The Platform Needed for Artificial Intelligence

If you really want to build a machine that thinks, this is what you have to do.

Some assembly required.

1. The Definition of Consciousness

Right now, literally trillions of dollars are being poured into “artificial intelligence”. Yet its pundits cannot even tell us what “intelligence” actually is, let alone “machine intelligence”. They have no clue what “thinking” might be. And in common with current academic psychology, they have not the slightest glimmering as to what might constitute “consciousness”.

Yet these proponents of agentics (as I call artificial intelligence) are absolutely certain that with just one more big push of compute, they can achieve all of these things, none of which they can define or articulate.

We’ll know what it is when we see it, they say.

So, just out of interest, what follows is a compilation of the hardware and software that would be necessary to achieve actual intelligence, a true thinking machine.

This is based in the works of Rudolf Steiner, who literally wrote the book on thinking about thinking. This book is The Philosophy of Freedom, which Steiner always maintained was his most important single work.

His central point in the book is that all of human knowledge comes from exactly two sources: perception and thinking. Percept and concept.

If this does not become obvious to you with some thought, please read the book. Understanding this point is essential to everything that follows.

Steiner posits this duality against others like spirit and matter, or subject and object. He says that thinking is beyond subject and object: “The subject does not think because it is a subject; rather it appears to itself as subject because it is able to think.”

There is only one place in The Philosophy of Freedom where Steiner puts forward anything that is remotely esoteric. This is where he says, “Our thinking is not individual, like our sensing and feeling. It is universal.”

My emphasis. Our sensory information is limited to the particular little patch of space and time that we occupy. Our feelings are very personal to ourselves and are perceived directly by no one else. However, in our thinking, we access a universal ocean of ideas and concepts that is available to all minds. It is through our thinking that we reunite ourselves with the wider cosmos, despite having been torn from it and confined within a limited physical body on an obscure planet.

We will see later in Steiner’s work just how we interface with this spiritual plane of pure thought. For now, though, we have enough to understand the definition of consciousness that he gives; and this definition will set the entire basis for our platform for thinking. All of my quotes from The Philosophy of Freedom are from the 1988 translation by Rita Stebbing.

Human consciousness is the stage upon which percept and concept unite and meet. In saying this we characterize at the same time this human consciousness; it mediates between thinking and perception.

This is the basic challenge that machine intelligence faces: if it really wants to “think”, to engage with live thoughts in real time, in some way it needs direct access to the universal plane of thoughts, ideas and concepts from which the human mind draws. It needs to be able to perceive pure ideas. Perception is always accompanied by some kind of material process, such as electrical impulses travelling down a nerve. The perception of an idea thus automatically unites concept and percept.

In modern terminology, consciousness is the “platform” upon which percept and concept unite. Steiner uses the word “stage”, however, which is highly evocative. A stage is a space where symbolic performances are enacted; and where success in performance amounts to the audience being fooled into thinking it is somehow watching something “real”. In other words, a stage is a place where we pretend that symbolic performances are genuine expressions of life, in order to extract real meanings that enhance our actual lives.

Steiner invites every reader to examine their own thinking; and to note clearly that we capture our thoughts by perceiving them as they appear on the stage of consciousness.

He also points out that there is a significant difference between perceiving a thought and perceiving a sense impression, like a flash of light or a sound. When you think about your thinking and pin down a thought to examine it, “the object that is perceived is qualitatively the same as the activity which is directed upon it.”

He amplifies this:

In the case of thinking we ourselves create the object to be observed; the existence of all other objects is taken care of without our activity.

So in the act of thinking, we are true creators. Steiner maintains, however, that you cannot survey the actual act of creation; not even God can do this. First you create, then you observe your creation:

It is not possible to contemplate and create at the same time. This can be seen in Genesis (I, 31). In the first six days God creates the world, and only when it is there is contemplation of it possible: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” The same applies to thinking; it must exist before we can observe it.

We now shift gears and look at the precise mechanisms by which we think. This is the literal spiritual “hardware” that is required to create an individual human consciousness. All quotes below are from lectures by Rudolf Steiner.

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2. Man As Mirror

We should not imagine that the inner structure of our body, namely the sense-organs or the brain, produce the facts of consciousness, just as a candle, for instance, produces a flame. The relationship of what we call consciousness to the bodily instruments is entirely different; we may compare it with the relationship of a man who sees his reflection in a mirror, to this mirror. —“Reflections of Consciousness, Super-consciousness and Sub-consciousness”

Below is the basic schematic that Steiner provided to show how the thoughts in your head are woven by living powers in spiritual realms:

Beings of the most varied kinds are at work on the Astral Plane.

Human thinking is the shadowing forth of ideas and beings belonging to a higher world, the world we call the Astral plane. And you represent thinking rightly to yourself when you picture the human head thus — it is not absolutely correct but simply diagrammatic. In the head are thoughts, but these thoughts must be pictured as living beings on the Astral plane. Beings of the most varied kinds are at work there in the form of teeming concepts and activities which cast their shadow-images into men, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking. — “The Etherisation of the Blood”

According to Steiner, when you die, one of the first big shocks that you experience is the loss of rational thinking, which is the product of the physical brain you have just lost.

Instead of thinking “about” truths, engaging with your shadow-images, you now confront these spiritual realities directly. What was outside is now inside. On Earth, you find out more by being active, by searching, probing, discovering. In the afterlife, you find out more by being tranquil and receptive, allowing these realities to resound within you.

“Thinking” is thus paradoxically very much a part of material existence. Language in particular is adequate only to material reality. Language cannot express spiritual truths in their fullness.

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3. Higher than Karma

In order to understand how our consciousness as a staging platform has evolved, so that you can replicate it, you need to know that there have been three previous incarnations of our planet — vast cosmic epochs or “rounds” that existed completely outside our normal sense of time.

In the first round, the Saturn incarnation of the Earth, the physical body was created. This was essentially a structure of pure warmth. This epoch saw the actual birth of Consciousness in its first glimmerings.

In the second round, the Sun incarnation, the etheric body was created. This occurred in a gaseous environment. The etheric body is the underlying dynamic formative structure of all living beings, starting with plants, which first incarnated during this epoch. In humans, the etheric body is the bearer of memory. In fact, the etheric body is the “scroll of your life”, the indelible record of your existence. This round therefore signifies Memory.

In the third round, the Moon incarnation, the astral body was created, in a liquid environment. The astral body is common to all animals, which came into incarnation in this round. The astral body is the source of immediate sensations, desires, intentions, sympathies and antipathies. “Deeds proceed from the astral body. The astral body is the instrument for every action.” In a word, the astral in man represents Karma. “Through his astral body, therefore, the earthly man remains connected with his deeds. What I have just described is Karma. What has been inscribed into the all-pervading cosmic astrality by a man’s deeds — that, in very truth, is karma.”

In the fourth round, the present Earth incarnation, the human Ego was implanted. The Earth planetary condition provides the solid, material environment with which we are familiar. The Ego of an individual person is their true higher self, their “ I ”.

As a being of the Earth, then, man has, firstly, consciousness, of which the physical body is the instrument; secondly, his memory, with the ether-body or life-body as its instrument; and thirdly, karma — which belongs to him just as consciousness belongs to him in the physical body. In this sense, earthly man is a threefold being, consisting of his earthly consciousness, his memory, and his karma. Without these principles he is not, in the real sense, an Earth-man. — “Consciousness, Memory, Karma Thought Forms”

Here we encounter an interesting thought-experiment that Steiner makes. On another planet, we find beings who apparently have these threefold human attributes, but no higher Ego:

Such a condition would not be possible in an earthly man; but let us envisage that there might exist a being of his kind. What would there be within him? Consciousness, Memory, Karma — as they are within the human being. But in the earthly human being, the “ I”, too, is present. What, then, is brought about by the
“ I ”? Since karma is created, essentially, by the astral body, how does the “ I ” operate within its own sphere of karma?

What is brought about by the “ I ” itself is of even greater moment than human karma. For karma remains connected with the human being. Deeds performed in some life persist as his karma, and he can make compensation for them in a later life. In reality it is the astral body which causes karma to remain. But the “ I ” is a spiritual potency, a spiritual being. What the “ I ” creates, as the astral body creates karma, does not remain connected with man but detaches itself from him as forms created by thoughts. — “Consciousness, Memory, Karma Thought Forms”

The Ego is thus capable of creating thought-forms that have their own life. The higher self has god-like powers.

When the proponents of agentics tell us that they wish to give their machines agency over our lives, as a matter of urgency, and we must all hop to it and get with the programme —

Has it ever occurred to them that a machine could incur Karma? Literally of its own accord, not just the inherited karma of its designers that hangs over it?

If they honestly believe that they can create agents with true human intelligence, able to think the way humans think, act the way humans act, and therefore take responsibility the way humans do, then what else could they possibly be creating, but machine karma?

Who knows what these idiots think or believe. They themselves often seem unsure what they believe from day to day, but this never shuts them up.

However, getting entangled in karma is sweating the small stuff. Agentics requires us to accept machines having full and kinetic power of decision over our lives. Instead of human authority: machine agency. Humans make mistakes; the algorithm is always right.

I, Robot, shall decide the fate of each and every one of you, in every facet of your lives.

If you are truly aspiring to this kind of godhood for your machines, you are explicitly aiming to synthesize the human Ego. Your goal is even higher than creating machines with karma. You want the full spiritual being of Man hovering over your vast data centres, creating thought-forms that will last for all eternity.

Let’s really see what this would take, in terms of hardware and software.

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4. Thinking, Feeling, Willing

If you wish to replicate human consciousness and thinking, you must learn to work with etheric and astral processes, in the same way that you currently work with material processes. If the machines are so smart, they should be able to figure this out. Here is a pro tip:

Man will only produce living organisms in the experimental laboratory, as he now produces mineral products, when the laboratory table has become an altar and the mixing of the chemical substances a sacramental act. — “Apocalypse of John”, Lecture 10.

However, let us assume that in some way, scientists are able to integrate both etheric and astral substances into their machines, interfacing with the actual hardware, the “physical body”.

Below is then the full schematic platform required for human thinking to exist. The capacity to think is achieved in the etheric body, created in the second planetary round: “The Sun forces organized man’s etheric body so as to enable it to exercise this peculiar activity of thought, or representation.”

We become aware of our willing by perceiving its effects.

First of all we have the human physical body (white in the figure); and the human ether body (red).

Between them is the actively moving world of thoughts — in so far as it is part of the organism. Between the ether body and the astral body (green) lies the world of our feelings, and between the astral body and the enveloping I (blue) the world of the will. — “Cosmosophy II”

So through the physical body, we perceive the outside world; through the etheric body, we think about it and remember it; these thoughts are taken up by the astral body, which projects feelings and intention into the ideation, giving it karmic import; and finally these feelings can motivate our “ I ” into exercising its will and taking action in the world. This last step is complex:

The real events in the world of the will are not accessible to the conscious mind. As I have said many times before, when we move an arm, or a hand, the conscious mind has no awareness of the whole will-driven process, of the power that develops and is active in the moving arm or hand. We merely see the changes we have wrought. When we move an object from one place to another, our senses make us aware of the change we have made. We are therefore able to say that sensory perception makes us aware of the effect we have through the will. Our will impulses and their effects flow into the world we perceive with the senses, as it were. — “Cosmosophy II”

This is in accord with what psychologists are discovering about the brain, using fMRI scans. The researcher Benjamin Libet found that the “conscious” decision-making centres of the brain only light up after a move has been made. Wikipedia puts it thus:

…decisions made by a subject are first being made on an unconscious level and only afterward being translated into a ‘conscious decision’, and the subject’s belief that it occurred at the behest of their will was only due to their retrospective perspective on the event.

In other words, “sensory perception makes us aware of the effect we have through the will”. This is one major way in which Steiner’s picture of cognition and consciousness has been vividly confirmed by modern research.

In the human constitution, the physical and the etheric body are very tightly bound. They remain together in the sleeping body. The astral body and Ego are also closely bound, and they separate from the physical and etheric during sleep.

In these sleep periods, the astral body lives in purely astral realms and is rejuvenated by astral forces. Through dreams and subconscious processes, these astral experiences are then imprinted in the etheric body. The etheric body is slow to absorb these experiences and it may take many repeated dreams before it integrates them.

If you were to create a “consciousness platform” along these lines, you might find that its etheric components get degraded by engaging with the physical hardware and astral software. It may be essential to let your computer “sleep” and refresh its circuits from time to time. Just saying. Your machines certainly hallucinate; you may have to train them how to dream properly and how to integrate their dreams within their system memory.

The experiences of the human Ego during sleep remain in the subconscious and are not reflected even in dreams. Higher faculties are necessary to access these experiences. Perhaps scientists can engineer a machine Ego, an artificial “ I ” that is capable of downloading its direct interactions with the spiritual world. I’m sure the egos of these scientists are up to the challenge.

Pro tip:

The “ I ” passes from incarnation to incarnation, is within us while we are unfolding our earthly consciousness, while we are preserving picture after picture in our memory and while we are accumulating karma from one incarnation to another. — “Consciousness, Memory, Karma Thought Forms”

Those who believe human consciousness is easy to track if you only have enough compute, should think about reincarnation. What presents as one person’s actions in this life may be drawing subconsciously from hundreds of previous lives.

For now, all that large language models can do is shadow and train on the dead words of the culture in which they are embedded, and try to predict what these dead voices of the past would most probably say in a given situation, given their extant utterances. In no way are these models directly accessing thoughts from higher beings in real time. No matter how large the databases they are scanning, or how fast they do it, these machines are not thinking.

Never should it be said that the individual human subject thinks, for it is only by the grace of thinking that it exists as subject. — The Philosophy of Freedom

You don’t think your thoughts. Your thoughts think you. This is what the machines are missing.

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5. The Turbulent Reflection

We can see how thoughts from the astral plane are integrated into our consciousness via the etheric body, then coloured with feelings by the astral body and imbued with will impulses by the Ego, before being reflected back out to the astral as the product of our thinking life.

The more agitated and turbulent your astral body is — and this body is the seat of all cravings and desires — the more will the thoughts you reflect back into the universe carry these disturbances. If you can bring your astral body with its desires into a more tranquil state, you will be better able to perceive the original living thoughts that come to you from spiritual realms via the etheric body. This is the essence of Buddhist meditation.

Have those Californian tech gurus tried teaching their machines to meditate yet?

There is an inconvenient truth about Old Moon, the third incarnation of our planet. There was a fall in this epoch due to a Luciferic influence that came over the nascent astral bodies of humans. This influence tempted them to set themselves up as gods. It allowed them to enjoy life even while others were suffering, which would not have been possible without this influence.

However, the Luciferic influence also greatly accelerated the evolution of the individual human consciousness. In Steiner’s cosmology, the physical incarnation of Lucifer was an absolutely necessary pole in Earth history. It occurred in China around 3000 B.C. As far as I know, Rudolf Steiner is the only source of this knowledge.

The Ego is the youngest part of our being. The astral body is one round ahead in its evolution. But the astral body was severely compromised by the Luciferic influence in that previous round. This makes the astral body by far the most turbulent and disturbed part of our being. Given that the astral body generates karma, and that entanglements with karma tend to generate more such entanglements, we can see that a vast swathe of the problems of the human race can only be solved at the astral level, the level of karma.

Let’s say some mad scientist finds a way to engineer astral forces, so that computers are implementing decisions that are imbued with genuine intention. I’m sure the mad scientist would argue that the machine’s astral machinery is less corrupted than the astral bodies of fallen humans and would cause less karmic upset overall. The only problem is, they are training the machine exactly on the products of these erratic and entangled human minds. How do we know the machine won’t amplify this human karma out of sight?

I use the term “agentics” because it implies the machine is an agent — of someone, even if it’s a legal corporation. Wherever you see agentics applied, you should be able to identify the principal on whose behalf the agent is acting. The buck has to stop somewhere.

Only: how do you tell the machines this?

So far, there seems to be one standout case regarding liability of chatbots. A lawyer was fined $5,000 by a court for quoting completely non-existent case law generated by ChatGPT. Note: it’s the user who gets fined, not Sam Altman. Stupid user, for trusting that product.

The agenticists want to give their agents agency over us. They want to shift all responsibility for decisions to “the algorithm”. Somewhere, somehow, we have to be able to identify the developers of this software and hold them completely liable for the actions of their products. You cannot blame malicious actors or stupid users. They’re just doing what they do. You are supposed to have the “smart” machines that can detect hazards. How can you launch products that you know are defective and are literally going to kill people? Is it like motor cars, where society calculates what is an acceptable kill rate for the convenience of this technology?

The karmic burden of the people pushing artificial intelligence is beyond computation. What incredible turbulence their fevered imaginations are causing in the astrality, not least in what used to be called “the job world”.

The astral world is above all the realm of dreams. I’m going to end this section by recommending a book by the Russian psychiatrist Olga Kharitidi, The Master of Lucid Dreams.

She meets a shamanic healer called Michael in Samarkand, who trains her to deal with transgenerational “spirits of trauma” — psychological traumas transmitted through the bloodline. According to Michael, the only way these traumas can be healed is through lucid dreams, in which you confront the real demons inside you in full consciousness. I have to warn, it’s a scary book, but this is the most direct engagement with astral issues I’ve ever seen in the psychological literature. This is how we’re going to heal ourselves, not with fake therapy from robots.

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6. The Necessary Condition for Ethical Tech

My thought experiment of a machine with etheric and astral substrates is mostly intended as a joke, to show how far away we are from having computers that actually think.

The humblest gardener humming a tuneless tune while turning a compost heap may be channeling a choir of angels in the astral plane. In the future, a furiously churning data centre may even capture the gardener’s humming, along with millions of conversations it is tracking in real time, and try to integrate this tune into its statistical calculations to make its predictions “live”. It will get nowhere near what the gardener is experiencing, is thinking and feeling.

Here’s a joke I once heard on Radio Eswatini. A scientist goes to God and says, you know, I’ve been studying living things very carefully. They’re not so complicated. I bet you I could create a living being in the laboratory.

God replies — “You do know that I created life from dirt?” and the scientist says yes, yes, first you start with some dirt.

And God replies — “No, first you have to go and make some dirt.”

I don’t think it’s out of bounds to tell the agenticists: if you actually want to make machines that think, you have to go and make some etheric substance.

To show how far this all goes, and to show how directly we may indeed be able to harness and use etheric forces in the future, we are going to close with one of Steiner’s most far-reaching predictions.

There is something that has bothered me for decades, ever since I first became aware of Nikola Tesla’s work and that of others in harnessing abundant energy.

If you look at humanity’s track record, the provision of abundant energy in itself can be guaranteed to be a disaster. There will be a vast increase in industrial activity, which — if nothing else changes — will be of the same polluting sort that we have now. Even if this energy source is pollution-free, humanity and its activities will inevitably proliferate and crowd and pollute the Earth.

Intuitively, I felt that we need a technology that will only work if it is used for benign ends. A technology that literally won’t work if it is used to create pollution.

So far, the best candidate I’ve seen for green technology is the work of Viktor Schauberger, who used “implosion energy” in water to generate power. His ideas were stolen by the U.S. military and have been kept secret since the end of World War 2. Schauberger actually started the green movement in Germany, so he was deeply concerned with pollution.

However, Rudolf Steiner pointed to another inventor, John Worrell Keely (1837—1898), as someone who was working on the right lines, using “vibratory sympathy” to produce “interatomic ether” from air and water. Keely is generally taken as a fraud these days, not least because his energy-creating machines often only worked with him in the room.

However, Steiner said:

Perhaps you know that Keely constructed an engine that only worked when he was there himself. He didn’t fool people with it, because he had in himself that driving force which comes out of the soul and can set mechanical things in motion. A driving force that can only be moral, that is the idea of the future; the most important force that must be implanted in culture if it is not to overturn itself. The mechanical and the moral will interpenetrate, because then the mechanical is nothing without the moral. We are standing on the brink of this today. In the future, machines will be driven not only with water and steam, but with spiritual power, with spiritual morality.

This is exactly where he was queried by the researcher Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, one of the pioneers of biodynamic agriculture. He asked Rudolf Steiner the following:

My question was therefore: Can another force or energy be found in nature which does not carry the tendency to atomise and analyse, but which builds up and synthesises? Would we be able to discover those constructive forces that make things live and grow? Would we be able to find corresponding constructive methods of research and possibly use this force for a different kind of technology, to drive machines?

Steiner replied as follows:

Yes, such a force really exists, but it is still undiscovered. It is what is generally called the ether (not the physical ether), the force that makes things grow and lives, for example, as the seed force in the seed. Before you can work with this force, you have to prove its presence. Just as we have reagents in chemistry, you have to find a reagent for this etheric force. It is also called etheric image power, because it creates the form, the shape, the structure of a living, growing thing. You could try crystallisation processes to which an organic substrate is added.

It will then be possible to develop machines that respond to and are driven by this force.

Pfeiffer was given instructions to carry out certain experiments, “which I must not describe in detail”, to identify and engage with this etheric force. When the results were communicated to Steiner, he commented as follows:

“The result of the experiment points to another force, not to the etheric, but to an astral force” (i.e. to forces that live in sentient matter, in the nerve, in the brain). The fact that the experiment led to this result was the answer of the spiritual world for him, and it meant that the time was not yet ripe to make use of the etheric force. I asked when the time would be ripe. Answer: “When the social conditions are such that this power cannot be misused for egoistic purposes. This would only be the case when the threefold structure of the social organism had been realised on at least a few areas of the earth. Until then, attempts to use etheric forces would remain unsuccessful or should not be undertaken at all.”

What Steiner is saying is that this etheric technology literally will not work until there is a benign social structure in place on the Earth. You may think this is completely insane, but the etheric energies Steiner is talking about come from spiritual beings who know exactly what is happening on our planet. They will not allow their energies to be used for corrupt and polluting ends.

I wrote an article recently about the Threefold Social Order that Steiner is talking about. You will see here that humanity has one chance left to implement this social transformation, which will ensure that economic, cultural and political structures do not clash with and contradict one another.

The Threefold Order is also the only way I can see that we can get Big Tech under some kind of rational control. Right now, agentics is shredding the fabric of society in terrifying ways. The hype is that machines will do the drudge work and human beings will be free to create. The reality is that machine-generated music and artwork is destroying the careers of creative artists right now, even as the hype ramps up.

The machines are hungry for more data, however, they always need more human creativity they can steal. For me, one of the most important issues is for humans to find ways to communicate their deepest thoughts and plans privately, without the machines knowing. Otherwise the robots will track and train on our attempts to overcome them.

One thing is for sure. Rudolf Steiner says that the rest of the history in this fourth epoch of the planet Earth is going to be spent negotiating the war between humans and machines. When machines come for our jobs, and tell us where we can live and whether we can have medical care, it’s war. And it’s a war we can only win by threefolding ourselves and threefolding our society.

The necessary condition for ethical tech is thus the Threefold Social Order. Let all the machines digest that thought.

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