Dear Thomas Friedman

I have long admired your intelligence, and your ability to find new takes on hackneyed reality. I'm not so sure about your take on AI.

Language is the stuff of intelligence, and the artificial sort of intelligence works off that. But human intelligence - as is, incidentally, encoded in the Chinese language - also includes emotion at our center. Heart and mind are combined in a single word in Chinese. 

I was privileged recently to observe a lively discussion, led by educational policy leaders, about AI in education. After a fairly brief formal presentation, when questions were invited, I was gratified to hear each of the Chinese international students point out that emotion is what's lacking in AI. They seemed determined to make that point. It was well taken, and taken well.

Your phases of history are still progressions along a continuum which has already broken. As did most of us, you missed the happening. Humans have become so impressed with ourselves that we never did pause to examine our cosmologies after the Bomb, capital A. The Manhattan Project was perched on a World War; one in which we were desperate to keep at bay what by now has almost fully engulfed us. Totalitarianism is a failure of feeling, and it can't be eradicated by physical means. 

AI represents the totalization of language, just as physical infrastructure now represents the totalization of our planet. It can be very difficult to know anything beyond those facts. Totalitarians are humans who have made themselves inhuman. They have no understanding. Their expression comes from a very immature place. The tragedy of Hitler's rage returns as Trump's farcical buffoonery. A Marxian quip on history. But we have banished all teleology now, and good riddance. We shall never understand the All. And History has no more discernible direction than life as a whole does.

By commission and omission we have been killing more actual people before their time than ever before. Those at the top seem to celebrate this still, as well they might. When no meaning is made from history, only power remains. Power, as we all know, is addictive.

What we failed to notice even after we proved that we could in fact and in deed enact the reality of the mass/energy equation, was that our emotions had been dulled by those phases you recite in your piece in the New York Times: With your second phase, the Age of Information as triggered by the printing press, we had already introduced Artificial Intelligence. We could be emotively moved by a thing, though mostly because we imagined a person behind it, or sometimes God. It was the printed Bible which blew it for the makers of God's artificial meaning. 

Turing, Shannon, and all who work in AI, never understood that there is no information without its comprehension. It's otherwise only noise. We have equated information with its methods for decoding, and not with its meaning, and then we get sucked up into our own tuba. That is idiocy no different from a monkey playing piano.

Books hold no more emotion than does a brick. AI holds an equivalent amount. As with a furry robot, we project our feelings upon a void. 

We express our emotions facially and physically, though there is no one physical medium to make or convey the expression directly. It has to be understood, but in a way quite different from our understanding of the mass/energy equation. While a machine may learn to call out a smile, a machine will never feel it. Among living creatures, there is always reciprocal feeling. To smile at a machine is to give away far too much of yourself, as many of us have learned the hard way.

Our investigations into quantum physics take no emotion into account, despite the paradox of mind/body resolution. We thought we'd resolved the cartesian divide, when all we really did was to eliminate any possibility that mind is apart from matter. Maybe Penrose is taking a look, though he seems still to be looking for mechanism. A quantum aspect of the brain? How about mind as an aspect of reality from the beginning and to the end? Quantum reality has always been an aspect of mind.

Well, Penrose is beyond me, though I doubt it's all that complicated. If one simply supposes, as I do, that emotions are always simultaneous, which means that physical force is absent in if not from the emotion, then there is no medium through which they propagate, apart from all media. We've done away with ether in the physical world, but what we have yet to do, because it can't be done, is to do away with conceptual reality altogether. Conceptual reality allows for void, which perceptual reality abhors. Perceptual reality is understood conceptually.

Part of conceptual reality is the quite bizarre existence of DNA molecules. Our imagination fails to find meaning in their random appearance; and then again we fail to find meaning in evolution over time according to random mutation. Or rather, we posit that meaning itself is made from random connections, which is certainly true. There is vanishingly little about my life that I can attribute to my own choices. In that I might differ ever so slightly from those still jacked by the Manhattan Project. 

We flunked that test - the atomic test - when we let the hard-heads take charge. They dropped two bombs and then some, based on scant understanding. We've been frozen in time ever since. Now the digital adepts believe absolutely that they can make reality; and banish random from reality.

How ironic that early exponent of Geek Rapture Eliezer Yudkowski is now calling the technology evil and deadly. Along with Kurtzweil, he was celebrating the possibility of a cosmos where "intelligence" crowds out all else, imaging that he could perpetuate his disembodied person. Personality? Emotions are always bereft without a body.

Books disempower as much as they empower. Most of us cannot be either authors or authorities, and so we adapt the thoughts of others. Tools (your first phase, Mr. Friedman) had already channeled our actions according to some masters' wishes. Books carry on the same tradition. 

Recognition always precedes understanding. Cognition is always involved, while recognition engages emotion. Emotion triggers physical motion in living beings. Neurological studies demonstrate that decisions are not cognitive; they get made before we're conscious of them. They must be emotive, since cognition is too slow. Trust or fear, fight or flight. These are emotive decisions. Understanding is settled cognition, awaiting only upset. 

Time can only be defined metaphysically, as recognition followed by comprehension. There is no physical definition for time. Physical time surfaces in the same way that trust might arise from a smile. 'This' prior to 'that' has no meaning without emotion. Meaning is comprehension with consequence. One emotively knows what to do.

Now in the face of digital AI, which can feel no recognition though it might easily name you, we require the emotional maturity which we lacked upon the triggering of atomic explosions. As yet, we are not responsible adults. God knows how to organize ourselves globally anymore. 

We don't need leaders and followers so much as we need community. Community is always only local. Digital, as we deploy it now, disempowers community and creates actual physical gods. These, each and all, must be dethroned. Here's a paradox for you: One is Only Authentic when One Plays a Role (Yudkowsky joke)

God has no role. God is Love.

I mean this quite literally, of course. 

The interesting thing about AI is that it has one incredibly singular use. That would be to detect other AI. When declarations are found to be derivative and not initiated by the person who made them, which is trivial to discover by AI, then the person who made them is deploying AI. Thus a C-level spokesman for a corporation says only what he's been self-programmed to say. Emotion has been expunged; an activity long honored in the feminine fearing My Fair Lady West. Which hardly lets China off the hook.

A person with fellow feeling, which is to say a person who is a member of the same community he addresses, cannot be an AI, but can easily be exposed by AI as human. We'll waste a lot of energy and therefore money getting around to universalizing moral behavior, but it still happens willy-nilly. Remember the tobacco executive breaking down in tears?  He had been sorely tested. 

Germs that cause illness have always been a part of life. Who among us wants to relinquish our intelligent fencing off of germs? Recently, the global body politic has been infested by a kind of virus. I use the term advisedly, since viruses are generally found to be not-quite alive. But so deep has our mistrust of government and public institutions generally become that we have now elected a majority in government which has no fellow feeling at all. They work only for themselves.

Will it really take AI to call them out? Or is it that each of us has already been infected so that we think only of ourselves as well. One can't legislate morality. That's why we have elections. But we've all been trained now to look out only for number one. Digitally, that makes each of us a zero. When it's a contest and not a community initiative, getting ahead is immoral. Never mind the economic dogma. 

Anyhow, the really fun thing about quantum physics is that you can't remove mind from the equations. We already almost knew that when the first A-bomb was exploded. We knew that relativity, in addition to establishing the speed of light as a constant, also erased the possibility for any actual simultaneity. Emotion is always simultaneous. Bell theorem. And so we discover and name endless so-called particles without even pausing to wonder that they each may be a reflection of the strange community of strong agreement that is science. 

Alas, even that community has lost its trust. All research is motivated research when we stop stopping to smell the roses. At its most basic science was meant to delineate that knowledge upon which we must all agree. Their sin has also been a totalization of knowledge. 

There are just two books which I sorta kinda liked which I could never finish. I know it's a literary sin to say so, but one is Joyce's Ulysses and the other is The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Now my mind has become too weak, but frankly Joyce the man and his oddity slipped through his lyrics, and, well, Gaddis just cuts too close for my comfort. 

Yes indeed it is our craving recognition which is killing us. Along with our hiding of our basic loving nature. The rest is all outcome.

Notes While Reading The Dawn of Everything, by the Davids Graeber and Wengrow

Lately, I've been amazed at how often my local library has the books I want to read. Sadly, even though I could use the out-of-house time to make the nice and interesting walk to the central library, I mostly get them digitally. Now I have a backlog.

Whatever else I might eventually wish to say about this book, it surely does give the reader enough remove from Western Ways to see that we here in these United States revert to the aristocratic European form we'd meant to leave, far more than we diverge from it. Anymore.

The book dives into the question about why we seem stuck in our Western Ways which have revealed themselves to be at such a remove from Freedom, and even survivability. Their main objective seems to be to question the popularly received truths that ours is inevitably the social setup that all history would inevitably tend toward.

Whether in terms of political or financial power, the structure is aristocratic, no matter who the controllers are by any other name. If anything, our new aristocrats are more stupid, more foolish, more juvenile and more selfish than even the court of Louis XIV. I shall see if this book answers the question why.

Of course, to me, from the remove of China, I already have an answer. But China has also become more like than different anymore, and so I'll still want to know what better answers might be hinted in my read. 

The book's grand omission, so far as I can see so far, is the impact of the written language on history. I need to know, and I'm not sure these authors have anything on offer, if (and then how) it might be that the written word has created our most recent and now global prisonhouse. It's hard for me to disconnect the written language from our scientific and technological advances.

Of course history requires writing to be history, which means imposition of narrative onto the raw stuff.   

For sure there is a connection to law, as the sublimated and humanized version of subjugation to God's Word. And then, for equally certain there is the tabulation and recording of money hoards, and their transmutation into property and title (as the root of all evil).

But I think these authors are leaving the obvious alone. They deconstruct our projected histories according to a meticulously scientific method. They unsettle the seemingly obvious progressive timeline, where the "discovery" of agriculture is conceived as a unitary event, which sets us on the way toward our constrained bureaucratized state of complexity, which we can't seem to imagine ourselves getting beyond.

But these few observations threaten to paint these authors as just a newer sort of essentializer about what it means to be human. Or in other words, they stretch humanity to be coterminous with our genetic biological advent, where most of us would place humans in history, which means written history (along with our fantasies about what went on before history, which it is this book's main burden to reveal).

The answer I read for is about whether there might be a way to escape the prisonhouse of the written word without leaving history altogether. A way through instead of a way out. I think that's what they aim for as well.

It seems harder for me to trash our technologies entirely than it does for these authors. I want to keep my feeling that there might yet be something worthwhile about what we may indeed foolishly construe as our human ascendance. (The foolishness would be in our destruction of our earthly body, which makes us cancer, the single most powerful metaphor on offer in my other recent library reads, which would be the works of Ibram X. Kendi.)

Perhaps it is just that our preoccupations focus more on physical pleasures, offered or withheld, than could the primitives which precede us. Perhaps that's what entraps us. But if we are obsessed with pleasures, that might make us collectively one with all of life, which evolves toward fitting in some niche, which is made by all of other life? 

As a whole, must we be cancer? Or might we be fitting in to something even greater than our earthly body? Might we be a channel for the grander schemes of evolution. A scheme which would even entail the destruction of individuality among us. A reversion, in false historical terms, to the most primitive state of all. We become the rhizome, the media for some message that there is no one to read.

And then what will that sort of life look and feel like? Well, no inside, no outside, it will feel like nothing. Which could be a kind of nirvanha, right? Right?

Read on, read on, and see if you are liberated or if you are trapped. Really, this book is only about whether our own internal subversives - those whose books I seem able to find in the public library - have ever been real and in the flesh, or if they have only ever been jesters to the courts of power. Rhetorical devices designed to challenge and seeming to want to subvert the powers that be, but only ever actually bolstering those powers by their own inevitable and highly regularized failures.

How shall we succeed, is the question I want answered.

In partial answer, I would like to offer a smashup of the early reference in this book to Gregory Bateson's "schismogenesis" with Johan Huizinga's calling out of agonistic contest as the "play" which unites us with all animal life. Play is the realm of freedom, that thing which these authors now attribute, in debate, to introductions from American native peoples.

Or, in other words, our recent history is marked by a taking too seriously of our truths. We offer academic degrees in seriousness, and so the sides take up, in deadly earnest, their disagreements with the other side. As Bateson points out, each side moves to some sort of opposite extreme from the other, as now our Red and Blue teams do. The result is, of course, polarization and anger, as, perhaps, between the sexes which is one of Bateson's examples from the “savage” world.

And so the possibility for success might be prefigured in the comedic processes of queerness and transgender, but also in the raw comedy calling out each team for its exaggerations. It only seems that there is no common ground, which is not the reason for our deadly anger at one another. Rather it is our deadly anger which erases all the common ground, which does, in fact exist.

Pull the clothes off our representative leaders, and you will find harlequin fool facing off against harlequin fool; the people having willingly given over our every freedom. 

It would seem that non-Western "primitives," among other things, have a better sense of humor than we do. They might not take themselves so seriously, just as Huizinga once thought about us more recent Americans in contrast to the seriousness of European and Chinese politics. Now we follow the inevitable grim pathways of all imperialists, and we charge along as seriously as did those damnable Jesuits before us.

Would that we could mock our scientific and technological advances! Well, I sure do! There has never been a more Arlequin Sauvage than our kidlets riding their Unicorns worth billions. There is nothing more silly than a sexy car as apex object of desire. Inequality and even lack of freedom may be the inevitable result of divisions of labor according to economic valence, but our arrangements are grotesque by any measure. And most of us do laugh. 

So here's a definition of time, in human terms. Future is a place where things have yet to happen. It can be a source of dread or hope or even ecstasy or despair. But the future is never thought to be the cause for what happens in the now. Primarily, that's because it's not a fact yet.

A fact is something whose causal relation to the now can be proven, in a way, theoretically. An idea can only be related to a fact by way of some sort of documentation. Otherwise, an idea can only be a goad toward some future or other.

Now if I am right (and of course I am) that mind has always been an aspect of reality, since at least the Big Bang, then the distinction between past and future becomes much more interesting. And our problem in the present is transformed. 

Just now, those of us on the literate side of the great red/blue divide feel almost nothing but dread about our collective future. In part, that must feel like a tremendous sense of loss. We've had a near lifetime of experience with our cherished democracy persisting despite the idiots - charlatans, cheats, snake-oil peddlers - who have always been in charge. We developed a sort of faith in the system.

Mostly, we've experienced our fellows as idiots who don't understand the pleasures of comfort over extravagance, good wine over a good drunk, travel to wild places instead of to Disneyland. We've been content to see them deluded by cartoonish religious beliefs, mostly because it keeps them passive. And we've pretty much assumed, qua Steven Pinker, that history moves in an anti-racist ameliorative direction.

But now none of us can imagine how to get out of the mess we've made. Global Warming has become our catch-all, which manages even to lump into its bin all the reddening folk who seem to want to destroy any and all dreams of democracy in the name of a fantasy that things were oh so wonderful in the recent past. About the only thing that reds share with blues - our common ground - is a dread about the future.

Each group probably thinks the other has taken the red pill (blue pill? I honestly can't keep them straight) where fantasy replaces reality wholesale.

Anyhow, our overall trick is to replace dread with something toward excitement. Sure plenty of blueish people do that by way of the cool whiz-bang of our inventive recent history. But those darned redsters keep wanting to tear it all up with their coaling monster trucks.

So which of us is falling into the Somerset Maugham Razor's Edge trap of thinking that if we can think it, it can be real? Which of us is destroying our collective future by our dread of it?

Now along comes this contrarian, anarchistic, view of humanity which I want to believe in just simply because I like the authors so much, but they posit a pre-written language sort of consciousness that I just simply can't see. The writing on the wall tells me something different.

The Writing on the Wall shall be the title of my upcoming science fiction book, which will be about this hinge in time where present and past swap, in a way, and the writing no longer predicts or foretells or guides us into our futures, but as though light started to go backwards, is coming to us from a future which is as far from us as the stars. 

Not everything important is physical Larry Darrell. That's the name I was given as an outlier space cadet at Yale, when we had all just read that book. The only thing I had in common with the prepsters. I did, of course, deserve it. Already a classic, and old. But we had not yet escaped its thrall. 

I was, of course, a mistaken admit who made it in the back door of the engineering school.Worth David  - now there's a name right out of fiction - told me so by a look. He corrected course quickly, to allow the institution more certainty that its recruits would uphold the fiction of merit and talent and be out mostly for themselves, and eventually their alma mater. Most certainly yes.

And so which team, red or blue, betrays the promise of anti-aristocracy? That's the bigger question than the rest, no matter how caught up we all are in that trivia.

To put the matter into other words, has the written word become our prison house, or might it yet be our redemption. Read on, Sailor Moon, read on. Notes from the future take no time at all to reach us. They have been there all the time. It's the parsing takes time.

And nope, no Julian Jaynes, no Johan Huizinga in these authors' bibliography. Tant pis. We all have our blind spots and shortcomings and can't keep up with everything. Hardly. But the term "homo ludens" does appear. Shall I doubt their documentation, then? Of course to cite Julian Jaynes is to court ridicule.

But here is the reason why the globe is now overrun by the imperialistic and very racist police state: it's because we're in a mad dash to our future. We're on the move, and like societies everywhere, we don't dare to allow ourselves to be pushed off course. Our forebears also clamped down while on the hunt.  

The Trumpers are right to detect a kind of illicit coercion in all the sound scientific advice they're meant to ingest. They're right that it's a false future that's being held in trust. That we have construed a (virtual?) state of perpetual warfare, and that's why we're "stuck" (to use these authors' word).

This is a major insight from this massive book. Many societies which predeceased ours had cyclical periods of control and anarchism. The control was never gentle, but the anarchism mostly was. The control was focused on the capture of a kind of annual  plenty. The Buffalo Police of the American plains would viciously corral everyone to corral the Buffalo. Once the plenty is gotten, they revert to gentle anarchy.

And so here we are, so very excited by the plenty dangled in front of us or on our screens. And we want to squash everyone in our way. Some - the Trumpers - are saying enough already, leave us be. We don't want no stinkin' yacht to take care of. The rest - the literate - are just plain excited by the ever-elaboration of high culture, and want to know where it might end. 

Slowing down would be the thing, wouldn't it? But alas, all of us are addicted to speed.

In the back of my mind, and perhaps in the back of everyone's mind, while reading this book, is writing. While focusing on the likely equivalency between the political savvy of primitives and moderns, these authors do conflate pre-literate and post-literate humanity. They make a good case, in other words, for the fictional myth-making nature of our grand political histories, which move Biblically from primitive to modern, while apparently ignoring the forward march of science. 

Who is the sinner and who is sinned against here? It is hardly arguable that the explosion of technology in our contemporary world is disconnected from the warmaking and prodigious bloodletting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Now, we have made the emergencies permanent, but in a tiredly positive sense. We are feeling on the brink of breakthrough, and have for quite a while. Therefore the full regime of control as deployed by the written word is being deployed 24/7/365 as led by these United States. 

The trouble is that you can't follow science if you can't read, and so it was inevitable that the hoi polloi would, as these authors do, conflate political with scientific (anti-religious) thinking. Oppressed politically, the non-literate naturally assume that the oppressive forces extend to science. All authority is bad, unless it be a permanent jester-king, Buffalo Bob's Howdy Doody - Ronald Reagan in all his forms - who has always been meant to amuse us to death. 

Along with the technology inevitably comes social media. But social media with its algorithms of hate-concentration (this is just a law of nature, since anger promulgates far faster and wider than love) misses the main point. Which is that in our red counties, people still check in with one another. That is how they form their political opinions and actions. There is an hermetic distance now between urban and rural, and it is the distance of art from colloquy. 

Scientific discourse is political discourse in only the metaphorical sense. And vice versa. It is our figures that are mixed up. Private property is no requirement of the sciences, and in many cases has become its enemy, where money leads any discourse now.

And, back to the main point. If we are to become hopeful again about our collective future, we will then have to let go of the imminence of completion. We will have to recover seasonal ways of being rather silly. We will have to, periodically, issue get out jail free cards to all those who sinned against our ritual kings when we were stuck in the permanence of the hunt.

* * *

Anyhow, as I continue to read along in this lovely book, I am becoming rather convinced of its main thesis (at least as that appears to me so far, about halfway through). As humans apparently always will, we have imposed our narratives backwards across the vast expanse of time, and seen there all the signs of a narrative progress toward where we are today.

These authors are therefore solidly in line with scientific thinking, which takes evidence first before creating their narrative. They have a theory, sure, which is approximately that subjugation of man by man is not the necessary end of history, along with, of course, exposure of the equally false corollary; that further "progress" will get us beyond this local aberration. Here I find more true believers in human agency, so long as that agency makes allowances for something beyond rational economic ecological adjustments. So long as there is room for quirk.

It must be in the back of every reader's mind that they will have to explain away notions of scientific progress as well, along with the general certainty that this follows, more or less inevitably, upon the advent of writing. Certainly, they will at least localize our particular scientific fluorescence, perhaps following upon the WEIRD thesis.

As I might say myself, science is as stuck as everything else about our now globalized ways, and I hope and actually by now believe that the arguments in this book shall help us to get unstuck. I am puzzled for a moment when they declare that there have been no real scientific breakthroughs since Einstein. Perhaps to them, as to me, it's the physics which really matters?

I awaken this morning after the dire warnings yesterday of a wind storm. Funnel storms have churned a path from Arkansas through Tennessee, centering on Kentucky, as long as any recorded in history. The crows (are they ravens?) have returned to what I lately discover is their highest Buffalo concentration, just beyond my windows. What does their noise portend?

At the very least, I am convinced of the unity between private property and the narrative construction of an individual and highly specific self, housed within the boundaries of our skin. We have reduced agency to these terms as well. And we shall - we must - soon discover the fiction of this arrangement for our thinking right along with exposing the fictions of our grand stories for geologic time.

As these authors describe cars, whose insides are legally inviolate while their disposition and usage are incredibly circumscribed by not only law but by infrastructure and even, dare we say it?, civic norms. (Of course those norms have been massively disrupted in cities now, where loud and law-breaking two and four wheel Mad Max vehicles scream through the nights) . . . as they describe cars, they will certainly describe humans. Ownership of our fetishized self is as much a fiction as are the national boundaries.

Liberty is not available to those who fetishize narrative eternal life. (I also just completed Amor Towles' Lincoln Highway) There is no necessary progression through the agricultural "revolution" to enclosure to the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons also describes the tragedy of dividing of be-souled humans from the rest of life.

We shall see. The crows have dispersed with the sunrise. I remember that the Mad Max marauders are far milder and more funny than that term allows. There are also electric skateboards and unicycles and proliferating bikes. Perhaps my thinking has calmed.

So back to cars for a moment - that focal point for all that is wrong with the way we live now. Our mediated lives tend to lead us to think that the solution to cars is less polluting cars, when the only real solution is not to want the particular life which allows us to live, even in cities, without really having to interact with anyone outside our small circle of friends. 

The same lens needs to be applied to the meaning of all this communications technology and artificial reality. Does it solve a problem or exacerbate one (which might, as ever, be a goad to evolution)? What change in our consciousness - our sense of self - could change this? What are the powers which are desperate to keep us wanting what we want, and how do they infect our lives? Is it even possible that the Trump reaction is actually salutary, in a cosmic sense?

Horror of horrors, right? But where is the desperate rhetoric about what is going wrong lodged, and whom does it serve? Why are we meant to feel the precarity of the anthropocene and the inevitability of cataclysm if not utter ecological and economic collapse? Should these sorts of exhortations lead us to double down to preserve what we have or to dismantle it? We really can't seem to decide. 

Urban elites seem divided between thoaty exotic sports cars (I suppose one would have to include Beemers and Benzes and newly cheap Maseratis and the Japanese luxury models here as well), and the quicker and more acceptable to the authorial elite Teslas and their potential descendants. Meanwhile, the ride of choice in the redder counties is the pickup truck, around whose bed men commune and communicate. 

Could it be that the social networks are not powering social polarization and anti-literate chaos? Could it be that those outside the city still do actually know and go to church with and talk to each other? And form their takes on the world that way?

As tempting as it is - and it is really tempting - to see everything about the Trumpers in terms of racism and even white supremacy, the urban centers remain largely defined by exclusive neighborhoods if not by exclusive politics. Who among us participates in that politics to the level and extent of rural churchgoing?

If one doesn't read all the urban rags but listens instead to the likes of Rush Limbaugh (R.I.P.), or Hannity or that Fucker Tucker, or all the other fabulously wealthy exploiters of ignorance, why, really, wouldn't one be fairly certain that there is a conspiracy afoot which considers its opposition to be a Conspiracy of Dunces. 

I'm about to read this other book, which I consider to be a tract of the opposition. I am certain that its arguments will proceed conspiracy style. It's called Life 3.0, and it will reduce life the universe and everything to that old hardware/software saw. You won't even know what's been denied existence by omission. And I, for one, will be horrified that there are people who actually buy and believe this shit. 

Can't we please just get beyond conspiracy theorizing?

This book Life 3.0 will take to absurdity the procrustean logic which is deconstructed in the book I'm reading now, The Dawn of Everything, which is co-written by an anarchist who wanted to help guide us out from our current nightmares. 

The corrective lens The Dawn of Everything applies to our grand histories of the past can be and must be applied equally to our suppositions about our collective future. Already - halfway through - I find myself deconstructing apocalypse as yet another Platonic Christian imposition. And here I'd thought it was scientifically considered opinion, just like the grand histories Hariri and Diamond wrote.

Nope. Just more mythmaking. It's not that global warming isn't anthropogenic, it's just that the earth has turned more wildly many times before. One gets the feeling that we actually do still evolve and are still evolving and that far from being the end of history, we are closer to its beginning. Pushing back the timeline of the Anthropocene - which the book also implicitly does - also highlights our recent accellerationism.

Yes indeed now is far "worse" than when the dinosaurs were killed or when the earth was crusted in ice and human habits and habitats were squeezed. But as we are, we are hardly poised to prevail in our current disposition. What comes next becomes far more interesting and not necessarily deadly.

Whatever we explode into, supernova-like, it won't be Life 3.0. That sort of cognition riding on fully describable hardware is so very YESTERDAY. The belief system of (mostly male) children who don't even know what love, literature and good living are. Who fervently believe that they have driven the godhead from existence permanently and for all time by good common sense. Now that right there is just nuts.

Right there at the beginning, the author declares:

"But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the laws of physics, so before our Universe awoke, there was no beauty. This makes our cosmic awakening all the more wonderful and worthy of celebrating: it transformed our Universe from a mindless zombie with no self-awareness into a living ecosystem harboring self-reflection, beauty and hope—and the pursuit of goals, meaning and purpose. Had our Universe never awoken, then, as far as I’m concerned, it would have been completely pointless—merely a gigantic waste of space. Should our Universe permanently go back to sleep due to some cosmic calamity or self-inflicted mishap, it will, alas, become meaningless.

He then goes on to describe Larry Page as some kind of change-the-world genius. Really?!? These dudes are the reason I should have hope?

I mean the arrogance to suppose that without us the cosmos is meaningless! Our physics tell us that we can't know. What we can see is always from our past, and if one were to suppose that life develops according to the same universal timeline that life on earth has, then we shall never know, even before our inevitable flameout. And so we should fill the cosmos with us? I'd say that right along with Larry Page, these AI folks extend (to infinity, if they have their ways) our private property enslavement culture of totalitarian empire.

Apparently, I am the only non-Godist who understands that there is no time required for emotive contact. God Himself is, of course, just another anthropomorphic imposition on cosmos, in precisely the way that AI is. We reduce life, the universe and everything to our parochial terms and then we declare it ours. I'd say that's what's beyond boring.

We have always been in contact with other life, and it's not cognitive in the way that math could describe it. We just simply aren't paying attention.

Well back to more reading about what is and isn't "common sense."

* * *

And now, finally, by the summary chapter, I see it! As the discoverer of an earth-shaking scientific principle that I've strived to share for most of my life, I've also tortured myself each time - and it's only moments here and there - that I wish for fame and fortune. I see myself being interviewed on TV, say, where I will know what to say, when I can't while writing. 

But I don't need no stinkin' audience. I need only a single interlocutor, and I can't find them.

And so I realize that there is terrorism - and slavery - implied by individualism. If only my name were a title, shared by those in my geographically dispersed clan, I would be able to remain calm about my imminent death, for whatever reason it will come. Though I may never experience a spirit dream of sufficient power to marshal all my clan's power, I may know when one comes along. I would recognize it by obvious ways without possibility for trickery or secrecy, because it would be written on the landscape, in the weather, on the evening news. 

That is what money is for. Selfiness. GDP. GPP. MIT. And all I am allowed - no longer allowed - is the brief ecstasy of copulation. Now even that has been cleansed of smell and shaved and rendered into a commodity with almost all fetish power leached away, though I may still make claim to how amazing it really is to be slingshot into space. Changed forever. So profound. Orgasm and away, with Big Boobs, eh Bezos you big rocket prick?

My nightmare would be to awaken as Zuckerberg. Abandon hope, for your script is written. What does it profit you to gain the entire world? Oh one name men of the world all Ga Ga for the very same thing. So singular. So detached from all that keeps the rest of us alive. 

Sour grapes? You say. Well, I can't know. I don't know. I know that the plot of my own life interests me, and that it remains almost entirely unpredictable. And I'm nobody's slave.

Cycling down toward the end of the book, I find myself feeling hope and despair both. The hope, of course, is the loss of the feeling of inevitability toward the end of history. We've been here before. Perhaps not to this scale, but the pattern is the same. And so the Trumpers fit into the longer sweep of history, and are no more (certainly not less) deluded than the rest of us who have been both mystified and taken in by the arrangements of our modern world. 

As have peoples eternally, we don't even recognize what we've lost, even in the face of extremes of lost liberty (properly so defined) and lost truths and an apology for democracy that could not be more forced, and grotesque for that. And so the despair is that it must always be this way, cycling toward and away from more communal and congenial forms of life, perhaps because the strains of any sort of living can always lead to dreams of something better.

And so I am left wondering what can be preserved? Could we who have inherited the roles of priests and nobles in our brave new world extrapolated from all mystery come down from on high to understand the misery of the masses of people who feel so pushed around? Could that even be what 'woke' could come to be? If we could ever even take the esoteric out of that term.

At least I have a model for our future. We will have titles and not proper names, and we will share these and be therefore less alone. The ego will dissolve as will the state, and we shall be once again a part of nature. Could there be anything more certain than that?

Well, spoiler alert, by the end of this book the authors make a pretty good case that it really is all about private property and its genetic connection to slavery. It's about money, and if agriculture is important, it's because cereal grains can be counted and stored and are fungible forms of edible energy. 

We are not so smart. Our cities are no more complex than the many which came before we could write history. In most ways, our cities are far simpler. We are constrained in our behaviors in ways that were never even imagined before. We actually believe it's all hardware/software and that we are somehow different from all of life because we are conscious. And our definition for consciousness - like any good conspiracy theory anywhere - is perfectly circular. A perfectly empty concept. And round we go, above the earth and under our waters and never even touching life. Just gawking at how boring it would be without us.

Oh Please!

And Thank You Graeber and Wengrow for this wonderful book. It has given me actual, tangible, scientific hope. I'd thought hope was gone, and I am very glad to be proven wrong!

And Finally, THE REVENGE OF THE REAL

In this new Heart of Darkness, it's the Irony, the Irony! That good churchgoers from the countryside should consider Trump a decent and honest man. I ride out from our fair city which promises to elect a Socialist Democrat (female black!) as mayor, into the countryside where the Trumpers still prevail. Maybe the signage has been muted a tad, but the signs remain. I mean signs in the other sense.

These are people who live closer to nature, often in quite spectacular - by my sights as an apartment dweller - houses, often new. Of course I am mystified by the desire to have all the modern conveniences in the middle of nowhere. Even surrounded as I am by the rogue gunshot-like sounds of random privateered fireworks near where I live, I feel that much more at home in the polyglot miscegenated variegated city. One can walk here among people. 

The RVs also proliferate away from the city, and somehow these are extensions of the political demand that we not be forced to abandon the promised rapture. It is also a technological rapture, where AK's and snow and water mobility without sails and Internets galore and connected screens are never absent. Comfort in the wilderness, where those who would agree with Bratton all must prefer tents, or simply not indulge  In the countryside, nearly everyone owns an RV, and many if not most are far nicer than my apartment. (I still get 24 mpg towing my tiny home)

I said before that I don't know Agamben, but I do, it would seem, find his vocabulary familiar. From Bratton? No, I think I predate him. And so the serpent eats its tail and Agamben, the radical, is identical to those calling a state of exception against all rational governance. 

Of course I still wear a mask, even vaccinated and immune from having contracted the contagion, now moving among an ever smaller minority. I am not an idiot. Though I still find Agamben and his ilk interestingly provocative; affording some truth that others would eschew. You know, like that film about GW (Bush) bringing down the Trade Towers, Small Change, was as if it were true in a way. Some people can't distinguish signal from noise. Some crave a clarity that never has been and never will be.

The thing that no-one wants to say is that this contagion is a direct result of our very success at overtaking the planet. There are too many of us, overcome now by our own effluent, living too closely together and travelling too often. By most measures, it was inevitable. 

Our governments put our collective heads into the sand, affording more interminable warfare and almost no medical preparedness. Ever confident that only the homo zoe would ever be destroyed, in warfare or in contagion. Zoe's revenge, as objective embodied man becomes ever more dangerous in the red zones. Armed, flag waving, unmasked and dangerous. 

The irony. The irony. It was never the sacred man, homo sacer. Bios. It was the intelligent man; the one Bratton celebrates, who believes that our science is only ameliorative in the end. That we will always resolve the worst of our lives into the better, no matter how bad it gets. Because understanding is progressive, I suppose.

One wonders how many straw dogs Bratton has fired up here. We hardly require a sensing layer to know already that we have the tech to distribute pretty good living to all on the planet. We just simply won't do it. Same reason we misuse "data extraction" for the private profit of a minuscule handful of people with one-name impact on the planet.

From Wikipedia:

In one translation Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching begins with the lines "Heaven and Earth are impartial/ treating creatures like straw dogs".

Su Zhe's commentary on this verse explains: "Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them."

This is Bratton's whole book, really, isn't it? We have China as a reasonable facsimile of eradicating poverty. Over here we delegate government to invisible technocrats because we can't be bothered. Those we elect pretty much deflect us from government, no matter which side of the fake divide within neoliberalism they sit on. Capitalist and anti-China to their bones, eh Liz?

I still fail to see how more information will change the game if we won't change it until it's just patently too late. Or in other words, what if there really is something wrong with science as we practice it, or medicine as we practice it, or care as we administer it? Because we even delegate truth, which is what the crazies patently refuse to do. Can't there be a better coming together than this?

I am simply not so enamored of scientific rationalism as Bratton seems to be. I am with him up until he abdicates, in favor of what I'm not sure. We already have all the information that we could possibly need. The corruption was already within us before the virus hit. This was no epidemiological event. This was a metaphysical failure. 

Irony, indeed.

I am now reading Bratton's conclusion, and I have no hope nor certainly any expectation that I will understand what sort of a world it is that he wishes to live in. We seem to agree on most points, and yet I have no feel for how he thinks life may evolve such that I shall want to live it. He does sketch a negative trend, and how it will feel quite normal. I need a more positive vision at my conclusion.

Over the course of my life, once might say that there has been drastic change. And yet trains, planes and automobiles have hardly changed at all. I started along with the Interstate system. Death on the highways was but a street away. My uncle flew a boxcar and would storm our beach house when he could. I did travel overnight by train, and across the continent by plane.

I simply want not to want to do those things anymore. In this last brief phase of transformation, it seems that the cost-content of an automobile has shifted rapidly toward electronics. It is apparently so cheap to build the car I want that the automakers, almost out of desperation, need us to want all the automated processes. Built on the promise of better safety. Somewhat realized. But  so much easier if we simply didn't drive so very much in such extravagant comfort.

I admit that I wish I could still buy a stick shift without a backup screen and without all those sensors. I confess also that I did enjoy getting on the Shanghai subway or walking the dark streets without any fear at all of violence. It was a kind of surveillance that provided that ease. Also some lack of obsession with privacy. But they sure did like their selfie sticks, which I had only ever seen there. Software to post themselves as racially ideal, and identical to everyone else, it also seemed.

The biggest change to flight is also in the screens and the shuttered windows even though the North Pole or the Rockies might be on view below. Still, the planes do crash when the pilot doesn't know how to mistrust the obviously malfunctioning sensors when there's ice on the wings. And the wife of a good friend, a MacArthur genius for exposing genocide, dies with all the rest.

We were shuttered during the pandemic, and then there was a chip shortage. We thought it wise to poke China. I was happy enough to stroll or ride my bike or even ski during the shuttering. Not really missing the anxiety of wanting to travel coast to coast or over to China. 

I miss my little sailboat rowboat shuttered away in Canada. It is more than all I need to get me on the water. I practically had to beg my close friends to let go of Zoom and come to my apartment for dinner the other night. It was a lovely time had by all.

Last night - Independence Day - the private fireworks built in a kind of crescendo as though somehow orchestrated. They came from all over, and I was astounded that so many had bought so many. I now know why I felt comforted and not afraid when I heard the sparse popping leading up to this, when it came from so few that it did sound like gunfire. And you know the shootings have been going up. An almost nightly affair and not far from where I live. 

Bratton mistakes Trump for wanting to be the sovereign - that embodied state. No, Trump is simply the avatar for the manly white world outside the city, and the sovereignty those men wish to preserve over their domains. Their wives, their kids, their motorized thrills. There are, as yet no screens in the side-by-side four wheel drives, or on the Harleys. "You're fired" is a nice thing to be able to say, as you coal the bicyclist from your outsized diesel pickup.

The cars and planes will mostly go because they must. The trains may stay, and some trolleys. We will want fewer goods less often, and they will be delivered by a packet switching system of autonomous vehicles which also move stored electricity about. They may have racks for boats and kayaks and bicycles and they may travel to the countryside for recharging and even wait for you to recharge yourself. And you will not wish to hover in a bloated drone because there is so little thrill to doing nothing.

And our tracks will be cheaply built by China, and designed to enter quietly into and through the wilds, and we will naturally dwindle in numbers since kids will no longer be to us what Trump is to them. A maxi me. Because there will be no fantasy about love's product, and so schools will be rebuilt of love and not of what Illich wanted to deschool, and he was right about that. And the children will be part of the economy again because they will be excited about it., and they will grow by it.

And no-one will ever again want their selfie self to endure forevermore. As though we could extend to infinity in any dimension. As though we could fill the cosmos, which was never empty in the first place.

And all that we require to accomplish all of this is to take back the shock and awe of the military industrial complex and never again delegate its control to the likes of Donald Rumsfeld. We will stop exploding anything or building buildings toward the sky. We will stop designing our own destruction, and our doctors will be our friends and they will touch us.

We will recognize the accidents of life and death and evolution as the expressions of cosmic love that they are, and we will nevermore work to replicate death and destruction in the name of such love because it was never about tooth and blood and claw within any species, really, except for ours. 

It was never about survival of the fittest. It was always about putting a face on love and we should live it. We are plenty smart enough already.

The coming together will be when we realize that we all want the very same thing. I have never actually met a Trumper that I didn't like, though I've seen some from a distance. I sure do know the thrills of motorized joy, though I don't wish to expend my soul to afford them anymore. I even know a father's outrage. Even racist though I most certainly am, it seems obvious to me that the beauty is tending toward far darker skin than mine. 

I will work for our new Socialist Democratic mayor. Things will improve. The economy will flatten. Life will prevail. What's not to celebrate? I want my guitar back too. From Canada where all our musicians seem to originate. Oh Beautiful!

Hard Fail; Accident

Pondering Elon Musk's playful idiocy, as he expends the resources only he can have to realize childish SciFi fantasies, I must return to the ground of accident that is the only ground that counts. Just like the electrical ground that I struggle truly to understand before I undertake the tough stuff on This Old House on which I labor. Accident is the only safe constant.

Elon is Trump's twin as he leads us down the road away from accident. Those who suffer accident are, in Trump's terms "losers." He is, of course, quite correct in that. His mistake is to consider himself beyond the reach of accident. As do all of us who remain alive, his evidence is that he hasn't really suffered many. Accidents, that is. Or at least, apparently, he hasn't suffered enough of them. A winner like him can only be the Fool.

The accident ratio, of course, leaves a person far better off if he is white and rich, which is itself demonstrably goad to idiocy; the idiocy of self-congratulation for one's superior merit. Narcissism by any other name.

But the Trumpsters are onto something. They embrace accident, especially the sorts of accident most likely to emerge from the barrel of a gun or the carbureted or electronically fuel-injected barrel of an internal combustion explosion-containment chamber. 

Now Ol' Elon champions the electrical kind of motive power, just as he seems to imagine that the brain is a complexly wired container for our selfie-self. Perish the notion! The ground for all of us is accident, and the future is precisely that which we can neither project nor imagine because it always overtake us by surprise.

As we work to protect our selfie-selves, or to deny reality - take your pick - during this pandemic, our selfish genes are surely doing their own thing by managing to persist. The choices are among cucarachas, viruses, and perhaps still for just a moment longer whatever it is that could be meant by 'human.' 

If Trump suffers - heaven forfend - some unfortunate debilitating accident (prior to his ultimate demise, which can surprise nobody who hasn't internalized some fiction of immortality here on earth), that will cause no permanent harm to his ilk. Trump-alikes are apparently as numerous as Republicans now. They are the efficient causes - the 'engines' if you will - of our continued evolution. I suppose we should celebrate them for that. Pardon me while I puke out my guts.

The ground, remember, is accident. Life is an accidental direction away from entropy. It simply cannot be directed. No matter how much intelligence gets mustered, accident will prevail, and life will move the way that life has done for eons, which is, of course, in the direction of love. That's what love means. 

Intelligence is fine when it gets used properly in service to the comfort of our fellow humans. So often it gets used to engineer warfare and the death of those we deem to be on some 'other' team. As Dawkins so reliably demonstrates, those contests are at best only metaphorically related to what happens at the level of life's evolution. To treat them as contests between life and death is to make a categorical error. Genes are always grounded. Contests at any higher level can only cause sparks. Sparks are not alive, though heaven knows they may instigate life from time to time.

Intelligence cannot express love. Intelligence cannot channel love. Intelligence cannot in and of itself provide any basis for merit. Intelligence can only serve love, which it must do on the basis of exquisite balance. Our way of life demonstrates that beauty is the more reliable token for merit. Just ask Trump. 

We have surely crossed a tipping point in service to an excess of wealth that is more grotesque than whatever the First Emperor of the Chin Dynasty arrogated in attempt to obviate his mortality. Now there's a loser's game! 

Well over half of my stored energy for retirement is held on my behalf in hazardous bets - they call them equities - about the future of our economy as presently construed. Now that interest rates have descended to near zero, cash is a fool's reserve, though I can only try to enjoy the sport of my future being whipsawed by the stock market. 

Still, it's only half. Right? None of us is more than half right. But the amounts that evaporate in any given instant are stunningly beyond what I might need to live on during any given day. And I'm talking a mere multiple of three of my life-time's highest annual salary, which is right about at the median of income where I live, which is no place you'd aspire to. You do the math. I'm in the 50 percent, though - mostly by virtue of whiteness - I am immersed in the social capital of the one percenters.

I try really hardly to share my wealth in ways that don't lead to my being a burden on my progeny. For some reason, I just hate to work for the man, but I also have to admit that I hate that a little less than I would hate to be the man. It's a tough balance lots of the time. 

So, I give away my labor freely, now that I'm too old to work. Ironically enough, the labor I give away is precisely the sort that underlies the presumption of the need for a retirement battery. My donations are mostly physical, aided by tools. The logic is not linguistic logic. I make bad mistakes if and when my 'mind' is clouded by emotional charge. I have to love and to focus on the object that I'm fashioning. Mostly by hand. Without distraction.

How very ironic that labor with and by means of my body feels less painful than laboring with and by and through language! Both sorts deteriorate badly, though in some sense I am doing my very best work now. I am more motivated, apparently, to handle the more literal tools. My mind and my body have become one. Thanks God for that! I have some sense that I once did lack. I hope.

I do now actually prefer an electric bicycle. Go figure! I hope never to drive a Tesla, praying for streetcars in their place. Apple's so-called AI battery management really sucks. The batteries in my little mobile house are dying as we speak. I'm winding down myself. 

I labor for love, despite the evident fact that my motive undermines any and all appreciation for what it is that I provide. That is an unfortunate accidental side-effect of the sort of rampant unregulated capitalism that we still practice in these United States. Troglodytes!

What sort of fool am I? I am a fool for love. So is Trump, but his definition for love has a very low denominator. I think Biden may be my kind of fool. There are plenty of people whose work I admire that I can't really much agree with much of the time. That's OK. I love them anyhow. 

At my age, I'm less afraid to fail, and I guess that's how it should be. I must nurture my genes which are now contained in my progeny, right? They are my betters, though I wish they'd take more of my advice about what would be good for the planet. Electric better. Trolleys better. Cars bad. Diversity better. Race bad. Winning is not possible in love. Only losing. Love must be tested to be true. Intelligence is no foil. Alone and bitter in touch with truthiness and an audience of one. Time to get to work!

Finally, I think I Understand Bratton

I have only random. I try hard not to control what I read, but then I follow threads. I try hard not to look at social media, as if averting my eyes might somehow contribute to the downfall of their corrosive force. But I fail, even while I try to let the random in.

So Bratton tweets. So does my daughter, and she doesn't think she's so great. I should get over myself.

Meanwhile, here is something readable and coherent from Benjamin H. Bratton, which actually betrays a stance. In my attempts to read him, I have slowly developed some confidence that he is compassionate and thoughtful.

Now I know how I think he's mostly wrong (well, I'd have to say "wrong" only in the final or absolute sense, since he's otherwise 99 44/100% right). Via Twitter, he says this bit of writing is from the same time that Bill Gates did this on TED. I don't like websites which don't date their posts. I shouldn't care so much.

My trouble with his position regards the why of human survival. His view is so long - from such an altitude relative to cosmic evolution - that humanity becomes like another bacterial strain. Our strain jumps out from the evolutionary swamp and threatens not just some species or other, but the entire planet.

Implicit seems to be the notion that cognition is what needs rescuing. Agency. He does a glancing credit to Donna Haraway to envision a kind of cyborg future if we hope to survive as a species. An altered, evolved species. It strikes me that Haraway's position was rather more compassionate. Not sure.

My issue is with the supposition that cognition is what humanity is all about. I believe that Bratton falls prey to a pitfall in his very own argumentation here. He's essentially arguing that cognition is why we can and should and must survive, but not because it's at the apex of a long and now discredited chain of being. Rather, his claim is that we should survive simply because we can.

Same thing, no? But the real question is "can we?" Really? So man really does become God, then?

What if humanity is not about cognition? What if humanity is about love? What if our failing is not about not getting the politics right, or the technologies properly aligned, or re-establishing homeostatic balance for our planet by conscious means?

Consciousness is seated in the most primitive structures of the brain. These are the parts whose genetic progenitors go the widest and the deepest. Agency serves consciousness, and not the other way around, and even still our bodies are over 90% not what we consider to be ourselves, when we think in genetic terms. That sort of genetics covers only one aspect of evolution, as Bratton seems clear about.

There is only co-evolution among myriad species.

The wanting to survive which we now feel is the selfish anti-love part that we project into our collective future. In truth, we crave survival as a species for the very same reason that we live life as though it would last forever. We have nothing but what we call our personalities to project, and we mistake the pain of losing those as something somehow worse than the pain of death. Sex, love, rock and roll and personality the way we now live these are very very local and limited. We have mistaken personality for soul, and - as always - we have mistaken God for a cognitive being. A being with a plan.

Talk about anthropocentrism! God in man's image. But it's a funhouse mirror image.

I, too, am 99 44/100% materialist. But I also know that the pure random of evolutionary processes (more broadly understood than just Darwinism or neo-Darwinism or anything else that we think we already know more about than we really do) has not been guided by cognition.

It is consistent with any materialism you may wish that the process of evolution is "guided" by love. You don't need to call it God's love. It's just a proper naming for what's been going on across billions of billions of years to where "years" don't mean a thing.

This evolution is "present" in us. We are not its apex, because we are not its end.

It is perfectly consistent with materialism to reconsider the standard model of physics as a kind of limit to materialism. There are motions in the cosmos which cannot be construed as related to forces. There are no bosons - no messenger particles - to be found, no matter how we stretch our statistical methods for detection based on hyper-complex instrumentation.

These "motions" are actually "e-motions" and the relations are conceptual rather than perceptual. Conceptual relations are always in the perpetual "now," which only means simultaneous across all time and space.

That doesn't mean that mind cannot evolve. But two plus two will always equal four (depending, of course, on some consistent process for designating units).

It is more useful to think of mind as microcosm than as agent. Holograms are more informative here than schematics could be. We persist despite the degradation of the media. Gravitons fade in probability for detection. Zero is never quite zero, is it? Nowhere in the cosmos.

But human mind cannot comprehend the cosmos. That doesn't mean we aren't important.

I'm not about to say or even suggest that agency is not important. We should feel humiliated by what we've done to our planet. We have been humbled. That doesn't mean that we should stop being human. We just have the wrong notion about what it means to be human. Mind includes the emotive center; the heart.

Mind is not only cognition. Emotion is not limited here. It remains doubtful that earth is alone in the cosmos, but we are surely looking for friends in the wrong way. Reading the mind of God has always been a futile exercise.

So Are We the Disease, Then?

As I continue to worry this matter about the wisdom of Terraforming Earth, I may have at least located the crux of the matter, at least to my own satisfaction.

On the one hand, terraforming might mean that we would become Earth's master, and for our own very anthropocentric reasons. It's hard to see how that isn't what it would mean, no matter what Bratton says about a new Copernican turn.

On the other hand, to conceive of us as a disease that is destroying Earth both romanticizes Earth as Nature in a way to valorize all the benighted beliefs that Benjamin H. Bratton derides, and undoes, once again, our most recent and necessary Copernican turn away from man at the center. Man the despoiler.

I, frankly, see no alternative but to reaffirm my deeply held and perhaps nearly religious belief in the God of Irony. At the core of Bratton's line of thinking is not just conundrum but paradox, pure and simple.

The only way out of paradox is, perhaps, higher generality. Zeno's paradox is resolved by the destabilizing of position in quantum interpretations of reality, for instance. The only way out of paradox is to find the fault in our misuse of language. Language was never meant for truth, it was meant for conspiracy. (of course, language doesn't "mean." We do that, sometimes.)

If we conceive of ourselves as a pox on the planet, then to cure ourselves would surely mean to destroy the planet. If we are but a part of the planetary evolution, then why should we do anything at all apart from what we're already doing?

The trick being, of course, not to see ourselves as one-dimensional. We are neither disease nor anti-disease. We are both at once. The change from one to the other is the very essence of a change in moral stance, and not a change in essence.

I struggled really hard with these matters quite a while ago reading Stephen Jay Gould (R.I.P.) It's a Wonderful Life. I gather that argument remains rather radically unfinished? Not sure. I have no easy way to find out if notions of human cognition as a kind of apex to evolutionary processes is back in vogue or not.

How could I? Research has all moved to the 'Net, in part because the library can't be current enough. The Net is so current that it's a perpetual game of whack-a-mole. Nothing stays still long enough to hold in memory. The news changes minute to minute against algorithms used to predict what you, the hapless reader, might be interested in.

The solution is to take a longer view and to stand back from the moment. To turn away from any and all awareness of perpetual emergency. But . . .

Well, I've noted here that when I once did actually drown, I experienced what might have been the life-changing apprehension of my entire life being present to me in that instant. Eternity in the moment. Does this happen during waterboarding? Not likely, when it's being done to you, any more than you might tickle your attacker away. But genuine emergency does have its salutary function, perhaps.

I continue to frame the big questions morally rather than technically, which surely removes me from the celebrated realm of hard-core materialism that Bratton seems to maintain is all there is that worthy of being celebrated as a realm at all.

And yet I think that sort of materialism straight-jackets science in the same way that evolutionists once imposed their cultural prejudices upon the Burgess Shale that Stephen Jay Gould wrote about; their prejudice being that mankind was some sort of inevitable apex creature resulting from the wonderful processes of evolution. The Burgess gestalt was turned into the Burgess progression.

Now, has Gould's affirmation of the primacy of accident itself been unseated? I'm asking (because I'm not sure I have the energy to find out). I seem to remember that Gould didn't think we were anything all that special. His was the most forceful Copernican re-turn I've ever heard, certainly including Bratton's.

What would the vaccine against man as coronavirus-grade terminal disease look like? Here, I do maintain that the "good" would be the continuance of evolution, not the continuance of mankind as mankind is now behaving (I think, but am not certain, that Bratton and I would agree on that). So the project is not to cure "us" but to cure the planet of "us" as disease. A kind of re-subsumption of mankind's fortunes within the greater good, as it were. And re-subsumption of mankind in the evolutionary processes.

Surely the vaccine would stop the automated processes of economic growth based on oil extraction. Surely, therefore, it would re-engage control over our ways of living by man as moral creature rather than as apex-predator.

We habitually think of morality as an [artificial] imposition on nature, perhaps equated with something as now-seeming pernicious as God-given dominion. And yet morality may remain the most likely frame for how our behaviors must change if we (and the planet, perhaps) are not to remain but a footnote to more cosmic processes of life's evolution.

Or, to ask another way, does life even matter? If so, might morality matter even more than the amoral processes which are all that "science" is allowed to deal with? Or must the province of morality truly be ceded to those creepy, mean and nasty religionists? Why?

If human life taken as a whole has already become an autonomous non-thinking non-feeling amoral force (as it does seem to have become) then the conclusion is already foregone. We are already dead, but then we will never have been anything but the moral equivalent of a mindless germ-like disease process.

While praying to some God or other (I know that phrasing makes no sense) would seem like not only the best but the only thing to do, aren't there ways in which even that could be construed as a positive harm? To the extent that it turns away from what is real (not materialistically real, just plain real)?

We are responsible for this mess, brother Job! God didn't put us here. We did.

Once upon a time while living aboard a sailboat through the dead of a very cold winter, it was revealed to me - this is true and you can read all about it here, though you have to start at the end/bottom if you want to shart at the beginning - it was revealed to me that cosmically, evolution has always been a morality tale.

I'm kidding when I say "revealed." It took a lot of work, actually, and that work is on ongoing and almost utterly unrewarding (well, except for the incredible and unending intrinsic rewards, of course).

My work was via excursions through classical Chinese literature and relativistic and quantum physics. Alas, but I am no expert in either of those fields, though statistically speaking I am almost certain to know and understand more than you do.

I continue to try and stay clear of what I don't or can't understand, which also entails not falling prey to claims that I can't understand when those are made by "experts" who think they already do. That is a tough tightrope to walk.

Along the way to becoming expert in anything, one must accept institutional identifications which - as I would maintain - limit as much as expand one's understanding. I am trying to make that a very modest statement.

I say nothing about my own claims to truthiness, especially since, as far as I can tell, I continue in abject failure to convince a single other soul, boo hoo. But discourse groups become hermetic as they become arcane - meaning simply that they are closed to outsiders and that initiation is onerous and likely impossible within a single life-time where you can only make it as a sub-specialist and trust in the greater whole. Of the discipline? Of the family? Of the nation?

The turn from Man as Chosen to man as disease is recent. As is the turn that Bratton adverts to from future as something to look forward to, to future as something to prevent. The morality tale is about hubris, of course. I am not so optimistic, clearly, as Benjamin H. Bratton is, at least to the extent that his apparent optimism seems to depend on a more sanguine estimation of the innate goodness of man the animal than I can form based on my (mediated) observations.

Or then again, wait. My estimations of the animal are much more sanguine than his are when I limit myself to face-to-face interactions with my fellow man. Could it be? I don't know. I really don't.

But here are a few things that I do know: As individuals, we feel helpless to do anything about whatever it is that we see going wrong. So we abdicate any moral obligation beyond the local and face-to-face. Sometimes we even think that it would be immoral to act beyond that level, apart from registering opinion.

The main thing is that we can't agree about what is going wrong.

Of course, there is a small subset among us who are excited enough by the whiz-bang of "modern" life that they don't think anything is going wrong. They must have a kind of faith (that I can't have) in the innate goodness of technology's manifest destiny. I confess that I find such a stance irresponsible in the extreme, and remain happy that Bratton joins me on the responsible side (the side of the good, of course) insofar as I am capable to read him.

To the extent that materialism forces me to see myself as an individual above all else, I can't be a materialist. I'm hoping that makes me more and not less of a realist. It certainly doesn't make me a spiritualist.

Materialism falls out from the scientific method. As pattern-recognizing creatures, we have managed by way of linguistic conspiracy to form theoretical structures - conjectures really - about how the world works. These can be tested experimentally and thereby validated. In Bratton's cosmos, the technology invented as a result of newly developed materialistic understanding comes along with new fields for accident. In his mentor (in these matters) Paul Virilio's terms, 'the possibility for derailment comes along with the railroad.' (Yet another media theorist?)

Projection is the work of the cognitive portion of our conscious minds. It's how we stay alive. We impose simplified structures on the stuff of raw perception - call those simplified structures Platonic narrative forms, if you will - and then calculate the extent to which they predict what might happen. We get in trouble when the conscious mind overrides the decision handed up by the preconscious mind. The preconscious mind sorts far more input than our conscious mind could possibly "contain." Likely more than any computer or network could, for at least a while yet.

But what I'm calling the "preconscious" mind here is actually maidservant to the seat of consciousness, which is the seat of affect, which is how we feel about our prospects (for sex, survival, peace . . .) according to pattern assessments returned there from the cognitive "portion" of the mind. Affect triggers the decisions and is felt, by consciousness then, as free will. The preconscious mind is just an input processor which automates our responses when matches are solid. The conscious mind does the work when autonomous resolutions have not been canned yet. The conscious mind is the robot of our wants.

As I have said elsewhere, including in my therapist's office once, the unconscious and fate are technically indistinguishable. The greater field for accident in our daily lived lives is not in the statistically small (as proven by our continued living) error between the conjecture and the actual in the Platonic narrative projections (I LOVE this convoluted usage of both Plato's cave, along with his ideas to which we must uncover - reveal - access by means of dialog) that we project along our futures in order to survive. The greater field for accident is in the affective tenor. We can apparently override our feelings by our ideals, false those these may be, to disastrous result for conscious me!

Or in other words once we start to trust our gear more than we trust ourselves, we are dead. Once the mechanism - the technology, including the tech in our heads - becomes autonomous we would only reasonably relinquish control if we trust that its autonomous behavior leaves us in a preferable affective state. There's a lower bar for a chair than for a self-driving car. Taking control of my own breathing would leave me in a very distressed state, unless, of course, I was SCUBA diving and wanting to conserve air.

Our gear can only be a projection of our conscious needs and desires until we have locked out from consciousness the sensory inputs that those depend on, or transform them into a conscious sensation the way I do while breathing through a regulator.

And you thought that the accelerated conscious control required to stay alive while driving had no use other than to make petro-addicted life more comfortable and fun?? No, please, it is a consciousness-raising experience.

Autonomous cars are not just kill-joy, they are literal death (of the planet, I mean) by turning us into a pure disease process. They give us more time on-screen. The important difference from trains and trolleys is not the potential for global warming, though that IS great. The difference is that at  least the possibility for socializing exists on the trolley. Of course, we are too afraid to exercise that possibility just now.

There will be nothing to living left but to enjoy the fruits of our accurate projections into our futures. We will have escaped the pressures of evolution, which means that we will have escaped life, which means that we will have become cosmically irrelevant which means that we will be dead.

I did recently take a weak stab at a typology for technology, trying to find a cogent way to distinguish information and communications technologies from other, perhaps older, sorts. Now I think that an important criterion for classification regards whether and how technology directly harnesses enthusiasms.

Sitting down and relaxing is a homeostatic pleasure. Racing cars is a lust. Sitting down and driving a car seems more like an addiction.

The homeostasis that our affect-centered mind demands of the results of cognitive processes includes cravings, like hunger and sex, which while they seem to nudge us away from homeostasis are in fact necessary to survival as a species. The discomfort of hunger leads to the pleasure of eating. The uncertainty of cognitive dissonance leads to the work of learning. Survival depends on these things.

Many of us have puzzled about the progression of automobiles from functional to sexy. The connection, of course, is about what sells. What attracts us with promise of consummatory pleasure in the same way that a gorgeous (whatever that might mean) human body might.

Now that cars have become fashion accessories, even to the extent of announcing our politics, after always having announced our socioeconomic desirability for mating - A Tesla is more like an iPhone than like a model T - I think we're avoiding the obvious about what makes information technology different.

A nice chair promises comfort. Now our very phones - that we have with us and before us nearly all the time - provide us with a zillion ways to be tempted. In the face of such temptation and short the means to fulfill it, we can always turn to heroin or its surrogates, and many do.

The main accomplishment of information technology has been to provide a way for the scientific methodology, which is itself a distillation of the methods of the cognitive portions of our brain, to predict our purchasing behaviors in ways to enrich media titans, large and small.

Along the way, our economic system has magically become a zero-sum game, since those with the money either destroy jobs or reduce them to gigs, where once again, in a kind of nightmare almost retro inversion of Marx, you have to provide your own means for production. It's the pipeline that matters - the pathways to eyeballs - and as McKenzie Wark would have us understand, the Vectorialists are the new Capitalists, and it's worse! We are becoming serfs on the wrong side of an information divide, unless we are soul-less coders on the inside.

No, we cannot design for survival. Plastics, Benjamin, plastics. A real builder doesn't want a material that never pushes back. A real maker wants an uncarved block which contains its own designing reveals. The artist is never an engineer. We don't need a plan. We need a process that's fun to drive!

In our perpetual naivete, we once did think that the Internet would return power to the people. We simply didn't have enough imagination to foresee the way that it would harness the lowest parts of humanity toward empire. We are now a conspiracy of dunces, led by a clown, and we have ourselves to blame for falling asleep at the switch.

Realistically, we will never complete the standard model of physics. Meaning simply that we will never have a completed understanding of the workings of the cosmos. That seems obvious to me. It has been for as long as I can remember. I guess that makes me outcast. But really? Isn't everyone just acting as though we will, just like the Republicans are acting as though Trump is innocent. Because it's the party line which lets scientists among us continue with their research without having to worry about life more locally? (Don't forget how tied the Democrats are to Silicon Valley)

I'm not sure that I see the moral distinction between climate change denial and perpetual avoidance of responsibility by virtue of a belief in the ameliorative power of "progress."

What will be less obvious to you (meaning only that it is equally obvious to me) is that we already have enough knowledge to understand why it is so, that science cannot lead to universal and full understanding. We resist that particular knowledge - knowledge of knowledge's limits - not because it would destroy what we already do know and hold so dear (it wouldn't). But that it would make us responsible. That's the thing we want least of all (as well as, not incidentally, the thing that Bratton is urging upon us).

As an individual, I am an embodiment of mind. As mind, I have a center, which as the word is meant in Chinese, means a center of both emotion and cognition. The (classical) Chinese cosmos is in no way Platonic, and so cognitive mental constructs have no ontological (epistemological? phenomenological? I can never keep the -ologies straight) priority. There are no forms that are antecedent to or apart from mind's conception of them. There is no eternal abstraction.

In any case, emotion is as much a part of my center as is cognition, and there is no moral action without both. If mind is an aspect of cosmos, which I do believe that it is, then perhaps God can be conceived as its center. Not the man-made God of contemporary Christianity or Islam, of course, but the nameless God. The God whose motive is love.

But I am also no individual. I am not apart from the rest of creation to which I am not connected by my understanding alone. I am physically and bodily no more an individual than is the biota within my body owned by me. As McKenzie Wark just tweeted, my body is a spaceship for all forms of germs. I think she was feeling sick.

Spaceship earth is breaking out in a coronavirus fever. We have tried to box the wild for our own pleasures, beyond any reasonable limits. Of course the virus must cross that boundary. In an artificial sense, it's only natural!

Apart from all that is alive in the cosmos, I am and ever have been nothing. I am but a surfacing bubble from an ocean of aliveness. This is what I mean by Irony. We have to accept it both ways. As radical individuals we are indeed a pox upon the planet, but we are also emotive moral hearts, which the cosmos lacks without us.

As part of a communal whole, the planet will thrive along with that remainder among us who will seed the subsequent bread (I just put bread in the oven, so that makes a handy metaphor). Life requires the leaven of moral consciousness.

Neither apex creature, nor inessential, mankind matters in the cosmos to the extent that we maintain a centered xin (heart/mind) which is, of course, redundant. Aligning with cosmos is not the same as conquest of it by means of understanding.

Let us pray, Virginia, let us pray.

Just What is Real anyhow? Learning to Make Sense

As I learn to write, I have an awfully hard time finding the balance between working out thoughts for myself, and distilling something into readable prose. You might think that I'm incredibly clumsy about it - I certainly do - but it's really hard to let go of the things that haven't quite been worked out yet, in order to stick to a narrative that has completion.

Or is it the other way around? It's easier to "complete" things which have a shape apart from reality. Sometimes so-called "ideas" take off and dictate a narrative which becomes more compelling than what it's supposed to be about. It can be hard to hold onto some point, some direction for the writing.

Now I have New Yorker magazines - the paper version - strewn about to distract me, and I forget how interminable their analyses can be. You can't read on a laptop for too long, and I was happy to read about Scientology in the recent issue. It demonstrates yet again that narratives don't really have to be so much true - as in capable to sustain evidence gathering and refutation - as they have to be complete.

Scientology as a system is clearly nuts, but hey if it works for you, why dig that deep? Some of their surface "technologies" undoubtedly "work" for reasons most likely unrelated to the bizarre explanations behind them. But who, really, wants to know at that level where you can just trust that some expert has worked it out.

The system is complete, but you don't really have to complete your reading of it to make sense of it. In the case of Scientology, you just have to keep paying more money and getting closer to the inner inner sanctum of the Great Man's writings.

People should really read more Tibetan literature, you know, where peeling back the layers of the onion leaves you with no onion, but a great adventure on the way to that great awakening.

Last night I watched this cool movie, Catfish, which explores the creations we can make in our head from some scanty evidence gathered across the Internet. It's fun. It's in the vein of Exit Through the Gift Shop, or that lousy Joaquin Phoenix Hoax, where you have no way short of face-to-face actually to determine if you're being had or if something really interesting and exciting is going on. It explores the specific dangers of our human capacity to fill in blanks and fill out our own personal cartoons to something which might be real if fully understood.

The Catfish movie does the most interesting job, at least among these three films, I think, of tackling the problem in earnest. It exposes the trap of Internet technology for what it is. Following what seems to be genuine serendipity, you seem to find some solid ground right along with the film-makers about what really is real among the stuff we might concoct in our heads.

In the course of the filming, the film-makers track down the person who wants them to fall for their creation for whatever crazy or sane reason. That core reason can never be uncovered, but neither can any nefarious or self-serving motive in this case.

The subject of this documentary falls in love with an utterly fictitious female hottie made of purloined beauty shots and dialog and music. While the social networks - Facebook in particular - make this kind of fraud almost trivial to accomplish, the Internet also made it equally trivial to expose it before too much damage was wrought.

The plot started to unravel when the subject Googled a song which just sounded a little too good. as sent him by the fictitious "friend"  He found that it had been produced not by the beautiful woman with whom he'd started to fall in love (and who didn't actually exist) but by some actual and accomplished singer.

In the case of Scientology - or people in love with actually beautiful women - adherents don't seem inclined to look too deeply into something which is clearly working for them. Surely it just may be the case that the truth of the matter is never quite so important as its believability.

The processes of scientific investigation are mostly useful to true our collective believability matrix. Gradually, we all start to occupy the 'same page' about how stuff is really put together. If we took a careful look, we'd really have to agree that the premises of Scientology are plenty nutty, as is the likelihood that the character of a beauty is really true to the illusion of what it is you fall for.

But it also may be that having something to believe in, whether Jesus or the person built by virtue of internalizing a beguiling manner in refection of whatever everyone else is seeing, is less nutty than to have nothing other than the clingy belief that eventually we'll have all the answers. Skeptics among us seem to feel that in the meantime believing in anything at all is the nuttiest thing to do (read four times fast!).

I mean really, stop to think and the nuttiness of our existence at all has to hit you like a ton of bricks. Why not Thetans left over from a time when souls were incinerated to make more space on earth or whatever gibberish these Scientologists spout? It's laughable sure, but does it really make any more sense to suggest that some day some how, we'll have the real answer, documented and believable both.

Not everything about the comic historical record is likely to be retrievable by methods archaeological or instrumental.

I mean, why not Scientology in the face of the nuttiness to which Christianity seems (and the seeming is the important thing here) in thrall? It just may be that the creative fiction on which their "technology for going clear" is built provides a foundation for something actually more useful than believing in a personal savior. Just like antibiotics are more useful than witchdoctors. Even though the notion that all disease germs can be eradicated is itself a dangerous fiction.

Scientology almost certainly does work if you're an actor and need to learn how to drive your body the way you might drive a car. (Going "clear" in Scientology terms seems hard to distinguish from telling a really earnest lie wherein you, the liar, pretend to be a really really good person and where's the harm in that?) You learn to be detached from your actual emotions and you can really act with commitment, the way that Ronald Reagan did. And look how far he got, once he left the little stage and climbed up onto the Big One.

I guess for me the trouble with religions is that they expunge irony, and in this, at least according to the New Yorker report, the Scientologists are no different. But neither are many scientists. They earnestly do believe that all can ultimately be revealed by diligent and emotionally detached investigation. That consciousness - whether machine form or organic - will ultimately push everything out of the cosmos.

But you know, cosmically, it really is all a joke. It's as foolish to believe in ultimate answerability as it is to believe that humanity was plunked on earth a mere 5000 years ago.

Though hell, maybe we really were plunked here 5000 years ago, in at least the sense that that time-frame pretty much delimits the inception of our most powerful (and most masculinist) toolset, the written Word.

We now know that we cannot know apart from our emotional posture in relation to the world "outside" us. We know that reality is a mirror, at least in part, for what we bring to it. The way we act surely is a reflection of our own reflection reflected in the social norms and standards of our time. Imagine how different a Rubens subject would behave, see herself, and be poised in today's more neotonous world of slender beauty.

Such also is the world of physical reality. Even without difficult and scary notions for the really raw stuff of quantum reality, the macro reality of life on earth is clearly showing signs that we'd better get our act together, and, like, quick! What is it we really want to do with the reality - the Earth - we live on?

Among the reasons for our dangerous predations against the ground for our reality is the notion that there will be some rational realization at the end of all this progress which might compel us individually and collectively to behave in ways not quite so detrimental to our futures. As but one aspect of this stance, is the stark conflict between what we earnestly wish for our personal and very local comfort and pleasure, and what would be good for the planet and thereby for humanity as a whole.

Clearly, the planet and the rest of its species might prefer that we were not so damned effective and efficient at developing technologies to meet our needs (and not incidentally, to enhance our species' very local - in historic terms - profile for evolutionary success).  The planet would like us tribal, or maybe organized with more misery among the lower classes so that the really destructive technologies could be reserved for just a few regal prospects at the top. As it was and ever will be, world without end, Amen.

Religions and science are reasonably identical in promoting dreams for eternal repose as we struggle toward variously defined pinnacles. Yes, it's worrisome that the swamp at their base encroaches. But surely there will be something close to enlightenment as we approach those peaks.

Or, as I suggested the other day, it might just be that what has proven so successful in its natural evolution is not so much humanity, as it is a viral meme riding on humanity as host. It may be that what has really proven so successful is a kind of mechanical thinking, promoted by the written word.

The written word enables all these technologies for domination. Money renders our individual wants collectively.  Our collective pursuit of those things which money can both buy and make available is apparently limitless, until the basic resources run out.

We are already enslaved to machines, in other words, in the same way that we are enslaved to all those things which entrap our senses and divert us from the hard work of being human. Those machines got their start with language. Increasingly, we are in thrall to unchanging logic, and utter predictability. Life as in the Life Force is giving way to full descriptions and mechanical interconnections.

It seems that there is nothing that will or can come in the way of this evolutionary triumph. Well, nothing other than random chance. Something like an asteroid to destroy our ecosystem, or a bug to wipe out just our species. Or we could just keep on keeping on, and then an accident will be almost certain to wipe us out. Eventually, if you create enough complexity, failure is a virtual certainty.

It is our desire to be kings combined with our strange altruism about making the same pursuit available to as many people as possible which provides the exploding living pool on which machine consciousness has been riding now these couple of millennia.

OK, so that's disturbing. The written word as the tool of the devil, but what about Tibet? What about spiritual peoples who live to do no harm. What about the Shakers? Everything about us now seems bent on increasing the population of humans on the planet, which can serve the survival of our species only if it doesn't destroy the overall ecological niche (surely a misnomer in this usage) we evolved to fit.

And silly transhumanist notions of evolving beyond this deadly mob-species would require not enhancing our bodies and minds with machines, but rather stepping out altogether from the deadly machine-form which now already uses us as substrate for its far more successful "consciousness."

We would have to become more, not less, bio-logical. We would have to find new ways to survive apart from the machine. We would have to demonstrate superior consciousness of a sort which is ours and ours alone, where consciousness is just that thing which defines us as human and not some other animal.

It would have to be our desire and not our genetic capability to mate which would determine this Brave New Species. It would be this removal from the thrall of seeming physical perfection and earthly beauty. Individually, we would have to leave behind the attraction of mere beauty and combine our genes instead with those we might encounter by random chance, or random choice of words.

Just like we always have. Life is powered by irony. Machines are powered by entropy.

The End.