Artificial intelligence is dead intelligence; in principle, no future impulses come from it – no matter how ingenious it appears to be.
The spirit within it says: As it was, so it will be again. Future impulses come solely from the living, active thinking and willing of people in the here and now.
Symptom
A youth hostel in the Harz Mountains is large, modernly equipped and offers young people a huge, partly wooded play area, a sports field, some table tennis tables, etc. It is ideal spring weather, the sun is shining, and the air temperature is pleasant. The hostel is fully booked. 210 young people have found accommodation but the huge grounds are only being used by one class. All the other students are sitting outside or inside, busy with their smartphones. And why is this one class behaving differently? Quite simply: the children had to leave their smartphones at home; their class trip is mobile phone-free!
This incident, which was reported by a visibly shocked teacher, is one of the many obvious symptoms that show that the younger generation – and not just them – is becoming alienated from real life and migrating to the virtual world.
World 2.0
In the shadow of ChatGPT, another significant development was presented but it attracted much less attention than the text generator. The IT company Apple presented its Vision Pro mixed reality glasses in June 2023. In this MR headset, people have two high-resolution screens just a few centimeters in front of their eyes, which provide them with a stereo image. This gives the person the impression of seeing a three-dimensional world. Two stereo loudspeakers above the ears support this illusion. They believe they can see their surroundings, in which the content of a computer display is integrated. The Apple device contains several microphones and twelve cameras that record the outside world live as well as track eye movements, hand movements and finger movements. This makes it possible to control the processes on the two screens using hand gestures and gaze alone, as well as by voice. Apple’s MR headset can be paired with another computer so that you can see its screen in large format in the room in front of you. You can now do all sorts of things with this device: work on the screen, surf the Internet, 3D photography, cosy cinema evenings with 3D films, computer games, etc.
With this device, Apple took another technical step in the direction that Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, described in 2018 as the goal of his company and others:
‘Using mixed reality, we’re creating the ultimate computing experience, where your field of vision becomes the computer surface and your digital world merges with your physical world’ (Nadella 2019, p. 7).[1]
Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen, the Danish government’s representative to the global tech industry, believes:
‘The external devices for experiencing VR [virtual reality, EH], AR [augmented reality, EH] and MR [mixed reality, EH] will continue to develop inexorably over the next few years and could eventually become obsolete and be replaced by technology integrated into the body (‘wetware’)’ (Engtoft Larsen 2019, p. 258).[2]
By this, Engtoft Larsen means that it will one day be possible ‘for VR to be controlled from the brain’ (Engtoft Larsen 2019, p. 258). Although this is not yet feasible, experiments have been underway for several years to connect people’s brains directly to computers.
Yobie Benjamin, co-founder of the company Avegant (USA), also describes the goal of this development very clearly: ‘In the end, the differences between AR and VR will probably disappear’ (Benjamin 2019, p. 262).[3] This means that we will no longer be able to distinguish between virtuality and reality in World 2.0 – but this is nothing other than a loss of reality.
Division
This loss of reality is serious because it is based on a kind of division of the human being. What does that mean?
With a little attention, you can notice it in yourself when you watch a film, for example. After just a short time, you are completely absorbed by the film and lose sight of everything around you – including yourself. This can be observed in extreme cases when you ‘enter’ a virtual room with the help of a VR headset. In this case, the eyes and ears are completely immersed in a computer-generated realm of experience, while the other senses, especially those through which the body is anchored in the real world (sense of touch, sense of warmth, sense of movement, etc.), continue to experience the real world. What the eye and ear experience have nothing to do with what the other senses experience. For example, you can be near the North Pole in virtual space through Google Earth while you are actually sitting in your warm room and not realize that you are sweating. The human sensory organism is split.
Consciousness is filled with the experiences of the virtual world, while the bodily experience sinks into the darkness of disregard. Man loses his body, so to speak.
Neglect of the body
What the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum already reported in the 1970s about compulsive programmers (Weizenbaum 1978, p. 160f.)[4] was confirmed in the 1990s by the psychologist Christel Schachtner in a study of software developers and young people who spend a lot of time with computers. In her study, she found clear evidence that people who spend a lot of time with computers and have an intensive relationship with them lose a sense of their bodies. They have less interest in good nutrition and physical activity – their own body is forgotten in front of the computer (Schachtner 1993, p. 152ff.)[5].
Inspired by Schachtner’s study, the theologian and computer scientist Anne Foerst undertook a similar investigation in the USA. She found similar effects and summarized,
‘that the sense of disembodiment that has characterized people in the Western world for centuries is often reinforced by the daily use of computers’ (Foerst 2008, p. 98).[6].
The neglect of the body, the forgetting of the needs of one’s own body are widespread today. Current research findings indicate that even children and adolescents do not heed their bodies’ alarm signals during the long hours they spend in front of screens, as many of them complain of health problems: 33% complain of neck pain, 24% of dry and itchy eyes, 19% of pain in the forearms and hands. Intensive users of digital devices have impaired perception of their bodies, double the risk of depression, a significantly higher risk of an anxiety disorder and a higher risk of experiencing loneliness (Bauer 2023, p. XX).[7] Other studies show that children and young people are moving less than in previous decades and, as a result, their ability to move their bodies skillfully is also declining.[8]
When people become alienated from their bodies, they also become alienated from the world. Because body and world are inseparable. ‘The body is the nature that we ourselves are’, said the philosopher Gernot Böhme (Böhme 2003, p. 63);[9] the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty put it poetically: “One’s own body is in the world like the heart in the organism: it is what keeps all visible spectacle incessantly alive, nourishing and animating it internally, forming a single system” (Merleau-Ponty 1966, p. 239).[10]
Balancing weights
Screen technologies are part of our culture. They offer enormous possibilities if we know how to use them sensibly and become dangerous for human existence if we fail to practice balancing skills through our own initiative. These are, for example, the discipline to be able to renounce the temptations of screen spaces, the ability to observe something attentively and to be able to develop an honest interest in life’s processes. You could also say that being able to love the phenomena of the real world is the balancing weight that helps us to withstand the temptation to be alienated from the world.
Above all, however, we must develop an awareness of the fact that everything that a person carries out as a mental-spiritual activity always has a subtle effect on the body. Salutogenesis, developed by the medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky, is based on the discovery that the sense of coherence – the feeling of being able to understand and handle the world and to perceive one’s own life as meaningful – has a healthy effect on the body.
This aspect is enormously important for everyday use of IT technology. In addition to paying attention to external aspects of health, it is also very important to cultivate an active mental and spiritual inner life for a sense of coherence. This is because we can not only become alienated from the perceptible world, but also from the world within ourselves, as the emergence of AI is increasingly tempting us to unlearn our independent thinking.
Artificial intelligence
The age of universal devices that mechanize human thought began with the construction of the first computers. In the computer programs, which run on the hardware in a precisely predetermined manner, the structures of the logic living in human thought solidify and these are written onto the universal structure of the hardware, so to speak.
As early as the 1940s, the first ideas emerged on how to imitate not only human logic by machine, but also the physical processes in the brain. This led to the construction of so-called artificial neural networks, i.e. computers whose programming imitates the stimulus transmission of the human nervous system in a very simplified way. These networks are currently the basis of so-called artificial intelligence (AI). Today, they are huge computer systems that, like ChatGPT, for example, have billions of variable parameters. Neural networks are programmed in such a way that these parameters first mustbe adapted to given data before they can be used. This means that these networks still have to be trained. By repeating data input millions of times, the system is made to gradually adapt its parameters more and more to the hidden structures of the external data until it is finally able to react meaningfully to new data input.
The Internet has made it possible for billions of people to exchange their thoughts and feelings in the form of texts, images, films or sound files or to display them on the Internet. This is all stored on large data storage devices that are part of the network. This is used to train the artificial neural networks. In other words, humanity is working on the creation of artificial intelligence, usually without realizing it. In what appears as so-called artificial intelligence, we therefore encounter nothing other than the collected and networked past thinking of mankind. People’s thoughts have materialized in the devices: Computers are congealed ‘thought ice’.
Artificial intelligence is dead intelligence. In principle, no future impulses come from it, no matter how ingenious it may seem. The spirit within it says: ‘As it was, so it will be again’. Future impulses come solely from the living, active thinking and willing of people in the here and now.
Dawn of a new consciousness
The now global power of computer systems demonstrates the world-shaping significance of human thought, because all of these systems originated from human thought, or more precisely: human intellectual thought. This first developed in ancient Greece and is now – to put it comparatively – overripe. It challenges people to develop a new level of thinking that goes beyond mere reason.
The cultural phenomenologist Jean Gebser spoke of a new consciousness beginning to develop in the transition to the 20th century: an aperspectival or integral consciousness. His detailed phenomenology of this change in consciousness culminates in the thesis that humanity as a whole is on the way to breaking through to a new consciousness. And for him, this breakthrough is a shining through of the divine, an experience of the reality of the Christ. At the end of his work, he writes about our present:
‘The profound truth of Christianity of the transparency, the diaphaneity of the world becomes perceptible. The loud intrusion of the beyond into this world, the presence of the beyond in this world, of death in life, of the transcendent in the immanent, of the divine in man becomes transparent. The incarnation of God has not been in vain’ (Gebser 1953, p. 379)[11].
The anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner also drew attention to this fact and emphatically pointed out that one can expand one’s thinking consciousness to other forms of consciousness. He showed from the most diverse aspects which paths one can take in order to gradually expand intellectual thinking to higher forms of consciousness.
The necessity of inner development
Gebser’s repeated warning that people would fall back into old forms of consciousness that had become decadent if they avoided the demands of the new age can also be found in Steiner. He repeatedly warned that complete decadence, even barbarism, would be imminent if not enough people decided to add an inner development of their own accord to the external technological development. He saw it as an existential necessity that technical progress must be counterbalanced by a realization of the spiritual world. In the last essay he wrote, he explicitly points out that humanity has entered a technical realm with its everyday actions, which he describes as sub-nature. Humans must come to terms with this sub-nature, but they can only do so in a meaningful way if they also gain access to a super-nature:
‘The sub-nature must be understood as such. It can only do so if man ascends in spiritual realization at least as far to the extraterrestrial super-nature as he has descended in technology to the sub-nature. The age needs a cognition that goes beyond nature because it must inwardly come to terms with a dangerous life content that has sunk below nature.’ (Steiner 1998, GA 26, p. 257)[12].
We are integrated with our bodies into a technical world: We operate a wide variety of apparatuses, move with the help of machines, look at screens, etc. This harbors the danger of becoming alienated from the visible world. The past human intelligence hidden in the devices threatens to alienate us from the spiritual world to be found within us. This situation is the fate of the times. Today, it is the individual’s responsibility to want to cope with it by embarking on an inner, for example meditative, path of development. This does not take place in a ‘vacuum’ but also has an effect on the body. Just as technology has a disruptive effect on the body, inner development places the body in an overarching spiritual wholeness from which healthy forces emerge.
Epilogue
It is important for the upcoming generation to find as many adults as possible who can be role models for them in this respect and who also have the courage and strength to put a stop to the seductive pull of digital devices for a while. Children need free spaces in which they can experience and explore the real world enough to become a friend to the world.
This idea does not mean that we are anti-technology, but rather that we are in favor of young people learning to stand firmly in the real world and being able to master its challenges. Only when they have established a solid foundation in the reality of life on earth can they integrate the virtual world into their outer and inner biography in a meaningful way.
[1] Nadella, Satya (2019): As a preface. In: Klaus Schwab with Nicolas Davis: The Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. How we are shaping the digital transformation. Munich: DVA.
[2] Engtoft Larsen (2019): Virtual and augmented reality. In: Klaus Schwab with Nicolas Davis: The Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. How we are shaping the digital transformation. Munich: DVA.
[3] Benjamin, Yobie (2019): The interface: the be-all and end-all. In: In: Klaus Schwab with Nicolas Davis: The Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. How we are shaping the digital transformation. Munich: DVA.
[4] Weizenbaum, Joseph (1978): Die Macht der Computer und die Ohnmacht der Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp edition
[5] Schachtner, Christel (1993): Geistmaschine. Fascination and provocation at the computer. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
[6] Foerst, Anne (2008): Of Robots, Man and God. Artificial intelligence and the existential dimension of life. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
[7] Bauer, Joachim (2023): Loss of reality. How AI and virtual worlds possess us and threaten humanity. Munich: Hayne.
[8] A summary of current findings can be found in Zdražil, Tomáš (2024): The living and health situation of children and adolescents – a stocktaking. In: Thomas Damberger/Edwin Hübner (eds.): Strengthening children in times of digitalisation. Developing reflexive energy in crises. Opladen, Toronto: Barbara Budrich.
[9] Böhme, Gernot (2003). Being a body as a task. Philosophy of the body from a pragmatic perspective. Zug/Switzerland: Die Graue Edition.
[10] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1966): Phenomenology of Perception. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter &Co.
[11] Gebser, Jean (1953): Origin and Presence. Vol. 2: The manifestations of the aperspectival world. Attempt at a concretion of the spiritual. Stuttgart: DVA.
[12] Steiner, Rudolf (1998): Anthroposophical Guiding Principles. The path of knowledge of anthroposophy. The Michael Mystery. GA 26, Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag.
