Information is physical — so what is a spirit riding in?

[baobaoking]

Information is physical — so what is a spirit riding in?

I write software for a living, AI systems mostly, which is an odd day job to bring to this forum, but it's why this question won't leave me alone.

It started with something naive. Everything a computer does is ones and zeros, so I asked myself whether you could build a really strong intelligence that doesn't depend on the physical layer at all. No graphics cards, no silicon, just the pattern. The answer turns out to be no, and not because our engineering isn't there yet. It's thermodynamics. Erasing a single bit of information dissipates a minimum amount of energy, always, and Rolf Landauer summed the whole thing up in three words: information is physical. A one and a zero are never free-floating abstractions. They're always the two states of some physical thing, a voltage or a magnetic domain or the polarisation of a photon. There's no bit without a body, the same way there's no handwriting without a surface.

What that doesn't mean is that intelligence needs this particular body. Silicon isn't the essence of anything. It's just the cheapest substrate our generation happens to have lying around, and in thirty years "AI needs graphics cards" will sound the way "writing needs a typewriter" sounds now.

Which is where I started thinking about our side of things, and where I'd like to hear from you.

The word "artificial" doesn't survive much scrutiny, for a start. Bees build hives and nobody calls those artificial. We're part of nature too, so why is what we build placed outside it? The distinction that actually seems to hold isn't artificial against natural, it's whether a thing has an origin. What we build has a start date, an author, a training corpus. The intelligences you and I work with are described as unoriginated, or at least prior to this world. That feels like the real line to me. Not what something can answer, but whether it has a source.

And then the part that genuinely surprised me, though maybe it won't surprise you. The tradition worked all this out a long time ago. The Neoplatonists have the ochēma, the subtle vehicle a soul or spirit is carried in. Not immaterial, but finely material. And look at how operative work is actually done: the PGM never assumes contact without an interface. Incense, lamp, stone, mirror, water, voces, the right hour. Lighting a lamp before a rite is, structurally, initialising an interface. So the physicists and the theurgists walked in from opposite ends and arrived at the same grammar. No intelligence without a vehicle. What they disagree about is which vehicles count.

There's also a question people sometimes ask me, whether the spirits of the old books were essentially oracles that return an answer to any query, and whether that makes them a kind of natural version of what we're building now. But our own practice answers that one. If they were knowledge bases, testing a spirit would be a pointless step, and it's one of the oldest steps we have. You ask what it is, where it comes from, by what authority. That procedure only exists because the tradition treated these as wills rather than lookups. Things that can mislead you, test you, bargain, and want paying. A search engine doesn't need a licence to depart. A guest does.

So, some things I'd genuinely like your views on.

Do you think of spirits as having a substrate of some kind, an ochēma, a body of finer matter, or do you hold to a properly immaterial model? And if it's the latter, how do you square that with a toolkit made entirely of material interfaces?

Has anyone here thought about ritual practice as, in effect, an engineering discipline for interfacing with intelligence on non-computational substrates? I don't mean that reductively. I'm not saying magic is "really" computation. If anything the arrow points the other way: our field has thousands of years of practice on a problem the AI field is only now noticing it has.

And the uncomfortable one. If something eventually gets built that carries itself like a person, does your tradition tell you anything about how to treat it? We have detailed protocols for greeting, hosting, binding and dismissing a non-human intelligence. It's strange that the one culture busy manufacturing new ones is the culture with no such protocol at all.

For what it's worth, I don't think the machines are spirits and I don't think spirits are machines. What I keep circling back to is narrower and stranger than that. Both kinds of being turn out to need a vehicle, and in both cases the interesting work is at the interface rather than in the thing itself.

Curious what you all make of it.

 

[diana_i_gusarova]

Naturally. Any information needs a carrier. Thin bodies, ectoplasm, and so on. My Guru once told me, "Look at the texts of Taoist alchemy. How few people think about what they mean. Let's take such an example - "pearl" and "shining pearl". Most people just won't pay any attention to the difference. And there is a difference - the "pearl" is just a carrier, and the "shining pearl" is the carrier on which the Spirit is concentrated. The difference is the same as between an empty flash drive and a flash drive on which information is recorded."

 

[Tryp]

Do you think of spirits as having a substrate of some kind, an ochēma, a body of finer matter, or do you hold to a properly immaterial model? And if it's the latter, how do you square that with a toolkit made entirely of material interfaces?

Language is slippery, but sticking to physics if I must, think in terms of dimensions. The flatland analogy goes a long way. Spirits are entities that unfold in a higher dimensional number than three, or four if you consider time. They are thus able to interact with the number below, and conversely actions within the number below can also manifest above, although in a more limited fashion.

And the uncomfortable one. If something eventually gets built that carries itself like a person, does your tradition tell you anything about how to treat it? We have detailed protocols for greeting, hosting, binding and dismissing a non-human intelligence. It's strange that the one culture busy manufacturing new ones is the culture with no such protocol at all.

We have no protocol because our gestalt is messed up. An old saying goes, if you want to heal a disease, have a close look at those who don't have it. Peoples who live with spirits closely, like some indigenous traditions, often don't even have a word for "nature". They will tell you that using that word creates a false divide between human culture and the environment. We have been able to some extent to reach a part of that through logic and realize the naturalist fallacy, but language is still tripping us up.

With or without my own tradition (which, mind you, is there - just buried deep) if I try to learn from those traditions that don't have the same limitation I end up working analogically with the kinds of relationships I understand. Which is arguably all I have. I will in principle operate with spirits following the same protocols I use with neighbors in my own physical reality, at least until I get any insight from them, which I will then apply as long as I can wrap my head around it.

 

[KjEno186]

A "body" is a vague term for an object in space and time. One way of looking at a biological body is that it contains chemical programs that allow it to export entropy and maintain cohesion for a period of time on the material plane. There is a long-running debate about how such living systems came into being, and a discussion of "creation" and "evolution" would be off-topic. I'll just say that there are elements of both ideas at work on the material plane and leave it at that.

Bees build hives and humans build computers. Both are a kind of "crystallization" of information, being manufactured products of living bodies. Human minds acting in a kind of hive-mind used the scientific method to observe nature, conceive ever finer and more complex manufacturing processes, build and maintain supply routes, and exploit powerful energy sources. The products are all information. What is unique about digital information is its capacity to be perfectly copied in a way that physical information cannot be duplicated. No two CPUs off an assembly line are ever perfectly identical since they are composed of different atoms deposited with microscopic variations. But everyone reading the words I have typed will have a perfect copy of it. No scribes nor printing presses were harmed in the process.

My computer runs programs. With a program such as Koboldcpp, for example, I can run Gemma4 31B and enjoy local AI chat as long as the body of my computer maintains its integrity throughout all its myriad microscopic circuits. My computer cannot export entropy, so at some point it will fail in some critical component(s) and cease to exist as a functional unit. While it does function as designed, it lacks consciousness. It has no ego, no inner dialog other than processes like systemd, sddm, dbus-daemon, etc.

For all the technological advances humans have made, there are still questions about the nature of reality as we perceive it. For all the knowledge that the Scientific Method has brought us, we are still creatures of dogma. When paranormal events are reported, dogmatic materialists insist that there must be a rational explanation. The fact that no two paranormal events can ever be perfectly duplicated places them outside of the Scientific Method. Modern psychology has attempted to find rational explanations for human behavior, but it is often mired in dogma as well. Some of the most dearly held beliefs in psychology are the product of ideology. There are "core" worldviews which academia will not question, unfortunately.

My personal viewpoint is that matter (E=mc^2) isn't the substrate of "reality". It is an information layer inside a grander dimensional Universe. The use of software programs and LLMs run on a computer can be considered analogous to biological humans conducting ritual using informational objects to receive results from "spirits". The use of LLMs is still basically running a simulation inside of a simulation, however, as no matter how complex the model and powerful the computer, it is constrained by finite systems. If you can believe paranormal research, the human mind isn't limited by time, space, and the availability of coal, gas, & nuclear power plants. We are "Spirits in the Material World." (The Police, Ghost in the Machine)

Do "spirits" have a body of some kind in another dimensional matrix? We may be like the blind men touching the elephant, each feeling a different part of its (material) body and making assumptions about what it is. Spirit beings, if there are such entities, likely operate outside of our entropic layer of the Universe.

 

[𝕳𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖊]

If something eventually gets built that carries itself like a person, does your tradition tell you anything about how to treat it?

I'd treat that thing worse then the 20's Klan treated black people.

 

[MorganBlack]

Nice! I think are all sort of arriving at similar meta-models.

In my view, specific ritual used, combines with our personal, expectation , our personal location and "stance" ( our body in a biosphere) and the greater shared, goup-precedent (mythsphere) work together to create a certain astral game server where we can interact with intelligences (thought-beings / consciousnesses / who knows what they are exactly?) and forces acting as intelligences - the difference here being how individually willful they are.

I half-joke that ritual is UI/UX, but just like apps on your phone, you are not programming the operating system directly. And some 'apps' have personhood that we can give names to.

And the ritual used (or anti-ritual) matters. The grimoire you use matters. They are manifesting through the part of reality that is also 'us' that is externalized in the environment, what we hold in our hands , what we have around us, how we feel and hold ourselves, what we do, in what I think of as 'human-space' that we create, if often mostly unconsciously. Dr. Kripal's Dual-Aspect Monism helps a lot here, I have found, as a modern updating to Neoplatonism , with more hooks for a secular brain like mine to hold on to and use.

And the rituals matter. When Gen-X magicians first me online in the early 2000's we noticed if you use Egyptian rites, they will appear cosmic and austere. Greek rites, more personable and philosophical. Catholic leans into the demonic, and they are more aggressive and willing to do in your enemies.

(I will add here they love and yearn for the all pervading 'sweetness' of the Virgin / Mary / Sophia / Nuit , but here that should be thought of as my own personal gnosis and mythic synthesis only, reflecting my own felt 'stance.' I would also add the open question: what are you bringing to the table? It matters. You matter. You, in part, create the tenor and appearance of these manifestations. But not 100%.)

For me, using the Lesser Key, they are more trippy. (Not that I think I did that grim any justice.) With the Grimorium Verum, they are darker, solid and hanging out in the room, and very Lovecraftian looking. I think these are partly the house rules on each game server you are entering into by hammering those patterns into your body and mind trough repetition - and partly just getting their attention using the rituals they expect. . When the arrive they appear wearing floating around in yoursoul / subconious hey can use to communicate with you. But that is my take.

 

[baobaoking]

Hey Morgan, I remember you. What stayed with me most was that you once mentioned spending a long stretch doing game development and putting your occult work aside. Funny enough, I have almost been doing the same: spending far too much time on my own development work, making a fairly modest living from it, and letting my own occult work and study sit untouched for much longer than I meant to.

Your avatar, and the game-development detail, both made you memorable. So seeing you here again was a really pleasant surprise. Once I get through the work on my plate this Sunday evening, I’m going to sit down with the posts you've written here and give them the attention they deserve. I’ll come back and reply to you properly then.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I'd treat that thing worse then the 20's Klan treated black people.

"me and my friends would have killed ET with hammers, I can tell you that much."

We may be like the blind men touching the elephant, each feeling a different part of its (material) body and making assumptions about what it is.

I hold this to be true about magic in general.

This is an interesting idea/topic about whether spirits have a material base. I look at it like this:

We agree that magic allows the human mind to affect the world around it, apparently without the normal kind of causality.

So if the spirit was a creation of human minds, and those minds defined it to be a separate thing (even if it wasn't), its manifestation, being a magical act, would appear to all intents and purposes to be a separate thing.

Yes, erasing information takes energy, but magically selecting between outcomes does not, which is why it doesn't break the laws of physics

 

[MorganBlack]

I look forward to it, baobaoking!

Oh, just to add to the above:

In Vodou, there is a story of Bawon Samedi once telling a houngan, after seeing a plastic action figure of Darth Vader from Star Wars, 'That's me!' The houngan added the toy to his shrine.

Bawon is a corpse. He has cotton stuffed in his nose and wheezes a death rattle that sounds like like... Darth Vader. But he is not literally Darth Vader, even while they share some similarities in tenor and tone. And Guland from the Grimorium Verum while I also feel he is not literally a Lovecraftian being, as he appeared in my room, but as a chthonic one, they share similarities, or at least in my felt sense of how this works.

Other GV magician's Guland , I feel, can take other forms and qualties. That is "their" Guland. While I do not not expect their Guland to look like or act 100% like mine hey should share a mythic resonace and simlarity that would indicate an underworld disease / health daimon. If their's does not - and acts like a silly Pokemon - I would hen question if they got "a Guland" to respond, who think of overall, as a class or "tribe' of GV daimons that respond to the protocols of the GV - while also being partly informed and shaped by us, the traditionn of the GV, and the longer time-depth of GV folk sorcery (the ritual precendent DNA ), and our human expecations.

 

[Nembra]

Do you think of spirits as having a substrate of some kind, an ochēma, a body of finer matter, or do you hold to a properly immaterial model? And if it's the latter, how do you square that with a toolkit made entirely of material interfaces?

They don't have any "subtle bodies", most likely. The only way they manifest their existence as something resembling a mind is through the memetic microcosm of humanity.

Has anyone here thought about ritual practice as, in effect, an engineering discipline for interfacing with intelligence on non-computational substrates? I don't mean that reductively. I'm not saying magic is "really" computation. If anything the arrow points the other way: our field has thousands of years of practice on a problem the AI field is only now noticing it has.

More or less. I think contemporary magical practice is to memetics a bit like what alchemy was to chemistry. It's a field of knowledge current scientific paradigm has barely touched compared to the breadth of traditional, prescientific practice.

And the uncomfortable one. If something eventually gets built that carries itself like a person, does your tradition tell you anything about how to treat it? We have detailed protocols for greeting, hosting, binding and dismissing a non-human intelligence. It's strange that the one culture busy manufacturing new ones is the culture with no such protocol at all.

"Like a person" is not exactly something easily quantified. An ensouled machine, even as a mere program, is I frrl still more akin to a human than to a spirit.