Question & Answer​ with Andrew Linnell

QUESTION: 

Given that there is consciousness, and given that discrete separate parts of the human being are not individually conscious (for example, the big toe is not separately conscious, although it participates in sensation) … is it possible for a computer or other discrete object to have sensation or consciousness?  If so, where would it be found?

ANSWER:

When we humans think with our everyday consciousness, our thoughts are present in the lifeless aspect of our brain reflecting on the lifeless aspect of what we are able to perceive with our physical sense organs which are part of our lifeless neurological system. Our senses are “of this world”. An enormous amount of thinking, as a spiritual activity, went into each generation of computers and networking and soon augmented reality. But all this prior thinking has been “dead” thinking. This dead thinking is “embodied” into each device in a way similar to how the thoughts of an author are embodied into each of his/her books printed. When one reads the book, one “perceives” the author’s thoughts. This is much less “occult” than the thinking that is embodied in a computer. There is nothing new in the thinking despite the glorious claims of machine learning and self-programming. So, a computer from a given manufacturer has hardware, software, and firmware where each have embedded dead thoughts – many billions of dead thoughts all arranged to be integrated by further dead thoughts. None of this is consciousness. But it is the wrought work of consciousness. This is the spiritualization of matter, a modern “masonic” work, Cain-work. 

Christ said, “my kingdom is not of this world”. When we come to living thinking, we are entering Christ’s kingdom – the etheric where we can find him today. 4000 years from now, our lowest bodily member will be our etheric body. The physical body will be gradually given over to our ahrimanic double. More and more our relationship to our physical body will resemble the relationship we have today to our car. Does the car have consciousness? No. But when we are inside it, driving it, the car appears to have a consciousness. I certainly enter this mode of perceiving when I am driving on a highway. I try to assess what each car’s behavior is so that I can drive defensively and safely. This is similar to imagining a conscious entity inside a computer driving it! In this case, each device is like a cell of a body but a body that is not physically coherent, not in one integrated space. The conscious being, if we call it Ahriman, is not within a device as a human consciousness is within its physical, etheric, and astral bodies . Similarly, the “Ego” of each mineral is at the level of Devachan and not within the physicality of the mineral.

On November 14, 2021, Prof. Valdemar Setzer gave a webinar called: The Turing Machine and what computers can and cannot do, where he proved that a computer, as a subset of Turing Machines, cannot have free will nor any feelings, nor any of its own thoughts. Thus, a computer, with all of its artificial intelligence or even artificial soul, has no consciousness of its own.