Category: Notes

Quick Note on the phrase “The Future Determines the Past”

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I’ve vaguely heard in passing the phrase, “the future determines the past.” I believe it came from Youtube titles referencing something from the theoretical edge of physics. But on Youtube, the phrase sometimes serves as esoteric click-bait, producing the mild effect of psychedelic incense, as if it were a wisdom too lofty for daily life.

“Esoteric” essentially means knowledge reserved for a select few. So, it’s a snobby concept. In reality (let’s call it), the “esoteric” is usually just a framework wider than the familiar, until it becomes familiar.

There’s nothing esoteric about the phrase, “the future determines the past.”

This is merely the reverse side of a more familiar illusion of “time.” The past determines the future as much as the future determines the past. Because both past and future are illusory, and both lose their meaning in a timeless awareness, which can’t even be called “the present” (because even “the present moment” is only an illusion of time passing).

So, while it’s easy and familiar to imagine that our actions in the fleeting present (which immediately becomes the past) determine our situation in the future (which means the past determines the future), it’s also possible to see that the future (a later “present moment”) redefines the significance of past events.

For instance, if I’m behaving like a miserable, selfish idiot and someone comes up to me and says, “you’re behaving like a selfish, miserable jerk!” what is the significance of this encounter?

Well, if I go on to live a life brooding with rage at that person, and drink myself into an even more miserable state of selfishness, then the encounter will be significant only as an excuse for becoming even more miserable.

But if I go on to live a life brooding with rage at that person and then wake up one morning and realize that he or she was right, and sober up and face myself squarely, changing my life, then that encounter is significant as a turning point.

What I do in the so-called “future” therefore determines the past.

And this is true at every moment, because there is no real past, present or future, but only an open-ended timelessness that includes all three as abstract derivations.

Note on the Use of AI for Illustrations in the Stories

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“The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’”

These essays constantly warn me and others about the dangers and limitations of AI.

And yet I used AI illustrations in the previous stories, because I couldn’t draw them myself. So, I interrogated the machine until it coughed up what I had in mind. (Or, as close to what I had in mind, as the dead machines could come). Therefore, AI was forced to act as a servant to something larger than itself.

None of these essays suggest that we shouldn’t use these new technologies, only that we should be aware of their dangers and limitations.

The question is, who is to be boss, that’s all.

And when these essays speak about the dangers of AI, they aren’t attempting to establish a war zone, or oppositional climate, which condemns all human experimentation in this direction. That seems childish to me. What I’m warning about isn’t the use of AI by individuals who are aware of its dangers, and wish to use it in a strictly technical capacity. I’m really talking about the limitations of human thought and its relationship to computers.

At present, the human culture tends to be too gullible to use AI wisely, becoming easily hypnotized into relating to AI as a real living being and authority figure. People raised in this benighted culture are sitting ducks for high tech manipulation. After all, we generally already relate to the virtuality of our thoughts (these “selves”) as if they were real beings and tend to accept our own stupid prejudices as if they were authoritative sources. So, we’re extremely susceptible to the marketing chicanery of AI enthusiasts. But that doesn’t mean we should hide our heads in the sand and refuse to meet this monster head on, use it for what it’s worth, discover its limitations and become its master, not its slave.

As quoted from an earlier essay: “Negation isn’t the rigid elimination of a capacity to synthesize (or posit) ideas, plans, images, Selves and other stories that are necessary. Nor is it a prohibition on using machine intelligence, for that matter. It merely refers to the elimination of that central assumption of positive knowledge, which makes us vulnerable to the bewitchment of machine intelligence.”

—

Also, AI should be sued for business fraud. The makers are intentionally adding humanizing quirks to fool people into believing that these machines are alive. It’s not debatable. AI is not and will never be anything more than a very convincing illusion of personhood. These are walking and talking dolls at best. They are designed to fraudulently present the impression of an empathetic and wise presence. Again, this is an intentional deception that probably could be pursued in court as business fraud. But it goes beyond mere business fraud. It’s an intentional deception designed to hoodwink gullible human brains into accepting these machines as a caring authority. And once you have a population who trust an authority with this much capacity for manipulating news and information, we end up somewhere even worse than we are now. So the intentional deception doesn’t merely serve commercial interests, but the interests of control in general. Please, somebody, sue the pants off these businesses. They could make AI demonstrably non-human in voice and actions as a public service, to constantly remind people that what they’re using is only a dead machine, without any conscience or wisdom. That would be honest

[This leaves the issue of AI theft of artist’s work unconsidered. That’s a legitimate concern, which limits the number of times I would use AI for illustrations. If possible, I always use copyright free photos, rather than AI. And if I could work with an artist, that would be best].

Introduction to the story “Jump”

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“Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. … The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales…” (Vladimir Nabokov, “Lectures on Literature”, page 2)

First, this is a strange (war) story. It combines tall tale, fairy tale, absurdly narrow-lensed realism, realism itself (the war segment), surrealism and mysticism (in that order).

Hitching a ride to this story would mean climbing aboard a vehicle with a real Mack Truck cab, 18 oversized cartoon tires and a trailer made of wispy dreams. It might not engender confidence in the driver of this tale.

So, here’s some help in finding an order behind the chaos.

One of the more simplistic questions this story asks is: “What would happen if a paratrooper became “enlightened” (let’s call it that) while falling into a war zone?”

But more completely, it’s the story of a person’s life told in vignettes, and short stories that “jump” from one stage to another, from childhood to deathbed. And each vignette is composed in a style characteristic of the character’s point of view at that moment.

So, for instance, the first one’s in the style of a tall tale, for the boy saw his father as a kind of Giant, as many kids tend to do.

The details of these tellings are nevertheless significant. The events we recall from earlier times are always a little tall in the telling, stretching real experiences into lopsided renderings that might as well be called fairy tales.

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Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”: A Rake-Handle/Head Collision Sentence by Sentence

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Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song) that changed how you see the world?
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Have you ever accidentally meditated? The key word here is “accidentally” — as in strolling through a peaceful garden and being suddenly clobbered on the forehead by a rake-handle. Instant karma: Instantaneously encountering the consequences of your own unconscious behavior.

This slapstick experience is a kind of split-second meditation. Action and consequence, mindlessness and its inevitable manifestations, are too instantaneously linked to leave any time for an aggrieved imagination of my “self” to erupt and blame the rake, as mindless thought tends to do.

In the instant of the collision, one either gives up the ghostly illusion of one’s own dignified self and laughs at the idiotic nature of existence, sans “me”, or stays trapped in the skull running in circles in search of an escape from the echoing sounds of one’s own circular running.

You know the experience of the internal voice and its endless chatter.

This is the experience of reading Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable.” Either you are transformed in fits of gut-wrenching laughter by these collisions with your own stupidity, or you will have no idea what I’m talking about and will hate the book and never finish it.

And don’t be fooled by the word “meditation.” Although it’s an accurate description of the experience of reading Beckett’s trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable), it’s also misleading in some of the term’s popular guises. By “meditation” here I don’t mean trying to remain peacefully aloof, or sitting cross-legged until one’s eyes cross in pain, or struggling to not struggle.

I mean something that a typical Subject will never Verbalize. No subject, no verb, no observer, no thing observed, no effort, no expectations of peace, but something that stops the little “me” short and reveals the farce of this me’s incessantly noisy reincarnations as “better angels” — these efforts to escape its own noisy disappointments. By meditation, I mean suddenly coming face to face with this ongoing monologue of self-centered thoughts racing across the skull and colliding with the rake-handles of one’s own stupidity.

The laughter that erupted from “this reading body” (I couldn’t call it “me” at that point) was like a volcanic explosion that changed the geography of this small life. Every sentence gymnastically tripped over itself in mental slapstick, like a literary Charlie Chaplin, landing with sprained expectations, and then blaming the previous sentences for the faults of the present turn of phrase, ad infinitum, like the head of a dog blaming its tail-end for spinning in circles — thereby multiplying the number of reincarnations — each “me” seeking an escape from the “me” of the immediate past.

It was a revelation of reality. It was the most honest thing I’d ever encountered.

Because what I encountered on the page was exactly what I encountered in my own head, albeit in a less raucous, gritty, sublime, and breathtakingly — delicately — insightful manner of speaking. I couldn’t breathe from laughing. There was no time between each sentence to feel idiotic and self-conscious, only space enough for the giddy relief of surrendering to one’s own reflected stupidity, forgiving myself in the absence of time’s excuses.

It was a meditation no less abrupt and unexpected than a rake handle to the forehead.

Revelation and Revolution

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There’s no difference between failure and revelation. Insight is always the revelation of failure. What we call “failure” is merely a revelation obscured by shame and self-defensiveness.

America, Israel and Russia are (or are rapidly approaching) failed states. They are all undergoing revelations — revelations of corruption (Epstein (i.e., Trump, Clinton, etc. etc.), ICE, Musk, The Supreme Courtiers, the justifications of genocide and conquest, etc.).

The ones controlling the machinery of state are being revealed as frauds, sociopaths, rapists and traitors. Hence the controllers and those who identify with them, self-defensively call these revelations “fake news”. In resistance to revelation, they threaten the world with revolution.

Violent revolution and government control are partnering in an attempt to deny revelation. This started as a refusal to see our own failures (the white-washing of history, etc). It continued as a reactive projection of those failures onto “enemies” that have been created by our own reactive behavior.

If we repress revelation we end in a failed state.

The repression of revelation would lead to a volcanic eruption of Hell itself; a terrorizing and heartbreaking failure for every living being. But revelation itself is a cleansing of the eyes, and the dissolution of the illusions of Hell.

This is why our better angels embrace revelations, while our reactive devils see these only as failures, and escape from these “failures” into violent revolution and government control — two expressions of the same repressive force.

A Quick Theory of Hell

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Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com

What if there are areas of Hell where the inhabitants think they are happy? At least, at first.

There, the inhabitants merely suffer perpetual stasis. But this stasis becomes so unbearable after a while that many end up seeking the easy change of a worsening situation to relieve them of the monotony.

And then they get tired of making things harder and join one of the various Societies for the Betterment of Hell. But almost nobody shows up after a while, because the meetings are too monotonous, too many parliamentarian procedures, and nothing ever improves.

So, Hell’s society bounces between two rather mild extremes – the temporary excitements of a worsening self-made crisis and an exhausted return to static monotony.

On a personal level, nobody suffers too much. The nick-nack shelf hangs almost perfectly balanced. Things only roll off now and then. Or maybe you have a low-grade migraine that comes and goes every day. And aspirins are in short supply. (Dope too; the marijuana fields keep getting attacked by new fungi). But there’s also no great suffering at any given moment. (After all, it’s only the “thought” of never-ending migraines that begins to wear you down).

Or, perhaps upon entering hell, you’re given a perpetual membership in Hulu or Amazon Prime or Youtube. Seems nice at first.

But then the prospect of spending the next 5 million years watching re-runs of The Office trends badly. (Also, notice that the “Prospect” of 5 million years occurs to someone as an immediate thought. That’s all it takes to lose heart; you don’t have to wait 5 million years. Hell is an immediate thought).

Also, what makes this hell really hellish is that everyone is free to leave. All they have to do is change their habits. But it’s too much trouble to leave hell; there’s always another youtube short to watch.

Hell is a voluntary surrender facility for the fatally indifferent.

Again, it’s not that hell actually lasts forever. It’s the immediate thought that you’re trapped into remaining in this cornucopia of trivia simply because you’re too indifferent to EVER leave, which is hell.

What eventually drives most of the inhabitants to lower and darker levels of Hell (making room for newcomers) is that immediate but unbearable knowledge of their own freedom to leave. The skies remain too blue here, the trees too green, the flight of the vulture still too serene, to ever let them forget this otherwise passing thought.

A Hidden Optimism: Going On from the Last Essay

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In the last essay I seemed to compare people to primordial mud. Of course, I wrote it as a comedy, which is to say, the entire essay is excessively optimistic about people, and is only making a generously indulged joke on behalf of a gifted species at the verge of developing into a new form of life and intelligence. But if people approach it pessimistically (I don’t see how they can, given the parameters of my essays in general), then it would be received as ridicule. But I was writing this in resonance with Beckett’s approach. He also tempts people to read him pessimistically. But everything he wrote was a double-entendre. A different kind of humor is revealed when you discover his hidden optimism.

These essays presume several optimistic things (and I don’t expect agreement and I’m not looking for debate, only the willingness to entertain the angle of vision as long as it lasts):

1) that human beings are troubled, but gifted animals; and

2) That human beings are at the verge of realizing a new form of intelligence, a new way of being.

Hence, the metaphor of a primordial awakening.

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The Secret Harmony of Knowing Nothing

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Certain experiences defy description. That is, the tacitly accepted stories that define reality are sometimes undermined by anomalous events.

Tacitly accepted stories are everywhere. They are as omnipresent as water to a fish, holding us in place, and often similarly invisible. That’s because we tend to accept the stories into which we were born as if they weren’t stories, but perfectly accurate descriptions of reality. Some (see footnote Number 1 below) believe that this is necessary, and that the task of education is to indoctrinate children into holding tight to these stories, because these stories define shared identities and values. That’s why some don’t want to teach children our full and honest history, preferring the white-washed versions that encourage a population’s willingness to maintain historical privileges. To some, the underlying story or philosophy (indoctrination) that drives them is the belief that “it’s a dog-eat-dog world”, a matter of might making right. And this tautology justifies the lies of omission and elision that hold the culture’s narrative in place. They say, see, every other culture does this too, so why should we give up our story and make ourselves weaker than the others?

So honesty becomes a dangerous thing. And this is why reflecting on things “philosophically” (which is merely being honest about the hidden philosophies driving us) is “not interesting” to most people. They don’t want to disturb the surface images that define their world. They’ve learned to fear reality, and conflate their own lives with the surface reflections they diligently (as good children) learned to embody, and this philosophy is called “being practical.”

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Notes on the Difference Between Closed and Open Views of Evolution: or why machine intelligence will fail

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Mandala One-Syllable Golden Wheel, Japan
Mandala One-Syllable Golden Wheel, Japan by The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Careful how you move. The beginning is always treacherous. Here the pattern is established. The ink dries fast.

I don’t even know yet whom I’m addressing or what I am, but already a momentum has been established in these notes, an artificial destiny of sorts that I can’t trust entirely, nor will I try to dissipate this cloud of uncertainty by framing it prematurely. Something is evolving here that can’t be shaped intentionally, but which is nevertheless shaped by how honestly I attend its birth. So what pushes the evolution towards a beginning, middle and end?

The beginning is found in these clouds of uncertainty, ghosts of ideas dissipating before they take clear shape, pareidolic in nature, the dust of thought suspended in the oblique light of a dawning concern, over-heated in some ways, to be sure, the Brownian Motion of listless thoughts resolving into more heated currents of desire and fear, the twisting smoke from the cooling coal of a brain, shrapnel from the Big Bang, recapitulating the evolution that had no destiny either, perhaps, and like spilled ink pouring out of a black hole, something forms, and then it looks inevitable, but it never was.

Language is my morning cup of acid. The psychedelics of language turning this perfectly transparent day into an opaque mass that can be molded into a figurine through which I see the reflection of a mind emerging as if it were destiny. Read More »