Defense Mechanisms of the Ego

François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778) known by his mom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enightenment writer, historian and philosopher sais it, ->

According to Isaac Asimov  (born 1920 Petrovichi, Soviet Russia - died, April 6, 1992 in NY) the classic dilemma is that religious moderates and scientists do not argue to force everyone to follow the dictates of science, but in almost all (now also high) societies and nations, religious fundamentalists strive to force their beliefs on all and make disagreement illegal.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. 

According Asimov there are these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all: who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes.

The true enemy may be the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

This influence is Mephistophelean, said Rudolf Steiner, even though dogmatists fear devils: they have dogmatized it into a spiritless image that, in reality, serves the needs of darkness.

Anna Freud (1895-1982) addressed one particular problem (by her work The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence that is with the ways and means by which the ego wards off unpleasure and anxiety, and exercises control over impulsive behavior, affects, and instinctive urges. 

Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, was a very brilliant theorist in her own right. 

She catalogued many of the ways the ego defends itself—not just in pathology, but also in the ordinary movements of life.

See that Anna Freud’s Defense Mechanisms of the Ego and the Dharma Path.

According to Eckhart Tolle (Ulrich Leonard Tölle, born 1948) we can stop this cycle of ego-defence by stepping out of your thoughts, becoming the silent observer of our mind, and anchoring our awareness purely in the present moment.

To understand the core teachings of Tolle on anxiety, we have to recognize one fundamental truth: individuals are not your anxiety, and are not the voice in our head.

Constant self-preoccupation obstructs the path to the higher world

We know that constant self-preoccupation, egoism, obstructs the path to the the another, higher world.

That is why one of the very first conditions for gaining a proper relationship to the spiritual world is a certain inner flexibility, a certain ability to adapt to the most diverse individualities, a constant capacity to step outside oneself and enter into other individualities. If one truly wishes to express with a certain accuracy what exists in the supersensible world and what lives within it, as is the case with one who has passed through the NDE. He must above all be thoroughly healed of what might be called the earthly delusion of the ego.

"He must have come to the realization of thinking as little as possible about oneself, of placing oneself as little as possible at the center of one’s view of the world", 

said Rudolf Steiner (Lecture VII given in Dornach, 1915).

If man has a strong tendency to speak much about oneself, to think much about oneself, then one must overcome this tendency, for this speaking much about oneself, this thinking much about oneself, is truly the worst path to self-knowledge.

If invidual has a tendency to talk a lot about oneself, to judge all things in such a way that one is concerned above all with how one positions oneself in the world, what one means to the world: if he has this tendency, then one is ill-suited to find one’s way in the spiritual world or to express anything of the spiritual world.

Questioning causality

Since brain physics does not provide an exhaustive explanation of consciousness, one author suggests that consciousness may not, in fact, be a by-product or causal consequence of brain activity:

"Phenomenal consciousness has no satisfactory explanation in the strict natural scientific physicalist framework. This may be an indication of consciousness not being a causal outcome of neurophysics at all. If this is the case, there would be no grounds for postulating that the collapse of neurophysical structures at death would dissolve consciousness and its constituent elements. If consciousness does not disappear when neurophysical functions terminate, the near-death experience could be an indication of the continuation of consciousness after the collapse of brain functions. This would be in line with the proposal that higher spatio-temporal dimensionality is involved in the emergence and maintenance of phenomenal consciousness, even after death."

This quote by Pekka Reckhard (pictured ©Suonna Kononen) represents a dualist or idealist view in the philosophy of mind, challenging the prevailing materialist and physicalist understanding of consciousness.

Here is a concise breakdown of the text's key arguments and their logical progression:

What is The Hard Problem? The text begins with the observation that the natural-scientific, physicalist model fails to explain phenomenal consciousness—that is, internal, subjective experience or "what it is like" to experience something.

Considering life after death: If consciousness is not bound to the physical functioning of the brain, there is no logical basis to assume that the cessation of the brain's electrochemical activity (death) would extinguish consciousness.

What are near-death experiences (NDEs)? Viewed in this light, near-death experiences are seen as potential evidence that consciousness persists even after brain function collapses, rather than merely being hallucinations caused by cerebral oxygen deprivation.

Reckhard's short text refers to a hypothesis suggesting that phenomenal consciousness might be linked to higher space-time dimensions. This would explain how consciousness persists and functions independently of the three-dimensional material world we know, even after death.

Reality and Fantasy in AI Development

What was mere fantasy just a moment ago is now stark reality.

Princeton University [image] has successfully simulated the neural network of a fruit fly's brain. The insect's brain capacity - comprising 166,000 neurons and over 125 million synapses—provides a model sufficient for interacting with the environment and engaging in autonomous reasoning.

The "toaster" metaphor for AI used by Prof. Pekka Abrahamsson as recently as six months ago—now falters more than ever, a fact he himself acknowledges: a toaster has tiny legs.

In a test environment, this tiny insect’s neural network—microscopic in scale and smaller than the head of a pin—learns to analyze and resolve various situations, such as steering a vehicle by performing the necessary reasoning.

About 15 years ago, I wrote one of the first overviews of the emerging world of AI for *Kanava* magazine. I used the "intelligence" of the dandelion as a coding example: the plant systematically shortens its stalk to protect itself from the blades of a lawnmower—an adversary that repeatedly attacks it. Eventually, the flower stalk becomes so short that the blade cannot harm it. Simulating a mosquito's flight was too complex

For a long time, the flight of a mosquito in a room remained such a complex multivariate problem that simulating it using a mechanical computer model was beyond reach. In a real mosquito's neural network - and the associated data fusion - far too many variables interacted simultaneously.

Multivariate modeling is advancing rapidly, yet there is still a long way to go.

A dog's brain contains an estimated 2.2 billion nerve cells, or neurons. Of these, approximately 430–623 million neurons in the cerebral cortex are responsible for complex thought and decision-making. A single cortical neuron forms, on average, between 2,000 and 10,000 synapses.

In the field of robotic automation, we are approaching a threshold where a machine's neural network—and its data fusion processes—might make unexpected, autonomous decisions, particularly if the boundary conditions governing the AI's operational scope or the "safety cut-offs" in its evolutionary code fail or leak.

Included here is an image from Princeton showing a fruit fly's brain. The fruit fly was already a classic subject for genetic modeling in high school biology classes. The Chronological Path to the Emergence of a Thinker

What has bothered me about the AI ​​discourse since the beginning of the decade is that the loudest voices belong to parties with absolutely no background in computer science—not a single credit hour of study nor any coding experience involving even a single algorithm. This seems to result, among other things, in a failure to grasp the validity of binary logic. In my own teaching, I have used pseudocode to illustrate how intelligence functions in real-life scenarios, and I have witnessed the moment when the lights come on in people's eyes as they finally understand what is actually at stake.

Without this foundation, it is impossible to comprehend edge computing, language models, neural networks, or the workings of embedded circuits. While there is no shortage of popular, fictionalized threat scenarios, they lack any grounding in reality. I have observed that when an author truly understands and has mastered the subject matter, the reader is at least offered a chance to get a handle on the actual reality.

Princeton’s image of a fruit fly’s brain.