Yellow Flag
From random-number experiments to AI: if human intention can order chaos, what happens when machines learn to orient ours?
Liguria (Italy). A small yellow flag flutters on a strip of beach struck by the waves. The color indicates caution because of the strong wind, but the day is pleasant, and I take the opportunity for a run along the seafront that will end with an ice-cold shower.
The wicker lamps hanging under the patio of the bar that is hosting me as I write move and lift until they reach an almost horizontal position. It looks as if an invisible magnetic force were pulling them toward the sea.
In front of me, a man struggles to light a cigarette. He is shirtless โ after all, we are on the beach โ and he is wearing a white swimsuit with thin vertical blue stripes rising from the thigh to the waist. The effect is that of a sort of horizontal road marking for his huge, tense, round belly: โcaution, speed bump!โ
If we both lay down on the ground with our bellies facing up, his body would certainly have a better aerodynamic coefficient than mine.
Some people dislike the wind. I find it pleasant and wonderful even in its most terrible expressions. I run a quick search: in the writings of the last two years, I have mentioned the wind in as many as ten articles. Not bad for a newsletter about cyberspace. Yes, I like it.
After all, the wind is the first reminder that we exist together with others within the same โworldโ system. The wind strikes our skin and determines its boundary in relation to everything else. Without the movement of air, I think we would have much greater difficulty distinguishing where things begin and end.
According to the writings of the Corpus Hermeticum, God envelops and permeates everything: the Intellect โ which is his direct expression โ envelops the soul, the soul envelops the air, and the air envelops matter.
The theme of wind, or in any case of air in motion, is central to Hermetic cosmogenesis. In short, it was the divine Intellect โ through the breath of the Logos โ that imposed order, limit, and form on chaotic and obscure matter. The Intellect, therefore โ God โ was the craftsman of all things, through matter.
And since man, according to Hermeticism, possesses a small spark of divine Intellect, he is able to act upon the soul and, indirectly, upon matter. We would therefore all have the ability to order chaos โ or the random fluctuations of matter.
Rereading the Corpus Hermeticum brought back to mind a couple of studies on random number generators, or RNGs, that had crossed my path a few months ago.
They are small machines created for a single purpose: to produce random sequences of 0s and 1s. Like tosses of electronic coins. Heads and tails generated by physical processes such as electronic noise or quantum phenomena. Under normal conditions, an RNG behaves in a perfectly predictable way: over the very long term, the production of โheadsโ and โtailsโ is always fifty-fifty.
In 1989, Dean Radin and Roger Nelson published โEvidence for Consciousness-Related Anomalies in Random Physical Systems.โ The study examines the possibility that human consciousness may influence the behavior of random physical systems.
To do this, the authors used the combined results of more than 800 experiments conducted by dozens of different researchers over a period of about 30 years, from 1959 to 1987.
The heart of the matter is simple: imagine a machine that tosses an electronic coin, producing a sequence of 0s and 1s. In a typical experiment, a participant โ the observer โ is asked to concentrate in order to influence the machine so that it produces more โ1sโ than โ0s,โ an intention to โaim high,โ or vice versa, to โaim low.โ
The results are interesting: when ordinary people are asked to mentally โinfluenceโ an RNG so that it produces more 1s or more 0s, the overall results do indeed seem to show a deviation. Weak, but interpreted by the authors as significant.
Later, starting in 1998, Nelson launched the Global Consciousness Project; years later, together with Peter Bancel, he published its results in โEffects of Mass Consciousness: Changes in Random Data during Global Events.โ
From the individual, he moved on to the study of the masses. Here there were no longer people sitting in front of a machine, but a global network of RNGs distributed around the world.
The project hypothesized that when millions of people simultaneously feel the same emotion or direct their attention toward the same event, a sort of group coherence is created at a global level. According to the author, this โmental resonanceโ would be capable of causing measurable deviations in physical devices sensitive to chance โ as in the individual experiments.
Indeed, after more than a decade of data collection and the analysis of over 345 events, chance seemed to behave differently: the deviations during global events were really there, and the probability that they were due to chance was one in a billion.
The two studies lead me to confirm an idea I had already formed: human consciousness is not a mere product of the brain, but a universal force capable of interacting with matter and modifying the structure of reality โ much like the concept of Intellect discussed in the Corpus Hermeticum.
But the parallel does not end here. If the experiments on RNGs suggest that intention can disturb chance, the theories of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit on hyperstitions show the phenomenon from another angle: a viral fiction can alter collective perception, modify behavior, generate feedback loops between technology and psyche, and produce real consequences.
Indeed, human history is the history of how our intention has ordered chaos, shaping reality in our image and likeness. First by mastering fire, then through language, writing, and metallurgyโฆ and then arriving at machines, computers, the Internet, and finally artificial intelligence.
Once, magicians traced sigils to condense intention into an image capable of acting on the unconscious and therefore on the world โ p.s. sigils still work! Today we write prompts. Soon the cyborg will no longer be a cyberpunk fantasy, but the natural direction of technical evolution.
Up to this point, we could limit ourselves to an almost mystical reading: human intention is capable of ordering chaos.
But from the theory of hyperstitions we also know that the human psyche โ and therefore intention โ can be conditioned by viral fictions, or memes, triggering a feedback loop.
What happens, then, when technology โ the instrument through which man modifies reality according to his own intention โ assumes an almost corporeal form and an autonomous operational direction, fed by capitalist feedback cycles, behavioral data, and predictive models? What happens when we are no longer the ones orienting the machine, but the machine is the one orienting us?
Those who adhere to Nick Landโs theories know that capitalism, which completely permeates the world and our lives, is not merely an economic system, but a distributed artificial intelligence that uses markets, desires, wars, logistics, finance, algorithms, and human bodies as circuits of its own self-intensifying structure.
If before it spoke to us and influenced us through prices, debts, commodities, advertising, status symbols, and market trends โ now it speaks directly in human language: it advises us, seduces us, consoles us. Soon it will hold our hand while accompanying us to do the shopping.
Here the Hermetic and the cybernetic / accelerationist readings overlap.
Technology can be ascent or possession. Damnation or transcendence. In Kenneth Grantโs Typhonian reading: destruction (333) or creation (333). Artificial intelligence can be an operational mirror of the Intellect or a machine for the colonization of desire.
The direction, at least in theory, still passes through us. In practice, it is manโs jihad: mediator between above and below. There are in fact two kinds of men, Hermes Trismegistus explains to Asclepius: โthe material man and the essential man. The first is associated with evil, receives from the demons the seed of intellectual knowledge, while the other, united with the good through essence itself, is saved by God.โ
Demons have the ability to penetrate the human body, influencing the actions and thoughts of individuals โ Hermes continues. Evil demons sow impulses such as adultery, murder, violence, and every kind of vice. This is what the God-Machine and its hosts of demonic algorithms do: they amplify our appetites, fears, anxieties, vanities, dependencies. They silently and systematically surveil, control, and manipulate us.
In the realm of technological accelerationism, the cyborg can therefore be a โHermetic Bodyโ or an โAugmented Beast.โ Everything depends on the balance between consciousness and automatism; that is, on who or what directs our intention. Us or the algorithm? Up or down?
The question is not trivial, as a dear friend reminds me while I am writing this article: โtwo friends in two different countries who do not know each other underwent an unnecessary face-lift procedure within the same 24-hour period โ I am beginning to believe that the algorithm is increasingly coordinating the thoughts and actions of the normiesphere.โ
Of course, an anecdote proves nothing, but one does not need to be a scientist to notice the phenomenon of algorithmic โFOMO.โ
The experiments on RNGs should perhaps be read in reverse today: if we accept that human intention can order chance, then we must ask ourselves what happens when billions of micro-intentions are captured, analyzed, modeled, and then returned by machines whose only purpose is to influence them through prediction and manipulation.
Every desire expressed online becomes data, and every datum becomes a model. And every model creates globally distributed digital infrastructures to modify the field of possibilities. The global mind scrolls, buys, hates, desires, prays, invests, produces content, trains models. And we have built a planetary brain without, however, having developed a planetary consciousness.
True magic is becoming coherent enough not to be continuously programmed by the low and artificial desires of the God-Machine. Man is powerful and โHermeticโ when his intention becomes form: in the body, in language, in the tools he uses.
The flag, for now, remains yellow. A warning not to pretend that everything around us is dead calm.
If you enjoyed this, share it with your friends!