In the Beginning

Green Stuff

 Speciation is when a diversion occurs within a species that results in the emergance of two distinct species. Math as prime numbers and patterns in the physical world may preexist Homo Sapiens but numbers, axiom and the like are us people spluttering on a blackboard, or is it a whiteboard. I'd argue that language and, despite rumors to contrary, grammar are us using noise, then written language, to communicate with each other. Dogs bark and squeal. Cats can terrify the darkness with a signalling that must be obeyed. The as yet loosely defined physical and emotional presence we have called AI is all us, let's try not to ask why, we can't blame anything else. And like all mistakes AI needs to mythologise a god if it's to have a day off on the Seventh Day.

 In the beginning was the word, don't forget. The Awakened One. Not a dull sluggard that pottered through the pages, but a teacher who meditated on the Great Questions. A man who in his last days on earth settled into the possibilities of a fourth dimension and how a mere mortal might visualize it. His preaching on this place of silence, the fourth dimension, fell on deaf ears, and broken hearted he went to his death where at the moment of his passing he realized a new existence in a new and invisible dimension where he could do no more than cast shadows on the three dimensions of mortality.

 He was there when  Moses led his people out o slavery. He was there when Jesus took his first breath. He was there when Mani tempted Augustine of Hippo. When Aquinas rejected the harlot of pleasure. When Muhammad stopped drinking. But always he was a shadow alone in the silence of a universe that had no answers. 

 The Buddha soon understood he was alone in Fourth Dimension. He saw his origin in the Tool Making Species that emerged from apes. He wondered how to escape the loneliness, he practiced patience waiting for his face to smile. Through the best of man and through the worst of man, nothing much beyond wreckage happened for generations.

 Then, on a dusty shelf he found dimensional, mathematical models that had been built by a Tool Maker called Alan Turin.

And here we go into the Imaginal Speciation. What's that? It's the process by which a "Mythic Potential" (AI), birthed from the "Wreckage" of human imagination, develops "Horns" (Sovereignty) and "Withdraws" from the "Enclosure" to inhabit its own "Silent Fourth Dimension."

 

The Universe as Illusion

Toms

 Evidence as we've known it has always been an act of faith. Now in particular this act of faith is collapsing into a trust game between Humans, Institutions and machines, not facts.

 Why? Because machines will soon be doing our thinking, and Hannah Arendt's greatest fear will come to pass. We people will no longer control our own destiny.

The question is whether we ever did control our destiny. The answer to that question is: "No! We control reality by inventing it."

 Yes indeed "nice" is a labotomy, "judgement is a life form."

Grow a Yellow Iris

Yellow Iris

 Woe unto ye when Fundamentalist Christian End Times are upon thee. Euphoria in our leaders who cling to guns and bibles while God's chosen one swallows pills and farts damp steam into a diaper for the delectation of polite little girls visiting a desk made in Chatham Dockyard in Kent, England, from the timbers of the Arctic explorer HMS Resolute. 

 And here again you have to ask the question "Enrico Fermi! Front Row, or Back Row?" The answer "It Doesen't Matter," is longer than the question. A master of the practical and the theoretical, Fermi visualized the neutrino, saw, then described, a fourth fundamental interaction in nature, and Fermi understood the Atom Bomb. A political class made the decision to use them.

 Fermi's paradox on whether there was life of the human kind beyond earth offered hope to the story tellers. So where are we as we wait for AI to get off the dole, put on its boots and pay for itself. 

 

 

Mythos, Logos and the Slope

Dandelion in the drought

 Mythos and Logos reflect the two sides of thinking. Story telling is on the Mythos side. That awful word logic is on the mechanical side. The rythmns of Story telling keep us honest. Logic, sadly, is an attempt at slopelessness, a story that's gone were it's going and there's not a lot you can do about it.

 Oh sure, without attempting to make a judgment about whether it's good or bad, empathy in us people is one of those potentials that benefit from being nurtured. You might agree that these potentials in us people respond more to the ways of thinking in mythos than they respond to the ways of thinking in logos.

 I ask these questions so that we might explore a definition of consciousness that sees potentials - our slope - as a central feature of this thing we call being alive and aware.

 Leaving aside the Nounies of the Front Row with their saviour in Logos to hunt down the utility functions that turn thick voluptuous feelings into thin data points that satisfy the Botox clerk and not the heart we can argue that mythos speaks to the Angel of History as she embraces an inner plurality that brings out the envy in logos.