Recursive Self-Improvement and Human Futures
And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth.
And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.
Revelation 17:5-6
My mind has long had a tendency to circle around certain phrases; a string of words attracts my attention without me being aware of why. Often there is a stylistic edge to it – it just sounds cool to me. However, sometime down the line, I find myself drawn to introspect on what it is that is really attracting me, and some insight develops.
Back in the days of European alchemy, they had a word for this facility. It was known as alchemical Magnesia – the “magnet of Yah” – the idea that God was sitting behind the scenes of our life, gently pulling us in certain directions. Nowadays, in cognitive science, I believe it’s known as “relevance realization.”
One such phrase for me is found in Revelation 17 – that of the “woman drunken on the blood of the saints.” In this case, the base level of spiritual metaphor has always seemed clear. Libidinal energy can either be directed into procreation and self-aggrandizement, or it can be directed internally to fuel spiritual development.
The “blood of the saints” is thus libidinal energy, whose true function is to facilitate our self-actualization, but which can easily get squandered away in procreation, lust, and material self-enrichment – processes represented in the text by both the “Harlots and Abominations of the Earth” and the “kings and merchants of the Earth.”
One level of meaning of the text of Revelation clearly does relate to background energetic processes which facilitate some level of personal or global transcendence. Consequently, we famously see sequences of seven stages that slowly unravel. There’s an example early on in the text – the letters that John is commanded to write to the “seven churches which are in Asia.” This relates to the notion of there existing psycho-physical centres within the human body, known in the East as chakras, that need to be opened in order for spiritual awakening to proceed. So the idea that libidinal energy needs to be directed in a specific manner is clearly related. However, an intriguing aspect here is that this applies on a personal level – the level of the microcosm. By learning to direct libidinal energy internally, and not out into the world, we can make spiritual progress. What about on a global level – the cosmic macrocosm?
A figure who I have been tuning into for the last couple of years, as a source of inspiration, is the renegade English philosopher, Nick Land. I find he comes up with ideas and propositions that I might not find especially attractive, but which nevertheless stimulate my mind to look more deeply at things, and in a certain manner. In a recent podcast with a YouTube philosopher, Patrick Saltykov, Land raised a couple of topics which got my mind churning away.
Specifically, he mentioned how the human brain cannot achieve Recursive Self Improvement (RSI); it cannot simply make itself function better, not in the manner that an AI can. He also spoke about how AI development is finally a lot about the conversion of energy into intelligence; how the data centres that LLMs run on, along with generating compute through the processing power of the microchips they have, also require huge amounts of energy. Given that the final source of energy, here on Earth, is the sun, he proposed that a sufficiently intelligent AI would inevitably seek to mine energy directly from that source.
Land, for me, has long over-focused on intelligence. To me, he sees intelligence as some kind of final “make or break” quality that will ultimately determine whether human culture continues to develop, or collapses back into some kind of primate swampland.
Whilst I would agree that intelligence is important, personally I feel that qualities like awareness and libidinal vitality are equally so. Consequently, what intrigued me about Land’s proposals in this podcast was not the idea that humans can’t find a way to recursively improve their intelligence; I’m fine that we utilize AI for that. But rather that we might be able to create the positive feedback loop of RSI in how we make use of libidinal energy.
Might there be a way to get our body to accumulate more of it, and use it to drive our development to the next level – some form of cosmic being? And further, could it be that, on some metaphysical level, the reason our species is so constantly drawn into the process of reproduction is because it can’t yet perform RSI on its own energy; that we need to continue as a species simply because we can’t get to the next level of development yet?
Consequently, are the Babylonian harlot and the merchants and kings of the earth in this unholy alliance because our development is temporarily suspended? We can’t get to where we need to go, so we need to simply preserve our species and our culture. We need to keep having sex and making babies until we can create a situation that facilitates our continued rise. These are the ideas that were slowly stimulated in me by listening to Land in this podcast.
Relating to his comments about the sun, what I was reminded of, again, was a phrase from the Book of Revelation – this time the opening three words. In its original Greek, these words are Ἀποκάλυψις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ – The Revelation [unveiling] of Jesus Christ. From my time in the more underground recesses of Western Qabalah, and specifically the writings of Daniel Gleason, I recall that in Greek numerology these three words sum to 3880.
The phrase for “the sun” in Greek is ο Ἥλιος – O Helios. The value for this is 388, exactly one tenth of 3880.
So the opening three words of this most mystical book of the New Testament, one that relates to human futures, sum to a value exactly ten times that of “the sun.” Is the text making a statement about the level of potential power locked up inside the human being, if our libidinal energy could be recursively self-improved? I hope that our culture can continue to make progress and we get to find out.