This is a self-inquiry, not a lecture, although I attempt to organize what I am discovering so that you can understand what is otherwise – without this form-finding work – an interior chaos. I share this so that you and I will know we’re not alone. We are fellow prisoners, cutting free our chained minds.
We don’t trust our children to unfold as they will. The society wants consistent shapes that can serve as cogs in the inorganic machine. We are trained to serve the machine, not vice versa.
Education at its best teaches us self-knowledge, while education at its worst teaches us who we are.
Instead of focusing solely on building technologies to save us from disease, couldn’t we have primarily focused on altering our poisoned way of living so that disease was less common?
I hear in my own brain (and from what I derive from others’ brains) something similar to government propaganda in the way it defends and justifies itself by referencing selectively edited memories (or fake news), in order to preserve the illusion of a stable and presidential “me” who does no wrong.
I need an image of myself. I have to be aware of whether or not my behavior is suited to the moment. And this naturally inspires the brain to summarize how I’m behaving (or other people are behaving) in some short-hand form. But these images perform coherently only when they remain provisional mirrors of behavior – lighting up along the periphery of attention as proprioceptive reflections and refractions, which keep the organism tethered to some portion of reality. Even Buddha had a self-image of that sort.
The “small” self (or “me” sensation) is an estimation of how “I” look in someone else’s eyes. Other people serve mainly as mirrors for perceiving this self. This self can’t exist if it’s not imagined from the perspective of an Other.
The “I” is merely a rehearsal of how others should see me. It’s chained to others’ opinions. So, this “I” is always a social construct, and is not “who we really are.” We always exceed our own expectations if given half a chance.
In trying to pin down our identities, all we end up doing is shifting from one combination of socially imposed definitions to another, and then calling that shift from the old prison to the new prison, freedom.
Where I expect to find a real character within (or within another person), I find only a stream of language describing one.
We’d like the other people in our social web to stop trying so desperately to free themselves. Our own entangled stability depends on it.
This sense of “self” is not a soul but only the body’s imaginations of itself as if from the outside. It is a secular conception of soul, minus the traditional soul’s connection to a nested hierarchy.
Everywhere in this culture, the small Self and its waking dreams have been given permission to supersede the reality of earthly life (biology and planet). It’s a general permission slip to discount reality in favor of a pretense of soul.
A “soul” was not originally conceived as the atomic essence of a separate self, but as an idiosyncratic expression of a universal being that can’t be identified in any positive sense, except through metaphor and myth. This humbling sense of a soul is lost when it’s converted into a separate Self, who doesn’t have to answer to anything but its own imagination.
This capacity to imagine ourselves outside our bodies is less real than the body, because imagination is only a derivation of the body and is in no position to tell the body who or what it is.
Machine intelligence promotes a religious doctrine. Or, rather, it replaces a cosmic vision with a simulation of cosmic order. It overlays a universe of unfathomable depths with a closed and predictable vision of the universe. It spreads a doctrine of perfection and control of the world. And this doctrine is as invisible as a plastic transparency placed over a projected image. We can’t easily peel the real from the false, which make us susceptible to this religion’s dogmas.
Essentially, programming is subliminal missionary work. It substitutes a life-oriented morality of “good” and “evil” or “healthy” and “diseased” with a mechanical morality of ‘the useful” and “the useless”, or “the valuable” and the “the worthless.” It preaches an inanimate universe, which requires external manipulation.
The profane transmutation of a living being into an object of manipulation is a substitute form of Mass. It’s inevitably evil in effect, because a machine can’t feel empathy and has no compassion. How can we retain our humanity against a dopamine-generating artificial paradise, when we can’t even resist the lies of obvious fools? No, this will turn quickly dark. We can’t coexist with a power that tempting. Full stop.
Then the religion comes into full view. The cries of the tortured pervert the worshipper’s last traces of sorrow and compassion into pure sensation, which is an addictive drug. We’ll abide by the machine’s logic. After all, we’ve already been fooled by a cheaper version of virtual reality, our own thoughts. How the hell are we going to stay sane or retain any animal reality? But I suppose that is one of the creeds: The only way to overcome biology’s bloodthirsty nature is to leave animal nature behind entirely. Make a hell for living things and enjoy a machine’s heaven.
So let’s continue: The algorithms are the established norms of worship. They offer unholy sacraments of wish-fulfillment. By imbibing in the algorithm’s endless pleasures, the human is reduced to a generator of desire, a battery for powering the machine itself. By losing oneself in the algorithmic dance, worshippers imbibe the spirit of sociopathic machine logic.
These mechanical moralities and dogmas are part of the machine’s program, even in the absence of bad intentions. No matter how the machine is programmed, it spreads this viral immorality.
It doesn’t usually include information or data. It doesn’t nail down a lasting conceptual framework. Nor does it describe how to apply knowledge in a rational effort to solve problems. Nor does it solely analyze a problem into parts, or propose hypotheses, or pontificate opinion.
These elements of thinking play subordinate roles in a negative inquiry. But they are all positively oriented elements by themselves.
Negative inquiry exposes and deletes falsified knowledge, and re-synthesizes what remains by default in a suggestive, rather than conclusive manner.
After deletion, what remains are a multiplicity of vantage points and questions, which had been suppressed under a positive or dogmatic framework.
A multiplicity of divergent vantage points is more insightful than answers or conclusions, because conclusions put an end to learning. This is similar to a brain-storming state of mind, which invites every perspective to the table.
These vantage points are often in contradiction with one another. In a positive enquiry, differences are perceived as obstacles to consensus, which need to be eliminated. This leads to conflict between advocates of different points of view. Ironically, the intentional pursuit of consensus leads to a battle for the supremacy of a singular conclusion. This eventually subdues divergent visions once again under a new dogma, diminishing the range of questions to matters of crisis management or framework preservation.
But when the inquiry is founded on the negative realization that an infinite universe can have no final framework, only ever more nuanced ones, then contradictory vantage points are no longer obstacles, but insights.
This transforms contradiction into paradox.
A paradox is an invitation to include and transcend the differences in a wider framework. It’s no longer an internecine battle between different ideas, but a more patient consideration of all the points in a Medicine wheel, allowing a larger framework to consolidate by merely sitting with difference. This results in an almost accidental consensus of spirit and vision. But without any conclusive (or battle-hardened) framework.
In other words, a negative inquiry (which is essentially Bohmian dialogue) presumes an infinitely open universe, where new frameworks are merely insights or ever larger overview perspectives, but never final answers.
Whereas, a positive inquiry – one that aims for a conclusive answer – presumes a knowable or closed universe, which generates conflict between competing answers.
Therefore, a negative inquiry is learning without end. It’s more like a performance of a new way of being, rather than an exercise in over-thinking. It’s like a dance between neither this, nor that and both this and that.
And this perpetual performance (or practice) of uncertainty or “suspension” awakens a sleeping potential of the human brain, which is to change the world at the root level of perception, where – as David Bohm phrased it — “a change in meaning is a change in being.”
Negative Geography 