Jonathan Black aka Mark Booth

If ever the philosophy Heidegger tried to hide his political affiliations, his moustache would have been a bit of a giveaway.

The lure of the abyss. Nietzsche was an early adopter. Others followed and found the experience of trying to live consistently and authentically in a universe devoid of meaning to be painful to the point of madness.

Many modern physicists, including Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli were fascinated by alchemy and the conjunction of opposites. Pauli lived out this principle in his sex life too.

@JohnSmi44739531 I agree. Francis Bacon said that all artists can do is deepen the mystery- and I believe that’s true too of scientists and mystics.

@jblackauthor You are fully correct about that, 100% agree. I have had some scary revelations on this. I cannot see though how that could or would interface with a computer. It requires a central nervous system. Also, by design some aspects of the universe will be impossible to explain.

Will an AI intelligent enough be able to reverse engineer the entire universe to say what that happened ‘In the beginning…’?

@JohnSmi44739531 You may well be right. (I kept on running out of word count too!) But all my writing is working towards a conviction that that there is a universal intelligence ‘out there’ or rather that we are part of. We may be building new nests for it.

@jblackauthor I am surprised by your conclusions in terms of your writing legacy. I had looked into this a few years ago, and recall all the earlier promises, boasts, and 'Yoga laptops', to know this is just another point of human bluster. It will impress, but bring back the philosophers ston

It’s 2am again, my favourite time, and as always reality is still staring me in the face 🧐

@JohnSmi44739531 I don’t think we’re going to agree on this point! It’s a wide field, ripe for discussion. I don’t think intelligence needs to be identical or similar to human intelligence. New quantum computers may be able in principle to simulate any and all creative processes in the universe.

@jblackauthor That is the fundamental distinction, consciousness can produce novelty, indeed, madness. AI can only assign integer values, and is always informed by an algorithm. AI will say these outcomes remain calculable, like they did after Heisenberg, but computation is not intelligence.

@awlally Thank you! Thank you! That’s such a cheering thing to say.

@jblackauthor Best of luck Mark. Can't wait to get stuck in. If it's anything like "...World", I shall enjoy many re-readings!

@JohnSmi44739531 I suspect I’m more agnostic than you when it comes to AI’s potential abilities. It’s often the case that we have no idea how it reaches its conclusions. Like the contents our own unconscious minds, its contents are closed off to us.

@jblackauthor I suspect AI cannot produce more than the sum of its parts, unlike conscious intelligence. It will always be tethered to an algorithm. Formulas, neither yet which have worked for unified physics. So no, it will be another oversold human endeavour. But profitable 😅

@JohnSmi44739531 The computer says no!

@jblackauthor Probably not, unless you can give it the option of having no beginning.

History upside down, inside out and the other way around- first in the Secret History of the World, soon in The Secret History of the Universe by Mark Booth AKA Jonathan Black

Niels Bohr was the great mystagogue of the paradoxical universe. For him the paradox was a great philosophical and scientific tool.

Niels Bohr - on the right. Master of monobrow and mystagogue of the paradoxical universe.

Genius, madness and mysticism. Scientists and historians of science in the Anglosphere, raised on down to earth materialism, have often failed to understand what their contemporaries in Europe meant by their theories.

Interesting interview with the current owner of Atlantis, Geraldine Beskin (GPO’s connection) on the origins of the store wiccanrede.org/2019/01/interv…

They are ants solving a geometric problem and it is mind-blowingly colorful.

Demis Hassabis creates machine learning - what a cute little mischievous smile it has! Illustration from the new book The Secret History of the Universe

The Fall isn’t the punishment for sex. Sex is punishment for the Fall. Hegelian concept often illustrated in Carry On films

@memizon Ran out of road….tho can’t now see my earlier reply - Like people like Geoffrey Hodson or my friend Lorna Byrne, he seems to see into other realms in an uninterrupted way. Tho in Lorna’s case she doesn’t talk about a lot of what she sees for fear of frightening or fascinating!

@jblackauthor Leadbeater tried a novel interpretation of the eucharist but within an esoterical, occult framework. His method very much builds on his and Besant's 'Thought Forms' (1905) and the same technique (astral sight) used for his 'Man, Whence How and Whither' (1913).

Today I found this first edition by controversial theosophist Leadbeater, published in 1920. Lots of plates and diagrams. The most interesting part of his work is his clairvoyant attempts to invoke a religion fused with science, (in the spirit of Blavatsky). I call it Art Brut.