3/25/24: DEEPFAKING YOUR DEATH W/ MATTHEW JAMES BAILEY

All biometric data, DNA data, and everything that makes you who you are can be replicated and deep faked – the ability to recreate the finer points of what makes you an individual, Only this time, you are digitally living in an advanced simulation, like in the movies, “The Matrix” and “Total Recall”. Could this be what our existence is now, only that through our machines we may be able to resurrect the dead for a new posthuman paradise? As we become more acclimated to AI technology and virtual reality, will we be able to distinguish what is real and what is an artificial existence in the metaverse? Tonight on Ground Zero (7-10pm, pacific time), Clyde Lewis talks with global innovator of AI Ethics, Matthew James Bailey about DEEPFAKING YOUR DEATH.

SHOW SAMPLE: 

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: 

It was 25 years ago this month that one movie changed the way we see ourselves in the real world. A Young man named Neo sits across from another man who appears to be some mysterious man in black holding in his hand a red capsule and the blue capsule. The man is named Morpheus and he tells young Neo that his reality is a lie — and that the only way to know the truth about human existence all he has to do is choose one of the pills.

“You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill…and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Neo chooses the red pill and learns the terrible truth that the advent of artificial intelligence allowed machines to take over the Earth. All human beings are perpetually asleep in vats, exploited by their AI masters as a source of energy. The world they think they experience is actually a virtual reality known as “The Matrix.”

This idea has grown into what can be called simulation theory or hypothesis.

The simulation hypothesis proposes that what humans experience as the world is a simulated reality, such as a computer simulation in which humans themselves are constructs There has been much debate over this topic, ranging from philosophical discourse to practical applications in computing.

Another movie that deals with the idea that life is a simulation is The Truman Show, which triggered a mental disorder called Truman Syndrome.

People with Truman Syndrome or Truman Show delusion is a preoccupying belief that the world has changed in some way that other people are in on, which is interpreted as indicating that everything is a prefabricated world –where everyone lives on a huge set and living a part in a script.

I am sure many of us from time to time have experienced things that have us wonder if we are living in a construct — or that we are living in a game of our choosing — that perhaps we lived in a preexisting life where we decided to enter this metaverse, choose a character and then live it out –your life is a construct, and perhaps your afterlife will be a construct that you choose to play in.

We have all heard the phrase “life is but a dream” and perhaps this is what the philosophers meant when they constantly indicated that life at times is an illusion.

Living in a Matrix — for some has been accepted and presented as an alternative view of how we live our lives in some play being watched by architects, Gods, or even sympathizing aliens who see this as a history lesson,

“The Matrix” was a box office hit in 1999 and spawned two sequels in 2003 and another in 2021.

That one was called Matrix Resurrections.

These films became an important cultural influence. The term “red-pilled” is now widely used online to describe someone who has grown skeptical of the way political reality is usually depicted.

The power of the film lies in the way it adapts one of the oldest allegories in the history of philosophy. In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates describes prisoners who have spent their entire lives manacled in a cave. A fire behind them casts the shadows of objects on a wall in front of them, and because shadows are all they have ever seen, they assume that what appears before their eyes is reality.

One prisoner breaks free, however, and makes his way to the surface of the Earth, where he beholds the sun and the real world. Ultimately he returns to the cave, seeking to convince his fellowman that reality is out there to be discovered. Plato argues that the philosopher is like this escaped prisoner. It is his job to free humanity from illusion and teach us what is truly real.

The allegory of the cave is one of the indelible images in the history of thought, a metaphor for the capacity of human beings to break free from falsehood. Morpheus and Neo have been widely recognized as Plato’s heirs, and philosopher-kings for the digital age.

But Plato also warns that the prisoners in the cave will resist being freed and that they will hate the philosopher who tries to teach them unfamiliar truths: “If anyone tried to lose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

However, we are now facing a moment in our history where reality fades and the artificial is preferred and this casts doubt on the future of mankind.

Everyone talks about the transhuman digital existence — and yet no one sees the condition of posthuman existence, where you give up or deep fake your death to move on as something that resembles more of a machine.

In posthuman thought it is difficult to even assume that one would enjoy or even realize that they can be forced to live a digital afterlife — one where the matrix constructed would be a form of hell where hollow consciousness is pervasive and the illusion to the living is your continued projection into a computer or screen.

You then become that digital shadow in an artificial Plato’s cave, going from one simulation to another.

We all know that there is the carbon you –that is your body and you that is light and heat — that is a less poetic way of indicating that you have a spirit — or a divine spark that fires up the engines that make you who you are.

It’s theorized that all the electricity that keeps our bodies moving is the same that manifests spirits.

After a person dies, the energy in the body goes into the environment—that’s where all organisms’ energy goes after death. When we die, our energy is released in the form of heat.

In the movie “The Matrix” the machines learned that if they could harness that energy they could use it to remain operational. Every human was seen as a battery.

In the film Morpheus tells Neo that human beings produce 25,000 BTUs of body heat, No doubt that we generate energy and that electronic reaction is what keeps us alive — and it is that heat and charged particles that are released when we die.

But the task at hand would be to quantify it and then transfer it to an avatar or even a computer so that it could remain in stasis until the time comes to place it again in a carbon form — or perhaps the person would prefer remaining in an avatar that decides on a Deep fake afterlife — roaming the eighth sphere of existence.

Rudolf Steiner explained in the early 1900s that the ultimate goal of the adversarial powers is to draw as much of humanity into the Eighth Sphere as is possible. If you imagine a future where people’s minds are permanently connected to the internet, which by then will likely be a quantum internet controlling all aspects of life both real and virtual; the virtual made up of countless worlds indistinguishable from physical reality, then you will have some idea of how consciousness will be controlled, harvested and bottled up like Data — just like DNA is being cataloged for the new final solution whatever it will be.

Steiner gave 10 lectures in 1917 and in one of them he described the future and how the eighth sphere would influence mankind.

“In truth, therefore, our Earth —the Fourth Sphere — is simply not what it appears outwardly to be. Were it really to consist of atoms, all these atoms would still be impregnated by formations belonging to the Eighth Sphere — which are perceptible only to visionary clairvoyance. These formations are present everywhere; so too is the specter-like content of the Eighth Sphere which can therefore be perceived just as actual specters are perceived.

All earthly beings and existence are involved here. Lucifer and Ahriman strive unceasingly to draw from the Earth’s substances whatever they can snatch, to form their Eighth Sphere which then, when it is sufficiently advanced, will be detached from the Earth and go its own way in the Cosmos together with Lucifer and Ahriman.”.

If the Eight Sphere is the metaverse, then I contend that Steiner saw it as the domain of Lucifer and the Antichrist.

Within spiritual science, Rudolf Steiner used the names Lucifer and Ahriman to designate two opposing forces towards mankind.

Rudolf Steiner and his adherents explain how the workings of Lucifer and Ahriman are connected with the forces of man-made electricity and magnetism, the polarities that information processing technologies are based upon.

But this is an oversimplification — it was simply an entanglement we see with mankind and technologies that create an anti-life and anti-spiritual experience.

Anti-spiritual forces are precursors to anti-life actions and many see Transhumanism as the bridge to extinction like a thousand paper cuts as we are beguiled to trade our bodies for avatars and our souls for bytes in a technological Eden.

Imagine a future time when the internet is a quantum internet and much of our technology uses quantum-based processors. As strange as it may sound, the processing will not be taking place within the physical hardware but, rather, the physical hardware will create a condition where the processors can access and utilize the parallel, non-physical dimension of our reality system known as the Eighth Sphere.

What we are projecting is a future with interchangeable hyperreality but arguably, the Mark of the Beast in the initiation into the pit of the metaverse and eventually the full surrender to the portal to the other side.

All Biometric data, DNA Data, and everything that makes you who you are can be replicated –deep faked, the ability to recreate the finer points of what makes you an individual,

Only this time you are digitally living in an advanced simulation.

Could this be, what our existence is now, only that through our machines we may be able to resurrect the dead for a new posthuman paradise.

The Eight Sphere is to be sucked into a technological hell that will eventually mean death.

Steiner spoke about the coming takeover of scientific materialism and the need for people to awaken to the “spiritual realms”. Steiner left us with the following warning – that the “forces of darkness” would attempt to prevent humanity from developing spiritual inclinations. Here is what Steiner said more than 100 years ago:

“I have told you that the spirits of darkness are going to inspire their human hosts, in whom they will be dwelling, to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination towards spirituality out of people’s souls when they are very young, and this will happen in a roundabout way through the living body. Today, bodies are vaccinated against one thing and another; in the future, children will be vaccinated with a substance that will certainly be possible to produce, and this will make them immune, so that they do not develop foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life — ‘foolish’ here, of course, in the eyes of materialists.”

This quote is fairly harrowing considering what we’re currently witnessing, which can only be described as a global psychosis – a mockery of informed consent and a vicious attack on humanity itself. But what Steiner says warrants further analysis, because what he’s talking about in 1917 isn’t just some kind of poison acting on the human nervous system, but a substance capable of preventing people from developing “foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life”.

What Steiner may be implying here, then, is that there is a genetic/physiologic component involved in spiritual experience. That there is something that can interfere with that synergy and taint the spiritual and genetic connection to God.

With an A.I. Afterlife, there is no connection to God — or some spiritual renewal — it is all artificial.

Steiner’s words at the time must have sounded like lurid science fiction but when seen in the light of current and future technological developments, they stand as a prescient warning of a terrible future that awaits humanity if we continue blindly along our current course of technology development and continue to deny any reality beyond the senses.

We face a pivotal moment in human history when binary technology starts to enter the body of human beings, changing the evolutionary path of those who accept it. Bio-integrated quantum technology would, ‘if developed’, entangle human beings with the Eighth Sphere.

The ‘system’ seeks to create a world of forced illusionary oneness. A world where there will be no room for individuality or freedom – we will have to give these things up for what we are being told is a ‘greater good.’

Lost would be the “At Onement” of mankind and God–and the sacrifice that was made –that signified redemption over death.

Not only are we recognizing the anniversary of The Matrix release this year also marks the anniversary 50 years ago, but the philosopher Robert Nozick also foresaw the themes of The Matrix – and much more about contemporary life – by proposing an intriguing thought experiment. In his 1974 book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he asked his readers: would you willingly plug your brain into a simulated “experience machine” if you could live out your deepest desires? Would it matter to you if it wasn’t “real”?

In the current moment, where virtual experiences are becoming more prevalent and intertwined with our daily lives, and technology can increasingly simulate pieces of reality, Nozick’s question feels more prescient than ever. Whether spending an afternoon in the metaverse, using a chatbot as a stand-in for a human friend, or creating an AI-generated video, it is asked of us repeatedly in small but important ways.

Similar to the Matrix, Nozick’s experience machine would be able to provide the person plugged into it with any experiences they wanted – like “writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book”.

No one who entered the machine would remember doing so or would realize at any point that they were within it. But in Nozick’s version, there were no malevolent AIs; it would be “provided by friendly and trustworthy beings from another galaxy”. If you knew all that, he asked, would you enter the experience machine for the rest of your life?

If offered an opportunity to deep fake your afterlife and experience it fully –would you choose that?

The idea would be tempting as your afterlife can be programmed for adventure after adventure — much like what you are living in now — but exceptionally more vibrant and stimulating.

Preferring the hyperreal over the real.

“We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”–is a Book by Philip K. Dick where a mild-mannered worker decides that he wants an adventure on Mars… rather than going there literally he is provided the experience through a machine hook-up.

The story eventually became the movie “Total Recall.”

Day-to-day, we also still spend huge swaths of our day interacting with digital worlds through our phones and other devices. As algorithms have become increasingly tailored, we often consume information that fits closely with our preferred conception of the world. Is the only thing that determines whether these encounters are “real” our experiences of them? What matters to us, beyond the pleasure provided by these platforms and technologies?

As we get more familiar with technology, especially virtual technology, we are going to care less about what is reality and not even think that something is virtual rather than non-virtual.

The brain responds the same way to both real and artificial stimuli — and so we must conclude that if it is possible to jack your afterlife it could be done as well.

Living forever in the metaverse.

SHOW GUEST: 

Matthew James Bailey is an internationally recognized pioneer of global revolutions such as Artificial Intelligence, Smart Cities, and The Internet of Things.

He is the author of the playbook for the Age of AI – Inventing World 3.0 – Evolutionary Ethics for Artificial Intelligence™ – https://aiethics.world/the-book. Matthew has been recognized as a Who’s Who in Artificial Intelligence and is a Visiting Scholar to the National Institute of Aerospace and NASA. He is the founder of AIEthics.World – https://aiethics.world  – an organization providing leadership training for artificial intelligence and new inventions such as Ethical AI and a new ethical genome for AI.

Matthew has assisted multiple territories and global technology companies to successfully position themselves in the digital future.

His website is: https://inventingworld3.com/

Written by Ron Patton