Out of alignment

 

Christopher Wallis is a scholar of religion and philosophy who also practices a form of Indian Tantrism. Here, he criticizes the notion that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can become conscious and somehow take over the world, exterminating all humans in the process. Or, in a more benign version, co-exist with us while enjoying all the usual human rights. (I can already see libertarians and cornucopians campaigning for the rights of robots.) Both scenarios are equally absurd, according to Wallis.

For starters, “consciousness” and “intelligence” are not the same thing. Consciousness simply means subjective experience. Your pet has it. Intelligence means problem-solving ability. A machine could have advanced problem-solving abilities (Wallis´ example is a computer that can solve problems associated with the complex strategy game “Go”) without having any consciousness at all. On a deeper level, Wallis´ objection is that materialism (here called physicalism) is simply wrong or at the very least unproven. The idea that AI can become conscious is clearly based on a physicalist metaphysic, in which consciousness arises (perhaps inevitably) once matter is organized in a particularly complex manner. This is what might turn robots or computers into Terminators (or benign right-holders). As a Tantric, Wallis is a metaphysical idealist. Consciousness is the basis of Reality and our “material” world exists *within* this universal consciousness, almost like a dream.

Wallis argues that consciousness is made up of four interrelated powers or “shaktis”: enjoyment, desire/will, cognition and action. There is also a kind of meta-capacity: autonomy or freedom. There is also a force Wallis calls “prana”, usually translated “life force”, but here more algebraically interpreted as “that which biological entities have in common”. AI of course isn´t biological. Only conscious beings develop desires that are in conflict with those of their “creators”. AI can´t do this. There is no “alignment problem” here, except in the sense that AI can be used (by humans) in ways detrimental to society. The game-playing computer mentioned earlier was actually defeated by a “lower-ranking” human player who assumed that the machine doesn´t really know what it´s doing!

Of course, if you believe in some particularly dark-side form of Tantrism, I suppose you could still argue that robots with positronic brains could be possessed by demons, and then it´s off to Terminator land anyway, but this particular scholar seems to be a moderate…

Absolute discretion

 

"The Game" is a film from 1997 featuring Michael Douglas in a plot I always found incomprehensible. However, it seems that the "game" of the film is a real thing. It´s called "immersive experience" and could best be described as a very advanced form of LARP. 

In the clip above, the Why Files discusses one such immersive experience, known as The Latitude, developed by artist Jeff Hull. It´s essentially a fake Masonic lodge with all the usual paraphernalia. Or perhaps even better, since many "members" didn´t want to leave when Hull declared the game to be over! 

Only in Amerika, right...? 

Socialist Worker: Tool for Terminator?

Occasionally, Socialist Worker (UK) gets some kind of strange fits of rationality, and actually publishes something that´s worth the while reading. 

Like this relatively short piece on AI, where SW asks if Elon Musk & Co are *really* afraid of an AI global takeover á la Terminator, or if something more mundane is going on.

If "power and profit" are mundane things in the world of the super-rich...

Who is served by tales of an AI global takeover?

They say you want a revolution

 

"My spiritual beliefs are very eclectic". Bingo! ;-)  

Canadian counter-cultist activist Henri Jolicoeur is in India at the moment, and here he visits the abandoned ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of TM and for a while the guru of the Beatles. Note that the Beatles are depicted on the ashram walls together with Maharishi! 

When Henri was a Hare Krishna devotee, he actually met the Beatles, including George Harrison and John Lennon. The video upload ends with a John Lennon song. 

I´m not much for travel, but some of the vistas Jolicoeur has visited do seem quite interesting! 

The modernist mythology

 

John Michael Greer again! 

The Myth of Modernity

Scorched earth tactics

 

A female art colony?

 

“Ljus över hav och land. Önningebykolonin på Åland” is a book and exhibition catalogue published by Waldemarsudde in Sweden. The publication year is 2022. Waldemarsudde is an art museum in Stockholm and the former domicile of Prince Eugen (1865-1947), who was a patron of painters and a painter himself. And yes, the “prince” is his actual title, Eugen being the son of King Oscar II. This particular book has no connection to Eugen´s artistic endeavors, however. Frankly, “Ljus över hav och land” is quite boring, unless extremely local landscape painting is your thing, the locale in question being Önningeby at Åland, or perhaps Åland in general. Late 19^th century Åland, that is. Think peasant women working, peasant men working just as much, trees, windmills, coastlines, that kind of stuff.

Åland is an archipelago in the Baltic Sea. The population is Swedish, but Sweden lost Åland to Russia after a major war in 1808-1809. During the same conflict, Sweden also lost Finland to the Russians. Åland was administered as part of the so-called Grand Duchy of Finland until 1917, Finland of course being under Russian overlordship. When Finland became independent in 1917, Sweden wanted Åland back, but eventually the islands became a self-governing territory sorting under Finland, a status they still enjoy.

In 1886, an “art colony” was established at Önningeby, a farming village at Åland. Such “colonies” were apparently quite common all over Europe at the time, forming part of an emerging artistic subculture. Or perhaps demimonde? The colony lasted until 1914, when World War I broke out and the artists left in a hurry. Most members of the colony seem to have been Swedish painters from Finland (there is a Swedish-speaking minority in Finland), which is natural, since Åland´s farming population presumably only spoke Swedish. Most of the artists rented rooms or houses from the local peasants. The leaders of the colony were Victor Westerholm and his wife Hilma (who wasn´t a painter). Another prominent member was the Sweden-Swedish (to coin a phrase) J. A. G. Acke. What made the community unique among European art colonies was that the majority of its members were female, many of them painters in their own right.

I don´t think the articles in the exhibition catalogue are *that* good at explaining this peculiar state of affairs. As already noted, art colonies were an important part of the lifestyle and networking of a certain kind of late 19^th century European painters. There must have been something counter-cultural about them, August Strindberg (the famous writer from Sweden) complaining about rank lesbianism when visiting a French art colony! Önningeby seems to have been much less raunchy, but it was still vaguely alternative since it offered female painters an opportunity to socialize, paint and sell their art. The usual norm at the time was that women were supposed to give up their educations and careers (if any) at marriage.

Other factors also contributed to the establishment of art colonies in the rural hinterland, such as new trends in painting itself, landscape and portrait painting becoming more realistic than before. There were also more or less explicit nationalist sentiments at work, the painters perhaps trying to find something “authentically national”. This kind of art colonies apparently disappeared with the advent of so-called modernism in art, since the modernists extolled the city over the countryside, and weren´t interested in artistic realism anyway. Still, counter-cultural communes certainly continued to exist even after World War I, so perhaps the authors´ perspective is a bit narrow here?

All that being said, “Ljus över hav och land” is mostly just an art book with Åland-related landscape and portrait paintings (and some still lifes thrown in for good measure). Good if you are an Ålandese local patriot, I suppose.

Finlands sak är svår

 

Håller kanske inte med om *precis* allt i denna artikel, men den är ändå relativt intressant. Största problemet är väl att den kallar 1523 års Sverige för "nationalstat". Ähum, det fanns inga nationalstater på 1500-talet. Har författaren i brådrasket glömt bort den östra rikshalvan? Vad hette den nu igen...?

Så blev PR-geniet Gustav Vasa rikskändis

Favorit i repris

 

Apropå Gustav Vasa, och så vidare. 

The rehabilitation of Uppland

Credit: Algirdas (Lithuanian Language Wikipedia)

Originally posted on July (sic) 6, 2020. Since Sweden celebrates "500 years as a nation" today, June 6 2023, I thought this might be of more than passing interest...

"Det svenska rikets födelse" (The Birth of the Swedish Kingdom) is a book by Dick Harrison, a Swedish professor of medieval history. The book is part of a long series of short popularized books on Swedish and European history written by the same author. However, it sounds more scholarly than most of the others, perhaps because the Swedish Middle Ages is close to Harrison´s main field of expertise. 

During most of the 20th century, the standard view among Swedish historians was that the Swedish kingdom emerged during the Viking Age, more specifically the 11th century, and that the center of the kingdom was Old Uppsala and Uppland more generally. After all, this was what the written sources suggested. To take just one example, in Snorri Sturluson´s "Heimskringla", Old Uppsala is prominently featured everytime the Icelandic writer mentions Sweden. While it´s true that Snorri was often retelling mythology, it could still be asked why *that* particular mythology? Archaeology also seemed to confirm the importance of Old Uppsala and Uppland. However, at the end of the 20th century, a new paradigm emerged which argued that the Swedish kingdom didn´t start to emerge until the 12th and 13th centuries, with the culmination point during the time of Birger jarl (de facto ruler 1248-1266). Even worse for the Uppland local patriots, this new scenario suggested that Götaland, Västergötland in particular, was the cradle of the Swedish kingdom, while Uppland was peripheral. One of the foremost popularizers of this perspective was novel writer and media personality Jan Guillou. Another was Dick Harrison...

Personally, I have no horse in this game, but I always found the Götaland hypothesis somewhat problematic, since it´s obvious that Uppland couldn´t have been a "periphery" in any meaningful sense of that term. Why did king Olof Skötkonung (who was indeed baptized in Västergötland) build a new town in Uppland, Sigtuna, which had the right to mint coins? Why were there royal halls in Uppland? What about all the runestones? And although no "real" Swedish kingdom existed during the 5th century, the gigantic burial mounds at Old Uppsala surely suggest some kind of powerful chiefdom? And what about those pesky written sources...

I therefore find it interesting that Harrison seems to have abandoned the Götaland-centric perspective of his previous popularizations. Instead, he paints a more sophisticated and therefore more believable picture of constantly evolving interactions between Götaland and Uppland. These interactions in turn were part of even broader networks of trade, political alliances, Church missionary activity and cultural diffusion, spanning all of northern Europe from England in the west to Kievan Rus in the east. In this scenario, there is no longer any "cradle of the Swedish kingdom", the whole concept being an anachronism (of course, in a sense it was an anachronism under the Götaland hypothesis, too, since kingdom-formation was seen as a gradual process). 

However, on one point Harrison is adamant: if there is a "founding father of Sweden", it really is Birger jarl. On that point, he is surely correct. Birger Magnusson (his real name) was the first Swedish ruler who created a "real" kingdom with a centralized administration, bailiffs to collect taxes from the peasantry, castles as outposts of the central power in various provinces, and national laws on top of the local ones. After Birger jarl, even virtual civil wars between factions within the nobility were about control of the state. Before Birger jarl, there essentially was no state. A very succesful ruler could create a vast "kingdom" or dominion by prowess in battle and/or clever marriage alliances, but the construction was unstable since it was tied to the king´s person and dependent on support from various local elite groups. Erik Segersäll comes to mind. But, of course, this is not the same thing as a kingdom sensu stricto. 

The main take aways from this extremely interesting book is that the Swedish kingdom evolved slowly through constant interchanges between different regions, that the process could have ended otherwise (perhaps with a much smaller Sweden, or with a Scandinavian kingdom, or with Scandinavia becoming a northern outpost of Germany), and that the process didn´t really reach its fruition until the mid-13th century. It´s also interesting to note the role of Christianity in the kingdom-building process. At this time, Christianity was the "royal" religion which legitimized the idea of an elevated ruler - one god, one king. Which makes me wonder what would have happened if Scandinavia remained pagan...

With those reflections, I end this review of Dick Harrison´s "Det svenska rikets födelse".