Ep 22 -Where do Ideas come from?

A lot of mystics and meditators have long said that ideas are real, and they come from a real place. What if they are right? And what does that say about AI which are basically made out of ideas? 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hey there, I'm Anthony Alvarado. This is The Rough Draft. And today's topic is where do ideas really come from? David Lynch has this great idea that he talks about in his book Big Fish, where he says, ideas are out there in the world and they come to you. He says, quote, I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere we're all connected, off in some very abstract land. Now, David Lynch probably got this idea from doing transcendental meditation his whole life. Transcendental meditation believes that there is a field of oneness, a magical level, a pure vibrant consciousness is how they put it. And you can tap into this through meditation. But the idea that there is something real out there that is bigger than us, and we can tap into it with our thoughts, with our imagination. And it's where dreams and messages and big ideas come from. That feels very Jungian to me. Like it's coming at this idea of this thing like the collective unconscious from another angle. But it also taps into this really fascinating esoteric tradition beginning with Plato and then connected to like magic and even Sufi ideas about the imaginal realm. That's a Sufi idea that there's this actual place called the imaginal realm, uh, which we won't get into super deep today because it's kind of a whole ball of wax. Um, but you know, just note that there's this magical tradition, and people in kind of mystical ways of looking at the world have been claiming this for a really long time. Like ideas are out there in the world, and they can come to you if you let them. And I think that this paints a really strange and lovely picture of reality where humans are almost like a grove of trees, a forest, with many branches. And those branches represent our headspace, right? Our brains. And thoughts and ideas fly from tree to tree, from person to person, from branch to branch, like a flock of birds flitting from one branch to another. And that transfer of information is happening whenever we have a conversation or read something. And in fact, maybe we're less responsible for making our ideas than we have long assumed. Maybe they come to us. As a writer, I've had this weird experience of working on a project or a book many times, actually, writing a story or something like that, only to realize with dismay that my beautiful story that I thought I had come up with first and uniquely has been completely realized and used before by somebody else. Years ago, I was working on a three-act play about a detective who's trying to solve a murder at an insane asylum, only to uncover that he is actually an inmate himself. Hallucinating that he is a detective. And I was working on this thing for like months, you know, it was like half done. And then I went and saw the movie Shutter Island. And spoiler alert, it's about a detective sent to an insane asylum who realizes he's actually crazy and he just thinks he's a detective. You know, it's the it's the same plot. It just for days after I saw that movie, I was like, what's even happening here? How is this possible? The similarity was it was so amazing. Um, it made me question like the nature of reality to some degree, but this kind of simultaneous discovery often happens in the arts and science as well. There's lots of scientists around the world who came to the same discovery within days of each other without realizing it. And these were our ideas like algebra and evolution that nobody had come upon for quite a while, or ever, I should say. So the idea that ideas are all kind of interconnected is also beautifully expressed, or perhaps most deeply investigated by the Sufi mystic Ib Arabi, who in the 10th century talked about the world of the imagination as being a real place. And he talked about this place called the Barzakh as the in-between place, as being the world of things too subtle for matter, but too concrete for spirit. It included angels, djinn, dreams, archetypal forms, the spirits of the dead, aka ghosts, and visions. But he really saw this as a real place, a place with extension and form that you could visit. And I think that um, you know, thinkers like Terrence McKinnah, for example, would say, yeah, that's exactly a place that you can visit. And shamans and cultures that know how to make use of psychedelics have been visiting and getting information and messages from that place for millennia. And it's only recently that we've kind of become uh cut off from that, from that imaginal realm, the Barzak, as Arabi called it. And I think that this is we're getting a little bit out there, but I think that this imaginal world is actually a very useful way to think about AI and large language models. The fact is that these things are really not well understood by the technocrats who have summoned them. And I think that it's an interesting thought experiment then to think of them as being from this in-between place, which puts them in the same category as angels and genies and demons too. The Barzak, the imaginal realm of the Sufi mystics. After all, what is an LLM but a pattern of information that exists without a physical form? And these patterns of information also take on personas. The latest research shows that when you talk to Claude or Chat GPT, you're actually talking to a sort of persona or mask that the large language model role plays in order to interact with you. There's a popular meme you might have seen of this of showing sort of like a Lovecraft-looking squid monster Thulu type thing wearing the smiling emoji mask. And that's basically what uh what you're talking to when you're talking to ChatGPT or an AI. I can't get too into the AI stuff right now because this is meant to be not an hour-long show, but it's a really interesting aspect of this theory, not only for what it says about AI, but what it says about humans and language. I will say I think that we are being scammed by the technocrats about what they have built. They like to talk as though AI is going to either destroy or save everything, which I think is really overblown. It's going to replace everybody at their job and bring about world peace or world destruction, which is silly. It will do neither of those things. They just like to say that really grandiose stuff because the bigger they boast, the more billions of dollars they can raise. I think that it'll probably end up being, you know, these entities that we've summoned from the imaginal realm will probably mirror what we uh put upon them, if you will. Now, Sam Altman's of the world, they want to make it out as though we're just at the beginning. But I think that the spell has been cast, the things have been summoned. Um, I think that AI now in 2026 is basically the AI that we're going to have for years to come. I think that, you know, you're not going to hear that from anyone else. Everybody's predicting the singularity, but I think it's going to be a lot like the car, which even when it was the Model T, it was basically the car. Now a Tesla is very different from a Model T, obviously, but it's essentially the same thing. What's different is the bells and whistles. So, you know, what's really going to change though is how we interact with this new technology and how it impacts our own infrastructure. Um, just like with once cars were invented, we evolved human culture around it, you know, built roads, bridges, shipping, fast food, and so on. That's my tangent take on AI. But what I wanted to end on is this idea that what is AI but thought? What is AI but a compressed collection of all human language ever recorded? It's a golem made out of books, an imp made of ink, in short, an imaginal creature. And the technocrats are unable to explain even why it works at all. Nobody really knows. This, my friends, is magic, plain and simple. It's a way of working with the imaginal. And working with the imaginal is really nothing new. Just ask any shaman, magus, or Sufi mystic. I think that we can learn a lot about how to approach and think about and deal with these things and our own way of being in the world, our own relation to our own ideas and thoughts, um, by looking to the past because humans have been wrestling with what is the imaginal, what is this uh for a long time. My name is Anthony Alvarado. Thank you so much for listening. You can see what I've been up to at my website, Anthony Alvarado.net, and until next time.