Thinking of AI as an intuition machine
Why there's a "6" on my palm, the meaning of "Decide Nothing," cave art, AI-assisted inner work, DALL-E, Jaron Lanier's "data dignity," Captain Rob, and raypunk intuition machines.
That’s my left hand there. You may be wondering, and I’d like to explain why I wrote the number “6” on my palm one day in the summer of 2020, and why I’m using an illustration based on this image as the logo for my writing site, DECIDE NOTHING. And for that matter, what does that “6” have to do with “decide nothing,” what does decide nothing mean anyhow, and why would you want to decide “nothing”?
The palm-6 image is an artifact—and a reminder of the power of—intuition. I wrote up the full story as Two Days Outside the Gate, but the short version is that I made a mistake by ignoring my intuition as I prepared for a kitesurfing mission out into the Pacific outside the Golden Gate Bridge a couple of years ago Although I didn’t ever quite feel in imminent mortal danger, I did end up in a pretty hairy situation, and I did feel that it was prudent to call 911 for a rescue, seeing as I was by myself late in the day, at least 2 miles outside the Gate, with no wind and a very long swim in front of me. In a situation like that it’s best to call for help before you really need it, and that’s exactly what I did.
The specific intuitive message that I chose to ignore came in the early morning that same day. I was lying in bed, waking slowly after a night of less-than-perfect sleep, still excited, in fact from a long day kiting outside the Gate just two days prior. As I rolled in the liminal space between dawn and daybreak and between sleep and waking, the light beginning to warm the window across from my bed, I noticed that the trees were quieter than they had been the past couple of days, and it occurred to me that a quiet morning meant less wind. Very much feeling myself that summer in my body as a sailor, and even more specifically as a kitesurfer, and even still half-asleep, I immediately connected the strength of the wind to a specific size of kite. Lying there in bed horizontal, before I had so much as moved a leg, I knew when I went to the beach that afternoon that I would need to rig a kite one size larger than the one I had used on my last day out in the water. Like something drawn in the sand below the tide line, that half-conscious realization registered—and then washed back into the sea of dreams as I rolled out of bed and into the kitchen for my morning cup of coffee.
When I finally got back to the beach much later that afternoon (thanks to the guys on FV Phoenix for picking me up out there), I did something to remind myself to pay closer attention to these subtle and ephemeral messages that arise from the subconscious. Although—clearly—I’m still learning that lesson, I am getting better at it, and one method that has helped is something I learned from Robert Johnson’s Inner Work, which is that when we sense something that might have meaning—in something we see, in a dream, in an intuitive moment—to make it concrete with a physical ritual or by creating or otherwise manifesting the image or symbol in the waking world. As Johnson puts it, “You can always do a simple physical act, even if you can’t think of something that relates directly to your dream.”1—and what I did was to write that big “6” right there on my hand like a tattoo, as soon as I got back to my car. Obviously, it would have been better if I’d done this when I first woke up, but then I wouldn’t have this story to tell!
Bringing something out of the dream-world into the light of day is an example of how making an artifact makes art a fact. It literally brings something from inside your mind out into everyday reality. As it seems to me, this is the key to understanding what all art is—a physical manifestation of some part of the artist’s soul—and you can probably see why doing this can be so powerful, even if it’s just to remind yourself not to rig too small and sail yourself into hole out by Point Bonita and have to call for help.
Even though the “6” that I wrote on my hand with a black Sharpie has long since worn off, that image has been recorded indelibly in my mind ever since. Our human consciousness is wired for making, recalling, and using symbols, and the power of symbolism is such that I recall that black 𝟲 far more readily than the much longer episode of everything that happened that afternoon. The main reason that symbols are so important to how we think is that a symbol is a compact and potent pointer to, and a placeholder for, a much larger story. Symbols are so dense that a simple circle traced on the wall of a cave can easily represent the sun, Earth, and all of humanity, the wheel of life, God—in fact, the totality of the entire universe, all in a little symbol just a couple of inches across, traced out by the simplest motion of one fingertip. Symbols allow us to carry around, remember, refer to, and communicate huge abstract concepts and epic stories that would otherwise take many nights of fire-side storytelling to relate.
We’re also very much wired for pattern recognition, which is a big part of what intuition is in the first place. That morning before I made my not-quite-fateful trip out the Gate, my subconscious had very clearly recognized a pattern in the pre-dawn weather (and also in my own lack of proper sleep) that suggested that a more conservative choice of kite size. One way to understand symbols is that symbols encode patterns—a circle encodes the shape of sun, for example—and also comes to encode the conceptual pattern of the all-powerful Sun that brings light and heat and life to the world.
Just as my unconscious, intuitive premonition was drawing upon the collective experience of all of my fellow sailors in that particular area to tell me that I would be well advised to use my six square meter kite that day, pulling that six out of my subconscious and putting it on my hand, and then out here as part of my writing is a concrete example of contributing back to the collective unconscious. I created that symbol, and now that I’m sharing it with you, it’s possible that at some point in the future you’ll find meaning in that “6” as well. If enough people process the symbol, it’s possible (although, I admit, not likely) that some collective story or mythology could emerge about the meaning of the 𝟲, as my original story gets retransmitted and refracted through thousands of retellings. It’s just possible to imagine that “𝟲“ could come to stand for a slightly-wrong choice of sails, the sun still shining and not yet sunk below the horizon, or a ship sailing in to rescue a stranded sailor.
Just as my own individual unconscious could be seen to be populated by patterns and stories and symbols that I’ve accumulated over the years, the collective unconscious is something like the sum of symbols that are known well enough by enough of us that they occupy some space in all of our individual consciousnesses. This is what Jung meant by archetypes—the shared symbols, conceptual patterns, schemas that form recognizable parts of our psychological landscape across all of humanity and therefore, in turn, serve as part of the raw material for new experiences, stories and symbols. My story of this day is a classic sailors’ story, and, not to put myself in the same category as these heroes, but at least in theory, the ‘story of six’ could become a story larger than me, as did the stories of Ulysses, or Beowulf, or Amundsen—just as “6” could become collective shorthand for intuition, or rescue, or foolishness, and just as all the numbers of the tarot carry various interpretations.
Regardless of whether this specific symbol ever comes to mean anything to anyone else, I won’t ever forget what happened that day, and that 𝟲 serves as a constant and visceral reminder that when my intuition speaks up, it’s very much worth paying close attention.
The concept, or pattern, or archetype of intuition is deeply intertwined with my writing, and my self as a writer. It was my intuition that spoke up, again and again, persistently and consistently, that finally led me to dedicate myself to becoming a writer—and it’s also true that I ignored an intuitive message much earlier in my life about writing that plagued me for most of my life, until I was “rescued,” brought myself back to the shore, and was able to begin. My own active, present feeling-core of intuition is a constant inspiration for my writing and also a subject that I often feel to explore, and so when I put together my Substack site this summer, DECIDE NOTHING—itself a linguistic symbol that, to me, represents intuition—was the obvious choice for the name. As I assembled things on the fly, I made use of the photo of the “6” drawn on my palm as part of the design for the site.
The phrase “decide nothing” itself first came to me back in 2015 right after I sold my conference business. At the time, it seemed imperative to me to avoid having to decide—that is, figure out—what I was going to do next. I wanted to give myself the freedom to not stew and puzzle and analyze and not to have to come up with an answer, and as I was still very detached from my inner guardian and not able to see my self-nature very clearly at all, I didn’t really know what else to do other than to not do what I had been doing so much of for so long—that is, deciding.
That keyphrase has served me well. Like a minor spell, it took the pressure off and allowed me to change my approach to living. I did give myself the freedom to not decide, and I gradually learned to listen more to the voice within. I’ve also come to think of “decide” a bit differently, in part thanks to something my friend Robert Ellis said on on my podcast just recently about how “decide” means cut away, while ”choose” means taste, or try. I was stuck thinking of deciding as analytical and contrary to intuitive thinking, but this insight has helped me to get more comfortable with cutting away things that aren’t on my clear path to “B-prime,” as he puts it—a process that I wrote about more in The Last Time.
With a few months gone by since I first put up the palm-6 image, I began to feel that I wanted an something with a more strikingly graphic quality than the rather plain photo of my own hand. A year or so ago, my friend Anthony had introduced me to GPT-3, part of the emerging category of AI-powered content-creation tools that now includes DALL-E and many other tools for images, Jukebox for music, and who knows what-all else. I like messing around with software tools, so I thought it would be interesting to see if I could use DALL-E to create an illustration.
It takes a little doing to grok the language that you need to feed into these AI tools. You have to give them a lot of keywords to work with. I discovered this amazing guide to DALL-E prompts and that helped me quite a lot in coming up with the codephrase “detailed charcoal illustration of left hand, number 6 written on the palm, dark background with stars and planets, raypunk” that generated this image:
I haven’t figured out how to get DALL-E to start with an existing photograph, so this image is not based on my own photo—and yet it’s remarkably similar to the very real image of my hand, and that’s because this new breed of AI works by having ingested millions and millions of existing images that carry the imprint of human consciousness—and meaning—in their patterns. In responding to my request, the AI was drawing upon this massive collective aggregate of human symbols and using pattern recognition to put them together in a way that ‘makes sense.’ Of course, there’s no way for the AI to understand what I ‘mean’ by the palm-6 symbol unless I tell it. I did try adding “intuition” to the prompt for DALL-E, and the result is different, but to me it doesn’t seem to convey the meaning of intuition any more than the first one.
I suppose if I had the technical know-how I could dig into how the AI model processed those two different requests and see precisely how it interpreted the additional keyword, but I don’t, and so I don’t know whether the AI has an idea of what intuition ‘looks like,’ but it certainly did manage in both cases to generate a symbol that has meaning, by squeezing my input text through the palimpsest of as much of our collective unconscious as we’ve managed to upload so far.
What I’m getting at here is that these AI tools might just be giving us new ways to do inner work! I doesn’t so much matter to me whether the AI knows what intuition looks like—it’s giving me a new way to create symbols that are meaningful to me. I could have asked a visual artist to create images based on my input, but that single artist would only have access to their individual lens on consciousness, whereas this new tool draws upon, well, not quite all of human consciousness, but certainly far more than any single person has access to. As an old colleague of mine put it,
“although algorithms are generating the images, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the algorithms are creative. The creativity lies with the human being asking the algorithm to create an image. The execution may come from software, but the inspiration is still human… at least for now.” —
It seems to me that we’re feeding our collective unconscious into these machines so as to be able to get more direct access to these parts of ourselves, and the result is an explosion of a creativity, and even new types of art made in collaboration with AI. While I can’t say that the computer produced an image that meant intuition to itself, what’s going here at a larger scale is that we are re-creating the architecture of intuition in the form of a vast machine populated by our own archetypes and symbols, and with far-greater-than-human power to recognize patterns and connections. In effect, what we’re calling “AI” might be something like an intuition machine.
Jaron Lanier spells this out in slightly different terms in his recent article in the New Yorker entitled “There is no A.I.” I really dig his take, how it points us past an ad-based information economy—and also how it aligns with the Substack ethos.
At the same time, it’s not true that the interior of a big model has to be a trackless wilderness. We may not know what an “idea” is from a formal, computational point of view, but there could be tracks made not of ideas but of people. At some point in the past, a real person created an illustration that was input as data into the model, and, in combination with contributions from other people, this was transformed into a fresh image. Big-model A.I. is made of people—and the way to open the black box is to reveal them. … The familiar arrangement has turned out to have a dark side…Users experience what seems to be a communitarian paradise, but they are targeted by stealthy and addictive algorithms that make people vain, irritable, and paranoid. … In a world with data dignity, digital stuff would typically be connected with the humans who want to be known for having made it. In some versions of the idea, people could get paid for what they create, even when it is filtered and recombined through big models, and tech hubs would earn fees for facilitating things that people want to do. Some people are horrified by the idea of capitalism online, but this would be a more honest capitalism. The familiar ‘free’ arrangement has been a disaster.
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The new programs mash up work done by human minds, framing them as tools of ‘social collaboration.’
In the end, I’m just happy that, first of all, I was picked up by Captain Rob and his buddies, and also that I have this new way to cook up colorful images. The end result is that now I have a new logo for the site, and also an image that I can use for the first DECIDE NOTHING swag! I took the raypunk image that DALL-E and I cooked up, and then used Stickermule to gin up these sweet buttons, which I’m now offering to all of my paying subscribers.
Although it didn’t occur to me until I was writing this piece, it’s no coincidence of course that a long-standing synonym for “intuition“ is the “sixth sense.” No wonder that 𝟲 keeps turning up! If you’re having trouble deciding, perhaps it’s time to invoke the mantra that I began with. Decide nothing—and instead, choose the delicious feeling of supporting a working artist. One of the best ways to encourage your own intuition to speak up is to recognize it, acknowledge and reward it, and this is one small way to do just that, with an artifact that will serve as a constant reminder to listen evermore closely to that very precious inner voice.
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Love reading?
You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of intuition, symbols, computers, and AI. I also highly recommend Robert Johnson’s book, Inner Work.
Please stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…
Are there any symbols that are particularly meaningful to you? How did they come into your life, and how do you use them?
What do you think—are we collaborating with GPT-3 and DALL-E, or are they just one step closer to grey goo?
What’s your experience with intuition, decisions, and choices?
Did you know that this entire piece was actually written by an AI?
Thanks for the quote and the fine piece, Bowen!