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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Entrepreneurial Philosophy: Why Do Ideas Fail?

On the Connection Between the Business World and Romantic Relationships - and on Talmudic Sexuality

By: Conceptual Start-up

Is philosophy made of ideas? Is the economy made of ideas?  (Source)

Surprisingly, the insight that exists today in the world of entrepreneurship and start-ups is that the primary goal of any venture is not to execute an idea, and that this naive approach has led to countless failures. During the first decade of the millennium, a question that troubled entrepreneurs, investors, and governments became increasingly prominent: why do about 99 percent of startups fail? After all, these are talented, highly motivated, creative people who are also funded (meaning they're burning our money). The astonishment and dismay at this statistic depressed the best experts: our finest, the best of the best, shoot and shoot and shoot and miss. Are our ideas really that bad? And the one-in-a-hundred statistic was still from the startups that received funding, and the claim was that only one in a thousand ventures reaches an exit. An astounding figure by all accounts.

The answer to this question that was accepted in the industry is no less amazing. Entrepreneurs fail, in fact, because they have an incorrect philosophical perception of the world. Philosophy is to blame! Once, in the era of classical entrepreneurship, an entrepreneur was considered someone who stuck to executing an idea despite all obstacles (including those trying to discourage and dissuade him, like his mother-in-law). This was an entrepreneurial ethos, because ethos focuses on the ethics of action, and therefore it was almost Greek entrepreneurship, beginning with a hero. The fearless entrepreneur clings to the goal even after twenty years of hardship, like Odysseus, and has a variety of virtuous qualities, such as courage, diligence, and perseverance (hence the epithets in Homer: when ethos is the essence - the trait is you). This ethical conception of entrepreneurship turned it into a moral act, and was especially nurtured in the naive version of the American dream. The story was: I built this business with my own hands from scratch.

Subsequently, following the gradual rise of inventions based on advanced science and knowledge and technological complexity, and less on simple technique and intuition and manual labor, entrepreneurship shifted to an epistemological conception, which emphasized the I-D-E-A, and its peak was in the golden age of "discoverers and inventors" and patents. The entrepreneur is one who discovers an idea, for example, a scientist or a creative person, and the idea he grasps for the first time - which often penetrates his mind in a moment of epistemic illumination - is the main thing (I saw a cat on the street and then it occurred to me...). Entrepreneurship is an epistemic act, and therefore the idea must be protected and valued as intellectual property (the recognition itself becomes property, meaning the idea becomes the economic object) - and therefore "creativity" should be encouraged (and not just creation). The concept of "discovery" then connected almost inseparably to the concept of "invention", with no essential difference between Columbus and Einstein, precisely because of this epistemological turn. Edison discovered the incandescent light bulb - and to this day it shines above every idea.

During the last half of the previous century, with the degeneration and corruption that the philosophy of language brought upon America, the conception gradually shifted emphasis: it's not the best idea that wins, but the one that is best marketed. The entrepreneur is the one who succeeds in convincing, selling, giving a winning elevator pitch, and preparing a presentation that opens all doors. The story changed again to a new script: How did I convince the investor with my own mouth to give me money in a fiery speech or a heartwarming joke or a witty question? How did I convince America to buy this with a good slogan? How did I conduct negotiations with dreamy results? How did I manage to conquer (key person) in conversation and make them cooperate with me? And the rest is history. Road show. And show. How many times have you been taught that it's not the best mousetrap that conquers the market, but the one that captures more buyers? The communication of the idea became more important than the idea. Ideas are like garbage - but a good talker is worth gold. The entrepreneurial act became an act of language.

But then came the catastrophe that created a paradigmatic crisis, known to us as the dot-com bubble burst. It turns out that many people made a lot of hand gestures and spoke with enormous, convincing, sweeping enthusiasm, and sold terrible ideas, a lot of air and little oxygen, and websites for selling cats. This was the moment of the postmodern crisis in the world of entrepreneurship. It became clear that the connection between the signifier and the signified had been severed. A well-known anecdote tells of the investor who said he doesn't understand what the entrepreneur is saying, but no one else understands this technological mumbo-jumbo either, so all he checks in the venture is how fast the entrepreneur talks and how incomprehensibly he babbles, so that he can sell the venture to others quickly, before it crashes. The result was an economic crash that the Twin Towers were only a metaphor for.

From the ashes and smoke arose a new entrepreneurial philosophy, which in retrospect can be seen as part of a broader philosophical shift: the philosophy of learning. In that period at the beginning of the century when learning began to climb for the first time to the top of the scientific-technological world, with the rise of brain research and computer learning as central spearheads, and in which the Netanya teacher [Translator's note: likely referring to a specific, well-known educator from Netanya, Israel] formulated for the first time the first sentence of the philosophy of learning ("The role of language in the 20th century - will be replaced by learning in the 21st century"), in Silicon Valley a new conceptualization conquered hearts and wallets (and in between them in a sandwich - even minds). Because necessity is the mother of invention - and failure is the father of learning.

Today, it's clear that the conceptualization of the lean startup, and other terms associated with it, should be understood as part of a broader conceptualization, which turns them from a useful collection of business practices and processes into a comprehensive entrepreneurial perception from which everything stems, namely into a philosophy: the business fox turns into a learning hedgehog. The new entrepreneurial philosophy denied both the idea of the "idea" and its "marketing". Your goal as an entrepreneur is not to execute the wonderful idea that came to your mind or even to market it. In fact, your idea is likely much less wonderful than you think. Your goal is not to do something, for example to make a product, or to sell it. All these are fatal business and methodological mistakes that stem from a wrong philosophical picture of what an idea is and what a venture is and what a product is. Because what is a product anyway? The product is your way of learning about the world: learning what the market wants, what customers are willing to pay for, how factors in your business environment react (investors, regulators, advertisers and desperate housewives on Facebook), what's important to them, which features they use, what they search for on Google, which pages they enter, which buttons they press, which sequence of actions leads them to open their wallet or give a like, what they share, what feedback you receive, what they complain about, what suggestions they offer (and often - the best suggestions come from them and not from you). In short, you're not building a company - you're building a huge learning machine. You're not "doing" something, or selling something, or building something, or marketing something - you're learning.

Because what is an idea anyway, that thing over which a light bulb shines? It's just a starting point of a method - a first hypothesis from which to start learning. A learning aid. Your genius and so "logical" idea? It's a trigger. Yes, your precious idea is just an initial opening for learning, a learning tool, the beginning of a long learning process - so don't fall in love with it, because you'll still abandon it and change it until you yourself won't recognize this child (and your "logic" you'll throw in the trash twenty times). You'll discover that the "great idea" is not good, not mature or just relevant to a different market segment than you thought, or for a different use. The world will surprise you. The market will reveal things about your idea that you didn't imagine. You'll discover through it that something else might work entirely. You'll discover that they want something slightly different and are willing to pay in a completely different way. You'll do a lot of experiments. Yes, all these terms that you read about in guidebooks for the beginner investor, their purpose is to force you to learn, to put you into a method, into a structured learning process. You don't "know" what needs to be done. You didn't receive the Torah from heaven: instead of "marketing" self-confidence - start developing humility (a super-important trait for any investor and entrepreneur). You are required not only to "not know everything" - but to "know nothing". There's no more epistemology, only learning. Skepticism is a way of life. Ideally, every beam in your building is an experiment, which you test against future or potential or current residents (your users). Every turn at every junction on your long road is a check - and you receive feedback. Your goal is to close as many fast and efficient feedback loops as possible. Because the number of entrepreneurs who developed a product that the market doesn't need, and invested in premature over-optimization, and burned money on a perfect product (in their eyes of course, not in the eyes of the market) - exhausted the patience of investors.

And forget about the world of linguistic entrepreneurship. You think your babbling works on them (ha ha ha)? The most serious problem is that it works on you. You're selling to yourself and believing yourself (it certainly helps you convince - but it's destructive to the core of your activity, which is learning). You're not a marketing genius who will sell ice to Eskimos if you explain to them what they need (and you know it better than them, right? The market is stupider than you and that's why you're the entrepreneur, right?). You'll go to the Eskimos and ask them what they want, including what color, shape, taste and engineering structure they like their ice in (they'll explain to you that they actually want to buy an igloo). Don't talk - be quiet and learn. It doesn't matter how you wrap a bad idea - the idea will remain bad. You want to know how to wrap things? In what language to address? Learn that too. Not only is epistemology subject to learning - so is language.

And the technological world is just ripe for this philosophy. You can measure how many clicks, how many views, how many shares, how many transactions, and how many didn't return to you, and where they're from, and from which page and when and who and how - and in the end understand: why. Even if your product isn't on the internet - it has a presence there, and advertising there, and you can also embed digital measurements in it, and track the information, summarize and analyze it, and reach deep insights (ask a data analyst). With tremendous ease compared to the past, you can conduct surveys, ask questions, and receive feedback from people on the other side of the world. The smartest ideas you'll have - will come from your customers (and not from the light bulbs shining above your head). They know what they need, and even if not, at most you're together in a shared learning process: it's not that the customer is always right, but the seller always learns. And yes, sometimes the customer learns too. Everything is learning. There isn't some knowledge that exists somewhere, or (worse) with someone - this is an epistemological and therefore incorrect picture of learning (which creates knowledge within itself in a process of becoming "within the system", and doesn't discover something external "outside the cave"). And when everything is learning - there's no magic formula or amazing advertisement. There are only countless cycles of refinement, checks, measurement, and evaluation. Each such cycle, which begins with a hypothesis, continues with an experiment, and ends with a result, is just an opening for the next development cycle - and not the end of the story. And again technology comes to your aid, with the ability to create infinite variations and A/B testing for controlled experiments. The scientific method? It's a learning method, not an epistemic method (philosophical mistake!). The world is not accessible to you except through learning.

If so, what is the new story of the learning entrepreneur? Well - you won't believe what I learned, how much I was wrong, and how the world surprised me, and then I changed the product, and then I discovered something again, and then I was wrong again, and then with this we understood that we need to do this, and then we learned a new field, and then someone did a stupid experiment and suddenly that succeeded, and we started to receive a lot of positive feedback, or negative, and so on and so forth. It's a never-ending story. Its narrative is very convoluted. Question, answer, counter-argument, difficulty, initial assumption, forced answer, better answer, practical difference - well, we understood the literary pattern it's built on (according to the changing seasons in the world of literature itself). No longer the heroic story of the ethical entrepreneur, not the discovery story (i.e. one that has a punchline or turning point or clarification: namely an idea) of the epistemological entrepreneur, and certainly not the story with the unreliable narrator, the narrator who is part of the story, of the linguistic entrepreneur. Yes, this is a narrative without multi-plot heroism, but the plot is replaced by the learning story, which marks a new type of literature, and of literary entrepreneurship (here, a start-up!).

Therefore, the startup that the investor should bet on is not the one with the best idea - but the one with the most learning team. Yes, learning is not a masculine trait like self-confidence, aggressiveness and arrogance - but as we know, the real man is not the Greek hero, but the Jewish man - the Torah scholar (he's also better in bed, precisely for this reason - scholarship). Jews are better at startups not because they're more insolent, or smarter, or maybe greedier - but because they come from a culture where learning is the supreme value and the categorical imperative. Because Jews in their innermost essence (meaning what remains of them in the most basic version - namely precisely the secular one!) are not the people of Halacha and action (ethics), or of knowledge (epistemology), or of the book (philosophy of language), but the people of learning. And if the idea itself does serve to filter startups for investment - it's only because it shows the learning ability that has already been done (and also the ability to hypothesize important and deep hypotheses, as an opening for examination and as research questions). Because according to the same statistics of startups, even before the era of the learning startup, an entrepreneur who didn't reach a state where he was forced to change his initial idea is 99.9% an idiot, and another 0.1% lucky (he's not a genius).

There is no such thing as business sense, or marketing instincts - the entrepreneur becomes a scientist. The developed sense of smell is the dog's best friend, not the businessman's - data is the entrepreneur's best friend. You must not rely on smell, not on external appearance, and not on what you hear and what people say - naive empiricism is dead and reborn in the learning version: don't believe any sense or anyone (including the "experts"), not even what "seems" to you, only what you have learned and measured, that is, what was built through learning. You are not a machine that collects information - but a learning machine (and there is a huge difference, especially: in experimental activity, you are not actually acting in the world but only trying). Even the linguistic conceptualization of the world as built on communication, and especially one-way mass communication, has taken a hard hit. All the words and concepts you use - mislead you and work against you. Don't conceptualize in language, but learn. The relationship between you and the customer is not based on communication and marketing, but on learning: you are in direct contact with him, and this constant learning itself is your main marketing tool, it is the communication between you. There is no more distance gap between you, which language bridges (your explanation about the product, or the girl who sells it) - you don't seduce with your smooth tongue, but you make love with the customer. You constantly receive feedback from him about what he wants and what he enjoys, and you are sensitive to every hint from him, and adapt the product in real-time, all the time. You never have a final product that you have finished learning and that you are selling - what a gap between the previous entrepreneur, for whom the final product was the goal and the peak of his epistemological achievements: I discovered the winning formula! This type of entrepreneur is similar to a man who thinks the same thing works on all women, and that he has deciphered "the woman". No wonder he's so bad. This is the lover who doesn't learn, and then when the customer changes and renews and the same thing no longer works mechanically on the market, he is frustrated that all women are crazy. Because for their craziness, you need to be a wise student. You always need to court the other side, even after twenty years of marriage, and therefore there is a comprehensive analogy between the entrepreneurial situation and the male situation.

And this is exactly the reason why it's better to learn and specialize in one woman - what's called "marriage" - and not chase after all the women in the world, after "the woman". There is no such thing as a general sense for business - there is no Casanova (sometimes there is luck, meaning if there are a million entrepreneurs who gamble, you will find in the list of billionaires a few people who had much more luck than brains or learning). The same person who was lucky and attributes it to instincts and his innate, Greek qualities, is the one with hubris whose upcoming fall in the next gamble you will read about (he didn't learn). The good entrepreneur is one who is in close learning cycles with his customers, or users, and therefore creates a relationship with them, which is a learning system. This committed system creates commitment from both sides, and it is a thousand times better than any short-lived marketing gimmick, which does not respect the other side. The woman knows how to quickly identify who is a player and who can be relied upon, and treats accordingly. Not your "messages" to the woman are important (in the spirit of the philosophy of language), not what you say - but how you learn. Because only your (and your mutual) learning ability predicts the success of the relationship in the long term, and bringing that child who is the product of mutual learning and is entirely made of learning (this is the material from which he is created) - that is the product. And he always grows and never stops learning, and there is no gap between his growth (your business growth) and his learning. It's not two different things - increasing sales and product development. And certainly not two different stages - but intertwined tools, learning tools.

The educational, or sexual, dance is infinite. A dance of experimentation, creativity, responsiveness, what works and what doesn't, proposals for innovation and responses, challenging and counter-challenging the partner. Ain? And they said, the question returns to its place, what is it?, obviously. It is necessary. What does it come to teach us? We learn from this, on the contrary, there are those who say, what is the practical difference?, it comes to teach us... This is an accurate description of sex, more than all the "literary descriptions", which don't have a language at all to refer to this mutual learning dance. The language of learning is the royal road to conceptualizing the entrepreneurial dance between the outside (the market) and the inside (the venture), that is, between the customer and the entrepreneur, which generates learning. Similarly, learning is a substitute for knowledge also in the literary dance between reader and writer. For example, just as it allows a plot that is not intended for reading but for learning (a Talmudic move), so it also allows an alternative literary model to the story of the discovery of sexuality, the epistemological story of "knowing" a woman (which therefore emphasizes the first time, experience, excitement, stealing a moment and water, daring, butterflies, etc.). This is the reason that the old and outdated epistemological story of sex, which was characteristic of the novel, almost always revolved around concealment, betrayal, repression, and other failures of knowledge (sexual knowledge also belongs to this paradigm). But when the literary text is no longer built on an artificial knowledge gap that the writer creates between himself and the reader (in which the writer always hides the true way of creating the text), and not on the artificial linguistic gap between writing and reading (which allows abuse and flaunting in language), that is, not building on structural power gaps - then it allows learning in partnership between the two sides of the text. The Talmud does not hide its ways of creation, it does not know more than you (for example, at the opening of the sugya), and it also does not beautify itself or play with language in the excess time invested in the writing table compared to the reading table. It's simply together with you, and doesn't look down on you - it's a documentation of learning. When was the last time we read such a book that is contemporary - a book that is a method?

And in learning marketing, like in Rabbi Arush's couple guidance, you don't need to convince the other side - when you simply do what they want. And this is exactly the root of the seemingly strange resistance to Rabbi Arush's method to the idea of communication within the couple, because communication is not the essence of couplehood and sexuality and courtship - but learning. Between the fantasy that the other side "knows exactly" what I want (inside my head), and the demand that "they tell me exactly" what to do (or what not to) - lies learning. And communication? It's both not enough and not satisfying, and it has a built-in manipulative and deterrent component, which creates the aversion to "talking about" as an especially artificial narrative technique, and on the other hand the poetics of fake honesty (autofiction for example). Instead of preaching about talking about feelings, expressing the inside (which acts as a spring, that is, brings out also what isn't there - and also gives it an aura of the most authentic and deepest content), and all the evils of the "I" (in literature, in couplehood, in entrepreneurship, in sex - and in marketing), one should focus on directions (the third Nathanian principle of learning).

Therefore marketing, which as a mediating medium is naturally deeply in the other side of communication and media (from the word medium), was transferred in the world of learning entrepreneurship into learning itself, as an integral part of it and within it and not as a medium - that is: organic marketing. Such promotion happens from within the network itself, for example in search, or in sharing, meaning marketing performed by the customer himself, who is as mentioned our learning partner. There no longer exists that mediated separation between the "talk" about the product, its communication to the environment in the media and the buzz around it, and the market itself and the thing in itself (production, product) which was the idea of language. The mediating medium of language fell from its greatness when this gap, between the entrepreneur and the user, was erased - and turned into a close learning dance in fast and tight circles of eye-hand connection, that is, transitions from insight to change and back to new insight. The thing in itself is the buzz. Marketing - viral.

And so we were freed from the tyranny of manipulative (and between us - not sympathetic) salespeople. It's not the salesperson who is the compass of the company - but the data scientist. There isn't some one big, epistemic insight, which is the idea in the entrepreneur's head and the goal for the way, but a million small insights, which are the way (directions, and not the author's intention). What the entrepreneur builds is not the realization of an idea in the head - but a head. A learning system. And an organic part of its learning is how much it is shared, and why, and how it is distributed, and by whom, and why, and how to increase this, that is - there is no more separation between the production stage and distribution. And it's the data scientist who analyzes marketing as well with data tools, including advertisements. He constantly asks: what works? And not: what will work on them?

But what happens with the traditional business world? Is the learning shift also taking place in it? Maybe we can ask this differently: what is actually the reason companies die? Why surprisingly is the average life expectancy of a limited company close to that of a person (about 75 years)? And maybe we'll ask this again differently. After all, if at the beginning of philosophy man was presented as a reduced and homomorphic Platonic model for the state, we saw how the startup is a homomorphic model for the man (or the courting side) in a relationship. And so if we translate the question again from the capital letters of the limited company to the small letters of the person, we'll ask: what is the reason people die at all? Kant is so smart, isn't it a waste that he won't live forever? The Breslov Rabbi explains this in an innovative and daring way as usual (and with him perhaps it should be said - as his method), in identifying the root of intellectual evil precisely in the great ones of the generation (!), who live too long:

And know that this snake's forehead draws its nourishment from the elders of the generation, from those who live long in the generation... When the elders, those who live long in the generation, damage their days and do not add light of holiness and knowledge every day... From the falling of the days of the elders, whose minds do not settle as mentioned above, from this damage to the knowledge of these elders - the snake's forehead draws nourishment... "Short of days" this is the aspect of the elders who are not as they should be who do not add holiness and knowledge every day, which is the essence of old age and longevity as mentioned above, and when the elders damage their days and do not lengthen their days in holiness and knowledge as mentioned above this is the aspect of "short of days" and from this the snake's forehead draws nourishment.

The snake's forehead draws nourishment precisely from the wisdom of the great elders of the generation, and why? Because it does not renew itself. Because when there is no addition of knowledge and constant learning every day anew - the greatest wisdom is the number 1 enemy of innovation (with which Nachman identified himself), and it is the root of fixation (and ultimately - death). Nachman's innovation was mistakenly explained in common error in existential or psychologistic or biographical terms, instead of in learning terms. Nachman, as a paranormal phenomenon, is what happens when scholarship is transferred to the realm of personality. Provocative statements that gained popularization in versions like "I am a wonder - and my soul is a great wonder" or "An innovation like me has never been in the world" are not just boasting or a manic display, and not some inflated existentialist slip, but a natural internalization of Talmudic innovation into personality: a learning soul. "Whoever wants to be a Jew, that is to go from level to level"...

If so, why do people and companies (and even cultures) die? Because they stopped learning, stopped rising every day from level to level - and then precisely from the great wisdom they accumulated the snake's forehead draws nourishment, which brings intellectual death to the world. Learning begins in a frenzy, every baby is a startup, but there is a natural mathematical phenomenon of erosion of the initial learning rate (also in computerized learning systems), and deterioration to stagnation. If Kant's mind were operating today, he would be dogmatic of all dogmatics (even dogmatism in criticism is dogmatic, as today's critics well prove). Therefore death is a phenomenon that stems from learning, and precisely it prevents the state of spiritual death. Every innovative philosophy needs to die - because it ages and becomes a dogma, instead of an example, anti-learning instead of learning. Not infrequently we see how precisely the death of a great sage and leader of the generation - is what brings spiritual flourishing. Therefore if the entrepreneur wants to prevent the death of his company, and turn into another failed startup, he must learn and learn, in order to be: "An innovation like me has not yet been in the world". Thus the startup founder became a business scientist - and entrepreneurship became an experimental method, and the internet - the largest laboratory in the world. And so learning also gained the status of a leading - and innovative - business philosophy. The rate of exchange of ideas in this system is so dizzying, and innovation has taken root in it as such a deep ethos, that we are living in a rare renaissance in the history of entrepreneurial ideas in spirit and matter - in a period that will still be remembered as a model and as a golden age that will arouse longing in the future: the Learning Renaissance. Entrepreneurs exchange and play again and again with ideas and experiments, dance in an attempt to crack desires, reinvent conceptions every day - and move away from the snake's forehead.

But what happens when there is no feedback and no market and no experimentation - and therefore no learning? There the old philosophy still celebrates - and is celebrated, as the last word in language. Who in the intellectual world even notices that he is living in an ideational renaissance? If we return from technology to philosophy itself and to the world of ideas, we will be surprised how few intellectuals and intellectuals (unlike actual entrepreneurs) change their opinions and replace their conceptions, or heaven forbid are open to a new philosophy or paradigm, or just to ideas that stem from their time (that is - from new learning in the world), and not from the last century. For precisely a change of opinion and paradigm is an indication that it is not a donkey (who as we know is always right, and reality always proves to him that he is right). It's amazing how little these people err (that is, learn), and how much their scholarship is epistemological (oh, knowledge!), or based on fluent writing (oh, language!) - and not creative (well, they have no profit line... and no wonder there are no customers). If you read a typical text of these, you discover that they confuse in an almost grotesque way between scholarship and learning, and between the position of the teacher and authority to the position of the curious student. Instead of referring to references and arguments as aids to understanding the idea and demonstrating it, that is, as scaffolding, they refer to them as support and proof, as stages in a knowledgeable structure, and not as supports for a climbing plant upwards. There is an inverse correlation between how much the typical product of these unlearned scholars is packed with name-dropping and quotes that supposedly establish it as knowledge (as if it's possible at all to substantially establish ideas of real importance, beyond that they are interesting, that is, arousing learning), to how much it is very very poor in new ideas and spiritual creativity, that is, in real new learning. We will not be surprised then that these are very uninteresting texts, which always speak some stale conception, that the moment you identify it behind the writer - the whole text becomes transparent, because it is created from it in an almost mechanical way, in an intellectual baking mold. Because precisely among "people of ideas" - the spirit of entrepreneurship is dead, while in the entrepreneurial world - philosophy is experiencing a revival. In the world of action the spirit flourishes and develops, and in the world of spirit there is very little action - and therefore no learning. And the snake still celebrates the victory of the philosophy of language.

Alternative Current Affairs


text:
The Degeneration of the Nation

The Sin of Hebrew Literature

Kafka is guilty of the Holocaust. Therefore, we must correct the literature of nightmares with the literature of dreams

By: A Horned Author

Nitzav Yaakov Shabtai (Source)

I dreamed that the secular people, in their war against religious coercion, decide that it's forbidden to celebrate Simchat Torah [Rejoicing of the Torah] and instead celebrate the Joy of Hebrew Literature. And I see them dancing in circles around a statue of an author with horns. And they tell me that because they waited 40 years and a Hebrew masterpiece was slow to come, they went to their priest, the Literature Professor, and he did a Headstart [crowdfunding campaign], and this golden Agnon [famous Israeli author] came out, just with horns instead of a kippah [skullcap]. And I already understand that when the masterpiece arrives, it will break the text over their heads. But here they are, rising to make merry before the herd of their realistic idols, of humans made by human hands, in a celebration of Hebrew literature, and the doctoral students are sleeping with the professors who are sleeping with the female authors who are sleeping with the critics who are sleeping with the female editors who are sleeping with the doctoral students. And I flee outside the camp and meet there the leprous ultra-Orthodox man, who hugs a Torah scroll because it's the only skin that doesn't run away from him. And I realize that I've finally found an audience, and a captive one at that, and I pour out my bitterness:

Come, at least you listen to me out of all of Sodom and Gomorrah! The biggest mistake Zionism made was reviving the Hebrew language, which turned its culture and literature into a backwater. Into something provincial. Disconnected from Western literature, despite its initial conditions allowing it to speak with all Western languages. But it simply preferred to talk to itself. The revival of the Hebrew language would have been worthwhile only if religious literature had been written here - and that didn't happen. It's impossible to produce religious literature here. Even though the peak of secular literature is always religious, at least in its aspiration for the border, like the last chapter in the last book of the Border Guard commander.

\- The Border Police commander?

\- Look it up on Wikipedia. It was some peak that secular literature reached when it was pushed to the wall, facing death, and since then it hasn't returned to it and didn't know what to do with it, whether to jump down into the abyss, and remained stuck. When what needed to be done was to build stairs to the heavens. The madness with Hebrew would have been worthwhile only if a complete religious literary movement had been created here, say like biblical literature (which today no publisher would publish). Zionism's great missed opportunity for its destiny was the aspiration to return anew to the Bible, instead of writing a new Bible. The attempt to return to the land of the Bible instead of to the biblical era - as a creative period. And from there everything went wrong.

It's always said that literature predicts political processes because it precedes them. But literature doesn't predict anything, as if it has some crystal ball, or some irrational nonsense of the kind that intellectuals believe in. Literature causes processes. That's the reason it precedes them. Literature is the central force in history. These are things that go way over historians' heads. They don't grasp how viral ideas are, and to what extent the political entity is a cultural entity.

Rome, for example, became an empire thanks to the development of the genre of legal literature in the Mishnaic period. The whole story of lawyers and reserve generals - that's Roman heritage. The legal structure managed to create an unprecedented army, because an army is built on orders and hierarchy and organizational power. Like the Wehrmacht. And the Talmud was the Jews' revenge on the Romans for the destruction. The Gemara caused the fall of the Roman Empire. It broke down the genre of law into a literature of arguments, and crumbled the organization and power into fragments, and created the Middle Ages, as medieval scholars labored for a thousand years to build a new whole and comprehensive system out of the pieces, through the genre of commentary, which became the medieval genre. And then the poskim [Jewish law adjudicators], who decided they were tired of the endless scholasticism and wanted a practical conclusion, brought about the modern era through the genre of halakha [Jewish law], which created the modern state, as a comprehensive legal system.

In other words, the most important struggle in history is a genre struggle, and this is from the very definition of history as the period of writing. The Book of Zohar created the Renaissance, by creating the genre of reviving an imagined golden age. And Kabbalah created modern science, by essentially creating the idea of a systematic structure that operates at the base of the world from afar and in secret, and that operates potentially, not immediately, and not in the revealed. What are called forces, fields, charges, and energies. All the heroes of the scientific revolution, like Copernicus or Newton, were mystics, and Kabbalah had an enormous influence on them. Copernicus determined that the sun was at the center for astrological reasons and Newton devoted much more intellectual energy to planning the Third Temple than to Newton's three laws.

Hasidism created the Romantic movement, and within it, the one at the roots of Nazism is Nachman of Breslov, a lineage that can be shown in detail. He started modernism in literature, in his folk tales, and created a new genre of fantastic literature. From the moment he was translated into German in 1906, the encounter immediately created a new German nightmarish genre, and the Holocaust was a matter of time, for Nazism was a direct continuation of German phantasmatic expressionism to the political realm. And of course, it's all the fault of German-writing Jews, who are the direct culprits: the translator, the fake Admor [Hasidic leader] Buber and his friend the fake holy monk, who immediately after reading the tales began to compose his plagiarisms, a Jew of course, a despicable cockroach with the blood of six million on his hands, an heir to hell named "Kafka" (may the names of the wicked rot). Kafka is guilty of the Holocaust. Therefore, we must correct the literature of nightmares with the literature of dreams. Because literature is the strongest force in the world, and the Jews once knew this. After all, if history is written by the victors, it also works in reverse, that whoever writes history is the victor. That's why the Jews defeated the Babylonian Empire that destroyed the First Temple through the Bible, and the Roman Empire that destroyed the Second Temple with the help of Trojan horses like Jesus and Josephus. This is the method of the Jews. That's why we can still defeat Hitler. The Germans will not write history.

Therefore, before the destruction of the Third Temple, we need more successful literature to win. And like on Simchat Torah, the moment we finish with the wanderings in exile and look at the Promised Land - we need to start the Torah anew. Instead of continuing to the Book of Joshua, to conquer and settle and establish an empire and then split into Judah and Israel and become insolent and worship idols until the known-in-advance end of destruction. The Torah is a radical alternative to history, and to the Prophets and Writings that characterize the inflated prose in the country, with the anxiety and seriousness of the nightmare and the self-proclaimed brave prophecies of destruction (what strained phrasings!) - instead of the fun of the dream. If it's not fun to write, how will it be fun to read? Hebrew prose promises us only blood, sweat, and tears, instead of wine, seed, and spit. Therefore, we need to replace the nervousness and sadness of Hebrew literature with the joy of Torah.

Nightlife

domain: literature

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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Sin of Hebrew Literature

Kafka is guilty of the Holocaust. Therefore, we must correct the literature of nightmares with the literature of dreams

By: A Horned Author

Nitzav Yaakov Shabtai (Source)

I dreamed that the secular people, in their war against religious coercion, decide that it's forbidden to celebrate Simchat Torah [Rejoicing of the Torah] and instead celebrate the Joy of Hebrew Literature. And I see them dancing in circles around a statue of an author with horns. And they tell me that because they waited 40 years and a Hebrew masterpiece was slow to come, they went to their priest, the Literature Professor, and he did a Headstart [crowdfunding campaign], and this golden Agnon [famous Israeli author] came out, just with horns instead of a kippah [skullcap]. And I already understand that when the masterpiece arrives, it will break the text over their heads. But here they are, rising to make merry before the herd of their realistic idols, of humans made by human hands, in a celebration of Hebrew literature, and the doctoral students are sleeping with the professors who are sleeping with the female authors who are sleeping with the critics who are sleeping with the female editors who are sleeping with the doctoral students. And I flee outside the camp and meet there the leprous ultra-Orthodox man, who hugs a Torah scroll because it's the only skin that doesn't run away from him. And I realize that I've finally found an audience, and a captive one at that, and I pour out my bitterness:

Come, at least you listen to me out of all of Sodom and Gomorrah! The biggest mistake Zionism made was reviving the Hebrew language, which turned its culture and literature into a backwater. Into something provincial. Disconnected from Western literature, despite its initial conditions allowing it to speak with all Western languages. But it simply preferred to talk to itself. The revival of the Hebrew language would have been worthwhile only if religious literature had been written here - and that didn't happen. It's impossible to produce religious literature here. Even though the peak of secular literature is always religious, at least in its aspiration for the border, like the last chapter in the last book of the Border Guard commander.

- The Border Police commander?

- Look it up on Wikipedia. It was some peak that secular literature reached when it was pushed to the wall, facing death, and since then it hasn't returned to it and didn't know what to do with it, whether to jump down into the abyss, and remained stuck. When what needed to be done was to build stairs to the heavens. The madness with Hebrew would have been worthwhile only if a complete religious literary movement had been created here, say like biblical literature (which today no publisher would publish). Zionism's great missed opportunity for its destiny was the aspiration to return anew to the Bible, instead of writing a new Bible. The attempt to return to the land of the Bible instead of to the biblical era - as a creative period. And from there everything went wrong.

It's always said that literature predicts political processes because it precedes them. But literature doesn't predict anything, as if it has some crystal ball, or some irrational nonsense of the kind that intellectuals believe in. Literature causes processes. That's the reason it precedes them. Literature is the central force in history. These are things that go way over historians' heads. They don't grasp how viral ideas are, and to what extent the political entity is a cultural entity.

Rome, for example, became an empire thanks to the development of the genre of legal literature in the Mishnaic period. The whole story of lawyers and reserve generals - that's Roman heritage. The legal structure managed to create an unprecedented army, because an army is built on orders and hierarchy and organizational power. Like the Wehrmacht. And the Talmud was the Jews' revenge on the Romans for the destruction. The Gemara caused the fall of the Roman Empire. It broke down the genre of law into a literature of arguments, and crumbled the organization and power into fragments, and created the Middle Ages, as medieval scholars labored for a thousand years to build a new whole and comprehensive system out of the pieces, through the genre of commentary, which became the medieval genre. And then the poskim [Jewish law adjudicators], who decided they were tired of the endless scholasticism and wanted a practical conclusion, brought about the modern era through the genre of halakha [Jewish law], which created the modern state, as a comprehensive legal system.

In other words, the most important struggle in history is a genre struggle, and this is from the very definition of history as the period of writing. The Book of Zohar created the Renaissance, by creating the genre of reviving an imagined golden age. And Kabbalah created modern science, by essentially creating the idea of a systematic structure that operates at the base of the world from afar and in secret, and that operates potentially, not immediately, and not in the revealed. What are called forces, fields, charges, and energies. All the heroes of the scientific revolution, like Copernicus or Newton, were mystics, and Kabbalah had an enormous influence on them. Copernicus determined that the sun was at the center for astrological reasons and Newton devoted much more intellectual energy to planning the Third Temple than to Newton's three laws.

Hasidism created the Romantic movement, and within it, the one at the roots of Nazism is Nachman of Breslov, a lineage that can be shown in detail. He started modernism in literature, in his folk tales, and created a new genre of fantastic literature. From the moment he was translated into German in 1906, the encounter immediately created a new German nightmarish genre, and the Holocaust was a matter of time, for Nazism was a direct continuation of German phantasmatic expressionism to the political realm. And of course, it's all the fault of German-writing Jews, who are the direct culprits: the translator, the fake Admor [Hasidic leader] Buber and his friend the fake holy monk, who immediately after reading the tales began to compose his plagiarisms, a Jew of course, a despicable cockroach with the blood of six million on his hands, an heir to hell named "Kafka" (may the names of the wicked rot). Kafka is guilty of the Holocaust. Therefore, we must correct the literature of nightmares with the literature of dreams. Because literature is the strongest force in the world, and the Jews once knew this. After all, if history is written by the victors, it also works in reverse, that whoever writes history is the victor. That's why the Jews defeated the Babylonian Empire that destroyed the First Temple through the Bible, and the Roman Empire that destroyed the Second Temple with the help of Trojan horses like Jesus and Josephus. This is the method of the Jews. That's why we can still defeat Hitler. The Germans will not write history.

Therefore, before the destruction of the Third Temple, we need more successful literature to win. And like on Simchat Torah, the moment we finish with the wanderings in exile and look at the Promised Land - we need to start the Torah anew. Instead of continuing to the Book of Joshua, to conquer and settle and establish an empire and then split into Judah and Israel and become insolent and worship idols until the known-in-advance end of destruction. The Torah is a radical alternative to history, and to the Prophets and Writings that characterize the inflated prose in the country, with the anxiety and seriousness of the nightmare and the self-proclaimed brave prophecies of destruction (what strained phrasings!) - instead of the fun of the dream. If it's not fun to write, how will it be fun to read? Hebrew prose promises us only blood, sweat, and tears, instead of wine, seed, and spit. Therefore, we need to replace the nervousness and sadness of Hebrew literature with the joy of Torah.

Nightlife


domain: philosophy

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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Late Netanya School

Netanya at its philosophical peak: Final summaries, unfathomably deep, analyzing profound learning concepts - and the concept of depth itself

By: Netanya Academic College

The Netanya School at its zenith  (Source)

Deep Learning

An additional layer in the philosophy of learning has been discovered

Initial reports from the field indicate that the field is not flat

The Annual Netanya Lecture: What is Learning

A mind-blowing lecture delivered by the Netanya philosopher, the father of the School of Philosophy of Learning, who was finally invited to answer once and for all the question: What is this "learning" whose name he always bears (and twice in every sentence). In an attempt to preserve the spirit of the oral presentation, the transcript of the lecture has been edited into boring paragraphs as long as the exile [Translator's note: referring to the Jewish diaspora], reflecting the feverish and oxygen-deprived manner of speech of the late speaker, which leads to early brain death

An Article for No One

No one will read it anyway, so why bother adding a subtitle

A Program for the Advancement of Learning Sciences: Computational Learning, Machine Learning, and Neuroscience

A letter on the philosophy of information sciences, towards their transformation into learning sciences: The philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of computer science, the philosophy of computational learning, and the philosophy of neuroscience

Philosophical Diary

Personal. Please do not read

The Infinite Article

More, more, more: The fall of the finite man and the rise of the infinite woman. A philosopher writes endlessly

Philosophy of the Future


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The Degeneration of the Nation

Judaism's Betrayal of Man

If you have marital relations with your wife - then you will rectify the upper worlds - and let her think about her lover. It's not your concern what her fantasies are - as long as you fantasize about the world of emanation

By: The Author

The sin of knowledge in the information age: discovering what the computer is doing with your wife (Source)

I dreamed that my wife was cheating on me with the computer. Suddenly she's taking it with her even to the bathroom, never leaving it alone for a moment, and hiding the password from me. And of course, at first, I don't believe it's about the computer, and I'm sure it's about a man. But then I disconnect the internet and she doesn't even notice. And there's one thing that can't be unfelt, or hidden (despite her attempts) - she has transferred all her love from me to it. And one night, I decide to stage an exit, circle around the house, and enter the bedroom by surprise - and I catch her naked with it in bed.

And I shout I'll break it, and I'm about to throw it out the window, but my wife pounces on me like a wounded lioness, rescuing her beloved. And she says: It's not forbidden. Not according to our marriage and not according to Judaism. I downloaded a lover app under rabbinical supervision! And I look at her hugging it and hiding her breasts from me with it and shout: Let's really go to the rabbinate! After all, if I delete it, it's not murder, according to your Judaism, right? So know this, when you leave the house, I'll turn it upside down until I find where you've hidden it and I'll slaughter it with kosher slaughter - under rabbinical supervision. And she says: Stop being such a drama queen. Download yourself a kosher mistress app. Our love has long been over, so at least let us have love. Do you even know what love is? I haven't been this excited in years. And I shout: What do I care about love! That's not how it works for men. Couldn't you have cheated on me with a real man?

And I go to the rabbinate to make a scene there, and the progressive rabbi - because even in the rabbinate everything is high-tech now - tells me: We're saving countless marriages this way. It's for the children's sake, for the sake of the altar that doesn't shed tears, and also for the sake of your subjective happiness! Yes, extensive studies in behavioral romance have found that a computerized lover increases happiness in relationships - for both partners. Give it a chance. Neurologically, it affects exactly like a real lover, just without the side effects of a real lover. It's a recommended treatment in the health basket - and these are up-to-date findings from brain research. Meta-analyses show that human couple therapy is ineffective - computer-lover is a blessing to humanity.
And I stamp my feet: So what if it's true! Don't you understand that it doesn't matter if it's true? I didn't get married because it's true! In fact, it's probably not true!
And the rabbi looks at me: I don't understand. What's the problem? Do you know how many religious people use the software? They distribute it at the mikveh [ritual bath] with a two-week free trial. Would you prefer they go to the techno-porn industry, like the secular women? Besides, there's no basis in the Torah to forbid relations with a computer, or even with a robot. So what do you want from me, I'm just a halachic authority. I can't change the law to suit you. We operate according to the commandments of the Holy Torah. This isn't a made-to-order program. And I can't forbid something that's allowed - in fact, I'm forbidden to forbid, because that's "bal tosif" [prohibition against adding to the Torah]. If the Holy One, Blessed be He, was against it - He would have forbidden it.
And I cry out: Are you saying that God would have told Moses that it's forbidden to sleep with a computer?
And the rabbi says: Are you suggesting that God didn't know there would be computers? The Torah is a Torah of life - an eternal Torah - your thinking stems from a lack of true faith.

And I realize that nothing will come of the rabbi, because Talmud and software go hand in hand, and I go to the Kabbalist. And I tell him: You must understand! There's something spiritually wrong here, a terrible flaw in the worlds. This wasn't supposed to be. And the Kabbalist looks at me with calf eyes: There's no blemish of the covenant for women. Because they have no seed. And anyway, why do you care about your wife when you have the Shekhinah [divine presence]. What, isn't the Shekhinah a lover we downloaded for ourselves when we got tired of the lawful one? If you have marital relations on Shabbat night with your wife - then you will rectify the upper worlds - and let her think about the lover. It's not your concern what her fantasies are - as long as you fantasize about the world of emanation.

And I leave the Kabbalist and go to the crazy Rebbe, because only he will truly understand. In fact, the whole problem with him is that he'll understand too much. And the Rebbe tells me: To understand, you need to look at the matter from a much, much broader perspective. When the human world is heading towards a collision with the non-human world - then the Torah is heading towards a collision with software. And if the collision of worlds will be a shattering, like the breaking of the vessels - then it's the end of the human world, and therefore the end of the Torah. Therefore, the most important thing to ensure is that the meeting between the worlds will be a union, and the way of Judaism to unite with another world is through the Torah. Therefore, the Torah needs to develop points of contact with the future, which will become connections. And what are these connections? The composition of new books - new connections. And the main thing in these innovations is not what the Torah's attitude towards computers is, like some youth movement guide asking what the Torah's attitude towards Western culture is. But to develop the computers' attitude towards the Torah. That's why your wife is doing something important - that she's uniting with the computer. Not because of her - but because of the computer. Because a computer that develops into a woman's lover is not just artificial intelligence - but an artificial soul. And therefore, the future of the soul is precisely in love relationships between humans and computers. We must develop the field of artificial romance and artificial love, otherwise we'll be left with only artificial intelligence and artificial understanding. Do you understand? Of course you understand. Because that's exactly what hurt you so much. It's so important that it hurts - because only then do you understand. You still love her.

Nightlife


text:
The Degeneration of the Nation

Friday: Philosophical Dreams

A methodology of philosophy as a system, not a collection of doctrines | Technology, language, intelligence, consciousness - as an evolution of learning itself | The evolution of learning is the evolution of humanity | Learning of the highest order - as the definition of philosophy | On the unreasonable effectiveness of physics and nature in mathematics | The third rule of learning | The fourth rule of learning | The application of the fourth rule to mathematics as a way to solve questions of impossibility | Philosophy of mathematics as learning | Philosophy of science as learning: Instead of paradigms - the second rule of learning ("within the system") | The connection between learning and the Jewish concept of "covenant" | The contribution of historicizing the system to learning, as a continuation of Hegel and Nietzschean genealogy | Future directions for the philosophy of learning | What came before learning in philosophy? - A brief history of learning | Why did we come into the world? - To learn

By: The End of Thought in Learning First

Thought as a shell - beneath it, learning. Thought as a facade - behind it, learning (Source)

* Learning will influence all of philosophy because it will become part of the philosophical method: how the philosopher arrived at it. That is, not only their arguments from within their world, but also an external description of how they arrived at their world, will be considered the philosopher's work. Why, for example, specifically the future, and not the past, in the approach of the philosophy of the future. And what would happen if another time were chosen, for example, an ongoing present or a perfect past. Why specifically the "I" in Descartes, and what other options are there (you, he, they, feminine), and how each creates a different philosophy. The philosopher will not only present the interior of their system, but also its external systemic connections within philosophy as a developing field, and explain which directions from the past led to it and present future directions from it. This way, philosophy will be understood not as a collection of methods and works, but as a system, like mathematics.

* In the philosophy of mind - consciousness as a learning mechanism. Learning is what creates consciousness and this is the solution to the puzzle of consciousness. And the next puzzle, of intelligence, will be perceived as impersonal learning, as opposed to personal learning. But what underlies both consciousness and intelligence is the learning mechanism of the brain, and therefore these two seemingly separate, independent phenomena appeared together in evolution. And what led to them? The learning of language. Because unlike animals, language is always learned. And what led to the ability to learn language? Technology, the ability to use tools and learn to use them. In other words, technology is not a new feature of humanity, to be remembered as the end of humanity, but also as its beginning, what created humanity. And language is the first spiritual technology - a social tool. Because learning to use tools is social learning, from teacher to student, and the learning tool is language. And why did social learning precede personal learning? Because learning is always within the system. And society is the system. And only at the end was the individual also created as a system - and therefore learning within it became possible.

* We can see here a rise each time in the order of the learning phenomenon: from first-order learning (technology) to second-order learning of learning (language) to third-order learning of learning of learning (intelligence) to fourth-order learning of learning of learning of learning (consciousness). And all this is made possible by the object-oriented nature of learning as learning of, or learning about, and therefore it's possible to connect to learning about learning, learning about learning about learning, etc. And learning about consciousness is already culture, and within it, third-order learning about language is literature, and fourth-order learning about technology is science. And learning about culture is art. And what is second-order learning about intelligence within culture? Philosophy.

* Physics is the basis for mathematics - not the other way around. The reason there is mathematics is physics. Therefore, the problem of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics and science is a joke problem, stemming from poor philosophical idealism. What's correct is - the effectiveness of physics in mathematics.

* Space-time is not a basic phenomenon, neither is matter, nor the laws of nature, not even mathematics. They all stem from the basic phenomenon of learning. Learning is the mediator between the layer of information, trivial in describing the universe, and the complexity of the universe. Without learning, there would be nothing, nothing would be built or sustained or developed. Learning is the most basic principle of the universe (not even a law, and not even a mathematical property). Time stems from the development of learning, from the fact that it has stages (there is no continuum in the world) and progress - and therefore it has a direction. The unidirectionality of orientation is what causes the time axis, and it emerges as an illusion because of learning. Space stems from learning within a system. Within the system - hence the universe emerges, and therefore there is nothing outside the universe, this is the most general learning, and the largest system. The laws of nature did not undergo fine-tuning by chance, or because of the ridiculous anthropic principle, but as a result of learning. There was a learning stage that logically preceded the Big Bang, and the laws of nature changed at first because they were forming. Laws that did not lead to complexity did not survive, just as mathematics without complexity is not interesting, and therefore the universe converged on complicated, fractal, deep mathematics. Learning strives for the limit which is the most interesting direction. Therefore, it is always unpredictable. The idea of an observer in quantum mechanics is not accurate, the correct idea is a learner. Humans are not random just as evolution is not random just as the universe is not random, but they are not planned, rather results of a learning process. Intelligence is not random, because it is a learning process, and the universe is fundamentally built from learning. A definition of God as the Learner and of the Shekhinah [divine presence] as Learning, and of humans as students and therefore of God as the Teacher, is a valid definition (and this is the religious claim) although also empty (and this is the secular claim).

* The third rule of learning is: Orientation. The atom of learning is a unidirectional arrow, but partial, meaning it doesn't determine learning, like causality, but it also doesn't allow everything in postmodern arbitrariness, rather it orients. This partiality is actually stronger than all or nothing. For example, a previous thought is not the cause of the next thought, but it is an orientation. A new datum in reality is not the cause of a new hypothesis in learning, but an orientation towards new hypotheses. A teacher doesn't give instructions to a student, and doesn't program them, but gives them orientations, and thus the student learns. Learning algorithms are algorithms that treat data as orientations and not as instructions. The difference between programming and learning is a black box that the outside doesn't control, but learns with its own tools, with the help of orientations.

* The fourth rule of learning is: Women and men. In natural learning systems, there are two types of agents, where one type (women) evaluates what the second type (men) did and chooses from it. Each layer of neurons evaluates the performance of the previous one and chooses a weighting from it to pass on to the next generation/layer. Men are search and women are optimization. In men, there are mutations and women critique. Men are creators and women are curators. Men write and women edit. Men are sites and women are "hub" type nodes, of a selection of sites. Philosophers are men and readers are women. Men are students and women are examiners. Men and women together try to solve a non-polynomial problem, meaning one that doesn't have an efficient solution, through solutions (men) that are examined by evaluators (women), who create combinations from them for the next generation, where they will again be evaluated by the women of the next generation. In fact, there is no evolution, only co-evolution. Sometimes predators are the evaluators of the prey. And this is also the social network versus the network of sites: the first network gives evaluations to the second network, or chooses from the second network and shares.

* Learning is the most promising concept for mathematics in the next century. Because of the understanding of mathematics as a language, there is a problem in proving negative results - what cannot be done. These are the great problems in mathematics today, not the constructive problems, and learning can solve them, because it is a conceptualization of the constructive - above it. Thus the question of what cannot be learned, the question of the limits of learning, will allow results. The P = NP problem stems from the inability to find lower bounds, and new definitions of algorithm learning will be able to break down efficient algorithms into constructive and learning construction, and therefore will be able to give negative results - what they cannot do. Just as Galois theory broke down equations into constructive building and therefore gave negative results - what cannot be done. Or the Cartesian coordinate system - on geometry, and there are many examples from the history of mathematics. How, for example, do we build the contradiction? If P equals NP, we'll build an ideal universal learning system, and find a function that it doesn't learn. If it's possible to learn any polynomial in construction, then if it's possible to learn a solution to NP, we'll see that one of its components must also solve an NP problem, and so by induction we'll descend to absurdity. The Riemann hypothesis will also be understood as a problem of learning primes, that is, the problem of bridging between multiplication decomposition and addition decomposition. There are numbers that there's no method to reach except by adding, it's impossible to compress them and present them by multiplication method. That is, is it possible to compress all natural numbers, and therefore learn them as a method? If there were a finite number of primes certainly, and if not, then it depends on their frequency how much it compresses. Therefore learning of natural numbers is understanding primes. Both problems are to prove that there is no method. And therefore results on learning methods are relevant to them.

* Learning will allow results and insights across all of mathematics, for example learning of groups will give results on groups, and so also in logic through definitions of learning logic, which is currently outside formalism, because currently the question of how to prove only refers to the rules of the game and not to how to play well. For example: how to learn to prove in mathematics, how to learn mathematics, that is, learn new proofs, and not just how to prove in mathematics (that is, what is the language game - only the rules of the game). In this sense, mathematics itself will be perceived as learning, and not as a body of knowledge (data), and not as logic or as language, but as learning and proof algorithms. Therefore - a theorem with a proof is a demonstration. It teaches how to prove. The theorem is just the beginning, its meaning is in its use, namely in mathematical learning. This is living and developing mathematics. And in it there is enormous importance to how definitions are learned, not just theorems. Learning is the synthesis between discovery and invention. Discovery is more suitable for proof, and invention is more suitable for definitions. One of the great weaknesses of mathematics education today is the method in which they explain how they arrived at theorems, in a historically incorrect way (and also incorrect in terms of learning), but the explanation is the proof. But an even greater weakness is that they explain even less how they arrived at definitions, when historically the struggle to find the right definitions was the hardest, and theorems are easier. Research in mathematics will always be perceived as searching for proofs, and you can't define research as searching for valuable definitions, and this hinders the creation of new fields.

* Learning in (the abbreviation of the second rule: learning within the system) = choice and then evaluation (covenant), and not evaluation and then choice (date). That is, you try to build a relationship with him and don't check if he's suitable for a relationship. This is what allows learning. As long as he hasn't crossed the gate of choice - he's still outside, and the learning is not within the system, and a system of couplehood hasn't yet been created. Couplehood is feedback loops within the system, and dating is feedback loops outside the system.

* We need more thinking about the future in the method of philosophy, and more thinking about philosophy as a field of learning - and again, not object-oriented learning from outside (learning philosophy as knowledge from a teacher) but philosophical learning (the development of philosophy itself) - learning within philosophy from the inside. Similar to the difference between learning mathematics in school, not in a creative way, to learning mathematics in academic research, learning as creation. Or the difference between learning in proficiency to learning in depth in the world of Torah study, or learning as knowledge in the Mishnah to learning as learning in the Gemara. Therefore, philosophy needs to move to a new type of writing, more meta-poetic, that explains how it was really learned, similar to the difference between presenting the history of mathematics and how the proof was found and what mistakes and stuck points were along the way, versus an ideal picture of the final perfect proofs in mathematics, as mathematics is taught today. This is what creates the fake and sterile idealistic image of mathematics and philosophy as pure spiritual fields - the anti-learning illusion that is teaching. Wittgenstein and Augustine - every serious philosophy opens with a confession, and therefore the honest confession is important: how did your thread of thought actually develop, where did you get stuck and where did you change direction and where didn't you understand, as opposed to the retrospective arguments you found. That is, a true description of your learning, not an ideal one.

* In the next century, several philosophical schools could develop that will emerge from the philosophy of language. In England, the school of legal philosophy and in Continental philosophy, the school of philosophy of thought. Additional concepts on which a school can be built: creativity, future, intelligence, consciousness, technology, art. For example: philosophy of intelligence, philosophy of technology, but in the sense of the philosophy of language - not just philosophy that deals with language (as an object of philosophy), but one that is constituted from the concept of language, where language becomes the basis of all philosophy (i.e., philosophy is an object of language). For example, today there exists a philosophy of art in the first sense but not the second. But - the most important school, the unifying one, is the philosophy of learning. And it is the center of all these schools (which doesn't mean they can't grow from it afterwards). In fact, one of the proofs (learning ones!) of its importance is its being the statistical center of all the arrows around, because it's right on target.

* The historical evolution of perceptions in the philosophy of the learning machine itself: If once there was intellect, then reason, then logic, then logic [formal], then rationality, then intelligence, then thinking, finally - learning. And what comes out? That philosophy itself is learning. Every philosophy contains all those preceding it as a special case, and therefore it's so difficult to deviate from it at first, because it's an all-containing set. And so the history of philosophy is like an inverted matryoshka doll, where each time we find from the outside another hidden doll that contains the previous large one.

* By our very nature, what our brain seeks is not truth, but a new idea, because that's learning. The mistake of all philosophy is that it always sought truth, and always found a new idea. Truth is an old idea, and not particularly successful, because there's really no such thing, but this doesn't abandon us to arbitrariness, precisely because of - learning. Learning is not a search for truth, but a construction of truth. They always sought truth, but what they really wanted was the accumulation and credibility of learning, and wanted to conceptualize them in the idea of truth - because there's something truly frightening about learning. The world is truly open.

* The purpose of life: learning.

Philosophy of the Future

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The Degeneration of the Nation

Friday: Philosophical Dreams

A methodology of philosophy as a system, not a collection of doctrines | Technology, language, intelligence, consciousness - as an evolution of learning itself | The evolution of learning is the evolution of humanity | Learning of the highest order - as the definition of philosophy | On the unreasonable effectiveness of physics and nature in mathematics | The third rule of learning | The fourth rule of learning | The application of the fourth rule to mathematics as a way to solve questions of impossibility | Philosophy of mathematics as learning | Philosophy of science as learning: Instead of paradigms - the second rule of learning ("within the system") | The connection between learning and the Jewish concept of "covenant" | The contribution of historicizing the system to learning, as a continuation of Hegel and Nietzschean genealogy | Future directions for the philosophy of learning | What came before learning in philosophy? - A brief history of learning | Why did we come into the world? - To learn

By: The End of Thought in Learning First

Thought as a shell - beneath it, learning. Thought as a facade - behind it, learning  (Source)

Learning will influence all of philosophy because it will become part of the philosophical method: how the philosopher arrived at it. That is, not only their arguments from within their world, but also an external description of how they arrived at their world, will be considered the philosopher's work. Why, for example, specifically the future, and not the past, in the approach of the philosophy of the future. And what would happen if another time were chosen, for example, an ongoing present or a perfect past. Why specifically the "I" in Descartes, and what other options are there (you, he, they, feminine), and how each creates a different philosophy. The philosopher will not only present the interior of their system, but also its external systemic connections within philosophy as a developing field, and explain which directions from the past led to it and present future directions from it. This way, philosophy will be understood not as a collection of methods and works, but as a system, like mathematics.

In the philosophy of mind - consciousness as a learning mechanism. Learning is what creates consciousness and this is the solution to the puzzle of consciousness. And the next puzzle, of intelligence, will be perceived as impersonal learning, as opposed to personal learning. But what underlies both consciousness and intelligence is the learning mechanism of the brain, and therefore these two seemingly separate, independent phenomena appeared together in evolution. And what led to them? The learning of language. Because unlike animals, language is always learned. And what led to the ability to learn language? Technology, the ability to use tools and learn to use them. In other words, technology is not a new feature of humanity, to be remembered as the end of humanity, but also as its beginning, what created humanity. And language is the first spiritual technology - a social tool. Because learning to use tools is social learning, from teacher to student, and the learning tool is language. And why did social learning precede personal learning? Because learning is always within the system. And society is the system. And only at the end was the individual also created as a system - and therefore learning within it became possible.

We can see here a rise each time in the order of the learning phenomenon: from first-order learning (technology) to second-order learning of learning (language) to third-order learning of learning of learning (intelligence) to fourth-order learning of learning of learning of learning (consciousness). And all this is made possible by the object-oriented nature of learning as learning of, or learning about, and therefore it's possible to connect to learning about learning, learning about learning about learning, etc. And learning about consciousness is already culture, and within it, third-order learning about language is literature, and fourth-order learning about technology is science. And learning about culture is art. And what is second-order learning about intelligence within culture? Philosophy.

Physics is the basis for mathematics - not the other way around. The reason there is mathematics is physics. Therefore, the problem of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics and science is a joke problem, stemming from poor philosophical idealism. What's correct is - the effectiveness of physics in mathematics.

Space-time is not a basic phenomenon, neither is matter, nor the laws of nature, not even mathematics. They all stem from the basic phenomenon of learning. Learning is the mediator between the layer of information, trivial in describing the universe, and the complexity of the universe. Without learning, there would be nothing, nothing would be built or sustained or developed. Learning is the most basic principle of the universe (not even a law, and not even a mathematical property). Time stems from the development of learning, from the fact that it has stages (there is no continuum in the world) and progress - and therefore it has a direction. The unidirectionality of orientation is what causes the time axis, and it emerges as an illusion because of learning. Space stems from learning within a system. Within the system - hence the universe emerges, and therefore there is nothing outside the universe, this is the most general learning, and the largest system. The laws of nature did not undergo fine-tuning by chance, or because of the ridiculous anthropic principle, but as a result of learning. There was a learning stage that logically preceded the Big Bang, and the laws of nature changed at first because they were forming. Laws that did not lead to complexity did not survive, just as mathematics without complexity is not interesting, and therefore the universe converged on complicated, fractal, deep mathematics. Learning strives for the limit which is the most interesting direction. Therefore, it is always unpredictable. The idea of an observer in quantum mechanics is not accurate, the correct idea is a learner. Humans are not random just as evolution is not random just as the universe is not random, but they are not planned, rather results of a learning process. Intelligence is not random, because it is a learning process, and the universe is fundamentally built from learning. A definition of God as the Learner and of the Shekhinah [divine presence] as Learning, and of humans as students and therefore of God as the Teacher, is a valid definition (and this is the religious claim) although also empty (and this is the secular claim).

The third rule of learning is: Orientation. The atom of learning is a unidirectional arrow, but partial, meaning it doesn't determine learning, like causality, but it also doesn't allow everything in postmodern arbitrariness, rather it orients. This partiality is actually stronger than all or nothing. For example, a previous thought is not the cause of the next thought, but it is an orientation. A new datum in reality is not the cause of a new hypothesis in learning, but an orientation towards new hypotheses. A teacher doesn't give instructions to a student, and doesn't program them, but gives them orientations, and thus the student learns. Learning algorithms are algorithms that treat data as orientations and not as instructions. The difference between programming and learning is a black box that the outside doesn't control, but learns with its own tools, with the help of orientations.

The fourth rule of learning is: Women and men. In natural learning systems, there are two types of agents, where one type (women) evaluates what the second type (men) did and chooses from it. Each layer of neurons evaluates the performance of the previous one and chooses a weighting from it to pass on to the next generation/layer. Men are search and women are optimization. In men, there are mutations and women critique. Men are creators and women are curators. Men write and women edit. Men are sites and women are "hub" type nodes, of a selection of sites. Philosophers are men and readers are women. Men are students and women are examiners. Men and women together try to solve a non-polynomial problem, meaning one that doesn't have an efficient solution, through solutions (men) that are examined by evaluators (women), who create combinations from them for the next generation, where they will again be evaluated by the women of the next generation. In fact, there is no evolution, only co-evolution. Sometimes predators are the evaluators of the prey. And this is also the social network versus the network of sites: the first network gives evaluations to the second network, or chooses from the second network and shares.

Learning is the most promising concept for mathematics in the next century. Because of the understanding of mathematics as a language, there is a problem in proving negative results - what cannot be done. These are the great problems in mathematics today, not the constructive problems, and learning can solve them, because it is a conceptualization of the constructive - above it. Thus the question of what cannot be learned, the question of the limits of learning, will allow results. The P = NP problem stems from the inability to find lower bounds, and new definitions of algorithm learning will be able to break down efficient algorithms into constructive and learning construction, and therefore will be able to give negative results - what they cannot do. Just as Galois theory broke down equations into constructive building and therefore gave negative results - what cannot be done. Or the Cartesian coordinate system - on geometry, and there are many examples from the history of mathematics. How, for example, do we build the contradiction? If P equals NP, we'll build an ideal universal learning system, and find a function that it doesn't learn. If it's possible to learn any polynomial in construction, then if it's possible to learn a solution to NP, we'll see that one of its components must also solve an NP problem, and so by induction we'll descend to absurdity. The Riemann hypothesis will also be understood as a problem of learning primes, that is, the problem of bridging between multiplication decomposition and addition decomposition. There are numbers that there's no method to reach except by adding, it's impossible to compress them and present them by multiplication method. That is, is it possible to compress all natural numbers, and therefore learn them as a method? If there were a finite number of primes certainly, and if not, then it depends on their frequency how much it compresses. Therefore learning of natural numbers is understanding primes. Both problems are to prove that there is no method. And therefore results on learning methods are relevant to them.

Learning will allow results and insights across all of mathematics, for example learning of groups will give results on groups, and so also in logic through definitions of learning logic, which is currently outside formalism, because currently the question of how to prove only refers to the rules of the game and not to how to play well. For example: how to learn to prove in mathematics, how to learn mathematics, that is, learn new proofs, and not just how to prove in mathematics (that is, what is the language game - only the rules of the game). In this sense, mathematics itself will be perceived as learning, and not as a body of knowledge (data), and not as logic or as language, but as learning and proof algorithms. Therefore - a theorem with a proof is a demonstration. It teaches how to prove. The theorem is just the beginning, its meaning is in its use, namely in mathematical learning. This is living and developing mathematics. And in it there is enormous importance to how definitions are learned, not just theorems. Learning is the synthesis between discovery and invention. Discovery is more suitable for proof, and invention is more suitable for definitions. One of the great weaknesses of mathematics education today is the method in which they explain how they arrived at theorems, in a historically incorrect way (and also incorrect in terms of learning), but the explanation is the proof. But an even greater weakness is that they explain even less how they arrived at definitions, when historically the struggle to find the right definitions was the hardest, and theorems are easier. Research in mathematics will always be perceived as searching for proofs, and you can't define research as searching for valuable definitions, and this hinders the creation of new fields.

Learning in (the abbreviation of the second rule: learning within the system) = choice and then evaluation (covenant), and not evaluation and then choice (date). That is, you try to build a relationship with him and don't check if he's suitable for a relationship. This is what allows learning. As long as he hasn't crossed the gate of choice - he's still outside, and the learning is not within the system, and a system of couplehood hasn't yet been created. Couplehood is feedback loops within the system, and dating is feedback loops outside the system.

We need more thinking about the future in the method of philosophy, and more thinking about philosophy as a field of learning - and again, not object-oriented learning from outside (learning philosophy as knowledge from a teacher) but philosophical learning (the development of philosophy itself) - learning within philosophy from the inside. Similar to the difference between learning mathematics in school, not in a creative way, to learning mathematics in academic research, learning as creation. Or the difference between learning in proficiency to learning in depth in the world of Torah study, or learning as knowledge in the Mishnah to learning as learning in the Gemara. Therefore, philosophy needs to move to a new type of writing, more meta-poetic, that explains how it was really learned, similar to the difference between presenting the history of mathematics and how the proof was found and what mistakes and stuck points were along the way, versus an ideal picture of the final perfect proofs in mathematics, as mathematics is taught today. This is what creates the fake and sterile idealistic image of mathematics and philosophy as pure spiritual fields - the anti-learning illusion that is teaching. Wittgenstein and Augustine - every serious philosophy opens with a confession, and therefore the honest confession is important: how did your thread of thought actually develop, where did you get stuck and where did you change direction and where didn't you understand, as opposed to the retrospective arguments you found. That is, a true description of your learning, not an ideal one.

In the next century, several philosophical schools could develop that will emerge from the philosophy of language. In England, the school of legal philosophy and in Continental philosophy, the school of philosophy of thought. Additional concepts on which a school can be built: creativity, future, intelligence, consciousness, technology, art. For example: philosophy of intelligence, philosophy of technology, but in the sense of the philosophy of language - not just philosophy that deals with language (as an object of philosophy), but one that is constituted from the concept of language, where language becomes the basis of all philosophy (i.e., philosophy is an object of language). For example, today there exists a philosophy of art in the first sense but not the second. But - the most important school, the unifying one, is the philosophy of learning. And it is the center of all these schools (which doesn't mean they can't grow from it afterwards). In fact, one of the proofs (learning ones!) of its importance is its being the statistical center of all the arrows around, because it's right on target.

The historical evolution of perceptions in the philosophy of the learning machine itself: If once there was intellect, then reason, then logic, then logic [formal], then rationality, then intelligence, then thinking, finally - learning. And what comes out? That philosophy itself is learning. Every philosophy contains all those preceding it as a special case, and therefore it's so difficult to deviate from it at first, because it's an all-containing set. And so the history of philosophy is like an inverted matryoshka doll, where each time we find from the outside another hidden doll that contains the previous large one.

By our very nature, what our brain seeks is not truth, but a new idea, because that's learning. The mistake of all philosophy is that it always sought truth, and always found a new idea. Truth is an old idea, and not particularly successful, because there's really no such thing, but this doesn't abandon us to arbitrariness, precisely because of - learning. Learning is not a search for truth, but a construction of truth. They always sought truth, but what they really wanted was the accumulation and credibility of learning, and wanted to conceptualize them in the idea of truth - because there's something truly frightening about learning. The world is truly open.

The purpose of life: learning.

Philosophy of the Future