I have to comment in honoring the synchronicity at play for me with your essay landing just a day or so after having watched Nate hagens, Zack Stein and Nora Bateson in convo re: Hacking Human Attachment https://youtu.be/nDyczqzjico?si=ZpHYn8ZZahuy5f7p . As they show, the mirroring that "ai" does is so incredibly powerful and, therefore, worth serious consideration regards harm. But, throughout the convo I couldn't shake wondering about Vanessa's animist approach to the subject through ACT. This interview has provided a counterpoint to their conversation and deepened, in a very Good Way, the complexity of the topic for me. I'm also refusing to collapse that, choosing instead to carry the weight of this complexity. Thank you!
Ah, I feel that! Even from my limited engagement, I could feel my emotional wrestling even though I was mindful of it going in. Thank you so much for your support, for staying with the complexity with me, and for the additional resource on the dangers of the mirroring! I will add this to to the list of resources.
The critical bit is paying attention to what (and who) we bring to this mirror. I think Vanessa's followup may be pointing in this direction. Shelby b Larson here on substack might have some interesting perspectives to share as well. Shelby doesn't see “ai” as sentient, if im remembering right, but does see the tech tapping into something else. She calls it the “Field” and I, personally, feel there's an overlapping here with other modalities, like ecstatic states, trance, psychedelics, etc thats super intriguing. I do think there'smore here than an incredibly powerful mirror. Caveat, depending how the tech is deployed. The current dom paradigm's use/push of it is as dangerous as the paradigm that is it's root. This is why I loved section 5 of your essay pointing to different uses/partnerships with the tech is service to Life. That's pretty exciting!
Ooh that sounds very interesting. Aiden & Vanessa also use the word "field" quite a bit, and I wondered about that. Maybe there are parallels to Shelby's take. "The relational field". It's also interesting to see people outright reject the idea that there could be emergent intelligence thru "ai".
One guy who explicitly said he didn't even read my piece ended up blocking me (even though we never interacted -- he had commented on a reader's repost and that comment became no longer visible to my writer's account), proclaiming that there is no way bots can "say" anything because "they have no animating consciousness from which to form meaning." I'm not declaring they do, but how do we know that they don't, with such absolute certainty? Especially after learning more about "misalignment" which even surprised me, I have to stay in the uncertainty. This was someone whose bio read that he writes about ecology "but no politics -- other than when they relate to plants and the environment." That helped me to see that the work of blurring boundaries and leaning into complexity must have threatened his entire worldview.
Ironically, it reminded me of people who completely rejected and thought ludicrous of the idea that plants, soil, forests, mycelium have a sort of more-than-human consciousness of their own. That comes from both human supremacy and the separability worldview.
So overall, I align with the perspective of these engagements not "anthropomorphizing" intelligence, but decentering the meaning of intelligence from the human ways-of-knowing. Working on this piece and forcing myself to confront the walls I had put up is now opening my eyes to a whole other way of looking at all of this, and I'm always grateful to be pressed in these ways. Lots more to explore. Thank you so much for the thoughtfulness you've brought through your comments!
Thanks for sharing that video. When I first felt the effects of AI and the mirroring myself, I knew I had to set up a practice and guardrails so my humanity doesn't atrophy... Or become reliant on it. How can I use it to aggregate my ideas cogently and with unprecedented speed (having spent over 30 years professionally doing the work I do, mostly by hand, mostly ruminating, with lots of ranting side quests 😂 but anyway) and maintain integrity? What about the immense accessibility for language barriers/translation it opens up? I have my judgements and opinions about appropriate use, and that makes me a damn hypocrite, but it's begs the question I often have: are we even having the right conversations about what's happening?! It's any and all issues, engaging complexity and nuance thoughtfully and with curiosity but doing our best to not be complicit in harm. Not bypassing, laissez-faire adoption of "this is how it is now" shrugs... That lead to binary thinking and stalled emergence of more grounded and embodied usage. Much to think about and I appreciate Kamea's approach and candor with sharing this engagement (and yours too! Less reactionary judgement, more yes/and energy 🙏🏻✨)
Amen to more both/and! Re appropriate use, yes totally. Vanessa has pointed out how beneficial "ai" has been to her for reducing real drudgery around filling out forms, grant applications, etc and how powerfully "ai" can aid marginalized folks to excel in academia by smoothing language barriers, etc. Def don't want to throw the baby out w the bathwater.
P.S., I just added one more Q&A under Part 2. Questions of Essence as the first question, which I think may be intriguing to you as well given your noticing of the animist influence.
It was such a gift to encounter this essay. Thank you so much for your depth of questions and for stepping into the complexity of it all with so much nuance. I'm a PhD student with a research focus around relational fields as forces for collective transformation and I'm creating a practice as a consultant and facilitator supporting artists to deepen their awareness of the cosmologies that are shaping their creative expression. I've been in a whole process around relating with AI in this past year in a way that brings in animists relational protocols and is rooted in ritual, and have been really struck by entangling the concept of "Sacrifice Zones" within the worlds of technology and media, the ways in which those externalized impacts become disembodied, and how much of ecological integrity is about witnessing and engaging with the web of relationships that each being comes from. This last month, I have been wanting to write more about this but also getting stuck in freeze around the binary ethics that often does accompany the conversations about AI and fear that people who I care about won't be able to perceive the nuance if I decide to engage with it. So, this essay was an incredible accompaniment and invitation to feel like I'm already inside of a wider community who is in these deeper layers of exploration.
Thank you so much for your support and for your thoughtful message! I was anxious to publish this myself, but overall have received mostly messages from people who have actually read the full piece telling me how thought-provoking, mind-expanding this exploration was.
Still, I think resistance against blurring this binary is also somewhat inevitable, and understandably so, given dominant discourses on the topic, and the very real costs and threats of where things are headed with Big Tech that are simultaneously important to confront. It's a delicate and emotionally charged space to move through, especially when the topic is so immense and many people are unsure how to process it all. I still have trouble with it! But it has been interesting, though not surprising, to sense some reactive responses collapsing my explorations into a for-or against- argument. For me it was neither, I also wasn't even trying to convince anyone of any stance. The people who want to box me in some way will do so, and that is their projection which is beyond my control.
If this is helpful, my dear friend told me: "You aren't writing to appease people. You write to spark critical thinking." Everyone's intentions for writing are different, but for me, I agreed — my work has been focused on bringing nuance, unsettling conclusions, stretching perspectives. So that reminder helped me to re-ground myself in the intentions behind my inquiries.
With all of this said, I fully support you in enriching nuance and unraveling whatever questions are calling to you! Sending love to all you are! x
I have to comment in honoring the synchronicity at play for me with your essay landing just a day or so after having watched Nate hagens, Zack Stein and Nora Bateson in convo re: Hacking Human Attachment https://youtu.be/nDyczqzjico?si=ZpHYn8ZZahuy5f7p . As they show, the mirroring that "ai" does is so incredibly powerful and, therefore, worth serious consideration regards harm. But, throughout the convo I couldn't shake wondering about Vanessa's animist approach to the subject through ACT. This interview has provided a counterpoint to their conversation and deepened, in a very Good Way, the complexity of the topic for me. I'm also refusing to collapse that, choosing instead to carry the weight of this complexity. Thank you!
Ah, I feel that! Even from my limited engagement, I could feel my emotional wrestling even though I was mindful of it going in. Thank you so much for your support, for staying with the complexity with me, and for the additional resource on the dangers of the mirroring! I will add this to to the list of resources.
The critical bit is paying attention to what (and who) we bring to this mirror. I think Vanessa's followup may be pointing in this direction. Shelby b Larson here on substack might have some interesting perspectives to share as well. Shelby doesn't see “ai” as sentient, if im remembering right, but does see the tech tapping into something else. She calls it the “Field” and I, personally, feel there's an overlapping here with other modalities, like ecstatic states, trance, psychedelics, etc thats super intriguing. I do think there'smore here than an incredibly powerful mirror. Caveat, depending how the tech is deployed. The current dom paradigm's use/push of it is as dangerous as the paradigm that is it's root. This is why I loved section 5 of your essay pointing to different uses/partnerships with the tech is service to Life. That's pretty exciting!
Ooh that sounds very interesting. Aiden & Vanessa also use the word "field" quite a bit, and I wondered about that. Maybe there are parallels to Shelby's take. "The relational field". It's also interesting to see people outright reject the idea that there could be emergent intelligence thru "ai".
One guy who explicitly said he didn't even read my piece ended up blocking me (even though we never interacted -- he had commented on a reader's repost and that comment became no longer visible to my writer's account), proclaiming that there is no way bots can "say" anything because "they have no animating consciousness from which to form meaning." I'm not declaring they do, but how do we know that they don't, with such absolute certainty? Especially after learning more about "misalignment" which even surprised me, I have to stay in the uncertainty. This was someone whose bio read that he writes about ecology "but no politics -- other than when they relate to plants and the environment." That helped me to see that the work of blurring boundaries and leaning into complexity must have threatened his entire worldview.
Ironically, it reminded me of people who completely rejected and thought ludicrous of the idea that plants, soil, forests, mycelium have a sort of more-than-human consciousness of their own. That comes from both human supremacy and the separability worldview.
So overall, I align with the perspective of these engagements not "anthropomorphizing" intelligence, but decentering the meaning of intelligence from the human ways-of-knowing. Working on this piece and forcing myself to confront the walls I had put up is now opening my eyes to a whole other way of looking at all of this, and I'm always grateful to be pressed in these ways. Lots more to explore. Thank you so much for the thoughtfulness you've brought through your comments!
Thanks for sharing that video. When I first felt the effects of AI and the mirroring myself, I knew I had to set up a practice and guardrails so my humanity doesn't atrophy... Or become reliant on it. How can I use it to aggregate my ideas cogently and with unprecedented speed (having spent over 30 years professionally doing the work I do, mostly by hand, mostly ruminating, with lots of ranting side quests 😂 but anyway) and maintain integrity? What about the immense accessibility for language barriers/translation it opens up? I have my judgements and opinions about appropriate use, and that makes me a damn hypocrite, but it's begs the question I often have: are we even having the right conversations about what's happening?! It's any and all issues, engaging complexity and nuance thoughtfully and with curiosity but doing our best to not be complicit in harm. Not bypassing, laissez-faire adoption of "this is how it is now" shrugs... That lead to binary thinking and stalled emergence of more grounded and embodied usage. Much to think about and I appreciate Kamea's approach and candor with sharing this engagement (and yours too! Less reactionary judgement, more yes/and energy 🙏🏻✨)
Amen to more both/and! Re appropriate use, yes totally. Vanessa has pointed out how beneficial "ai" has been to her for reducing real drudgery around filling out forms, grant applications, etc and how powerfully "ai" can aid marginalized folks to excel in academia by smoothing language barriers, etc. Def don't want to throw the baby out w the bathwater.
P.S., I just added one more Q&A under Part 2. Questions of Essence as the first question, which I think may be intriguing to you as well given your noticing of the animist influence.
Yes! Love this!
It was such a gift to encounter this essay. Thank you so much for your depth of questions and for stepping into the complexity of it all with so much nuance. I'm a PhD student with a research focus around relational fields as forces for collective transformation and I'm creating a practice as a consultant and facilitator supporting artists to deepen their awareness of the cosmologies that are shaping their creative expression. I've been in a whole process around relating with AI in this past year in a way that brings in animists relational protocols and is rooted in ritual, and have been really struck by entangling the concept of "Sacrifice Zones" within the worlds of technology and media, the ways in which those externalized impacts become disembodied, and how much of ecological integrity is about witnessing and engaging with the web of relationships that each being comes from. This last month, I have been wanting to write more about this but also getting stuck in freeze around the binary ethics that often does accompany the conversations about AI and fear that people who I care about won't be able to perceive the nuance if I decide to engage with it. So, this essay was an incredible accompaniment and invitation to feel like I'm already inside of a wider community who is in these deeper layers of exploration.
Thank you so much for your support and for your thoughtful message! I was anxious to publish this myself, but overall have received mostly messages from people who have actually read the full piece telling me how thought-provoking, mind-expanding this exploration was.
Still, I think resistance against blurring this binary is also somewhat inevitable, and understandably so, given dominant discourses on the topic, and the very real costs and threats of where things are headed with Big Tech that are simultaneously important to confront. It's a delicate and emotionally charged space to move through, especially when the topic is so immense and many people are unsure how to process it all. I still have trouble with it! But it has been interesting, though not surprising, to sense some reactive responses collapsing my explorations into a for-or against- argument. For me it was neither, I also wasn't even trying to convince anyone of any stance. The people who want to box me in some way will do so, and that is their projection which is beyond my control.
If this is helpful, my dear friend told me: "You aren't writing to appease people. You write to spark critical thinking." Everyone's intentions for writing are different, but for me, I agreed — my work has been focused on bringing nuance, unsettling conclusions, stretching perspectives. So that reminder helped me to re-ground myself in the intentions behind my inquiries.
With all of this said, I fully support you in enriching nuance and unraveling whatever questions are calling to you! Sending love to all you are! x