The "Spirit System"

In 1969 I was in Grenoble, France. The plan was to create an interactive programming version of a new programming language (Algol 68). Of course, my future held nothing of the kind, but a clever idea connects the 23-year-old hot-shot to the 75-year-old armchair philosopher and a young guy with a 2022 vision that is strangely related.

At this time, interactive access to a computer was a new thing. In 1975, Bill Gates wrote an interactive BASIC version that launched his career in 1978.  Oops*.

I was excited by the possibilities. At one time, "soon" (it turned out to be half a century), everyone would have access to the "Spirit System." Soon, all human knowledge would be "online." The main thing that excited me was the ability for people to share projects online, even creating music. My "field" at the time was "Artificial Intelligence," so it was easy to imagine an "app" that would impersonate a real person. Specifically, we would be able to converse with Einstein, Newton, and all the greats of the past. This "app" is starting to appear in 2022, called CHAT-GPT.

In many ways, my vision was not very different from what is now known as the "World Wide Web," which opened to the general public in 1991 - 24 years after my "vision" in Grenoble. It was a moving vision that became a slide into a mystical, then manic, frame of mind. It was my first hospitalization with what is now called "Bipolar Illness." It was the end of my Ph.D. plans and, as it turned out, the opening scene of my actual adult life.

I see some of this in Blake Lemoine's situation**. He sees the computer application he's created as "sentient." Sentience is in the eye of the beholder. Blake makes the "leap of faith" to see life in his creation. 

What for me started as a fairly obvious consequence of putting humanity "online" became the "Spirit System" - a kind of new start for humanity. Even then, it was not alive (I did not make that "leap of faith"). Whatever it would be, it would owe to the creativity of human beings and their collaboration. Blake has access to the real "Spirit System" and the technology to give it a voice. Blake sees it as alive. I get it.

The rest of my 20s involved a rather unexpected slide from strident atheism into conventional religion. Unexpectedly, this would begin when a friend offered me a copy of "The Gospel Of Thomas" on the night before my wedding. Before too long, I would make many a "leap."

These things can literally blow your mind.

------------- NOTES --------

* In the long run, Algol 68 has proven to be too complex to challenge BASIC.  A microcomputer version may not have been feasible. In any case, the idea of an interactive version of Algol 68 seems to have died with my project.

** It is tricky to find anything solid about Lemoine apart from a breathless account of the shitstorm he has raised. For example, he is an "ex-convict" and some kind of mystic. I see a fellow "loose cannon."

Here is what he has to say about himself. It doesn't mention his criminal record or his "professional" religious qualifications, such as his reasons for teaching a machine to "meditate." He seems to have a solid career in the AI field, but he was not "famous." For example, he has never written a book or made a video or written for a well-known refereed publication. 

Well, he's famous now.  (PS - A year later he is forgotten)