In 2002, a guy named Jason Padgett was brutally attacked and beaten outside a bar. Afterward, everything he looked at suddenly had “pixelated” edges and could be perfectly represented by mathematical formulas, structures, and fractals. Everything: buildings, cars, fish, and flowers.
Think about that. Mathematical formulas and frameworks are what we use to design complex structures like buildings and bridges. Yet he saw mathematical structures are also the framework for trees, plants, people, and animals.
Recognizing that there is a mathematical formula producing our bodies suggests something out of the Twilight Zone, as if maybe we are being stamped out by some machine. Interestingly, it’s not too hard to think of computers soon being able to do that. Artificial intelligence is already being used to create the mathematical formulas that produce humanoid robots, building plans, and everything else imaginable. Many are worried about the implications. Will the world be taken over by AI?
But maybe it has already happened. In Lesson 163 we are told that what the Course considers to be “life” is not material or physical and that death is anything that contradicts life. “Either all things live or else they die and cannot live. No compromise is possible.” (W 163, 6:3-4)
We know we create our personal reality with our perception, and we also know that our thoughts manifest physical reality. In fact, the Course tells us that we made the world. The Seth books explain in great detail how we do that individually and collectively. So what are we to make of our elaborate physical world programmed with intricate mathematical formulas made by bodies that are not “life” or truly “alive”?
Artificial Intelligence? Maybe our wrong mind has been the artificial intelligence all along. Is AI already here? And has it been for millions of years?