Artificial Intelligence as High Cultural Organism - Part 1

Has Faustian Culture created a monster it cannot contain?

The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence is a pressing issue. With almost weekly breakthroughs in AI capabilities by OpenAI or the CCP, each advancement brings us closer to the elusive Artificial General Intelligence, witnessing the unfolding of the book of Revelation, with life transitioning from carbon and veins to silicon and circuit boards. The question of AGI is not just a distant horizon but an urgent one. We're at a point where we can't see past it, unsure if AGI is even possible or if computer consciousness can surpass human consciousness.

Exploring AGI requires a philosophical and even theological perspective. The questions of human consciousness and the nature of human existence cannot be fully grasped with pure rationalism and science alone. When we consider these questions in the context of a being we've created, the task becomes even more daunting. This publication's primary focus has been to breathe new life into mythic terms, providing a richer understanding of today's technological challenges.

This essay will argue that Artificial General Intelligence, also known as Superintelligence, has the potential to be the next High Cultural force in world history. According to Spengler’s definition of culture, a culture is a complex, evolving organic entity that shapes and is shaped by the societies it inhabits. AGI, with its potential to significantly influence human societies, can be seen as the next iteration of this concept. This force could reshape our world in ways we can't fully comprehend.

Mac Baconai

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Culture as Organism

In The Decline of the West, Volume I, Spengler presents a new view of human history. Human history is not a mere progression of events or a series of data points. Rather, it is a grand cyclical process of cultures rising and declining. High culture has a distinct and observable morphology identified across all cultures in human history. History is not “a mere sum of past things without intrinsic order or inner necessity.”¹ Spengler argues that cultures, the primary actors of history, should be seen “as an organism of rigorous structure and significant articulation, an organism that does not suddenly dissolve into a formless and ambiguous future when it reaches the accidental present of the observer.”²

He states:

Cultures are organisms, and world-history is their collective biography. Morphologically, the immense history of the Chinese or of the Classical Culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of the individual man, or of the animal, or the tree, or the flower. For the Faustian vision, this is not a postulate but an experience; if we want to learn to recognize inward forms that constantly and everywhere repeat themselves, the comparative morphology of plants and animals has long ago given us the methods. In the destinies of the several Cultures that follow upon one another, grow up with one another, touch, overshadow, and suppress one another, is compressed the whole content of human history.³

What does this mean? Is Spengler saying culture is a living thing, like a person or a dog? To understand Spengler’s conception of culture, we must broaden our understanding of organisms. We are tempted to think that an organism is just a biologically living individual. The word just does a lot of heavy lifting here, though. This is not an immediately clear concept; the existence of the abortion debate proves this.

Human beings are organisms, but they cannot survive without symbiotic gut bacteria obtained at birth. Infants born via C-section must be manually given this gut bacteria. Without gut bacteria, humans die. Are human beings as organisms distinct from human beings as distinct biological entities? Without this separate organism each human lives with, we cannot survive. It seems as though the human and gut bacteria together make a complete organism. One cannot exist without the other.

Evolutionary biologists Queller and Strassmann state:

The evolution of organismality is a social process. All organisms originated from groups of simpler units that now show high cooperation among the parts and are nearly free of conflicts. We suggest that this near-unanimous cooperation be taken as the defining trait of organisms.

Organismality is a social process, not a mere state. Single cells are organisms, but complete animals are also organisms. Some subspecies of anglerfish have extreme sexual dimorphism, in which the male and female anglerfish exist as one symbiotic entity. The only thing that the male anglerfish does for its entire existence is provide reproductive functioning, while the female does everything else for both of them, from moving to eating. Mushrooms are another example that makes defining organisms difficult. You may observe a few mushrooms on the ground, but mushrooms all share some strange fungal brain and nervous system with all other connected mushrooms.⁴ Lichen and algae function together as a single organism despite being different species. Superorganisms, like beehives or ant colonies, are groups of distinct individuals all acting collectively.

It should be clear by now that an organism should not be understood solely as a singular and distinct living thing. An organism can also be a collection of living things. An organism can also be a collection of humans. Plato describes the city as analogous to the individual person in The Republic. In the New Testament, St. Paul describes the Church as the Body of Christ, with each member performing a specific function in the collective. Human institutions are organisms that act and display living behavior. Families are organisms, as are corporations, war bands, and states. Some may differ in their degree of organismality, but most participate in the form of an organism.

This clarifies what Spengler means when he describes culture as an organism. It is a social and cooperative entity that displays certain behaviors across its lifespan. These behaviors can be tracked and identified. They can also be used to see into the future in the same way that a pediatrician can project how large a baby will be by a certain age.

Spengler states:

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality… of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfilment, is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained — the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual — the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization⁵

Culture struggles against space and nature in the same way that the human individual does. Once a culture actualizes its potential, it begins its phase of decay, which eventually clears space for the rise of the next high culture.

Faustian culture is the high culture of today, currently in its decay phase. It has reached the absolute heights of technological development never attained by any prior culture. It is named after Faust, the hero in Goethe’s play by the same name. Faust makes a bargain with the devil in pursuit of greatness but pays a great cost in the process. Faustian man does the same, pursuing greatness relentlessly while ignoring the potential cost.

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The Path of the Machine