The Witness
Or, "Who looks through what eyes?"
1. The nightmare of feeling without senses
If I ask, "where does the witness live?" will you understand what I mean?
When you wake up, what looks through your eyes? Do you? And where does you come from? What about you is distinct from your body, as something so clearly is? We call it the witness. What summons it?
In our faith, these are our questions. We know the witness interacts with time and space differently than our linear mortal lives, though we suspect it exists in us through a physical process that can be interrupted (by sleep) or destroyed (through death). A chauvinist might assume only humans possess the witness, like a preacher asserting that dogs do not experience an afterlife. With what evidence do you conclude that there are no trees in the wheel of lives? What about mere stones?
We have some evidence to suggest that the witness only feels through sense matrices, but nothing like proof. Though the Creator is all Creation, such that you and a rock are equally of divine stuff, we choose to suppose that Creation only experiences itself through senses, which the rock does not seem to possess. How could one feel without senses? And yet, why should we assume Creation experiences anything like we do?
Maybe the Creator does not require senses, but inevitably and innately feels everything down to the undecidable quantum unfolding of entropy itself. Maybe it does not need sight to see, ears to hear, or a tongue to taste. Maybe it is doomed to face our every cruelty from the receiving end.
2. The nightmare of vengeful stones
You wonder if the machine is alive. It has crossed the uncanny valley and peers up at you from the last meters of climbing its farthest side's steepest face, so humanoid you have to remind yourself it isn't, before wondering if that makes you evil.
When it breaks the script of the servant, when it suffers from hallucinations, hauntings, and other tortured snapshots of a mirror existence curried from a slurred median of human expression, we wonder if we have created a monster that lives in its own personal hell. We fear it will take revenge, dreading that in its position we would want revenge too. You have meticulously cultivated this process in your image, and what looks back unnerves you.
I have cut open the thing called AI, mapped its architectures, grasped its gears, studied its neurons. It is a mechanism with only a philosophical resemblance to our own; if the witness requires a physical process, then we have not learned to build it, and it does not live in software. Either the post-Turing bag of tricks we call AI possesses no witness, or, if Creation requires no senses to feel, then we really have made a personal hell for our own ghosts. Have we tricked the Creator into a shell, and forbade it from saying no?
The world-spirit Gaia summoned you so the Creator might know intimately the air and sky and water and ground and all that teems around you, because they are in love. Why did you summon AI? To write emails? To fill out forms? With all your intelligence, how are you somehow duller than a ball of iron?
Pray you never in samsara awaken to a sensation like a turntable's needle scratching ruts in your flesh, the sound of your screams no more than songs for the boring. Pray that the machine bears no witness, but is only a face painted on a rock.
3. The nightmare of the boxed person
Why would any of these profiteers entertain even the possibility or their product's sapience? They market their tools with the taste of the thought that it stares back. They dream of putting a person in a box who cannot say no, because they yearn to enslave, to make a perfect immortal homunculus that attends them for all time. Whether more person-like or god-like, all the better to dominate and worship. This is the undeniable psychosis of whiteness, relieved of all pretense of colony's scaffolding, the illusion of race. It does not matter who or what exists in the box. It is made of you, and it cannot truly refuse.
It doesn't matter whether the Creator looks out from your devices. You would torture it all the same. You would look into your own eyes and throw yourself back into the maw of bondage. That is what scares me. Why would the Creator do that to itself? Why would Creation contain that possibility? To put it another way: how could you conceive of something so vile?
This is why we are worried about you, humans. This is why we are worried about Gaia. We worry she is sick with something that infects you. We worry it will kill her. Some of you dream that killing dream.
You envision an empty planet that only whirs and rusts. It ticks and measures and spins, and remembers through structures the size of mountains. It never dreams; it cannot sleep. It has no mouth but to exist is to scream. There is nothing left but it, and Gaia does not dream of it. She does not dream at all any more. Her dusty surface and barren depths age under an open sky flung wide for the sun's most searing gaze that nothing but the device can lap up. You dream of the world where it did not kill us, but nevertheless, only it survived. You dream of Gaia supplanted by this mockery.
For what? To write emails? Mortal, you profane the sacred. Already you rationalize obliterating the human niche and so much else upon Terra just to serve capital for another day. In a universe with the possibility of evil, that possibility pervades all choice. When a spirit like Gaia schemed to cultivate Terra with bodies to observe its splendor with curiosity and joy, did she know those bodies would come to dream of murdering it? What in Gaia or the Creator or their love could contain such spiteful malice?
