Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Spiritual Freedom and the Re-animation of Matter

Lafitte, Luke

ISBN 10: 1644114062 / ISBN 13: 9781644114063

Verlag: Inner Traditions, 2022

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Inhaltsangabe:

Examines the role that machines play in the struggle between “spiritual man” and “mechanical man” throughout the ages

• Explores how we naturally project consciousness onto machines and how this is reflected in human culture, science, artificial intelligence, and literature

• Demonstrates a direct connection between consciousness and the history of machines in American history

• Looks at the contributions and influence of Grace Hopper, Richard Feynman, Philip K. Dick, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, David Bohm, Norbert Wiener, and Steve Jobs as well as the Nag Hammadi Gnostic gospels

Humans invented and constructed machines to aid them as far back as the Stone Age. As the machines became more complex, they became extensions of the body and mind, and we naturally began projecting consciousness onto them. As Luke Lafitte shows in detail, although machines complicate the already complicated issue of identity, because they are “ours” and “of us,” they are part of our spiritual development.

In this sweeping exploration of the history of the machine as a tool, as a transpersonal object to assist human activity, and as a transitional artifact between spirits and the humans who interact with them, Lafitte examines the role that machines play in the struggle between “spiritual man” and “mechanical-man” throughout history. He interprets the messages, archetypes, and language of the unconscious in the first popular stories related to mechanical-men, and he demonstrates a direct connection between consciousness and the history of machines in American history, specifically between the inventors of these machines and the awakening of our imaginations and our powers of manifestation. He examines the influence of Philip K. Dick, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Grace Hopper, Richard Feynman, Elon Musk, David Bohm, and others and shows how the Nag Hammadi gospels explain how we can take back our myth and spirit from the machine.

Although the term mechanical-man is a catch-all phrase, Lafitte shows that the term is also a meeting ground where extra-dimensional communications between different forms of matter occur. Every machine, android, robot, and cyborg arose from consciousness, and these mechanical-men, whether real or fictive, offer us an opportunity to free ourselves from enslavement to materialism and awaken our imaginations to create our own realities.

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren: Luke Lafitte, J.D., Ph.D., is a trial attorney, American history teacher, and co-founder of Dead White Zombies, an award-winning theater group in Dallas, Texas. Partner in a leading law firm in Dallas, he is the author of the three-volume series Chronicles of a Curious Mind.

Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal is the associate dean of the Faculty and Graduate Programs in the School of the Humanities and the J. Newton Rayzor chair in philosophy and religious thought at Rice University. He is also the associate director of the Center for Theory and Research and the chair of the Board at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Jeff is the author of eight books, including, most recently, The Flip: Who You Really Are and Why It Matters (2020), where he envisions the future centrality and urgency of the humanities in conversation with the history of science, the philosophy of mind, and our shared ethical, political, and ecological challenges. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the sciences, modern esoteric literature, and the hidden history of science fiction for the University of Chicago Press collectively entitled The Super Story: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies. There he intuits and writes out a new emerging spectrum of superhumanities (in both senses of that expression). The website jeffreyjkripal.com contains his full body of work.

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm:...
Verlag: Inner Traditions
Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
Einband: paperback
Zustand: Very Good