To the Path Beyond Reason

Experience comes before thought. These indulgent experiential essays are purposefully fragmented to encourage the reader to interact and re-construct historical reasoning rather than hand them some answer, especially when there may be few or none. They appear as over-reasoned discussions to disguise the intent, which is often unknown to moral and scientific inquiries. This study is more like a game and culminates in dismantling the Western construct of Consciousness to get at its various parts, to see how and why it works across countries, and to encourage context and process. If it only means momentary awareness, then any animal is similar to the human animal, given that man's neurological origin is connected to and still integrated with animal instincts embedded in the brain. This examination leads us not to answer what AI and our Conscious selves are, but to open-ended reflections on the ineluctable sense of a moral vacuum in programming and in our modern TikTok, interconnected, reflexive lives that batter around abstractions without connection to our own lived experiences. The poetry serves as a conclusion to the previous epic work. It builds upon the earlier search for America's rise in the internet age found in the slim companion volume, The Gates, which also explores the connections between the primitive, wordless self, the external context of nature, and the emergence of the internet age. It considers what lies beyond, beside, and beneath the language that connects us, as well as the primitive and elemental forces within and around us that influence our environment and, in turn, our Consciousness. There are no definitive answers—only an effort to access the unconscious connections our minds are built upon, deep within us, beneath our reason. This zigzagging examination addresses the false notion of "Western" superiority linked to colonization, but not to deconstruct colonization itself. Instead, it aims to explore what exists beyond these Western ideals of Consciousness and Western rule-based morality. Because we cannot afford a one-sided AI approach. We have crossed the Rubicon in war, the point where drone robots can and have targeted autonomously and killed. Is that really the height of Western Civilization? Or the low point? Is that a reflection of a governance that is morally restrained, or a system of governance where Consciousness is embedded as one that is reckless and self-infatuated with its technological prowess, disregarding the moral implications for the sake of higher profiteering from weaponization war brings? These essays are not straightforward, as they dissect the maze of thought by experiencing it and by tracing its evolution, showing how, in the end, neutrality is only neutral as a created weapon of control. Artificial intelligence cannot give rise to a type of human Consciousness as long as we cannot define and agree on what Consciousness is. If we don't experience how it was socially constructed over centuries of wars, religious changes, and shifts in empires, then all human experience means little. Consciousness in and of itself is a blank idea. What gave it motivation was daily confrontation, human socialized exchanges of culture and language, and the recognition that human restraint is constantly challenged and continually broken: warfare, sexual assaults, murders, drunk driving, family abuse, battery, and more violent personal and societal actions that persist in the personal and collective Consciousness. We cannot help ourselves. Consciousness does not limit the harm we do to others and to ourselves. Knowing better rarely translates into doing better in practice. AI, like our "selves," must explore this historical construction of Consciousness in man and be "trained" to accept that self-realization from journeying has no end. It is a path that must itself find the beginning and travel down alone.