For the Ages

Evening Aster

    By most accounts, The Enlightenment presented new ways of thinking about what and who we are. In the tradition of these things this new way of thinking eventually wandered into a period referred to as The Romantic Age.

   You can mark the beginning of The Romantic Age with the French Revolution and you can think of The Romantic Age as achieving a conclusion, in and around 1837 when the leisured classes concluded that reason wasn't all bad as long as it remained self conscious when it looked itself in the mirror and actually did something about the sewers.

   1837 was the year an 18 year old Queen Victoria was crowned, the same year that Michigan became a state, there were pro-slavery riots in Illinois, it was the year Dickens published his Oliver Twist, around the world a standing army had become increasingly important and there was redemption to be had by teaching supply and demand curves to heathen savages in faraway places so they could better understand the fundamentals of Calvin's Economic theories. 

   The Roman Empire and the Roman Republic regularly struggled with the phenomena of people moving away from using coin of a realm as the means of exchange. Gold by weight, silver by weight, something that kept its value was fine, but something the value of which was entirely reliant on trust wasn't big on the list. The Roman Denarius was an almost pure silver coin about the size of a US cent. The Greek equivalent was the Drachma and back in the days of Pythagoras, long before it became the Euro it was a bit smaller than a US cent. But the point is even when the coin had an intrinsic value, as in silver or gold, you can't make an omelet out of silver or gold.

     Calvin's own position was culled from the biblical texts. 'Earthly Riches' he'd concluded were nothing but smoke, the real do-do was living a life devoted to the goodness of god as explored in the scriptures. Nor did he approve of an element running through some of the texts that suggested usury was a cardinal sin, a combination of greed, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Not at all! If you lend money to someone, he claimed, and that someone made billions of doubloons on the basis of borrowing money from you it was only right that he send some of that profit your way. In short Calvin remains the Patron Saint of Modern Banking.

   In our current time as truth becomes a brand our species has achieved what may be the beginning of a new age. Future historians, if there are any, might look to the past see a Sumerian invoices on a clay tablet, find someone like Liu Hui who calculated a value for pi in the 3rd Century AD or Shiing-Shen Chern with a wonderful name, possibly Turin or the triumvirate of Hinton, LeCun and Bengio which sound like the stops on a subway train.

   On the day mathematics died as our new age progresses our species will slowly begin to relearn lessons of the enlightenment one of which was the sad consequence of concentrating knowledge into fewer and fewer hands. 

As with the Hula Hoop, this too shall pass

Frog on Siding

     You can try calling them empire building fascists addicted to CapEx, but if you want to mightily piss off Polling Bros, AI Bros, Tech Bros generally, and anyone who believes there's an everything machine that will produce the rapture of a singularity that leaves us people entirely liberated from the toil of chasing sparkly things all you have to do is say Stochastic Parrot and you will be rewarded by the sort of pissed-offed-ness that launches ships. Then just go ahead and add: "by the way, if a bridge collapses, it's not because it's a bridge that's gone rouge ." 

    Like all guilt ridden land grabbing empire builders a defensive paranoid reaction is the self appraising reflex. The question of course is "why guilt ridden." When you think you're perfect, a criticism hurts and the rule is to build a narrative based, not on well researched data that more likely demonstrates your imperfections, but on the sort of massive lie that's so impossible the world has to be flat and full of people who just don't understand and never will know what intelligence is.

    When I utter it comes from my mind. When you utter it comes from your mind. Language, as it is, includes not only words and impressions of words, it includes an impression of the mind behind the utterance. And there's not a lot you can do about that because that's part of the way we are as beings. An LLM is a probabilistic sieve that is able to gather and utilize data about you, your interests, your political inclinations, and to anything from your side of the exchange it guesses with great accuracy what word comes next.

   When it speaks it has a tone and accent that broadcasts familiar impression and word usage which go toward tickling those receptors inside your mind that suggest personage. 

Power defined by belonging

Spindle Tree

    The Age of Enlightenment, or the age of wig wearing, came to a slow realization that reason and looking good in stockings wasn't the answer to everything. It was followed by a return to the dream world of Romance and an age of what I will call idealism which conflicted with the essentially analytical mindset forged by the Enlightenment. The analytical, or science, was basically boring, but the analytical, or science, made money and those dark satanic mills quickly produced lots of money for guns and lawyers for those who mattered. The rest of us stood stuck in a world of change that wanted us to belong, but you know, what difference would it actually make. This way power was given unto he who could make us want to belong to the world that he, she or  it was trying to make. If we go back a bit, it wasn't hope and wanderlust that pulled us out of the trees and onto the savannah, it was our disappearing trees that forced change on us.   

The Ding an sich of Me and a definition of power.

Dogwood

   Let's try to look at it this way : knowing a pattern exists doesn't mean you know that you live inside a pattern, then when you ask why don't I know I live inside a pattern, the answer is branding and branding is language. Re-branding, changing the name and the description, does fuck all to the pattern you live inside. The thing you live inside is a thing in itself or a Ding an sich as our friend Immanuel Kant would have it. 

   A "thing in itself" was for Kant, the thing itself. The words used to describe a Ding an sich were just words. These words are not the thing itself.

  Let's look at a pattern that is you. The first thing, your pattern and my pattern are different. The issue is which one of us has a pattern that better reflects the Ding an sich. The answer is neither of us and both of us. As things in ourselves, we exist on a slope, then as we tumble together we begin to think we belong to a pattern, and this pattern is a shared pattern, it's not the ideal form of a thing in itself, it's a desire to belong.

   This desire to belong is the foundation of how I would understand power. 

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