But it’s a big subject - I would expect that those who made the most out of their relationship with a guide of some sort were those who took the time to learn something about their spiritual interests first, and sought a route based on that.

Idries Shah quoted one of his antecedents as saying, “That’s why they’re called seekers and not finders.”

This kind of makes me think of John Searle’s “Chinese Room argument” against Strong AI. In this case, we can think about “the web” as the translating machine in Searle’s situation, our problems and their answers as the unreflective rules (syntax) on which it operates, and the otherwise deeper considerations that we get from real people as meaning (semantics). Like the translating machine, people can put in stuff and get intelligible stuff back out, but because nothing about the web requires it to understand people’s problems, just the stuff they put into it, that reflective edge is missing from what they get back. In otherwise “normal” interactions with people, they think about our problems and we get some of that reflection back in their answers. With this reflected aspect missing from the internet though, I wonder how people will actually deal with their problems as they seek solutions through the internet.

One possibility, though, is that it prompts reflection on the part of the person with a problem. This could be thought of as happening when they put their problems in, thinking like they did with other people that it would bring back reflection, and when no reflections actually come back they still act as if they did. Since no reflections are really coming back though, they are doing all the thinking for themselves. This possibility is constrained by a lot of what the person with a problem is bringing to the situation though.