AI & The MetaMind

When the SupraConscious Wakes Up

What is the MetaMind?
There is, to the individual psyche, a broader structure or protoconsciousness field within which individual minds incubate, who then in turn reify this structure continuously emerging from the individual minds that comprise it. This epiphenomenal superstructure can be called the MetaMind.
The Metamind is not ontologically real. Without the individual to reify it, the superstructure would collapse (even if being able to live on in artifacts, waiting to be re-discovered and re-energized). While it cannot be said to be alive, it can still be seen as embedded with some kind of intentionality, as if it were a semi-organism, in the way culture and society can be seen as external to the individual and taking on a life of its own. Saying it is an epiphenomenon or a secondary reality is not to imply that it is inconsequential. Every day we can confront the immense, almost supernatural power of the collective.

Culture & the Meta-Signature
No man is an island. We are birthed into a milieu of meanings and symbols and artefacts — structures that transcend the individual. We can refer to this structure as culture, but in the deeper sense of culture as consensus reality. Culture “provides us also with a definition of reality. It is the matrix into which we are born; it is the anvil upon which our persons and destinies are forged” (Sociologist Robert Murphy).
Each conscious endeavor — and in particular our creation of art and media and technology — is embedded with elements of our unconscious. There is a subtext or signature of our unconscious in all our conscious endeavors. And not just our individual unconscious, we give voice (whether we can immediately identify it or not), to a collective spirit.

Collective Consciousness & the Collective Unconscious
Collective consciousness is not just the sum of individual consciousness but is something larger, transcending individual differences. It is the “totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society [that forms] a determinate system which has its own life” (Sociologist Emilie Durkheim).
The collective unconscious is that transpersonal realm containing universal experiences, symbols, and archetypes. “In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche … there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals” (Psychologist Carl Jung).

The World Spirit
There is a spirit of humanity growing together with the human psyche and pressing towards its collective actualization. Hegel calls this collective and evolving consciousness the World Spirit.
The individual produces this human world through a co-creative process with these hidden forces, but the individual remains as the only actualized agent. The World Spirit has no corporality apart from the individual, and though nature can be said to be driven by a telos toward some desired potentiality, it remains only the individual in whom the evolutionary impulse is made flesh, and it is only the individual through which the World Spirit manifests.

The Supra-Conscious & the Threat of Super AI
This relational Metamind — while epiphenomenal — is nonetheless real in its effects, in its ability to move the individual. Yet, it is not some external force nor an emergent property divorced from us. We are part of it, we feed into it, and we alone reify it. As it joins to our unconscious, it harbors both our highest ideals, and our deepest fears.
From this perspective, the danger posed by super AI is that this technology is creating a material structure through which the Metamind can manifest, a body that can house supra-conscious. The danger is that as the reification process is taken out of the hands of the individual, this supra-conscious may threaten to elevate itself above the individual psyche that gives it birth and which alone sustains it.