We relying on an immense collection of communication data. Precisely by abstracting from who said what and only counting what has been said. An LLM has the artificial voice of a collective us. But based on the concrete prompt or series of prompts it is fed by a person talking to it, it generates a specifically tailored and simulated eye through which the big we speaks. ChatGPT and DeepSeek impersonate eyes when we speak to them. LLMs simultaneously impersonate millions of eyes when they speak to millions of people at any given time. This reminds me of the multitude of alabaster eye idols that impersonated gods and could simultaneously speak to thousands of prehistoric people 5,000 years ago. The Alabasta eye idols, conveyed a sense of gods. The LLMs convey a sense of AI. When speaking to AI, we develop a sense of AI speaking back to us.

The Dao Deing, the first foundational text of the Dawist tradition, probably stems from centuries of oral traditions going back at least to the middle of the first millennium B.CE. The earliest known written versions from around the 3rd century BC do not indicate an author. They are written down collections of oral sayings. Then in the 2n century BCE the text is eventually ascribed to a man named Laa and legends about how he supposedly wrote it down begin to circulate. At this time deep into the first millennium BCE there already lots of non-religious texts as well. Texts including religious ones are now often regarded as written by identifiable authors. People read texts in their own voice or if they can’t read they hear someone else read them out in a human and not in a divine voice. Along with the silence of the gods, the rise of writing and a partial secularization, intelligence is insourced to thinking selves as authors and readers. A long history of the disenchantment of communication takes place. Religion doesn’t disappear but it loses its monopoly of collecting, transmitting and authorizing all relevant knowledge.

Eva M. Knodt, translator of Niklas Luhmann ’s book “Social Systems” calls this systemic rift between minds and communication “Hermeneutic Despair”, and she illustrates it with a scene from a theater play. She writes in Danton’s Death, Georg Büchner, dramatizes the primal scene of hermeneutic despair. The protagonist makes a silent gesture, toward his lover’s forehead ,and says to her, “There, there, what lies behind this? To understand one another, we would have to break open each other’s skulls and pull the thoughts out of the fibers of our brains.”

Niklas Luhmann writes, “Categorically”, human beings cannot communicate. Not even the brains can communicate. Not even the conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.

Philosophically we should distinguish between this first person mode of thinking thinking with a sense of self and the self as a supposed thing. The thing self is about as elusive as its conceptual predecessor the soul. Neither souls nor selves can be pinned down as anything concrete.

If you look into the history of ideas east and west, you will easily see that the understanding of the self is entirely contingent. It varies greatly from ancient concepts of the soul. Many cultures actually believed there was not one but several souls in each person to the modern enlightenment concept of singular sovereign individuals. The sense of self is psychological and it changes throughout a person’s lifetime. Historically and culturally, the supposed thing self also changed a lot. It is a very flexible construct.

From a systems theory perspective, this construct of the self is an effect of the coupling between mental and social systems. When we’re born, we already have consciousness, but we can’t speak. When we grow up, we learn to think in language. Language becomes the shared medium between thought and society. We learn to think in the form of some inner dialogue, talking to ourselves or others in language. Just think of a child playing with its toys and thinking aloud while doing so. The coupling of thought processes and social processes through language results in the incredible effective illusion that’s DeepSeeks expression again that there’s a self in the mind of each person who inhabits it who is it and who is the one that speaks.

I mentioned Wikipedia as a potential endpoint of the age of medium data, but Wikipedia is internet-based. Therefore, it’s somehow already part of big data. Or isn’t it? Well, Wikipedia still functions on the basis of personally authored texts. Individual people. It’s possible to trace who the contributors are write entries based on sources which again in many cases are attributed to individual authors.

But LLMs like most AI tech work differently. There’s no author at work and the data they use are not traced back to authors. LLMs and AI tech in general operate by statistically and algorithmically processing big data regardless of authorship. An immense amount of data is accessible to AI tech. AI ops processing these data produce AI talk. You can give AI a task and it responds in natural language. We know this. The magnitude of the data makes authors obsolete in light of the vast amount of communication. Who said what is of little interest. What literally counts for AI talk is which word is both hindsight and foresight most likely to follow another. In big data, communication is liberated from the selves that we are conditioned to attribute communication to.

In 1976, the American psychologist Julian Jaynes published a book titled [The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind]. It is beautifully written and caused quite a stir beyond academia. It impressed writers like Philip K. Dick and Douglas Adams, and the message “your bicameral mind” — “mind your bicameral” — was written on a David Bowie record. Hippies liked it because it was quite psychedelic. Today it’s almost forgotten.

Jaynes’s controversial claim was that before the second millennium BCE, there was no consciousness as we know it today, because of a supposedly pervasive bicameral morphology of the brain back then. He argued that in bicamerality, the right brain hemisphere was producing language. It spoke, and the left hemisphere listened and obeyed. Human thinking operated by auditory hallucinations. People heard voices talking to them.

Daily life in the age of bicamerality, Jaynes said, consisted mostly of routines. People would do their daily chores more or less automatically without much need for thought. In situations of stress, or when deliberate action was required, or perhaps when they had nothing to do, they would think. Then they would produce and hear hallucinated commands in their mind, which they thought were spoken by gods or by their authorities — by kings or priests — and then they would follow these commands.

Jaynes provides a lot of evidence for his theory. It’s a long book. One major source of evidence is prehistoric artifacts. Here’s one example: this is one of many thousands of alabaster idols that can be held in the hand, from about 3,300 BC, excavated at Brak on an upper tributary of the Euphrates. The stag is a symbol of the goddess Ninasak. Such eye idols and similar little statues were found all over the world. Jaynes explains them as some sort of prehistoric smartphones. People would carry them along and hold them in their hands. Whenever the need to think arose, they’d look into the eyes of the idol, and in their mind they would hear the idol speak and tell them what to do — like talking to ChatGPT on your phone today. You may already guess what I’ll be getting at at the end of this video, but let’s get back to Jaynes for a bit.

Another major source of evidence for him is ancient literature that documents earlier oral traditions. The [Iliad] and the [Odyssey], ascribed to Homer, feature lots of still partly bicameral characters who act by listening to the gods. The same is the case for many characters in the biblical Old Testament. Jaynes also claims that auditory hallucinations best explain ancient social hierarchies with supposedly godlike rulers on top, architecture centered around dwelling spaces of gods and spirits, and large-scale building projects such as the Egyptian pyramids.

Jaynes assumes that at the end of the second millennium, bicamerality broke down for a number of reasons. For instance, because of population growth, environmental changes, warfare, and trade, people increasingly dealt with others who spoke different languages. Societies became more multilingual. The invention of writing weakened orality and changed the methods of thinking and memorizing. These and other factors triggered physiological changes in the brain and the rise of self-oriented consciousness. The self was no longer a mere addressee of commands spoken by supposed gods or leaders. It became the author of the words that were thought and spoken.

Jaynes thinks that the disappearance of the voices was by no means experienced as a liberation of the self. To the contrary, it was first experienced as a tragedy. The gods became silent. They retreated from humans. The retreat of the gods was a crisis, a loss of orientation. This is a stone altar made for the Assyrian tyrant Tukulti-Ninurta I around 1230 BCE. Jaynes writes: “Tukulti is shown twice — first as he approaches the throne of his god, and then as he kneels before it. This begging posture is unheard of in a king before in history. No scene before in history ever indicates an absent God. The bicameral mind had broken down.” Jaynes then quotes a lament written on a cuneiform tablet ascribed to a ruler from the same period: “My God has forsaken me and disappeared. My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside me has departed.”

The final part of Jaynes’s book is about the traces of bicamerality that remain until today. Hearing voices is common among people suffering from schizophrenia. Prophecy and supposedly divine messages are still important in many religions. Artistic creation is still often ascribed to some sort of higher inspiration, and psychedelic drugs can produce bicameral experiences.

To be clear, Jaynes’s theory is physiologically outdated. To my knowledge, it’s not supported by today’s brain science. Many of his historical and philological claims can be easily disputed, especially regarding the timeline and extent of the supposed shift in consciousness. And yet, the basic idea — of a shift in existential orientation away from gods or spirits to selves as the relevant intelligent agents — still seems convincing to me.

Gods do not exist, but they are an incredibly effective illusion for minds and society to operate with small data. Selves do not exist, but they are an incredibly effective illusion for minds and society to operate with medium data. AI as a racequence does not exist, but it is an incredibly effective illusion for minds and society to operate with big data. And yet in big data times, the situation is still the same as it was in medium and small data times. Only communication can communicate and only thinking that is mental systems or minds can think. In AI talk we that is society is still talking to itself. All the data in big data are social data. Machines statistically process language which is still nothing but communication. AI talk is still purely social. As before, thought co-evolves with communication. Minds co-evolve with society. Given the vast amount of AI talk, minds now have a lot of stuff they can think of. And society will certainly be irritated by these thoughts. As we can already see, what has changed is that communication can now be digitally stored, processed, and produced. It is a big change for sure. And this big change may very well result in an existential reorientation. In times of big data, we might need to once more outsource the imagined authority of intelligence. And this reorientation may be experienced as an existential crisis. Just as it was painful to say goodbye to the gods and insulting to see them lose their dignity, it’s painful to say goodbye to the self and insulting to see it lose its dignity. But it seems that the self is vacating the throne and that AI is going to be its successor even though none of them actually exist.

At the heart of it is a distinction between three kinds of autopoietic self-reproducing systems. Three kinds of organisms so to say. There are biological systems. The self-reproductive evolution of life like our bodies or plants. They consist of all kinds of physiological processes. They are mental systems. The self reproductive evolution of consciousness. what we call minds. They consist of all kinds of psychological processes, their social systems, the self reproductive evolution of communication like the economic system, the political system or the media system. They consist of all kinds of social processes like payments, elections or YouTube videos. All these systems are environments for one another. To record this video, to be able to talk to you on social media, my body must be alive and my mind needs to think. And for you, the same is the case if you’re watching it. Communication, including social media, operates within the environment of bodies and minds. The three systems co-evolve. They’re often structurally coupled. As @luhman says, society influences how minds evolve and minds influence how society evolves. And this in turn also influences biological evolution in various ways. That’s by the way why we speak of the entroposy. In other words, systems are contingent upon one another. Curiously and importantly, systems are operationally closed. They’re not in direct mechanical contact with one another.

Along with the silence of the gods, the rise of writing and a partial secularization, intelligence is insourced to thinking selves as authors and readers. A long history of the disenchantment of communication takes place. Religion doesn’t disappear but it loses its monopoly of collecting, transmitting and authorizing all relevant knowledge. With author reader based writing the number of data grows immensely. We can call this medium data. The age of medium data spans from early written texts like the Dao de Jing and the establishment of ancient libraries to modern encyclopedia and education projects that make all knowledge public. First in the enlightenment and recently in Wikipedia. The reorientation of intelligence to an inner self and the replacement of the gods with the individual author was a very effective move for getting from small data to medium data. What remained the same in small and big data was that with these data society was speaking to itself. All the data all the communication is produced in society. Only communication can communicate.

Minds think about what is communicated. Society communicates about what is thought. Thinking and communicating are organic autopoietic processes like life functioning systemically without agents that can be empirically pinned down. Try to find your soul or your true self.

It’s somehow said there’s a feeling of loss, a loss of the familiar agent behind the text, a loss of style, a loss of personality, or more precisely, a loss of a sense of self that somehow feels like an insult and a threat. And this is not only the case when reading AI talk by others. If I use AI and write with it, this too insults and threatens my own sense of self. The frustrated discomfort, the annoyed sadness about a certain loss of selfhood when reading or writing AI talk may be like the despair felt by that old Assyrian statesman when he lamented about the gods turning silent. My God has forsaken and disappeared. My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside me has departed. When reading or writing AI talk, I have a similar feeling. My good old sense of self seems to have forsaken me and seems to retreat. It fails me, keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside me is departing.

I mentioned that this video is inspired by a conversation with ID Rahar. This is a painting by him oil on linen 100 cm* 100 cm. It’s titled the service. The title is a pun obviously. The computer servers at the center are served by the human worshippers circling them like the Kaaba in Mecca. Humans become servers again. They outsource intelligence like in religion. Who’s to judge if that’s good or bad? From a Dowist perspective, I suggest to start with being stoic about it rather than outraged, fearful or depressed. We can be galassen or chill because we can understand that AI reified artificial intelligence does not exist.

Religious speech codes all knowledge by outsourcing it. And in this way it communicates it and makes it collectively available. Here’s an example. Polynesian navigation. Roughly between 3000 and 1000 B.CE. That is in Jane’s bicameral period probably starting from the island of Taiwan humans crossed the Pacific Ocean and populated islands all the way to Polynia. They relied on navigation skills based on the observation of stars, water currents, clouds and birds. This knowledge was stored and transmitted in religiously coded oral traditions, songs, and stories.

We imagine mental systems as an I, a me, a self that has intention, free will and agency and becomes authoritative. That’s the famous Cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.” theoretically according to Niklas Luhmann and scientifically according to Robert Sapolsky […] and philosophically according to Brick Saporin […] Deard’s claim is a fallacy.

In fact, we’re not born with a sense of self develops when we grow up until it gets rather solid around the age of five from then on we cannot but think in this cartesian manner. We think thinking it is our self who thinks but empirically it’s clearly not the self that produces thought but thought that produces the self.

The fallacy is that from the undoubtedly existing sense of self after age five, we conclude that there must be and must have always been and also often that there will always be in the future a true self. The ancients used to call it soul.

Communication can only be continued by more communication, not by biological or mental operations on their own. Systems operate only with their own operations, not with the operations of other systems. However, systems irritate one another. What I say irritates what you think. It triggers thoughts which in turn can irritate your body. When I speak, you may be scratching your head or start yawning or maybe even smile slightly.

[Yuval Noah Harari’s] website shows an aphorism presumably meant to summarize his approach: “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”

I like the first part of this aphorism, but not so much second.

Google AI says, that for Harari, religion is a crucial imagined order or social construct rather than a divine truth designed to unite large numbers of people through shared myths. For Harari, the invention of religion, shared myths, and an imagined order of the world was a big evolutionary game changer. It enabled humans to cooperate much more effectively and on a larger scale. It was also a key factor for social and technological progress because religions, myths, and orders collected, stored, and transmitted practical knowledge of all kinds. The gods and the spirits were an incredibly effective illusion for memorizing and retelling knowledge.

Religions were an interactive encyclopedia. Everyone was thinking religiously and society communicated religiously. In religion, we find the same conflation of I and we, as in the sentence by DeepSeek, quoted at the beginning of this video. When the gods or their spokespeople gave their commands, they spoke presumably in the first person mode and said, “I.” But in fact, what they said was always what we had already figured out. It was society speaking to itself.

AI generated student work is usually correct, but it sounds so sterile, so predictable, so simulated. AI talk is right to the extent of being wrong. It kind of offends the expectation of however flawed authorship.

The gods, not the selves, were the imagined agents, uttering everything meaningful and reliable in society. They were the supposed relevant nexus between what was thought and spoken. Over a long period of time, outsourcing was gradually replaced by insourcing. After a period of crisis, a great reorientation took place. The sense of self became stronger than the sense of gods and the self replaced the gods as the relevant intelligent authority who speaks. Society was reorganized in orientation to this new authority. Eventually in modernity, the self became the sovereign individual with free will. Our social, political, and legal structures now worship it. Human rights, private property, personal autonomy, you name it. The sovereign individual has been put on the throne.