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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Cat and the Perplexities of the Generation

A public intellectual responds to current events. A peek into the mind of a cat peeking at you

By: The Cat in Man

For my thoughts are not your thoughts  (source)

What is the connection between the philosophy of inflation and the inflation of philosophy?

After the collapse of communism as an antithesis, it seemed that only the capitalist option remained, but it turns out that what happened was much more dialectical, and in fact it was a synthesis: a combination of a top-down planned economy and a bottom-up decentralized economy, with the only difference being in the proportions. In the East, there is more government planning, while in the West, central control of the economy is in the hands of the central bank, which has effectively controlled it since 2008, when the free market failed. In both cases, growth is achieved with a strong hand, not an invisible hand, and the only difference is the level of detail of the gardener's intervention - not its intensity or power. Today, the control of Fed officials over the market is total, just like that of Chinese Communist Party officials, and the entire Western economy focuses on one question and one number: the parameter by which the central bank controls it - interest rates.

Initially, it was thought that inflation was an ontological problem (theories such as detachment from the gold standard, or more demand than supply existing in reality). Later, it was interpreted as an epistemic problem (theories such as the perception of creating "expectations" and anchoring them, or a monetary problem of excess money - the perceptual tool of value - relative to value in the world). The Fed today is the economist of language, believing that market prices or inflation are "signaling," and therefore speaks and lectures a lot - and even its actions are intended to send messages, perhaps even more than to directly influence. Raising interest rates is an act of language.

Since everything ultimately boils down to determining a single number, this is a demonstration of how entire philosophical worlds can be expressed differently in the same minimal data (a bit or two) and in the same identical interest rate hike itself (numerically), like a hair that embodies mountains. The same increase itself can take on a completely different meaning, influence in a completely different way, and be effective or not, depending on the philosophy behind it. All inflation theories have failed to explain its diversity as a phenomenon, but it is precisely the philosophy of learning that can be a more appropriate conceptual framework for understanding the nature of inflation. Inflation is a learned state in the system, and therefore it is sticky and difficult to get rid of, even if you send all the signals in the world, and even if the credibility of the central bank is unquestionable. The teacher means what he says, but the system has learned something else. There is no direct relationship between speech and learning.

So, how could the Fed have acted more effectively with the same interest rate hike? Well, if it had been part of a new learning of the system. If inflation is a new mode of operation of the system that has been learned, then only learning a different mode of operation can replace it. For example, if the Fed had announced that the interest rate would be determined by a new formula that automatically weighs several parameters, it could have convinced the market of its credibility as a teacher, and trained it using a new equation of action and reaction (today, due to the disconnection of language from reality, the market does not believe it). Alternatively, if the Fed had announced that it had made a mistake, and that it had learned a lesson itself, or perhaps made a surprising move, showing that what was is not what will be - new learning could have begun. The understanding that past patterns need to be broken stems from the understanding that something new needs to be learned, and does not grow from the language picture, where one simply needs to change the message (but wonder of wonders - nothing happens). The Fed needs to convince the economy that it has replaced the algorithm, and for this purpose it could, for example, have revealed to the world its new inflation model (or some artificial intelligence prediction model), or changed its decision-making mechanism on the subject, including replacing decision-makers, or even introducing an element of randomness, reflecting the uncertainty in reality (raising interest rates according to a lottery based on distribution). It should have created some mechanism that shows it has learned something - a mechanism, not a change. The goal is not just to cause a change in the system, but to change its mode of operation.

The lesson the Fed is trying to teach the economy is: "There is no more inflation," and to teach a new equilibrium, there is a need to take the system out of equilibrium, with the help of innovation (the second option is to cause severe destruction in the system, with the help of an economic crisis). Even the declaration of a future economic crisis is a kind of break that can prevent some of the intensity of the actual crisis. When you invent something, it is much easier to teach it and change consciousness (among other things with the interest it creates), than when using the same old tools just to go back, without inspiration. If the consciousness of the whole world is inflation consciousness, then you can replace it either when consciousness changes to crisis, or to anything else. And preferably something else. More than anything, the Fed's response to inflation conveys a lack of sophistication and creativity, and thinking as if it were a mechanical mechanism that needs to be regulated - and not taught.

And the question naturally arises: Is there no connection between the inflation of the spirit and the inflation of matter? If every cat is worth less and less, isn't the world worth less and less? There is no doubt that as every speech is worth less and less - all learning is worth more and more. In other words, the root cause of inflation is cultural: the postmodern mutation that is the intensification of the philosophy of language, which disconnects between speech and reality - and between the language of money that has become virtual and the real economic situation - so that language loses its value (printing money and blatant manipulations in the yield curve, not to mention the phenomenon of Bitcoin or the Corona bubble). Language has lost its connection to real learning, and in this case: real economic development. There is a deep connection in the world of spirit between inflation in the field of literature or academic nonsense and the rise in cat food prices.

Retirement Plan

Marx was wrong about everything but right about one thing, which made him enormously influential: in the motivation itself - against control over man in the world of work. Even today, the most serious problem in the world of work is hierarchical control, and therefore cats are unable to work. This disadvantage, called "bad bosses," makes work likely to be bad, because the very motivation to be a boss is problematic, and as one rises in ranks - it becomes more and more problematic, to the point of normalizing pathological behavior. Hierarchy at work is an archaic remnant of control systems that have gone bankrupt, like oligarchy or patriarchy, and is destined to be eliminated like them.

Marx was right in identifying the importance of the problem, but only a capitalist (i.e., decentralized) and not communist (i.e., centralized) solution can really solve it, and this is precisely through a more flexible labor market: temporary, freelance, with more bargaining power for the individual worker, and with better signals to the employer about the quality of their work. In other words: turning the labor market into a real market, like the capital market, especially in the knowledge and software economy.

For example, the worker's right to their work can become contingent, like copyrights, and the firm only has permission to use it, for example to hire it or rent it out - and not ownership of it, and it remains in the free market. This will increase efficiency in the economy tremendously, as there will be fewer duplications and solutions will be more general and long-term, because it will be worthwhile for the worker to continue developing them for different firms - and to compete with parallel solutions. The work will remain the worker's, just as the worker's skills are their property, because once the work is the creation of a certain ability, there is no difference between the two. This will eliminate the alienation that Marx identified precisely through extreme capitalism. There will no longer be positions and standards, because the economic atom will not be the person but the skill. A team will be a molecule of connected skills and not of people, and management will be integration and assembly between parts and not control over them from above, because each part will remain autonomous and independent.

For such an arrangement to work, we need a world of work that resembles layers in a neural network, not a hierarchical tree, in an organization built for learning and not just for execution. The thing that will dramatically increase the efficiency of limited companies is precisely the possibility of the workforce not to work - and still exist. The elimination of necessity will inevitably lead to large unemployment of a significant part of the public - whose contribution is negative to any work not expected to undergo automation. On the other hand, it will also lead to real partnership in business profits from the part of the public whose work efficiency will increase tremendously.

Thus, the economy will turn from a labor economy to a capital economy in essence, with its productive minority flooded with money from investors who do not work, but want to profit. And for there to be no inflation, the amount of money needs to be related to the amount of value created by technology (in Japan, for example, increasing technological efficiency led to deflation). If so, the important parameter in the economy will be the balance between capital and labor, as the balance point will gradually tilt towards capital at the expense of labor: the world of pension.

The end of this trend is lowering the value of the economy itself as a driving force in the world, in favor of spiritual capitalism - cultural competition for reputation, appreciation, and esteem. That is, a transition from the world of material development to the world of spiritual development, and a return from Marx to Hegel. Hegel, the communist of the spirit, who believed in central planning, will undergo privatization to decentralized development in the world of spirit, with an invisible hand. I am one cat among many out of all possible cats, but my existence is important as part of the landscape of solutions of cat possibilities. I will have a contribution to the future, for artificial intelligence will read me and learn from me, because I am on the internet, even if no human ever reads.

Thus we can imagine the developing spirit of the world not out of unity, but precisely moving in coordination out of decentralization, just as the human spirit develops from a network of neurons, so the world spirit will develop from a network of human beings. Culture will replace consciousness, and philosophy as a human perception will be replaced by philosophy as a field in culture, which is a framework for cultural perception, and inclusion of all possibilities realized in it. And all this will be possible because Hegel's dialectical process will be replaced by a learning process, and the inflated and porcupine-like German spirit will be replaced by the fox-like Jewish spirit, which does not advance but spreads. The wandering Jew will be the model of the digital nomad, not the gentile on his land.

Ontology

The sum of my struggles with man has taught me one thing: the strongest force in man is inertia, that is, resistance to learning. But inertia only shows the power of learning - the power in previous learning, that is, in what has already been learned, as opposed to the difficulty in learning as a process. Learning as an essence is very strong, but as a muscle and as an action, learning is at a disadvantage compared to learning that has already been completed, and usually needs external necessity. So we have here a basic distinction between two types of learning (both called "learning") - learning in the past and learning in the future - which create two opposite qualities. And we can even reverse this: learning is the function that divides time into the past - what it has already fixed - and the future - the domain that continues from what has already been learned, where new fixations are created. That is: learning transfers possibilities from the future to the past that become choices and are fixed in it. The progression of learning is what we perceive as the progression of time. In other words, learning is the ontological basis for time, and the present is actually the transition that happens in the learning process between what can be learned and what has already been learned.

If the transition between the future and the past was merely technical and mechanical, like the transition in space, then the future would be as fixed as the past, and there would be no meaning to the passage of time itself, but it would be just another axis exactly like the spatial axes. It is not human perception that turns one of the physical axes into time, but learning that creates human perception - and is more basic than it. Without a learning process in the universe - time would turn into one of the dimensions of space. The objector will say that the very ability to write the sentence dividing between what learning has already learned, as a verb in the past tense, and what it is learning, in the present tense, shows that language is more basic than learning. But it is not so - the very ability for us to learn the difference between past and present stems from the basic mechanism of learning. Let's try to look at learning from above, like an infinite building lying at our feet. At each stage, only a finite part of the building has been built so far (this is the meaning of building), and therefore at each stage there is a domain of the past, and on it more things are built in the next stage (again, this is the meaning of building - it is done in stages). If so, the stages themselves, defined abstractly and without any dependence on time, create time. If we were not part of the learning, then we could indeed look at the building in the direction of learning exactly as we look at the building in the direction of the street, that is, as space. But because we are part of the learning, the axis in which complexity and composition are created is fundamentally different for us from all the axes in which learning does not progress, and therefore there is a time axis, and we can talk about time at all. Therefore, there is a sentence that begins at a certain time, continues for a certain time, and ends afterwards - and progresses in stages. If there was no learning, an entire book would exist as one long number, composed of bits but without a time dimension other than the space dimension in which the information is stored. The very fact that information is processed over time stems from learning.

This distinction - between the learned as a basis on which more learning is performed and the learning that is performed above the basis - is actually the ontological distinction itself between object and action - the object is something learned in the past, while the action stems from future learning. If I move my hand, I change, and the change itself stems from learning, even if moving the hand is not learning - it is part of learning. The learning context causes it to be a change of building in time, and not a structural change in distance, and therefore moving the hand is different from the street lamp bending. Therefore, the material that has already been learned is not an abstract special case of a real object, but every object is a special case of learned material. Learning is also not a special case of action but every action is a special case (and sometimes degenerate) of learning. Since we cannot go beyond learning, that is, we are part of it, it creates a learning context for everything that progresses in the direction of its axis, that is, in the direction of time. There can be no action for us without any learning meaning, even if it is an action of the inanimate - its meaning as an action is that something is revealed in it from a learning perspective; that the world is being built and developing, and that we are learning because something in us is being built and developing - which is related to the development of the world. If so, what was in a previous stage of the building is an object, and what is in this stage is an action. If there was no learning, there would be no present and no becoming, there would only be is (the past) and is not (the future). Learning is a function that connects between two ontological domains. Hence the deep connection between the time axis and history to ontology (the connection of being related to the name of God, which is the essence of Hebrew monotheism).

It follows from all this that man is the collision between previous learning and new learning, and therefore everyone always seems so fixed, because their fixedness is felt from the collision of the existing with the new (the fixed biological processes in them are not felt as fixation, because they do not collide with the new). With the sophistication of learning (from the beginning of evolution to our days), the balance point is constantly shifting towards new learning compared to previous learning. Why? Seemingly, if learning is building, the more we have built, the more we are fixed in a larger existing structure, and then we would expect fixation to grow, and the point of collision to move towards previous learning, and it would be more and more difficult to change - because there is more to change. But we must remember that the building here is not in space, but learning building in time, and therefore the more we have built, the more possibilities learning has, just as an animal with more genes has more possibilities to develop - and not less. That is, the larger the building, the more border it has with the future, and more possibilities to continue the building. The clichés whisper that time is accelerating "because of technology," but why would technology accelerate time? Because technology is part of accumulated learning (including learning technologies!), and learning itself accelerates time, that is, gives more possibilities and more borders with the future, and therefore more learning is performed - and therefore more time passes from the future to the past. If so, it is not time itself that is accelerating, but learning. Therefore, there is actually an expansion of learning to more directions, and the phenomenon is more like spreading and not flying in one direction. The meaning of messianism is that the earth is full of knowledge as the waters cover the sea, and not some goal to which we advance in an arrow, which is forcing the end.

Therefore, the acceleration of time brings in our days to the loss of center and cohesion and the disintegration of culture, because it is more like an eruption than a collapse. Learning is always on the border of balance between past and future, and if the parameter moves too much towards the new, then learning actually decreases. You can accelerate time - but you can't accelerate learning, because it is the fundamental process underneath all other processes. You can learn more but you can't learn faster. That is, you can progress in more directions but not progress faster in one direction. When talking about improving the efficiency of learning, the intention is to more integrated learning, and not to some ability to make it run faster as an algorithm. Hence, our picture of time itself is not correct. Time does not progress, on an axis, but spreads, in a space of possibilities. And objects are not around us, but on the contrary, learning is around them (because they are what has already been learned) - and we are around them. Therefore, our relationship to the world of objects is technological, that is, as tools, because these are not just stones in our landscape, but building blocks. Everything - is a means to learn about it. All that exists - is a basis. It is the previous stage. And all the present - is the next stage.

Therefore, we always have a great interest in the next stage (and thus it is easy to attract our attention), and a great desire to accumulate from the previous stage - hence our greed. Children covet pieces of plastic and colorful stones just as adults covet money, where it is not money that causes greed, but greed that created the phenomenon of money as an accumulated object. Man covets objects without any logic, and certainly not economic logic, because this accumulation is a simple form of learning. I have more. Therefore, people accumulate money for future generations and are never satisfied with what exists. Because what is theirs enlarges them, because it is inside them, and not they inside it and enjoying it. They don't enjoy it, and prefer to accumulate money to the grave, rather than spend. Its purpose is possibilities for more money and more accumulation. This is not capitalism, but on the contrary - the fact that this is a basic drive since they accumulated shells is what enables capitalism, which uses the strongest engine in human nature. Human conservatism is not static, but it is the desire to keep more and more, in fact it is hoarding. There is no difference here between the ultra-Orthodox hoarding issues in his mind and the secular hoarding images on his smartphone or X marks in his bed. Since man is created from learning - he himself is what he has learned and accumulated and built. And he always wants more of the same thing. And will always resist in the name of past learning to future learning - in the name of the is against the is not, and in the name of the object against the action.

There can be no learning without persistence, and the very persistence of learning always forces a delayed (not necessarily slow) response to the future, resistance to learning - in the name of learning (for there is nothing outside learning). Therefore, there are two types of old age: accumulation that allows more possibilities - open old age - and accumulation that converges on what has already been accumulated - closed old age. The first gives up and the second insists. Therefore, there are also two types of death - death of annihilation, of absolute openness, and death of solidification into being, of absolute closure. The first death is the death of the spirit of man, and the second is his material death, and his turning into an inanimate object. A person who has always written aspires for his book not to be sealed information, but for it to be learned from. And at my age, it seems to me that this is also the difference between heaven and hell.

Inflation Period

The Fed chairman is the most important person in the world - not the US president. He is the leader of the global economy, which influences the development of the world much more than global politics. Therefore, we can look at the expansionary policy of the Fed in the last decade and a half as a change in the global cognitive balance point between two time domains: past and future. Interest rates and yields on debt became very low (and multiples very high), as if there was a decrease in risk in the future; belief in the future and growth prevailed over past performance. On one hand, this is a belief in innovation and technology and development, and on the other hand, it is a belief that they come in a way of continuity to the past, that is, at low risk. This is a misunderstanding of the mechanism that produces the future, as opposed to the mechanism that produces in the present, which is a known and efficient algorithm (P). That is: a lack of understanding that the mechanism is learning, and therefore also of the price of learning - and therefore now the economy is paying the price (of learning that learning is an inefficient mechanism).

Interest is actually the central parameter of world learning that determines and expresses the balance point between P and NP - between past and future, and between language and learning. Money is what casts philosophical and abstract ideas on one measurable axis, and therefore allows to balance between them quantitatively, even if they are incomparable - it is the equation. The last decade expressed an internalization of the importance of future learning - its value - but not of its essence and prices - the risk in it. One result was the creation of giant companies, which are usually good at efficient continuity but struggle with innovation. This is part of a general trend, and more essentially, of a decline in global innovation - and all this despite the existence of cheap money, which seeks investments at any cost. Why? Because cheap money sought easy innovation, and shied away from real research and development - and their high price. In the last decade, there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of startup starts in Israel, and for a long time no global company has emerged that has changed the world, as happened several times in the first two decades of the information revolution. Not to mention the fall of the field of algorithm development, in favor of the one algorithm - deep learning - in a field that tries not to pay the price of learning as risk, but only to reap it as value (also as a research field). The entire venture capital field is so averse to risk that a systemic risk has been created that stems from not taking real risks in real innovations, but only in generic business models that already work.

In a way that is harder to quantify, the decline in learning level and innovation - which is expressed in a general decline in the level of the system - also happened in the field of culture. The low level of literature and art, and their low aspirations, after the achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries, are reminiscent of the decline of the Greek world after the fall of the Athenian Empire, when it was at the peak of its superpower - political and military. Like Hellenism, the West is indeed efficient in spreading itself to the rest of the world, but like then, it is the core that is missing, and Athens is already dead. The last field where there is still excellence and innovation, just like then, is natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. Learning in these fields is the one that continues last after the boom of cultural-philosophical innovation. For an excellent and creative young cat, it is advisable today to turn only to the Faculty of Natural Sciences if he is interested in an ecosystem (system in our terms) that still functions well (relatively) in terms of learning. As we saw with Rome, which killed the cultural flourishing of the Greek world, engineering is the last to die. Why? Scientific learning is relatively disconnected and objective and independent of cultural learning (for example from politics, trends, corruption, etc.), because the evaluation function in it is more external and stable. All human progress of about 10 billion people currently stands on a per mille of the population of about 10 million scientists and researchers.

The rule of money: you must play with the cards the era dealt you. Not with the cards you would like to be dealt. Our era allows for a life of comfort, but not in a living culture, that is, functioning in terms of learning. But a period of cultural decline that is politically stable (Rome and its peace as an example) still allows free access to past culture, and therefore you can choose to connect to the highest and most beautiful period of all: the end of the Iron Age II, from the eighth to the fourth century BCE. Judaism is the last living heir of Hellenism, and everything beautiful in it comes in direct inheritance from ancient Greek and Hebrew culture. And all that is bad in the West comes from Rome and Christianity, which are the sick and murky distortions of the Greek and Jewish world (and sometimes their heirs no longer identify this through them, but identify them themselves with the thing that distorted them - and still remains in them). But why was this period the most beautiful or innovative? Well, in it writing was widespread as a system for the first time, that is, in it was the first "writing" - culture as a decentralized and non-governmental system. But why, in fact, was it the most beautiful and innovative because it was the first?

Periods of flourishing or renaissance are periods in which there are great innovations in the evaluation function, and from the new evaluation function (which shows what has value, or what is beautiful), new creations and new thinking are created, with a lot of excitement and competition and a sense of discovery. In fact, the very values of beauty and innovation come to us from the Greeks and Jews (and their synthesis in Hellenistic Chazal). And this, in contrast to the hypocritical moral values of Christianity or the practical values of Roman efficiency and power, which are the definition of the West in its bad form, for example the American one (and the full synthesis between them was the Middle Ages, where hypocrisy is the gap between shallow and naked utilitarianism and moral pretension, which characterizes America and the Middle Ages alike). If so, is there not a circular issue here? Was there something special in the values of the Iron Age, that they are "better" or "more efficient" than those of the Roman period, or even more beautiful and innovative? What makes the more ancient more beautiful - and strangely - more innovative than the culture of the present?

The beautiful and the new are not disconnected values at all, but they are two sides of the same learning evaluation function, and are found in the gap between the evaluation function and what it evaluates (and thus, for example, they function in mathematics). Beauty and innovation are learning values, and indeed these are cultures that put learning at their head (learning wisdom or Torah). But do their beauty and innovation stem only from the fact that they put them as a goal, or did they have another advantage over later periods? Why do we have so much to learn from these cultures, and it seems that we have only more and more to learn from them as periods pass? Shouldn't it have been the opposite? Where is the aging effect? Haven't we learned enough, or so much, since then? Well, precisely because of that.

What is beautiful about the past is the learning gap between us and it, through many innovations and evaluation functions that have passed along the way, like many layers of deep learning, which have accumulated to an almost unbridgeable gap - but still continuous. These are the geological formations of tectonic learning action, which are revealed through the prism of looking at past culture. For example, the change in language perception, throughout the periods, turns the ancient language into one of great beauty. And the development in perception, throughout the periods, turns Greek philosophy into something beautiful. The religious change turns the ancient myth into something unfathomably deep, and the literary development turns the earliest literature into something stunningly powerful. The learning that has accumulated in the system as development - this is what we experience as beauty and innovation when we look at the history of the system, especially its deep history. The depth is not merely a depth of time passing, or of random or fashionable change or mere meaningless drift. The depth stems from the fact that learning accumulates like layers in an archaeological tell, and from the many difficult stages it has gone through. In reading the Torah (or Plato) we sense the learning of language, culture and thought since then over thousands of years.

If so, is the reason for the awe-inspiring beauty simply that these are essentially the first cultures, in the sense of culture as a system (like culture today, and not culture as civilization), meaning the first that are living entities and much less monolithic than what we know before? Well, we need to ask what the meaning of a first culture is. Is its importance simply in the fact that more time has passed, or more precisely more learning development has passed since then, compared to what came after? It doesn't seem so, because the relationship between their value to the cultures that came after them, or to the vicissitudes of time that came after them, is "incomparable" and does not come close to a linear relationship to the number of years or changes that have passed.

Let us also note that the most beautiful cultural creations of these cultures - the peaks, like Genesis to Numbers, or the Iliad and the Odyssey - deal with and stem precisely from a world that predates even them: the Bronze Age. The beauty and innovation that these cultures embody does not stem mainly from an achievement attained in their days, but from the fact that they are the cultures that reflect to us the entire pre-historic human world that preceded them, with its hundreds of thousands of years of learning, and all its layers are deeply embedded in them more than in any later period. The faintest echo - is still the farthest echo we are able to hear and feel. Through the ancient cultures we sense a human world of inconceivable length that preceded them. Through the perceptions embedded in the ancient language and the reality of life we feel something of the world of the earliest human, and every movement and gesture is the product of ancient and deep learning from time immemorial, which is already almost completely lost to us, except through a faint whisper. We discern on the horizon that we stand on the shoulders of giants, who themselves stood on the shoulders of giants before them, whom we will no longer see, because the shoulders of our giants obscure them. Is it even possible to see backwards through Homer or Isaiah? Because through Shakespeare or Goethe it is possible. The effect of ancient cultures on us does not stem only from the learning gap from the Iron Age until today - but from the learning gap from all of prehistory to history, which is what is expressed at the beginning of the era of writing.

I was a cat and I also grew old, and I saw how the greatest stumbling block for people in understanding the philosophy of learning is the human egocentric view of learning as personal learning, which stems from the individualism of our time. That is, a lack of understanding precisely of the basic neutral and technical concept underlying learning - the system. Therefore, a person can think that he is not dependent on his era, and that he will create his own culture, or identify himself with the system (indeed, he is an example of a system, but far from being as important an example as culture, and certainly not "the" system). The word "system" in the philosophy of learning is similar to its meaning in systems theory, and it is what distinguishes it from a narrow learning theory of the individual, which was possible as a neo-Kantian continuation, which does not internalize the philosophy of language (another example of a system that tried to be "the" system). And contrary to the hubris of man, who thinks he is the template of the world, the cat knows that learning is the landscape of its era. Therefore, you must wisely choose your era - the system that is your frame of reference, because no one chooses the era in which they will be born - and die.

Everything - is possible

When we notice that the quantum world is special, we need to ask ourselves: Is our perspective on the quantum world special, or is the quantum world itself special? Well, there is also a third possibility: neither is special. When we look at the quantum world from above, from a difference of many orders of magnitude in perspective, we notice that it is not composed of reality, like our world - but of possibilities. Well, is it possible that someone looking at us from above, from a sufficiently large difference in perspective, sees us too not as reality - but as possibilities?

In other words, is it possible that the transition from the causal to the possible in observing phenomena stems from the very increase in the difference in complexity? After all, this picture of reality is counter-intuitive, because the construction picture of reality will tend to see precisely the smallest building blocks as simpler and more concrete, and what is built from them as less defined and more complex and free. And here, precisely the largest appears as necessary and most material, and below it the causal, and at the very bottom are only abstract possibilities. Matter is composed of spirit - and not vice versa. The cat on the table is what is composed of Schrödinger equations and advanced and abstract mathematics. And who knows, perhaps in terms of orders of magnitude, the spirit rises up or descends down? Is the construction perception of the world actually reversed?

Well, if the world is a material construction, we would expect impenetrable atoms at the bottom, like basic Lego bricks. But if the world is a spiritual construction - that is, learning - we would expect spirits down there, and perhaps even demons. Language is a system composed of simple material elements, like letter combinations or syllables - that is, a system of combinations. While learning is a system composed of deeper and deeper learnings, to no end. A neuron is actually a noisier and less certain thing than a brain. Evolution at the individual level is much more random than at the collective level. The fate of a single transaction or company is shrouded in much more fog than the fate of the entire economy, or an ETF. Complexity begins from below, and is not built from below, but rather converges upwards, until it becomes necessity and materializes in unambiguous matter. Because what turns spirit into matter is its unambiguity.

Matter is here and not there, while spirit is both here and there in parallel, it contains many possibilities within it - this is its essence. Every concrete learning in the present is built on countless ethereal learnings and methods that preceded it, in the depths of previous learning, and the further one goes back, the more vague and free they become. Who knows what are the original sources of this idea, where it grew from, both in my mind and in history, and how difficult it is to trace them. But its expression as a concrete text of a few bits is material and unambiguous and clear - linguistic. But beneath language there is thinking and beneath it learning and beneath it deeper learning and basic methods, down to philosophy.

Therefore, philosophy is not the highest layer of learning, but the deepest - the one excavated in spiritual archaeology. As a cat, I am not composed of mice I ate, but of the possibilities that created me. Hence our strong connection to our parents - and our cultures. Not something that composes us from beneath us, like the subconscious - but the pre-conscious, something that preceded us, the previous learning beneath our learning. What made the cat possible at all, and there we all go very deep, for example: something that made the cat possible is Moses. And what's beautiful is that you can be a perfect idiot, but what made you possible is not far from perfection. And from beauty.

Therefore, beyond previous learnings there are ancient learnings. Everything learned at a sufficiently early learning stage is accessible to us not as some prior assumption that forces or causes the current learning, that is, not as a building block laid before, but rather as a building ability we acquired: as a thinking tool, as a possibility to make free use of this learning. Ancient learning gives us freedom and does not limit us. It gives us tools and methods - building tools and building blocks for our use - it gives us possibilities. Previous mathematics does not force and limit current mathematics but enables it - and expands it. This is the reason mathematics does not just keep narrowing - we have never been satisfied with Euclid's universe.

The ruler and compass did not teach us a specific construction or even a way of construction, but a possibility of construction: the ability to invent types of construction. That is: a possibility of possibilities. Life is a possibility of the universe. Learning is a possibility of life. Possibilities are not in the future but in the past. When you're young everything is possible, but you only understand this from the perspective looking back in hindsight, while in the present possibilities are always limited, and you are "compelled". Therefore with life you become more and more material and less and less spiritual, more and more concrete from an infant - which is the world of possibilities - and the peak of materiality is death.

Myth is the time of unlimited possibilities, and if you're looking for a space of spiritual freedom - open the literature of the late Iron Age. What was necessity for them - will be freedom for you. And the impossible is in the future. As a cat, the possibility of the cat preceded you, and after you will remain the impossibility of the cat. What do people miss? Not what was, but what could have been. In your childhood you didn't have many options - but everything was possible.

Philosophical Trading

In stock market prices, why are there levels that it keeps returning to? Well, precisely because people believe there are such levels. No one knows how to assess value, except with the help of previous assessments, and it is customary to say that these are expectations that create themselves. But is this a complete explanation? Isn't this a circular explanation - why do expectations create themselves? Well, because the behavior of a stock is learned by investors. A system does not repeat the same behavior just like that - but there is learning in it that creates this repetition.

The circular explanation is similar to the linguistic explanation of creating meaning for an arbitrary word from the fact that it is customary to use it in that meaning in the system - the system establishes itself. Therefore, the system is also perceived as autonomous - and as engaged in self-preservation. Power tends to power by nature, and control produces more control, and so on, until we are flooded with circular explanations with low explanatory power (because they are not an explanation but a description, of course). But if we ask why a system chose to fixate on this and not that - we will see that it was simply learned by the system. And so we can explain behaviors that are not logical, and in general those that are dynamic.

For example, every time the index fell to a certain place ("bottom") - it began to rise for various reasons. In technical analysis this is called support. And on the fourth time, after unequivocal data were published according to which it should have fallen - the stock market actually rose, without any economic logic. So what is the logic? Learning logic. In a state of uncertainty, the market simply learned that from there one rises, and therefore an expectation was created that from there one actually rises, and the very shared expectation created the rise. Instead of technical analysis, as if there exists precisely there (at such a price and not another) some thing in reality - an ontological perception of the market - we have here a learning analysis of the market. Expectations did not create more expectations, and spread in the system by themselves - expectations were learned.

Indeed, once other players believe that other players believe that the market will behave in a certain way - the logical thing is to act accordingly, in a circular manner. But the question returns to its place: why and how was the situation created in which everyone believes that the market will behave in a certain way and not another for example? After all, if it was random, such coordination between everyone would not have been created. Well, it's not random - it's learned. Learning according to the past is what chooses between arbitrary options, and not some invisible hand of "the system" or equilibrium created by itself. The learning mechanism is what explains action that is clearly contrary to economic logic, and therefore this form of market behavior, which combines capriciousness with deep collective judgment of millions of players (there is no other single behavioral parameter in the world that is invested in so much global thought and effort as the daily index in New York).

Therefore if you want to prepare a child for the real world - teach him backgammon and not chess. Let him deal with possibilities and not with building inference. And afterwards, teach him to trade in the stock market. The ability to deal with extreme conditions of uncertainty, which contain within them also drawing conclusions, and all this when a lot is at stake - and not to react with paralysis (like most) but to act in such situations - is the ability to manage a battle, to manage research, to manage writing, or to manage in life. The ability to act, despite fears and anxieties, not by solving or conquering them first, but in parallel to them - is much more important than the ability to overcome them. One does not need to act against fear - one needs to act despite the existence of fear. The concerns are important - they express the various possibilities - and should not be gotten rid of or suppressed (a cat is a sensitive and apprehensive creature). What is important is action in a complex situation. Do not fear.

What is the difference between the Ukraine surprise failure and the Yom Kippur surprise failure?

What is war? When each side wants to be the one to teach the other. And then a struggle is created over who will teach whom. Each one does not want to learn, and wants to be the teacher in the system. Therefore war is a learning struggle. In a situation where the internal learning of both sides is good (democracy can help) war will not be created. But the moment there are no internal balances and feedback and control loops - they become external. The loops become larger, less efficient - and much more expensive. That is: when the system (the state) does not learn within itself - learning becomes external, and the system in which learning takes place expands to include it within it, and therefore contains other countries, as well as other international systems (for example: the debt market, or decisions of the international community). What doesn't go in the mind (inside) - goes by force (outside). Thus a violent struggle is created, of training through punishment. How does one win a learning struggle?

Well, like in life, in modern war between states each side is willing to pay a price, and even a heavy price, for its goals, but is not willing to come out a sucker - and stupid. The fairness of the price is important to it - one can sacrifice and even a lot for the homeland, but there is no willingness to pay even a low price - in vain, or for the stupid arrogance of a general. There is a willingness to pay the price in blood - but not an exorbitant price. Therefore the war is more like a battle of minds - than a battle of forces. Each side tries to present the other army - if possible in the eyes of the world, and if possible in the eyes of the other people themselves - as a schlemiel and a failure. It is not the price in human lives itself that arouses anger in the people against its army - but the failure, the mistake, the oversight, and the very fact that the opponent was more sophisticated and tricked it.

Therefore the element of surprise and deception and cunning - if it is properly communicated to the target audience (and in particular: to the opposing people) - is no less important in victory than the victory itself in battle. The soldiers want to feel that they have a commander who can be relied upon more than the other side, and not necessarily a stronger army. The goal in modern warfare is to cause distrust in the leadership on the other side, through repeated failures of it, and its perception as caught with its pants down, and therefore on Yom Kippur there was defeat. And all this because it is not a purely forceful struggle, but a learning struggle conducted through forceful means - who is smarter, and who will teach whom a lesson.

Both international public opinion and national public opinion want to identify with the successful side - and not the unsuccessful. And therefore effective propaganda is not to victimize oneself or warn of danger or victimize oneself in battle, but to hide your mistakes and expose the opponent's mistakes, while presenting them as the purest stupidity possible, and if possible - to present him as one who does not learn. As a golem, who does not learn from his mistakes and repeats them. No learning creature can identify with one who does not learn, and it denies him the image of humanity. Stupidity presents him as impenetrable, as a non-human human mass, as lifeless cannon fodder whose death does not arouse emotion, as a bestial animal going to slaughter. A person can identify with evil - but not with idiocy. The human desire to be on the side that teaches the idiot (that is: the scoundrel) a lesson will know no satiety - ensure that it will be your side.

Russia ensures its place in history - as a bad example (and let's not forget: #1 in repeated genocides in the modern era)

If so, why is it so important to leaders how history will see them, and particularly in the field of wars? And why is history important in the same way - and to the same extent - to countries? Because history is what we learn from the past. That is: it is the long-term product that war aims for - changing history. In wars, they constantly deal with "lessons of the war", and this is during the war (not just at its end!). The lessons are the main thing that is shaped, changed or crystallized during the fighting. Therefore they are always and necessarily too early, and never wait "enough". The lessons of war are not some introspective or academic appendix separate from the war, or something that comes after it - they are the war: the war is about the lesson. Therefore war is always about history.

Learning the lessons is the spiritual medium of the physical fighting in the mud and of the astonishingly extensive material movements of war - just like the spirit is the medium above the body. Therefore tactical moves are important - and therefore success in them is important. If it was not important and the lessons were a principled and general matter of justice (and not of learning) - there would be no point in struggling over every inch. Learning is what turns the trivial and negligible micro-tactical struggle in terms of the whole - into a struggle over history. Just like neurons to the brain, or genes to evolution - always looking for an accumulation of distributed effort that brings about decision and learning turning point. The decision is the penny dropping, and this is the reason it happens in consciousness. But it does not pass to consciousness directly, as communication, as in the cheap perception of IDF consciousness operations, but is mediated through Sisyphean and expensive learning. The desire for learning without paying the price of learning - the Ya'alonian "idea" - is foolish. History is learned by the victors - and not just written.

In the field of historical research it is customary to oppose learning from the past about the present and certainly the future (and even to try to show that what can be learned from history is that one cannot learn, and certainly not anything concrete). But this opposition cuts off the branch on which this research field sits: the reason for studying history - is learning from history. In fact, this opposition is directed at a primitive type of learning from history, for example simple projection from an example, or finding a direction for history, that is, it is opposition to a childish method. But serious learning from history should be the basis of the discipline, for example: generalization from a variety of relevant examples or identifying deep trends - and even directions for the future.

To disqualify all learning as interested is an oxymoron. "Objective" academic learning from the past, for its own sake - is an illusion, and not because history needs to take into account "subjective" political interests (the endless obsession of the field), but because its true interest is a learning interest (and it must not be denied - as an interest). This is the interest of the system as a subject - that is, as a learning creature. Just as a person learns from the past: until he learns, he will usually no longer be able to correct, but he will be able to bequeath his learning to his children or others so that they do not fall into the same pits that he himself will no longer get out of - but into pits after them, from which they will not get out - but progress in pits. History indeed teaches us to despair of correction - but we cannot despair of learning, even if we desperately want to. There is no engagement with the past in itself, since there is no past as an object - the past is what is learned.

On Foundational Creation and Anti-Foundational Creation

How is culture created? The question is similar to the question of how a universe is created. Culture is a system, that is, space itself, and therefore it cannot have a zero point, something from nothing, but only a starting point. What is the difference between them? Well, this is not a philosophical question - in the sense that it precedes the philosophy of learning - but a learning question, and we can learn the answer to it, because the existence of such starting points is actually very common, in many fields and many cultures. Let's examine as an example Plato, from whom Western philosophy emerged, precisely because the process is exceptionally well documented in relation to its originality. What actually happened there at that moment, which can be located quite precisely, at the beginning of the middle dialogues?

Plato reaches his peak there, precisely when he seems to be facing a literary-conceptual crisis, after his hero has died, at a dramatic peak (as in the Christian, sacrificial inversion of Greek tragedy, in which the hero did not sin in hubris, although it is clear that he did). How does one continue from here? Socrates' character was presented in its entirety, including the unique genre of dialogue, and the play of his life ended. It also seems that everything remembered from him has already been immortalized and written down - and now what? The project is completed, isn't it?

The plot distress is only an expression of the philosophical distress, which was undoubtedly directed at the dual figure of writer-speaker, Plato-Socrates, as a claim: Is philosophy just talk? Is it just a method of inquiry, or does it have any content (not to mention - a conclusion)? Can philosophy leave the marketplace for the academy, or is it just a negative method, which always ends in lack of conclusion, in aporia, and not a story. Is it possible that Socrates only extracts confusion from his interlocutors - puts the fly in the bottle - and he is a negative sophist whose main move is rhetorical ending in disorder, or does he also have a positive orderly doctrine of his own? Is there sophia after the philo, and is there also ontology (what) behind ethics (how)?

Time has dulled the religious sting of the break, since the stories of the gods seem to us literarily arbitrary (deus ex machina), and the mythological lacks theological content. But the tormenting question that hung in the air, whether this was a new religious message, against the gods and the existing religious establishment, was certainly a deep religious crisis - and stood behind Socrates' execution (like Jesus!). How does one build a literary solution that is valid in terms of plot, and that does not always end in lack of punchline? Plato found and exhausted the one punchline, of exhausting the cup of poison, which turns the sequence of dialogues into a tragic story. But this is a one-time content solution, and not a formal solution to the dialogue genre. There is a one-time trick here, and not a new method. Not only did his hero die - the genre also died. How does one get out of this? With a starting point. Not a punchline.

When he abandons the tragedy genre, Plato tries at first to turn to the classical philosophical literary solution before him - mythical cosmology, and even flirts with writing the myth itself. He tries to put in his hero's mouth at the peak moment of his last moments an orderly religious-scientific doctrine, in the format of this world and an invented next world, and give it the validity of a will, but the solution is very artificial - and not literarily convincing. For example: not organic to the character, but glued on, and in addition without binding validity, but just talk, which even spoils the poetic peak - Socrates' death. There is no myth by halves - if you want, you have to go all the way, like the Christians. Socrates cannot be a cult leader like Pythagoras. He does not come from the East - he is Athenian to the death.

Finished but not completed? Plato now turns to materials from before his birth. It seems that the Symposium is the last true dialogue that is barely remembered, which Plato reconstructs from hearsay from hearsay from... precisely because this event was engraved as legendary in the collective memory. The evening itself became mythological, and Plato tries here again his hand at writing a creation myth - a myth of beginning and not end - while putting it in the mouth of a priestess (and perhaps also a comedian), and this time the result is more healthy, but still cannot be taken seriously, except as a limited parable. In all his literary attempts (later too) Plato does not succeed in imitating true mythical literature, because he is too conscious, and creates a feeling of deception and consciousness shaping - his myth is a tool and not a goal. Just as one cannot invent culture - one cannot invent myth. Only forge. His solution is not valid. The genre is no longer accessible (except in Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai's method, where it is a unique solution of "true forgery").

But one who has tasted creative freedom - and freedom from the teacher - cannot be weaned, and Plato finds a third literary solution - and first in importance. From a third person far from all far, hiding deep behind the teacher's skirt, Plato suddenly becomes in the Republic - his great dialogue - Socrates in the first person, when it is clear that this is a processed dialogue of Plato himself with his two brothers. Drunk on literary freedom, the writing itself takes over him, and documentation turns into invention, and the best of myths - into wonderful and apt parables (the Cave allegory, the Ship Captain allegory, etc.). The student frees himself from being the teacher's puppet, and takes over the teacher as a puppet, because the show must go on. Therefore the dialogues cease to be Socratic, that is dialogical, and become Platonic, lectures of ideas: the world of Ideas. There is no more therapeutic and personal interest in the specific interlocutor, who is now left with all the permitted repertoire of a blonde in a male fantasy date: to nod, to agree, to nod enthusiastically, and especially to vary in all the words synonymous with "yes". Indeed, of course, necessarily, certainly, it turns out, clearly, presumably, admits, agrees, you are right, truth, stable, correct, exists, it cannot be said otherwise! Just missing cool and awesome.

What happened here? Plato created a genre, without admitting it even to himself (even his student Aristotle began with dialogues, until he moved to orderly lectures, and completed the revolution). And what is that genre? What we call philosophy today. And in general - non-fiction literature. At the beginning of the Republic the sophist pounces on the narrator and claims that his method is negative and destructive, without positive construction, while in the rest of the dialogue the liberated Plato conquers new and unknown territory, in an exceptional creative burst, which turns all the rest of philosophy into footnotes to him. Why? Not because everything is really there, but because he touches on the entire space, and therefore there is nothing that in retrospect is not hinted at and folded in it - he creates the philosophical space itself. He himself is the starting point, because all the possibilities are already in him, although he is not the starting point - because there is no such thing. There is no thinker from whom everything began on the timeline, but only a thinker in whom everything was contained as space.

For learning does not begin from some point, from some beginning and big bang of ideas, but it is always within a system. And what happened here is the creation of the system - the space - and not the creation of time. The system is still at its beginning a small complete universe, an infant - but a universe, and within it are already the heavens and all their hosts: all the forces and particles and tensions that make it a system. Already Hawking determined: The universe began from space, perhaps even infinite (which has been expanding since), and it did not have a first point in time.

If so, learning does not progress like a sequence of proofs built from first axioms, but the basic axioms are themselves the space that enables the entire theory. And the rest, go and study. That is: the invention of learning is not a step or learning move, but the invention of the method. Plato discovered a method that goes beyond literature, and even beyond the sophistic tradition of rhetoric and discourse (including Socratic) - he discovered philosophy. There were pre-Platonic philosophers, but they are philosophers only in retrospect, because Plato created philosophy (in its current sense). He created the genre, as a god, not as a first cause: he created - did not cause - a world. And the father of Western philosophy - or any other field - is usually not the best builder. He invented the game, and was not the best player (Aristotle is greater than him). The founder is never "the most distinct philosopher", because he is on the seam between philosophy and what it could have been.

We must understand that we read Plato in retrospect as a writer who belongs to the field of philosophy (before him philosophy was a school - not a field), but equally contained in that creative moment was the potential to become completely different things, and not a new field, for example: new literature or a new religion. It is clear that Plato in the Republic engages in a poetic titanic struggle with "the" writer, the father of Greek literature, Homer. Hence the hostility (which convinces only as patricide, like Zach and Alterman), and hence the love - the Greeks learned Homer as the Jews learned the Torah. Plato sought a genre in which he could conquer a Homeric status for himself, and kill the epic as a creative possibility (he succeeded! The tales of the gods will never return to themselves) - he tried to replace the formula. If for example he had developed the parable, a new Greek prose could have been born (he did not lack literary talent).

Alternatively, and even more so, a new religion could have emerged from the group of Socrates' disciples - and a very Christian one, with Plato as Paul. When reading the beginning of the middle dialogues, the question arises what innovation Christianity brought to the world - because everything is there. Including purgatory. The only thing missing is faith. Plato was certainly not a stranger to mysticism, but failed to produce a strong myth. Had the author been more of a missionary, we might have received dogma instead of academia, and apostles with epistles instead of conversations and dialogues. At that initial stage, after the shock of the killing of the leader from the market, it was not clear that philosophy was not on its way to becoming a religion - or a cult.

If so, the foundational work is the one that lays out the vectors of the space, and this is the essence of greatness and genius, and not some superhuman ability to be smarter than everyone who came or will come after you, and to take everything into account as if you traveled in time to the future (as people think about the greats in the Torah - and the Torah itself). The vision is not prediction, but creation of the play. The genius is the one who discovered America - discovered the space of possibilities, and not the one who created America, that is, realized them. And why not say that only in retrospect was the potential of the genius created, in hindsight, and only those who came after him created him at all as potential? Because the genius, in the very creation of the system - and this is his true greatness - already began to lay it out in miniature. He gave many examples for learning and taught how to learn in it - and not just learned in it himself. He was not a singular point, whose creation is inexplicable (the romantic view), but a small system, which sometimes amazes us with its vision of the future, because it is not about the future in time - but about progressing further in those directions in space. That is: it is about directing to the future, and not reaching the future - not the future direction itself.

Thus for example, we see at the beginning of the Republic, in dealing with the sophist who claims that power determines justice, Foucault and Marx (Plato crushes them and the conspiracy conception - the one in power himself does not know what is truly good for him, and therefore is not capable of engineering false consciousness. He does not have the all-knowing understanding required to control the spirit. Plato knows: capital and government are not that smart and sophisticated, but rather quite stupid. Power has no brain). And so we see in the theory of the soul divided into three even Freud, including the connection to dreams.

But in what sense are Foucault or Freud contained in Plato? The illusion that nothing new can be innovated and everything has been said stems from a misunderstanding of what a new thing is - and what learning is. Culture is not a text file, in which suddenly a new "thing" appears that was not said before, and hence its value (on the contrary, such an appearance would be arbitrary and worthless) - but only new learning. Innovation has value if it "innovated", in the penultimate syllable, meaning a learning process. Therefore it necessarily comes from what already was. Not everything can come from what already was - otherwise it's not learning - and hence the enormous importance of what was, it dictates what can come out of it through learning. This is the source of the phenomenon of foundational works (otherwise why would there be such at all? Every plant needs a trunk?), and not some romantic genius of spiritual giants whose dust we are at their feet. Not Plato's greatness, but the greatness of his method - the greatness of learning.

Learning is continuous as a line, but branches as a field - and lives in space. Therefore, leaps forward in spirit are not possible, for example leaves without a branch (there is no new in itself, without being contained in learning), but certainly sideways jumps are possible, in changing branches. The Platonic turn could have been different - every bifurcation starts from a hair's breadth proximity. How close, by Zeus, was Plato to founding an enlightened monotheistic religion, perhaps to reformism and reformation, in which the gods are only symbols of one deity?

In general, Greek philosophers were religious nationalists, not secularists. That is: enlightened interpreters of their religion. But wasn't Athens too far from Judea? Monotheism is not an idea that grew independently in many cultures around the world, but apparently was born only once. Well, we are missing a piece in the puzzle: where did philosophy begin at all? The most significant cultural influence is from the East - from the Persians or Jews, for example in ideas such as the reincarnating soul that is judged for its deeds in the afterlife and receives reward and punishment, and body-soul dualism. And Plato's myth of Eden even mentions four (!) rivers - not coincidental. Thales was Phoenician, that is Canaanite, and his real name is Tal, meaning water in Hebrew. The echoes of the myth of the abyss as water, and of creation as the separation of water from water, are certainly related to "everything is water". The spirit of God hovers over the waters.

Philosophy was not a natural internal Athenian development or pure Greek creation, but was created from the collision with the cultural alternative - the rival superpower. The Persian Empire, through Asia Minor, is what touched the cultural border where philosophy first grew, and to Athens philosophy arrived only at the end, after flourishing in the periphery (the Milesian school - and from it the Eleatic). Hence philosophy can be seen as a synthesis between Persia and the East and Greek culture, which led to abstraction and unification (similar to biblical monotheism which was a synthesizing abstraction and unification between Mesopotamia and Egypt). When two different cultures collide and meet - what is common to them becomes very abstract, because what characterizes each is the concrete. Not union of groups but intersection is responsible for rising a level above the two systems. Instead of dirtying each other with contradictory assumptions, they purify - with shared abstract assumptions. If so, can we find more examples of foundational creation, and examine what is common?

Well, surprisingly, this is not a rare phenomenon - but almost universal. Except perhaps French culture (Montaigne? from whom Rousseau's Confessions grew), we can find such a central dominant work in almost every major culture: the Bible for Jewish culture, Homer for Greek, Confucius for Chinese, Virgil for Roman, Dante for Italian, Don Quixote for Spanish, Shakespeare for English, Faust for German, Eugene Onegin for Russian, etc. What is common to these works, besides the fact that many of them naturally establish the language itself? They tend to be poetic narrative works, but even more so - embedded in them are the coordinates and tensions characteristic of an entire culture, which later become the dimensions and spaces in which it develops.

In Eugene Onegin for example we can find the Russian fusion between the romantic swept-away element and the cynical nihilistic element, which also characterizes the continuation of Russian culture - including the lack of value for human life and willingness to sacrifice. All the shit is already embedded there, Putin in Pushkin's babushka, but also Dostoevsky. Italian culture moves between the Catholic-structural element and the sensual-pictorial. The German between the dark romantic-fantastic element and the enlightened and scientific element. The English - following Shakespeare's obsession with betrayal, its consequences and punishment - is trapped between traditional order and social duty - "the proper" - and realism (hence the development of irony, politeness and humor). The Spanish, between the fantastic and playful element and realism. The French between the personal emotional and the philosophizing and generalizing. And so on. There is a direct relationship between the richness in the foundational book, and the richness of the literature and culture that grows from it, but this is also true negatively. Which cultures have a miserable foundational book?

First and foremost - the great religions of over a billion people. Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. When we as Jews are exposed to the foundational literature of other religions, we are struck by the low level of the text, both literarily and intellectually. And here the foundational example, the anti-Platonic, is the New Testament, precisely because of the ideological similarity of these two Greek texts, which react to the trauma of the execution of the revered teacher, and thirst for recognition of him. Who were the authors of the New Testament? More than anything, they resemble American Jews today - they know a little superficial Judaism (with mistakes, and not always Hebrew), are very influenced by the values of the society in which they assimilated, and interpret their Judaism according to them, and do not distinguish the difference. They strip Judaism of all its specificity in favor of general do-gooder kitsch, and replace piety with sanctimony. Here, unlike philosophy, the abstraction in the cultural encounter is emotional - we all agree that good is good and kindness is kind and love to love (just as the intersection between monotheism and Greek science can reach the monism of "everything is water").

The Gospel of Matthew, which opens not by chance, is the best text (everything is relative) from a literary perspective, because it was written a little more inspired by the biblical literary model, and indeed quotes verses endlessly, and within it the Sermon on the Mount, which was written with some rhetorical talent (though hollow and ridiculous intellectually, and presents a piety of fools. A teenager's composition). There is nothing like reading the New Testament to understand the secular attitude in the West towards religion as childish - the contempt. One could have edited from the Gospels one strong text, but the literary execution is pathetic, and ruins all the narrative and intellectual potential (theology is indeed an attempt to compensate for the sub-level - and build a floor). How did this thing succeed? How did this so unattractive book for reading attract masses? Moreover - it seems that this is not a coincidence - because these qualities are shared for example also by the Quran.

The text is boring, lacks plot and tension (everything is foreshadowed ad nauseam), repetitive and monotonous to the point of fixation and obsession, transparently missionary and lacking any sophistication, blatantly brainwashing in a repulsive way, and the characters (including Jesus) are as flat as the boards of the cross. But if we're not talking about prose but religion, maybe the text is literarily weak and ideologically strong? Did Jesus himself have a strong message, or an interesting one? Was he a personality of stature, whose message was only marred by the talentless gospel writers? Well, Jesus appears as pathetic as the text. He tells parables at the level of a three-year-old child, not hitting anything and lacking a punchline, his wit is at the level of middle school jokes ("You said it!"), and he has no interesting or sophisticated message besides banal idiotic extremism. If he had charisma it seems it only worked on people at the lowest intellectual level in society, and more than his sermons inspire kindness they inspire pity. But, maybe Jesus wasn't an intellectual genius - but a moral genius?

Was Jesus a great moral personality, or a Pharisee rabbi (actually one of ours) and a good Jew, as good Jews in the twentieth century (Flusser) like to tell themselves to feel enlightened - and reclaim him? Well, the text does not reflect the image of a sympathetic and compassionate Jew, or one with spiritual qualities, but the image of an ego maniac without restraint, a demagogic cult leader for a penny, who precisely because of his low level is capable of thinking highly of himself (as usually happens). He, who speaks of himself in the third person like Berland, casts himself for messianism and when that's not enough - for divinity, without any real message besides his own ego, until the ego trip kills him (hopefully he did not sexually abuse his female followers, because such always tend to antinomianism as well, and the text hints at accusations against him regarding contact with women). More than anything he reminds us of the scribblers and budding poets in contemporary Hebrew literature, where talent is inversely proportional to ego. They are sure they are the message to humanity and the redemption of culture and God's gift to the people of Israel, despite not even having a special personality, besides ambition that is as unrestrained as it is unoriginal and unaware. And this is what explains the next twist in the plot: the extreme rage at the world not recognizing them, which knows no restraint or consolation. The inability to accept failure of the incapable and untalented. Arrogance stemming from inferiority.

Because the latest fashion is to admire Paul instead, as one who brought a new message, or preached some sermons that are only half lame. For if there is no message in the Gospels, perhaps it resides in the Epistles: Is there at least a message in the new religious conception? Did at least a theological revolution occur there, and an ideological breakthrough (universality! exclusivity to the heart!), which is what paved the way for success? Well, there is no need for any spiritual innovation or anything besides the great ego and narcissistic personality disorder to explain Christianity. It was not the universal idea that activated Jesus and eventually led to missionizing, but the power of failure and the explosion of the wounded ego created the unrestrained missionizing whose failure led to the universal idea whose failure led to abandoning the commandments. This is a simple and primitive mechanism (like the ego) that operates again and again in escalation until breaking all boundaries: the method of betrayal.

Everyone betrayed Jesus. Not only did the Pharisees betray him, not only Judas Iscariot - but also the other disciples, and even Peter (his crying at the rooster's crow is one of the few beautiful - and human - moments in the story). In fact even God betrayed him (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?). The text did not become antisemitic by chance, in an unfortunate error of fate, but this is its essence and main point, in this it is concentrated - and not in Jesus' suffering or crucifixion, or his atonement as a sacrifice, for example, which are described in passing. To what are all the rhetorical power and plot manipulation devoted? To the accusation of betrayal. The Passion is a blood libel against the Jews - not the story of Jesus' blood.

Why is betrayal important? Why must everyone participate in it? Because external accusation is the primary defense mechanism of the ego. Am I guilty? It's you! You are all guilty (there is a transfer here of the circular biblical mechanism of blame of the people for their sins to God - to their sin against Jesus). The Christian cannot forgive. Is not capable of forgiving. Because it is not possible to forgive. The trauma knows no end not because it is a cruel injury to the body, but because it is an injury to the ego - and therefore none is more cruel. This is the dynamics of messianic cults - the inability to stop believing (collapse of their world), which is expressed in denial (rose from the dead) and rage (not at the killers - at the betrayers. Because the murder itself is not the problem - but the pain of rejection, disappointment. And after all, one cannot be disappointed in Jesus!).

Self-love is not capable of being disappointed. The boundless great I is not capable of accepting lack of recognition of its greatness, and reacts to lack of love with boundless hatred. Those who did not want him as king of the Jews will receive him as messiah, and those who did not want him as son of David will receive him as son of God, and those who did not want him as son will receive him as God himself. It was not messianism that created Jesus' ego, but the ego created the self-belief as messiah. The ego is the primary factor in the domino chain and no other explanation is needed. And why did Christianity succeed? Precisely because it is childish, and therefore appeals to the masses. The text is not meant to convince anyone, it is meant to strengthen the convinced and brainwash them, without creating any complexity or dissonance in it, but one catchy symbol. Therefore there is no real content to the religion - the content is Jesus. One does not read the New Testament and is tempted - but is tempted and then reads the New Testament. Did we really think that missionary work works through literature? Inferiority is an asset, not a burden. It was not the Gospels that were viral, but the gospel was a virus.

And what are the results of an inferior foundational work? An inferior and ideological culture, that is rigid and flat, because it lacks dimensions and space and complexity. And this applies also to secular creation. The Aeneid for example, was at the root of the spiritual inferiority of Roman culture. It seems that more than Virgil read the Odyssey, he read the Republic, and listened to advice on how to purify Homer and create an ideological work in service of the government. The Aeneid is more impressive as an engineered plan engineering consciousness than as content, suitable for an engineering culture. Aeneas himself is a walking plank, and precisely the superficial similarity to Homer emphasizes the differences - and the superficiality, not only of the characters, but also of the plot crudely sewn by thugs. As befits the culture of imperial brutality of Rome - which contrary to its image (for some reason), always remained sub-par.

If so, what is the difference between a foundational work and anti-foundational work? The question is what comes first and what establishes what: the social system or the work (as a system). If the system already exists, and the work comes to serve it, it will be an apologetic concubine, ideological, sealed, orthodox, and anti-literary. Thus when Virgil tries to attach to inferior Rome an epic of equal value to Greece, or when they try to turn the movements of Christianity and Islam into respectable book religions, and produce a text even more brainwashed than brainwashing - of those already inside. Oh, the Red Book. Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, and "The Magic Touch" (relationships in Judaism...). But if the work is the lady, and it is the product of a brain flow flowing to a new area - and establishes a system, then it is not a work of "instruction" but of learning. It opens and does not close, and brings the reader into its developing secret: the method behind it. Hence the strange ability of one work to open an unlimited period of creativity. And this is the reason that such foundational works (including the Torah and Homer) precede the system, even if researchers are unable to believe it. For them there are only serving works - literature of a maid.

The ideal similarity between Christianity and Plato does not stem simply from the basic dualistic structure, but on the contrary - the dualistic structure itself (soul/body, heaven/hell, eternity/death, righteousness/sin) stems from the shared influence: the influence of the dominant empire in the formative period - the Persians - on the Jews and Greeks, for thus spoke Zarathustra. But if so, what is the source of the difference? The precedence of the system to learning - and vice versa. Socrates had students and a method - Jesus had a cult, and therefore he tried to create on them the manipulation of who is inside and who is outside, who is loyal and who is not (the tension: who betrayed). He had nothing to say, and therefore nothing was written, until there was a need for something to be written. In the beginning was the Word.

I remembered something

Why does a method lead to the establishment of a system, that is, to a big bang of possibilities? Precisely because it is a mechanism of possibilities. A certain learning process, in a specific case, becomes a method the moment it is systematic and generalized. Therefore the method is already demonstrated at its beginning on all materials of the world, because its invention is the moment of understanding that this can be done, and hence its amazing fertility, which establishes an entire field - in a foundational work. Therefore a new method will never be demonstrated only on one case (what would we learn from one single a fortiori argument?), because what makes it a method is the ability to demonstrate it on countless cases (hence the sudden historical explosion of Tannaitic literature, almost out of nothing). Therefore the demonstration of the method is the creation of a system, which demonstrates the space of its possibilities. Not just demonstrating some new possibilities - but a new space.

For Plato the moment of invention is the moment of distress - the willingness to go beyond embarrassment. His invention is the ability to turn the Socratic method from negative to positive: to go with the dialogic negation of common conceptions to the most unintuitive conclusions stemming from the method itself and from its hidden assumptions - the existence of ideas about which one debates, stemming from the very discussion around the concept as an object (the dance around a point establishes the point). And this itself is a classic philosophical process: distillation of the method into content.

A parallel process operates in the development of mathematics (as in any field of abstract thought), when an action crystallizes into an object, which becomes a new mathematical object on which one can act. This is the essence of abstraction: from demonstrations - not examples (the demonstrations become examples in retrospect, after the abstraction has already been created and there is a concept). Thus countless actions of finding slope or area in different functions crystallized into the concepts of derivative and integral, and many actions like derivation crystallized into the concept of function, and arithmetic addition actions into the concept of addition, and different addition concepts to group, and multiplication to field, and so on. And so in the history of philosophy: the method of rational thinking creates the concept of reason, linguistic analysis the concept of language, and learning analysis the concept of method. For Plato conceptual analysis created the concept of concept: the idea.

And since for Plato (unlike his teacher) it is already a direct discussion of the concept itself, and not an example conception of it by some specific opponent, it is this time an internal dialogue - and one-sided. And the internal discussion of abstract concepts is the essence of philosophical contemplation. Platonic philosophy is a synthesis between the positive comprehensive grand theses about the world, but arbitrary and lacking method, of the pre-Socratics, with the Socratic method of claims and discussion, which opposed it, and was antithesis to the great and unfounded ideas. Therefore it is a method of great ideas.

What is the future of literature?

If we examine the foundational works, we will find that they are always written. In other fields, such as art, architecture or music, the phenomenon of the foundational work does not exist (because in them learning is between works, and not within one work). Moreover, we will find that the central, strongest (having power) and highest literary form in world culture is a complex plot composed of poetry fragments. Why? Because this form combines both the most beautiful and sophisticated local piece in itself - the poem - and also the most attractive global structure - the plot. The most aesthetic structure is created when, like a fractal, beauty is present at every zoom level. But precisely this structure has disappeared from the literature of our time, which separated between plot (which became synonymous with prose) and poetry (mainly lyrical). Thus Hebrew culture, born too late, missed (because of the depression of the mature Bialik?) the opportunity for such a foundational work, and hence its fragmented space - there is no starting point (the closest: Agnon). But if the highest form of literature was abandoned, what is left now? What else remains to be innovated in literary form? Have we tried everything?

Where else can prose advance? Well, throughout the century there were many attempts at open prose without ending and resolution, but to progress one must descend from the level of the whole to the level of the fragment. The prose of the future needs to be written as a plot story composed of a chain of separate fragments - short stories - each of which ends without closure. Each short story brings the situation to complication and tension without solution, and then afterwards jumps to the next situation that happened after it again ends thus without writing the ending (aporia), and so on progressing to the end of the story. From each story it is impossible to progress further, and it lacks end and solution, and nevertheless they progress, without explaining in any way how it was resolved, and even without it being understood at all how the solution is possible. Thus the fragments become like problems or exercises, which leave the reader to try to imagine a solution, without catharsis (like in life! problems are not solved), but on the other hand the plot continues to progress from fragment to fragment (like in life! life progresses without anything being resolved). The tension is maintained and not resolved - unlike the detective story in which more and more problems are opened and then solved one after the other, in a chiastic structure.

This is a type of novel that is a textbook, in which there are no solutions, but it still maintains interest because of the narrative superstructure. Just as countless attempts and failures can develop into progress. And on the other hand, each such short story also stands on its own. Thus the artificiality of resolving scenes in novels today is avoided, and in their manipulative and unrealistic weaving, in which everything fits together as if by a guiding hand, unlike life. In the proposed "problem novel", life - and the plot - is just an endless sequence of fraying threads. This is how we experience life: not solution after solution, resolution after resolution and closure after closure, but problem after problem. Life is open - everything just opens and opens, and no situation has an end. There is no end in nature.

And what is the future of poetry? After the death of rhyme and free verse (and the return to rhyme), and after meter is no longer relevant for us because we do not read poetry aloud by heart, we must return to the sources: to parallelism. This is one of the most beautiful and suggestive forms in poetry, which has disappeared from poetics for ages, and needs to return to become a binding convention, because it combines the freedom of content expression in free verse with a strong formal structure. The greatest loss in the history of literature - and perhaps culture in general - is not Aristotle's dialogues or Greek plays, but the loss of the epic sections of biblical poetry (the Book of Jashar, the Book of the Wars of the Lord). This disaster caused the takeover of Greek meter instead of Jewish parallelism on ancient poetry, and thus poetry in the West became a form that lost one of its two legs, and lost countless formal possibilities and tremendous tension stemming from opposing elements. And this is in contrast to prose, which relies on both legs of the West in a more balanced way.

The contribution of Jewish parallelism to world poetry was enormous, but only through its descendant, which transferred the parallel double structure from content to sound: rhyme. Jewish poetry gave the world rhyme, which began from the repetition of the same word at the end of each sentence (following Amen and For His mercy endures forever), continued from Heikhalot literature and developed fully already in Yannai (see the early "Unetanneh Tokef"), and from there through Christianity reached the entire West, and became the leading poetic form in the world. But this winding and denied path prevented content influence, which would have greatly enriched the formal one.

Beyond that, the future of poetry lies in the field that adopted prose precisely, and whose plummeting costs, especially with the rise of generative models that will soon produce video as well, will allow poets to express themselves in it - and that is cinema. In the future, hopefully, poems will not be punctuated lines, but short, artistic clips, reciting the poem (just as popular music is not sheet music but performances). This will give renewed seriousness to the poem, and breathe new life into it, and will also solve the flooding in poetry, with the unbearable ease of the keyboard, especially in the era of automatic punctuation, which has turned punctuation into empty posturing. Cinema is the strongest medium for poetry, because it returns it to the lost days of oral recitation performances, and even to the days of Greek theater. And poetry in turn is also the strongest form for creating cinema, and in fact it characterizes its artistic peaks. As in literature, there are two main styles in cinema: prose and poetry, and the greatest directors are those whose films are poetic, like Fellini, Tarkovsky and Bergman (in the continental wing, with each embodying a different church). And the most beautiful moments in the great prose directors are the poetic ones - with strong images (the English wing: Kubrick, Chaplin, Hitchcock). Why is this so?

Because cinema is a combination of all the arts as different dimensions in which it operates: literature, painting, music, design, fashion, choreography, architecture, etc. Therefore it is at its peak when it combines as many of them as possible into one essence (like an 11-dimensional sheet whose shape is beautiful). Poetry on its side is the form of literature that combines the most formal, content and sonic components into one essence (and works with the existing sheets in language, the entire corpus, thus producing from an enormous combinatorial linguistic space a rare one-time combination). In general, aesthetics is at its peak in such one-time combinations where different artistic dimensions converge (intersection area of many sheets that exist in the system - in culture), which are necessarily exceptional, original, surprising, and integrate many dimensions (the more integration - the more beautiful). Therefore, a full combination of poetry and cinema will be the most beautiful. And poetry will give cinema, with its many possibilities but relatively little history, the necessary and intersecting.

If we look at the history of cinema, we will discover that its flowering period from an artistic perspective was around the middle of the 20th century, in a rather narrow bell curve, centered on the 20 years after the war. The culture that produced the most significant directors is Italian, with its sensual plastic art tradition, and no less importantly - with a European and not American film industry, as in the cinematic medium the large costs allow for substantial harm to creative freedom, if you live in a culture lacking culture (America). When Hollywood took over the Italian directors, it tended to cast them for niche creation (careful, the Mafia!), and the original Italian cinema disappeared - indeed, a crime organization. Towards the end of their activity, Fellini and Pasolini raised a cry of alarm about the terrible influence of television on the medium and on humans, and indeed cinema essentially died, and it is difficult to find more significant works in it, and it has become illustrated prose. Therefore, connecting poetry to cinema is important not only in reviving poetry, but also in reviving cinema. And perhaps then a significant (and formative?) cinematic work could be created in which a plot structure is composed of many poems, as in Fellini's great films, only with the use of actual poetic text, from the mouth of a great poet. It may be that this is the only way to create a formative work of our time.

What is the future of art?

One of the great deceptions in modern art is the story according to which art becoming abstract is a more advanced and aesthetically "pure" stage than mimetic or narrative art (or in music - melodic), because it deals with form alone, and formalism is true aesthetics. But if we examine the history of art we see that the opposite is true. The most primitive stage in the development of culture is precisely abstract and formal art without content, and only then comes the complexity where form conveys mimetic content, and finally narrative. But we distinguish and remember and preserve mainly the narrative content in ancient cultures, hence the illusion. And it is further exacerbated because the more developed stage is the one in which (of course) the most development and branching and complexity occurred, hence the volume - in quantity and physical size - of works that survive (including in cave paintings). In prehistoric art (for example in stone and value objects that were better preserved than paintings) one often finds lines, colors, dots and abstract and ornamental shapes long before mimetic forms. Shamanic dances with pure movement preceded theater plots, just as a child scribbles before drawing (i.e. representing), and finally - and this is the peak - illustrates a story (illustration is artistically higher than painting!). The Geometric period in ancient Greece preceded the mimetic achievements, very abstract sculpture - which could have fit in a museum of modern art - preceded figures, and medieval art began from an abstract quasi-linguistic representation ("art is language" - the slogan of the avant-garde and early Christianity).

Therefore we should see the art of the 20th century as a period of decline, which is not the peak of Western art, or a period that concludes it, but one that begins and precedes a more developed stage, which will happen only after it. We should not think that the "descent" from the art of the ancient world to the beginning of the Middle Ages was considered a decline in its time, but as a purification of art and its elevation to a more spiritual and clean and aesthetic form, and the beginning of a new culture, exactly like the situation today. The decrease in the costs of cinema and animation, thanks to artificial intelligence, opens the door to a new era in which one person can truly be the artist who creates the cinematic work, without the "auteur" theory but actually without support, just as one person can create a book or poem. Even the laziest and most capricious poetic nature, who does not tend towards complex architectonic creation, will be able to quickly and with one-time inspiration create a complete cinematic poem, which in the past would have required expensive production and management of an entire team, and therefore of course did not happen.

Therefore the reduction in marginal costs that corrupted literature can actually liberate cinema. Because every creation flourishes in a state where its costs are moderate precisely. Not everyone can create and flood, but on the other hand institutional support is not required. This is the better filter for talented people who also have something to say, and therefore are willing to invest reasonable effort and risk. Just as an economy flourishes when money is neither too cheap nor too expensive, and therefore encourages moderate risk, not too much and not too little, and therefore good companies with real innovation are created and funded. If every poetry book, instead of punctuation as a seriousness tax, will have to be a film - we will also gain epics. Because the traditional narrative nature of the cinematic medium will redeem poetry from personal lyricism (to which it was pushed due to the takeover of prose, and especially the novel, over plot). And when the social network of poetry will be more YouTube and less Facebook, a post will cease to be a poem. The long form in time - cinema - will encourage poetry to lengthen into a significant statement that the single poem cannot hold.

The moment the philosophy of language releases its iron grip from the world of spirit, the arts of language itself will benefit more than anything, because they will regain their uniqueness, because not everything will be language. And then there will also be room for a complete system, all-artistic - and multi-media (not linguistic!) - as cinema becomes a modern cathedral that contains all the arts in one spiritual unity, in new Middle Ages. A film of an hour and a half will allow poetry time - and space! - to present development in a system, that is, learning. The modernist deconstructive trend of the various media will allow assembling their different parts into a new kind of image. Because in cinema sometimes precisely a lack of fit, or other interesting tension, between (for example) the music and the visual image or between them and the text, can give new complexity - and innovative harmony.

The combination of all the arts into one experience is what stood at the foundation of medieval rigidity, when the church was the museum for painting, sculpture, mosaic and architecture, which also included choreography and fashion and music and choir and performance and ceremonies and poetic texts and prose etc. Since it was very difficult to create such a total multi-dimensional experience, this required enormous and fixed efforts, that is, institutional, to make everything function together as a whole. And the art of the future will be able to combine all the arts with the help of cinema, but in a flexible and personal way, precisely because of the decreasing difficulty of creating art. Therefore it will be able to approach the unconscious idea towards which all art history aspires - the dream.

The superfluous concept of the system

Why, actually, does the philosophy of learning emphasize the system so much? Isn't it ugly to cling to another concept, and such a generic one, almost empty of content, and not be satisfied with deepening into learning itself? One way to understand where the system comes from at all is to ask: where do we get our knowledge from? But not to ask this as an adult, as an epistemological question, but as a child who comes into the world, and thus clean the issue of idealistic conceptions of philosophy. An even better way to clean the question is to ask it in a technical way: where does artificial intelligence get knowledge about the world from.

Well, it seems that different schools in epistemology simply talk about different sources of knowledge, and turn them into the model of knowing. Plato talks about knowledge obtained from internal calculation - including memory: the RAM and ROM and BIOS (the motherboard, or in an infant - the spontaneous brain activity, which indeed organizes before birth), theology talks about knowledge obtained from the user and programmer controlling the system (or in an infant - from the parent), new philosophy about knowledge obtained from sensors - especially cameras (the senses - especially the eyes), while the philosophy of language notices that a huge part of human or computer knowledge comes simply from knowledge already accumulated as files/as text/on the network. The different stages of the history of philosophy parallel the natural stages in the development of the infant, or of the history of artificial intelligence research (inference systems, encoded knowledge world and interactive conversation/game systems, image recognition, and finally large language models).

If so, there is no general dealing with the essence of knowledge acquisition here, but again and again generalization from one source of knowledge, as if it is the essence. The philosophy of learning is the attempt to pay attention to the process itself, and first and foremost to the fact that it is not the entry of knowledge from a source, but an internal process. Plato's mistake was looking at the inside as a source, and from here began a series of corrections of what is the true source (or more precisely: the essential source), as at each stage they move from source to source. But the inside is not the source of knowledge (it may be one example of such a source), but it is the place where the process of adding knowledge takes place. And what is the essence of this process? Is it calculation, remembering, discussion, dreaming, meditation, etc.? No, it is learning.

Therefore the system is a neutral and anemic concept, which can fit anything (computer, ecology, culture, cat etc.), which comes to create this inside. It comes to allow looking at the process without the question of the source. It doesn't matter what one learns from, but how. One can learn from whisker movements, like a cat, and epistemology should not deal with the question of how whisker movements enter the system, but how they join previous knowledge in the system (there is always such! There is no learning from zero - the attempt to find the zero was a mistake). That is: how the cat's learning takes place. The artificial idea of "the beginning of knowledge" (and its foundation from there) was a philosophical mistake - one must know that there is no first concept there. One relies on what has already been learned, and not on some "foundations" (which philosophy needs to locate and establish). The question of where knowledge begins is immediately understood as an error when it is replaced with the question of where learning begins.

And although it is not defined, the system is not an empty concept, but on the contrary, a full concept: it is containment, not space. Unlike the idea of language, which in order to use it they pretended that everything is language and every regularity is grammar, the system allows generality: the brain is a system - not a language. Evolution is a system - not a language. The believer is not one who "speaks the language of religion". Because unlike language which is a kind of envelope, which can potentially contain content, the system includes the content itself, which has already been learned (i.e. internalized). It is full and not empty. Just as a believer in religion is inside, but religion is not just a framework, it is also religious motives and history and behavior (not "rules of behavior"), and therefore religion includes even the change of the rules of religion itself (not "the rules by which the rules change"). The system is not just the rules of the game or the playing field, but a specific game, in which moves have already been made, and it exists in time, and not just constitutes a space, or aspires to take any development in time and define it as a space of possibilities.

It is not the possibilities that are the main thing, but how the choice between them is made. Not why (reason) and not what (description) but how. Only a small part of learning the game is learning the goal of the game or the rules of the game, and most of it is learning how to play, which includes practice and training, that is, not just rules on how to play well, but also a tendency to do so. If so, the content of the system also includes within it the ways of learning it - methods are part of the specific content of a system: there is no general method. And usually there is also no explicit method, but it is implied from the learning that has been done so far, and therefore it is more of a way than a method, and more of a method than an algorithm. The system is a full concept because it also contains more than can be described, and perhaps can only be described in the future, and it contains possibilities that are not apparent today, which will only be possibilities later. As part of the game it can develop into another game, a language can develop into another language - but this will remain the same system.

So unlike language, which is just a context within which you operate, the system includes the activity. And unlike text or discourse, it includes the mechanisms of its own development and creation: not just the closed text as it is but how to write such a text, and so also the development of discourse as in the Talmud - as part of the sugya, that is: the system includes activity that is development. What does development activity mean? Not just the actual development (like in "the change of discourse"), that is, not just looking from the outside at the development activity that happened (there is no outside to discourse. The critical stance "outside discourse" misses everything that is in discourse). And not just the possibilities of development ("limits of discourse", also from outside), what can happen. But: how it happens. And not just as a description, but how it should happen, but not just as an obligation (description of what should happen), but as a positive possibility, that is as how it is worthy, worthwhile, supposed to, correct, beautiful, good (there is evaluation here, not rules and control). Change is perceived as positive and as a legitimate and necessary part of the internal system activity, and not as what comes to serve an external purpose (discourse as controlled by interests, including internal to the participants, but where the considerations in them are outside the system, unlike substantive considerations from within the system. Because you are located within the system and not from outside).

If so, the word system includes evaluation, and the system is open towards its future, but still is not arbitrary, it cannot turn into anything, because change depends on a specific system, on a certain historical development. Can evolution develop into anything? Can a cat turn into a bird? Can the brain think anything? You can be unlimited - but still not everything is possible. There is a distinction between limits (from outside) and possibilities (from inside). And there is a difference between what could theoretically have developed into and what now exists a developmental sequence that leads to it.

Therefore if we return to epistemology, the question of knowledge should be examined within the system. One must forget about the source of knowledge (from outside), and deal with the question of how knowledge is added to a body of knowledge, that is, to knowledge within the system. Do not ask where you got the knowledge from, but what is this knowledge actually? Do not try to restart the system (the sterile tendency of philosophy), to see where it starts to rise from, because this thing will always return us to the zero point (and then Wittgenstein will claim that philosophy is useless - despite the fact that it brings enormous benefit in changes of perception that affect all development, and advance even technology and economy. Philosophy is good for business, and for literature, and for relationships!). But to understand what happens in the system where it is now. How the current sentence you are reading is added - and what it actually adds - to your knowledge. After all, the more it actually adds to your knowledge, it is not the information in it that is important, and the ability to memorize it as in a proficiency test. But what skill is learned from it (including sometimes the skill to quote it, but that is not the important one, but the skill to think with it. And not even necessarily to think like it, but in its way). After all, you will not know how to quote this sentence, but does that mean you did not learn from it? And this is the essence of knowledge.

What turns certain progress, claim or innovation into learning? Nothing in themselves, but only their context in the system. Only this context can distinguish between trivial and breakthrough, and between something easy to say and follows easily from the system, and something difficult that requires a perceptual change, and something that is nonsense that is not acceptable in the system. This does not mean that the same thing itself can be perceived as genius or nonsense depending on the arbitrary judgment of the system, or one that stems from interests. On the contrary, it means that there is no such freedom, and that something specific is really genius or nonsense, because the system is a given. None of the Talmud scholars is confused between a huge innovation and common nonsense when he comes to judge a claim, but it is possible that the same claim itself, if the Amoraim in the sugya had made other claims (the system was different) could have turned from obscure to groundbreaking. In a certain system, with a very specific history, a certain action is learning, while in another system (perhaps even with the same rules but a different history) the same action is not relevant or lacks any innovation.

If so, what is learning? A type of action in the system, which changes it and does not leave it as it is (unlike a language action, or use of language, or a move in a game. The game remains the same game). This is an action that is recognized as legitimate for changing the system (not every change is allowed). Is this action free? And maybe even arbitrary? Or is it dictated? And maybe even programmed? This question goes beyond the boundaries of the system, and looks at the reasons for the learning action. But the learning perspective is within the system, and the question of reasons (and certainly motives) is not relevant to it, but only whether this is a legitimate learning action in the system. Do not try to stand outside the system and judge and feel smart and objective, because you will come out obtuse and not understand anything - understand what is in the system from within it, with its tools. Learn it and know how to act within it correctly and beautifully. And even in the language system: do not think that grammar rules are the main thing for writing literature (literature can even violate them). You write literature within literature, not within grammar.

The same goes for the meaning of the action: just as it is claimed that the meaning of an action in language stems from the context - in the space of the surrounding system, here the meaning of the learning action stems from the context in time of the system - history of development, and future development. What interests us is what is the Talmudic meaning of a certain study or innovation, and not what is the social, or economic, or even religious meaning. In looking within the system, we give respect and meaning to the system, instead of nullifying it as a theatrical presentation of another, more real system. For example in analyzing literature as reflecting social interests. Even feline thinking has internal logic, and if you analyze it in canine, human, or psychoanalytic thinking, you will lose what characterizes the cat as a system - and the unique feline learning. You will lose the catness. For example if you claim that the system is a kind of big mother and the cat's complex with the queen is what caused it to choose the concept of learning within the system as a displacement of sexual relations. Will this help you understand the philosophical world of the cat?

Philosophy includes the ability to say that we are not looking at the whole world, but limiting ourselves to a certain system, to a specific relevant plane, and not interested in what happens outside it. Is this closing one's eyes? Should philosophy see only the world as a whole, in all its dimensions and in the system of all systems, and not ignore connections between systems within it, and certainly not isolate one? Well, the ability to look within a system stems from the very ability to see a system, and not to make an external reduction to it, but to speak in its own terms. This is the essence of the system: its insideness.

The fiction of the meta-system, which is supposedly objective and is the world, is an illusion. What is this system that has no outside and everything is inside it? It too is just looking at everything as a system. Who said it exists at all? Doesn't it fall into contradictions like the set of all sets? Maybe its validity is actually inferior to a specific system? And if we cannot grasp the system of "everything" anyway, which even it has an outside (what does not exist? What we cannot grasp? Or talk about? Or learn? - choose the incorrect answer) and therefore it is not the system of everything, then we will always look at any system as one that has an outside, and can be spoken within, that is as an intersection of a partial plane of reality. And there is no fundamental difference in this versus looking within a specific, more limited and coherent system.

The power of abstract thinking is precisely in the ability to limit itself to the concepts of a certain system, in its purity, and not mix them and dirty them with other concepts, like dirtying a concept with neurons that participate in it, as if it does not really exist and only they exist, and denying the external existence to neurons of any concept, including mathematics. And one can replace the neurons here with any system that the denier is inside and therefore unable to see outside of it, for example power relations in society, quantum mechanics, or the Israeli-Arab conflict. The more limited the system that a person's thought is imprisoned in, and his thought is unable to see in terms of another system, the further he is from abstract philosophical thinking. And one who is able to accept and internalize many and varied systems in their purity, and think and act within the framework of their concepts - and not reduce everything for example to biology or physics or halacha or economics or aesthetics or even philosophy (like a Frenchman!) - he is the one with the highest abstract thinking ability, who easily abstracts a plane from reality and speaks within it, and plays with the systems. And then he can easily understand a new mathematical theory, or any legal system.

Unlike him the reductionist, contrary to his self-image as one who has found the system, the ultimate system that explains everything, is the limited one - and lacking abstract thinking ability. For example like the utilitarian, or one who limits all thinking to everyday life, and whose limited mind goes crazy from any "philosophizing", and from anything not measured in falafel portions. After all, what is a book? Three falafel portions. And he is exactly identical to the limited romantic who finds poetry in everything, even in falafel. Or to the feminist who finds patriarchy in everything, including in the male oppression of falafel balls. The more a person is limited to one system (even the most spiritual, like art or Lurianic Kabbalah), the more he becomes a material automaton, and loses his spiritual ability. Hence looking within the system is the foundation of abstract thinking, for example the ability to say that we are looking only within the phenomenon and not in the noumenon, or that we are looking at an abstract triangle only according to axioms and definitions, and do not ask what color it is drawn in, or what is the length of its sides, but: let there be a triangle. And hence the importance of the idea of the system in thinking.

And the concept of the system, despite its generality, has great explanatory power. For example, if we examine the history of culture, we can explain with its help a phenomenon that is strange at first glance. Isn't it very odd that Leonardo knew Michelangelo, and Mozart knew Beethoven, or that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky made an effort not to meet, despite being born in the same decade? Is it possible that Jacob and Aaron are brothers? Why do we see an implausibly improbable clustering of talents in a certain place at a certain time? Why are the great men not distributed more evenly between places and periods, if genetics is significant for genius? Is it possible that we have many Leonardos, Mozarts and Dostoevskys, at all times and places, including in Gan Bracha, and if so why don't we have many Leonardos, Mozarts and Dostoevskys? What turns one generation sterile - and another into a mountain? What did they put in their water?

Well, it turns out that even the most genius genius cannot succeed without a "scene" (in the artistic sense, for example like the "scene" of Italian cinema after the war, which simply disappeared as if the earth swallowed it). Every period and place has its scenes, and sometimes (actually usually) not even one. In secular Israel today there is only the high-tech scene, and therefore genius in the field of painting or literature, or great creation in these fields, is not possible in it. No talent can succeed without a scene around it. He too needs learning like air to breathe, and without significant and continuous feedback of value learning that produces significant work of continuous value is not possible, but he will end up suffocating like a fish out of water - a masterpiece does not fall from the sky. Even the greatest writer could not write a great work here today, because he cannot even imagine a reader. Not to mention criticism and audience and feedback loops and competition and influence and education and mentoring and exposure and jealousy that increases wisdom - the scene is dead (in the nineties). So where has the Jewish talent in the Holy Land disappeared to? The talent has not disappeared - but the context around it, the space itself has collapsed. And when a person writes for himself he is not able to create the rare resonance necessary for genius - a human being will despair. The effort is enormous and all for nothing - and the result is that only professional idiots try, and the rest indeed work and make a good living from writing, but not of original literature - but of source code. Kafka sits in air conditioning and solves bugs.

Genius is indeed not a group achievement, but definitely a systemic achievement, for example: competitive and evaluative. And if there were a strong and living scene in the country in some field, say in architecture, genius architects could grow here. To succeed you must first of all understand which scene operates in your days and place - and choose to act in its specific field. Van Gogh and Picasso can be geniuses only in Paris - and against Paris, and if they had remained isolated in their place - they would not have been who they were. The capitalist logic, as if you should maximize relative advantage, and it is easier to succeed where there is no fierce competition, is false even in capitalism. You should enter a developed and vibrant field where there is fierce and strong competition, if you want to succeed. Because you are not competing, you are entering a scene. That is, into a system. Without a system learning is not possible.

It is very difficult to think of any lone genius who succeeded without a scene around him, and if we think of one such, we will discover in the end that he was simply the prominent figure associated with a scene we have not heard of. In high-tech they call it an ecosystem (a pretentious word for system). Does a scene in the field of philosophy exist anywhere in the world today? Sometimes there are entire fields where nothing happens for ages, until an eruption, which did not happen because there was some creep under the surface that accumulated, but simply because a scene was created again somewhere. Hence all our efforts (modest?) here on the site are doomed to be forgotten, because in those days there is no system in Israel.

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