a bunch of convolutional neural networks – the most common architecture for machine learning. The Bible describes Leviathan as a formidable beast with monstrous ferocity and great strength. Leviathan cannot be tied or tamed; it’s scary to look at. At the same time, he has an elegant appearance, he is perfectly protected by scales, his back cannot be pierced, not a single sword, spear, dart or arrow can defeat him, he cannot be shackled, because he destroys iron like straw, he harrows the earth with his belly , he makes the water boil and leaves a luminous trail. “There is no creature like him on earth, a creature that knows no fear.”
The Elohim is saving the Leviathan to control mankind, but in the end the Leviathan will be defeated — obviously, when such creatures are no longer needed. Moreover, in such creatures in the plural — Leviathan is not just one creature, but many of them in one and one in many.
Just like artificial intelligence.
“On that day the Lord will strike with his heavy sword, and great and strong, Leviathan, the straight-running serpent, and Leviathan, the curving serpent, and will kill the monster of the sea.”
For Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan is a kind of omnipotent and omniscient machine, it is an apparatus, an instrument created by people and standing above them in order to prevent them from killing each other. He is equal neither to the people who inhabit the state, nor to the king, nor to the collective ruler.
It is important that this apparatus is a single organism, it has its own nature, it is an independent agent, quite self-righteous in Spinoza’s understanding.
Although the digital Leviathan has the properties of recursiveness, it does not fit well with the vague definition of artificial intelligence given in federal law, but fits perfectly into the definition of Shane Legg.
The observers and the observed
Today’s world is divided into observers and observed. Those observed are completely naked, any movement of their bodies and souls is visible, they are completely transparent, they live in glass houses of glass cities under the all-seeing eye and all-hearing ear, and even at night they cannot hide from infrared rays.
Observers seem to be removed from all records and encrypted, they live behind dark glass, are on the other side of a one-way mirror, where they, invisible, can see the observed.
The difference between the observers and the observed is the rifle in the optical sight of which power is born. But, of course, the observers themselves are being monitored. In 2019, it was reported that the Saudi crown prince hacked the phone of Amazon head Jeff Bezos: it is clear that intelligence agencies, domestic states, personal guards, who have become part of the digital Leviathan, are watching the observers themselves, who use the most sophisticated means of protection — but no one will leave from the gaze of Leviathan.
He is the ultimate observer, and moreover, the observer whose appearance led to the collapse of the function of point of view, the function of judgment, the function of critical reason, and hence the function of science, the function of democracy, the function of the modern state as a whole.
Today’s digital Leviathan is becoming the ultimate observer, an observer of human lives, an observer of man as such. The digitized Leviathan guards the gates of the park from humans, exercising strict supervision and executing punishments. When the park, that is, paradise, finally opens, Leviathan will provide the Elohim with all the information to let the worthy into the park.
The question of whether democracy was also a kind of Leviathan, we will leave open.
Once upon a time, human rights — and freedoms — were placed under the supervision of institutions so that they could ensure the implementation of the adopted declarations.
Formal rights were expanding, while the uncertainty of the system was growing, and the economic system demanded more and more determinism, which has become an economic imperative in the last couple of decades.
In order to survive, late capitalism needed complete certainty, the prediction of the future of all its agents, including, in an ever-increasing way, people.
I am talking about capitalism in the past because, in my opinion, it ended with the creation of a digital Leviathan, Leviathan as artificial intelligence, at a time when the main product of the economic system was the production and sale of futures on human behavior. They render obsolete and senseless the fundamental concept of contract as a contract of free agents. This also applies to the social contract.
Leviathan and the little leviathans
Instrumentalism, that is, the control of agents who have lost their freedom, by the systems of many artificial intelligences-leviathans, has led to the fact that the power of capital, previously personified, is transformed into anonymous power.
The formal owners of the fortunes, people from the Forbes list, are controlled by their leviathan, which is part of the big Leviathan.
The digital Leviathan is being born before our eyes, first of all, as a means of control, as a tool to combat the growing tension in the human community — a tension that, as we see from the events taking place in the United States, the democratic Leviathan can no longer cope.
Everyone probably saw the worship of St. George of Minneapolis, whose sparkling golden coffin was carried by a white horse in a white carriage, black people in white masks and white robes prayed in his name, and before our eyes a new cult of the ever-living St. George Floyd arose.
Of course, in the name of combating uncertainty, the system creates more uncertainty, an existential uncertainty that is fraught with catastrophes.
A person himself becomes a part of Leviathan, a part of a global digital platform, people’s health and life itself are transferred under the supervision of Leviathan.
At the same time, it is curious that Leviathan acquires a viral character, because it has been found that a person can be a vessel in which the virus moves.
Viral media have appeared, a viral economy, one can even talk about a viral philosophy — the views of Daniel Dennett or B. F. Skinner are spreading the Yuval Harari virus in a completely viral way.
Thus, the degeneration of the person himself into a virus occurs.
A person has become a part of the media environment, to which it is no longer possible to apply the concept of «one’s own».
Part of the Leviathan is the behavior that fits into the media landscape, is reflected by many sensor mirrors and returned to the former agent in the form of direct instructions and other types of instrumental influence.
Values, words, language, metaphors are being transformed, all of them are subject to digitization and must find their place on the control panel.
Even the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed how, having become part of the television media environment, a person began to lose the opportunities that the environment of the book civilization gave him.
He began to lose the possibility of developing and effectively disseminating with the help of the printing press his individual point of view, his judgment, the possibility of consolidating and uniting in communities and parties.
The Digital Leviathan of which the human has become a part generates many opinions that are easy to manage, while the opinions that are really important for managing the human swarm are imposed omnichannel, reflected by mirrors of universal approval, which serve as indicators of the smooth operation of the system, and returned in the form of algorithmic instructions, mandatory for execution.
In particular, we see such work of Leviathan in the development of agreement around Black Lives Matter actions, when a person can either ardently support the only correct opinion developed by the platform, or keep quiet. Leviathan is able to fully track the behavior and form futures on it, and is instrumental in ensuring that these futures are sold without a discount.
Futures are devalued with a clear expression of self-righteousness and remaining judgment, so Leviathan will work to eradicate these relapses of the bookish past and the Enlightenment.
We wanted to be everything — and became a screen for everything, we live in a giant echo chamber. We are reflected in every mirror, and every echo repeats our words. We see how the concepts of the state, corporations, media environment, religions, digital platforms, and man along with them, mix and combine into one organism, which we called Leviathan.
The state as a man-made technology is artificial and can be replaced and reinvented.
For Hobbes, people transfer their will to the state-leviathan, which develops its own collective will, so that the war of all against all does not lead to the fact that people will devour each other.
Digital Leviathan creates such a hive system when there is no longer a gap between the will of an individual and the will of the hive. The personal will of an ant or a bee is identical to the collective will — and in the same way, the personal will of a person — part of the digital Leviathan is nullified.
She feels good and right only when she does the prescribed things, when all the algorithmic instructions of the mathematical agents that guide her through life from birth to death are fulfilled. Thus, the state becomes unnecessary — as, indeed, the traditional corporation.
Neuroscientist Karl Friston, creator of dynamic causal modeling, sees consciousness as an error that occurs in the brain in the process of releasing free energy.
Friston assumes that the brain is a predictive machine.
It exists only in order to make predictions, constantly check them with information from sensors-sense organs, then correct the forecasts, check them again — and so on.
The brain tries to achieve a state in which its entropy — just that very free energy — remains minimal.
Thus Friston measured the principles of Buddhism by Western mathematics.
Human consciousness responds to almost any experience with desire, and desire breeds dissatisfaction.
Consciousness requires that pleasure does not stop.
Consciousness is never satisfied, always restless.
Pleasure also haunts us — we either fear that it is about to end, or we dream of more.
Thus, consciousness is equated with suffering, being considered as an entropy that must be got rid of.
One can consider the very creation of the digital Leviathan as a collective suicidal act of our will to erase existence and our own consciousness as a source of suffering.
After all, it seems that this process defines our era.
However, I, as a man of the book, would not abuse the faculty of judgment that still remained in me.
Generalizations can be beautiful in the Kantian sense of the word.
By the way, this feeling of the beauty of generalizations alone, in my opinion, refutes Friston.
But let’s take this concept of Friston not as a real scientific theory of the brain, but as a kind of working model that Leviathan will be guided by when controlling a person.
We will see that after a number of iterations, the residual human consciousness will disappear from the Leviathan.
And he will acquire his true appearance, so colorfully described in the Bible.
by Igor Shnurenko, a Russian writer, author of books
“The Demon Within. Anatomy of artificial intelligence «,
«Homo fractus / Hacked Man», «Kill the Leviathan»,
“World without people. Survival in the era of total digitization «,» Solar Crow «and others.
contact address: ishnurenko@mail.ru
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