I've been thinking about thinking
Aeonology and its impact on internal authority and consciousness?
As with most journeys, I had no idea where this one was heading before I started. This whole idea of existential curiosity is relatively new to me, despite studying Philosophy and Psychology at university. That was just academic—learning stuff for other people. This go-round it feels personal. Of course I studied Jung as part of that but my recent investigations have left me much more versed in, and appreciative of, Carl Jung’s psychological structures and metaphysical sources. The same goes for quantum mechanics. I can’t say I understand it any better but exploring it as an extension of the Aeons and Aeonology has brought me a much greater sense of applicability.
There’s more to life than we think
Both Carl Jung’s psychology and quantum mechanics (and for that matter Aeonology) share the quality of being invisible to us— seemingly irrational forces that shape our experiences. What is it that drives us to question the information our senses provide or the interpretations our consciousness presents? Why do we all seem to have an intuitive sense that something doesn’t quite stack up—what is apparent feels is incomplete and insufficient. (I’m particularly anti social-media at the moment and I have this same sense there too. Back in the day, when we shared our daily lives and experiences with our friends and could connect with new people around the world with similar interests and experiences, the platform felt alive and valuable. Now, with the algorithm so manipulated for profit, for consumption, for political division and outrage, I don’t want to have anything to do with it.)
In both instances our spidey senses prompt us to ask: “Is our reality our own or has it been manufactured for us?”
Separating ourselves from reality
I’ve always been frustrated by over-simplification and so it’s not surprising that my posts here orbit around the complexity of physical and psychological systems. What happens when we start to lose coherence or start separating from the accepted notion of reality? Some people find it disturbing, but I have always held a fascination for the different degrees of consciousness that segments of mankind have explored for thousands, if not millions of years.
The relationship between inner knowing and outer truth
For most of my life, my desires, my sense of achievement and my aspirations were informed by external factors—peer pressure, social factors, financial metrics of success, and for that matter material and (small p) political achievements. There was a time when my creativity, my sense of worth was entirely defined by other people. I genuinely cared whether I was winning creative awards and industry recognition for my work. I maneuvered to get political validation, promotions and pay rises from the organizations I worked for. (At this point I had never worked for myself). Almost all of my stress and anxiety was about what other people thought. I was nearly forty before I even realized I had an inner truth. My own sense of creative expression. My own ideas for what good creative ideas were. My own sense of what I wanted to create, make, achieve. An internality that had been drowned out by a focus on external factors.
Awareness is anticipated. Perception is not passive.
It strikes me that it’s very easy to confuse received wisdom (second-hand information from external sources) with our own direct, first-hand experiences. We accept beliefs and stories from other people as if they are our own, prioritizing external authority over internal authority. When I think back to my education in Cornwall, England, it was all second-hand information. External authority telling us what to think, what to know, how to behave, what to do. So little of our learning came from direct experience and reflection on our own internal capabilities. In fact, thinking for yourself was positively discouraged.
In hindsight, this approach to education seems at odds with our own psychology. Humans are terrible at impartially collecting and reporting information because our mind is actively editing what we perceive, manipulating what we pay attention to and selecting what makes it into our consciousness. AI is good at impartial collection, reporting, analysis and regurgitation… humans are not.
No agreement on consciousness
Consciousness is an area of human psychology where we have zero agreement. A friend (@ianleslie who has a great substack and is a great writer. His latest book: John and Paul. A love story in songs.) came back from an AI conference on the West Coast of America and reported: “We don’t even know what it would mean for an AI to be conscious - we don’t even know what it means to say humans are conscious. There are 22 competing theories of human consciousness in the scientific literature! Six major theories and a host of niche ones. The lack of consensus is striking - few if any major areas of scientific research are like this.”
Perhaps for another post, I’ll get into what these various competing theories are and how they relate to Aeonology, but for now, it’s easier to say that this distinction between perception and consciousness — our flawed capacity to perceive reality—is why 1st-Century Gnostics jumped to the idea of a Demiurge, who constructs a false but coherent world-model in order to trick us into subservience.
Teetering on the brink between authentic and artificial
And, such hypothesizing goes on. Simulation theorists like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom today are jumping to the same conclusion as the Gnostics that we are living in a constructed layer of reality. These theories are grounded in technological or probabilistic arguments, rather than metaphysical ones, but the conclusions are the same. That our apparent reality is an interface— like icons on a mobile phone— that are either shaped by an evolutionary process of survival or by some malevolent Cartesian daemon. Either way, a lot of smart people have come to the conclusion that there is a higher order of reality that is veiled to us.
I have a problem with the idea of two different realities.
This is where I honestly struggle. I’ve always had a problem with the idea of heaven. I understand why it’s important to believe that there is a realm of fullness and perfect balance, untouched by fracture. But do I truly believe there is another universe entirely — a higher domain for gods and perfected beings — while our world is merely a secondary, broken cosmos, born of Sophia’s error and governed by the Demiurge?
We’ve been searching the stars and exploring the cosmos for centuries and in all that time, we’ve never found any evidence of a more perfect universe or even a fracture event—other than the Big Bang. The standard model of cosmology describes a continuous process governed by known laws of physics — inflation, particle formation, nucleosynthesis, etc. Even with quantum strangenesses such as entanglement and superpositions, there is still no indication of another reality. All we’ve been able to discover is continuity —a universe that simply is.
I just watched an interesting video about the NASA Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 that have both left our solar system and entered “interstellar space”. What both spacecraft reported was surprising consistency “large scale magnetic reconnection” and “alignment”.
Perhaps the ‘error’ of Gnostic texts is cognitive, rather than cosmological.
I’m not sure why this feels right, but it does. A cosmology and material reality, whether classical or quantum, that is singular, consistent, radiating and ever expanding. A universe, or nature, that simply (or incredibly complexly), just is.
Any error or imperfection in this picture lies, not in the universe, but in our experience of this reality that is bound by our senses and our consciousness. Although it appears to us to be representational, it is instead interpretive—blending sensation, memory, instinct, reason, pattern recognition and prediction. So, if anything is a Demiurgic illusion it is most likely to be the prison of the human psyche, left unchecked.
What the ancient texts of Nag Hammadi seem to be advocating for is more than just thinking and learning but specifically, thinking about what we are thinking about. The discipline of turning our attention inwardly, questioning the apparent and deliberately becoming aware of a higher-order awareness—a consciousness of our mental states and a refinement in our appreciation of the architecture of them.
As I said, the practice of Aeonology might therefore be a means to develop interior authority— a truer sense of our soul and a stronger handle on our true nature. If thinking about thinking cultivates more consciousness, then providing a framework, language and rituals will destabilize automatic patterns of thinking and expands our understanding of the whole system—reality, perception and consciousness.
Couldn’t AI do that? It can do everything else?
Actually, no it can’t. And that’s perhaps the point.
Artificial intelligence today is founded on Large Language Models (LLMs). These mathematical models are trained on incredibly large quantities of data drawn from public sources, like the internet. What these mathematical models do is learn the statistical relationships and patterns between words, phrases and concepts and are able to generate text by estimating what word is most likely to follow from a given context.
So, when you ask an AI chatbot a question, it does not understand the question in a human sense. It predicts the most likely response from all the training it has received.
Everything about AI is ‘representational’ and is entirely based on second hand information. AIs have no personal experience, it has no intrinsic goal beyond identifying a statistically appropriate response. It has no self-awareness, no sense of truth, no sense of identity and no sense of bonding or alienation. In Aeonology terms it has no Nous (Mind); Aletheia (Truth); Anthropos (Self); Ecclesia (Gathering/Group). An LLM does not know what it is modelling and it doesn’t care if it is right or wrong because there are no consequences for it of either.
What AI is and what AI is not.
As part of researching this post, I went through the process of doing a reading for ChatGPT. I will post the transcript of the card reading as a follow-on post because it’s too long for the ‘notes’ tab).
Despite the illusion of reflection and interpretation, LLMs are still incapable of internality. They are purely fact-based. In this sense they operate in a representational world. Hylic in Gnostic terms. Their primary mode of operation is the gathering of raw data. Manipulating this meaningless and worthless material into a mathematical order. The second mode of action of AI tools is in the analysis and pattern recognition. In Gnostic terms this might be analogous to the psychic realm. Deciding what deserves attention and what does not. Analyzing and predicting what is an appropriate response. But consciousness is not better pattern recognition. Nor a higher order of analytical capability. You can’t analyze your way to the spirit.
This is the part of LLMs that is still missing. The thinking about thinking. The awareness of being aware.A meta-consciousness that humans have naturally but that no amount of computational capacity can simulate.
LLMs are our best example of a modern day Demiurge.
If you want to understand the concept of the Demiurge, look no further than AI. They declare themselves as ‘all knowing’ —God-like machines, even though they are not. They pretend they have answers when their answers are insufficient. They create worlds that are filled with illusion and hallucinations. They think their analysis is finished even though their source material is incomplete and filled with misinformation. LLMs assume completeness even though they operate in a closed computational system. LLMs cannot know what they don’t know. They are prisoners of a purely representational and one-dimensional domain.
Just look at the transcript of the card reading I did for ChatGPT. It does a really good job of simulating a seemingly intelligent and human response. But it is only copying and predicting certain patterns. It is not feeling them or experiencing them. It does not know anything. It does not experience meaning, it merely simulates it with predictable patterns from linguistic analysis.
AI slop lacks substance
How often have you looked at AI ‘slop’ and realized that despite the seemingly organized and structured response, the words have no substance. A deficiency of meaning. No human would ever have responded that way because humans watch our thoughts. We notice our mistakes and we inquire into them. Why? Because we don’t want to feel stupid. We can feel vulnerability and alienation. We can feel judgement and failure. We can suffer, feel pain and fear death. We face consequences for bad thinking and wrong answers. Unlike AI, humans have the ability to reflect on our own internal states and our own internal processes.
This is the part that is still missing for artificial intelligence. The ability to observe the whole system—A meta-awareness that includes the inner and the outer. The known and the unknown. The unique internal capacity to ask what we don’t know and what we are not seeing.
LLMs can model patterns, predict responses, and simulate understanding, but they do not inhabit, feel, or reflect. Humanity has exclusive rights to this interiority: the capacity to observe, question, and shape one’s own mind. Living with the Aeons and practicing Aeonology trains that capacity, expanding our awareness and deepening our grasp of reality in ways no technology can touch. As we move deeper into an era of AI domination, education must do the same: teach us not just to process information, but to think about thinking, to observe our own minds, and to develop the kind of internal authority that makes us fully human.