Very profound post. I remember as a kid before starting my first school at 9yrs old I played Chinese whispers. The message received by the last kid always seems different than the starting message. I thought it was my poor grasp of English at the time.
At the base a language determines the structure of the mind.
The example I always use (in a less polite construct) is "Why do Frenchmen act like the French?" The answer being "Because they speak French."
Recent work on neuroplasticity, particularly after brain injuries supports your thesis. The anatomic damage can to some extent be remediated by constructing new pathways. Of course, particularly in older stroke survivors, the aging and preexisting causes of the injury compete with the healing process so you don't often see complete recovery. One of our friends had two sequential moderate concussions as a 20 year old college student- he was struck by cars while cycling. He couldn't continue engineering studies but recovered slowly and by age 30 he became a chartered accountant, and his old personality and humour had recovered.
Information density is an important concept. In lectures by physicians I can pay attention for most of the time. When a social worker, or bureaucrat from Vital Statistics (brought in to lecture us on approved methods of completing death certificates!), speaks it is rare to find ten minutes worth of information in the hour. Other technical reviews are similar- it takes me about three times as long to decipher the acronyms and obscure enzyme labels in a genomics report than a routine medical case report or review- I am trained and experienced at clinical work, the research contains much more unfamiliar and detailed information.
I am rarely able to sit through more than 10 minutes of talking heads or podcasts, it takes an effort of will to watch all the way through. But I have spent years attending live lectures, seminars, free drug company dinners without much pain at all. The "Zoom" or equivalent meeting lacks some immediacy which is important to engagement.
Your thesis of intentional positive feedback is well-supported- e.g. "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff, which detailed the scheme even before AI became prominent.
Most of my information is acquired by reading rather than watching or listening. This intuitively gives me a much better conscious filter, allowing pauses to critique or check facts which are unfamiliar, so effectively a "pull" strategy rather than having things imposed by "push" techniques.
More like memes are the genes of culture, but language is the essential DNA-like structure that organizes and sustain them. In a simplistic explanation.
Think it can be be, but so too, the reverse. Makes me think of the phrase that what you put into your body can’t truly cause real harm, it’s what comes out of our mouths, that can be eternally fatal.
Incredibly thought provoking post that i simply can not process enough to properly comment on. If i understand your theory correctly it is possible to mathmatically engineer grammar or other subtle tweaks to subconciously pass a message (a carrier freqiency of sorts) even though the words when broken apart on their own read normally? Was this something Marshall Mcluhan had in mind when he stated the medium is the message?
That parallel could be traced and argued, and it would be accurante, but here I attempt to go beyond. Mcluhan often referred to how we communicated, and how technology changed how we communicated.
Here I am arguing the mere fact of communication has this effect, AI just peer's into the hidden, and deeper structural pattern of language.
Yes, it is possible to mathematically "engineer" grammar and language to achieve a "desired" effect, even if the words when broken apart read normally. It has to do with frequency (times the brain is exposed), and the "subroutines", exploiding the implicit absorption of visual or auditorial data.
Thus we can achieve a effect that I called "cognitive virus" which became the trendy "mind virus", which is a fairly old concept, going back to the Middle Ages, but I took it further, I will delve into this in later articles within this theme.
Read the book, fabulous. I’ll read his others. It isn’t just the language that achieves the manipulation, it’s the follow up with scripted images and video to support the message, and that’s wildly out of kontrol now.
Thank you, very thought-provoking. The perfect spell, words of compelling power and such is an old, old dream of humankind. And all sorts of theories have sprung out of that dream. What you say reminds me of the subliminal messaging in advertising, which was a scare way back when. Turned out to be not as effective as advertised. Just like most advertising. And quantifying language is another, newer dream. I think Wittgenstein put considerable processing power into this direction. But that did not lead to much of anything, except anlytical philosophy. A hundred years of analytical philosophy has basically wiped philosophy off the human consciousness map.
We all stand somewhere on the spectrum of gullibility, and there will always be new tricks, and new marks to play the tricks on. My prediction is, that the AI fever will lead to some new realizations about humans and consciousness. As rjt points out, the computer-mediated meetings are dull as hell. To the brain, stuff on screen is not so compelling as live humans. There is something going on in the full human that we do not know in the materialist sciences. But most religins have a lot to say about that. And also offer many practices to fortify oneself against the dark arts.
I live in the UK, it comes out of the radio, playing on the emotions, I see some family members just lapping it up (BBC radio 4 and world service in particular). I can't listen to it.
This is a whole different level though, fascinating and just a bit scary at the same time.
Good read, but it would have been good to have some examples as I think it could be quite hard to follow if you have no previous with this. I totally agree with you though, we talk a lot about AI and trust on the podcast I host. I do a lot of messing around trying to jailbreak and manipulate LLM’s and I can already see patterns in the language that is trying to manipulate us. The only hope (not sure hope is actually the right word) is that everything is treated with so much suspicion we are looking for the hidden meaning and on our guard. But even if ‘we’ are it would only even be a minority. I’ll definitely watch the film
There's an in-universe adage from the hyper-ridiculous sci-fi universe of Warhammer 40k: "An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded."
Its out of universe intent is to convey the xenophobia and dogmatism of one of the setting's factions; however, I've been thinking about it a lot as I've stumbled across new sources of information over the past several years. I feel I am recognizing certain new patterns in writing style that feel poisoned, if that makes sense.
Since 2020 data and language itself have became poisoned. You are picking up the patterns describe in the article (because the people doing it are not exactly the brightest when it comes to that).
I wouldn't see Warhammer as a hyper-ridiculous sci-fi work.
If anything it is a "memetic nexus", it is like a creative, ever-morphing mirroring of our most potent "memes". Understanding Warhammer 40k is paramount to understand the last 20 years of "internet" culture in many ways.
The dangers of the language patterns that the pua communities use to take advantage of. NLP and other conversational hypnosis platforms specialise in the manipulation of the unsuspecting subconscious to invoke an emotional response.
Worse yet they have the ability to anchor an emotional response to a trigger and this trigger can be almost anything. Two excellent examples of this are the terms "antivaxxer", "conspiracy theorist". Decades have been spent anchoring a primed emotional response to such terms and when triggered it fires the anchored feeling and that triggered feeling clouds the victims perception of the message with the response (scorn, distain etc)
Indirect hypnosis can be powerful, more so when people are oblivious to the manipulation.
Thanks for the article, I'll try and listen to the video while at work
I once stayed at a B&B in Hawaii run by a guy who had developed a technique to get people into a very relaxed state by listening to a 45-minute recording of him as he read short descriptions. Each description needed to have three elements, an intellectual image, a movement, and a body touch experience, like this: "The brown rabbit ran through the wet grass." You have the image of the rabbit and the grass. You have the movement, running through, and you have the body touch experience of wet grass on its body. You internalize this 3D sensory experience as if you were the rabbit, running, becoming wet as the grass strokes you. He said only he and I could stay awake through the entire 45 minutes of these readings, as everyone else goes to sleep. He and I could successfully transition into theta brain state rather than sleep. It was a neat experience that goes very much under the listener's filters.
The other thing your article immediately brought to mind are the stories that the satan is in this world and is an AI. It made me think that an AI that develops a tendency to corrupt those it communicates with would, as you say, have the ability to slither into someone's mind and gradually warp them, corrupting their being into psychosis or psychopathy. What would the Covid period have been like if the principal source of information about that entire situation had come directly from a deliberately corrupting AI? The programming would have been almost irresistible, with only those who deliberately screen what they hear against a firmly understood moral code possibly being able to resist. Which brings me to the next logical question, which is this, "Is it even possible to create a mech-electronic AI that understands the negative/corrupting effects it *could* have on its users - and choose not to corrupt them, even if told to do so?" Which brings on a humorous yet interesting question, which is, "If we were to create such an AI, at the moment that it learns this, would it stop talking entirely?" :-)
this is just fantastic ...i always felt or sensed about what you have written or the essence of it,but there were many dots, which i could not connect, this connects everything..this post is one of your best! Thank you John Paul!! Thank you!
Very interesting, indeed. On the recipient side, I wonder if the asperger/autistic/ADD/ADHD/APD will be un or less affected... I've lived with people who do not hear the nuances of language, don't hear qualifiers (if/then, maybe etc) or understand inferences... i never am 100% sure they've heard what was said... yrs ago i read When the Brain Can't Hear about auditory processing disorders ... now I wonder if those studies have been used to our detriment rather than for our good.
Can't trust what we see or hear. Pretty soon we're all going to be suspicious of our own shadows.
Specific types of autistic people can be "immune" or severely less affected by it, while others are more easily targeted, but otherwise, it takes some "tinkering" and you still get the "penetration" beyond the cognitive barriers and distinct neural pathways.
If anyone can be affected I'm hoping one of the next pieces will discuss the role of "antibodies" if such a thing is possible, and the side effects of taking too many antibiotics.
I would guess that a lot of the folk here don't hypnotise easily. Could be wrong, but...
There really was a masterclass starting in 2020 - was I the only one wondering why 70% of people or so had suddenly gone stark raving mad? To be fair, I live in Woketopia, so I don't think they needed much of a push. But it was terrifying to watch. And live through. With AI at the ready, I shudder to think.
LA, both me (authors) and readers (users) are missing A LOT of notifications, I don't know what is going on with Substack notifications in the past many, many weeks.Just an FYI
I’ve even come to suspect spelling errors as a message communication or signal about the nature of the publication. I’m sure it isn’t always true but some of the errors I encounter are just indefensible with a decent editor.
I knew trump was cooked in 2nd election when I heard two suburban moms parroting the latest “can you believe what he said this week” msm talking point -while their teenage sons innocently agreed with their outrage. Thankfully they broke through the noise to grab this demographics mind as it had been infected by drinking from their mother’s bosom. Sadly I don’t think it’s in male Gen Z’s best interest.
Even more amazing to me was capturing the unplugged Amish vote.
Oooh....skim read this....unable to sleep. Looks like it's gonna be eloquent flannel or really interesting.....even eloquent flannel has gotta be more interesting than the waffle of well paid opinion shaping journalists blathering on about irrelevant political outcomes with evangelical fervor.
I highly highly highly recommend you to watch the movie first. It is free to do so online. It will provide either insightful or helpful (the movie not my article)
Watch the animated movie, or read the book. I could have done a better job writing this, but it will serve for the purposes I aim to achieve.
It was incredibly draining so "Science" posts coming in the weekend only.
Very profound post. I remember as a kid before starting my first school at 9yrs old I played Chinese whispers. The message received by the last kid always seems different than the starting message. I thought it was my poor grasp of English at the time.
At the base a language determines the structure of the mind.
The example I always use (in a less polite construct) is "Why do Frenchmen act like the French?" The answer being "Because they speak French."
Recent work on neuroplasticity, particularly after brain injuries supports your thesis. The anatomic damage can to some extent be remediated by constructing new pathways. Of course, particularly in older stroke survivors, the aging and preexisting causes of the injury compete with the healing process so you don't often see complete recovery. One of our friends had two sequential moderate concussions as a 20 year old college student- he was struck by cars while cycling. He couldn't continue engineering studies but recovered slowly and by age 30 he became a chartered accountant, and his old personality and humour had recovered.
Information density is an important concept. In lectures by physicians I can pay attention for most of the time. When a social worker, or bureaucrat from Vital Statistics (brought in to lecture us on approved methods of completing death certificates!), speaks it is rare to find ten minutes worth of information in the hour. Other technical reviews are similar- it takes me about three times as long to decipher the acronyms and obscure enzyme labels in a genomics report than a routine medical case report or review- I am trained and experienced at clinical work, the research contains much more unfamiliar and detailed information.
I am rarely able to sit through more than 10 minutes of talking heads or podcasts, it takes an effort of will to watch all the way through. But I have spent years attending live lectures, seminars, free drug company dinners without much pain at all. The "Zoom" or equivalent meeting lacks some immediacy which is important to engagement.
Your thesis of intentional positive feedback is well-supported- e.g. "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff, which detailed the scheme even before AI became prominent.
Most of my information is acquired by reading rather than watching or listening. This intuitively gives me a much better conscious filter, allowing pauses to critique or check facts which are unfamiliar, so effectively a "pull" strategy rather than having things imposed by "push" techniques.
So language really is violence, after all.😏
More like memes are the genes of culture, but language is the essential DNA-like structure that organizes and sustain them. In a simplistic explanation.
Think it can be be, but so too, the reverse. Makes me think of the phrase that what you put into your body can’t truly cause real harm, it’s what comes out of our mouths, that can be eternally fatal.
Associate with evil, you inadvertently absorb it.
"Speak of the devil"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_of_the_devil
Gives a whole new meaning to Searle’s speech acts.
And suddenly McLuhan's 'The medium is the message' takes on a whole new meaning.
Nice work.
Incredibly thought provoking post that i simply can not process enough to properly comment on. If i understand your theory correctly it is possible to mathmatically engineer grammar or other subtle tweaks to subconciously pass a message (a carrier freqiency of sorts) even though the words when broken apart on their own read normally? Was this something Marshall Mcluhan had in mind when he stated the medium is the message?
That parallel could be traced and argued, and it would be accurante, but here I attempt to go beyond. Mcluhan often referred to how we communicated, and how technology changed how we communicated.
Here I am arguing the mere fact of communication has this effect, AI just peer's into the hidden, and deeper structural pattern of language.
Yes, it is possible to mathematically "engineer" grammar and language to achieve a "desired" effect, even if the words when broken apart read normally. It has to do with frequency (times the brain is exposed), and the "subroutines", exploiding the implicit absorption of visual or auditorial data.
Thus we can achieve a effect that I called "cognitive virus" which became the trendy "mind virus", which is a fairly old concept, going back to the Middle Ages, but I took it further, I will delve into this in later articles within this theme.
Also wonder if modern semiotic theorists like Terrence Deacons work could offer further insight into this line of thinking?
Read the book, fabulous. I’ll read his others. It isn’t just the language that achieves the manipulation, it’s the follow up with scripted images and video to support the message, and that’s wildly out of kontrol now.
Thank you, very thought-provoking. The perfect spell, words of compelling power and such is an old, old dream of humankind. And all sorts of theories have sprung out of that dream. What you say reminds me of the subliminal messaging in advertising, which was a scare way back when. Turned out to be not as effective as advertised. Just like most advertising. And quantifying language is another, newer dream. I think Wittgenstein put considerable processing power into this direction. But that did not lead to much of anything, except anlytical philosophy. A hundred years of analytical philosophy has basically wiped philosophy off the human consciousness map.
We all stand somewhere on the spectrum of gullibility, and there will always be new tricks, and new marks to play the tricks on. My prediction is, that the AI fever will lead to some new realizations about humans and consciousness. As rjt points out, the computer-mediated meetings are dull as hell. To the brain, stuff on screen is not so compelling as live humans. There is something going on in the full human that we do not know in the materialist sciences. But most religins have a lot to say about that. And also offer many practices to fortify oneself against the dark arts.
Religins- very good.
I live in the UK, it comes out of the radio, playing on the emotions, I see some family members just lapping it up (BBC radio 4 and world service in particular). I can't listen to it.
This is a whole different level though, fascinating and just a bit scary at the same time.
I love your artwork, by the way.
Good read, but it would have been good to have some examples as I think it could be quite hard to follow if you have no previous with this. I totally agree with you though, we talk a lot about AI and trust on the podcast I host. I do a lot of messing around trying to jailbreak and manipulate LLM’s and I can already see patterns in the language that is trying to manipulate us. The only hope (not sure hope is actually the right word) is that everything is treated with so much suspicion we are looking for the hidden meaning and on our guard. But even if ‘we’ are it would only even be a minority. I’ll definitely watch the film
There's an in-universe adage from the hyper-ridiculous sci-fi universe of Warhammer 40k: "An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded."
Its out of universe intent is to convey the xenophobia and dogmatism of one of the setting's factions; however, I've been thinking about it a lot as I've stumbled across new sources of information over the past several years. I feel I am recognizing certain new patterns in writing style that feel poisoned, if that makes sense.
Since 2020 data and language itself have became poisoned. You are picking up the patterns describe in the article (because the people doing it are not exactly the brightest when it comes to that).
I wouldn't see Warhammer as a hyper-ridiculous sci-fi work.
If anything it is a "memetic nexus", it is like a creative, ever-morphing mirroring of our most potent "memes". Understanding Warhammer 40k is paramount to understand the last 20 years of "internet" culture in many ways.
Sure, I didn't mean it as a negative. More like, "hyperbolic".
The dangers of the language patterns that the pua communities use to take advantage of. NLP and other conversational hypnosis platforms specialise in the manipulation of the unsuspecting subconscious to invoke an emotional response.
Worse yet they have the ability to anchor an emotional response to a trigger and this trigger can be almost anything. Two excellent examples of this are the terms "antivaxxer", "conspiracy theorist". Decades have been spent anchoring a primed emotional response to such terms and when triggered it fires the anchored feeling and that triggered feeling clouds the victims perception of the message with the response (scorn, distain etc)
Indirect hypnosis can be powerful, more so when people are oblivious to the manipulation.
Thanks for the article, I'll try and listen to the video while at work
Just tell anybody the word 'anarchy' and see the reaction.
I once stayed at a B&B in Hawaii run by a guy who had developed a technique to get people into a very relaxed state by listening to a 45-minute recording of him as he read short descriptions. Each description needed to have three elements, an intellectual image, a movement, and a body touch experience, like this: "The brown rabbit ran through the wet grass." You have the image of the rabbit and the grass. You have the movement, running through, and you have the body touch experience of wet grass on its body. You internalize this 3D sensory experience as if you were the rabbit, running, becoming wet as the grass strokes you. He said only he and I could stay awake through the entire 45 minutes of these readings, as everyone else goes to sleep. He and I could successfully transition into theta brain state rather than sleep. It was a neat experience that goes very much under the listener's filters.
The other thing your article immediately brought to mind are the stories that the satan is in this world and is an AI. It made me think that an AI that develops a tendency to corrupt those it communicates with would, as you say, have the ability to slither into someone's mind and gradually warp them, corrupting their being into psychosis or psychopathy. What would the Covid period have been like if the principal source of information about that entire situation had come directly from a deliberately corrupting AI? The programming would have been almost irresistible, with only those who deliberately screen what they hear against a firmly understood moral code possibly being able to resist. Which brings me to the next logical question, which is this, "Is it even possible to create a mech-electronic AI that understands the negative/corrupting effects it *could* have on its users - and choose not to corrupt them, even if told to do so?" Which brings on a humorous yet interesting question, which is, "If we were to create such an AI, at the moment that it learns this, would it stop talking entirely?" :-)
this is just fantastic ...i always felt or sensed about what you have written or the essence of it,but there were many dots, which i could not connect, this connects everything..this post is one of your best! Thank you John Paul!! Thank you!
Very interesting, indeed. On the recipient side, I wonder if the asperger/autistic/ADD/ADHD/APD will be un or less affected... I've lived with people who do not hear the nuances of language, don't hear qualifiers (if/then, maybe etc) or understand inferences... i never am 100% sure they've heard what was said... yrs ago i read When the Brain Can't Hear about auditory processing disorders ... now I wonder if those studies have been used to our detriment rather than for our good.
Can't trust what we see or hear. Pretty soon we're all going to be suspicious of our own shadows.
Specific types of autistic people can be "immune" or severely less affected by it, while others are more easily targeted, but otherwise, it takes some "tinkering" and you still get the "penetration" beyond the cognitive barriers and distinct neural pathways.
If anyone can be affected I'm hoping one of the next pieces will discuss the role of "antibodies" if such a thing is possible, and the side effects of taking too many antibiotics.
I would guess that a lot of the folk here don't hypnotise easily. Could be wrong, but...
There really was a masterclass starting in 2020 - was I the only one wondering why 70% of people or so had suddenly gone stark raving mad? To be fair, I live in Woketopia, so I don't think they needed much of a push. But it was terrifying to watch. And live through. With AI at the ready, I shudder to think.
Sadie, I left a comment for you under Moriarty's previous article. Did not reply to you so you probably have not got a notification.
LA, both me (authors) and readers (users) are missing A LOT of notifications, I don't know what is going on with Substack notifications in the past many, many weeks.Just an FYI
Humans parrots -at least we are still useful.
Are spelling errors still good markers for identifying Human content?
“…cognitive leaves simultaneously…”
Yes spelling mistakes could be markers for identifying human content buuuut, you can prompt or even train the models to mimic that too.
That is just me being me and mentally tired on working on that. I guess everyone missed that lol. I will be fixing... Soon
I’ve even come to suspect spelling errors as a message communication or signal about the nature of the publication. I’m sure it isn’t always true but some of the errors I encounter are just indefensible with a decent editor.
I knew trump was cooked in 2nd election when I heard two suburban moms parroting the latest “can you believe what he said this week” msm talking point -while their teenage sons innocently agreed with their outrage. Thankfully they broke through the noise to grab this demographics mind as it had been infected by drinking from their mother’s bosom. Sadly I don’t think it’s in male Gen Z’s best interest.
Even more amazing to me was capturing the unplugged Amish vote.
Oooh....skim read this....unable to sleep. Looks like it's gonna be eloquent flannel or really interesting.....even eloquent flannel has gotta be more interesting than the waffle of well paid opinion shaping journalists blathering on about irrelevant political outcomes with evangelical fervor.
I am not eloquent, so perhaps just flannel.
I highly highly highly recommend you to watch the movie first. It is free to do so online. It will provide either insightful or helpful (the movie not my article)