America on Psilosybin - Good Night and Good Luck

The misapprehension that the brain was a calculating logic machine endured until the so-called LLM AI achieved AGI liftoff. This happened once non-techies, meaning socially well adjusted creative types, took over app conception and creation. AGI did the coding. Things went wild. The cores melted down.

There are statues now to Trump, celebrating him as a force of nature; one of the gods. He'd dismantled the military industrial complex and destroyed the American empire. No political process was up to the task of instructing the country to cease and desist automobile driving, single-family nuclear homes, multiplying screens. Only nature was up to the task. Natural disaster does the job every time.

And, bonus, our political system was also updated to prevent such a force of nature in the form of a man ever to take hold of it again. Not much different from building a house to keep out the elements. That was shortly after global corporate control was supplanted by local investment. Global collapsed and local took over. An amazement of wealth returned to our cities and towns.

The streets are full of walkers now, the roads, piece by piece, retrofitted for bicycles and mass transit. Beauty is returning, trala trala.

The human mind never had all that much to do with logical problem solving. It - and here I'm including the brain - was a generalization machine. Not so needlessly complex as the computers humans created and made had become, which did the job of problem solving much better than any organic mind could. Still much more complex than anything man-made could ever be. As complex as the cosmos, in fact.

Generalizations are as simple as the apprehension of similarity in the perceptual world beyond the skin. The brain spins those perceptions around, clustering them into nameable and primordial concepts. The mind, in the main, responds emotively to the match between perception and conception which it is the brain's job to orchestrate. Just one unintended consequence is the ability to problem-solve.

Machines, corporations, the economy, have no emotion. Their problem-solving looks like glass and steel skyscrapers in which nobody sane wants to live. It takes an incredible lack of imagination to consider one's mind a CPU. Mind as CPU is phenomenally retrograde. 

Those who'd lived through the transformation marveled at how much nicer it was to live in streets full of walkers and bicycles and a very few trolleys on restricted tracks for longer distances. The passage from plush automobiles through autodriving app-hailable cars to not really wanting or needing to go anywhere happened precisely as quickly as the disappearance of want-creation as an industry. Within a couple of generations. Wants of that sort are as mechanical as a windmill, though much more difficult to fix.

Amazingly, whole world generalizing was enhanced and not denigrated by this contraction away from what once was called progress. Universal translation had already reduced the globe to a village, which meant that live performance and art came alive again. Over there became as boring as in here used to be. The problems which had once been humans' main motivation disappeared as problems, once it became obvious that life was not a problem, or a set of problems, to be solved. 

* * *

I paid a lot of money to watch the first ever live and global broadcast of a Broadway Production. By 'a lot of money' I mean a tiny fraction of what it would cost to see the play live, bringing along with the subscription over a hundred new channels to my screen. Like watching football (Go Bills!) on my wall-sized projection screen, I can enjoy the game without all the F-bombs, which are now so built in to bro-talk. I can understand the "play" because I can hear the commentary and watch re-runs.

Same deal watching a Broadway production. CNN couldn't help themselves, deploying oodles of electronics, giving me closeups and absolute clarity of sound. The production itself was a mixture of filmed renditions of the actual TV presence of Edward R. Murrow's subjects, if none of the man himself. It was a marvel of perfect execution.

... absent was the magic of live theater, which I imagine was also absent in the theater itself. Really? A film star now takes the Tony? He didn't act any differently than he does in the movies. What I watched was a movie of a play. What I want is local theater that I can afford to be engaged in. I mean kudos for the ability to recreate live over and again, without the outtakes of perfection.

Local stores within walking distance selling locally made wares. Who knew! Local theaters present plays with global resonance. Wealth descends like rain.

These last several hundred years of so-called progress have, in the main, been a concentration of wealth upward with digital technology being no different from an accelerant on a house fire. Our President can now make millions or even billions from his office while he's in it. He no longer has to wait until he makes book in retirement.

The entire CNN spectacle was apologized for as a righteous take-down of a man in office no longer so petty as the Junior Senator from Wisconsin. A man magnificently more dangerous. In just the way a tornado is dangerous. God help you if you're caught up in his whirl. The twister is so powerful that your very soul will be flung away, leaving the dummy core of Botoxed and plumped cartoon realization of your nothingness.

Have you no decency!?

Old Age

I am joined
In a militant detachment
By myself
Redundantly patting my parched
Pecker package
Dry
Rank and defiled

Pecked letters

Mirror image
Assigned without achievement
To the accomplished ranks

A part
Without the hair to hold
The heat and moisture in
Pat pat tappety tap
I resonate without a fret
Without a stop
Without atone

Ment
Without completion

To
In
Con
De
Flate
Evermore

Phtttt

Twang

Artificial General Intelligence is Not Around the Corner

All the AI gurus have taken to saying that Artificial General Intelligence is just about here. Maybe a year, may be two, maybe tomorrow. What's really just around the corner is awareness of that in which human intelligence consists. That will be transformational, and maybe even this quest for AGI will have been helpful in our dawning awareness.

Our dawning awareness shall include our awakening to the fact that the weather, the earthly pushback and even the volcanos and earthquakes gather their energy inside of us, if, unlike me, you believe in that insider/outsider distinction. 

Trumpism is, of course, a force of nature. To the extent that we don't know what to do about our complicity in earth's destruction - I just helped my daughter buy a sports car, ferchissakes - we also must celebrate MAGA insanity as the identical force that a tornado has when it tears through a community. Thank you Agent Orange for prodding our awakening! We so innocently sanctioned your spewing.

I'm just guessing, but people involved in AI have probably had the experience of feeling really smart. They're among people who are also really smart, but they just somehow get it better and faster than everyone else. 

I once ran a school for gifted kids and never did figure out how to resolve this conundrum of goodness's self-awareness leading to its self-destruction. If I had, the school would still be alive and promoting and instilling all those humane human tendencies which characterized the innocent direction of the lost and forever departed so-called American Century. We knew not what we did.

What they're good at, these AI titans, is something godawful boring to the rest of us. No, don't include me, I too was mesmerized by my first encounter with networks, and proceeded to spend an unforgiven godforsaken chunk of my life on them.

Naturally, these people, we these people, assume that intelligence is like what they have. But what if they're all really amoral, like AI is amoral. Meaning here that there's nothing "inside" the AI that generates moral acts and behaviors, but it's rather taken in from the handling they do of language and other artifacts. They might be able to project a shadow of human morality, but wouldn't be able to initiate a moral act on their own? Or if they would, it would have to be derivative.

One example of amoral behavior is that of the tech titans and especially of the titans of AI, when they go all out for themselves. Would any of them do what they do if there was nothing in it for them? And if they think that their work will make the world a better place, why aren't they willing to accept the opinions of others on that score? Simply because they have no need to. In our world, the economy stupid, is the proxy for humanity. Our wants are toted up for us, and along we go, merrily or not.

AI is the oldest story in the cosmos. God forsaken.

Well, OK, so the rest of us mostly are cheering them on because we largely think and believe that tech is good and AI could be good as well, especially if it becomes better at problem solving than humans are.

But what if humans are the problem that needs solving? Collectively, we all are supposed to thrive on recognition. On standing out. That's our interpretation of the cipher of evolutionary genetics. AI can do so much better than we can with that or any kind of ciphering. Oh please God turn us over to an AI engineering of our future! Please guide our DNA. Oh.

Maybe there's a difference between a stand out artist and a standout money-maker? Adrian Brody plays long-suffering Jewish geniuses in The Pianist and The Brutalist, and wins two academy awards. Living life in an antisemitic hell. Can there ever be too much beauty in the world? There can certainly be, and already is, too much technology.

It's not just the surveillance capitalism which Shoshana Zuboff calls out. It's the network effect, where each of us wants and needs to be where the rest of us are. But post-digital, none of it can be called capitalism when only one thing needs to be made with zero labor for the rest. Now it really is become a zero-sum game, with almost all of us losers when the winners win so big.

It's not even so much the dispiriting as caused by immiseration within the dynamics of inflationary costs and expectations. It's the more direct immiseration of the spirit when you know there's nothing all that special about yourself. When it's all a lottery.

Sure there's a bit of schadenfreude when trollish boring geeks like Musk and Zuckerberg and Cowbezos are haplessly lured into revealing their ghoulish innards by the likes off Trump. But can that compensate for their criminal appropriation of the vectorial commons for themselves?

I myself see a dangerous sub-text in Brody's roles. That some of us are simply superior, smarter, morally better. That some of us are guided by a compulsion of rectitude. But the suffering is human and he never makes a direct argument that his roles are more deserving of a better life than all of his fellow sufferers. He too mainlines heroin.

Anyhow, machine intelligence is a one-way street. It embodies the assumption that more intelligence is a good thing and the we humans can continue to behave as beastly as we do because super-human intelligence will make it all good. When what we really need is a Jesus Christ figure to bring us down from our anti-earth high. The problem to be solved is indeed ourselves. Maybe we can do it once the nature of human intelligence is revealed to enough of us. Only then will the utterly repudiated actual Jesus come back to life. JD Vance is sufficient alone to goad His IHS return to us.

Hell is a lousy concept, though maybe it worked for all those years. Anyhow we're bringing more hell down to earth than we care to admit. Yes, sure, life is better for more people than it has ever been before. But if it all ends in a hellish mess . . . it does none of us any good to externalize this evil.

How can we deter smart individuals from craving recognition and the power that goes along with it? Without personal hell? Without actual hell for the rest of us? I wish I knew. In what humanity consists.

Let us pray.

Sensory Deprivation and Hallucinating AI

Remember sensory deprivation tanks? Loss of sensory balance and awareness leads to hallucination, akin to taking certain drugs.

Now the profiteers of AI claim to be baffled by increasing rates of what they call hallucination as AI develops, expands and improves, according to the laws of profiteering. But hey, eating their own dogfood, isn't it obvious that AI would have even less ability than humans to differentiate actual speech and writing from the artificial kind?

We live inside an emotion deprivation tank now. The soulless heartless hucksters are in charge, put there by feckless upholders of a status quo which was very good to them. Very good to those in power. Congratulating themselves past the guardians to hell. We the holders of mystical merit. The bogus gift was held out with both hands to the hucksters.

We face a meltdown and the profiteers won't let go. They can't let go. The entire cosmos is in the throes of fake meritocracy based on a kind of asocial intelligence. Humans are tending in the direction of LLM ourselves. As though we need any of this. Of course Bill Gates, who sounds actually sane in comparison to his wildly opportunistic wealthy peers, thinks that AI can solve all sorts of research problems. He thinks his mind is his brain is a CPU. Weird!

Yes, they will study the mystery of AI hallucination even as the instrumentation "progresses." Yes, they will devote megawatts to instrumenting our lives for their profits and many of us will buy it. Without paying directly, of course.

Even as the globe convulses in tribalistic linguistically and ethnically based Neo-nationalism, we in these United States are losing our bearings. We were once proud of the dream, the principles on which this new-style nation state was created. All men. All people now, and what? We want to resurrect a nation created under a white God for White Men only. 

As American poetic authors have always known, The Confidence Man has always been lurking, always there to feed on our enthusiasms toward worldly success. Always there to flatter what we never had and lost in its true season. 

While these may feel like the end times, they are actually a Brave New World, struggling to be born. This center cannot hold.

Review of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century's only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup

Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kastrup is brilliant, and this book provides an excellent exposition of the metaphysics behind his cosmology. His theorizing usefully dispatches several of the nuttier directions that dogmatic physicalism has taken. Along the way, he provides an excellent elucidation of what information theory is and what it isn't. I've been craving that since forever. Not to mention putting A.I. in its place.

The trouble is that although he claims Occam’s Razor as his guide, he introduces still more needless complexity with his flip-flop from physical to mental; thinking that he’s reduced complexity by claiming that all of reality might reduce to a single principle, which is mind.

I have more than a little sympathy for this maneuver, but in fact Kastrup glides past a more basic distinction between perceptual and conceptual reality. By replacing the substance of physics with mind-only, Analytic Idealism actually re-enters woo-woo mysticism rather than to escape from it.
In the end, Kastrup has conducted a sleight-of-mind 'against' himself; he fools himself in almost the way that he accuses physicalist scientists of doing.

Kastrup is right about many things, and his insights have enabled him to challenge accurately many of the stranger cosmologies of his physicalist colleagues. But that doesn't quite stop him from his own weird conclusions.

In brief, Kastrup substitutes an inside/outside duality for the now antique mind/body duality for which Descartes generally receives credit or blame, depending on one's disposition. Mind/body maps to concept/percept while inside/outside creates an entirely unnecessary complication about that aspect of mind which cannot consistently be claimed to be inside, and that which is demonstrably outside.

Kastrup’s usage of his newer term "alter" to describe our individuated interiority is useful, though not meaningfully different from Descartes' usage for mind once inside and outside are introduced.
In Kastrup’s “analytic idealism,” alters exist in a field of “subjectivity,” built on the analog of a possible grand unification theory for quantum electrodynamics, where there would be a single quantum field upon which all that we perceive as physical has no separate ‘substance’ from the field. A wave is an action on water and is nothing without the water. It has no substance, and is the very meaning of abstraction once we call it into being. Abstraction is a conceptual maneuver whereby concepts are taken from physical reality.

No actual circle exists in nature, any more than numbers can be imposed there without some degree of abstraction. But the concept of the circle and the power of numbers to help with prediction and therefore with understanding are both undeniable. Sure, a circle is the stuff of mind, while we may perceive only approximations. It’s the matching of percept with concept which composes understanding.

While there may not be any actual and perfect circles in what I would still call the physical world – the world of substance – there are plenty of structures whose description is equivalent to their actuality. Molecules, for instance, whose structure is identical from one to the next such that each is individually indistinguishable. But they do have a describable form.

‘Field of subjectivity’ is only meaninglessly different from ‘field of objectivity.’ The meaningful distinction is between conceptual and perceptual reality.

As do many who descend from the world of information technology, and in his case also the kind of Quantum Electro Dynamics which energizes CERN, where he once worked, Kastrup uses the inaccessibility of personal thoughts to others/outsiders – the secrecy of our thoughts and feelings – to prove his inside/outside distinction.

He then goes further, and for me beyond the pale, to replace the sensible apprehension of the boundary of skin with a fairly, to me, specious metaphor of a “dashboard.” In many ways - and this is surprising to me - Kastrup is himself stuck in the Western set of imperatives as much as are those physicalists that he ridicules.

"Alter" is his metaphor for how individuals - chips off the cosmic mind of analytic idealism - are individuated. We are likened to the seemingly separate selves of those who suffer dissociative identity disorder, or what used to be called multiple personality disorder.

One of the weirdest of Kastrup's moves is that he posits a reality apart from perceptual reality (as conventionally considered) that is more real than what we perceive. I suppose the metaphor is that the physically real is composed of unperceivable parts; subatomic particles, in a vast emptiness, say, pervaded only by a quantum field.

According to him, those “particles” are actually eddies in the subjective field without substance of their own. Quantum fields may be more both/and than he thinks though, which might even scotch the dream of completion for a Grand Universal Theorem. Not every literate human culture is quite so obsessed as the West is with history as unitary progress toward completion.

He attributes our misperception - our inability to perceive actual reality - to the perceiver inside our perceptual apparatus having only a dashboard by means of which to perceive. We can’t see reality in itself. Well, of course we can’t. Reality as we perceive it is also composed with concepts, which are mind extended into matter.

But Kastrup then goes so far as to say that the things of our lived experience from behind our dashboard wouldn't exist without someone there to perceive them. They exist in mind and not in matter, remember. He thus reintroduces the gracefully moribund mind inside the mind corroborating sensory inputs. The mind behind the inner screen is a free floating "alter." A mind inside a mind in infinite regress.

Abstraction is real. The physical is real. One is conceptual while the other is perceptual. Putting both on the same side in a universal field of subjectivity is where Kastrup stops following the principle of Occam’s razor. Analytic idealism is far more complex than a metaphysics allowing for both conceptual and perceptual reality; both mind and physical stuff.

In my usage, the only meaning for interiority is that there must be a physical divider for perception to occur. That's not the same as to say that there must be a perceiver "inside" or behind some screen. There is no real locus for the self inside of mind. Kastrup’s replacement of skin with screen, and mind with alter recreates a superfluous and unnecessary confusion.

Perception happens to a body as divided from the rest of reality by a skin and its organic involutions which form our perceptual organs. The mind of the perceiver has never been confined there, inside our skin nor certainly inside our skull. Kastrup and I seem to agree on this.

As do most scientific thinkers, Kastrup - who talks about emotion more than most scientists do, and certainly more than most devoted materialists ever would - still relegates emotion to being epiphenomenal to consciousness. He often conflates thoughts and feelings as things without extension. He claims to deproblematize the puzzle of consciousness by positing that mind is the whole shebang. So, no problem with consciousness being transformed or transmuted out of physical stuff!

But really, consciousness is just the apprehension of both conceptual and perceptual reality. A lizard knows a hawk when it sees one. Evolution adds the quickening of emotion to the apprehension of a hawk to short-cut conscious thought.

At some level higher than a lizard, something like re-cognition occurs, bringing choice along with reaction.

I confess that I don’t see the need for the usage of “qualia” that many philosophers see. Just because colors and flavors don’t exist in the thing itself, the fact that such so-called qualia are almost universally shared should be sufficient to put them on the perceptual side of things. Niggling about the marginal cases seems not much different from mistaking distortions for wholesale misperception, as Kastrup tends to do.

Those perceptions assigned to the category of qualia are rather more complex than simpler perceptions. I would say that the proof for their objective existence is simply that we can talk about them. And animals respond to qualia much further “down” the line.

I would say that concepts exist outside the individual mind, and that, therefore, emotion is fundamental and even primordial. Indeed, mind cannot be described without emotion. Any mind is as much about emotion as it is about cognition. I’ll even grant that Kastrup might agree with this.

But emotion requires at least as much definition as physical forces do. Here’s my radical maneuver: emotion is both real and as outside of mind as perception is.

In my usage, emotion is rather more like the false definition of gravity as a simultaneous force acting at a distance. That sort of physical simultaneity is better defined by a shared 'curvature' of space-time, as Kastrup urges us to understand. Emotion is defined by actual simultaneity without any physical force involved. Emotion is engendered by conceptual/mental and not perceptual/material movement. Emotion involves no physical force but is engendered by the matching of concept with percept, the apprehension of new concepts or the transformation of old ones. It is not a process which can exist within an asocial individual. For humans, emotion takes as much learning as does cognition. But unlike perception, emotion is felt directly by the mind. If mind is outside the skin, then so is emotion.

And furthermore, morality is no more a part of Kastrup's purportedly comprehensive analytical idealism than it is a part of physicalism. Kastrup’s ethics might be something like “we have to keep contributing to the cosmic mind.” In the same way, a physicalist might use the imperative to understand as the highest purpose for humanity.

But in fact, conscience is more a matter of fellow feeling. For humans, the recognition which engages conscience is enhanced by the highly individualized nature of faces and voices and stature and skin coloring.

Being me is still about outside and inside, and a bat or a human only knows what it's like to be me from the outside. And yes, I mean that I don't know what it's like to be me from the inside. I can't know myself without you who help me to know myself. Cogito ergo sum is nonsense, as we all know. My good friends know my thoughts much better than I do. That sometimes hurts. Don’t we hide from ourselves as much as we have secrets? And having secrets doesn’t indicate a thing about the privacy or insidishness of our mind. Sure, we put some of our thoughts behind a blind, and sometimes we blind even ourselves.

To repeat myself again and again, I make my claim for his fooling himself in part because of his strange - to me - reliance on the hackneyed usage of an instrument panel to describe our distance from understanding or even describing the world as it fully is. Like a computer screen and its icons as related to the workings of the actual computer, another of the metaphors he uses, we only know what is presented. Trying to interact directly with the inners of a computer could only get in the way of its usefulness. This "interface" between inside and outside is identical, I would say, to the dualistic distinction between mind and body, and equally useless as an explainer of anything. 

His screen metaphor confuses our perpetual shortfall from full understanding with a perceptual shortfall from full seeing. Indeed, I don't believe any adequate description for 'understanding' exists in his arguments.

Sure, there is more complexity to the world than what we can know, but almost none of this regards what most of us will continue to call the physical world. The contours of the physical world are as real as the conceptual relations beneath or behind or within those contours. Those interior contours of reality are, yes, mental, but as with the surfaces, they are the same to every understander. Instruments on a panel may refine our perception, but they almost never change its outlines.

The complexity we miss from behind our screens is really mostly social and intellectual. The sort of complexity that it's always hard to understand without actual engagement. It is indeed our physicalist researches which have, by way of measurement and calculation, enabled us to refine our understanding according to the materialist scientific method, to the extreme that we have.

Of course, there is complexity to the physical world which we cannot see directly. But we can certainly understand it by way of instruments connected to a dashboard.

Sure, we are limited in our perceptions by the fact that we don't see all frequencies of light, nor hear all frequencies of sound, nor taste all that might be tasted. But when we do extend our perceptions by use of those instruments which compose his metaphor, we have no reason to expect that the invisible - meaning not fully perceived - world would be drastically altered [sic] from that part of it which we do perceive.

And to perceive is not to understand. Instrumentation and numbers enable a deepening of our understanding of the physical world. There is no reason to suspect that the physical world is substantially different or other from what we perceive directly. And you will never know me by my guts. Do we see through or with a telescope? Our instruments allow us to make better predictions. The best part is that quantum physics puts a stop to our dreams of complete understanding. We cannot and do not stand outside the real world.

Understanding is a match between conceptual and perceptual reality. As regards the material world, that would involve the ability to predict behaviors based on an understanding of properties. Emotional reality depends, differently, on mutuality and simultaneity of a sort which can't exist in the physical world.

For a conscious agent having free will, emotion impels both physical motion away or against or toward at the same time that it instigates a mental quest for understanding. It is telling that Kastrup is involved in developing hardware for Artificial Intelligence. But, mirabile dictu, he is not so mystified by it as are those whose most precious dream is to get fabulously rich and powerful off it. Kastrup’s explanation about what AI is and isn’t is just as good and clear as is his explication of information theory.

If mind is all, then there can be no fundamental difference in mind depending on its substrate. Kastrup avoids the trap that the brain is the house of the mind. It's not just that AI has a difficult time with emotion. It's that the on/off nature of silicon logic gates divides such quasi-thinking from the extension that living mind has to the universe all around. Kastrup gives us this and then takes it away with his dashboard.

As the mind researcher Riccardo Manzotti urges us to understand, our memories are not contained in our brains, which instead loops our actual perceptions of actual things. Our memories are all around us. Visit a former habitation if you can find one that hasn't changed too drastically, and feel the memories rush in. Our brain generalizes from multiple perceptions to form concepts. Those concepts are also out in the world. We prove this easily by the languages which create our social being. We share conceptual reality.

It is specifically this conceptual reality which mind "imposes" on what we perceive. We organize the world into lions and tigers and bears, never mind that these are not always so distinct as our mind would like them. Those objects still exist if conceived differently by others. Sure, there is some raw stuff not yet conceptualized. But the reality that we've already conceived is as real as real can be, despite Kastrup's protestation that evolution requires distortion of our perception. Distortion does not make the world that we perceive unreal. Distortion is correctable.

Emotion is as real and external to us as is measurable and detectable physical reality. Indeed, the reality of emotion falls out naturally from Kastrup’s definition of reality as cognition. Mind before matter, as it were. And emotion before cognition.

I do think his discarding of matter complicates rather than simplifies his cosmology. Of course, matter is something, but it is not everything. Neither is mind. Contrasting with his usage for the parsimony of Occam's razor, I would say that to maintain the yin/yang of both mind and matter is the parsimonious course. Get rid of static outside/inside. Reality moves.

As illustration, consider that evolution has a direction which is, in rough terms, opposite to the direction of physical entropy. Indeed I would say that the physical enactment of time's arrow is defined by that interplay, and I would call the direction of life's evolution something akin to love or eros (for the materialists).

On-line, Kastrup has described his own uncanny experiences, which are nothing other than meaningful coincidence, which probably can't be proven or disproven, since it's only meaningful to those who find it so. But Kastrup has described his openness to such happenings after being convinced by his own analytic idealism. Likewise, evolution depends on random mutations - on happenstance - which is no longer so meaningless when taken in the aggregate.

Apart from the metering of entropy, material science has no explanation for time's arrow. And yet for all his analytical idealism, Kastrup still treats time in the way that historians do, and supposes a before and after for everything. Having experienced death a few times, I have the revelation that before and after collapse into a lifetime fully present. Kind of the way the Big Bang might or should be conceptualized, instead of trying to measure its distance from now across time. I would love to disabuse Kastrup of his fear of death.

Love is indeed the hardest guide for humans to follow, though most of us know it easily enough in opposition to, say, hate. From there, everything about morality can be built, no man-made dictates from a man-made God required. However, why not call the non-alterial [!!] all of analytic idealism - the cosmic mentation, if you will - why not call that God? What else to call cosmic mind? It does remain other to us, and always shall be. And God won’t be conscious until or unless there’s another cosmos. Ha! Bernardo and I agree!

Is it any wonder now that the world is in the thrall of conscienceless individuals? These are people without fellow-feeling, sometimes believing that they are following God’s dictates, and sometimes obeying the false consciousness of transactional materialism.


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Old Age Theorizing and the Stupid Economy

I suppose that we're all thinking about age. Biden's blank look, where makeup brings the undertakers' art to mind. Trumpian fallback into the increasingly wild discourse he's been successful with since Garry Trudeau invented him. He's degenerated from his Apprentice edited appearance. Barack targeted him so perfectly way back at that press club affair that Trump had to retrieve himself. Would that we all had reality TV producers to reinvent us into our most watchable moments. I'm pretty sure I knew the one who did up The Apprentice, though we've grown out of touch. 

Meanwhile, as you know gentle reader, I've lately worked up the meaning of mind; what mind means. That lovely, and possibly mostly false sense of  'understanding' when we match up conceptual with physical reality. (It's only false because we inhabit such a small sliver of, reality) Both conceptual and physical are real, I insist, and both are primordial. Meaning that mind is also primordial, but can't be real without the physical. 

So I'd like to extend my set of metaphors, which aren't properly metaphors, since I do believe that I can bring my metaphorical tenor down to earth in words. We'll see. I'm very trying.

Many thinkers, including my old friend and whipping boy Benjamin Bratton, declare that we will know civilization, say elsewhere in our cosmos, by the distinction of its shapes from nature. We see circles and squares that are too mathematically consistent and we know we're in the presence of one-time intelligence, even though it might have passed. 

The capitalist supposition is that this process of realization of conceptual reality involves invention and that the invented real thing becomes a kind of property. Well, not the thing, but the idea of the thing. Our politics are that convoluted. Economics is not just the dismal science, it's become a religion. 

In actual reality, there is no invention. Only discovery, since the thing realized has always been there. There is no way to imagine the invention of an automobile without the prior realizations of all its historical and already conventional parts. But an actualized automobile was always "there" by the very possibility of its being, to paraphrase Picasso.

In the world as I imagine it, time is a dimension equivalent to the other three. It's not that the future already exists (since "already" puts thing in a directional temporal "space" but rather that a car already exists as a possibility, albeit one which may never be realized.

The supposition that humans invent elevates the process of the realizations of conceptual and mostly mathematical reality to be the apex quality of humans and human-like others. The intelligent ones. Implicitly, invention denigrates morality. It is not the job of the inventor to dictate where and how his invention gets used. 

Our emotional responses are as primitive as the stuff our own archaeologists uncover. Quaint. Dead. But emotions are the actual  primitives of intelligence. Without emotive impulse, nothing would get done. What we call invention is more like the chance process of discovery. Our trouble is that we don't have a coherent understanding of chance.

Our world now is littered with "forever chemicals", so-called because they exist outside of natural means to deal with them. One new one I read about today is called TFA, and ironically enough, its increase may be directly related to our very well-meaning efforts to heal the ozone layer. "We don't yet know" how harmful it might be to humans, though in any case knowing would come too late since, as the article says, "everybody's drinking it."

We are rather addicted to the notion that we can only fix these things by the same intelligent processes which generated them. The master's tools and all. Idiots. We are very clever idiots, but it's our supposition that human intelligence is all and only the application of logic and problem-solving, ideally stripped of emotion, guesswork, tossing of dice, and such-like.

We even suppose that our human intelligence can be aped by machines. Now I'm curious about Roger Penrose and his purported discovery of how microtubules might instantiate quantum effects in the brain (conspicuously not the mind), but I remain skeptical that such a mechanistic explanation is necessary. I also don't quite see how this might explain consciousness, unless one is simply positing that it is the quality of life - of nature, if you will - to be connected to all other life, which of course it is.

It is surely reassuring that machines will never be intelligent, since they are pure mechanical logic, and when the machines are computers they are cut off by definition of 0/1 yes/no logic, no matter how complex the neural networks might become. 

I want to know what would moral intelligence look like to an outlander archaeologist, since clearly our sort of "intelligence" ends rather sooner than later. We have yet even to know, never mind to celebrate moral intelligence, religion being but creative fiction anymore. One measure may be our churches' own descent. We have actualized conceptualized reality now across virtually the entire planet, and the results are naturally both obvious and inevitable. The absence of moral intelligence will be obvious by civilization's end, no matter how elaborate or impressive the artifacts might be. 

"I'm sorry, but life begins at conception" sayeth the dorked-out evangelical. What could that possibly even mean? Conception is a scientific notion based on conjugation of sperm with egg. Why place your magic God there? Science or religion, Martha, science or religion?

I trace these results to greed, plain and simple. Gluttony and likely every one of the other deadly sins. It's the economic arrangements which have lowered us to our lowest common moral denominator. The religion of capitalism's magic pricing computer, as Cory Doctorow sets out so beautifully here and elsewhere.

Sure technology seems to make life more comfortable, but there still must be some difference between the pattens of built wood and rock and maybe metal, which don't persist forever and those of more durable structures which do. We'll take our comforts in plastic, thank you very much, and damn the future, since it can't be mine.

Here's a typical puzzle: Cars are getting bigger and deadlier, while pedestrian deaths are soaring. For each life saved by being surrounded by a massive SUV, twelve lives are lost in the smaller cars that smaller lives can afford. In our world, with our economic religion, and our increasingly mob-like so-called democratic behaviors, we can't even imagine solving that problem.

Fossils or artifacts, which are more durable? We can't know since artifacts are so very recent. In either case life turned dead still resembles life, and we'll know it when we see it. But a nautilus shell, despite its near mathematical ideation still won't be mistaken for intelligent life's traces. Just another extinct species by the time we're done.

I've worried this issue to death by way of my absurd and rather silly obsession with sailboats. Once upon a time, I did purchase, which is to say got hold of, an old wooden sailboat which had been adulterated with a forever polypropylene sheath, embedded in forever epoxy. I wanted to sail and so I compromised my morals, and likely my liver, by reapplying the stuff over my extensive repairs to the wood. 

We all still suppose that the plastic boat represents the more advanced civilization.

I fretted that red lead paint was in the process of being disallowed as a preservative belowdecks, and oil paints for places above. And what about the gasoline auxiliary? But boy oh boy that wooden boat did sail in most any condition despite my naive helmsmanship. 

Now I've capitulated entirely to fiberglass, and gotten myself dirtied all over again in the process of my final repair of my final boat, as I must and do declare. Meanwhile reading about Shackleton's Endurance and The good ship Wager, wondering all the while about why these  prototypes for Mars-bound (let us pray) Elon Musk are so celebrated for their questing. I understand Einstein's quest, ill-fated though it became for its unfinished nature. I don't understand climbing Everest at all. 

Music is the loveliest instance of man's conceptualizing physical reality. Sailing is right up there. Powerboating tends more in the direction of first person shooter gaming, but that's just my taste. How ironic that we've polarized ourselves politically over matters of style rather than substance. My military-industrial complex is your deep state and so on. 

Anyhow, one manifestation of technology, this digital stuff, is very directly related to the accelerating mess that we've engendered here on earth. What will outlandish archaeologists discover to explain our demise. What is our fault, and what would be these visitors' success from which we've descended. (of course, I have no expectation or even any way to conceptualize these outlandish physical visitations.) What visits me is always meaningful coincidence, which I still have no way to explain or to explain away. I mean, it's clear enough to me myself and I for sure. But I don't know how to make it so for you, dear reader.

Technology, as we deploy it, is mostly a pump upward for wealth. To be a beneficiary, you must be morally naive and irrationally attached to being rich. I call it irrational simply because that level of pleasure-seeking is about as vacant as what you might experience in an oxygen-depleted state of mind on the pinnacle of Everest. Death is still, however you arrive there. The smaller the boat, the greater the sailing pleasure if you ask me. Like music, there are peaks an valleys without the promise of proximate death.

What a grotesque misuse Trump made when he applied the 'super-predator' moniker to a bunch of hapless black kids. The term is properly meant for folks like Trump himself, or Bezos or Gates or all of the Paypal (Wars) Mafia. These people are predators against life itself, so in the thrall of secular materialism are they all. They don't even notice the digital divide, and I'm not talking about the social divide. I'm talking about on/off reality which divorces itself from felt reality.

Most of us remain blind to the ways that we exploit others. We are blind to lo the many ways that we could actually live in a peaceable kingdom. Well, not a kingdom, but you know what I mean. A peaceable democracy. We'd need a new way to understand economy for sure. Market economy is fine up to a certain scale. Beyond that we need government, in the same way that a steam engine does. Otherwise we fly apart.

Our artifacts should look more like spiders webs and seashells, right? Were we to stay alive. The music of nature evidenced by a lived beauty which transcends even those lovely physical embodiments of conceptual reality. Spiders' webs and seashells. Kindness to one another of a sort to lift literature from mindless cinema. The reality of Alice Munro rather than that of Tom Clancy. Stand down our imperial military. The bad guys are better than we are anymore. 

We won't awaken in time, which makes me glad for my age. Death be not proud, but still . . . I've earned mine. Sort of. Too lazy to make a difference, right? I wish that I did know how to write. Too lazy to learn. 

Well, I'm going sailing. There's little enough wind that my robotic autopilot would let me sleep. Given how little I sleep at night, I should worry about what the automatic worker might run me into as I doze off. To sleep perchance. The dreaming awakens me.

Lovely sail, thank you!

I return to advertisements for AI helpers while I try to become interested in watching the Olympics. Where are all those weird sports? I don't care anymore about gymnastics or soccer or swimming, even though that was once my sport when I looked like Mark Spitz. 

These AI ads show hard working minority class workers, avidly calling on whatever Google calls it's AI bot helper. Their keyboard pounding is almost sweat inducing, and the look of victory sincere. The one I hate the most is where a young aspirant athlete's father wants AI to help her write a letter to her heroine. Really? That's how we're going to get attention? By writing what literally everyone will write?

And those vague assurances that we can level the human language-based class distinctions by granting universal access to what makes the hyper-wealthy even wealthier. Because this stuff - free to you and me - doesn't just violate what we once meant by anti-trust. It utterly erases the meaning of price. Gone even the religion of capitalism, though none should mourn that.

We celebrate predatory intelligence. What would you call it when a pile of Wall Street hedgerow clippings fills shelves with stuff to undercut local retail, all made-in-whatever-China-might-mean at the moment for less cost than any local craftsperson could possibly meet. That's how poverty-addicted WalMart got its start. We celebrate the machine intelligence of our young relatives when they succeed in digital disruption. 

And we don't even realize that the various sorts of bitcoin are gigantic Ponzi schemes since the government has been bamboozled by the same hand-waving tech woo-woo which made Elon so wealthy. Call the banks ol' fashioned Paypal, and you'll find plenty of would-be regulators happy to shoo you in. 

These mega-wealthy are all gamer predators on their fellow human beings. We know this stuff is world-ending, but we don't know what to do about any of it. Now we have this catchphrase 'global warming' so that we can imitate the sense of having a grip on what's wrong. 

Guess what? We don't.

Well, listen to me. I have a theory. A cosmological theory of intelligence, if you will. But you won't. You're all what that goofy hate-mongering bishop somebodyorother calls secular materialists, or something like that. He's not wrong. Most of us are that. He thinks we know our enemy, like we're an army or something. He thinks whole gangs of secular materialists are out to destroy the church, as though the church has much of anything right lately. They seem not to need enemies, Pogo.

I know one Church whose condoning of kiddy-diddly has forced it to maximize the value of its earthy estate by hiring the world's most expensive mergers and acquisitions law firm to defend its earthly institutional form from going the way of all flesh along with its congregations which, of course, aren't identical to its lovely buildings.  

I am an amateur cosmologist, of course. I'm right up there with theologians, except that I haven't sold out to the totalizing academy. I'd like to, but nobody's buying. Anyhow, I don't have the right kind of mind for academics, though it's not for lack of trying. 

I like Bernardo Kastrup's theorizing OK, but his lazy usage of such terms as 'the screen of perception' which is identical to the bizarre notion of interiority for subatomic particles from Federico Faggin, whose thinking is in affine relation to Kastrup's, reveals almost everything that's flawed with analytical idealism. 

In a way, my complaint is that they've replaced one monism - that it's all material and discoverable - with another - that it's all mind. By disposition and a little training I'm more of a yin/yang cosmologist which is, by far, not the same thing as a mind/body dualist. Thank God, we've gotten beyond that particular silliness, apologies Descartes. Dualism is timeless, while yin/yang is always in motion.

Almost by definition those within the thrall of analytical idealism are also blind to the dangers of digital reality-replacement trends. They don't seem to mind or care that digital reality is, I'd say by definition, cut off from lived reality. Which means that they have a very flawed notion about what it is in which mind consists.  Mind without body is as absurd as mind apart from body. Digital attempts this, and our totalized destruction entails. This is not as complicated as we make it. 

I remember from before the days when Eric Schmidt became a total troll, and hated Bill Gates for his totalizing monopolizing super-predation against any and all potential rivals, including especially Novell which conveniently fell upon its self-forged sword. I too was enthralled. I am enthralled no longer. 

I wish that I could live to see intelligence redistributed to local, along with the return of local newspapers (in whatever form) and the death of social media, and any media which elevates super-stars beyond the rest of us, even though they can't hold a candle to local coffee house performances.

We have to end superpredation first, and then global warming and all the rest will take care of itself. Just add water. 

There are so many ways to accomplish this without political revolution. Tax it to death for starters, but an even simpler starting place would be to outlaw what gets laughably called creative destruction. Meaning that nobody gets to undercut local businesses by using money clout from afar. 

Fix the price of healthcare, meaning consistency and transparency no matter who's paying, and you don't even need socialized medicine. The market will fix itself, keeping in mind that inelastic demand requires a different model than the capitalism of industrial production. Public utilities, including especially Internet, require governmental regulation, as does, certainly, healthcare. 

We've managed, grotesquely, to create elastic consumer models for healthcare to the extent that the poor - the dispossessed - die while the wealthy can buy skinny. Most of us are stretched just to buy a roof over our head and food to eat. It is still alive in my memory when this just wasn't so.

It's funny. Bernardo Kastrup won't talk to anyone except publicly, which is perfectly understandable. I don't wish to expose myself either, though it would be trivial enough for anyone to follow the breadcrumbs back to me if direct personal contact were desired. It's not like I'm any kind of public personality. Heck, I'm not even sure that I'm a private personality.

I just happen to be cosmologically correct. I've tried my whole life to disprove my basic theory, and I can't. I'll keep trying, but what if I'm right? What if I die and nobody knows what I'm trying to tell? 

Well, I trust that the world is lots bigger than I, and that the truth will out, as it always does. But we sure do act dumb at the moment.

The Bland Lonely Life of a Cosmologist

I must be a cosmologist, since I know I'm not anything else. I was, apparently, born this way. I might as well be an alien from another planet. 

Let's say that it's true that life is but a blink in the cosmic scheme of things. That the time frame for Earth's survival is not significantly different from the life span which ends with anthropogenic destruction. That life of the type that we call humanity is always brutish and brief throughout everywhere and everything and across all time, once time is part of the equation. 

So what? I ask you. So what? Says Trump about Pence's safety.

Time was never part of any equation until we started to count it. Which was so recent as not really to even matter. Coterminous with humanity? Whatever. 

So I was invited to attend the New York Conference on Asian Studies, by a friend who took the job directing the Confucius Institute which I, cloddishly, refused at the last minute after it was offered to me. I'd applied previously when the Institute was first established, and was told that I was number two among the choices. At that time, the University was paying a living wage. The second time, they no longer were, and I'd very lately received an offer from a different college which did pay a living wage and which involved travel to China. 

So, apart from being a cosmologist, I already felt out of place as an interloper to a place I'd turned my back on.

There was quite a range of panels, among which I chose at random. The first regarded 20th Century Chinese history. Mostly young scholars presented on seemingly minute topics ranging through China's shattering cosmos, and especially its new triumphal revolution through the twentieth century.

The first paper dealt with the history of emotion, as seen through the lens of the sudden funeral for the last empress dowager, Longyu. I learned that study of the history of emotion is a trending topic in academia. Who knew? As you know, dear reader, emotion is a topic of cosmic significance to me. The presenter had my fullest attention. 

The second presenter, likely an advisee of my old friend at Ohio State with whom I began my own study of Chinese language at this self-same university, was talking about the advent of a publication industry in Shanghai, and in particular the new brand of geographic knowledge being promulgated. China had a new sense of self.

Already, the moderator had remarked about the resonances between presentation one and presentation two as regards China's identity as a nation. 

Then there was a paper about the evolution of fire protection systems in Guangzhou, and how civil government was taking over what had been local privately organized systems. Suddenly, there was a distribution of fire-houses developed from on high, and now strangely disjointed from actual needs on the ground. It wasn't easy to trust government. To let go of local responsibility. To see the privileged districts get more privilege.

The final paper regarded photography, and took us right up toward the present regarding a photo craze driven by cameras as an early blush of consumerism, and more recently by ubiquitous smartphones (not dealt with explicitly in this paper yet). 

I saw my very first selfie stick in Shanghai when I returned for my first time since celebrating my 30th (??) birthday at the Peace Hotel, where I and my socially prominent charges were regaled by the old men rehabilitated in their jazz band, for foreign tourists like us. We were lucky to catch the first private taxi in China, or we might not have made it back to our guest house. 

It was the general public which inaugurated a photographic profession, also absorbed into state apparatus for the sake of a new kind of socialist realism. Authenticity was suddenly at stake.

Now I almost didn't go to the conference, even though it was held almost literally next door to where I live. I haven't been sleeping well, and didn't feel well, but my interest won out over my torpor. My mind was also freed to roam

Perhaps even more than the moderator, I was struck by how each paper was about the same thing. A transformation of the Chinese collective psyche. I wanted to raise my hand and make a comment about how these twentieth century changes overturned the givens of the Chinese cosmology I'd learned as a student of classical Chinese poetry. Poetics is, after all, a kind of cosmology. No poet, I am yet a student of poetics; of making. 

I am loathe to remake received forms, and so I am a second rate maker. I repair and rebuild old boats old houses, and I only know how to read old poetry. I interpret rather than create. I am not so very certain of the implicit goodness of so-called "progress."

Despite their embeddedness in elitist social structures, surrounded by a sea of immiserated hoi polloi, I still honor the ancient masters, East and West. Church or state, Martha, Church or state?

I like boats that were made by craftsmen, and not those drafted on a table. But alas, I am priced out. And I cannot be a craftsman and a cosmologist both.

Anyhow, listening as I was, listlessly and anonymously, the presentations were all one. I wondered to what extent these young presenters had present in their own consciousness how "heart" in China includes both emotive and cognitive centers in one word. How the imperial exam stressed knowledge of poetry as a test of sorts regarding the trueness of the examinee's heart. 

How the term for geography mirrors the term of the ordering of the heavens, and how man has a role in the center, at the heart, on Earth, to bring heaven's order down to chaotic Earth. Heaven's pattern is given the Name of literature. Mindless and without heart though it is when bereft of humans.

How emotions tendered toward the emperor, or his proxy, often took on romantic fronts, where subversion could be coyly cloaked. 

And Geography is a sort of knowledge necessary to empire, to exploration, to conquest. But for China the incursions were made explicit, and the empire could be envisioned as a static state with shadings where there was trouble on the frontier. 

Art was never representative in China, the painter replicating with brush strokes - the same brush strokes used in writing - replicating the qi the anima the essence of the living thing he painted. And so what would photography mean? The composition of representative oil painting which had some fame was replicated in a photo still-life, itself containing a photo and which was somehow derided for the fraud of attribution's explicit lack?

I had no way to make my cosmic observations, which would be in praise of the scope of the panel. I am not part of academic discourse. I supposed that there must be a kind of taboo against sophomoric echoing of grander patterns than those which could rightly be comprehended by young minds. 

To be a cosmologist is to be a perpetual sophomore, which is a pretty fine description of me. 

And yet there is truth which cannot be spoken, which cannot be trued by words, because it is not a part of the orthodox which means ordering of knowledge that must prevail for society even to exist. 

But our earth, the geographic whole, is changing in ways far more consequential and chaotic and traumatic than even China's changes across the twentieth century. We've seen the Earth from space. Photographically real.

And yet our cosmology remains locked into the ancient forms of religion, of materialism, or certainty that emotion is entirely separate from mind. That the cosmos is bereft except for the chance occurrence of life here. Or there. Or neither.