Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Harmonizing Evolutionary Convergence

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think

In my experience, thinking is the way that thoughts, as new concepts, emerge in the Cosmic Psyche, directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe in the Eternal Now. To think is thus a Cosmic happening, as an anthropic instance of general creativity.

This is a quite different view of thinking from that of Alan Turing, the founder of the theory of automata, who asked in 1950: “Can machines think?” Although he had one or two reservations about his reasoning, he eventually asserted, “I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

Well, this didn’t happen, for reasons that Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron and his mathematician wife Annabella, gave in 1843. In a brilliant memoir on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the first design for a general-purpose computer, she wrote, “We may say, most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves,” going on to say:

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.

During the winter of 1980, when developing an innovative marketing programme for IBM in London, I realized that to demonstrate with rigorous reason that machines cannot think, it is necessary to study the way that mathematical functions and business processes are implemented as functions in computers.

As a consequence, I have become aware that all creative processes take place in the vertical dimension of time, not in the horizontal, as is generally believed. I thus know from irrefutable experience that what is called ‘artificial general intelligence (AGI)’, ‘artificial intelligence (AI)’, or ‘generative AI’ is a misnomer. But whether mathematicians and computer scientists will ever discover this truth for themselves by invoking Self-reflective Intelligence through unconditioned self-inquiry is most uncertain.

Etymology

Probably about 1175, thenken, from Old English þencan ‘imagine, conceive in the mind; consider, meditate, remember; intend, wish, desire’, probably originally ‘cause to appear to oneself’, from Proto-Germanic *thankjan, from PIE base *tong-.

Common ancestor(s):