I have a long held interesting the idea of artificial consciousness and its many forms (and dangers). File Not Found was my creative exploration of this idea as I was finishing my degree in Animation.
Though we might think of artificial intelligence as cutting-edge-tech-singularity the fact is that it's been around for a while. As I did research on robots and artificial intelligence for my film, I realized that this idea was not new at all. There's a whole other post to be written about what I discovered while making this film!
However I want to focus on what I found this week: another example of the ancient art of artificial consciousness.
For the record I stand as a staunch (apparent) neo-luddite in this respect. I firmly believe the best creations are those directly sourced into the unified source field. This way the consciousness can be sovereign and experience freedom as a created entity. It's not for me to judge when and where life will spring forth or in what form. I'm most familiar with organic biological lifeforms, and I do hold the possibility open that sentience may arise from our current technology systems and networks. However I can discern that the purposeful manipulation of forces to create consciousness beings with negatively polarized agendas, those that are 'created to serve' as workers or soldiers without choice must and will come to an end.
There is a long history in the Arabic world of astrology, astronomy, mathematics, and alchemy. Many star names are Arabic in origin as they have a long practice of reading the Fixed Stars.
I came across an interesting nebula called the Homunculus nebula which exploded in 1843 in the Eta Carinae system. I was fascinated by this term homunculus, what could it mean? Homunculus was a term used for a miniature human! In alchemy it refers to the creation of a miniature human using alchemical knowledge.
I'm going to save my indignant rant on men in a laboratory trying to sidestep the divine feminine creation process here, because I want to get to a point.
In Islamic alchemy, Takwin (Arabic: تكوين) was a goal of certain Muslim alchemists, a notable one being Jābir ibn Hayyān. In the alchemical context, Takwin refers to the artificial creation of life in the laboratory, up to and including human life.
So there you have an instance from the 700s of artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness as a goal. Although we think of alchemy as weird and archaic it actually reveals similar themes that seem to be surprisingly relevant to our current time.
Jabir Ibn Hayyan was a polymath, combing different disciplines of study. We don't think like this anymore. But the ancient quest to create or manipulate life requires alchemy, astronomy, engineering, philosophy, etc. All these arts are connected at their core with understanding the mechanics of consciousness.
Clearly distortions have arisen from this drive to create and manipulate life in the form of genetic experimentation.
One intriguing suggestion was also the line about Carl Jung, who identified the homunculus concept with the "inner person" in parallel with Christ.
I'll wrap it up here for now and continue later this week with part 2.
with love, Maria
