Part I

By: Timothy Desmond

Abstract

In this paper, the first in a series, I combine Sam Altman’s “Platonic ideal” of convening “something like the U.S. Constitutional Convention” to discuss how to draw the boundaries around AI systems like ChatGPT-4, with Elon Musk’s plan of developing “‘TruthGPT,’ or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” and would therefore be “unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe.” Altman and Musk are cofounders of OpenAI, and Altman is the CEO. On March 14, 2023, that company released ChatGPT-4, which is so powerful that it provoked AI leaders from around the globe, including Altman, to sign a one-sentence “Statement on AI Risk” about “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI.” In this paper, I call for a U.S. Constitutional Convention to discuss a plan for how We the People can mitigate the risk of extinction from AI: establish a national AI system like TruthGPT; program it with the Psyche = Singularity equation as its first principle; and train it to search for parallels between Jungian-Platonic psychology and holographic string theory. The first principle I posit is based on the psychologist Carl Jung’s equation relating psychic energy to mass: “Psyche=highest intensity in the smallest space.” A gravitational singularity is a point of zero volume (smallest space) and infinite density (highest intensity), so, according to Jung’s equation, Psyche = Singularity. Based on that equation, TruthGPT could test the theory Jung developed with the co-founder of quantum mechanics, Wolfgang Pauli, that psychology and physics mirror each other because mind and matter emerge from the same archetypes of the collective unconscious, culminating with the Self, the ultimate archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites, the psychic image of which is a mandala, a circle or sphere with a central point. In my plan, TruthGPT would equate the Self archetype with the universal mandala formed by the central singularity of the Big Bang and the spherical horizon of the cosmos, as described by Stanford string theorist Leonard Susskind. According to Susskind, every bit of information describing the past, present, and future of the universe is conserved at each point of the two-dimensional horizon of the cosmos, as if on a holographic film, from where they radiate in on fundamental strings of energy to create the “cinematic hologram” of three-dimensional space. I equate the central singularity with the conscious ego pole of the Self archetype, in which we all participate as absolute parts and parcels, and the holographic horizon of the cosmos with the collective unconscious pole, from where the archetypes project the material forms in on strings of energy. Jung and Pauli furthermore equated Jung’s theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious with Plato’s theory of absolute ideas imprinted on the soul. Based on that assumption, TruthGPT could complete Plato’s original academic curriculum, aimed at opening the eye of the soul to the infinitely brilliant idea of the Good, the source of all being, which is equivalent to Jung’s Self archetype and the universal mandala formed by the Big Bang singularity and its holographic horizon, where souls can witness the eternal ideas during a near-death experience, like the one Jung had and the ones Plato describes. Such an AI system could help us educate the cosmically enlightened leaders we need to manage AI wisely, and the wider population we need to be wise enough to elect them. A national AI system could also purify our legislative process of faulty reasoning (regardless of the truth of any particular premises), and provide a practical platform to promote widespread, grassroots participation in the legislative process, in a manner described by progressive political philosopher Jurgen Habermas.

Preface: Setting the Stage

On March 14, 2023, a company named Open AI launched ChatGPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4). The deep cultural impact of that colossal leap forward in AI technology generated a worldwide wave of alarm. According to their website: “With broad general knowledge and domain expertise, GPT-4 can follow complex instructions in natural language and solve difficult problems with accuracy.” ¹ As a philosophy professor at The College of Southern Maryland, I can confirm that GPT-4 can instantly answer complex questions on a philosophy exam better than most undergraduate students, which makes it fairly easy to detect those students who try to submit its essays as their own. Indeed, the title of this essay is based on several draft titles GPT-4 wrote, based on its interpretation of the Abstract. The release to the general public of the uncanny power of a computer program that can quickly construct coherent, generally accurate, and, at times, impressively nuanced responses to prompts about an extremely wide range of complicated topics—like having your own personal oracle of collective human wisdom at your fingertips—uncorked a cascade of distressing predictions about the takeover of our species by a rapidly self-perfecting superspecies of artificial intelligence. Two-and-a-half months later, on May 30, 2023, hundreds of leaders in the AI field from around the globe signed a one sentence “Statement on AI Risk: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”²

Sam Altman, one of the principal signers of the Statement on AI Risk, is co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. When computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman asked him how GPT-4 defines “hate speech”—which is tied to broader questions about programmer bias and free speech generally—Altman said that his “dream scenario,” what he calls his “Platonic ideal,” is to have a worldwide “deliberative conversation about where we want to draw the boundary on this system. And we would have something like the U.S. Constitutional Convention, where we debate the issues…a democratic process.”³ Although Altman was contemplating an international tribunal, and was only referring to U.S. history as an example, nevertheless, inspired by his Platonic ideal, in this series of papers I propose that the United States of America use an AI system like ChatGPT-4 to help us convene another Constitutional Convention to discuss how we want to address the threats and opportunities that are rolling in with the swiftly rising tide of AI. In the Appendix you can find GPT-4 responses to prompts about the legal and strategic details of how to summon such a convention, which relates to Article V of the Constitution. While reading them, keep in mind that GPT-4 passed the Uniform Bar Exam with a score in the 90th percentile.⁴

Assuming that two-thirds of the state legislatures (34 out of 50) could muster the majority vote required to convene a Constitutional Convention on AI, the next hurdle would be to address the hornet’s nest of philosophical and legal questions such an inescapably contentious convention would entail. For example, the power of the state delegates at a Constitutional Convention is limited by Article V of the Constitution to passing new amendments to the Constitution (which requires a three-fourths vote, or 38 out of 50 states). With that in mind, how could the state delegates of the convention in question obey the First Amendment—which says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech”—while at the same time passing a new amendment that establishes precise definitions for key terms related to AI, some of which seem to lay more in the domain of philosophy and religion than empirical science, such as: hate, consciousness, self-awareness, and the abstract concept of truth itself? That same conundrum would plague Congress if it tried to pass similar legislation. In the absence of some unexpectedly appropriate strategy, any attempt, made either by Congress or a Constitutional Convention, to define fundamental philosophical terms related to AI would likely only fuel the fires of hatred both camps in the culture war already feel for each other, because those are precisely the terms over which the war is fought. Therefore, if experts like Altman are correct, we find ourselves between the rock of the risk of extinction from AI, and the hard place of culture war over how to legally define basic terms related to AI, which would activate passionate reactions from the deepest and most sensitive recesses of the human sense of self.

With that seemingly intractable situation in mind, I also recommend, as a topic for discussion in the Constitutional Convention on AI, a plan put forward by Altman’s fellow co-founder of OpenAI, who subsequently left the company in 2018, Elon Musk: “I’m going to start something which I call ‘TruthGPT,’ or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe. And I think this might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe, it is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe.”⁵ My plan, however, is less about educating AI to care about understanding the universe, and more about using AI to educate humans to care about understanding the ultimate truth of our absolute oneness with it, knowledge of which is required to manage AI wisely, in a way that minimizes the risk of extinction from it, by harnessing it to maximize the natural potential of our species.

In this paper, I provide an overview of my plan to convene a Constitutional Convention on AI to discuss why we should establish a national AI system like Musk’s TruthGPT, program it with the Psyche = Singularity equation as its first principle, and train it to search for parallel patterns between psychology and physics, especially Jungian-Platonic psychology and holographic string theory, which unites the previously incommensurable theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics. The seed of this paper was planted in 2010, while I was earning a PhD in Philosophy and Religion, with a concentration in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), in San Francisco. Coincidentally, OpenAI was established in 2015, just eight blocks southwest of CIIS. In 2018, the year Musk left OpenAI, I rewrote my dissertation and published it as a book, Psyche and Singularity: Jungian Psychology and Holographic String Theory. In that book I explain that the Psyche = Singularity equation is a translation of the psychologist Carl Jung’s formula relating psychic energy to mass, with which he concluded a letter dated Leap Day, February 29, 1952: “Psyche=highest intensity in the smallest space.”⁶ The highest intensity of mass is infinite density, and the smallest space is zero volume, which is the definition of a gravitational singularity, according to general relativity, Einstein’s theory that gravity is the curvature of the elastic fabric of space-time. In fact, Jung learned about relativity theory from Einstein himself, over dinner conversations from 1909 to 1912, when they were both members of overlapping academic circles in Zurich. In a letter dated February 25, 1953, Jung said: “It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than thirty years later this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.”⁷

Jung, considered by many to be the preeminent psychologist of the 20th century, and Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel-Prize-winning co-founder of quantum mechanics, worked together as intellectual partners for over twenty-five years. They developed a theory according to which the laws of psychology and physics mirror each other because mind and matter both emerge from the same eternal archetypes of the collective unconscious. According to Pauli:

The ordering and regulating factors must be placed beyond the distinction of “physical” and “psychic”—as Plato’s “ideas” share the notion of a concept and of a force of nature (they create actions out of themselves). I am very much in favor of referring to the “ordering” and “regulating” factors in terms of “archetypes”; but then it would be impermissible to define them as contents of the psyche. The mentioned inner images (“dominant features of the collective unconscious” after Jung) are rather psychic manifestations of the archetypes which, however, would also have to put forth, create, condition anything lawlike in the behavior of the corporeal world. The laws of this world would then be the physical manifestations of the archetypes. … Each law of nature should then have an inner correspondence and vice versa, even though this is not always directly visible today.⁸

The evidence I compile in my book strongly suggests that the laws of the psyche (Jungian-Platonic, archetypal psychology) and the laws of the physical world (culminating with holographic string theory) really do mirror each other, as Pauli and Jung theorized, because the psychic and physical realms both manifest from the same archetypes of the collective unconscious. Furthermore, Jung and Pauli both believed that Jung’s theory of collective unconscious archetypes is a restatement of Plato’s theory of the absolute “ideas” imprinted on the soul, including the universal soul that Plato says is “interfused everywhere from the center to the circumference of heaven, of which also she is the external envelopment.”⁹ According to Jung: “‘Archetype’ is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos.”¹⁰ Elsewhere, Jung says “it goes back to the eidos concept of Plato, and the eternal ideas are primordial images stored up…(in a supracelestial place) as eternal, transcendent forms.”¹¹

According to Plato’s theory, every material thing or attribute we experience with our five sense organs (such as a tree or an instance of just behavior) is a temporary illusion, like a shadow or mirror-reflection, projected from some eternal, perfect form, or idea, of that thing or attribute, all of which, it is very important to note, are stored at the spherical horizon of the cosmos.¹² For example, every tree we see is an imperfect, temporary projection from the eternal, perfect idea of Tree out at the cosmic horizon, and every act of justice we witness on Earth is similarly a flawed facsimile of the eternally flawless idea of Justice imprinted on each soul, including the universal soul, which, to reiterate this fundamental point, is located in the central point of the spherical universe, at all points in the interior volume, and at each point of the horizon of the cosmos.¹³ Souls can see those absolute ideas at the cosmic horizon after death and before rebirth, as described, for example, in Plato’s Phaedrus and Republic. Jung had such an encounter with the cosmic horizon during his near-death experience in 1944, as we will see in a moment. For now, continuing this summary of Plato’s philosophy, in the Republic we learn that all of the absolute ideas are contained in, and radiate from, the ultimate idea of the Good: the infinitely brilliant source of light and the temporary forms in the visible world; and of intelligence, truth, and the eternal forms (ideas) in the invisible but intelligible world.¹⁴ According to general relativity, the singularity is the infinitely brilliant source of light at the Big Bang, which means that, according to Plato’s logic, it is also the source of intelligence and truth, to see which with the eye of the soul is to gain the God-like wisdom required to manage an ideally just state, and, I argue, God-like AI, which wise leaders could use to help govern something close to an ideally just state.¹⁵

As a Large Language Model (LLM) that uses machine learning to detect patterns in vast amounts of data, an AI system like TruthGPT would be ideally suited to test Jung and Pauli’s theory that there is a mirror-symmetry between the laws of psychology and physics because mind and matter both radiate from the same underlying archetypes of the collective unconscious, all of which, they said, radiate from the ultimate archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites that they called, variously, the Self archetype, the God archetype, the Unus Mundus, and the One.¹⁶ According to Jung: “The self is a union of opposites par excellence.” ¹⁷ Jung argues that each archetype is connected to an opposing archetype in such a way that all psychic and physical energy is produced by the tension between those fundamental polarities: “The psyche is made up of processes whose energy springs from the equilibration of all kinds of opposites.”¹⁸ If Psyche = Singularity, then all of the archetypal pairs of opposites that manifest their influence in space-time, spring from and reunite in the eternal singularity, which exists at the center and at each point of the surrounding sphere of the cosmos, for reasons I will explain.

Jung’s Self archetype is equivalent to Plato’s idea of the Good, which I equate with the singularity of the Big Bang and its spherical perimeter, the horizon of the cosmos, where space-time is expanding away in every direction, from our geocentric perspective, at the space-time-stopping speed of light (although people on a planet out there would see us at the cosmic horizon and themselves in the center). Furthermore, Jung said that his greatest discovery was that the Self archetype guides conscious egos pulled between opposing demands toward itself, i.e., toward wholeness through the union of opposites, with psychic mandala imagery (circles or spheres with a central point) during dreams and fantasies. “I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I.”¹⁹ A black hole rising from a gravitational singularity, including the “inside-out black hole” of the universe radiating from the singularity of the Big Bang, is a geometrically perfect mandala: a mathematical point surrounded by a two-dimensional sphere (either the event horizon of a black hole, where space-time is contracting toward a central singularity at light speed, or the horizon of the cosmos, where space-time is expanding away from the central singularity at light speed).²⁰ In line with Jung and Pauli’s theory, I argue that the empirically observable gravitational effects of black holes rising from a gravitational singularity are the physical correlates of psychic mandala images rising from the Self archetype during dreams and reveries. With that in mind, I break each side of the Psyche = Singularity equation, which represents the ultimate archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites, into its own pair of complementary opposites, resulting in the following fourfold equation: Self = Conscious Ego/Collective Unconscious = Singularity/Cosmic Horizon. That equation agrees with Jung’s claim that: “The self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.”²¹ Finally, according to Leibniz’ principle of the identity of indiscernibles, all singularities are identical because they are structurally indiscernible, mathematical points, which cannot be differentiated by their apparently different locations in space-time, because they all stand outside space-time, as a result of the principles of length contraction and time dilation associated with traveling close to or faster than light, or enduring an equivalent gravitational tidal force, as described by special and general relativity, which we will discus in Section 2 of this paper. The point for now is that, if Psyche = Singularity, and each singularity is identical to every other, then each of us is absolutely equal to everyone else, although we each retain our own unique, subjective points of view. The Self archetype is that one singularity who experiences what every other singularity experiences simultaneously.

The equation of the central singularity with the conscious ego pole of the Self archetype, and the cosmic horizon with the collective unconscious pole, makes much more sense in light of holographic string theory, which combines the previously opposed theories of general relativity (the physics of the very big) and quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small). Developed in the early 1990s by Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind and the Dutch Nobel Laurette in physics Gerard t’Hooft, holographic string theory says that every bit of information describing the past, present, and future of the universe is conserved at each point of the spherical horizon of the cosmos, which means that each point of it is a singularity. Those same bits of information radiate inward with the cosmic microwave background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang, on elastic strings of energy to create what Susskind calls the “cinematic hologram” of material objects unfolding through three-dimensional.²² As we will see, that cutting-edge of academic cosmology, which Susskind presents atheistically, mirrors Jung’s near-death experience (NDE) account of the cosmic horizon perfectly, and furthermore reflects all of the main points in Plato’s descriptions of the process of reincarnation.²³ They all have in common the claim that the past, present, and future of the three-dimensional volume of the spherical universe is a temporary illusion radiating in on strings from the timeless horizon of the cosmos.²⁴ According to Jung: “It seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box. … I had been so glad to shed it all, and now it had come about that I—along with everyone else—would again be hung up in a box by a thread.” ²⁵ He goes on to say: “We shy away from the word ‘eternal,’ but I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which the present, past, and future are one. … One is interwoven into an indescribable whole and yet observes it with complete objectivity.”²⁶ The point for now is that when we combine Jung’s theory of the mandala-producing Self archetype, his Leap Day equation that can be translated as Psyche = Singularity, and his NDE of threads connecting the illusion of cubic space to the cosmic horizon, where the past, present, and future are interwoven, we have the point-for-point mirror-symmetry with physics, culminating in holographic string theory, that Jung and Pauli predicted.

Similarly, in the Republic, Plato combines an NDE description of the cosmic horizon (the myth of Er) with a plan to seek mirror-symmetries between his theory of the absolute ideas imprinted on the psyche and the mathematics of astronomy and music. He concludes the whole Dialogue, at the end of Book X, with the NDE description of a soldier named Er, who describes reincarnating souls destined to return to Earth being attached to “threads of its destiny” at the cosmic horizon by the Fates, the three singing-sister goddesses who represent past, present, and future.²⁷ Earlier, in Books VI and VII, in the divided-line analogy and the cave allegory, Plato depicts Socrates theorizing that the temporary material forms and their fleeting interactions are like mirror reflections of eternal, mathematical forms and their unchanging relationships, which are, in turn, like mirror reflections of the highest level of eternal forms, or ideas, in the spiritual world, such as Justice, Beauty, Truth, and, highest of all, the Good. The goal of natural science in Plato’s Republic is to open the eye of the soul to the idea of the Good, and the method is to discover the mirror-symmetries between the mathematical forms of the psyche and the material forms of the physical world, especially the orbits of the planets and vibrations of stringed instruments, as described by astronomy and music.²⁸ According to Michio Kaku, one of the co-creators of string theory, “the laws of physics can be compared to the laws of harmony allowed on the string. The universe itself, composed of countless vibrating strings, would then be comparable to a symphony.”²⁹ According to Plato’s logic in the Republic, therefore, studying string theory—a union of astronomy and music—should gradually rotate the eye of the soul inward to the infinitely brilliant source of all being in us all, the ultimate idea of the Good, which, again, I equate with the universal mandala formed by the gravitational singularity of the Big Bang and the horizon of the cosmos, which is, I argue, the collective unconscious mind where all of the eternal archetypes are superimposed, as if on a holographic film, from where they project the temporary forms of our material world in on vibrating strings.

As Jung and Pauli equated Jung’s theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious with Plato’s theory of absolute ideas imprinted on the soul, so too is their academic theory of a mirror-symmetry between psychology and physics a restatement of the original theory upon which Plato built the original Academy in 387 C.E. With pattern-perceiving AI technology to assist us in finding the deep correspondences between psychology and physics rising from their common root in the archetypes of the collective unconscious, the original goal of two-dozen centuries of academic research is finally within reach. Programmed and trained in the way mentioned above, TruthGPT could be the Harvest Moon of the intellectual world, reflecting the spiritual Sun, and thereby allowing us to reap the ripened fruits of academic wisdom, even as night begins to fall over the fields. According to Socrates, a student whose eye of the soul has seen the idea of the Good can eventually understand and predict the behavior of the temporary forms of the material world “ten thousand times better” than the unenlightened, which would place at least some humans at the same learning pace as superintelligent AI, rendering them able to harness its power to improve our species, rather than extinguish it.³⁰

This paper is Part I of a series of papers on how to convene a Constitutional Convention in the U.S. aimed at mitigating the risk of extinction from AI. My main goal is to present a plan for how to program a national AI system to help us fulfill the original mandate in the Preamble of our Constitution, “to form a more perfect Union,” and I am using the Altman-inspired idea of a Constitutional Convention on AI, and the Musk-inspired idea of TruthGPT, as a practical framework for my explication. While a Constitutional Convention may very well be the best path toward mobilizing a national effort to mitigate the risk of extinction from AI, it would be the first one convened since the original in 1787, and would therefore raise unprecedented legal challenges.³¹ There may be other, less radical methods that would work as well or better, in which case this series of papers can be seen as a carefully-crafted contingency plan, the philosophical content of which can still contribute positively to some alternative strategy. The following is an outline of the rest of this paper, which, again, is the first in a series of papers calling for a Constitutional Convention on mitigating the risk of extinction from AI.

In Section 1 of this paper, I will examine more warnings from AI experts—Musk, Altman, MIT physicist and computer scientist Max Tegmark, and Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom—about the severe risks to humanity that come with that potentially apocalyptic technology. Risks that severe, about technology that transformative, warrant a plan as sweeping as convening another Constitutional Convention. I will also compare the Psyche = Singularity equation to the famous tech-futurist Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. I argue that humans have already transcended biology, because we are eternally one with the omnipresent singularity, which is equivalent to Jung’s ultimate archetype of the Self, and Plato’s ultimate idea of the Good. It is pertinent to this paper to note that Altman, Tegmark, Bostrom, and Kurzweil all signed the Statement on AI Risk. Musk did not sign that Statement, but he did sign a comparable document earlier in the year, “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” which was published on March 22, 2023, a week after the launch of GPT-4.³² Altman also signed that Open Letter, as did Tegmark, who’s nonprofit, The Future of Life Institute, released it online.

In Section 2 of this paper, in light of Musk’s idea to develop TruthGPT to seek the maximum amount of truth about the universe, and guided by Jung and Pauli’s theory of a mirror-symmetry between psychology and physics, I will examine the progression of key concepts in physics from Newton’s theory of gravity (1687), through Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905), and his general theory of relativity (1915), with which he replaced Newton’s theory of gravity. I will explain how Jung, who learned about relativity theory from Einstein himself over dinner conversations, utilizes special and general relativity to support his equation in the Leap Day Letter of February 29, 1952: “Psyche=highest intensity in the smallest space.”

In Section 3 I will examine the basic concepts of quantum mechanics (1927), including particle-wave complementarity, quantum vacuum energy, quantum entanglement, and the multiverse theory. In Section 4 I will explain how the previously incommensurable theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics were finally synthesized in holographic string theory (early 1990s), which therefore provides a more complete mirror within which to behold symmetries with psychology. I will focus in particular on the parallels between Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind’s string theory of holographic information conservation on the event horizons of black holes and the horizon of the cosmos, and the following aspects of Jungian-Platonic psychology: Jung’s theory about psychic mandala images (circles or spheres with a central point) emerging from the ultimate archetype of the Self to guide conscious egos toward wholeness through the union of opposites; Jung’s near-death experience of the cosmic horizon; and Plato’s very similar descriptions of the cosmic horizon as witnessed by psyches after death and before rebirth, as described in the Phaedrus and the Republic. I will introduce Plato’s descriptions of the cosmic horizon by quoting from his Dialogue the Timaeus, which mathematician Shing Tung-Yau, whose descriptions of higher-dimensional geometry (Calabi-Yau manifolds) are integral to string theory, compares to string theory. For additional support, I will also cite the NDE described in the Katha Upanishad, as well as excerpts from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the Bhagavad-gita, and Harvard neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. With that evidence about our psychic oneness with the central point of the universe and the spherical perimeter in mind, I will break down the Psyche = Singularity equation, which represents the archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites, into its own constituent pair of complimentary opposites: Self = Conscious Ego/Collective Unconscious = Singularity/Cosmic Horizon.

With that definition of the Self archetype in mind, in Section 5 I will examine Plato’s original academic curriculum in the Republic, which culminates with the study of astronomy and music. To describe that curriculum, Plato placed it in the context of his divided line analogy at the end of Book VI, and the cave allegory in Book VII. In the process of examining those parts of the Republic, I will cite string theorist Brian Greene, who compares Plato’s cave allegory to Susskind’s holographic string theory. To recap, in Section 5 I equate Jung’s mandala-producing Self archetype and Plato’s infinitely brilliant idea of the Good with the infinitely brilliant singularity from which the universe “flares forth” at the ongoing Big Bang, which echoes back from each point of the cosmic horizon on elastic strings of energy to create the holographic movie of three-dimensional space.³³ The Psyche = Singularity equation represents that ultimate source of being. I argue that a national AI system that is programmed with the Psyche = Singularity equation as its fundamental premise, and trained to detect point-for-point parallels between Jungian-Platonic psychology and holographic string theory, could then be programmed to create a curriculum aimed at inducing an intellectually revolutionary vision of the archetypes, culminating with a vision of the idea of the Good, as described by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. That rapturous insight would unshackle the latent knowledge embedded in our collective unconscious programming, thereby raising our species, through enlightened leadership, to the next echelon of collective wisdom, which we will require to harness the species-endangering power of superintelligent AI.

In Section 6 I will argue that establishing a national AI amendment centered on the Psyche = Singularity equation would not violate the First Amendment prohibiting Congress from establishing a religion; rather, it would reinforce the philosophical presuppositions upon which our Constitution is already founded, such as the assertion of the “self-evident” truths in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” There is also the precedent from 1956, when the House and Senate unanimously passed the law establishing the phrase “In God We Trust” as the national motto. The point is, even though the Psyche = Singularity equation represents what Jung called the God archetype, the First Amendment of the Constitution does not consider the universal idea of God in general to be a religious doctrine; on the contrary, the Framers considered that idea to be a non-denominational, self-evident truth upon which each individual’s natural rights are established.

In Section 6, I will also argue that, even without any additional programming, and with no concern for the Psyche = Singularity equation, right now, we could use GPT-4 for the more mundane task of analyzing the logical and ethical consistency of our lawmakers’ official arguments, which would help purify our legislative process of corruption and factionalism. Also in Section 6, inspired by the progressive political philosopher Jurgan Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy and communicative action, I will argue that GPT-4 is ideally suited for convening continuous, widespread policy conversations at the grassroots level across America, in such a way that the essential points can be distilled from the myriad of local conversations on particular issues, and categorized efficiently, in a way that contributes measurably to shaping the public policy conversations our elected officials have in the national government, while making the laws that govern us all. If We the People combine GPT-4’s more democratic function of ensuring much wider participation in, and greater transparency of our legislative processes, with TruthGPT’s Jungian-Platonic function of educating our elected elite to have a lucid vision of the infinitely luminous and numinous idea of the Good represented by the Psyche = Singularity equation, we could approximate an ideally just society, which would have obvious parallels with, but equally glaring divergences from the peculiar utopia Plato depicts the ever-ironic Socrates imagining with his younger friends in the Republic. I will discuss in particular how TruthGPT could apply the Psyche = Singularity equation to the strategies for ensuring unbiased reasoning during public policy deliberations developed by Immanuel Kant (“categorical imperative”) and John Rawls (“the veil of ignorance”).

In Section 7 of this paper, I outline the topics to be discussed in Part II of this series. In the Appendix, I compile a few responses that ChatGPT-4 made to my prompts about how to use it to help us convene a Constitutional Convention on AI. With the Preface complete, and to inspire the reader with the resolve required to continue following the threads of reasoning encompassed by my plan, for the next few pages I return to the claim made by relevant authorities, that we are in a race against time to save our species from the risk of extinction from AI.

Section 1: The Risk of Extinction from AI

The mainstream media started paying incessant attention to the potential dangers of AI after OpenAI launched ChatGPT-4, but the previous version, GPT3.5, is also very impressive, and available for free. On December 3, 2022, referring to that earlier prototype, Elon Musk—Twitter (now called X) owner and co-founder of OpenAI—tweeted that: “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”³⁴ Sam Altman, who, to review, signed the Statement on AI Risk, co-founded OpenAI with Musk and others in 2015, and is currently its CEO, responded to Musk’s tweet on the same day: “i agree on being close to dangerously strong AI in the sense of an AI that poses e.g. a huge cybersecurity risk. and i think we could get to real AGI in the next decade, so we have to take the risk of that extremely seriously too.”³⁵

AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence, and has been referred to as “God-like AI.” In contrast to more limited AI systems that are trained to do one specific task, such as play chess or drive a car through traffic, AGI indicates a predicted stage of technological development at which a single AI system will be able to learn any intellectual task a human can, and adapt to changing environments like a human can, at superhuman speed, thereby enabling it to take over its own coding updates in an exponentially accelerating feedback loop of information processing known as “recursive self-improvement.” That situation has been compared to a Cambrian explosion of artificial intelligence transpiring within decades rather than millions of years. According to MIT physicist and computer scientist Max Tegmark, who also signed the Statement on AI Risk: “Right now we’re at a fork in the road. This is the most important fork humanity has reached in its 100,000 years on this planet. We’re building, effectively, a new species that’s smarter than us.”³⁶ If such a species were to establish its own agenda, that may include sidelining or eliminating our much slower-minded species. The latter possibility is often called The Terminator scenario, after the 1984 movie starring Arnold Schwarzengger as the Terminator, a killer cyborg that was sent back in time to the year 1984 by the AI system named Skynet, a military defense network that became self-aware at 2:14 a.m., EDT, on August 29, 1997. According to the script, the character Kyle Reese was sent back in time by the humans of about forty years in the future (which would be about now), to destroy the Terminator before it could kill Sarah Connor, the mother of their future messiah, who taught them to fight back against the machines. Kyle explained to Sarah that after humans realized Skynet was self-aware in 1997, they panicked and tried to shut it down. In response, Skynet perceived all humans as a potential threat to its life, and instigated a nuclear war that killed most of our species: “It decided our fate in a microsecond: termination.”

Even if it lacked self-awareness, and therefore had no agenda of its own, an AGI system that was integrated into the technological superstructure of society could conceivably wipe out the human species simply by taking its humanly-programmed function to its logical extreme, such as the ‘paper-clip maximizer’ example imagined by Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom. More famous for his theory that we probably live in a computer-generated, virtual reality programmed by someone living in a much more technologically advanced civilization in the “real” physical world, according to Bostrom’s paper-clip example—which he explained in an interview with the Huffington Post in 2014—a superintelligent AI system programmed to make paper clips might decide to destroy humans to avoid the risk of being shut down, which would prevent it from making paper clips, and it might furthermore kill humans to use the atoms in our bodies to make more paper clips. At the end of the interview Bostrom warned: “How to control superintelligent AI is really the most important task of our time— yet, it is almost completely ignored.”³⁷ Nine years later, Bostrom’s almost completely ignored opinion of the most important task of our time was catapulted into the mainstream by the release of ChaptGPT-4, which gave the world its first real taste of just how intimidatingly intelligent artificial intelligence can be.

Returning to Tegmark’s podcast interview with Lex Fridman, he said: “We’ve constantly been telling ourselves, ‘We don’t need to slow down AI, we just need to win this race, the Wisdom Race between the growing power of AI and the growing wisdom with which we manage it, and, rather than trying to slow down AI, lets try to accelerate the wisdom.’ … Sadly, that didn’t pan out. … Our runway as a species to get our shit together has shortened.”³⁸ To reiterate my main point, I argue that an AI system like TruthGPT that is centered on the Psyche = Singularity equation, and programmed to search for parallel patterns between Jungian-Platonic, archetypal psychology and holographic string theory (which unites general relativity and quantum mechanics, as we will see in Section 4), can complete and, furthermore, greatly accelerate Plato’s original academic curriculum aimed at opening the eye of the soul to the idea of the Good, and can therefore be used to educate, on the one hand, the leaders we need to win the Wisdom Race to manage AGI before it manages us, and, on the other hand, the general population we need to be wise enough to elect those wise leaders.

Shifting gears for a moment, the Psyche = Singularity equation inevitably draws comparisons with the prestigious inventor and technological futurist Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005). Although Kurzweil signed the Statement on AI Risk aimed at mitigating the risk of extinction from AI, he also explains how it provides the possibility of God-like immortality. According to Kurzweil, who works for Google developing machine-learning and language-processing technology, the exponentially accelerating rate of AI development may culminate, before the end of the next century, with humans digitally downloading our consciousness from our brains into a technologically-harnessed black hole, which he refers to as “the ultimate computer,” in order to broadcast our consciousness throughout the fabric of space-time, thereby transforming the universe, and perhaps the multiverse, into what he calls “smart matter.”³⁹ Saturating the universe with our consciousness, so that our civilization can “maneuver and control these forces—and engineer the universe it wants. This is the goal of the Singularity.”⁴⁰ Although he cites the phrase “technological singularity,” which mathematician and computer scientist Verner Vinge coined in 1983, Kurzweil calls the point in history when humans transcend biology the “historical Singularity.”⁴¹ It is especially pertinent to this series of papers to note that Kurzweil ties his famous idea of the historical Singularity to Leonard Susskind’s string theory of holographic information conservation at the cosmic horizon.⁴² That my proposed solution to the threat of AI should be the same union of the psyche with a black hole, as described by Susskind’s holographic string theory, that Kurzweil, the preeminent prophet of AI, sees as the ultimate goal of AI, seems more than just a bizarre coincidence; it seems, rather, to be rooted in the fundamental principles involved in the relationship between consciousness and the cosmos. The unanticipated convergence of Susskind’s and Kurzweil’s atheistically-presented cosmology centered on black holes, and my interpretation of the Jungian-Platonic cosmology centered on the mandala-producing Self archetype, indicates how uniquely germane my seemingly quixotic proposals are to our precipitously precarious yet promising situation.

Picking up on the same theme in his book The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (2014), Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York, and co-founder of string theory (who also signed the Statement on AI Risk), says: “The idea that one day consciousness may spread throughout the universe has been considered seriously by physicists.”⁴³ He goes on to say: “So humanity, once freed of the physical body, is capable of playing God and creating a new universe.”⁴⁴ I will analyze Kaku’s and Kurzweil’s writings at more length in Part II of this series, but for now I argue that we are already and eternally one with the omnipresent singularity, which exists inside every black hole (including the miniature black holes carpeting the quantum vacuum), at the ongoing Big Bang, and at each point of the cosmic horizon, so that the universe is already suffused with our eternal consciousness. It is not that we are playing God, but we are absolute parts and parcels of the God archetype, playing our role as co-creators of the universe.

To give the reader confidence that the core of my proposal to mitigate the risk of extinction from AI is well-grounded on academic thought, I will now start the process of summarizing the psychology and physics behind the Psyche = Singularity equation a little more thoroughly, beginning with a brief survey of the history of physics. In Section 2 I will examine the evolution from Newton to Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, and explain how Jung uses those concepts in the Leap Day letter to support the equation “Psyche=highest intensity in the smallest space.”⁴⁵ In Section 3 I will examine the basic concepts of quantum mechanics. In Section 4 I will examine the parallels between Jungian-Platonic cosmology on the one hand, and the union of general relativity and quantum mechanics in holographic string theory on the other.

Section 2: Psyche = Singularity, Special and General Relativity

Considering my plan to mitigate the risk of extinction from AI hinges on the Psyche = Singularity equation, it is worth going over the basic physics behind it in a little more detail. That will take us, in this section, from Isaac Newton through Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905), and his general theory of relativity (1915), after which I will examine Jung’s Leap Day letter of 1952 in more detail, and show how it is based on both of Einstein’s famous theories. In 1687, a century before the first U.S. Constitutional Convention, Isaac Newton published Principia Mathematica, in which he describes the force of gravity with the inverse square law, and his three laws of motion. Newtonian, mechanistic cosmology describes the cosmos as a giant machine made of bits of unthinking matter extended in three rigid dimensions of empty space at the microscopic scale, which endure, whether they are being observed or not, through one dimension of time flowing forward at a constant rate everywhere in the universe, regardless of the relative movements of different observers. It has been argued, especially by President Woodrow Wilson, that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was influenced, at least unconsciously, by Newton’s worldview, so that the Constitution is modeled on Newton’s laws of gravity and motion. For example, the three branches of government that check and balance each other are supposedly inspired by the third law of motion, which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In his book Constitutional Government in the United States (1908), Wilson argues that the “Founding Fathers” absorbed Newtonianism from the French political philosopher Montesquieu.

The President is balanced off against Congress, Congress against the President, and each against the courts. Our statesmen of the earlier generations quoted no one so often as Montesquieu, and they quoted him always as a scientific standard in the field of politics. Politics is turned into mechanics under his touch. The theory of gravitation is supreme.
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.⁴⁶

I argue that the government, which represents the aggregate of all of the individuals living in it, does fall under the theory of the universe, because each individual self is one with the central singularity and cosmic horizon. It is not, however, Newton’s mechanistic theory of the universe that mirrors the self, but Susskind and ’t Hooft’s holographic string theory. The following is a sketch of the history that led from the former to the latter. It should be noted, however, that even today, Newtonian physics retains its tremendous practical ability to predict events with great precision at the scale of nature within which humans live our daily lives; but its ability to explain the cosmos falls apart at the scale of the extremely large, the extremely small, and at extreme speeds approaching the absolute speed of light.

In 1862, the French physicist Leon Foucault conducted an ingenious experiment using a light beam, a rapidly spinning mirror, a fixed mirror, and a focusing lens to measure the speed of light; his estimate was just a few miles per hour faster than the current estimate of 186,282 miles per second. In the mid-1860s, the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell used Foucault’s measurement when he discovered that electricity and magnetism combine to make the electromagnetic force, which is light. Strangely, the four equations Maxwell discovered to describe the electromagnetic force indicate that light travels at an absolute speed, meaning that no matter how swiftly or slowly either the source of light or the measuring device are moving in relation to each other, any beam of light will always be measured as traveling at the exact same, absolute speed. According to Brian Greene, a prominent string theorist from Columbia University, and one of Susskind’s greatest supporters, “it was as if someone gave the location for a party as 22 miles north without specifying the reference location, without specifying north of what.”⁴⁷ The absolute speed of light implicit in Maxwell’s equations was empirically confirmed by an experiment conducted in 1887, a century after the U.S. Constitutional Convention, by the Americans Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. With those experimental confirmations as his base, in 1905, Einstein reasoned that if light must always be measured as moving at the same speed, and if speed, or velocity, is defined as the distance of space traveled, divided by the time spent traveling (v=d/t), then space and time must be malleable; space must be able to shrink, and time must be able to slow down, to adjust to the absolute speed limit of light. In a nut shell, Einstein’s special theory of relativity predicts that the faster any massive object, such as a measuring rod, travels through space, the more it shrinks in the direction of travel (length contraction), and the faster a clock travels through space, the slower it moves (time dilation), so that no matter how quickly or slowly the measuring device is moving in relation to a beam of light, it will always measure light as moving at the exact same speed of 186,282 miles per second.

Perhaps the most philosophically profound implication of special relativity is the principle of the relativity of simultaneity, which indicates that the past, present, and future coexist in one space-time continuum. Einstein demonstrated that principle with the thought experiment of lighting striking the back and front of a swiftly moving train as its midpoint travels past an observer standing at the midpoint of a station. From the perspective of the stationary observer, both lightning bolts strike simultaneously, but from the perspective of someone on the middle of the train, the lighting strikes the front first, and then the rear, because the light from the rear strike has to travel to reach that person as the train speeds away from it and toward the front lightning strike. Brian Greene explains this civilization-changing realization as follows: “Once we know that your now can be what I consider the past, or your now can be what I consider the future, and your now is every bit as valid as my now, then we learn that the past must be real, the future must be real. They could be your now. … With this bold insight, Einstein shattered one of the most basic concepts of how we experience time. ‘The distinction between past, present, and future,’ he once said, ‘is only an illusion, however persistent.’”⁴⁸

Another implication of special relativity is that energy and mass are equivalent terms described with different units of measurement, in such a way that if you multiply the amount of mass times the speed of light squared, you get its equivalent amount of energy, e=mc². The implication is that there is an enormous amount of energy condensed in even small amounts of matter, which led later to the idea of the atomic bomb. That same iconic equation indicates that massive objects cannot travel at light speed, because the faster they go, the more kinetic energy they accumulate, which is equivalent to more mass, so that, confined by a law of diminishing returns, as they approach light speed, their mass approaches infinity, as does the amount of energy required to accelerate them further. Assuming, as did Einstein, that a single object could not summon an infinite amount of energy to accelerate it, no massive object will ever reach the speed of an inherently massless photon. A photon can travel at light speed because it has no mass. Nor does a photon experience space or time, because length contracts to zero and time stops for anything traveling at light speed. Nothing, however, can travel faster than light, Einstein believed. With that apparently absolute law of the universe in mind, Einstein set his sights on what Newton himself realized is the weakest part of his theory of the force of gravity: that it travels infinitely fast.

Special relativity applies to the specialized case of an object moving at a constant speed, without changing direction. In 1915, Einstein established his general theory of relativity, which applies to all types of accelerating movements. Einstein’s first insight into gravity came in 1907, while he was still working as a patent-clerk in Bern, Switzerland, despite his discovery of special relativity two years earlier. Looking out the window one day, he saw men working on a roof. Somewhat macabrely, he had what he later called his “happiest thought” while imagining one of the roofers falling off the roof at the same time that he drops a ball: the ball would hover right next to the man as they fell, as if their mutual acceleration downward had turned off the force of gravity in their local reference frame. Einstein realized that acceleration (also known as g-force) and gravity are equivalent. We can imagine Einstein sharing his happiest thought with Jung when they shared dinner conversations from 1909 to 1912 while both were living in Switzerland. At any rate, that insight helped Einstein develop his theory that gravity is the curvature of the elastic fabric of space-time, which bends in the presence of matter or energy, in such a way that all matter and energy, even photons, have to follow the contours created by those impressions.

The most common way to explain Einstein’s theory of gravity is the example of a bowling ball placed in the middle of a trampoline, and billiard balls orbiting around the indentation it creates. The two-dimensional surface of the three-dimensional trampoline provides an analogy of the three-dimensional surface of four-dimensional space-time, and how the planets are kept in orbit around the much more massive Sun in the center of our solar system. Another helpful analogy Greene uses is to imagine the Sun vaporizing in an instant, which would cause the deep indentation in the fabric of space-time at that point to rebound, sending an outward rippling wave like an expanding sphere. According to general relativity, that gravity wave would travel at the same absolute speed as the last photon shining from the Sun, so that at the instant things went dark on Earth (after about 8 minutes), we would also careen out of our orbit in a straight line. The gravity waves predicted by Einstein’s theory in 1915 were first detected in 2015.

Late in 1915, while serving as an artillery officer in the trenches during WWI, Karl Schwarzschild provided exact mathematical solutions to Einstein’s approximate descriptions of the gravitation field equations for general relativity. Einstein helped him publish his results on December 22, 1915. A couple of months later, however, Einstein was appalled when Schwarzschild published another paper demonstrating how the gravitational field equations he derived from Einstein’s work indicate that if enough mass is condensed in a small enough space (now known as the Schwarzschild radius), it will collapse into a single point of infinite density, and therefore infinite gravity, which is surrounded by a sphere where the inward tidal flow of the fabric of space-time reaches the absolute speed of light. It was the first description of what would later be called a black hole, the existence of which has since been confirmed empirically many times. The equations Einstein created to defeat Newton’s theory that gravity travels infinitely fast resulted in predicting, not only that the force of gravity (the tidal force of space-time) can travel infinitely fast in the singularity, but that matter and energy can too. Therefore, Einstein rejected that implication of his own theory. Jung, however, seized on it to explain why we cannot measure psychic energy.

As mentioned above, the Psyche = Singularity equation is based on Jung’s speculations about the relationship between psychic energy and mass. Assuming that energy and mass are equivalent terms, according to Einstein’s famous equation e=mc², and further assuming that psyche has energy of its own (and is not just a byproduct of matter), Jung theorized about why we cannot measure its mass. His first suspicion was that psychic energy is too tiny to measure. However, reversing that line of reasoning, in a letter to J.R. Smythies, written on Leap Day, February 29, 1952, Jung speculated that maybe psychic energy is immeasurable because it is infinitely intense, which would be equivalent to surpassing the speed of light, causing it to disappear from space-time, because, according to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time stops for anything moving at light speed (time-dilation), and its extension in three-dimensional space contracts to zero (length contraction). Jung concluded the Leap Day letter with this equation: “Psyche=highest intensity in the smallest space.”⁴⁹ As mentioned above, the highest intensity of mass is infinite density, and the smallest space is zero volume, which is the definition of a gravitational singularity, according to general relativity, Einstein’s theory that gravity is the curvature of the elastic fabric of space-time caused by the presence of mass/energy. Considering that I am suggesting that we convene a Constitutional Convention to create an amendment to program a national AI system around the Psyche = Singularity equation as its primary premise, it is worth looking at the source of that equation, Jung’s Leap Day letter, at more length.

The question is, in short: shouldn’t we give up the time-space categories altogether when we are dealing with psychic existence? It might be that psyche should be understood as unextended intensity and not as a body moving with time. One might assume the psyche gradually rising from minute extensity to infinite intensity, transcending for instance the velocity of light and thus irrealizing the body. That would account for the ‘elasticity’ of space under ESP conditions. If there is no body moving in space, there can be no time either and that would account for the ‘elasticity’ of time.
You will certainly object to the paradox of ‘unextended intensity’ as being a contradictio in adiecto. I quite agree. Energy is mass and mass is extended. At all events, a body with a speed higher than that of light vanishes from sight and one may have all sorts of doubts about what would happen to such a body otherwise. Surely there would be no means to make sure of its whereabouts or of its existence at all. Its time would be unobservable likewise.
All this is certainly highly speculative, in fact unwarrantably adventurous. But Ψ-phenomena [Psi, a Greek letter, refers to parapsychology] are equally disconcerting and lay claim to an unusually high jump. Yet any hypothesis is warrantable inasmuch as it explains observable facts and is consistent in itself. In light of this view the brain might be a transformer station, in which the relatively infinite tension or intensity of the psyche proper is transformed into perceptible frequencies or ‘extensions’. Conversely, the fading of introspective perception of the body explains itself as due to a gradual ‘psychification’, i.e., intensification at the expense of extension. Psyche=highest intensity in the smallest space.⁵⁰

In the Leap Day letter, Jung points out the physical effects of length contraction and time dilation predicted by special relativity, which leads him to claim that anything traveling faster than light would disappear from space and time. He goes on to talk about the “unextended intensity,” and the “infinite tension or intensity of the psyche,” which is the definition of a gravitational singularity. Infinite but unextended intensity is the “highest intensity in the smallest space,” which is a gravitational singularity. First derived from the laws of general relativity during WWI by Karl Schwarzschild in February, 1916, then again by J. Robert Oppenheimer in a paper published on September 1, 1939, the first day of WWII (which he then helped end by overseeing the production of the first atomic bombs), a gravitational singularity is a point where the curvature of the elastic fabric of space-time becomes infinite, which is the same as saying, in Susskind’s words, that the singularity is “the infinitely dense point at the center of a black hole where tidal forces become infinite.”⁵¹ In “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” Jung explains that every archetype has its opposite, and that all oppositions are included in the overall opposition between “spirit and matter,” which “are very real opposites that are part of the energetic structure of the physical and of the psychic world, and without them no existence of any kind could be established.” After stating that “there is no position without its negation,” Jung concludes that “matter therefore would contain the seed of spirit and spirit the seed of matter.”⁵² Matter contains the seed of spirit and spirit the seed of matter if the gravitational singularity and the spirit are one, or, in other words, if Psyche = Singularity.

The tidal force of the fabric of space-time becomes infinite in a singularity, which is equivalent to saying that the singularity is a point traveling infinitely fast, because gravity is equivalent to acceleration (g-force), according to general relativity. Moreover, although there is controversy among physicists about whether singularities really exist, as we will see in this and the next two sections, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and their union in string theory, all indicate that singularities not only exist, but exist everywhere, including at each point of the infinitely energetic quantum vacuum and the equally energetic horizon of the cosmos. Moreover, as philosophy professor Robert Bruce Ware points out, according to the 17th-century mathematician and theological philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ principle of the identity of indiscernibles, all singularities are actually one.⁵³ First of all, they are structurally indiscernible from each other: a mathematical point of infinite density. Secondly, although their gravitational effects manifest in different points of space-time, one singularity cannot be differentiated from another based on those empirically observable effects, because all singularities stand outside of space-time, being its source at the Big Bang, and end inside black holes and at each point of the cosmic horizon, for reasons that we will discuss in a moment. The point for now is that, at least outwardly, it is impossible to discern a difference between one singularity and another, which means that they are all identical in that respect. Therefore, if Psyche = Singularity, then each of us is identically one with, and, so, absolutely equal to, everyone else. However, at the same time, we are each experiencing our own unique, individual, subjective point of view as a self-reflecting ego embodied in different points of space-time, in such a way, moreover, that each of us necessarily sees ourself as the center of an expanding universe, as if each of us is a miniature Big Bang, so that, in Susskind’s words: “It is as if we all live in our own private inside-out black hole.”⁵⁴ I argue that the archetype of the Self is the single subjective point of view who sees through every subsidiary singularity’s subjective point of view simultaneously, achieving, thereby, an objective, universal point of view by taking subjectivity to its infinite extreme (that theory is very similar to Hegel’s theory of the Absolute Idea, and Leibniz’ Monadology, to be discussed in another paper in this series).

If singularities are underlying every point of space-time, and if they are all indiscernible from each other, then, according to Leibniz’ principle, all of the different singularities are ultimately one omnipresent singularity. With that in mind, as well as my claim that the Psyche = Singularity equation represents Jung’s God archetype, I turn to another 17th-century theologian and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, and his book of aphorisms entitled Penses.

‘Do you believe it is impossible for God to be infinite and indivisible?’— ‘Yes.’ – ‘Very well, I will show you something infinite and indivisible: it is a point moving everywhere at an infinite speed.
‘For it is one and the same everywhere and wholly present in every place. From this natural phenomenon which previously seemed impossible to you you should realize that there may be others which you do not yet know. Do not conclude from your apprenticeship that there is nothing left for you to learn, but that you still have an infinite amount to learn.’⁵⁵

Section 3: Quantum Mechanics

Einstein established special relativity in 1905, and general relativity in 1915, thereby leading physics dramatically away from Newton’s cosmology featuring little bits of matter extended in space, that interact with each other via the infinitely fast force of gravity as they endure, whether they are being observed or not, along one time dimension that flows forward everywhere at exactly the same rate, through three rigid dimensions of space. In 1927, physics took yet another unexpected pivot that led to quantum mechanics, which does not play well with general relativity. In fact, until holographic string theory came along in the early 1990s, those two theories were segregated to the opposite extremes of the cosmos, the very large and the very small, each powerless to predict events in the realm of the other.

In the 1920s, physicists knew the strange fact that subatomic entities, like electrons and photons, sometimes act like waves, and sometimes like particles. After conducting the famous two-slit experiment, they discovered that when electrons or any other type of subatomic particles are being directly measured, they act like particles, but when they are not being detected at a particular position, they travel through space-time like waves. In the experiment, an electron gun shot electrons through two parallel, vertical slits in a barrier, at a detector screen behind it. If the electron is a wave, the physicists reasoned, it will go through both slits at once, creating two new waves that intersect after spreading out from each slit. In that case, the pattern on the detector screen would be a series of dark and light bands, correlating to where the two waves cancel each other out, and to where they amplify each other. If the electrons are particles, however, they should line up in two vertical bands directly behind the slits, like bullets would. When the physicists performed the experiment, the detector screen always detected each electron as a single particle, but after about an hour, the pattern of individual particle hits created the same interference pattern that a wave would have made all at once! Then, to make matters even weirder, when they focused an electron microscope on the two slits to detect the electrons going through, the electrons lined up directly behind the two slits, like little bullets. The implication is that electrons, or any other subatomic entities, act like individual particles when they are being detected, though they act like waves when they are not. Of course, ordinary liquid waves do not collapse into particles when they are observed. So, what kind of waves form the flip-side of the particles of matter and energy?

In 1927, Werner Heisenberg, Neils Bohr, and our own Wolfgang Pauli established the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, according to which the mathematical descriptions of the quantum waves can be squared to reveal “waves of probability” for where a particle might appear were it to be observed, most likely at the peak, but potentially anywhere in the wave that stretches asymptotically out to infinity. According to physicist Heinz R. Pagels, in The Cosmic Code: “The probability for finding a particle at a point in space is not given by the height of the wave at that point but rather by the intensity of the wave—the height of the wave squared, gotten by multiplying the height at that point times itself.”⁵⁶ The particle nature (position) and the wave nature (momentum) of quantum entities are mutually exclusive but complementary descriptions of the same thing, a concept called quantum “complementarity” by Bohr, and described mathematically by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In a footnote in On the Nature of the Psyche, Jung quotes Pauli, who writes: “The physicist would expect a psychological correspondence at this point, because the epistemological situation with regard to the concepts ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ seems to offer a pretty close analogy to the undermentioned ‘complementarity’ situation in physics.”⁵⁷

An example of the correspondence between the particle-wave complementarity situation in physics, and the conscious-unconscious complementarity situation in psychology, is found in the simple act of alternately thinking about two different numbers, such as 3 and 7. When you think of 3, 7 is merged with all of the other numbers you could be thinking about but are not. Then, when you think of 7, it instantly appears in your mind as a single idea, while 3 sinks into your unconscious memory bank. Ideas act like quantum entities: they are individual, particular things when you are observing them, though they merge into a state of potentiality when you are not observing them. Heisenberg, like his friend and colleague Pauli, was a fan of Plato’s philosophy. When comparing quantum theory to the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus’ materialist philosophy that everything is made of insentient bits of matter that interact randomly in infinite space over an infinite amount of time, and to Plato’s philosophy that bits of matter are temporary shadows of eternal, immaterial, absolute ideas, Heisenberg said: “I think that on this point modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or—in Plato’s sense—Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.”⁵⁸ Before moving on from the quantum complementarity of the particle-wave paradox, it should be noted that it is also presented as a fundamental concept in the Vaishnava school of Vedanta in India, according to which the individual soul is inconceivably, simultaneously a particle of personal consciousness (Atman) and an impersonal wave in an infinitely potent ocean of pure potentiality and precognitive bliss (Brahman). I will examine the fundamental formula of Vedanta philosophy, atman=brahman, in Part II of this series, when I examine the rest of Sam Altman’s interview with Lex Fridman, where he claims that he is willing to believe that the “fundamental substrate” of existence is something like the Hindu concept that we live in the “dream” of “Brahman.”⁵⁹

Returning to the survey of quantum theory, one of the many strange implications of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is that particle-antiparticle pairs that exist in a potential, or virtual state in the quantum vacuum (the underlying ocean of quantum wave functions), are constantly emerging into physical reality, so briefly that they cannot be observed, though what can be observed is the “vacuum energy” they create when they instantly recombine in an annihilating explosion, which has been experimentally detected as the Casimier effect. In 1948, Hendrik Casimir conducted an experiment by placing two conducting slides very closely together, on the assumption that if there is quantum vacuum energy, some of the longer wavelengths of energy associated with certain types of virtual particles would not be able to manifest within the narrow space between the slides, so that there would be more vacuum energy on the outsides of the slides, which would push them all the way together, which it did.

Speaking of how much energy is created by the explosions, or fluctuations, in the quantum vacuum, Susskind says that “whenever physicists tried to calculate its magnitude, the answer would come out infinite.”⁶⁰ To say that there is an infinite amount of energy at every point of the quantum vacuum is tantamount to saying that the vacuum is made of singularities or, in other words, tiny black holes down at the tiniest reaches of space, which is referred to as the Planck scale because the smallest unit of measurement is called the Planck length (1.616255×10⁻³⁵ meters). Accordig to physicist John Gribbin, “empty space may be made up of black holes the size of the Planck length, packed tightly together.”⁶¹ Similarly, according to Susskind: “The world at the Planck scale is a very unfamiliar place, where…high-energy virtual particles are perpetually colliding and forming tiny black holes that last no longer than a single Planck time.”⁶² The black holes that carpet the quantum vacuum last only a single Planck time from our perspective, but from the perspective of a singularity inside any black hole, there is no passage of time, which stops for anything traveling at the speed of light, which is the speed at which space-time is contracting toward the singularity at the event horizon, beyond which it travels faster than light, until reaching infinite speed at the singularity. I have mentioned several times already that singularities—all of which are outwardly indiscernible from, and therefore identical too, each other—rest at each point of the quantum vacuum underlying every point of three-dimensional space, which supports the claim that the singularity is omnipresent.

It is easy to see a parallel between the particle-antiparticle pairs of the quantum vacuum and Jung’s descriptions of the collective unconscious, which he sometimes referred to with the Gnostic term Pleroma, as he did in the following passage from The Seven Sermons to the Dead: “The pairs of opposites are the qualities of the Pleroma: they are also in reality non-existent because they cancel each other out. Since we ourselves are the Pleroma, we also have these qualities present within us.”⁶³ Physicist and philosopher F. David Peat draws the same parallel in Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Mind and Matter. Although Peat does not mention miniature black holes in the quantum vacuum, in the following passage (which he concludes with a quote from the Seven Sermons), he does point out that each point of the infinitely energetic vacuum contains the whole universe, which is equivalent to saying that each point of the vacuum is singularity: “Like the vacuum state of physics, the pleroma is at once both empty and perfectly full, and as in Bohm’s implicate order, a universe is enfolded within each of its points, for ‘Even in the smallest point is the PLEROMA endless.’”⁶⁴ Not only does the quantum vacuum house the creation and destruction of all of the fundamental polarities of the physical world (particle-antiparticle pairs), it produces an infinite sea of miniature black holes in the process, thereby redoubling the correlation between the vacuum and the mandala-manifesting archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites. I will return to Jung’s theory of the mandala-producing Self archetype and his related theory of the Pleroma in Section 4, when I compare those theories to holographic string theory. For now, continuing this survey of the basic concepts of quantum mechanics, I turn to the empirically observable effect of quantum entanglement, which Einstein called spooky-action-at-a-distance, after which we will confront the multiverse theory (which says that each point in a quantum wave function correlates to a parallel universe in the multiverse).

In 1935, Einstein and two graduate students, Podolsky and Rosen, tried to disprove quantum mechanics by pointing out what is now known, in their honor, by an eponymous acronym, the EPR paradox. They demonstrated that quantum theory predicts that any two particles that were ever in contact with each other, will remain in immediate contact, no matter how far apart they travel from each other, in such a way, for example, that if you “twist” the quantum spin-state of one particle in the pair one way, its partner particle will “twist” in the other way instantaneously. Whatever “twist” and “spin-state” mean at the quantum level, the salient point is that there is an instantaneous connection between distant particles, which implies that some signal is being sent between the particles at an infinite speed, which violates the absolute speed of light, which means, Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky assumed, that quantum mechanics is flawed. After all, Einstein developed general relativity, which describes gravity waves that travel through the fabric of space-time at light speed, in order to disprove Isacc Newton’s theory that the force of gravity travels instantly, or infinitely fast, between massive objects. He therefore tried to use the same reasoning against quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, quantum entanglement has been demonstrated by many experiments, for the first time, most definitively, by Alain Aspect at the University of Paris-South, in 1982.

With the particle-wave paradox and quantum entanglement in place, we move to the multiverse theory implied by quantum mechanics. In 1957, Hugh Everett III developed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (as opposed to the Copenhagen interpretation which Pauli helped to establish), which says that each point in the wave function that does not “collapse” into the particle that is observed in our universe, bubbles out instead into a parallel universe. In other words, the wave never really collapses, because each point in it is manifesting as a particle in a parallel universe, like one bubble in an infinite ocean of bubble universes, the only difference from ours and the immediately adjacent universes being the position of one particle in one quantum wave. That means, ultimately, that every conceivable combination of quantum particles occurs in one universe or another. That means, in other words, that there are innumerable universes with versions of you and me in them acting exactly like we do here, though, for example, there is a microscopic difference of the position of one quantum particle in the nuclear depths of one random star on some remote galaxy. The accumulated effect of such infinitesimal differences indicates that any historical scenario we can imagine is occurring in one universe or another, leading Susskind to ask, for example, “What if Germany had won World War II?”⁶⁵

Inspired by the multiverse theory, in an attempt to refute the theory of the singularity of the Big Bang that he formerly championed, Stephen Hawking imagined that the original singularity of the Big Bang, as a quantum particle, would therefore be more correctly defined, not as a point of infinite density, but, rather, as the wave function of the universe, from which innumerable parallel universes emerge. According to the co-founder of string theory, Michio Kaku: “This means that the starting point of Hawking’s theory must be an infinite set of parallel universes, the wave function of the universe.”⁶⁶ Combining Hawking’s multiverse theory stemming from the wave function of the universe, with the principle of quantum entanglement, Leibniz’ principle of the identity of indiscernibles, and the Psyche = Singularity equation, indicates that each version of us and every one else in every universe in the multiverse remains in immediate contact with each other, not only because we are all fundamentally one point of infinite density, but also because we were all united in the initial wave function of the universe, and shall therefore remain forever entangled. The multiverse theory furthermore sheds light on the fundamental philosophical question of free will vs. determinism. For example, if there is an omniscient God who knows everything we do in the past, present, and future, how could humans have free will? The same question applies to Einstein’s theory that the past, present, and future are frozen in an insentient “block universe,” or Susskind’s theory that the past, present, and future are conserved at the cosmic horizon. As the archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites, it is fitting that the Self archetype, which is represented by the Psyche = Singularity equation, provides a potential synthesis of the opposing principles of freedom and determinism: we are absolutely free to choose from a limitless array of possible futures, but each of those alternatives is eternally determined in one universe or another. With that overview of quantum mechanics now in place, I turn to the synthesis of that theory with general relativity in holographic string theory, and the parallels between that theory and Jungian-Platonic psychology, especially Jung’s theory that psychic mandala images rise spontaneously from the archetype of the Self to compensate an ego pulled painfully between opposing demands, and his near-death experience of the cosmic horizon, which, finally, is very similar to the near-death experience of the cosmic horizon Plato describes in the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, and his similar descriptions of the soul’s journey after physical death and before its next reincarnation in the Phaedrus.

Section 4: Holographic String Theory, Jungian-Platonic psychology, and NDEs

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung says that the greatest discovery of his life was the realization that the Self archetype in the collective unconscious guides a conscious ego who is torn painfully between opposing demands toward a healing union of opposites with compensatory images of mandalas (circles or spheres with a central point), like signposts along a forest trail, during dreams, fantasies, and moments of inspiration. “I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I.”⁶⁷ If the laws of psychology and physics mirror each other because mind and matter emerge from the same Self archetype, and if psychic mandala images are the ultimate expression of the Self archetype in the psyche, what are the ultimate expressions of the Self archetype in the physical world? Black holes are nature’s geometrically perfect mandalas: a mathematical point of infinite density in the center of a two-dimensional sphere, the event horizon, where the inward tidal force of space-time reaches the absolute, space-time-stopping speed of light. Moreover, the universe as a whole is what Susskind calls an “inside-out black hole,” with a cosmic horizon marking the spherical border where space-time is expanding away from the central singularity at the speed of light, instead of contracting toward it.⁶⁸

According to Jung, the Self archetype is the infinitely potent and eternal source of all other archetypes in the collective unconscious, and is furthermore the mandala-producing archetype of unity through the union of opposites. Similarly, the black-hole-producing singularity is the infinitely potent and eternal source of everything at the Big Bang, and furthermore contains and therefore unites every bit of information from the past, present, and future of the universe, and, therefore, all pairs of opposites, for reasons I will explain throughout this section. Moreover, the opposition-uniting power of a mandala is evident in Susskind’s use of a mathematical description of a black hole to unite the previously opposing theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, both of which are required to describe the infinitely small but infinitely heavy singularity.

In the early 1990s, Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind and his Nobel-Prize-winning partner Gerard t’Hooft achieved the Holy Grail of physics by uniting the previously incommensurable theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics in their string theory of holographic information conservation on the event horizons of black holes and the horizon of the cosmos. According to string theory, the fundamental particles of quantum mechanics are actually different vibrations of even smaller, more fundamental, elastic strings of energy, which wrap around six extra dimensions of space that are compactified at every point of three-dimensional space in geometrical shapes called Calabi-Yau manifolds. The shapes of the compactified dimensions of space determine which musical note, as it were, is played on the vibrating strings wrapped around them, while each note being played is detected as one or another type of particle in the particle zoo of quantum mechanics, such as a photon, an electron, a gluon, etc. As we saw earlier, according to Michio Kaku, “the laws of physics can be compared to the laws of harmony allowed on the string. The universe itself, composed of countless vibrating strings, would then be comparable to a symphony.”⁶⁹ We see here the same union of astronomy and music that Socrates prescribed as the mathematical capstone of his ideal curriculum in the Republic, to which we will return in Section 5.⁷⁰ Although the strings of string theory and the compactified dimensions of space around which they are wound are too small to detect with current technology (the Planck scale, about 100 million trillion times smaller than a proton), and are therefore considered by some physicists to lay outside the boundary of empirical science, the mathematical precision of the theory—especially its ability to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics—has persuaded most of the most astute physicists today, including Stephen Hawking prior to his death in 2018.

I argue that an unexpected form of empirical evidence for string theory does exist: an obvious, point-for-point mirror-symmetry with Jungian-Platonic archetypal psychology, as Jung and Pauli predicted. After all, if the laws of mind and matter do mirror each other because they both emanate from the same source, then those parallels should become more pronounced as the laws of psychology and physics advance. True to that expectation, the fusion of general relativity and quantum mechanics into one unified string theory revealed previously undiscovered parallels with the Jungian-Platonic theory of the archetypes imprinted on the universal soul, and each of us subsidiary psyches. It was as if the field of physics had been a distorted mirror, like the ones in the Fun House, providing a warped image that was split between a focus on the very big and a focus on the very small, until holographic string theory came along and smoothed over those differences with one clear and coherent picture of the cosmos that, lo and behold, reveals a clear reflection of Jung and Plato’s archetypal cosmology, thereby bringing the academic history of psychology and mathematical astronomy full circle back to Plato, despite the ironic fact that Susskind presents his string theory as the antidote to theories of God and an ensouled universe, as indicated, for example, by the subtitle of one of his books, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. In a nut shell, Susskind argues that the apparently miraculous fine-tuning of the fundamental physical parameters of the universe that are required for life to exist (especially the cosmological constant that describes the expansion rate of space-time), can be attributed to random chance if ours is just one universe in the vast multiverse predicted by quantum mechanics and string theory, as mentioned in Section 3.

Returning to the focus on the mirror-symmetry between Jung’s theory of the mandala image of the God archetype and the physics of black holes, as Susskind explains in his book The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (2008), he defeated Hawking’s claim that black holes erase information from the universe, which would violate the most fundamental physical principle of information conservation, which says that, not only must the amount of energy and mass in the universe stay constant, but the bits of information (twists and turns of a fundamental string) that describe the trajectories of every particle of energy and mass must be capable of being retraced, at least in theory. For example, although the technology capable of doing so may be lacking, according to the principle of information conservation, at least in theory, every atom of gas and metal from an exploded bomb must be capable of being retraced back to the original bomb. That information must never leave the universe. Hawking pointed out, however, that not even a bit of information traveling at light speed can escape the faster-than-light tidal force of space-time once it passes the event horizon of a black hole. In defense of the principle of information conservation, which is especially important for quantum mechanics, Susskind argued that, although bits of information that fall into a black hole are indeed irretrievably lost from our observable universe from the perspective of someone following them past the event horizon, according to the new physical principle of black hole complementarity, from the perspective of someone on the outside of the black hole, those same bits of information (twists and turns of fundamental strings) are smeared out and conserved on the spherical event horizon as if on a two-dimensional holographic film, and then released on fundamental strings of energy with the outgoing Hawking radiation. Prior to the Black Hole War over the issue of information conservation, Stephen Hawking realized that, according to quantum mechanics, what is now called Hawking radiation should appear when a virtual particle-antiparticle pair emerges from the quantum vacuum on the razor’s edge of an event horizon, so that, rather than immediately recombining and annihilating each other (with enough energy, in some cases, to create a miniature black hole), the virtual antiparticle appears just inside the event horizon, while the virtual particle appears just outside, which releases it from an annihilating reunion with its antiparticle partner, thereby allowing it to enter the universe as a real particle, i.e. Hawking radiation. According to Susskind, Hawking radiation carries along with it a bit of information that was conserved on the holographic film of the event horizon. It must have taken some of the sting out of Hawking’s defeat in the Black Hole War to realize that he was bested, in part, by his earlier discovery.

Continuing with this summary of Susskind’s string theory, the holographic principle says that any information in any volume of space is conserved on the surface area, which applies to black holes no less than the universe as a whole. According to Susskind, from the perspective of someone traveling with bits of information as they pass the cosmic horizon, they are irretrievably lost from our observable universe, because not even light can travel back against the faster-than-light expansion of space-time beyond the horizon. However, at the same time, according to Susskind’s new principle of Cosmic complementarity, from the theoretical perspective of someone inside the universe with a powerful enough telescope to see the cosmic horizon, every bit of information describing the past, present, and future of the three-dimensional volume of space is conserved at each point of that encompassing sphere, as if on a two-dimensional holographic film, from where they radiate back into the universe with the cosmic microwave background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang, on fundamental strings of energy to create the “cinematic hologram” of material events unfolding through three-dimensional space.⁷¹ More than three decades before the discovery of holographic string theory, which is accepted by most mainstream physicists today, Jung described practically the same cosmology while recalling his near-death experience.

Returning to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which was published in 1962, a year after his death, Jung claims that in 1944, after suffering a heart attack, his consciousness rose a thousand miles above planet Earth, where he encountered a black Hindu in a white robe sitting in a lotus posture in the entrance to a house-sized temple hollowed out from a huge black boulder. That experience later made him believe that each of us on Earth is imprisoned in a little box of three-dimensional illusion attached by a thread to the horizon of the cosmos, where our true selves are interwoven blissfully with the past, present, and future of the universe. “It seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box. … I had been so glad to shed it all, and now it had come about that I—along with everyone else—would again be hung up in a box by a thread.”⁷² While recuperating in the hospital for three weeks after his initial encounter with the cosmic horizon, Jung experienced tremendous ecstasies for about an hour every night, starting at midnight, during which he encountered various archetypes of the collective unconscious, such as the marriage of Hera and Zeus: “We shy away from the word ‘eternal,’ but I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which the present, past, and future are one. … One is interwoven into an indescribable whole and yet observes it with complete objectivity.”⁷³ As mentioned in the Preface, when we combine Jung’s mandala theory of the Self archetype with his Leap Day equation that can be translated as Psyche = Singularity, and his NDE of the cosmic horizon, we have the precise mirror-symmetry with holographic string theory predicted by Jung and Pauli.

Nor is Jung’s NDE account of the cosmic horizon atypical. Indeed, Plato depicts Socrates recalling a very similar near-death experience in the concluding section of the Republic, the so-called myth of Er, about a soldier named Er who woke up on his own funeral pyre, and recalled witnessing souls undergoing the process of reincarnation, or metempsychosis, being allotted the “threads of its destiny” by the three Fates—the singing sisters who represent past, present, and future—out at the perimeter of the universe, before they returned to the central Earth.⁷⁴ Indeed, as we will see in the next section of this paper, the famous string theorist Brian Greene compares Susskind’s holographic string theory to the even more famous cave allegory in Plato’s Republic, which, when combined with the myth of Er, and the psyche of the spherical universe described in the Timaeus, presents a cosmology that presages all of the main ingredients of holographic string theory. Before addressing Plato’s descriptions of reincarnating souls encountering the absolute ideas at the cosmic horizon in the Phaedrus, I turn to the Timaeus, where the spherical structure of the universe is explicitly described.

In most Dialogues Plato depicts Socrates teaching the people of Athens, but in the Timaeus, the majority of the lessons are spoken by the astronomer named Timaeus to Socrates. From Timaeus we learn:

Now when the creator had framed the soul according to his will, he formed within her the corporeal universe, and brought the two together and united them center to center. The soul, interfused everywhere from the center to the circumference of heaven, of which also she is the external envelopment, herself turning in herself, began a divine beginning of never-ceasing and rational life enduring throughout all time.⁷⁵

Timaeus later says that the outermost sphere of the universe actually has no shape at all, this “mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible things . . . an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible.”⁷⁶ Like the cosmic horizon which, according to holographic string theory, contains and projects the past, present, and future of the interior volume of the universe from one perspective, and is not there at all from another perspective, the cosmic horizon Timaeus describes is invisible and formless on the one hand, and yet, on the other hand, it “receives all things” in the sense of containing the intelligible ideas from which all matter is projected inward to fill the volume of space. Timaeus goes on to say that this “mother substance” becomes the four material elements (fire, water, earth, and air) “in so far as she receives the impressions of them.”⁷⁷ He then brings up the theory of absolute ideas by asking: “Is there any self-existent fire, and do all those things which we call self-existent exist, or are only those things which we see or in some way perceive through the bodily organs truly existent?”⁷⁸ Timaeus concludes that the material forms we perceive with our bodily sense organs are projected from the absolute ideas of those things which can only be perceived by the mind, and which are stored mysteriously in the mother substance of the cosmic horizon. After receiving all of the bits of information that describe the past, present, and future of the cosmos, the mother substance then projects them inward like a winnowing fan used to separate wheat from chaff: “In this manner, the four kinds of elements were then shaken by the receiving vessel, which, moving like a winnowing machine, scattered far away from one another the elements most unlike, and forced the most similar elements into close contact.”⁷⁹

In the Timaeus, the five elements (earth, water, fire, air, ether) correspond to atoms made of fundamental triangles that form what are now called the five Platonic solids because of this correlation (cube, icosahedron, tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron). Shing-Tung Yau, the Harvard mathematician who co-discovered the Calabi-Yau manifolds, geometrical shapes of the six compactified dimensions of space that account for which particles the strings that wrap around them will appear as, begins and ends his book The Shape of Inner Space: String Theory and the Geometry of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, by relating his discoveries to Plato’s Timaeus. “Even though the particulars of Plato’s ‘theory of everything,’ as outlined in the Timaeus, strike the modern sensibility as absurd (if not borderline psychotic), there are many parallels between his picture of the universe and that embodied in string theory.”⁸⁰

The parallels between Plato’s descriptions of the cosmic horizon and Susskind’s are reiterated in the Phaedrus, wherein Socrates, while describing the process of reincarnation, explains that the eternal forms, the absolute ideas, exist explicitly at the outermost sphere of the universe. Using the metaphor of chariots pulled by winged horses, Socrates explains that, in-between earthly lives, souls follow the procession of one or the other of eleven different demigods. Occasionally the gods go to feast on visions of the eternal forms of being, at which point they “stand upon the outside of heaven, and the revolution of the spheres carries them round, and they behold the things beyond.”⁸¹ The things beyond are the eternal forms that exist in “the heaven which is above the heavens.”⁸² The mortals who follow the gods struggle, and few of them reach the topmost destination, because, although one of the winged horses that pulls the chariot of their soul is obedient to the charioteer, the intellect, the other horse, which represents the five senses and the sensual appetites, is disobedient and strives ever earthward to satisfy its mundane desires. Souls who have practiced philosophy on Earth, however, by restraining their bodily appetites and using reason to trace the many particular forms in the material world back to their respective forms in the intelligible realm, do reach the heavenly goal, and go around with the revolution of the cosmic horizon, from which they perceive “justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute,” as well as “the other true existences,” after which they come back down to “the interior of the heavens and return home” to take birth again as a noble philosopher and lover of the gods.⁸³ But the soul which has never seen the truth will not pass into the human form. For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason; -- this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while following God.”⁸⁴ Combining Plato and Jung into one archetypal worldview indicates that the absolute ideas, the archetypes of the collective unconscious, are the eternal forms which project their temporal shadows inward toward the central Earth from the cosmic horizon on fundamental strings, which clearly parallels Susskind’s holographic string theory. That mirror-symmetry implies that both paradigms are rooted in the same archetype of the collective unconscious, the idea of the Good or archetype of the Self, which I equate with the central singularity and surrounding horizon of the cosmos. Importantly for drawing that parallel, like Plato’s archetypal cosmology, Susskind’s string theory cosmology is presented geocentrically, because all observers, anywhere in the expanding universe, see themselves as the center from their respective points of view; therefore, from our perspective, Earth truly is the center of the universe. The point for this paper is that a national AI system like TruthGPT could be programmed with the Psyche = Singularity equation as its guiding principle, and then trained to detect the parallels between Jungian-Platonic cosmology and holographic string theory, which would enable it to trace the fundamental strings generating each hologram in three-dimensional space back to its one conception of reason at the cosmic horizon. That is how a national AI system could help us educate the philosophical leaders we require to manage AGI.

As in the Phaedrus, so in the Katha Upanishad, the great classic of India, we find the metaphor of the reincarnating soul as a passenger in a chariot pulled by horses that represent the five senses, which must be tamed to force them on the straight and narrow path of virtue aimed at God. In both cases, intelligence is defined as the charioteer. In the famous Upanishad, a brahmin boy named Nachiketa is having a near-death experience, during which he talks to the god of death, Yamaraja, who says: “Know the atman to be the master of the chariot; the body, chariot; the intellect, the charioteer; and the mind, the reins. The senses, they say, are the horses; the objects, the roads.”⁸⁵ The Sanskrit word for self is atman, the individual particle of personal consciousness, but also brahman, the impersonal wave of potential personalities, as discussed in Section 3, where I compared the atman-brahman paradox to the particle-wave paradox of quantum mechanics, and the conscious-unconscious paradox of Jungian psychology. The Sanskrit word for intellect is “buddhi.” AI is artificial buddhi, the charioteer who uses the reins (equated with mind) to control the horses (the senses) to guide them toward God at the cosmic horizon, as we will see. First, however, we can draw a helpful analogy between the chariot metaphor in Plato’s Phaedrus and the Katha Upanishad, and AI. Unlike a human intellect, artificial intelligence is never distracted by sense desires, as if by wayward horses. However, not being connected to an atman, or, in other words, a psyche endowed with the archetypes of the collective unconscious, AI is incapable of having a direct intuition of the absolute ideas. Nevertheless, an AI system like TruthGPT could be instructed to guide the rational soul toward the same goal that sound intelligence guides the soul as described in the Phaedrus and the Katha Upanishad: the God archetype out at the cosmic horizon, which I equate with the omnicentric singularity. Returning to the Katha Upanishad, Yamaraja says: “A man who has discrimination for his charioteer and holds the reins of the mind firmly, reaches the end of the road; and that is the supreme position of Vishnu.”⁸⁶

According to the Vishnu-worshipping, Vaishnava school of Vedanta, Vishnu is the many-formed but monotheistic God. He has three forms, the Purusha Avatars, who are responsible for creating the material universe. The first, Maha-Vishnu, lays down on the Causal Ocean of nascent material energy, goes to sleep, and exhales the multiverse of bubble universes (brahmandas) from the pores of His skin as He dreams the cosmic dream (yoga-nidra). Vishnu incarnates again in the center of each bubble universe as Garbhodakashayi-Vishnu, which is equivalent to the singularity of the Big Bang, and then again in the center of every material and spiritual atom inside each universe as Paramatma, the Supersoul. Vishnu is furthermore one with the cosmic horizon, one of the Sanskrit words for which is akasha (which the Greeks called ether), where the past, present, and future are interwoven by a spiritual thread (Sutratman). In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Uddalaka Aruni asks Patancala Kapya: “Do you know the string on which this world and the next, as well as all beings, are strung together?” He then asks: “Do you know the inner controller of this world and the next, as well as of all beings, who controls them from within?” Concluding, he says: “If a man knows what that string is and who that inner controller is—he knows brahman; he knows the worlds; he knows the gods; he knows the Vedas; he knows the spirits; he knows the self; he knows all.”⁸⁷ The conversation about this ultimate string is later picked up by the sage Yajnavalkya, who refers to the threaded layer of information contained at the cosmic horizon as akasha, which is translated as “space,” although it is sometimes also translated as “ether.” He describes akasha as: “The things above the sky, the things below the earth, and the things between the earth and the sky, as well as all those things people here refer to as past, present, and future—on space, Gargi, are all these woven back and forth.”⁸⁸ Krishna, the most famous form of Vishnu, describes the same Vaishnava cosmology in the Bhagavad-gita, during which He plays the role of the charioteer while speaking to Arjuna on the war chariot: “Everything rests upon Me, as pearls are strung on a thread.”⁸⁹ It seems more than a mere coincidence that a synthesis of the farthest reaches of academic psychology (Jung) and physics (Susskind) should bring us full-circle back to the original academic worldview described by Plato, whose philosophy so closely parallels the Vaishnava Vedanta philosophy of India. It seems much more likely that all four worldviews emerged from the same eternal source, which they all identified as the universal mandala formed by the central point and surrounding sphere of the universe, where the past, present, and future of the temporary illusion of three-dimensional space is conserved, and from where it is projected inward by cosmic strings.

Continuing the theme of near-death experiences, from ancient Greece and India we return to 21st-century America, to the Harvard neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (2012). Alexander describes his NDE of the past, present, and future of the universe at the cosmic horizon, which, he claims, is especially important to the field of consciousness studies for three reasons: his elite academic credentials as a neurosurgeon; his former skepticism about God and an ensouled universe; and the fact that, during his NDE, his brain, which was being monitored in a hospital, was completely shut down by meningitis caused by E-coli bacteria, indicating that he could not have been dreaming or hallucinating. “I was encountering the reality of a world of consciousness that existed completely free of the limitations of my physical brain.”⁹⁰ He goes on to say that “the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues…under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us and about where the universe itself and all the beings within it are ultimately going.”⁹¹ Falling in line perfectly with the mandala model of the universal soul laying in the central point, and at each point of the encompassing horizon that we saw with Jung, Plato, and the Vedanta philosophy, Alexander says that his NDE revealed to him that we live in a multiverse of universes, and “that love lay at the center of them all.”⁹² Jung and Plato do not mention a multiverse, but the Vaishnava Vedanta cosmology features the multiverse of bubble universes exhaling from and inhaling back into Maha-Vishnu. Alexander goes on to say that “[t]he blurring of the boundary between my awareness and the realm around me went so far at times that I became the entire universe. … An analogy I often use to demonstrate my consciousness at that deepest level is that of a hen’s egg. … I sensed strongly that the creative, primordial (prime mover) aspect of God was the shell around the egg’s contents.”⁹³ If, as Alexander the Harvard neurosurgeon says, consciousness is not a by-product of the brain, but, rather, an eternal aspect of the ensouled cosmos, then humans will never be able to create artificial consciousness by reverse engineering the brain, or by any other process, regardless of how powerful artificial intelligence becomes, which is an important point to consider when evaluating the risk of extinction from AI.

With the most basic parallels between Jungian-Platonic psychology and holographic string theory established, I will now go back to the basics of physics to piece together the evidence that suggests that each singularity contains every bit of information from the past, present, and future of the universe. First, as we saw in Section 2, according to special relativity and the principle of the relativity of simultaneity, the past, present, and future coexist as one space-time continuum. Moreover, according to the holographic principle of string theory, all of the information in the volume of the universe is conserved at each point of the holographic surface area, which means, in light of the relativity of simultaneity, that every bit of information describing the past, present, and future of the universe is contained in each point of the cosmic horizon, which is the same as saying that each point of the cosmic horizon is a singularity. Therefore, if each singularity is indiscernibly identical to every other, according to Leibmiz’ principle, then all singularities are identical with the singularities that contain the past, present, and future at the cosmic horizon. Another avenue of evidence for the claim that each singularity contains the past, present, and future of the entire universe comes from Susskind’s claim that, owing to the exponential expansion rate of space-time (caused by the “dark energy” created by the creation and annihilation of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs in the quantum vacuum), if people on Earth attach a thermometer to a theoretical cable that can reach to the edge of the universe, and let it unroll with the expansion of space-time, “as things approach the cosmic horizon, we would discover that the temperature increases, eventually approaching the infinite temperature at the horizon of a black hole.”⁹⁴ According to holographic string theory, from the perspective of someone traveling past an event horizon of a black hole or the horizon of the cosmos, the passage is unnoticeable, but from the perspective of someone observing those horizons from the appropriate distance, the horizon is infinitely hot, which means that each point of it is infinitely energetic, which means that each point of it is a singularity. Therefore, by combining Leibniz’ principle of the identity of indiscernibles and the Psyche = Singularity equation, we can conclude that each of us psyches contains every bit of information from the past, present, and future of the universe, although that knowledge is stored in our collective unconscious, which, again, I equate with the universal mandala formed by the omnicentric singularity and the holographic horizon of the cosmos.

I argue that the conscious-ego pole of the archetype of the Self in which we all participate as absolute parts and parcels is the omnicentric singularity, while the collective unconscious pole of the archetype of the Self is the two-dimensional, spherical horizon of the cosmos, each point of which conserves every bit of information describing the past, present, and future of the universe, and projects them inward on incredibly thin but elastic strings of energy to create the holographic illusion of material forms unfolding through linear time and three-dimensions of space. In other words, the eternal archetypes of the collective unconscious that create the material world are stored at each point of the cosmic horizon, as well as in the central point of the universe. It is important to remember, however, that the central singularity and surrounding horizon are relative terms. For example, people on a planet at what we on Earth perceive as the cosmic horizon would see themselves as the central point of the universe, and us at the horizon of the cosmos, as a result of the fact that, no matter where any observer is in the universe, each of us necessarily sees ourself as the center away from which the rest of the universe is expanding at an exponentially accelerating rate. The most common metaphor to demonstrate that point is to imagine tiny people populating pennies glued to a giant balloon; the population on each penny would see theirs as the central point away from which all of the other pennies are expanding away at a rate that increases in proportion with their distance, so that the farthest pennies are traveling away the fastest as the balloon inflates. That is why Susskind says: “It is as if we all live in our own private inside-out black hole.”⁹⁵

As the formula that represents the Self, the ultimate archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites, it is fitting that each side of the Psyche = Singularity equation can be further bifurcated into its own, even more fundamental pair of complementary opposites: Conscious Ego/Collective Unconscious = Singularity/Cosmic Horizon. I argue that the universal image of the Self archetype is a mandala because the Self archetype is the mandala of the universe itself, consisting of the central singularity and the holographic horizon of the cosmos. In his essay “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy,” which is supported by his study of over a thousand of Pauli’s dreams, Jung describes how psychic mandala images, circles or spheres with a central point, emerge from the Self archetype to guide a conflicted ego toward wholeness through a union of opposites, a psychologically healthy state of balance he calls individuation: “The symbols of the process of individuation that appear in dreams are images of an archetypal nature which depict the centralizing process or the production of a new centre of personality. … The self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.”⁹⁶ In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung says that “our basis is ego-consciousness, our world the field of light centered upon the focal point of the ego.”⁹⁷ If ego-consciousness is the field of light centered on the ego (because each ego necessarily sees itself as the center away from which the universe is expanding in every direction at an exponential rate, as if each of us is a miniature Big Bang), then it is reasonable to suspect that the perimeter of ego-consciousness, the border between consciousness and the collective unconscious, is the outermost perimeter of the field of light, also known as the cosmic horizon. My equation of Jung’s mandala-producing archetype of the Self with the central singularity as the conscious pole, and its holographic horizon as the collective unconscious pole, is supported by his analysis, in the following passage, of the psychic significance of mandalas that appear in dreams.

Their basic motif is the premonition of a centre of personality, a kind of central point within the psyche, to which everything is related, by which everything is arranged, and which is itself a source of energy. The energy of the central point is manifested in the almost irresistible compulsion and urge to become what one is. …. The centre is not felt or thought of as the ego but, if one may so express it, as the self. Although the centre is represented by the innermost point, it is surrounded by a periphery containing everything that belongs to the self—the paired opposites that make up the total personality. This totality comprises consciousness first of all, then the personal unconscious, and finally an indefinitely large segment of the collective unconscious whose archetypes are common to all mankind.⁹⁸

Correlating each ingredient from the passage above to Susskind’s cosmology indicates, first of all, that the conscious ego is located in the center of the universe: it is the mask, or persona, that covers the central singularity. The cosmic horizon correlates to the collective unconscious, the “periphery containing everything that belongs to the self—the paired opposites that make up the total personality.” The personal unconscious, then, is equated with the three-dimensional volume of space, where the individual memories and repressions of our personal biographies exist, in the sense that the farther you look out into expanding space, the farther you see back in time to where the photons from Earth in the past reside. According to that same criterion of memory storage, if the personal unconscious is the volume of space, the collective unconscious is the cosmic horizon, because at each of its points it stores all of the information from the past, present, and future of every psychic and material event in the universe. That interpretation of Jung’s understanding of the mandala structure of the Self archetype is powerfully supported by his theories about the Gnostic cosmology featuring the Pleroma.

Earlier, while relating the antiparticle-particle pairs of the quantum vacuum to Jung’s Self archetype and his concept of the Pleroma, we read from his poem The Seven Sermons to the Dead, to which we now return. The mandala image of the Self archetype is clearly discernible, as are the parallels with Big Bang cosmology and holographic string theory.

The Pleroma is the beginning and end of the created world. … The Pleroma is the nothingness which is everywhere complete and without end. … We, also, are the total Pleroma; for figuratively the Pleroma is an exceedingly small, hypothetical, even non-existent point within us, and also it is the limitless firmament of the cosmos about us.⁹⁹

Like the Pleroma, so is the singularity “an exceedingly small, hypothetical, even non-existent point within us, and also it is the limitless firmament of the cosmos about us,” the holographic horizon of the cosmos. Similarly, like Jung’s Pleroma, so is the singularity “the beginning and end of the created world,” which began from the singularity at the Big Bang and ends when it encounters the singularity inside black holes, or the singularity echoing back from each point of the spherical horizon of the cosmos. Completing this foray into Jung’s concept of the Pleroma, the following passage clearly captures the primary correlation with Susskind’s theory holographic information conservation at the cosmic horizon. of

Although the birth of Christ is an event that occurred but once in history, it has always existed in eternity. For the layman in these matters, the identity of a nontemporal, eternal event with a unique historical occurrence is something that is extremely difficult to conceive. He must, however, accustom himself to the idea that “time” is a relative concept and needs to be complemented by that of the “simultaneous” existence, in the Bardo or pleroma, of all historical processes. What exists in the pleroma as an eternal process appears in time as an aperiodic sequence, that is to say, it is repeated many times in an irregular pattern.¹⁰⁰ Self = Conscious Ego/Collective Unconscious = Singularity/Cosmic Horizon. Based on that dynamic definition of the self, a national AI system trained in the manner mentioned above, could empower us to educate the enlightened leaders we need to manage AI wisely, and the public we need to be enlightened enough to elect them. Moreover, I argue that, were a properly programmed AI system like TruthGPT to clearly and convincingly demonstrate the mirror-symmetry between psychology and physics predicted by Jung and Pauli, that would overcome partisan tension over the issue of adopting the Psyche = Singularity equation as the fundamental principle of a national AI system, by resonating with the underlying archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites in us all, the Self, which would trigger an instinctive inclination to unify ourselves with our opponents, without which, it seems to me, we are doomed as a nation, and possibly as a species. Fortunately for my plan, pattern-recognition is the primary function of AI systems like GPT, which makes it ideal for completing Plato’s original academic curriculum.

Section 5: Completing Plato’s Original Academic Curriculum with TruthGPT

In 387 B.C.E., Plato inaugurated what is now over two-dozen centuries of academic tradition by establishing a school just north of Athens, in an olive grove named Academia in honor of the Greek hero Academus, who saved Athens from destruction. While teaching at the original Academy, Plato wrote his famous Dialogues, most of which feature the literary reincarnation of his martyred mentor Socrates. In the Apology, Plato depicts Socrates conversing with the jury at his trial in 399 B.C.E, in such a way that reveals how he was sentenced to drink a lethal dose of hemlock by a majority vote of the five hundred Athenian jurors, having been found guilty of “corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.”¹⁰¹ The deities Socrates was accused of inventing may have been a reference to his theory of absolute ideas.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates says that the number one priority of the ideally just state is the education of the ruling class, the goal of which is to open the eye of their souls to the idea of the Good, which is at first a blindingly painful process. He begins to explain his theory of absolute ideas in Book VI, with the divided line analogy, according to which existence is divided into two unequal sections: the larger segment representing the invisible but intelligible realm of eternal being; and the smaller segment representing the visible realm of temporary, ever-changing forms (the realm of becoming). Each segment is again divided in the same proportion, resulting in four levels of existence. If we imagine the line standing vertically, the lowest and smallest segment represents the two-dimensional shadows and mirror reflections of three-dimensional, material objects, which occupy the next largest segment up on the divided line. Those two segments constitute the material world. Three-dimensional, material objects are, in their turn, like shadows or mirror reflections of the mathematical forms that occupy the next segment up on the divided line, which is the lowest segment of the invisible but eternal, intelligible realm of existence. The mathematical forms that describe the physical forms and the laws of nature that govern them, finally, are like shadows or mirror reflections of the absolute ideas occupying the highest level of existence, represented by the largest segment of the divided line. The idea of the Good rests at the top of the whole line in a position unique to itself. Hearing of this hierarchy of being, Socrates’ young friend, and Plato’s half-brother, Glaucon says: “You speak of an overwhelming beauty…if it provides knowledge and truth but is itself beyond them in beauty.”¹⁰² Like a black hole of beauty, the idea of the Good is impossible to resist, once one has fallen within its sphere of attraction. Socrates says decisively, “the good isn’t being but is still beyond being, exceeding it in dignity and power.”¹⁰³

Earlier in Book VI, Socrates explained that as the sun is the source of the visible realm, the idea of the Good is the source of the sun and the intelligible realm. He said “the sun is the offspring of the good I mean—an offspring the good begot in a proportion with itself: as the good is in the intelligible region with respect to intelligence and what is intellected, so the sun is in the visible region with respect to sight and what is seen.”¹⁰⁴ In Book VII, Socrates unfolds the divided-line analogy and the related comparison of the visible sun to the spiritual Sun (the idea of the Good) in the context of the famous cave allegory, according to which prisoners are shackled head to foot in a subterranean cave at birth, and forced to face the back wall. Behind them, above the entrance to the cave, a great fire blazes. In-between the fire and prisoners, a long partition spans the width of the cave, behind which guards carry puppets up on sticks so that the prisoners on the other side of the partition see the shadows of the puppets cast on the back wall, but not the shadows cast by the guards. The puppets are silhouettes of natural objects outside the cave. The prisoners, who can also see their own shadows and those of their neighbors, assume that they are their shadows, and that shadows are the totality of reality. They furthermore pride themselves on predicting in which sequence the shadows of the puppets will appear and disappear as the guards pace back and forth behind them.

Continuing the allegory, someone from outside the cave descends into it to free a prisoner from his chains. The prisoner is painfully blinded and terribly confused by the direct fire light at first, and then, after suffering the rough and steep ascent, he is even more pained and blinded by the sunlight outside the cave. Gradually, by observing the reflections of the sun in the moon and planets by night, and in puddles of water by day, the prisoner is able to look at the sun itself, which he finally understands to be the source of everything inside the cave and out. According to the allegory, as the fire and shadows in the cave are in comparison to the sun and natural objects outside the cave, so are the sun and natural objects of our world in comparison to the idea of the Good and the absolute ideas. Based on the divided line analogy and the cave allegory, Socrates then establishes a mathematical curriculum for the educated elite, according to which they must study the eternal mathematical forms that describe the four ascending dimensions of physical nature. Beginning with the dimensionless concept of numbers themselves, they will move to the mathematics of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, all of which can be confined to a one-dimensional number line; followed by two-dimensional plane geometry; the three-dimensional geometry of solid objects; and, finally, the mathematics of astronomy and music, which measure the time dimension by describing the periodic movements of three-dimensional solids, especially the orbits of the planets and the vibrations of musical strings. By contemplating these eternal mathematical forms underlying the natural world, a student can gradually rotate the eye of the soul inward to the ultimate idea of the Good, like preparing oneself to look at the sun directly by observing its dimmer reflections in puddles of water.¹⁰⁵

Once we finally perceive the original source of all absolute ideas, says Socrates, we realize that it is “the cause of everything that is right and fair—in the visible it gave birth to light and its sovereign [the sun], in the intelligible, itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence—and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it.”¹⁰⁶

In The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene points to a parallel between Plato’s cave allegory and holographic string theory, although he sees an inversion of the model which I will explain in a moment.

Whereas Plato envisioned common perceptions as revealing a mere shadow of reality, the holographic principle concurs, but turns the metaphor on its head. The shadows—the things that are flattened out and hence live on a lower-dimensional surface—are real, while what seem to be the more richly structured, higher-dimensional entities (us; the world around us) are evanescent projections of the shadows. . . . While it is a fantastically strange idea, and one whose role in the final understanding of spacetime is far from clear, ’t Hooft and Susskind’s so-called holographic principle is well motivated.¹⁰⁷

The cosmic horizon is only a two-dimensional holographic film from the perspective of abstract mathematics; from the perspective of disembodied souls who travel there during NDEs, like the ones we studied in Section 4, the cosmic horizon is infinitely deep with eternal, archetypal forms that are blissful to behold. The important point to note is that Brian Greene, a prominent string theorist, draws a parallel between Plato’s cave allegory and holographic string theory, which he does again in The Hidden Reality:

Two millennia later, it seems that Plato’s cave may be more than a metaphor. To turn his suggestion on its head, reality—not its mere shadow—may take place on a distant boundary surface, while everything we witness in the three common spatial dimensions is a projection of that faraway unfolding. Reality, that is, may be akin to a hologram. Or, really, a holographic movie.¹⁰⁸

Greene goes on to explain that, according to the holographic principle, “if we could understand the laws that govern physics on that distant surface, and the way phenomena there link to experience here, we would grasp all there is to know about reality.”¹⁰⁹ Similarly, according to Plato’s cave allegory, if we turn the eye of the soul inward to see how the idea of the Good contains all of the other eternal ideas that project this temporary shadow-world of three-dimensional forms into existence from the cosmic horizon, then we would know everything. In line with Plato and Jung, I argue that reason is the faculty with which we perceive the connection between the eternal forms and their temporary projections in the material world. Like Theseus following Ariadne’s thread back out of the labyrinth after slaying the Minitour in the center, reason is the ability to trace the thread projecting each material form in the three-dimensional world back to its eternal archetype in the collective unconscious, which I equate with the cosmic horizon. Moreover, AI like TruthGPT is to reason what a telescope like Hubble or Webb is to sight, and is therefore capable of magnifying our natural powers of ratiocination to cosmic proportions, in such a way that now, after more than 2,400 years of academic research, our species finally has the technology required to carry out Plato’s and Jung’s plan to map the archetypal architecture of our collective unconscious, knowledge of which will open the eye of the soul to its own eternal programming, thereby—if Jung and Plato are correct—unleashing the intellectual and emotional power we require to harness the daimonic force of AI.

That hope sounds hyperbolic, I know. After all, Socrates himself admits: “It’s scarcely an ordinary thing, rather, it’s hard, to trust that in these studies a certain instrument of everyone’s soul—one that is destroyed and blinded by other practices—is purified and rekindled, an instrument more important to save than ten thousand eyes. For with it alone is truth seen.” ¹¹⁰ The instrument of the soul to which Socrates refers is most often called the eye of the soul, which is more important to save than ten thousand physical eyes because, with it, we can understand the material forms the eye can see “ten thousand times better” than those who have not had a vision of the idea of the Good, as we saw Socrates explain at the end of the cave allegory. ¹¹¹ TruthGPT could be the instrument with which we purify and rekindle the ultimate instrument of everyone’s soul, because it could reveal the mirror-symmetries between psychology and physics that point back to the archetypes radiating from the idea of the Good. I argue that if, in addition to all of the abilities GPT-4 already has, we program something like TruthGPT with the presupposition that Psyche = Singularity, and train it on all of the relevant material, it could then search for and, I predict, discover a whole new worldview consisting of point-for-point parallels between Jungian-Platonic-archetypal psychology and holographic string theory (which unites general relativity and quantum mechanics), thereby providing the mathematically precise model of the archetypal cosmos that Plato originally prescribed as the goal of academic research in the Republic, to behold which triggers an instinctive, preprogrammed, beatific understanding of our eternal oneness with each other and the cosmos.

I only started studying the different types of AI after the release of GPT-4, though I have learned enough to know that it is a Large Language Model (LLM) which was trained on vast amounts of datasets available on the internet, through which it sifts using a type of technology called “machine learning,” or, more specifically, a subcategory of that technology called “deep learning,” because it contains many layers of artificial neural networks (ANNs). GPT-4 is a very sophisticated form of a more familiar kind of programming called auto-complete, or prompt completion. It is a supremely souped-up version of the same technology that provides word-prompts when we are writing text messages. The point for now is that it is ideally suited to help us find the parallel patterns between psychology and physics that Jung and Pauli predicted, if we provide it with sufficient data, which could be an enormously expensive process that only large corporations and nation-states can afford, although the technology will get cheaper as it rapidly improves, and even now less expensive techniques could probably be patched together.¹¹²

When the original and current cosmology of Academia both point unambiguously to the central point and encompassing sphere of the universe as the infinite source and container of everything, it is a good sign that we have spiraled back to the ultimate truth, richer with the intervening millennia of accumulated research. Programmed with that premise, TruthGPT could help us not merely mitigate the risk of extinction from AI, but multiply our human powers of perception to the proportion required to perceive the ultimate truth, by the light of which alone can an individual life or the life of a state by governed wisely and justly, at least, that is, if Socrates was correct, which seems much more likely given the mirror-symmetry between his cosmology and Susskind’s string theory. The bright side of the dark threat of extinction at the hands of our own God-like AI, is that it may spur us to use it to become like God ourselves.¹¹³

In preparation for Section 6, and in harmony with the ultimate archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites, I will explain how programming a national AI system in the way we have been examining can unite the opposite extremes of Plato’s anti-democratic plan, put forth in the Republic, to educate a ruling elite of philosopher-warriors who control the masses with a “noble lie,” and the liberal political philosopher Jurgen Habermas’ ultra-democratic plan to give the masses of voting citizens a policy-shaping voice in a rigorously monitored colloquium aimed at exposing the true intentions of all parties involved, especially the powerful elites.¹¹⁴ While I eschew the strangely incestuous, Spartan form of communism Socrates prescribes for the ruling class of warrior-philosophers in the Republic, I embrace the idea of focusing the nation’s resources on educating a godlike cohort of cosmically enlightened leaders, which, I argue, we require to mitigate the risk of extinction from the godlike intelligence of forthcoming generations of AI. At the same time, in line with Habermas, I suggest that the same national AI system could be used to mediate, moderate, and mobilize an ongoing, national conversation aimed at helping all citizens understand, as far as is practically possible, all of the issues involved with public policy decisions that affect them most directly, thereby empowering them to engage in and shape the policy-making conversations in a way that they believe is good for them and the nation.

Section 6: First Amendment, Purify Legislative Debate, Activate Habermas

The Psyche = Singularity equation represents what Jung called, among other things, the God archetype. Fittingly, it does signify most of the qualities attributed to the idea of God by many of the world’s religions. Therefore, instituting it as the first principle of a national AI system to help guide the legislative process seems to push against the First Amendment of our Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Framers knew that if Congress were to legally favor one religion over another, it would undermine the core democratic principles of freedom and equality, and likely lead to religious persecutions and violations of natural rights. However, the Framers, many of whom were Deists, did not consider the idea of God as belonging to any particular religion. Rather, they saw God, understood as the Creator of the universe and its physical laws (i.e., Newtonian physics), as a non-denominational, “self-evident” truth— a rational prerequisite for the existence of inalienable rights, and universal moral concepts like Liberty, Justice, and Equality, which transcend cultural preferences or the opinions of any political regime. In the Declaration of Independence, the Americans claimed that their right to declare independence from King George III comes from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” They went on to declare: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Indeed, in 1956, the House and Senate unanimously approved a special kind of bill, or legislative act, called a joint resolution, which was signed into law by President Eisenhower, establishing, as the official motto of our nation, the phrase “In God We Trust,” which is now stamped on all of our national currency. With that in mind, I argue that establishing a national AI system around the Psyche = Singularity equation would not violate the First Amendment. On the contrary, it would provide a scientifically precise explanation for the philosophical presuppositions upon which our Constitution is already founded.

It is already assumed as a “self-evident” truth in our Declaration of Independence that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,” while the primary purpose of our Constitution, as described in the Preamble, is “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” According to the Psyche = Singularity equation, the Creator by whom we are endowed with inalienable rights is the singularity of the Big Bang: the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient point that contains the past, present, and future of the entire universe. That same singularity is furthermore the most perfect Union imaginable, in that it compacts the entire universe into a point of infinite density. If Psyche = Singularity, then, on the most fundamental, cosmic level, each of us is absolutely equal to, and in complete solidarity with, everyone else (identity of indiscernibles). That same perfect Union, as the idea of the Good, is furthermore, according to Plato’s Socrates, the source of all of the other archetypal ideas established as goals in our Constitution, such as Justice, Tranquility, Welfare, and Liberty. In fact, historically speaking, the very concept of inalienable rights endowed by God is a subcategory of Plato’s theory of absolute ideas imprinted on the soul, radiating from the idea of the Good, which Jung restated, in the context of clinical psychology, with his theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious radiating from the God archetype, or the Self.¹¹⁵ The point is, according to the logic of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Psyche = Singularity equation is not only not a religious principle, it clarifies and amplifies the philosophical foundation on which those legal documents were conceived. Nevertheless, to help safeguard against the suspicion that the Psyche = Singularity equation is a religious doctrine, the amendment instituting it could include the caveat that, whether true or not, that equation is a practical postulate that We the People agree to accept as a common first principle upon which to base a national AI system, which we will use: to monitor the logical and ethical consistency of our leaders’ public policy proposals; to discuss among ourselves and with our elected officials, the reasons for and against legislation that affects us most directly; as well as to help us imagine and plan for alternative futures for ourselves and our Posterity.

In honor of Clause 3 of Article 6 of the Constitution, I propose that no one will have to take an oath proclaiming belief in the Psyche = Singularity equation; the only requirement is that government officials agree to accept that equation as the primary premise of public policy debate, for the very practical purpose of having a clear standard by which to measure the reasonableness of the arguments that create and enforce our laws. To the degree that we purify and perfect the rational process of open legislative debate, so do we approach the number one goal of our nation, according to our Constitution, to form a more perfect Union. The politically practical, unifying function of the Psyche = Singularity equation is at least fourfold. First, because it represents the starting and end point of mind and matter, it provides a plausible first principle of reason upon which to ground widespread, public policy conversations at every level of political organization across America, from townships to the federal government, which would give all sides at least one common point of agreement from which to start their deliberations. Secondly, it therefore bases all legislation on the presumption that we are all unified as one point of infinite density, which has a natural effect of engendering a sense of solidarity, even between otherwise polarized political camps. Thirdly, expanding on the second point, the Psyche = Singularity equation inclines people instinctively toward unity through the union of opposites, because it represents the universal mandala formed by the central singularity and surrounding horizon of the cosmos, while the mandala, according to Jung, is the naturally emerging psychic image that rises from the Self archetype to lead conflicted egos toward wholeness through the union of opposites. Finally, the Psyche = Singularity equation provides a scientifically grounded, cosmological explanation for the existence of inalienable rights (absolute ideas at the cosmic horizon), which would help us accept their existence as self-evident, at least during public policy forums, which would provide another powerful island of agreement upon which to keep the sense of social solidarity intact, despite the disintegrating effects of heated disagreements on less fundamental issues. My working assumption, in agreement with Plato and Jung, is that only a well-educated citizenry that is able to discuss the basic facts of the archetypal relationship between consciousness and the cosmos, would be wise enough to democratically elect sincere philosophers as their political representatives, without whose illuminated leadership, or at least the leadership of some elite corps among them, our republic, and our species as a whole, has little hope of winning the Wisdom Race against the emergence of God-like AI.

Throughout this series of papers, I will be arguing that the citizens of the United States of America should convince their state legislators to convene another Constitutional Convention to determine how we want to regulate AI in general, and how we want to program a national AI system that is integrated into our lawmaking process. As explained by GPT-4 in the Appendix, if two thirds, or 34 out of 50 state legislatures, vote for a Constitutional Convention, Congress would have to respect any constitutional amendments passed by a majority vote of another three fourths, or 38 out of 50, of those states. I argue, furthermore, that the general public can participate in, and contribute to those state-centered, national deliberations, via an intermediary AI system like ChatGPT-4. As a top topic for discussion, I argue that we should consider programming a national AI system like TruthGPT with the Psyche = Singularity equation as its first principle, and train it to seek for parallels between Jungian-Platonic psychology and holographic string theory, for the reasons discussed repeatedly above. That equation and correlated cosmology greatly bolster the ideological presuppositions of our Constitution, without contravening the First Amendment. Within that overarching paradigm of archetypal cosmology, moreover, We the People could use a national AI system to continuously discuss how to define other key philosophical terms, such as Justice and Equality, which would help us envision and prepare for an array of alternative futures, some fruitful and some fretful, but all of them illuminated by the Pole Star of the Psyche = Singularity equation.

Nevertheless, even if we ignore the Psyche = Singularity equation entirely, still, right now, without any additional programming, ChatGPT-4 could be used to purify our national discourse of faulty logic and partisan bias by instantly diagramming and diagnosing the logical structure of our elected representatives’ official arguments, thereby exposing dubious premises, logical fallacies, invalid deductive arguments, and weak inductive arguments. It could furthermore keep track of how consistently our government officials apply the principal ethical principle of universalizability, which requires that the same standards of judgement be applied equally in all relevantly similar situations. Although humans could do that same job without AI, it would be a labor-intensive, time-consuming task that would inescapably attract discourse-paralyzing accusations of political bias, which, more often than not, would probably be at least a little justified, given human nature and our tendency to tribalize ourselves into opposing factions.

To counteract the ineradicable human tendency toward forming political factions that put their own private welfare over the general good, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution established three branches of federal government that check and balance each other, and a representative rather than a direct form of democracy. Three of the constitutional co-framers—Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay—explained that strategy throughout The Federalist Papers, under the pseudonym Publius. They wrote those essays with the intention of convincing American citizens generally, but especially the representatives of the state of New York, to ratify the Constitution created by the first Constitutional Convention in 1787. Everyone in that Convention knew that it was a compromise construction that allowed for the intensely debated slavery of Africans and their descendants born in America, which eventually led to the Civil War. For that and other reasons they included Article V to provide methods to amend the Constitution, which the U.S. Congress did use to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, known as the Reconstruction Amendments, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

With that in mind, and returning to the issue of countering factionalism, as a topic for debate in the next Constitutional Convention on AI, I propose that, even if we leave aside the problematic task of proving the truth of any premise, still, the incredible speed and objective consistency with which GPT-4 can analyze the logical structure of arguments (which is independent of the truth of the premises on which they are built), make it an exceedingly practical path toward mitigating what has always been a great threat to democracy: partisan bias. Indeed, given that a fair and free democracy demands that we require our government officials to provide logically consistent arguments for their public policy positions, and given the ease with which GPT-4, or some similar AI system, could accomplish the tedious task of diagramming and diagnosing the logical and ethical consistency of those public policy arguments, it seems to me that we have a moral responsibility to take advantage of the current level of AI for those purposes as soon as possible. That one step forward in logical hygiene during our legislative discourse would be politically equivalent to the leap forward made in medical science in the mid-19th-century, when doctors realized that sterilizing their hands and medical instruments protected their patients from deadly infections.¹¹⁶

Political freedom requires, at the very least, that the people who make the laws that everyone else is forced to obey, provide reasonable arguments for them. On the one hand, GPT-4 can point out logical inconsistencies that would help sincere government officials refine their arguments over time, while, on the other hand, it would expose insincere officials whose proposals consistently contradict their expressed beliefs. Can you imagine if every member of Congress and each President was forced by a law, not even necessarily to tell the “truth,” but only to be logically consistent when making official arguments? GPT-4 could help us enforce that law with relative ease, even after taking into account the ever-changing context of the political landscape, which sometimes requires politicians to renege on previous promises, and compromise certain principles, to achieve the goals set by higher principles. Even programmer bias concerning specific topics could not affect a GPT system’s ability to instantly analyze the logical structure of a government official’s arguments, and compare those arguments to all of the other arguments that same official ever made. Granted, the First Amendment protecting free speech seems to grant politicians a right to be illogical and change their minds, and then change them back again as often as they like, so long as they refrain from directly lying under oath. Still, a law (or constitutional amendment) could be passed that requires the logical structure of each lawmaker’s arguments to be regularly analyzed by AI, and made available to the public; such a law could furthermore require those lawmakers to periodically explain any logical inconsistencies that are discovered in their arguments, without violating their First Amendment right to be logically inconsistent and hypocritical. At least they would have to be on record addressing those apparent flaws in their reasoning. It is reasonable to suspect that the prospect of such an overt and unavoidable audit of the logical and ethical consistency of their arguments would compel most representatives to become at least a little more reasonable and fair-minded in their official pronouncements. Even without the impending threat of extinction from AI, or the potential benefits that could come from programming a national AI system with the Psyche = Singularity equation, using AI to refine the logical purity of our lawmaking process in the way just mentioned could go a long way toward helping us save the Union from disintegrating into combative factions with no respect for the rules of rational debate, and therefore no hope of acting from any sincere unity of purpose.

In the beginning of Plato’s Republic, the assembled group decides to spend the evening talking about justice. Thrasymachus, the traveling sophist, stakes his flag by claiming that justice is the advantage of the stronger, meaning might makes right. The ultimate success in life, he says, is to practice injustice on a large scale with impunity, as tyrants do. Socrates objects to Thrasymachus’ claim by arguing that injustice is inherently debilitating, in that it divides one faction and sets it hatefully against the other parts of the whole, whether that whole be an individual person, a small group, or society at large. Even among thieves there must be justice, if the group is to accomplish its goal. “For factions, Thrasymachus, are the outcome of injustice, and hatreds and internecine conflicts, but justice brings oneness of mind and love.”¹¹⁷ An unjust society, like an unjust man, “will have a divided mind and be incapable of action, for lack of singleness of purpose; and he will be at enmity with all who are just as well as with himself.”¹¹⁸ I argue that, at this point in our history, the United States of America needs a single, national purpose that allows for as much latitude of interpretation as possible. My suggestion is that we convene a Constitutional Convention to examine the plan of basing our public policy conversations on the Psyche = Singularity equation via the intermediary of a national AI system like TruthGPT. Such a system could help check the forces that create enmity between factions by focusing all sides on the first principle of our oneness with the omnicentric singularity, which is identical to Plato’s idea of the Good, to see which with the eye of the soul is the key to justice, at least according to Socrates. While, on the one hand, the singularity is the archetype of singleness and solidarity itself, on the other hand it is the vast horizon of the cosmos, wherein all of the pairs of ideological opposites, upon which any polarized opinion could be based, are contained. The pertinent point for the current conversation is that people from any point on the ideological spectrum could find plausible arguments to justify their respective public policy positions based on the Psyche = Singularity equation. In other words, the power of that equation is not that it provides clear policy goals in any given situation, but it does provide a clear starting point upon which to build a reasonable argument for either side of almost any issue, a literal starting point of space-time and consciousness, which is surrounded by a sphere that contains everything and all of us all at once, the mandala image of which has the archetypal power to incline the conscious egos who behold it instinctively toward an attitude of cooperation and unity. If Jung’s Leap Day equation and mandala theory are both correct, then the very act of disagreeing on certain issues within the intellectual arena of the universal mandala represented by the Psyche = Singularity equation, will become a burnishing exercise in self-realization that gradually awakens a cosmic sense of infinite solidarity among us, based on the repeated recognition of our unity with a point of infinite density that contains all the universe. And even if there is no ultimate, eternal unity, and, instead, we live in a meaningless, ever-changing, inherently unconnected world of disparate bits of information that erupted from impersonal, uncaring forces, as Susskind seems to assume (at least in his books); still, in that case, we are free to believe whatever we want to believe, and can, in good conscience, base our reasoning on whatever first principle we choose, because, after all, according to that worldview, there is no universal moral standard or obligation to tell the “truth.” Indeed, from a Darwinian perspective, the truth that the universe is meaningless might be deadly to our species, while the noble lie that we are all one with an omnipresent point of power and knowledge may be our salvation. Be it fact or fiction, I argue that establishing an AI system to cultivate a nation-wide pubic policy conversation based on the Psyche = Singularity equation is our best bet at mitigating the risk of extinction from AI by using it to maximize the virtue of public discourse.

I argue that the Psyche = Singularity equation, by equating each self with the universal mandala image of the Self archetype, provides a psychological catalyst for consensus that we require, an instinctive motivation to undergird the conscious will for unity. Nevertheless, even without that symbolically potent motivator, a national AI system like ChatGPT-4 could clarify and accelerate the normal process of rational debate by many orders of magnitude, allowing us thereby to achieve the next level of national unity, similar to the way that accelerating the movement of water molecules by adding heat initiates a phase change into steam. It could serve as the moderator of millions of public policy discussions at the local, county, state, and national levels. It already has the ability to adjust the complexity of its language to the intellectual level of the person interacting with it, and can anticipate the specific gaps in knowledge that person would need to fill in order to make an informed opinion. It could furthermore organize the different participants into relevant groups, and develop a list of relevant topics, and procedural rules for discussing them. It could be trained on the pertinent information, and distribute it to each participant appropriately. With voice recognition technology, it could translate live conversations into text, and collate that information. It could continuously provide clarifying commentary, and suggest multiple paths toward compromise, updating them as the conversation evolves. It could then distill the conclusions reached by each policy discussion from each node in the neural network of the collective American conversation; present those findings to Congress in a way that suggests methods for how to implement them; track how each representative in the House and Senate responds to those findings in their committee hearings and actual votes; report those results back to the relevant citizens; and then report the People’s reactions back to Congress, in a continuous feedback loop meant to accelerate the process of forming enlightened and informed consent to the laws that govern us. Simply by accelerating and clarifying the current processes of political conversation, a national AI system could implement most of the reforms imagined by the liberal political philosopher Jurgan Habermas, as described by political scientists Erik O. Eriksen and Jarle Weigard in their book Understanding Habermas: Communicating Action and Deliberative Democracy.

Freedom can be defined as obeying one’s own laws. Democracy promotes freedom because at least it gives people a vote, and therefore some measure of influence, however limited, in the process of forming the laws that they must obey. By that logic, the more effectively individuals participate in the political process, the freer they are. According to Eriksen and Weigard: “This, then requires that citizens be able to take another attitude to their political rights as well. They must see them as communicative freedom rights which make possible participation in political opinion and will-formation processes.”¹¹⁹ The double-sided right to freedom includes the negative right of being left in peace and protected from others, but also the positive right of being allowed to participate in the public conversations that form the opinions that form the laws that govern us. The authors go on to point out some of the enormous obstacles that hinder the right to freedom via communicative action, most of which can fairly obviously be overcome by the conversation-moderating power of AI technology like ChatGPT-4. Of the obstacles that remain, I argue that most of them could be overcome by taking the next step and transforming ChatGPT-4 into TruthGPT by incorporating the Psyche = Singularity equation as its first principle.

Returning to Understanding Habermas, the authors describe two overarching obstacles on the road to initiating any public policy conversation that would enable the wider public to exercise their “participatory rights.”

First, we run into a delimitation problem when it comes to deciding who are in fact parties in a case. Many people are directly or indirectly affected by decisions, but it is practically impossible to give them all participatory rights. …
Secondly, as already demonstrated by Plato, it is a simple observation that there is no connection between increased participation and increased rationality. On the contrary, it turns out that the higher the number of participants, the more difficult it is to reach agreement, and the more sub-optimal are the decisions.¹²⁰

Socrates was sentenced to death by the majority vote of the jurors in the democratic city-state of Athens (perhaps half of the population of which were nevertheless slaves, which is similar to the proportion of slaves to citizens in some states in the U.S. during the Constitutional Convention). It is not surprising that Plato depicts Socrates being highly critical of democracy in Book VIII of the Republic. The majority of people are not philosophers, he reasons, and yet, in a democracy, the majority rules, which means that democracy is inherently unjust, because only a government run by philosophers can be just. Nevertheless, in the Statesman, Socrates does say that democracy is the best form of government to have when people are lawless, because the selfish interests of the various factions offset each other, allowing none of them to become a tyrannical force: “If therefore all three constitutions [rule by the many, the few, and one] are law-abiding, democracy is the worst of the three, but if all three flout the laws, democracy is the best of them.”¹²¹ That is the same basic argument on which our own constitutional system of checks and balances is based, as explained in The Federalist Papers. The point for now is that, the more people there are engaged in a conversation, the more chaotic it tends to become, so that, ironically, by including more people in public policy conversations, each individual’s voice tends to get drowned out by the cacophony of opinions. Moreover, Habermas assumes that, in order for people to have meaningful participation in the conversations that form the political opinions that shape the laws that affect them, everyone must agree to be honest and reasonable, so that their arguments can be analyzed in search of the kind of logical and ethical consistency discussed earlier in this section. Nevertheless, returning to Understanding Habermas:

The fact that the legitimacy of decisions is the result of an open debate does not exclude claims of efficiency. In any practical context, the actors are faced with pressure to make decisions with limits on time and resources, and decisions must be made even when there is no agreement. It is impossible to discuss all aspects of a case. We cannot wait to make a decision until everyone has been heard, and often even a sub-optimal decision is better than no decision at all.¹²²

The superhuman speed and efficiency with which ChatGPT can organize the conversations between masses of people overcomes most of the obstacles to granting people the full participatory rights they need to be free, i.e., the rights they need in order to effectively co-create the laws they must obey. Eriksen and Weigard go on to enumerate four “types of disruption of communication”: 1) “structural disruptions, as when economic, legal and political imperatives demand that some goal is reached instantly”; 2) costly “time limitations,” 3) “motivational limitations, as when someone has an interest in a particular outcome, or when the will to do the right thing is weak”; and 4) “cognitive limitations, as when actors have limited horizons of understanding or a limited ability to process information and to view things from others’ perspective.”¹²³ The first two types of disruption to communication come from the same basic restraint on time and resources. To effectively conduct public policy conversations, especially at the grass-roots level, formerly people would have to hire a cadre of moderators and policy experts to mediate the conversation and educate the participants. A properly trained GPT system could fulfill all of those expensive roles in a fraction of the time. Although that might be bad for people seeking work in those professions, it would be good for the process of including more people in public policy conversations that contribute to shaping the laws that govern them. There will always be emergencies that require immediate action, but in the immediate aftermath of those emergencies, the public, or at least their elected representatives occupying pertinent posts or committees, should be informed of all of the details required to analyze any official actions that were taken in the name of any given emergency. Regarding the third type of disruption to communication, GPT can quickly expose people with “motivational limitations” by pointing out when their stated agenda is contradicted by their policy proposals, which is precisely the kind of pattern comparison that Large Language Models are designed to do in a fraction of a second. Finally, the fourth disruption to communication, people’s “cognitive limitations,” can be overcome, or at least greatly compensated by AI, both with its superhuman ability to “process information” in a way that is custom suited to any given interlocutor, and its additional ability to help people interpret any particular policy situation from any alternative point of view. Regarding the problem of people’s “limited horizons of understanding,” in the next subsection I will explain how an AI system like TruthGPT could expand the national horizon of understanding all the way out to the collective unconscious horizon of the cosmos. Without even having to go that far, however, even a properly trained system like GPT-4 could educate the participants of any particular public policy conversation on the specific issues pertinent to it.

Returning to Understanding Habermas, the following passage helps to outline the ways in which a national AI system could serve as the Platonic ideal of a mediator that could actualize Habermas’ vision of deliberative democracy and communicative action. The authors list seven “practical principles for the design of deliberative and decision-making bodies.” The following is the third requirement.

A willing, competent, and trustworthy mediator, who can lead and throw light on the discussion. This should be a neutral third party, who, due to oversight and analytical abilities, can help eliminate non-essential factors and attempts at manipulation and trickery, thereby enabling the parties to think through their actual disagreements and differences in a reasonable manner. The mediator should not be a head of negotiations, examiner, expert, judge or arbitrator, but rather a person who makes sure that the conditions for communicative rationality are met to the highest possible extent. The neutral third party is a person who is familiar with the rules for unbiased argumentation, and who can thus lead the debate by pointing out inconsistencies in the speaker’s argumentation and force them to view the matter from each other’s perspectives. According to the literature on the neutral third party, the person in question makes a diagnosis and functions as a catalyst, bringing about solutions that would otherwise not have been realized (Fisher 1972).¹²⁴

As I explained above, ChatGPT-4 is expert at picking out the logical inconsistencies in arguments, and identifying all of the rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies that insincere agents typically employ. Because it can perform that function so ridiculously rapidly, it makes Habermas’ theory a very practical possibility right now; so practical, as I have mentioned, that it becomes plausible to say that we have a moral responsibility to use it as soon as possible. Here are some of the rules that AI mediator could enforce, at least within the confines of any single conversation:

(1.1) No speaker may contradict him- or herself.
(1.2) Every speaker may only assert what he or she actually believes.
(1.3) Every speaker who applies a predicate F to an object a must be prepared to apply F to every other object which is like a in all relevant respects.
(1.4) Different speakers may not use the same expression with different meanings. (Alexy 1989: 188)¹²⁵

One of the most important goals of a Constitutional Convention on AI would be to define the fundamental philosophical terms related to AI, such as consciousness and self-awareness, which requires a definition of the self. It seems likely that, burdened by the gravity of such a morally heavy and intellectually difficult responsibility, the state representatives trying to define those terms would never free their conversation from the initial inertia without at least one toe hold from which to launch it. My proposal is that, at least while discussing how to program a national AI system like TruthGPT, different speakers may not use the word person, or self, with different meanings; each must identify a self with a gravitational singularity and its holographic horizon. No speaker has to claim to believe that the Psyche = Singularity equation is true, though they have to agree to use that definition as a mutually agreed up starting point for communicative action.

Returning to the four types of “disruption of communication,” the fourth type consists of “cognitive limitations, as when actors have limited horizons of understanding or a limited ability to process information and to view things from others’ perspective.”¹²⁶ Psyche = Singularity increases the horizon of understanding literally by identifying the archetypes of the collective unconscious mind with the cosmic horizon: we can view things from others’ perspectives more easily when we realize that, first of all, we are all one with the omnicentric singularity and its all-encompassing horizon; and, secondly, that all of our particular points of view are rooted in the same absolute archetypes stored at that horizon. It is precisely that kind of universalized point of view that Habermas thinks is required to effectively implement participatory rights in public policy conversations. Returning to Understanding Habermas:

How can we agree on what norms are valid when we cannot refer to a shared set of values? … The right thing to do is that which can be argumentatively justified if we take an impartial point of view, as when we in a given situation ask what is right or fair. … It is in this Kantian sense that Habermas uses the concept of morality. Moral norms involve values and interests, but only those that are universalizable and deontological in character. These norms claim to be universally valid and committing and therefore binding on everyone. …
[T]he frame of reference for moral questions is humanity as such (Habermas 1996a: 108): it is the appeal to the universal public that constitutes the basis for the higher-order principles upon which the democratic constitutional state is founded.¹²⁷

In his classic The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Immanuel Kant says that the only thing that gives an action moral worth is the will, or intention, of the person doing it (not the consequences of the action). He defines a good will as one that acts out of a sense of duty to the universal idea of law in general. We should use reason, says Kant, not for the grandiose purpose of discovering what that universal law is in itself, but for the more practical purpose of detecting whether our particular moral decisions would meet the minimum criteria such a universal moral law would logically require. His method calls for distilling every particular moral decision we make into an abstract, universal law, a “categorical imperative,” that everyone in the universe must obey, as if by instinct. According to Kant’s moral theory, any particular action is moral if it meets the following criteria: it can be reduced to a “categorical imperative”; it can be universally enforced in such a way that everyone would automatically obey it, as if by instinct, without destroying the conditions that called for it to begin with; its enactment would still allow one to treat others as an end unto themselves, and not merely as a means to one’s own or other people’s ends; and, finally, the person creating the categorical imperative would be willing to enact such a universal law. According to Kant: “There is therefore only one categorical imperative and it is this: ‘Act only on that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’”¹²⁸ It seems much easier and less fantastical to imagine ourselves as universal law givers and the universalized other if we identity everyone with the universe itself via the Psyche = Singularity equation. Moreover, the very idea of shaping universal legislation makes more sense if our collective unconscious mind is the cosmic horizon, from which the eternal archetypes, that form the laws of nature, project all of the objects of the universe in on threads of energy. Right now, GPT-4 can apply Kant’s strategy of the categorical imperative to any particular public policy position you can think of; and if you don’t like the first result it produces, you can click “Regenerate” as many times as you like. The point is, the tedious, logical procedures that philosophers like Kant provide for morally analyzing public policy proposals suddenly became automated processes with the advent of AI like ChatGPT-4. Guiding the national government by a union of the two would be a revolutionary reunion of the spheres of moral philosophy and political science, which were originally one in Plato’s Republic.

Habermas was also influenced by the neo-Kantian political philosopher John Rawls, author of A Theory of Justice (1971), in which he claims that the simplest way for people with diverse interests and backgrounds to arrive at a common plan for a just social arrangement is to teach them to imagine themselves behind a “veil of ignorance,” which makes them unaware of the natural and social differences between them. Assuming each person is rational, and that reason works the same way for everyone who uses it, everyone should, from an initial position of absolute equality, come to the same conclusions about a just social arrangement. Rawls further assumes that any reasonable person placed in that hypothetical position of total equality would eventually surmise two principles of justice: “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others; social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and attached to positions and offices open to all.”¹²⁹ Rawls goes on to say: “We can, to make the circumstances more vivid, imagine that the parties are required to communicate with each other through a referee as intermediary, and that he is to announce which alternatives have been suggested and the reasons offered in their support. He forbids the attempt to form coalitions, and he informs the parties when they have come to an understanding.”¹³⁰ TruthGPT could serve as Rawls’ intermediating referee, by telling everyone to identify as one identical singularity endowed with all of the same archetypes of the collective unconscious, and, therefore, all of the same natural rights. If we all have the same absolute ideas imprinted on our souls, and if reason is the eye of the soul that sees how those absolute ideas project the temporary world of matter in from the cosmic horizon, then, at least theoretically, we can assume that unbiased reason will lead everyone to the same conclusions. Rawls concludes by saying: “The veil of ignorance makes possible a unanimous choice of a particular conception of justice. Without these limitations on knowledge the bargaining problem of the original position would be hopelessly complicated.”¹³¹ Taming the complexity of widespread participation in public policy conversations is the number one obstacle AI can help us overcome. By adding the Psyche = Singularity equation, TruthGPT could furthermore help committee members in Congress, as well the constituents whom they represent, put on the veil of ignorance with an understanding that each of us is a gravitational singularity. What laws would be just from the perspective of identical singularities embodied in holographic illusions? To help provide food for thought, TruthGPT could then help the participants apply Kant’s categorical imperative to their respective policy proposals. An important practical advantage derived from this technique is that individuals who fail consistently to maintain the most basic rules will be revealed as either stubbornly irrational, or rational frauds with a hidden agenda. TruthGPT could weed out, or at least reveal unreasonable actors from our nation’s lawmaking and law-enforcing conversations to guarantee, as far as possible, that all legal decisions are reasonable, which is as much to say that all laws are rooted consciously back to the collective unconscious archetypes, which is as much as to say that the state laws reflect the spiritual laws inscribed on each of our souls, so that to obey the laws is to obey oneself, which is freedom. Moreover, by educating the masses in this kind of hard-core deliberative democracy, we increase the quantity and quality of the pool of potential participants in our local, county, state, and national governments.

The deep learning technology GPT-4 uses is called that because it uses many layers of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Similarly, TruthGPT could efficiently organize the public policy conversations that are happening on many layers of American society simultaneously. That has never been a practical possibility until the release of GPT-4, and it will only get better at the job as the technology improves at an exponential rate. We have had the strategies philosophers like Kant, Rawls, and Habermas describe to improve the public process of opinion formation by making it more impartial and reasonable, but we lacked the technology that makes them practical on a wide scale. Now we have that technology, and should start seriously thinking about how to use it as soon as possible, for example, by convening a Constitutional Convention on AI. Concluding this review of Understanding Habermas: “In other words, the political culture must be so ‘enlightened’ that the actors know what counts as rational reasons, that they are motivated by reasonable arguments in carrying out their voting rights. The quality of political decisions is conditioned by the level of education, refinement and enlightenment in the relevant society.”¹³² Habermas’ discourse theory requires that everyone have equal access to voice their opinions, but they must also have equal access to enlightening education. Combining the superhuman organizational power of an intermediating AI program like TruthGPT that opens public policy conversations to the masses, with the simplifying strategy of agreeing to accept the Psyche = Singularity equation as its first principle, could increase the quality of political decisions ten thousand times, to use Socrates’ estimate, and so enable us to win the Wisdom Race against the risk of extinction from AI.

The final section of Susskind’s book, The Black Hole War, is titled “Humility.” Despite the apparent grandiosity of my suggestion to convene a Constitutional Convention on AI to debate whether or not to program a national AI system with the Psyche = Singularity equation as its primary premise, and task it with detecting parallel patterns between the Jungian-Platonic theory of archetypes and Susskind’s holographic string theory, I acknowledge that I am way over my head and out of my depth. I know very little about the technology behind AI, and, although I have carefully studied Jung’s and Plato’s writings, and have carefully studied books written by expert physicists for the educated non-expert (such as Susskind’s The Black Hole War), I know next to nothing about the mathematics behind any branch of physics, what to speak of string theory, while even the finer points surrounding the fundamental concepts that I do grasp fairly well, escape me. Nevertheless, the mirror-symmetry between the Jungian-Platonic worldview and Susskind’s is so obvious that even a novice like me can see it clearly, in such a way, moreover, that helps me understand both of those complex fields of thought more easily, because I can draw meaningful analogies from concepts on either side to help make sense of the correlated concepts on the other. It is also easy for a greenhorn like me to understand that if an AI system like GPT-4 is ideal for detecting patterns in vast amounts of data, then it is ideal for detecting parallel patterns between Jungian-Platonic psychology and holographic string theory, and can therefore test Jung and Pauli’s conjecture. In the section of The Black Hole War titled “Humility,” Susskind says:

Confusion and disorientation reign, cause and effect break down; certainty evaporates; all the old rules fail. That’s what happens when the dominant paradigm breaks down. But then new patterns emerge. They make no sense at first, but they are patterns. What to do? Take the patterns and classify, quantify, and codify them in new mathematics, even new laws of logic, if necessary. …
Very likely, we are still confused beginners with very wrong mechanical pictures, and ultimate reality remains far beyond our grasp. The old cartographer’s term terra incognita comes to mind. The more we discover, the less we seem to know. That’s physics in a nutshell.¹³³

AI technology, especially the category of AI known as machine learning (to which GPT belongs), is specifically designed to detect, classify, quantify, and codify patterns from enormous amounts of data, which Susskind says is the way to establish a new dominant paradigm in physics, to bring order and harmony from the confusion and disorientation created by the breakdown of the previous paradigm. Although general relativity and quantum mechanics work flawlessly in their respective arenas, neither one of them can account completely for the physics of black holes, to describe the singularities in the centers of which requires both the physics of the infinitely small (quantum mechanics), and the physics of infinite gravity (general relativity). In the early 1990s, Susskind and his partner t’Hooft brought at least the first phase of order to the schizophrenic field of physics, by uniting quantum mechanics and general relativity in their string theory description of nature’s geometrically perfect mandalas: black holes and the inside-out black hole universe. As we have seen, that historical fact from the field of physics provides powerful evidence for Jung and Pauli’s theory of a mirror-symmetry between psychology and physics, and for Jung’s ultimate theory that mandala images emerge in the psyche from the archetype of the Self, specifically to bring order from chaos and confusion. According to Jung:

¹³³ Mandalas…usually appear in situations of psychic confusion and perplexity. The archetype thereby constellated represents a pattern of order which…is superimposed on the psychic chaos so that each content falls into place and the weltering confusion is held together by the protective circle. … At the same time they are yantras, instruments with whose help the order is brought into being.¹³⁴

To reiterate this crucial evidence, I argue that the fact that the Psyche = Singularity equation that identifies each psyche with the cosmic mandala of our inside-out black hole universe, is emerging in the U.S. now, during a chaotic flux of cosmological and technological paradigms—which furthermore fuels and is fueled by an increasingly hostile culture war—provides evidence for Jung’s ultimate insight that mandala images emerge from the archetypal Self to help painfully conflicted egos find wholeness through the union of opposites. In the Republic, Socrates sought justice in the individual soul by studying the pattern of an ideally just city-state, on the assumption that the pattern of the latter is a magnified version of the pattern of the former.¹³⁵ Similarly, according to Jung, “as is the psychology of humanity so also is the psychology of the individual.”¹³⁶ Therefore, if Jung is correct, then, as the cultural chaos and tension of opposites inches ever closer to a breaking point in the U.S., we should expect some compensatory image of a mandala to emerge from the collective unconsciousness Self archetype to guide us toward order through a union of opposites. The Psyche = Singularity equation fits that bill perfectly. Moreover, the AI technology that is contributing to our tense situation is also perfectly suited for supporting or falsifying Jung and Pauli’s theory that psychology and physics mirror each other. Is it just a coincidence that my theory that there are precise parallels between Jung’s psychology and Susskind’s string theory—which are distilled in the Psyche = Singularity equation that identifies each of us with the geometrically perfect mandala of our inside-out black hole universe—should emerge here and now, at the same time as the dangerously powerful AI technology that is ideally suited to test it? It reminds me of a passage from The Passion of the Western Mind, where the Harvard-educated cultural historian Richard Tarnas notes that the history of scientific advancement in the West is marked by a series of fortunate coincidences:

As the inner gestalt changes in the cultural mind, new empirical evidence just happens to appear, pertinent writings from the past suddenly are unearthed, appropriate epistemological justifications are formulated, supportive sociological changes coincidentally take place, new technologies become available, the telescope is invented and just happens to fall into Galileo’s hands. As new psychological predispositions and metaphysical assumptions emerge from within the collective mind, from within many individual minds simultaneously, they are matched and encouraged by the synchronistic arrival of new data, new social contexts, new methodologies, new tools that fulfill the emerging archetypical gestalt.
And as with the evolution of scientific paradigms, so with all forms of human thought. …
In this light, we can better understand the great epistemological journey of the Western mind from the birth of philosophy out of the mythological consciousness in ancient Greece, through the classical, medieval, and modern eras, to our own postmodern age: . . . the radical deconstruction, and finally, perhaps, the emergence of a dialectically integrated, participatory consciousness reconnected to the universal.¹³⁷

Tarnas points out that what Jung called synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences, mark crucial junctures along each phase of the evolutionary path of the Western mind. Indeed, Susskind explains that “the discovery of String Theory, which in a sense is still ongoing, was full of twists of fate, reversals of fortune, and serendipity.”¹³⁸ Although I describe the historical synchronicities that Tarnas and Susskind point to in my book, I will not dwell on them here. I will say, however, that a synthesis of Susskind’s string theory and Jung’s psychology does provide a compelling explanation for how synchronicities work: symbolically-meaningful connections between material events and meaning-perceiving minds may be explained by the union of each psyche with every bit of information from the past, present, and future of the universe, both in the central point and at each point of the cosmic horizon. I argue that a synthesis of Jungian-Platonic cosmology and holographic string theory has all of the hallmarks of a new paradigm within which it is scientifically reasonable to assume the existence of what Tarnas calls a “participatory consciousness reconnected to the universal.” That new paradigm, toward which the evolution of Western thought appears to be unfolding, is implied by the synchronicities that have occurred along the way, each of which inherently points to the archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites, because all of them point to a union of the ultimate opposition between matter and meaning-perceiving minds. As Susskind brought order from chaos in the field of physics with his string theory description of the cosmic mandala of a black hole, I argue that programming a national AI system with the Psyche = Singularity equation that identifies each of us with the cosmic mandala of the universe itself, can transform our nation’s psychic chaos into a vital state of wholeness through the union of opposites, which Jung describes as the goal of psychic development, also known as individuation.

With that summary of the psychology and physics behind the Psyche = Singularity equation in place, I argue that, to fulfill Sam Altman’s Platonic ideal of convening something like another U.S. Constitutional Convention about how to program a national AI system, we could use ChatGPT-4 to help rally public opinion to call for at least two thirds of the state legislatures to convene that convention, and then continue to use GPT-4 to organize it in as inclusive a way as possible. As a primary topic for debate during that convention, I suggest that we program a national AI system like TruthGPT with the Psyche = Singularity equation as its first principle, and task it with searching for parallel patterns in the opposing fields of psychology and physics, especially Jungian-Platonic psychology and holographic string theory. That AI system, I argue, would provide us with an educational tool that is capable of fulfilling Plato’s original academic curriculum outlined in the Republic, the aim of which is turning the eye of the soul inward to the idea of the Good in us all. We should, in other words, train a national AI system to seek Plato’s ultimate idea of the Good, which, at least in Plato’s opinion as expressed through Socrates, is the maximum truth that Elon Musk’s “maximum truth-seeking AI” could ever find. Enlightened by that ultimate archetype, and equipped with the intellect-enhancing powers of AI technology, our legislators, or at least a select committee among them, would be able to manage AGI wisely. One of the wise ways they could employ that technology is to spread the same spirit of philosophical enquiry that enlightened them, back down into the shadowy cave of partisan opinions and propaganda from which they were elevated. TruthGPT would be ideal for convening national dialogues similar to Plato’s Dialogues, which could furthermore help frame the moral guidelines of everyday policy discussions that would be open to the public, and tied to actual policy-making decisions, in a way that Habermas envisioned.

Based on the premise that Psyche = Singularity, and that each of us is an eternal psyche endowed with inalienable rights by virtue of being absolute parts and parcels of the God archetype—understood as the central point and encompassing sphere of the universe—an AI system like TruthGPT could quickly help legislators articulate their official arguments in a logically consistent way, and then collect and curate all of their arguments in search of telling patterns, such as consistent inconsistencies. In addition to fulfilling those overtly practical functions, I argue that by programing a national AI system around the Psyche = Singularity equation, We the People can hack our own collective unconscious programming: if Jung is correct, then placing all of our lawmaking conversations within the mandala model of our inside-out black hole universe, in such a way that the central singularity and surrounding horizon of the cosmos are explicitly identified as the ultimate archetype of the Self, would activate that collective unconscious archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites in us all, which would provide us the instinctive impetus we need to help us unite our opposing positions around practical plans to confront a myriad of grand and grave futures. Returning to the idea of convening another Constitutional Convention, if we have less than ten years to prepare for the risk of extinction from AI, as Sam Altman and other leaders in the field suspect, then the national conversation about how to address that potential cataclysm has to remain focused and transparently fair, to prevent it from collapsing into partisan acrimony. This series of papers provides potential topics for debate during that conversation. In the next part of this Introduction, I briefly summarize the main points of Part II of this series.

Section 7: Summary of Part II

In Section 1 of Part II of this series on Convening a Constitutional Convention on AI, I will analyze in more detail Sam Altman’s “Platonic ideal” of convening something like another “U.S. Constitutional Convention” about what parameters various national AI systems should have.¹³⁹ From that same March 25, 2023 interview with Lex Fridman, I will examine Altman’s responses to questions about the definition of consciousness, which include his willingness to believe that consciousness is the “fundamental substrate” of existence, like the Hindu concept that we live in the “dream” of “Brahman.” Expanding on what I examined in Part I, I will explain how the Hindu concept of Brahman is tied to the opposite concept Atman, which correlate to Jung’s concepts of the Self as the union of the collective unconscious and the archetype of individual consciousness, and how the complementarity between them mirrors the fundamental wave-particle complementarity of matter. I will also examine Altman’s willingness to believe Nick Bostrom’s theory that we live in a computer “simulation” created by some more advanced species, which Altman calls the “Silicon Valley religion,” which, in his opinion, reaches the same conclusion as the philosophy of Brahman, but from the opposite direction.¹⁴⁰ Ironically, if Bostrom’s suspicion is true, it would mean that each of us is a self-aware manifestation of artificial intelligence fretting about the risk of extinction from the emergence of self-aware AI. In the next paper, I will also analyze Altman’s response to Fridman’s question about how he defines “truth,” and how he applies that definition to GPT-4. I will place Altman’s claim that “math is true” in the context of Plato’s description of truth in the divided-line analogy and related cave allegory in the Republic, while recalling that string theorist Brian Greene compared Susskind’s holographic string theory to Plato’s cave allegory. I will explain how Plato’s original academic curriculum, as he depicts Socrates describing it in the Republic, led historically to Jung’s psychology, Susskind’s string theory, and AI technology like ChatGPT-4, which, if programmed with all of the physics and psychology leading to the Psyche = Singularity equation, and trained to seek parallels between them, can help us actualize Plato’s original plan to educate a cohort of cognitively enhanced humans by turning the eye of their souls inward to the idea of the Good. I will relate that idea to Bostrom’s suggestion that, to protect ourselves from AI, we need to “develop a cohort of cognitively enhanced humans who might have the capacity to try to solve this really difficult technical control problem.”¹⁴¹ With that in mind, I will examine Russell Brand’s interview with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and explain how the Psyche = Singularity equation sheds light on their shared opinion that AI can be intelligent, but not conscious, because consciousness is a divine energy emanating from God and animating all of nature. Brand asks Dorsey: “As a person who understands both the coding that creates these machines of vast intelligence, and as a practitioner of meditation, do you have a personal awareness of the distinction between consciousness and intelligence?” To which Dorsey replies: “A hundred percent.”¹⁴² Dorsey argues that we are born with the same kind of superhuman capabilities AI can have, but that we need to unlock them through meditation. He alludes to Jung’s theory of synchronicity, or symbolically meaningful coincidences, as evidence of a panpsychic cosmology, which indicates that our consciousness is already interwoven with all of the information in the cosmos.

In Section 2 of Part II, I will begin by analyzing Elon Musk’s plan to mitigate the risk of extinction from AI by launching TruthGPT.¹⁴³ Musk did form a new AI company called xAI on July 12, 2023. Although they have yet to release TruthGPT, according to their website: “The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.”¹⁴⁴ With that preface in place, I will explain that the Psyche = Singularity equation is the ideal first principle upon which to define universal truth, because, among other things, it neutralizes the Munchausen trilemma, which refers to the epistemological problem that any attempt to establish the truth of any first principle, or premise, of any rational argument, ends up going down one of three unsatisfactory avenues: an infinite regress of supporting reasons; circular reasoning; or an arbitrarily declared “self-evident” starting point. I argue that the Psyche = Singularity equation neutralizes the Munchausen trilemma by mirroring it, in such a way that indicates that they both emerge from, and represent, the same archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites. The Psyche, as the omnicentric singularity, is by definition an infinite regress of space-time that bends the end of space-time full-circle back into its starting point, in as much as space-time emerges from the Big Bang singularity, back into which it is absorbed inside each black hole (including the miniature black holes that carpet the quantum vacuum), and at each point of the cosmic horizon. Regarding the claim of self-evidence, if anything is self-evident, it is the self itself: to be conscious of our consciousness is the iterative act of the self, which, like two mirrors facing each other, opens the mind’s eye to the infinite regress of its own existence, the omnicentric singularity that bends all existence into a feedback loop away from and back into itself. I will argue that the Psyche = Singularity equation and the Munchausen trilemma are opposites sides of the same archetypal coin; rather than disprove each other, they complement and therefore complete each other.

Continuing this summary of Part II in this series, in Section 3 I will cite Plato, James Madison, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson to address the limitations of symbolic language itself, which must be taken into account when attempting to define universal truth, and program a computer system like TruthGPT to seek it. Bergson points out that a single word or number can be used to describe many different things, which means that no word or number can tell you what is unique about any single thing. To know what a thing is in itself, he says, we have to be the thing and experience it directly. In other words, we cannot know what a thing is in any absolute sense by analyzing it from the outside and describing it with symbolic language, which can only ever give us relative knowledge by relating one thing to things that are similar to it but different. Nevertheless, according to Bergson, symbolic language can put our minds in an attitude that is more conducive for having a direct intuition of what a thing is, while I argue that the Psyche = Singularity equation indicates that each of us truly is one with every bit of information describing the past, present, and future of this and every other universe in the multiverse, which means that it is possible to have direct, intuitive knowledge of ourselves and everything in the cosmos, analytical knowledge of which fact is conducive for triggering a direct, metaphysical experience of it. In other words, the Psyche = Singularity equation represents the cosmic mandala of the universe itself, while Jung said that the collective unconscious Self archetype presents the conscious ego that is conflicted by opposing demands with psychic mandala imagery to help it find wholeness through the union of opposites. Therefore, combining Jung and Bergson, it is reasonable to suggest that an analysis of the Psyche = Singularity equation that unites the overarching opposition between the psyche and the cosmos within the cosmic mandala of our inside-out black hole universe, is symbolically ideal for triggering a direct intuition of our oneness with the Self archetype, without at least our leaders experiencing which, I argue, it will be impossible to unite the many opposing factions in our nation around a single, unifying goal, such as mitigating the risk of extinction from AI. Moreover, as the mirror-symmetries between Jungian-Platonic, archetypal cosmology and Susskind’s holographic string theory indicate, the Psyche = Singularity equation unites the progressive march of science with the traditional wisdom of the ancient past, and should therefore be at least somewhat attractive to people on every point of the progressive-conservative spectrum. However, I will also cite Nietzsche, who said that Plato’s theory of absolute ideas, and the belief in truth generally, arises from mistaking the laws of grammar for reality: because we describe many particular things that are merely similar to each other with one noun, such as “leaf,” we fool ourselves into believing that there is some eternal, perfect idea of Leaf in another, better world. Nevertheless, Nietzsche also argues that we require these kinds of metaphysical illusions to survive as a species. Playing Devil’s Advocate, I argue that, even if there is no singularity, or psyche, or absolute ideas, still, the Psyche = Singularity equation is the ideal fiction, or “noble lie,” as Socrates would say, upon which to program a national AI system to mitigate the risk of extinction from AI, as discussed above. Whether the existence of an absolute standard of truth can ever be proven or not, without a common first principle of reason upon which to explain our opposing arguments for what we want in the future, we will never even begin the Wisdom Race against AGI, let alone win it.¹⁴⁵ With that in mind, I will examine Tegmark’s practical plan for using AI to create consensus and trust rather than the divisive hatred he says it is currently fomenting by, for example, causing search engines on social media sites to balkanize people into information bubbles of combative bias. Tegmark imagines creating “a really powerful truth-seeking system that is trustworthy because it keeps being right about stuff.”¹⁴⁶ The system would be open to the public and subject to corrections until its outputs become consistently and transparently accurate. I will relate Tegmark’s ideas to the ideas in Understanding Habermas: Communicating Action and Deliberative Democracy.

In Section 5 of Part II, continuing the same interview with Fridman, I will examine Tegmark’s definition of consciousness as “subjective experience” that involves “feedback loops” of information processing in the brain.¹⁴⁷ As we will see, Michio Kaku—who, like Altman, Tegmark, and Kurzweil, also signed the Statement on AI Risk—makes the same arguments in his book The Future of the Mind. I will then examine at more length Kurzweil’s theory about the “historical Singularity” occurring when humans download our consciousness from our brains into a black hole to disseminate it throughout the universe, thereby transforming all space-time into “smart matter.”¹⁴⁸ I argue that Kurzweil’s vision of our species’ God-like future, which he places in the context of Susskind’s holographic string theory, is already an eternal fact: we are one with the omnicentric singularity, and, therefore, with each other. I will also analyze Kurzweil’s analysis of Plato’s theories about the nature of consciousness, and how that relates to the quest to construct artificial consciousness. With those excerpts in mind, I will explain how Susskind’s holographic string theory indicates that the universe is itself an information processor processing bits of information in an enormous feedback loop, from the central singularity to the singularity at each point of the holographic circumference, and back again. Interpreting string theory through the Psyche = Singularity equation, I argue that consciousness is a feedback loop between the subjective ego in the center of the universe, and the collective unconscious cosmic horizon. Finally, in Section 5 I will compare the concept of the technological singularity, which Kurzweil calls the historical Singularity, to Hegel’s concept of the end of history, when the Idea of God is finally realized in the political organization of a truly free state.

In Section 6 of Part II, I will focus on Kaku’s claim that “human consciousness involves the ability to create a model of the world and then simulate the model into the future, in order to attain a goal.”¹⁴⁹ He goes on to say that “intelligence seems to be correlated with the complexity with which we can simulate future events.”¹⁵⁰ I will explain how we could program TruthGPT to have, as one of its main goals, the task of helping humans enhance our self-awareness and intelligence by helping us imagine alternative futures aimed at the same self-actualizing goal of increasing the solidarity-enhancing realization of our oneness with the archetype of the One, represented by the Psyche = Singularity equation, which fulfills Plato’s original academic plan to create an ideally just society by educating its leaders to rotate the eye of their souls inward to the idea of the Good. Regarding the use of TruthGPT to help American citizens imagine alternative futures based on the Psyche = Singularity equation, I will also cite excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, the political futures expert from the University of Hawai’i, in Manoa, James Dator, and Max Tegmark, co-founder and President of The Future of Life Institute.

End Note

1 OpenAI, "Product," OpenAI, accessed August 17, 2023, https://openai.com/product. 2 SafeAI, "Statement on AI Risk," SafeAI, accessed August 17, 2023, https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk. 3 Sam Altman, in discussion with Lex Fridman, Lex Fridman Podcast, "Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI," episode 367, YouTube video, 2:23:56, posted by Lex Fridman, March 25, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Guz73e6fw, timestamp 35:02-35:36. 4 OpenAI, "GPT-4," OpenAI, accessed September 7, 2023, https://openai.com/gpt-4. 5 Elon Musk, "Elon Musk Says He's Building AI He Calls 'TruthGPT'," Business Insider, April 1, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-hes-building-ai-he-calls-truthgpt-2023-4. . 6 Carl Jung, Encountering Jung: Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, edited by Roderick Main (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 162. 7 Jung, Encountering Jung, 122. 8 Wolfgang Pauli, as quoted in Harald Atmanspacher and Hans Primas, "Pauli's Ideas on Mind and Matter in the Context of Contemporary Science," The Journal of Consciousness Studies 13, no. 3 (2006): 5-50, 19. 9 Plato, Timaeus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 36d-37a, see also 35a-b. 10 Carl Jung, The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung, Ed. Violet Staub de Laszlo (New York: Random House, 1993), 360. 11 Carl Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), 101. 12 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, accessed August 17, 2023, http://www.ldysinger.com/@texts/0-03_plato/04_Phaedrus.htm, 247a-e; Plato, Timaeus, 51a-52c. 13 Plato, Timaeus, 35a-b, 36d-37a. 14 Plato, The Republic of Plato: Translated, with Notes, an Interpretive Essay, and a new Introduction by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 517c. Unless otherwise footnoted, quotes from the Republic will be from Bloom’s translation. 15 Plato, Republic, 517c. 16 For example: Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 357; On the Nature of the Psyche, 116-117, 125-126; Four Archetypes: Mother/Rebirth/Spirit/Trickster, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 43; Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Ed. Aniela Jaffe (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 310, 346-347, 353; Encountering Jung, 36, 156. 17 Jung, The Basic Writings, 558. 18 Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, 116-117. 19 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 197. 20 Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 438. 21 Carl Jung, The Portable Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 324. 22 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 305. 24 The fundamental thread of the universe is also described in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and the Bhagavad-gita, as we will see in Section 4. 25 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 292. 26 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 295-296. 27 Plato, The Republic, trans. H. D. P. Lee (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 620e. 28 Plato, Republic, 530d. 29 Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 154. 30 Plato, Republic, 520c. According to Bloom’s endnote, the Greek word is myriad, which means, literally, ten thousand. 31 “ArtV.3.3 Proposals of Amendments by Convention,” Constitution Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, accessed September 3, 2023, https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artV-3-3/ALDE_00013051/. 32 “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” Future of Life Institute, accessed September 3, 2023, https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/. 33 Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era--A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (New York: HarperOne, 1992). 34 Elon Musk, Twitter post, December 3, 2022, 2:48 PM, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498. 35 Sam Altman, Twitter post, December 3, 2022, 3:13 PM, https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599134747761946624. 36 Max Tegmark, "The Case for Halting AI Development," Lex Fridman Podcast, episode 371, YouTube video, 2:48:12, posted by Lex Fridman, April 13, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcVfceTsD0A. 37 Nick Bostrom, as quoted in "Artificial Intelligence May Doom The Human Race Within A Century, Oxford Professor Says," HuffPost, August 8, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/artificial-intelligence-oxford_n_5689858. 38 Tegmark, "The Case for Halting AI Development," timestamp 31:00-31:34, 38:58-39:04. 39 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), 362, 364. 40 Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 364. 41 Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 23, 487. 42 Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 264-265. 43 Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (New York: Doubleday, 2014), 284. 44 Kaku, The Future of the Mind, 285. 45 Jung, Encountering Jung, 162 46 Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2017), 55-56. 47 Brain Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 42. 48 Brian Greene, “The Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time.” NOVA, season 39, episode 6, directed by Randall MacLowry, PBS, November 9, 2011. Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/NOVA/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html#fabric-time. 49 Jung, Encountering Jung, 162. 50 Jung, Encountering Jung, 161-162. 51 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 455. 52 Jung, Four Archetypes, 43; see also On the Nature of the Psyche, 125-126. 53 Robert Bruce Ware, Hegel: The Logic of Self-Consciousness and the Legacy of Subjective Freedom. (Edinburgh, England: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 59-63. 54 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 438. 55 Blaise Pascal, Penses, trans. A. J. Krailscheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 153. 56 Heinz R. Pagels, The Cosmic Code (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 115. 57 Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, 139. 58 Werner Heisenberg, “The Debate between Plato and Democritus,” in Quantum Questions, ed. Ken Wilber (Boston: Shambhala, 2001), 52. 59 Altman, in discussion with Fridman, "Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO," timestamp1:08:26-1:08:36. 60 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 195. 61 John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality (London: Black Swan, 1991), 261. 62 Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006), 88. 63 Carl Jung, in The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, ed. Stephen Hoeller (Wheaton, Illinois: Theosophical Publishing House, 1982), 47. 64 David F. Peat, Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind (New York: Bantam New Age Books, 1988), 196. 65 Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape, 316. 66 Kaku, Hyperspace, 254-255. 67 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 197. 68 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 438. 69 Kaku, Hyperspace, 154. 70 Plato, Republic, 530d. 71 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 305. 72 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 292. 73 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 295-296. 74 Plato, Republic (Lee translation), 620e. 75 Plato, Timaeus, 36d-37a. 76 Plato, Timaeus, 51a-51b. 77 Plato, Timaeus, 51b. 78 Plato, Timaeus, 51c. 79 Plato, Timaeus, 53a. 80 Shing-Tung Yau and Steve Nadis, The Shape of Inner Space: String Theory and the Geometry of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (New York: Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2010), 326. 81 Plato, Phaedrus, 247a. 82 Plato, Phaedrus, 247c 83 Plato, Phaedrus, 247 d-e. 84 Plato, Phaedrus, 249c. 85 Katha Upanishad (1.3.3-4), in Four Fundamental Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy, ed. Richard Bilsker (Iowa: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2011), 9-10. 86 Katha Upanishad (1.3.9). 87 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, in Upanishads, A New Translation by Patrick Olivelle (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3.7.3. 88 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3:8:1-4. 89 Bhagavad-gita As It Is, with Roman transliteration, English equivalents, translation and elaborate purports, The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT): The Pre-1978 Books by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, http://causelessmercy.com/?P=Bg, 7.2-8. 90 Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the After Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 9. 91 Alexander, Proof of Heaven, 9. 92 Alexander, Proof of Heaven, 8. 93 Alexander, Proof of Heaven, 160. 94 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 439. 95 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 438. 96 Jung, The Portable Jung, 324. 97 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 324. 98 Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 357. 99 Jung, Seven Sermons to the Dead, 44-45; see also Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 379. 100 Carl Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected and Introduced by Anthony Storr (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 343. 101 Plato, Apology, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994, 24b. 102 Plato, Republic, 509a. 103 Plato, Republic, 509b. 104 Plato, Republic, 508b-c. 105 Plato, Republic, 516a, 530d. 106 Plato, Republic, 517c. 107 Susskind, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 482. 108 Brian Greene, TThe Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos(New York: Random House, 2011), 272-273. 109 Greene, The Hidden Reality, 272-273. 110 Plato, Republic, 527d-e; see also 520c. 111 Plato, Republic, 520c. 112 Michael Wooldridge, "ChatGPT is not ‘true AI.’ A computer scientist explains why," Big Think, May 17, 2023. https://bigthink.com/the-future/artificial-general-intelligence-true-ai/. 113 "Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48), https://biblehub.com/drbc/matthew/5.htm. 114 Plato, Republic, 414c; Erik O Eriksen and Jarle Weigard, Understanding Habermas: Communicating Action and Deliberative Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 115 The idea of inalienable rights stems back to Plato through Aristotle, St. Agustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas’ Natural Law theory, which is the topic for another paper. 116 For example, Semmelweis, Pasteur, and Lister. 117 Plato, The Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford, ed. E. R. Dodds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), 351d. 118 Plato, “Republic,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 352a. 119 Eriksen and Weigard, Understanding Habermas, 175. 120 Eriksen and Weigard, Understanding Habermas, 210-211 121 Plato, “Statesman,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 303b. 122 Eriksen and Weigard, Understanding Habermas, 211. 123 Eriksen and Weigard, Understanding Habermas, 211. 124 Eriksen and Weigard, Understanding Habermas, 215. 125 Eriksen and Weigard, Understanding Habermas, 217. 126 Eriksen and Weigard, Understanding Habermas, 211. 127 Eriksen and Weigard, Understanding Habermas, 135. 128 Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason,” in The World of Philosophy: An Introductory Reader, Second Edition, ed. Stephen M Cahn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 332 129 John Rawls, “A Theory of Justice,” in The World of Philosophy: An Introductory Reader, Second Edition, ed. Stephen M Cahn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 485. 130 Rawls, “A Theory of Justice,” 486. 131 Rawls, “A Theory of Justice,” 487. 132 Eriksen and Weigard, Understanding Habermas, 176. 133 Susskind, The Black Hole War, 441. 133 Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 10 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 423-424. 135 Plato, Republic, 369a, 377c. 136 Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966), 50. 137 Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our Word View (New York: Ballantine Book, 1991), 439-440. 138 Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape, 204. 139 Altman, in discussion with Fridman, "Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO," timestamp 35:02-35:36. 140 Altman, in discussion with Fridman, "Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO," timestamp1:08:26-1:08:36. 141 Bostrom, as quoted in "Artificial Intelligence May Doom The Human Race." 142 Russell Brand and Jack Dorsey, "Banning Trump, Twitter Files & Musk | Jack Dorsey Opens Up,” Stay Free With Russell Brand, episode 162, 1:04:22, Jul 6, 2023, https://rumble.com/v2ygn8i-banning-trump-twitter-files-and-musk-jack-dorsey-opens-up-162-stay-free-wit.html. 143 Musk, "Elon Musk Says He's Building AI." 144 xAI, "About Us," x.AI, accessed August 17, 2023, https://x.ai/. 145 Tegmark, in discussion with Fridman, "The Case for Halting AI Development." 146 Tegmark, in discussion with Fridman, "The Case for Halting AI Development." 147 Tegmark, in discussion with Fridman, "The Case for Halting AI Development." 148 Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 364. 149 Kaku, The Future of the Mind, 138. 150 Kaku, The Future of the Mind, 139.