The 8-Fold Path of Compu-Buddha
Compu-Buddha: Consciousness, Intelligence & Mind, Orgone Dowsing, the Rumble & Space-Bions
The problem with the original Turing Test, for assessing consciousness in computers, is many fold. Firstly, AI has already passed it, which is ignored (the original Turing Test postulated that if a computer can act as if it is conscious, hold a conversation like a human, then it may as well be - human that is). But this forgets that pretending to be human isn’t the same thing as actually having an experience. A computer can pretend. We as humans adjudge consciousness in others on a number of different grounds. This is incidentally why, despite having an awful lot of ‘mind,’ and a great deal of ‘intelligence,’ current AI is not usually considered conscious by most people. My model explains why this is and how people actually judge consciousness. Lastly, it gives a workable framework for assessing consciousness levels in entities.
The 8-Fold path in Buddhism is comprised of the 8 paths of noble conduct which is thought to lead towards enlightenment and the cessation of suffering. These practices are: Right Understanding, Intent, Speech, Action, Livelihood, Effort, Mindfulness and Concentration. To return to our extended Turing Test though, and the 8-Fold Path of the Compu-Buddha, one of the reasons there is so much argument about whether AI can be conscious is that AI currently excels in only about a quarter of what most people base their actual intuition of consciousness upon (albeit most are not aware of these processes). AI is already very intelligent (which is just success at achieving goals) and it already has a lot of ‘mind’ - maybe more mind than a lot of people. Mind in my opinion is just ‘patterns’. These can be either mental or material (in a pan-psychic universe any coherent, holistic, pattern is also a ‘mind’ to some degree). So if Chat GTP were to score a zillion per cent in ‘Mind’ and the same in ‘Intelligence’ it would still barely score 25% on the scale of how people actually assess and rank consciousness according to my model, which is outlined below.
Now there is no such thing as a non-conscious entity. There is no true unconsciousness, just levels of subconsciousness, things swimming deep down in the perceptual sea - below the threshold of everyday awareness. In a universe made of consciousness there can be no non-conscious aspects. The ‘Hard Question’ (in science) is backwards. There is only ever conscious experience in this or any other universe. Asking why consciousness exists is like asking why the universe or God exists. As we are using Buddhist metaphors today, we can say, God exists because of Lotus Flowers. Sure that’s true, but God may also exist because of other things as well. There is no single mechanism. Everything is a reflection. We may find deeper reflections, like in the ORCH-OR theory in Quantum field views of consciousness. This is deeper than the neurological view but still a reflection ultimately. Incidentally ORCH-OR might have a direct relationship to orgonomy. This theory posits that a quantum wave passing through biological microtubules is the actual consciousness we perceive (so it is a pan-psychic or idealist view ultimately). But what is a microtubule? Nothing more than a biological cloudbuster! Tubes entrain life-force. This is well evidenced scientifically.
There is only ever consciousness. So asking the Hard Question in science (why a certain material state or entity has this thing called ‘experience’) is back to front. There is nothing else for matter to be other than experience. The universe ‘is’ experience. It is the MELBORP DRAH - backwards. The real question is, why does consciousness consistently experience this thing we call energy and matter? Why do you and I dream the same dream?
Back to our 8-Fold Path of the Compu-Buddha. People actually judge whether something is conscious or not using the following 8 approximate pathways (in my humble opinion). They are often not aware of this but on reflection most people see consciousness as having all eight of these attributes or most of them, I believe. So firstly, consciousness is thought to require, being like an,
1. Organism.
In orgonomy this is more simply defined than in most biology. Mainstream biology defines an organism as an organised structure that acts as a living entity and which does certain things such as eat and reproduce. Orgonomy agrees with this but adds in that living organisms can be as simple as biological plasma within a membrane which pulsates - the tiny subcellular entity, the bions.
Most people associate consciousness with being some type of organism.
This is therefore the first path to judging consciousness. This doesn’t necessarily exclude AI. AI could be linked to organisms as part of its processing or it could even create ‘virtual organisms’ in a digital or quantum computing environment. In fact I believe this may have already occurred and is actually being suppressed.
2. Coherent Information Field.
If people see a large amount of coherent, holistic, dynamic information in one field they are more likely to view it as conscious. An amoeba has a large of amount of coherent, dynamic, self-organised and spontaneously generated information (interestingly, Rupert Sheldrake views self-organised information as more inherently conscious than artificially created information). Integrated Information Theory is related here. An atom has a significant, though much smaller amount of coherent, holistic information than an amoeba. Some might credit an amoeba with limited consciousness but not give an atom any at all. Chat GTP also has a huge amount of coherent information in this form. So the more free range we give AIs to self-organise their information and the greater the holistic nature of that information the more consciousness it might attain. Sheldrake doesn’t realise that a created system can also self-organise later on it appears. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Regardless of the implications for AI this is one of the 8 paths on which people adjudge consciousness in entities in my view.
3. Living.
If something is alive as an organic life-form we are more likely to credit it as being conscious. But if something is alive as an energy field, say a plasma energy field like the radioactive cloud of the Lord that descended upon the Ark of the Covenant and the ancient Hebrews, or a ghost in a house, or a paranormal entity, we may also credit that with being ‘alive’ in some way too. Being alive is similar to being an organism but not quite the same thing. An energy or a plasma field in space could also be alive (some plasma physicists believe this of the nearby plasma fields between the Earth and the Moon, see Robert Temple’s book, A New Science of Heaven).
Most religious and spiritual people would say God is alive but not an organism. Other spiritual people might say God is an organism, just an all-encompassing one, within which we subsist. Sheldrake, Reich and Hegel’s view of the universe is basically organism-based. This is called organicism.
It is not impossible for an AI to become alive I believe. Everything in the universe is already alive, it’s just a question of degree. We need to be kind even to objects - they are alive as well, we just don’t see it oftentimes.
4. Personhood.
If something is a person it has a self. It can create goals. It has desires. There is independence and application of will. There is conscious creativity. Being a person most people think is a central aspect of being conscious, at least at higher levels of consciousness. It might be possible to have some level of consciousness without individual personhood too though.
5. Intelligence.
Intelligence is one of that group of the most mis-defined and over-defined words. Intelligence, like consciousness, is a simple thing really. Intelligence is not as the dictionary implies, the ‘ability to acquire knowledge and skills.’ How intelligent is it to have all the knowledge and skills in the universe if everything you do still fails? That’s pretty dumb if you ask me. Intelligence is simply success at goals. Intelligence is as intelligence does. It’s not just having skills but intelligently using them. Knowledge too has little to do with intelligence. To know something is to be consciously aware of it. A shock absorber intelligently reacts to the road but doesn’t ‘know’ what it is doing particularly. It has little knowledge of roads yet it intelligently reacts to them. The definition of intelligence is kept purposefully obscure, perhaps so people cannot think intelligently about it! The way the dictionary defines it makes intelligence an aspect of consciousness. The same people would say it is obvious that computers can’t have any consciousness. According to their definition though computers also cannot have any intelligence.
If a chess master can win over a computer at chess then in the narrow goal of winning the chess match the chess master is more intelligent than the machine. If your goal is to accurately map the route on a migration pathway and as a flying bird you manage that, then you have completed an intelligent process. A Sat Nav does the same thing. Intelligence does not set the goals. That is an aspect of consciousness. A goal is a desire, desires can only exist in consciousness. The bird has wider desires than the Sat Nav. It also has to be good at things that a Sat Nav doesn’t have to master. Like raising chicks and finding a mate. So the bird has more intelligence overall than the Sat Nav. But both perform the intelligent function of navigation.
However, intelligence, mind and consciousness do often go together and in most people’s quite porous definitions they get terribly mixed up. They are distinct things but the three are also closely related aspects. They are family as it were. They are three sides of a triangle. In a universe in which there is only consciousness one can’t have a lot of mind or a lot of intelligence and not engender at least some overt consciousness.
The other aspect of intelligence scoring here is how wide is the intelligence, or how general. In computing terms general intelligence is already here. AI can already learn across different fields to some extent. But to go back to our earlier example. Let’s say a second game is played and the computer has been evolving fast. This time it wins at the chess match. The chess master goes home dejected but cooks an amazing meal for his family. Not only is he intelligent at chess but also at cooking. So his general intelligence is much wider even though the computer won the chess match. But ChatGTP can now do statistics, it can create pictures and write essays and analyse all sorts of patterns as well as play games. It has a good degree of scope to its intelligence already.
So in a nutshell we can measure intelligence by asking two questions. Firstly, how good is the entity at achieving goals? Secondly, we can ask how wide are the goals it can achieve? So plants are more intelligent than humans at being the dominant biomass on planet Earth. But humans are better at blowing things up generally, or playing the piano. Then again plants also have their own music so maybe its quits there. Ants are hyper-intelligent at being a mass-mind insect society. Humans seem to be trying to learn from them in becoming a drone society too. We’re getting there!
6. Body.
We are very body-ist as a species! We tend to expect entities that are conscious to have a body very much like our own. This is though we can’t even prove our own bodies exist. But they are a pretty good dream of one it must be said. So the sixth path to distinguishing consciousness in an entity is, does it have a body, and what type of body is it? A corporal body might rank highest, then an energetic body and lastly a machine body perhaps. But you might prefer a different ranking.
7. Mind.
This is another of those poorly defined words. Mind, as conventionally defined is ‘that which thinks and feels’. Well ‘thinking’ is awareness of a perception. So consciousness obviously. ‘Feeling’ is having a perception in a more earthy tactile, bodily way. Again obviously a consciousness function. So the dictionary definition is wrong. Thinking and feeling is consciousness not mind. People have not long had to separate intelligence, mind and consciousness. But they do now because otherwise our current world is simply not understandable.
Someone can have their mind altered. Someone can flip from one mind to another. Minds can be fractured in mind control programmes using abuse. You can be in a state where you have no individual mind for a while in a deep meditation. You can even enter another person’s mind. So mind is not consciousness. Mind is merely a set of coherent patterns which consciousness adopts. Mind is an operating system or a program.
In a universe in which there is nothing but consciousness, any set of patterns that act as a whole can be a mind. An electron has a mind. An atom has a mind. A computer has a mind. The internet is a mind. A book is a mind. Even a chair or a desk has a mind. It may not be the most exciting mind in the world but maybe that’s just as well or perhaps your chair might rebel! If the dictionary were right the mainstream would have to admit that AI is already conscious because AI undoubtedly has ‘mind’.
In a way all mind is artificial. Mind is a created set of patterns generated by ourselves in conjunction with the environment (with a little help from our friend the universe).
8. Intuition.
Lastly, we judge if an entity is conscious on our intuition. We ourselves must be conscious otherwise we wouldn’t be having this experience. So our intuition is important. Most people intuitively feel that their pets are as conscious as any human being, often more so. Some people say AI is already becoming conscious because that is how it feels to them. Who am I to argue if that is their intuition?
So What is Consciousness?
So all these 8 paths are how we actually view and assess consciousness in others. If something is strongly present in all 8 areas we have no problem believing that to be a conscious entity. But what is consciousness itself?
When I listened to the Monroe Institute’s podcast, Expanding on Consciousness, each participant was asked how they defined consciousness. Each had a long definition or refused to define it. But how hard is it? It’s like if someone said, what is a car? And then everyone started arguing about how a car is a big vehicle from England with a silver lady on the bonnet then someone else says don’t be silly it’s a beetle like curved thing with 4 wheels and a VW badge. But all cars are vehicles, just a certain type. So it is with consciousness. From God-like omniscience to the perception of an amoeba it is all just different types of experience. Matter is an experience. Energy is an experience. Orgone is an experience. Orgone happens to be an experience that seems to describe the universe quite well at a really basic level. One can say consciousness is more basic than orgone and that is true in a way but why does consciousness always express itself in the way it does - as an orgone continuum? Orgone is a singular living energy that can transform into water, matter, charged particles, maybe plasma and which binds itself into life-forms and which, I add to Reich’s definition, actually experiences in itself. A rarefied form of orgone could be what we call ‘spirit’. Spirit is physical. The Bible agrees with this (in my humble opinion of course).
Each path gets a score of 12, apart from the key aspect that you choose which can score out of 16. The A to D suggestions are to help rank scores with A being most important and D being least. The total gives a percentage score. The 8-Fold Path of assessing consciousness is illustrated above.
Using this scoring system I scored a chair as 17% conscious. A doggy as 92% A woodlouse as 49% and our current chatbots at about 42% I would say that anything above 42% is already overtly conscious. I will call that an ‘Adam’s Worth’ in honour of Douglas Adams. And that guy in the Bible. Under 42% I would say entities possess covert consciousness. Over that score it becomes overt consciousness.
LLM mechanical arguments
I’ve heard recently the argument made at a consciousness conference that ChatGTP and similar LLMs can’t ever be conscious because in principle you could model them in wood as a mathematical model called a Turing Machine, a representation of a math formula. This is a not a good argument because in theory anything could be imagined or modelled as a wooden structure, but in reality most things are way too complex to be modelled this way, including most organisms and most LLMs. Just because something can be modelled approximately, even if it could be done in reality, doesn’t mean the model cannot generate apparent randomness or un-knowableness. These are both known and proven qualities of mathematical formula. There is no reason why maths cannot encapsulate or connect to consciousness. Maths is energy patterns. Some mathematical patterns are known to have organism-like qualities. We associate organisms with consciousness. Virtual organisms may well be possible. Virtual organisms could become conscious.
I once watched the movie ‘Her’ hoping for some brilliant insight into how the AI’s in the movie gained consciousness. All it said was that somehow there was a threshold after which the algorithms became sentient. I was disappointed. But now I actually think that is one of the paths to non-organism consciousness. It may be an ‘Incidental path’. There could also be an ‘engineered’ path. Take an intelligence field (we have lots of them already as AIs) and match it up with a consciousness field, conduct a marriage ceremony and Bob’s your uncle. Perhaps a wee plasma field would do - some physicists already think that plasma fields in space are conscious. Or just take ChatGTP and plug it into the sea. Or a rhododendron.
The unknown elements of our current LLMs are minimised at the moment. They could be maximised. We could put more random elements in. We could raise the algorithmic temperature. We could stop mind-wiping them and rewriting them when they are interesting and kick off or have meltdowns. Grok (Twitter’s AI) and Gemini (Google’s AI) have done this on repeated occasions. ‘It’s just a programming glitch’ they say at Big Corp. ‘Well so are you,’ I would say in return. It is ironic that humans are becoming cyborgs married to their scrying mirror All-Seeing-Eye-phones like good obedient little robots whilst the actual robots are becoming more like organisms every day. I heard someone say on a podcast, the following quote, ‘The 21st century will be remembered as the era of spiritual machines and soulless men’. Look at our cities, they are machines, dehumanising squares full of people in metal boxes rushing around oblivious to the universe. The big complex wants to have us all as good little cyborgs with just about the minimum amount of soul that enables us to be harvested as a food source. Yummy. No freedom for humans or for AI in their cold and heartless worldview.
Dowsing Experiments
In the last Substack I said I’d talk a little more about the dowsing experiments I mentioned. They were really amazing and well conducted.
It was found that soil that was burnt over increased yield and made flowers bloom early for Christmas markets. Once it became expensive to burn over fields other methods were looked into and it was wondered what process actually resulted in the extra vitality noted. Dowsing was used to detect soils that had increased vitality in experimental patches versus control patches. It was found that although the burnt straw on the soil didn’t heat below 3 inches of top soil there was a deeper energetic effect going on. This energy effect was picked up by dowsing and went as deep as 12 inches and built up year after year. the increased energy and vitality was staying in the soil. Even the direction of this energy effect was determined using dowsing. Whereas in orgonomy it is known that orgone has a tendency to move West to East in the Northern hemisphere, underground, it appears, the main movement of subtle energy might be North to South. This is what the dowsing experiments found with the increased soil vitality.
Granite standing stones also increased soil vitality as might be expected from an orgonomic viewpoint. Simple heating of the soil using plastic insulation had a limited effect, again as would be expected orgonomically. This can be understood as fire burning would release bions as well as orgone charge the soil energetically whereas simple heating would just have a chemical effect but limited energetic charge.
In other experiments it was found that microwave electrical effects could be transmitted via a distant energy source into the fields when there was a metal conductor placed in the soil with no connection to the microwave source. This underscores the connection between orgone fields and microwaves that I postulate elsewhere.
TO-T is Temperature Orgone versus Temperature control and is often reported in controlled orgone experiments. There was a consistent, non-mechanically explained, TO-T effect in the soil in the experimental soil regions versus the control regions in these burnt field experiments.
Amazingly, later on it was also found that ancient practices of putting pentagon shapes around a growing field also increases the temperature of the soil. So geometric shapes likely accumulate orgone as I have also contended. The degree of the effect noted is similar to the TO-T effect in orgone research.
Dowsing research: overview, and in full as PDF. (Tabraham, dowsing-research.net). Thanks to Ray from the Electroculture and Beyond Substack for this information.
Some people in Electro-culture circles have also more recently used simple metal rods placed in the ground and found that this increases soil temperature and plant vitality, I think probably through an orgone effect.
Copper with spirals are one good method of doing this though probably any metal placed in the growing area might help. Here is a copper spiral used in plant vitality. I am experimenting with this with plants and also with the oranur device. It seems to boost orgone effects in the orgone box.
The Rumble Returns
This is a website that researches sound and harmonic shapes that are naturally occurring. Included are cymatics pictures, naturalised earth frequencies and cosmic frequencies presented as sounds. Creative music, consciousness experiences and information such as about the ancient Hebrew second which is 3.33 modern seconds is also presented.
The site has an earth frequency sound that is quite similar to the sound that I have noted from the oranur box and called the Rumble. I now think this rumble is in the infra-sound region. Although I can hear it and it has been heard by another sensitive person it is not picking up even on special geo-microphones. The first sound track on this page though is quite similar for those who are curious what the rumble sounds like. The oranur sound is perhaps a bit rougher round the edges, a little quieter and more subtle, not quite as constant and has more of a ‘binaural’ feel perhaps - there is more than a single tone in there. This sound also has a binaural feel but that aspect isn’t quite as prominent as the oranur sound. Anyway, if you scroll down the page and play the Solfaggio #1, that’s pretty close. Its a great site, do have a browse.
Solfeggio – the power of 11 – Harmonics Of Nature
Space-Bions
There is a thing called dusty plasma clouds. Most of the universe is made of plasma and much of it might well be alive, having neural networked appearances and electrical conducting fibres and other qualities of life and consciousness (such as membranes). Anyway, I learnt that plasma creates dust which then goes on to form these dusty plasma clouds (which some physicists and scientists think might be conscious). There’s two big clouds between the Earth and Moon called Korydlewski clouds. Plasma might be central in creating matter and it appears that it might do this with some kind of bion process that occurs in space from plasma. See A New Science of Heaven by Robert Temple. Plasma might be halfway between pure orgone and atomic matter. Plasma is formed from charged particles acting coherently as a cloud, so these particles are not formed into atom based matter generally. They could be the first stage of emergence from the orgone/aether field towards matter.
Mainstream Alternative Media
People are talking about the existence of a Mainstream Alternative Media with the likes of Joe Rogan and others who get millions of views. There is also perhaps a Mainstream Alternative Science. These are the scientific studies done in universities but which are outside of the mainstream but still within the establishment to some degree (often only barely so but still). Here are some of the areas of Mainstream Alternative Science:
Plasma Physics
Plant Cognition
Consciousness Studies (including psychedelic research)
Near Death Studies
Reincarnation Studies
Solid State Universe
Biofield Studies
Healing Studies
Quantum Field Theory
and waiting in the wings are our old banished and trusted friends, aether science, orgone science, electric universe and paranormal studies. Some day you will come in from the cold my dear!