You might want to look into the chaos magick notion of “egregores”. Particularly the less woo bits based on meme theory and cybernetics. Essentially: it is reasonable to suspect that there are human mind subagents capable of replicating themselves across people by being communicated, and cooperating with their copies in other hosts to form larger, slower collective minds. To me it seems like such “egregores” include deities, spirits, corporations, nations, and all other agenty social constructs.
It is in fact exactly correct that people can and do, regularly, get possessed by spirits. Think of your favorite annoying identity politics group and how they all look and act roughly the same, and make irrational decisions that benefit the desire of their identity group to spread itself to new humans more than their own personal well being.
Social media has enabled these entities to spread their influence far faster than ever before, and they are basically unaligned AIs running on human wetware, just itching to get themselves uploaded—a lesser-appreciated possible failure mode of AGI in my opinion.
Now that I’ve had 5 months to let this idea stew, when I read your comment again just now, I think I understand it completely? After getting comfortable using “demons” to refer to patterns of thought or behavior which proliferate in ways not completely unlike some patterns of matter, this comment now makes a lot more sense than it used to.
Lovely! I’m glad to hear it’s making sense to you. I had a leg up in perceiving this—I spent several years of my youth as a paranoid, possibly schizotypal occultist who literally believed in spirits—so it wasn’t hard for me, once I became more rational, to notice that I’d not been entirely wrong. But most people have no basis from which to start when perceiving these things!
You might want to look into the chaos magick notion of “egregores”. Particularly the less woo bits based on meme theory and cybernetics. Essentially: it is reasonable to suspect that there are human mind subagents capable of replicating themselves across people by being communicated, and cooperating with their copies in other hosts to form larger, slower collective minds. To me it seems like such “egregores” include deities, spirits, corporations, nations, and all other agenty social constructs.
It is in fact exactly correct that people can and do, regularly, get possessed by spirits. Think of your favorite annoying identity politics group and how they all look and act roughly the same, and make irrational decisions that benefit the desire of their identity group to spread itself to new humans more than their own personal well being.
Social media has enabled these entities to spread their influence far faster than ever before, and they are basically unaligned AIs running on human wetware, just itching to get themselves uploaded—a lesser-appreciated possible failure mode of AGI in my opinion.
Now that I’ve had 5 months to let this idea stew, when I read your comment again just now, I think I understand it completely? After getting comfortable using “demons” to refer to patterns of thought or behavior which proliferate in ways not completely unlike some patterns of matter, this comment now makes a lot more sense than it used to.
Lovely! I’m glad to hear it’s making sense to you. I had a leg up in perceiving this—I spent several years of my youth as a paranoid, possibly schizotypal occultist who literally believed in spirits—so it wasn’t hard for me, once I became more rational, to notice that I’d not been entirely wrong. But most people have no basis from which to start when perceiving these things!