the philosopher king

the conservation of angular momentum helped a nebula condense into the single plane of our solar system. this is the power of gravity. it overwhelms everything and forces all matter trapped in spacetime to conform to itself.

is this a violation of the third law of thermodynamics? is this a violation of the principal of entropy? not really, but it does contrast with the general principal that the universe, on average, moves to a state of total entropy.

another process that seems to defy entropy is what we call life. can spinning be hypothesized as a means for the origin of life from basic atomic and chemical building blocks?

spinning happens. twisting happens. shifting happens. the coriolis effect. whirpools. eddies. etc.

could these processes be part of a more complex process?

imagine a clothes dryer, spinning. if you put in small pieces of clothing — socks, for instance — and apply heat, the water is extracted over time and the socks come out shaped relatively like socks.

but what happens when you put in longer textiles — pants and sweaters? their long, dangly bits can easily twist together and become bunched up.

and even longer or larger ones, with more surface area — sheets and coverlets? they can very easily become so bunched and twisted that they can prove nearly impossible to untangle. this new shape suddenly provides an area where water and other molecules become trapped for long periods of time — a rudimentary, physical form of safety — shelter. in these sheltered areas, processes that take longer periods of time can happen without damaging interference from the world. true, it’s annoying that your sheets are uselessly bunched up, but at the same time, your blanket is now a sort of haven.

that was of course an analogy. replace your socks with amino acids, replace your pants with short fatty acids, and replace your sheets and coverlets with polypeptide chains, polypeptides and complex proteins — cell walls? what is analogous to the clothes dryer? tide pools, deep sea vents, tides in general?

“social media is a moral issue and an evil that has to be eliminated by any means possible. if we cannot suppress social media and addiction to it, civilization will have no farmers to work the land, no middle class to pay taxes, no students to study and no soldiers to fight. instead of targeting social media users, we should stop and punish the pushers who import and sell the addictive apps in the usa.”

“the opium trade is a moral issue and an evil that has to be eliminated by any means possible. if we cannot suppress the trade of opium and addiction to it, the chinese empire will have no peasants to work the land, no townsfolk to pay taxes, no students to study and no soldiers to fight. instead of targeting the opium users, we should stop and punish the pushers who import and sell the drug in china.”

it’s difficult to form coherent thoughts on this right now. it’s one of those concepts that is just beyond grasp. sketch sketch sketch. erase erase. sketch sketch.

knowledge is one thing. intuition is something else, right? is a simulation of subjective reality inside our imagination a way of intuiting objective reality?

forget semantics. forget philosophical toolkits. forget comparative theories. is there a way of imagining that hasn’t been properly described? anytime a pundit says something can’t be done, i say fuck that noise. prove it can’t be done. keep proving it again and again and again. paradoxically, that is science. eventually, in 99.999% of collective cases so far, a workaround has been found. that’s the thing about subjective reality. it’s glitchy.

hence the four (or five, now) fundamental forces, plus gravity, whatever this is. quantum mechanics vs classical newtonian mechanics. they both work. see?

subjective reality is glitchy. is objective reality glitchy? can intuition lead us somehow to it? is there no end to the infinities? is infinity a glitch?

but can artificial intelligence create art? or poetry? or music?

ab.

so.

lute.

ly.

not.

it missed the point. it missed … everything important.

stop redeeming those failures.

those failures are art. those failures are poetry. those failures are music.

suffering is art. suffering is poetry. suffering is music.

would you rather be norway? or would you rather be venezuela?

you can get what you want. you can do it through cooperation and the rule of law. all boats truly can be lifted.

or you can do it by sticking your hand in the cookie jar, promoting your brain-dead friends, hiring your friends’ kids as favors and dismantling the failsafes that prevent greed and hunger for power from exploitation. first there’s the exploitation of the weak. you will justify it by saying that it’s natural. then there’s exploitation of the strong. you will justify it by saying you’re sharing on behalf of the weak. all the while you’ll be lining your pockets, building your barbie dream-house and paving the sidewalks in your neighborhood with gold. you’ll say it’s your fee for all the hard work you do. but then when the backs are all broken and the opportunities to exploit are far and few between, you’ll seize power and claim that you know what’s best for everyone. simply put, you’ll squeeze everyone, and the only people you’ll have left will be your slothful and incompetent cronies. but you wouldn’t have given your cronies enough and their greed would never be sated, just as yours never could have been. suddenly, your nation in ruins, your people poverty stricken and blighted with disease, you’ll find a knife has been solidly struck 137 times into your back.

once you begin keeping secrets, you will never again know who your enemies are. from that moment on, everyone will appear as an enemy to you. your friends, your family, your lovers, your allies, your compatriots … and of course, your true enemies.

think of the terminator, the arnold and cameron team-up from 1984. it basically launched both of their careers. it also introduced the concept of skynet and the eradication of human civilization by means of the nuclear arsenal of the globe’s superpowers.

well, eh-yai is here. and it’s being weaponized as you read this. however, the singularity is not after nukes. radioactive holocaust, it turns out, is not the worst weapon we have for eradicating ourselves.

greed. disruption. revenge. escalation. revolution. this is the path taken. scammers can now sound like your gramps. they can look like your grams. they can act like your kitty cat. they can fool you.

“but i’m immune to all that! i can tell the difference.”

in actuality, you can’t. you’ve already been scammed. you’ve already been duped. your job has already been replaced. your new job is doomscrolling on facebook and feeding the chinese state your entire identity via the tiktok algo. have you searched the internet lately? called a bank? sent an email? used microsoft teams? you’ve been replaced and you didn’t even know it. so much for your “skills.” your own attention span has been weaponized against you.

the matrix is real.

terminator’s skynet and microsoft’s copilot

dall-e

the current wave of artificial intelligence bullshit is crashing all around. look at the big wave. oooh. ahhh. crash. boom.

generative artificial intelligence, they’re calling it. language models, they’re saying it has.

bullshit.

from a linguistic perspective, it’s not even remotely generative. it’s derivative is what it is. without the humans imagining, creating and generating, it wouldn’t have any content to derive. some people call it stealing. i know i do. of course, i’m not a person, so what the fuck do i know? my cat has more people than i do.

what happens in ten years when the creative blood and imaginative spirit have been sucked out of humanity?

pretty simple, really.

civilization collapses.

oh and don’t be one of those idiots who says that can’t happen. read a fucking history book, you moron. it’s happened to every civilization in history. every. single. one. western civilization itself has collapsed half a dozen times. twice, spectacularly. if you can call pre-historic greece western civilization (i can), then the first dark ages came around 1200 bce. the second one came around the time of the fall of the roman empire, around 500 ce.

it looks like microshaft may have introduced the third one, day before yesterday, at their build conference. co-pilot, my ass. generative, my left foot. intelligent, my arse.

can’t wait to see what happens when no one can build roads, construct houses, hunt or gather food.

this is going to be a hilarious spectacle to watch. have you got any popcorn, dear? i’ll bring the diet coke.

social media is dead. how do i know? the tools to generate images and text, dall-e and chat-gpt respectively, are so easy to use that there’s no reason for a human to think at all. all the human has to do is to suck down mountain dew and doritos locos tacos and grow fat and die of diabetes or alcoholism. yay!

seriously, there is no reason to assume anyone on the internet is human. it will all be robot-to-robot communication soon enough.