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The Degeneration of the Nation

Big Black and Little White

Mostly, the curiosity disguised as empathy weighs on me. And I ask if it's okay to ask what happened, sounds tough. And I write to my friend who knew her, who told me look how they can do anything, if I did that I'd be in jail. He always says Ethiopian women are the most beautiful, but he doesn't dare

By: Okey-Stupid

The envy of men will increase wisdom (Source)

After a year, I suddenly see her on the site. So I immediately send her a message while it still hurts, as if sad: What happened, I already imagined a wedding :( Right on the wounds. And she says yes, I imagined it too. So I see her, yes she has a new picture, and I think maybe. But mostly, the curiosity disguised as empathy weighs on me. And I ask if it's okay to ask what happened, sounds tough.

And I write to my friend who knew her, who told me look how they can do anything, if I did that I'd be in jail. He always says Ethiopian women are the most beautiful, but he doesn't dare. I write that she and the kushi [Translator's note: a derogatory term for a Black person] broke up, that's how I write kushi, and I'm reminded of the US president. I remember asking her how she could be with someone who doesn't have a bachelor's degree. And she's a doctoral student. And she also said that she herself was surprised, and didn't think she could, didn't know it could happen. But he has a lot of life wisdom. And then she started talking about his touch. That's how they always talk, how he knows how to touch. And how much he touches me, and touch is important to me precisely because I'm a person of intellect. He touches me like no one else has touched me, that's how they gush. And I felt like she was describing his genitals to me.

And she answers, after all she's polite and can't help but respond, and I immediately copy to my friend what she wrote to me, and right after that I send her a response of "I'm sorry to hear": Look what a bitch: There was a lot of love between us, but he's going through a difficult time, and we couldn't overcome these difficulties together. We came to the conclusion that he's not capable of being in a relationship right now, and I moved on. The kushi did his part, the kushi can go. I barely slept last night, I can barely walk. That's how she used to write to me at first, to excuse the fatigue and delay in responding. As if I have difficulty understanding. Great love, that's what she used to tell me, and I would imagine only one thing. From the moment she saw me, she told me I know myself, I don't like skinny guys, my previous boyfriend was the champion of the country, and I asked was he smart?

Culture and Literature


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Dog Ate the Notebook

Remnants of notes, from what is an immense loss to philosophy: The dog ate the philosopher's third notebook, who fell asleep in an armchair after a philosophical binge, in which he vomited into the notebook everything he had learned along with banana leftovers. From among the scraps, researchers of the Netanya School managed to decipher a limited number of passages, but it is precisely from their eclecticism that a coherent philosophical doctrine is gradually emerging and growing, until its maturation at the end of the notebook, which is the philosopher's final composition. From there, the notebook's landscape no longer appears as fragments of impressions of a distinguished intellectual tourist, but as a pilgrimage to the peak of a system that raised the future as its flag - in what is a victory of the spirit of philosophy over the spirit of the dog

By: Will for the Future

The Despicable Dog  (Source)

Scraps of the Notebook

The Intellectual Sublime

Philosophy of philosophy, which explores the sublime in philosophy versus the mythical in religion - through an unsentimental lens. Philosophy has accumulated many sentiments around it throughout history, and many myths, which obscure its true mode of operation for us, just as the myth of the artist obscures the way art is created. From the love of wisdom, philosophy has become precisely the fear of wisdom, and has gained prestige as the highest discipline in the world of the spirit, parallel to mathematics in the natural sciences. What made it so?

The Great Novel of the Next Century

All great literature is built on the collision of motivations and drives (vectors) of human beings. Therefore, to know what conflict the great literature of the generation should deal with, one needs to understand what are the strongest vectors of the era, and examine how they can collide and what happens then. Usually, it's the rise of a new vector that replaces the old ones and collides with them powerfully, and preferably in an internal conflict and not just an external one. Or in a conflict of the tragic type, where human desires and vectors collide with a reality stronger than him, above him

Feed = Intellectual Food. And What About Intellectual Sex?

In the current world, how can cultural creations still deeply influence a person, as in the pre-network era? Which of the technologies are merely an external form, and which among them are also content that causes internalization? Why is depth, as in sex, defeated by the repetitiveness of food. On the spiritual portrait of the thinker from Netanya as a parable for the era, for the spirit of the time - and for the matter of time

The Mother of the State

Feminism will triumph not when a woman rules instead of a man - because the structure will turn her into a man - but when the structure changes from masculine to feminine - and from control to nurturing. The easiest narrative for identification is that of a single person, and therefore religions that told the story of the individual in a concentrated manner (Christianity and Islam) had an advantage over religions that are feminine systems, like Judaism, without a central individual (but a people). But today, we need to build a narrative of systems, not individuals, in order to succeed in navigating a world of giant systems

Value as Future and Future as Value

A new philosophical theory of morality and aesthetics in accordance with the philosophy of the future, including an appropriate epistemology. From it, one can answer the question of what are the two most important things that a person should bequeath to the future - and why. In this view, what a person bequeaths to the future has a unique value from a philosophical and even ontological perspective

Wittgenstein and Hitler

An analysis of the philosophical critique of Nazism, from different disciplines and perspectives of philosophy, lacks precisely the most established and expected one - and precisely because of that. This perspective solves several historical puzzles regarding the Nazi phenomenon: Why specifically the Jews? How did it eventually deteriorate to the Holocaust? And what is the source of the phenomenon's power in the first place? To all these, it provides a necessary explanation, not just a possible one

The Revolution of Meaning in Urbanism

Towards an architecture of meaning. A proposal for a new agenda for world architecture, drawing its characteristics from the architecture of the ancient world and from poetry - and combining narrative and cultural content with form. Such a paradigm could replace modernism and post-modernism in architecture, and then we will not understand why we saw urban alienation, empty formalism, and meaningless replication as inevitable fates

The Future of Love - Between Him and Artificial Her

What if what is perceived as the highest phenomenon in the human world - love - is actually the most basic phenomenon? When there are two unique systems in the entire biological world - the question arises whether it is precisely the unique connection between them that created them, and created the human itself. The unique and accelerated evolution of humans and intelligence probably went through a mechanism unique to it, which combined the brain and sex into one unity, and caused unprecedented sexual natural selection in all matters of intelligence

The Smallest and the Largest Meet at the End

Could intelligence have been created in larger or smaller orders of magnitude in the universe than ours? Indeed, we are trapped between its maximum size determined by the speed of light and the minimum determined by the uncertainty principle, but why precisely our order of magnitude, and not others - is there something special about it? And do the theoretical connections between the world of elementary particles and the entire cosmos teach about a darker connection between the smallest and the largest in our world? One cannot deny the similarities between these two levels: being composed of vast emptiness within which tiny spheres of matter move in circular-periodic motions and between which forces act at distances

The 1% Smart vs. the 99%

The multiplication of the population means the multiplication of geniuses, but despite the multiplication of geniuses, complexity also grows and accelerates, to such an extent that it is not clear whether the understanding of reality is not actually in decline. Towards a medieval stage - where only a few have a broad enough education, ability to conceptualize and perceive reality - we must return to medieval methods of governance. The project of the education system and universal education by the state is going bankrupt before our eyes, and without it, democracy is a disaster

The New Anti-Semitism

A new class division is rising in the information age. Until now, every increase in education for the masses was accompanied by a smarter society as a whole, but as the democratic and individualistic propaganda of the media flatters the average person more, his wisdom, his understanding, his talent and his rights - so rises the arrogance and hubris of the public, to the point of cultural catastrophe. Only a new class division within society will stop the barbarism

The New Wealth of Nations

If we look at nations from a computational perspective, we will find that their power stems from a balance between human processors, non-human processors, and the organization of the form of connection between them - into a kind of general effective computational power of the state, instead of GDP. On the other hand, if we look at cultures according to the size of their effective cultural memory, we will find that their wealth and importance can be measured through this simplistic external parameter. Cultures and countries that internalize this insight will understand that it is difficult to change their resources - but relatively easy to switch to more effective algorithms, which will give them a significant relative advantage, considering the primitiveness of social algorithms that have not internalized anything from the sophisticated algorithmic knowledge accumulated in the last half century

On the Lack of Use of Mathematics in Public Policy

Mathematics still has tremendous potential for applications in a variety of disciplines and fields that have remained mathematically illiterate, including the public sector. Eventually, its requirements for feedback for optimization will cause the implementation of learning processes in institutions that currently operate arbitrarily and full of biases. The claim that not every result can be measured is based on primitive measurement methods, which higher mathematical knowledge would allow to replace, and certainly would lead to a more stringent examination of policies that are currently based mainly on gut feelings

Enough with the Sour Ones

Does culture serve the rich person, or perhaps he - who is trapped within the capitalist ethos of wealth and therefore creates economic activity like a donkey and finances society - is the exploited one? As part of the exhaustion and turn of philosophy against individualism, a concept will arise that will replace the individual in terms of value and focus of interest. The day is near when the value of the individual will be understood solely as serving culture, and therefore death will no longer be perceived as a problem, but only creative barrenness and cultural harm. The Holocaust will no longer be perceived as a holocaust of individuals, and the holocaust of culture will be perceived as the center of the crime

Caution Wet Paint

A comparison between contemporary art and contemporary literature shows the immense difficulty that still exists in the simple idea of coupling, which is the basis of the Zohar's ideology. The balance between content and form requires exceptional maturity, because there is always a tendency to maximize one side, instead of maximizing meaning - which is their coupling. Therefore, precisely artistic practice can help people improve in real coupling - and in love

The Explosion of Sexual Knowledge

It is not pornography that is the greatest influence on sexuality today - but rather the growing and spreading sexual education in the population, as knowledge that was once esoteric becomes a staple and basic knowledge. The period of sexual enlightenment, along with scientific innovations that have only recently begun massive research into sexuality, is the belated arrival of enlightenment into the darkest, most secret and private human domain. It is expected to have a similar effect - in raising the level of human pleasure and sexual happiness, while eradicating the medieval sexual heritage - for better and for worse (annihilation of magic and mystery). This is good news for marriage and couplehood - and for the human race

The One Name

Contrary to current research, which sees the Bible as a kind of testimony to power struggles whose blurring was unsuccessful, in imitation of Foucauldian thought, historical insights should be extracted from the Bible precisely through ars poetica thinking that gives tremendous credit to the writers and their aesthetic tendencies. The question that should be asked is how the unique biblical aesthetic grew and why precisely in Judah and Israel. And then the answer is obvious: This is a necessary aesthetic result of iconoclastic monotheism, where the physical worship of God and the popular religious feeling around it were replaced, for lack of choice, by textual work around the word of God, which created great literature, in which the best of popular religious feeling was invested. Because behind great literature stands an immense cultural effort - not a conspiracy

The Indians of the Future

What do Indians and Jews have in common, which caused these two traditional and divided cultures to choose democracy as a default? The 19th century powers, led by Britain, made a huge mistake in not conquering China and creating colonialism there - and we are paying for the consequences of this mistake today. In retrospect, British colonialism was the most successful of all, and therefore we should recreate an alliance built on the largest empire ever, which managed to create more stable democracies than any other empire

The Tragedy of Philosophy

There can be two main aesthetic tastes in the form of philosophical writing: philosophy that reveals its origin and way of thinking and follows the beginning of the development of ideas, and philosophy that presents ideas in their most sophisticated, aesthetic and complete form - and evokes astonishment. The second taste teaches less about doing philosophy, and it is contrary to the principles of the philosophy of learning, but it teaches the philosophy itself better, and evokes a sense of sublimity for philosophy and the height of its ideas - because it throws away the ladder. But there is also a third and tragic form of philosophical writing: when philosophical work does not reach completion, and evokes sorrow for the spiritual loss, but also opens a door for continuation

The Agnonian Anchor

Why did Agnon choose this name? The matter is related to a Kabbalistic conception no less daring than Sabbateanism - in the relations of the coupling of the Shekhinah with God. This conception is also the source of Agnon's modernism - and the reason he was accepted outside the religious world. A one-sided attachment, which has an overt component of necessity and a covert component of will and some inherent impossibility and hopeless hope and expectation, namely agunah [anchored/chained wife] in the language of tradition - is what ties Agnon to the sources of modern absurdity

Philosophy of the Mathematics of the Future

The philosophy of mathematics, in its aspiration for timeless eternity like its subject, does not take into account developments in physics as changing fundamental perceptions of mathematics. If not for its success in the sciences - which is very strange according to the current scientific picture (that is, this is probably not the correct picture) - the entire perception of mathematics would be different, as chess is perceived, that is, as arbitrary and not as an eternal truth at the basis of the universe. Mathematics can be perceived as a kind of physical experiment that reveals a basic low physical truth that is also expressed at the high level of thinking, that is, a physical law that is not limited to a certain horizontal order of magnitude in the universe but vertically crosses all orders of magnitude in the universe, and therefore accessible to us also at the level of thought, which allows us to conduct a physical experiment in the brain at the level of elementary particles and thus penetrate the secrets of the universe

The Future of Israel

What is strategy in the eyes of the philosophy of the future? An analysis of the learning capabilities of a system, compared to rivals. That is, it is not about future content (a problematic concept) but about future form - not the specific goals are examined in strategy, but the methodology. So the examination does not revolve around data, or even trends and directions, but around learning algorithms that operate in the system. Demonstration of algorithmic thinking about Israel

If Morality is Dead - Is Everything Permitted?

Demonstration of the philosophy of learning applied to the field of morality. Unlike the philosophy of the future, which will examine a moral act according to future judgment towards it, the learning philosophy of morality argues that there is no such thing as future judgment (when? In a thousand years? A million? After all, even in the future judgment will change and reverse again and again) as an object to aspire to (asymptotically). On the contrary, morality should be understood as a system of learning in the present, in which we have no future pretension (to reach the limit), except for the aspiration to progress (in the current derivative). In fact, ontologically, the future itself will be defined as the direction of progress of learning, which stems and is created from learning as a by-product, and not as an imaginary metaphysical object placed somewhere on an axis - at a time that does not exist now

On the Principle of Self-Repetition

Why do thinkers repeat themselves? Why is what is a literary flaw not at all a philosophical flaw? If we understand learning as evolution and not as learning that reaches a certain conclusion, then philosophy itself is a learning system, in which each philosopher is another stage in learning, or another direction for an evolutionary branch. And unlike a linear story, in evolution there is crucial importance to copying, and in learning there is tremendous importance to repetitions - to internalizing the idea and learning to use it, to turning it into a tool, and finally to a part of you. That is, ideas go through a technological process, in which the tool becomes part of the person

The Interest Network

The tourist site degrades to a collection of photography angles, and to a ritual of recreating canonical photographs, that is, to a Facebook feed, and therefore receives a similar spiritual structure. Tourism is always an intensification of reality, and therefore can be used as a seismograph for trends that later take over reality, and on the other hand to offer alternatives in it. For example, travel in the past was much longer and included an inner journey, sometimes with a religious or spiritual component that was not strongly anchored in matter but in the spirit and culture of the traveler. Therefore, not all journeys were "performances" of the same tourist route, where like in a concert the tourist or traveler is measured in "performance". In contrast, the traveler is a listener - and precisely because of that also a composer

Network Morality vs. Atom Morality

If Nietzsche contrasted slave morality with master morality and ridiculed the perception of good and evil through historicization and genealogy of morality, then precisely the use of history of moral examples as a philosophical basis can solve the problem of relativity and historicity of morality. Indeed, the perception of morality changes historically - but out of philosophical justification for ethics built on moral learning. And what we are learning today about humans causes us to see the group as the new moral atom - and to retreat from individualistic morality

Salon Philosopher

The house philosopher of the Netanya School is looking for a student

The Human Genius

The philosophy of the future is actually proven in practice. Almost never is the greatness of the great recognized in the present time, and on the other hand, people are amazed at people of the past who did not recognize the greatness of the great in their days. That is - it is actually impossible to see and distinguish the great in real time, because they are really not great from the perspective of the present, but only from that of the future. Therefore, only the future can judge greatness. And so also the understanding of who is stupid and who is smart becomes clear only in the future, because it is determined by the results, and the smart cannot know that he is smart and the stupid cannot know that he is stupid and the great cannot know that he is great. Therefore, wisdom and stupidity and greatness are not knowledge or awareness in the present, but a vision of the future

What is a Philosophy of Learning?

Philosophical learning, like any tree search, can be didactic and orderly, but also greedy and working on the principle of demonstration. When dealing with an unordered tree - there is an advantage to philosophical learning of the type presented in these notebooks. Like in evolution, it includes an element of random mutation, which is suitable for searching in a space with infinite dimensions. In the end, philosophy is a form of thinking, or more precisely a form of learning, and the notebooks demonstrate a form of thinking and learning. Blessed is the man who will learn it - and will not continue it, but will continue to learn

Philosophy of the Future


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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Metaphysical Banana Problem

Fermi's paradox is the Hitler heralding the next - and final - Holocaust. How can we escape it? How do new perceptual discoveries in biology influence philosophy? What's the difference between artificial intelligence and artificial banana? Does the Cambrian explosion teach us about the future of the internet? What would happen if we combined neuronal learning with evolutionary learning - for example, a genetic algorithm with neural networks? And what's the deep reason for humans being so stupid? Does a philocoph love a monkey? And is philobanana a monkey?

By: Philosopher After Human

Transcendental Philosophy: On New Connections Between Biology and Philosophy  (Source)

Solution to Fermi's Paradox

Fermi's paradox is caused by technological acceleration, meaning species that leave their planet even with small differences of a million years have no relation between their capabilities, like the difference between humans and ants, and therefore it's unlikely there would be a relationship of war between them, or competition, or even communication. Because if we encountered a new species of ants, we would study it but not destroy it, or compete with it, or communicate with it and try to help it eat more, but we would invest a bit of scientific resources to study it in its natural environment, without it noticing, and it's possible we've already studied the entire ant world and this type doesn't interest us at all, because we've learned everything possible about ants. But if there's no other life that left their planet, then it's unlikely that something future will destroy us and also every other alien civilization besides artificial intelligence, and we need to think what relative advantage we have over other aliens, that might allow us to pass the artificial intelligence barrier, or another barrier, where every person in the world could destroy the world, due to technological advancement, or a reasonable scientific experiment that would cause planetary destruction. But all these (and certainly the ecological crisis) are too random to eliminate every alien civilization in the galaxy, and therefore we need to think what's special about humans compared to other intelligent creatures that evolved. Maybe his notorious tendency for sex, of all the animal kingdom he's almost the most sexual, and therefore to create sexual artificial intelligence. Or the most unique phenomenon from a historical perspective that exists in him, which is Judaism. And therefore to go in the direction of Jewish artificial intelligence. The question is what happens to a species that is a billion years ahead of us, or a million, is there a limit to knowledge about the universe, to technology, that a culture can reach. Meaning not whether the universe is infinite but whether knowledge about the universe is infinite, or more precisely if the laws of the universe are infinite, and learning in the universe is infinite, or if there's some limit that a culture can reach, and then different cultures can compete as they approach this limit, and maybe every culture that approaches this limit is destroyed by the first culture that got there, like humans who see that monkeys are getting closer to them. And maybe a culture that reaches this limit loses interest in the world, or in the physical world, and moves to a mathematical world, and is there also a limit to mathematics, and a place from which mathematics is no longer interesting despite being infinite, and a place where art is no longer interesting, meaning all mathematical forms are already known and at most they repeat themselves in an infinite fractal. That the structure of mathematics is a fractal with interesting areas and boring areas is probably true, and the question is what its dimension is, and what can be said about this fractal, which maybe like Mandelbrot includes all others, in some sense. And maybe mathematical beauty stems exactly from this fractal nature, and maybe all aesthetics in the universe stem from its fractal nature.

The Philosophy of Technology: Instead of the Heideggerian Tool - Rather a Kantian Epistemological Gap

It's possible that the reason we're relatively alone is that it took a few billion years from the appearance of life, a phenomenon that's already clear isn't rare, and is spread in the galaxy through asteroids, to the Cambrian explosion, which is the truly rare phenomenon, and from which things started to run (within half a billion years, an order of magnitude less than the time before it). Or that the many extinctions required by evolution happen either too rarely, or too frequently and with completely destructive force, so that a sequence of significant but not total extinctions is rare. The explosion is probably the aggregation of cells into animals, and this is the turning point that took most of the time since the creation of Earth, and an order of magnitude of time that's relevant to the age of the universe (billions of years). This was probably created due to predation, the cruelest mechanism of nature gave an advantage to size, aggregation, and armor, and created an arms race. Therefore, it's possible that the mechanism of an arms race is what contributes to development, and not competition (and the development of intelligence could be an arms race between male and female, meaning the sexuality of two sexes creates acceleration in development). States were also created as armor from the hunter-gatherer societies before them, and created structure from groups, due to the need for defense, and therefore war accelerated development, what's called the agricultural explosion. Like the separate consciousness, and consciousness in general, which is protected thought, inside armor, and the creation of the individual, was the explosion of intelligence, and other animals don't think as separate, and therefore don't think about themselves. And a social arms race was created where anyone who had better social skills, and was smarter, succeeded more in the group against others. And what will be real development in the future, according to this, will be the aggregation of separate minds into a multi-mind, like cells aggregated into animals and societies into states and thoughts into consciousness. And this could be through a shell and need for protection from other thought groups, in an arms race of minds. And therefore Kant correctly identified this explosion, as a gap between the world in itself and our perception, which is primary in the animal world, thanks to this armor. And the history of philosophy is the history of this unbridgeable gap in human nature. The Greeks identified nature itself as directly accessible, and that the gap is between it and a more principled world of phenomena, like the world of ideas, or Aristotelian conceptual structures. And later the gap was internalized, as a gap between us and nature, where perception, or language, or mathematics is located. And another philosophy can identify the gap as technology - technology is what stands between us and the world, and produce a version of Kant that puts the central phenomenon in culture today at the center of philosophy - in the gap.

The Evolutionary Leap of the Brain

Can perhaps be explained bygenetic changes within neuronsthroughout life (the brain is the only place in the body with such genetic diversity that differs between cells in the same body, which supposedly should all have the same genome). That is, the learning mechanism of evolution helped (and maybe even still helps in brain function) the learning mechanism of the brain, for example by diversifying neurons, or by memory within them in genetic material, or even genetic computation. Additionally, it's possible that this also aided in the evolution of the brain in a more Lamarckian way, like in rapid developments in evolution occurring due to increased mutation in places in the genome where rapid adaptation occurs or in times of distress that justify increased exploration, and other adaptive mechanisms (which are hard to believe evolution wouldn't use, because they greatly increase its efficiency). Finally, it's also possible that maybe this helps in building the complexity of the brain in the embryo. In any case, it can't be coincidental that genetic variation occurs precisely in the brain, and it's also unlikely that this happened throughout all of evolution only in brain development, unless a unique combination of cultural selection and biological selection was created here. In any case, the abolition of the dichotomy between the two successful learning and adaptation processes in nature - the brain and the genome, thinking and evolution - is an earthquake. If a fundamental connection between them is found (or created, in future engineering) - the understanding of the brain will fundamentally change. What are the chances that nature didn't utilize the enormous computational ability of the genome for thinking? And if not, why didn't this happen?

From the Perspective of the Future, the Internet Was Just a Very Primitive and Preliminary Version of Connecting Minds

Human intelligence is the lowest possible in the degrees of intelligence, because it's the minimum that was enough to exit the monkey state (and the moment we reached this minimum, culture quickly developed until today), and there's still a lot to progress in intelligence, and in fact all human progress wasn't created from individual intelligence, which is very low, but from the ability to combine many such intelligences in culture. A genius becomes a genius only thanks to culture's ability to look at him as a genius and interpret him as a genius, but when you meet one in reality he's actually quite limited and stupid, like other humans, more or less. Genius is a product of culture, not of the individual, for example of its search for a breakthrough, and then the random person who broke through seems like a genius, because many searched and didn't find. But what really created the discovery is the army of searchers, both in terms of its value and in terms of its very occurrence, otherwise no one would have noticed it. A society loses the ability to produce geniuses when it loses the ability to distinguish geniuses, to mark them as such, and to understand them as such. And then comes the degeneration. This means it stopped searching and confronting difficult problems. But human intelligence is very low, and on the verge of retardation, meaning on the verge of something that doesn't allow humanity to progress at all. It's just slightly more than that, in terms of its learning ability, memory, and decision-making, and therefore only people who are one and a half times smarter than average can even advance humanity somewhere. And if not for the existence of diversity in intelligence, it wouldn't have reached anything. Therefore, long live the small difference. Every drop above the zero height line of intelligence, which is the border of retardation, already stands out significantly, against the almost flat land of human intelligence, every tiny hill seems like a tower. And when there are computers with IQ 1000, or 10000, or a million, then they'll understand how stupid humans were. What's the IQ of all humanity together? Since it doesn't add up like in addition, and two people aren't much smarter than one person, it's possible that all the IQ of humanity together is less than 10000. Like a hundred brains that are truly connected to one brain. Alternatively, it's possible that if we took the thousand greatest minds in humanity, and gathered them in the village of geniuses, we would reach progress that isn't inferior in order of magnitude to all the progress of humanity together. Therefore, it's possible that the connection of minds will be a much bigger revolution than is commonly thought. The results of connecting processors, which increase computing power in something that's much closer to the sum of powers, are encouraging in this sense. Today, the combination of minds is far from creating the sum of minds, but it's possible that connecting several average minds through neurons and thought and not through language could raise intelligence at once more than the most genius person who ever lived - and therefore this is the direction to aspire to instead of artificial intelligence or increasing intelligence through genetic enhancement. Because this is the safest direction, being based on natural-normal brains none of which is smart enough to control all the others.

Philosophy of the Future


domain: literature

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The Degeneration of the Nation

Rabbi Yuval Noah Harari

The sixth century BCE was undoubtedly the most important century in human history. Within a few decades, we see a global intellectual boom in all major cultures: China (Confucius, Lao Tzu), India (Buddha, Jainism), Persia (Zoroaster), Judah (beginning of the Bible) and Greece (Thales and the beginning of Greek philosophy)

By: A monkey with a hat who didn't study in academia

The Laughing Buddha, or: The Buddha of the Future (Source)

I dreamed I was wandering in the secular part of the city to see what's new. And the secular bookstores fill their display windows with the new book by the new historian who decided to exit history. And pashkevils [Translator's note: wall posters common in ultra-Orthodox communities] cry out from the wall:

A genius has come to town! A new book induction
In the presence of His Honor the Bestseller, uprooter of concepts and grinder of
them  together,  guide  of  ways  and  breaker  of  perplexities  and  digger  of
pits that do not lose shame, author of the Bible
of Bible authors, master of the Abridged Humanity
the   Edited,    The    Great    Guru    The   Homo
Sapiens Sapiens Sapiens, the Dr. who received
professorship for publishing a popular science book
raiser of academia from dust, crown of our brain
The Great YogiHNNH[Translator's note: Hebrew acronym for "His Honor Noah Harari"] may his musings protect us

And the secular Hasidim [Translator's note: followers] jump and sing in a circle "Harari Krishna, Krishna Harari", and hug me: Come join us and remove your sidelocks, Judaism has no historical importance! And I'm startled: Really? Not even the sidelocks? And they reassure me: Only the future has historical importance! Say N-Na-Nach Harari a thousand times a day and you'll be saved from judgment day. And I raise an eyebrow: But what kind of funny secularists are you - you can't do without? If you had a long and worthy historical Jewish nose, you'd identify it from miles away. Doesn't this stink a little to you? And they ask: What? And I say: The sweat, the messianic fervor, the missionary zeal, the disappearances for increasingly long periods in India, the righteous one who meditates for hours every day, the classic religious process of turning an author into an Admor [Translator's note: Hasidic leader], the style of the last of the flattering preachers looking down on the monkeys.

And they get angry: But it's written in the book that man is a monkey. So what do you want from us? So you're an ultra-Orthodox monkey and we're secular monkeys. That doesn't make you a better monkey. And I get irritated: Just because it's a Buddhist guru and not someone bringing you back to religion, you didn't notice that they're selling you a religious concept in scientific guise? And what's funny is how much it's a combination of Jewish ideology with Hindu theology, and therefore from Israel shall come forth Torah. Do you really want to know what the next century will look like? You'll go up to the grave of the secular Admor, and buy "scientific" New Age insights at an exorbitant price and used ideas as new at a bargain price. So here's one thought for free, from the head of a monkey with a hat who didn't study in academia, sidelocks not included. And I hand them a small pamphlet and flee back to the black city:

One Thought for the Year 5779 - A Brief History of the Future

It might sound strange to the modern ear, but the future is a Jewish invention. And it's the most important Jewish invention (much more than monotheism), which actually created Judaism out of the religion of Moses. Contrary to some present-biased reviews, the sixth century BCE was undoubtedly the most important century in human history. Within a few decades in the sixth century, without any satisfactory explanation, we see a global intellectual boom in all major cultures: China (Confucius, Lao Tzu), India (Buddha, Jainism), Persia (Zoroaster), Judah (beginning of the Bible) and Greece (Thales and the beginning of Greek philosophy). This is a phenomenon unexplained by current conceptions of cultural influence, since it's clear that texts weren't transferred between these cultures at that speed, but rather there was a transfer of the most viral idea in the world until then - a new conception that passes even in conversation.

And the source of this idea is at the beginning of the seventh century in the most important person who ever lived, because he is the initiator of the first global intellectual boom, which was therefore the most important in the history of culture and determined all the central ideologies in Eurasia to this day, and he is a Jewish man of letters named Isaiah. The Abrahamic monotheistic revolution and the Torah revolution of Moses had zero influence on human culture, except in a remote kingdom, for many hundreds of years. The viral idea that gave birth to two religious reforms in Judah within decades, and from there spread further partly because of the exiles to the margins of empires of the elites of Judah and Israel, is the comprehensive and abstract worldview born in Isaiah's prophecies, which has a completely new dimension - the messianic dimension.

From a literary perspective, it was first expressed in the genre that Isaiah developed to maturity, whose essence is the stretching of time created by his new conception of the future - the long prophecy. Out of dealing with the great historical catastrophe of the destruction of Israel and Judah by Assyria, Isaiah developed the world of the future and utopia and eschatology in the Jewish conception of time, from which it reached the human conception of time. The messianic idea is a powerful idea that in every historical appearance caused an explosion, and monotheism was spread in the world (and became a symbol of Judaism) only thanks to the messianic idea that was its carrier, through Christianity, which not coincidentally is particularly attached to the book of Isaiah.

The messianic idea is the donkey of Judaism, on which Jewish conceptions rode again and again into global culture, and it erupts in times of crisis towards destruction. Towards the destruction of the Second Temple, Christianity was created, and towards the destruction of Spanish Jewry, the Kabbalistic messianic idea of returning to the ancient and revealing secrets and developing hidden potentials influenced the Renaissance and the discovery of America and capitalism - all future conceptions. Israel became a startup nation and a dream only out of the messianic logic of a leap of faith regarding the future. The difference between Marxism and its parallels in German philosophy is the authentic messianic dimension, and so is Nazism compared to other totalitarian movements, hence their hostility to religion and especially to Judaism, as a competitor, and today technological messianism.

The reason why both Google and Facebook were founded by Jews is this gamble towards the future and the messianic dimension in their operation. The movements of the sixth century are all such movements: ideological startups founded by a specific person, who came with a global worldview, with a messianic intellectual dimension, and therefore we know the name of the specific man of the book who founded them (an almost unprecedented matter). Before that, the dominant view was of the past - remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt - or homeostatic present - every man under his vine and under his fig tree.

The whole idea of a person writing a book with a new message to the world that he signs on, which is the basis of literature, depends on the ideological legitimacy of the future dimension. Isaiah described a detailed fantasy about the future, and turned myth into something that deals not with the past or the fixed order behind the present, but with the future. This was actually the invention of Judaism, as opposed to Israeliness, which may have been a militarily stronger kingdom but gave nothing to the world, quite similar to today. And in this sense, there is nothing more Jewish than your Admor. So take a friendly tip from a primitive monkey who hasn't yet come down from the tree: every messiah is a false messiah.

Nightlife


domain: commentary

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The Degeneration of the Nation

Why are Ukrainians laughing all the way to war?

What is the real reason for the war between Russia and Ukraine? Why are the most bitter quarrels between brothers? And how is all this related to the "gloomy" state of Hebrew literature. Sad!

By: It's a Great Mitzvah to Always Be Happy

The Ukrainian Bear  (Source)

The world is astonished by the cheerful audacity of a comedian president who is a target for assassination, by the general clownish response to a general murderous invasion, by the sharing of "laughs" on the battlefield, by "trolling against missiles" and "TikTok against tanks" videos, by the smiling faces of citizens under shelling, and even the feed experts are puzzled: Yigal Librandt wonders about what he's "almost afraid" to call Ukrainian "jollity" in the struggle, and Shalom Boguslavsky doesn't understand why we know where the Russian army is - but not the Ukrainian one. The nature of the comic effect is surprise, and one can almost hear the enlightened wave of cognitive shock as the script breaks: Is this what war looks like? Where is the competition of victimhood and crying familiar to us (for example: between Israelis and Palestinians), in order to attract Western sympathy and its merciful Christian heart? Where is the pitifulness and self-pity, for heaven's sake? Where is our beloved duo: shooting - crying? Shooting and laughing?!

The world is captivated, surprised, and amazed - but not by the war itself (it has seen many wars and its heart has developed thick skin), but by the Ukrainian response to the war: Come, see, there will be laughs. What has turned the bored, uncircumcised heart of the world towards Ukraine? What fascinates those who already wanted to forget its existence and return to their dull indifference, as in any other "sad" conflict (oh, it's terrible what they're doing there in...)? Well, the fun. It's not the tear that creates identification but the wink, it's not the effortful "hasbara" [Translator's note: Hebrew term for public diplomacy efforts] that influences public opinion (watching the show) - but the show (and one that's fun to watch!). More than anything, the Ukrainian response to the occupation reminds us Israelis of Samson's testament to us, explaining how to get rid of foreign occupation and oppression (which is actually Jabotinsky's testament, author of "Samson", to Jewish culture): "Tell them in my name, not two but three things: to gather iron, to put a king over them, and to learn to laugh". Oh wait, where does Jabotinsky come from actually?

What actually distinguishes Ukrainian culture, whose greatest writers are Russia's greatest writers, from Russian culture? Is there really a distinct Ukrainian culture that is not part of Russian culture? Where can we even locate a cultural fault line, perhaps even a poetic one, which always eventually becomes a political fault line (and finally - when they refuse to recognize it, a warlike one)? Since we're dealing with "giant" literatures, literally, let's think about the most paradigmatic and canonical examples: the great writers. On the Ukrainian side: Gogol, Bulgakov, Babel (and in our literature: Sholem Aleichem, Joseph Perl, and yes - Rabbi Nachman of Breslov). On the Russian side: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev (and in our literature: every writer who wants to be great and "serious"). Is anyone starting to notice a pattern? Yes, seriously - seriousness.

From the Ukrainian side of culture, again and again, come the central exemplary models of parodic, satirical, mocking and smiling literature, which tends towards the fantastic, the grotesque, and the light form. The king is the Joker, the president is a Jew dancing with stars, and the joy - is great. And from the Russian side of culture, again and again, come the central exemplary models of "great", heavy, deep, serious, realistic, philosophical, tragic novels, with hundreds and thousands of pages, and everything we've grown accustomed to thinking of as "Russian literature" and "Russian soul". Everything that Israeli literature and criticism - which unfortunately always saw Russian culture as its No. 1 model - wanted to be: a literary bear, preferably bereaved (because sad is serious). This is how we arrived at a victimhood and wailing culture, with pauses (deep with meaning), a rich language that no one speaks (and therefore no one reads), that doesn't laugh during the siren. And so the outdated novel, the doorstop, became our only "meaningful" and "serious" literary genre. And what kind of novel? Well, obviously: a Russian novel. Service with meaning.

For us, war and literature, thought and culture, perception and meaning, are heavy things - not light things. Greatness comes from size, right? And in this, there's no competition for Russianness, so we'll always compete for who has the bigger - not who has the smaller. This is how we quickly turned from David to Goliath, and Jewish humor became Israeli lamentation, and Sabra mischievousness - became grim-faced tedium (of a military correspondent). Fighting for us is a competition of self-pity and bereavement - not a competition of mockery trying to turn the other side into a joke, with cheerful creativity (remember the world's identification with Israel when we were small rascals - and not big crybabies?). Yes, culture also has expression in military doctrine, and even - in combat success. Israeli literature aspires to be Russian - a 60 km long armored column crawling - and not light and disappearing units, targeting it in a satirical duck shoot. Brute force, firepower, and ("strategic") depth - not parodic mobility, wild humor, and developed imagination. That's why we'll always prefer to read a mediocre but "heavyweight" (=respectable) novel, and not a light masterpiece (see: the fate of the Black Circle trilogy...), or to drone on with another "serious" academic article in dry jargon rather than thinking in the style of the cheeky Netanya school. We always aspire to be a man of the last century, if not the 19th century (see Putin), and to return to the Russian golden age, with the tragic fate and the dark soul and the table as long as the exile - instead of becoming a comic reality of the 21st century.

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