text:
The Degeneration of the Nation

The Three Big Questions in Science Today

What is natural in nature? Is it possible that nature is not natural? Are the big problems in science today just gaps (or enormous holes) in knowledge, which turn nature into a miracle, or do they hint at the need for a paradigm shift, and a new type of scientific explanation, which is not the laws of the system (nature) but the learning of the system? On the difference between a networked and descriptive scientific worldview (we must remove all explanation!), which is abundant in random and therefore improbable details - and a learning-based explanation

By: The Legend of Three and Four

Multiverse - National Gallery of Art Washington (Source)

What is the worst thing that could happen to neuroscience in the coming century? The discovery that there is no "evolution" in the brain. That unlike biology, whose great successes stem from one algorithm, which is the simplest, most successful, and most comprehensive explanation in any scientific field (much more than in physics!), we'll discover that there is no comprehensive or central algorithm in the brain that can be generalized. That the brain depends on countless balances, perhaps even genetically programmed, that are very difficult to recreate, improve, or even understand. In short: the discovery that the brain is not only complex, but complicated and even tangled, meaning an unraveling knot. Like biology appeared before Darwin: as many related cases, that is, as a network - and not as an algorithm. As a language system and cataloging and characterization - and not as a learning system.

And what is the great hope of neuroscience? That the Einstein of the brain will appear, who will decipher basic, scientific principles that well explain its operation. That is, that the brain is driven by a strong algorithm and not just by big-data and a monstrous procedural operating system. That it does not depend on delicate fine-tuning at the motherboard level. Otherwise, even if we succeed in creating superintelligence, we will find it very difficult to create the precise balances required for it, the product of slow and insanely long evolution, and the path from here to catastrophe is short. In other words, if we don't discover that there is a new learning algorithm there besides the old evolution - then our situation is bad. And who guarantees us that "deep learning" will be able to advance us beyond the most superficial stages of the brain's learning system?

This problem of fine-tuning, versus an effective learning and adaptive algorithm, is perhaps the most basic problem in science today, in all areas of exact sciences, including mathematics. The question is how rich complexity is created at all? If we believe in the existence of a creator or designer, as in the Middle Ages, then very complex and rich explanations for our world are not problematic. But from the moment we are in the realm of modern science, we will find it difficult to accept a situation where the universe is designed for complexity at an exceptional level of precision, out of infinite possibilities, and without any apparent reason. Science seeks a case that will happen not by chance. Therefore, the three most significant questions in science today are actually one question:

* In physics: Why does the universe seem as if it is designed? Why is it built for complexity (and life!) and any tiny movement in conditions or constants would have created a trivial and uninteresting universe? Can we, like in evolution, find a basic developmental algorithm that created the complexity in the universe, or will we eventually have to assume that there is a God, a designer, or luck so lucky that the lottery looks like a safe bet next to it? How and why, in God's name, were laws of nature created with such precise balance systems, so many digits after the decimal point? How can it be that there is exactly the amount of dark matter and dark energy needed? Something here really stinks - if we are secular. The anthropic principle cannot be an answer to everything. In fact, it's probably not an answer to anything. Today the universe is looking more and more like the artificial clock from the teleological watchmaker argument for the existence of God. And the fine-structure constant - fear of God.

* In biology: The Fermi paradox. If evolution is a general algorithm in the universe - why has it succeeded only with us, as far as the eye can see (where is the evidence for advanced civilizations that can already influence at the stellar level and beyond? Or on the signals in the universe? The universe looks completely natural). How can it be that only here a sequence of circumstances was created that are probably very very improbable, that is, not reasonable in astronomical gaps. Something here really really stinks. It's not possible that there are no intelligent aliens. This is again the question of creating complexity in conditions that seem as if they were tuned by a watchmaker.

* In mathematics: Why the hell is there mathematics, assuming we don't believe in the Platonic world of ideas (and what's scary is that most mathematicians do believe, because how can it be that this is what's happening)? Where does this insanely beautiful complexity come from, which is really illogical, and is revealed again and again, in its most esoteric fields, as useful for understanding every phenomenon in the universe. What's going on? How can this even be? If the universe was tuned by a Swiss watchmaker with atomic clock-level precision, mathematics seems as if it was built by a genius artist with divine, completely illogical abilities. Where did such a phenomenon come from? Where do all kinds of really unexpected and infinitely complex orders come from within simple phenomena like prime numbers? Is it just like that, by chance, that they arranged this way? How is it possible to find again and again and again such rich and jaw-dropping complexity created from really simple and abstract structures in all branches of mathematics? This stinks to high heaven.

The three great anomalies hint at deep orders that exist in the universe, and perhaps deep learning algorithms and adaptation and creation of complexity that we do not understand. Just as we did not understand evolution - and the biological world seemed to us both random and terribly complex, but also wonderfully adapted, and as if created by a designer - so we can hope that the discovery of other learning algorithms will solve the cosmic clock problems. Yes, perhaps mathematics, neuroscience and physics also have their own evolution and learning mechanisms. Or there is a deep learning reason for creating complexity - and for the existence of conditions for it. We may, for example, be able to base physical complexity on mathematical complexity, or vice versa, and create at least a reduction to the problem (would there be different mathematics in another physical universe?). Or it may be that we can generalize evolutionary learning, which somehow managed to create the conditions that allow its continued development each time anew (once there was no oxygen atmosphere on Earth - life created it!). There is some important component in the complexity puzzle that we do not understand, and that is not "natural". Any answer that starts with winning the lottery is not a scientific answer - but a theological one. And it is much more likely to replace it with a designer or simulation operator.

But if we do reach such a design answer (and it's possible! Any design leaves traces) - this will be a real philosophical revolution, and we will understand that we are not here by chance. In the current state of knowledge, in a different intellectual environment, these anomalies would be considered strong evidence for the existence of such a designing God. Only our belief in the appearance of evolutionary and "natural" explanations later, in accordance with the development so far in the history of science, thwarts such an obvious interpretation even today. But if we discover that these anomalies are very deep, and perhaps even broader than we thought, and no natural explanations are found for them for a very long time - science may influence belief in a way it does not anticipate at all, and we will return to a medieval worldview. The universe may seem to us immeasurably huge, and not like a laboratory experiment on someone's table, but in relation to what do we determine that it is a large universe? Do we have any objective scale? The only objective thing that is large in the universe is the number of orders of magnitude, but in fact it is only a few dozen of these. Maybe there are thousands of orders of magnitude in a universe larger than it? Maybe there are infinite orders of magnitude? Maybe our entire universe is a negligible system in size?

Our universe does not actually contain huge amounts of matter as we tend to think. After all, the universe is almost empty. Almost everything is empty in the universe. The stars are tiny compared to interstellar space in ratios with many zeros, and in the same way the particles are tiny compared to the distances between them, and so on. The only thing that operates the universe is not the matter itself, but forces, charges and fields that fill these spaces, and they are the real universe. Matter is ultimately an illusion. We are completely empty, and the only reason my finger doesn't pass through the keyboard keys is not that the place is full of matter there, because it is actually completely empty - but that there are repulsive forces that act at enormous distances relative to the size of the electrons in my finger and in the shin key, and therefore they repel each other with unimaginable strength relative to their size. If there were no such forces, I would immediately fall from the chair into the ground to the core of the Earth. And as a black hole, that is, as concentrated matter, Earth is actually quite tiny... That is - whoever created the universe was very stingy in the amount of plasticine in it relative to its size, but very generous in relation to the influence of tiny pieces of plasticine from afar on each other. If so, after we see such an extreme mismatch in the universe itself between the amount of matter and space, it is difficult to talk about large and small in relation to the entire universe at all: it is possible that our entire universe is tiny in relation to other universes - or huge. A small experiment - or an unimaginable monster.

The same question concerning space also concerns time. If the objective scale for space and time is the universe itself, then we, both as a species and as individuals, occupy a much larger amount of time from it by many orders of magnitude than space. As evolution, for example, we have been here for over a third of the universe's life, and as a piece of matter Earth is less than a nano-nano-something of the universe, and our ratio as humans to the size of the universe is similar. We are not just similar to those giants in time, from Proust's stirring final paragraph of In Search of Lost Time, but we are really noodles in time. Tiny creatures in space that occupy enormous time relative to their size. But who said that even the universe itself can be an objective scale? Can there even be an objective scale for the universe?

The only distances and quantities that are objective in the universe in terms of their size are the orders of magnitude themselves. They are the ones that determine that the universe is actually empty, because there are many orders of magnitude between the size of its parts and their influence distances and the spaces in it. Are the true boundaries of our universe, far beyond any boundaries in time and space, actually the boundaries of the orders of magnitude accessible to us? After all, it is possible that the answer to rich complexity is unfortunately rooted precisely in orders of magnitude that are not accessible to us, whether larger than us (the great designer? super-universe? different structure?), or much smaller (some basis that creates complexity in all orders of magnitude above it, and perhaps even creates mathematics itself and the laws of nature). But maybe complexity is an illusion? After all, there are many orders of magnitude in the universe where there is no complexity, and many simple and boring and uninteresting parts in mathematics. Maybe complexity is created precisely from the existence of many orders of magnitude, which allow the gradual creation of complexity?

After all, if we unite the evolutionary algorithm and the neural network algorithm, the two natural learning algorithms known to us, we will discover that what creates complexity is many generations one after the other or many layers one after the other (deep learning), when in each generation and layer there is a huge multiplication and redundancy of agents (organisms or neurons). That is, there is complexity created from the stratification of time that passes over the system, and there is also complexity created from spatial stratification in the system. Stratification is the father of complexity and therefore development and learning. Isn't it reasonable that there would also be complexity that stems from the stratification of orders of magnitude in the system? That is, where each order of magnitude reflects greater complexity that emerges from the one below it? Can't the cosmic learning mechanism be a learning mechanism built on orders of magnitude, which generalizes the learning mechanisms in time and space?

Mathematical complexity is also created from countless stages that are composed one on top of the other, according to the evolving definitions and the mathematical logical language. Is the complexity of the world created just from repeated calculation, or perhaps from an even more basic mechanism than calculation? Why are such distant branches in mathematics connected by such surprising and deep connections (the central story that repeats again and again in all parts of modern mathematics)? Is it possible that all mathematics is built not only like a network with deep connections from sea to sea, but that there is one basic phenomenon at its foundation, that there is a sea? Or is there some deep generative process that creates complexity throughout mathematics, for example of prime numbers, and can we get to its depth? Is there evolution for mathematics? Mathematical logic is indeed a generative process, but it is not "deep", and there is no understanding of the order created, but only an external linguistic description (and indeed it is relatively disconnected from other parts of mathematics, despite model theory, and recent advances in the connection between type theory and category theory). Will we discover learning at the foundation of the foundations of mathematics?

These questions are on the edge of our perception. But it is possible that if we unite the different learning algorithms we know, from the evolutionary, neural, mathematical and physical worlds, we will reach some unified and basic theory of learning and its essence, and of the deep common basis for the different learning algorithms in our world, and therefore also of the properties and limitations of learning. Is it possible that we will discover in the 21st century that the theory of everything in physics (TOE), which unifies the two great physical theories of the 20th century - quantum and relativity - into one framework, is based precisely on evolutionary learning ideas, like biology is based on evolution? Such a theory can be even more general than the physical "theory of everything" - because we may discover that it includes all the exact sciences, including mathematics and biology and computer science and neuroscience - under one learning framework. For example, when different learning algorithms are special cases of one basic algorithm.

And if we choose a more modest goal, just as network theory today is beginning to provide insights into networks in all areas of science and technology, it is possible that in the future we will have an interdisciplinary and fundamental learning theory, which will even be discovered as more basic than the idea of the network. Just as learning is more fundamental to the brain than the neural network, or more fundamental to evolution than gene networks. We can certainly imagine a kind of Einstein of learning of the 21st century, who will establish it as a super-theory, and who will also discover in it a host of quantitative predictions (how fast can one learn? Under what threshold conditions? How much information is needed and how much is created? How to measure "rich complexity" through learning? etc.).

Then, such a theory may find a general and comprehensive explanation for complexity in the universe, and the basic learning mechanism that drives it. And then we will stop understanding the universe as computation (lacking depth and insight), or as a network (random), or as probability (implausible), and start thinking about it as learning. We do not know of any other natural process that creates rich complexity, whether in culture, in humans, or in evolution, that is not learning. Maybe we'll discover that this is true for physics and mathematics as well? And maybe the nature of this algorithm will reveal to us why we are the only evolution that converged to a state of intelligence, and that there can probably be too many types of complex development, which happened in other evolutions, and which led to other directions, which we do not understand today. After all, it is possible that evolution tends to converge precisely to learning algorithms other than ours (does digital computation, for example from the genome, naturally grow from it, and not a brain? Why isn't this actually more likely? Why would an additional and analog learning mechanism be created, disconnected from the digital genetic learning mechanism that already exists and is ready?). And if a general and comprehensive scientific theory of learning is created, we may even be able to measure the complexity that it is "reasonable" for evolution to create, and understand if we are really an extreme case, or identify some rare turning point on the way to us, which led relatively easily to the complexity that followed. And maybe, if we decipher the basic learning algorithm of nature, we will also understand how artificial intelligence should develop naturally (!), and what is the most n-a-t-u-r-a-l learning algorithm for intelligence in the universe. And what is natural - is probably safer and more correct and more adapted to the world. And to nature. And to the nature of the world.

Culture and Literature

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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Three Big Questions in Science Today

What is natural in nature? Is it possible that nature is not natural? Are the big problems in science today just gaps (or enormous holes) in knowledge, which turn nature into a miracle, or do they hint at the need for a paradigm shift, and a new type of scientific explanation, which is not the laws of the system (nature) but the learning of the system? On the difference between a networked and descriptive scientific worldview (we must remove all explanation!), which is abundant in random and therefore improbable details - and a learning-based explanation

By: The Legend of Three and Four

Multiverse - National Gallery of Art Washington  (Source)

What is the worst thing that could happen to neuroscience in the coming century? The discovery that there is no "evolution" in the brain. That unlike biology, whose great successes stem from one algorithm, which is the simplest, most successful, and most comprehensive explanation in any scientific field (much more than in physics!), we'll discover that there is no comprehensive or central algorithm in the brain that can be generalized. That the brain depends on countless balances, perhaps even genetically programmed, that are very difficult to recreate, improve, or even understand. In short: the discovery that the brain is not only complex, but complicated and even tangled, meaning an unraveling knot. Like biology appeared before Darwin: as many related cases, that is, as a network - and not as an algorithm. As a language system and cataloging and characterization - and not as a learning system.

And what is the great hope of neuroscience? That the Einstein of the brain will appear, who will decipher basic, scientific principles that well explain its operation. That is, that the brain is driven by a strong algorithm and not just by big-data and a monstrous procedural operating system. That it does not depend on delicate fine-tuning at the motherboard level. Otherwise, even if we succeed in creating superintelligence, we will find it very difficult to create the precise balances required for it, the product of slow and insanely long evolution, and the path from here to catastrophe is short. In other words, if we don't discover that there is a new learning algorithm there besides the old evolution - then our situation is bad. And who guarantees us that "deep learning" will be able to advance us beyond the most superficial stages of the brain's learning system?

This problem of fine-tuning, versus an effective learning and adaptive algorithm, is perhaps the most basic problem in science today, in all areas of exact sciences, including mathematics. The question is how rich complexity is created at all? If we believe in the existence of a creator or designer, as in the Middle Ages, then very complex and rich explanations for our world are not problematic. But from the moment we are in the realm of modern science, we will find it difficult to accept a situation where the universe is designed for complexity at an exceptional level of precision, out of infinite possibilities, and without any apparent reason. Science seeks a case that will happen not by chance. Therefore, the three most significant questions in science today are actually one question:

In physics: Why does the universe seem as if it is designed? Why is it built for complexity (and life!) and any tiny movement in conditions or constants would have created a trivial and uninteresting universe? Can we, like in evolution, find a basic developmental algorithm that created the complexity in the universe, or will we eventually have to assume that there is a God, a designer, or luck so lucky that the lottery looks like a safe bet next to it? How and why, in God's name, were laws of nature created with such precise balance systems, so many digits after the decimal point? How can it be that there is exactly the amount of dark matter and dark energy needed? Something here really stinks - if we are secular. The anthropic principle cannot be an answer to everything. In fact, it's probably not an answer to anything. Today the universe is looking more and more like the artificial clock from the teleological watchmaker argument for the existence of God. And the fine-structure constant - fear of God.

In biology: The Fermi paradox. If evolution is a general algorithm in the universe - why has it succeeded only with us, as far as the eye can see (where is the evidence for advanced civilizations that can already influence at the stellar level and beyond? Or on the signals in the universe? The universe looks completely natural). How can it be that only here a sequence of circumstances was created that are probably very very improbable, that is, not reasonable in astronomical gaps. Something here really really stinks. It's not possible that there are no intelligent aliens. This is again the question of creating complexity in conditions that seem as if they were tuned by a watchmaker.

In mathematics: Why the hell is there mathematics, assuming we don't believe in the Platonic world of ideas (and what's scary is that most mathematicians do believe, because how can it be that this is what's happening)? Where does this insanely beautiful complexity come from, which is really illogical, and is revealed again and again, in its most esoteric fields, as useful for understanding every phenomenon in the universe. What's going on? How can this even be? If the universe was tuned by a Swiss watchmaker with atomic clock-level precision, mathematics seems as if it was built by a genius artist with divine, completely illogical abilities. Where did such a phenomenon come from? Where do all kinds of really unexpected and infinitely complex orders come from within simple phenomena like prime numbers? Is it just like that, by chance, that they arranged this way? How is it possible to find again and again and again such rich and jaw-dropping complexity created from really simple and abstract structures in all branches of mathematics? This stinks to high heaven.

The three great anomalies hint at deep orders that exist in the universe, and perhaps deep learning algorithms and adaptation and creation of complexity that we do not understand. Just as we did not understand evolution - and the biological world seemed to us both random and terribly complex, but also wonderfully adapted, and as if created by a designer - so we can hope that the discovery of other learning algorithms will solve the cosmic clock problems. Yes, perhaps mathematics, neuroscience and physics also have their own evolution and learning mechanisms. Or there is a deep learning reason for creating complexity - and for the existence of conditions for it. We may, for example, be able to base physical complexity on mathematical complexity, or vice versa, and create at least a reduction to the problem (would there be different mathematics in another physical universe?). Or it may be that we can generalize evolutionary learning, which somehow managed to create the conditions that allow its continued development each time anew (once there was no oxygen atmosphere on Earth - life created it!). There is some important component in the complexity puzzle that we do not understand, and that is not "natural". Any answer that starts with winning the lottery is not a scientific answer - but a theological one. And it is much more likely to replace it with a designer or simulation operator.

But if we do reach such a design answer (and it's possible! Any design leaves traces) - this will be a real philosophical revolution, and we will understand that we are not here by chance. In the current state of knowledge, in a different intellectual environment, these anomalies would be considered strong evidence for the existence of such a designing God. Only our belief in the appearance of evolutionary and "natural" explanations later, in accordance with the development so far in the history of science, thwarts such an obvious interpretation even today. But if we discover that these anomalies are very deep, and perhaps even broader than we thought, and no natural explanations are found for them for a very long time - science may influence belief in a way it does not anticipate at all, and we will return to a medieval worldview. The universe may seem to us immeasurably huge, and not like a laboratory experiment on someone's table, but in relation to what do we determine that it is a large universe? Do we have any objective scale? The only objective thing that is large in the universe is the number of orders of magnitude, but in fact it is only a few dozen of these. Maybe there are thousands of orders of magnitude in a universe larger than it? Maybe there are infinite orders of magnitude? Maybe our entire universe is a negligible system in size?

Our universe does not actually contain huge amounts of matter as we tend to think. After all, the universe is almost empty. Almost everything is empty in the universe. The stars are tiny compared to interstellar space in ratios with many zeros, and in the same way the particles are tiny compared to the distances between them, and so on. The only thing that operates the universe is not the matter itself, but forces, charges and fields that fill these spaces, and they are the real universe. Matter is ultimately an illusion. We are completely empty, and the only reason my finger doesn't pass through the keyboard keys is not that the place is full of matter there, because it is actually completely empty - but that there are repulsive forces that act at enormous distances relative to the size of the electrons in my finger and in the shin key, and therefore they repel each other with unimaginable strength relative to their size. If there were no such forces, I would immediately fall from the chair into the ground to the core of the Earth. And as a black hole, that is, as concentrated matter, Earth is actually quite tiny... That is - whoever created the universe was very stingy in the amount of plasticine in it relative to its size, but very generous in relation to the influence of tiny pieces of plasticine from afar on each other. If so, after we see such an extreme mismatch in the universe itself between the amount of matter and space, it is difficult to talk about large and small in relation to the entire universe at all: it is possible that our entire universe is tiny in relation to other universes - or huge. A small experiment - or an unimaginable monster.

The same question concerning space also concerns time. If the objective scale for space and time is the universe itself, then we, both as a species and as individuals, occupy a much larger amount of time from it by many orders of magnitude than space. As evolution, for example, we have been here for over a third of the universe's life, and as a piece of matter Earth is less than a nano-nano-something of the universe, and our ratio as humans to the size of the universe is similar. We are not just similar to those giants in time, from Proust's stirring final paragraph of In Search of Lost Time, but we are really noodles in time. Tiny creatures in space that occupy enormous time relative to their size. But who said that even the universe itself can be an objective scale? Can there even be an objective scale for the universe?

The only distances and quantities that are objective in the universe in terms of their size are the orders of magnitude themselves. They are the ones that determine that the universe is actually empty, because there are many orders of magnitude between the size of its parts and their influence distances and the spaces in it. Are the true boundaries of our universe, far beyond any boundaries in time and space, actually the boundaries of the orders of magnitude accessible to us? After all, it is possible that the answer to rich complexity is unfortunately rooted precisely in orders of magnitude that are not accessible to us, whether larger than us (the great designer? super-universe? different structure?), or much smaller (some basis that creates complexity in all orders of magnitude above it, and perhaps even creates mathematics itself and the laws of nature). But maybe complexity is an illusion? After all, there are many orders of magnitude in the universe where there is no complexity, and many simple and boring and uninteresting parts in mathematics. Maybe complexity is created precisely from the existence of many orders of magnitude, which allow the gradual creation of complexity?

After all, if we unite the evolutionary algorithm and the neural network algorithm, the two natural learning algorithms known to us, we will discover that what creates complexity is many generations one after the other or many layers one after the other (deep learning), when in each generation and layer there is a huge multiplication and redundancy of agents (organisms or neurons). That is, there is complexity created from the stratification of time that passes over the system, and there is also complexity created from spatial stratification in the system. Stratification is the father of complexity and therefore development and learning. Isn't it reasonable that there would also be complexity that stems from the stratification of orders of magnitude in the system? That is, where each order of magnitude reflects greater complexity that emerges from the one below it? Can't the cosmic learning mechanism be a learning mechanism built on orders of magnitude, which generalizes the learning mechanisms in time and space?

Mathematical complexity is also created from countless stages that are composed one on top of the other, according to the evolving definitions and the mathematical logical language. Is the complexity of the world created just from repeated calculation, or perhaps from an even more basic mechanism than calculation? Why are such distant branches in mathematics connected by such surprising and deep connections (the central story that repeats again and again in all parts of modern mathematics)? Is it possible that all mathematics is built not only like a network with deep connections from sea to sea, but that there is one basic phenomenon at its foundation, that there is a sea? Or is there some deep generative process that creates complexity throughout mathematics, for example of prime numbers, and can we get to its depth? Is there evolution for mathematics? Mathematical logic is indeed a generative process, but it is not "deep", and there is no understanding of the order created, but only an external linguistic description (and indeed it is relatively disconnected from other parts of mathematics, despite model theory, and recent advances in the connection between type theory and category theory). Will we discover learning at the foundation of the foundations of mathematics?

These questions are on the edge of our perception. But it is possible that if we unite the different learning algorithms we know, from the evolutionary, neural, mathematical and physical worlds, we will reach some unified and basic theory of learning and its essence, and of the deep common basis for the different learning algorithms in our world, and therefore also of the properties and limitations of learning. Is it possible that we will discover in the 21st century that the theory of everything in physics (TOE), which unifies the two great physical theories of the 20th century - quantum and relativity - into one framework, is based precisely on evolutionary learning ideas, like biology is based on evolution? Such a theory can be even more general than the physical "theory of everything" - because we may discover that it includes all the exact sciences, including mathematics and biology and computer science and neuroscience - under one learning framework. For example, when different learning algorithms are special cases of one basic algorithm.

And if we choose a more modest goal, just as network theory today is beginning to provide insights into networks in all areas of science and technology, it is possible that in the future we will have an interdisciplinary and fundamental learning theory, which will even be discovered as more basic than the idea of the network. Just as learning is more fundamental to the brain than the neural network, or more fundamental to evolution than gene networks. We can certainly imagine a kind of Einstein of learning of the 21st century, who will establish it as a super-theory, and who will also discover in it a host of quantitative predictions (how fast can one learn? Under what threshold conditions? How much information is needed and how much is created? How to measure "rich complexity" through learning? etc.).

Then, such a theory may find a general and comprehensive explanation for complexity in the universe, and the basic learning mechanism that drives it. And then we will stop understanding the universe as computation (lacking depth and insight), or as a network (random), or as probability (implausible), and start thinking about it as learning. We do not know of any other natural process that creates rich complexity, whether in culture, in humans, or in evolution, that is not learning. Maybe we'll discover that this is true for physics and mathematics as well? And maybe the nature of this algorithm will reveal to us why we are the only evolution that converged to a state of intelligence, and that there can probably be too many types of complex development, which happened in other evolutions, and which led to other directions, which we do not understand today. After all, it is possible that evolution tends to converge precisely to learning algorithms other than ours (does digital computation, for example from the genome, naturally grow from it, and not a brain? Why isn't this actually more likely? Why would an additional and analog learning mechanism be created, disconnected from the digital genetic learning mechanism that already exists and is ready?). And if a general and comprehensive scientific theory of learning is created, we may even be able to measure the complexity that it is "reasonable" for evolution to create, and understand if we are really an extreme case, or identify some rare turning point on the way to us, which led relatively easily to the complexity that followed. And maybe, if we decipher the basic learning algorithm of nature, we will also understand how artificial intelligence should develop naturally (!), and what is the most n-a-t-u-r-a-l learning algorithm for intelligence in the universe. And what is natural - is probably safer and more correct and more adapted to the world. And to nature. And to the nature of the world.

Culture and Literature


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The Degeneration of the Nation

How does mathematics benefit literature?

And how can poetics benefit high-tech

By: Literary Response Journal

"New Beauty" (1923) by Ito - Reviving traditional art after its elimination by photography  (source)

On the margins of the many responses to my brief article about Dechak, I think there is something in the human response mechanism - or perhaps even in the aesthetics of the response genre itself - that always reveals some wretchedness in the character of the responder, no matter how they respond (and therefore the true heroism is not to respond: the main answer - will be heard in his disgrace, he will be silent and keep quiet), but despite all this I will risk responding to the responses. Among all the claims and misunderstandings of the reading that were raised, I find interest in only one, because it is fundamental to the infrastructure problem of our culture, and because it is so common in our places and in our times: what is the connection between technology and literature, or algorithmics and philosophy, or genomics and art. The Homo sapiens is strange. You can publish countless articles on literature, science, aesthetics and technology - and none of this will interest anyone, until you write about another Homo sapiens.

Well, I'm sorry to inform all the book and fine arts enthusiasts who surround us, but the most aesthetic masterpiece, the deepest, most impressive, thrilling and complete work that the human spirit has ever encountered is not the Iliad or the Sistine Chapel or Shostakovich's string quartets, but - modern mathematics (and it may not be a human creation at all! Which is important for the continuation). Anyone who publishes a series of books on aesthetics, or deals with aesthetics for a living (for example, a poet, artist or critic), and has never bothered to be dizzied by the beauty of Galois theory, holomorphic functions, or any parallel achievement, is like a writer on aesthetics who has never seen a painting. Or never heard music. Or a seminary girl who has never seen a beautiful naked man (or a yeshiva boy who has never seen a naked woman, if you prefer, and I think you will prefer). Or a secular person who has no idea what the meaning of a "beautiful move" in a Talmudic discussion is. Or someone who has never read a poem. It's a deep and fundamental deficiency in worldview - and in the breadth of the world - what is called: narrow-mindedness.

You'll ask: Well really, well fine. Maybe it's an exceptional and sublime aesthetic experience, but it's just an experience (dependent on personal taste... right?), meaning just an option in the broad world of human experiences and trials, and what's the big flaw in lack of experience and familiarity with it? Have you been to Japan yet? Well, aesthetics is not just an experience, and not even mainly, but it is a very wide range of tools, planes of reference, methods, constructions, motivations, conventions, directions, and more, some of which are indeed in the mental sphere and some intellectual or cultural - what is called spiritual - as any real poet should know (and this is, in fact, the hidden poetic doctrine of Dechak. And that's why it gives so much meaning to musicality and tradition, that is, to form). But from the tremendous success of mathematics in the last half millennium (often mistakenly called the scientific revolution), which is deeply connected to an aesthetic revolution that occurred before it in mathematics itself (yes, aesthetics is a mighty force!), the aesthetic structure of mathematics imposed itself on the human world, and created within it an increasingly powerful technical and technological plane (and today we are even approaching the mathematization of biology...), among other things with the help of the idea of mathematics as an active body and as a machine (known to you as a computer), but not only. Humans today are increasingly contained within this sphere, in which you are also reading this current text, and this process is irreversible, and apparently (and yes, it's clear that Homo sapiens is uncomfortable digesting this) - all-consuming. And from here we come to the human cultural crisis, within which, in a small corner, the crisis of Hebrew culture is taking place, within which, in a small corner, the current discussion is taking place.

The question is how to deal with the crisis, which is actually a crisis of paradigm shift. One way, easy and convenient, is simply to deny its existence. To block an ear to the heavy but accelerating steps of history, which is gradually becoming more and more identical to the progress of technology and science and economy (which is the mathematization of value, with the stock market being its analysis and accounting - its algebra), and to close eyes from looking straight at the face of the cultural holocaust (for now, only cultural) that is unfolding before our (closed) eyes. This way is the attempt to continue creating within the humanistic paradigm, and almost all our creators and intellectuals belong to it, for they studied in the humanistic track. The trouble is that today the scientific track is the one leading the world, and it is increasingly disconnecting from the other track, to the point of irrelevance of the latter to the world (which is also economic irrelevance, and lack of public interest, and institutional decline, and spreading corruption, and a war of survival of all against all from all all, and incessant lamentation, and how has she become a harlot, and general wretchedness, and increasing distress, and so on and so forth). The good ones - to high-tech, the geniuses - to the exact sciences, and the prodigies - to mathematics and computer science (and woe - to deep learning!). This is the reality in every university, not to mention the job market. One who can be both a poet and a mathematician is not a poet but a mathematician, and anyway fewer and fewer can, and this is exactly the point. The broad-minded cultural type of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century is lost (and I remember how I saw with horror that Peter Scholze, our young Hilbert, perhaps the brightest star currently in the skies of mathematics, doesn't know Achilles and the tortoise paradox!).

A second way, which is much less common but no less simplistic, is the futuristic way, which enthusiastically and one-sidedly adopts technology, and imposes it on culture, for example tries to write computer-poetry, say in code lines, or poetry of mathematical proofs, or internet literature, or Facebook post prose, or NFT art, and so on, in a kind of simplistic projection from the most external structures of mathematics and technology to culture. But as Brenner said in another context, this creative type, who is excited (and he is usually an excited type!) about the future, is one who saw the back of the mathematical god - and his face he did not see. In its most vulgar form, this excitement is a kind of boasting by the writer of his "knowledge", which almost always ends badly (see Houellebecq's Elementary Particles, who actually tried very hard to understand Bell's inequality, but mainly evokes an indulgent smile. Because after all it's someone who is not a great writer, but is a central writer, precisely because he is one of the few who does contend in this empty field, and scores against an empty goal).

What we need is actually another type, and it is unfortunately the rarest, and this is the Renaissance man type, that is, a polymath who is able to see the deep and creative connections (the threats and opportunities alike) between the human paradigm and the new paradigm. One who is able to c-o-n-f-r-o-n-t the computational, non-human world, and build a cultural bridge between our era and the era that comes after us. For this there is no need to be a great mathematician, or a researcher in the computer science department, or a narrow expert in optogenetics in nematode worms, but familiarity is needed with at least some of the foundational ideas, exciting innovations, intellectual methods, and spiritual depth structures of the approaching new paradigm, and above all - with its aesthetics.

For what else can connect between the worlds, and what else really connects us to the ancient world, for example the biblical world or the Greek world, distant from us by several paradigms, that can also connect us to the world of the future, which is going to change beyond recognition? Perhaps - only aesthetics. In my personal opinion (IMHO?), Kurzweil is right (Ray, not Baruch), or the comfortable-Harari-Musk-technological-false-prophet-of-your-choice, even if completely not in the timeline. It's very likely that there will be humans in a hundred years, but in a thousand years - it's likely that the creatures reading these words will be more different from us than we are from mice. This is quite a disturbing thought, especially since our world is already operating within this process, and see the impact of the computer and the network on human consciousness, spirit and soul (and in general, you don't have to accept the forecast to understand the irrelevance, which is lack of future, of literature that doesn't put this confrontation - with the most dramatic change happening in its days - at the top of its concerns). But this messianic era (which will not necessarily be dystopian and not necessarily utopian) should not surprise any son of Western culture, and certainly not the son of Jewish culture, in which unique aesthetic tools were developed to deal with it, talk about it and think about it. These tools are needed today more than ever, but if they persist in their antiquity as they are, and do not become new tools - they will not be worthy of the task, and will break like clay vessels.

I think the scenario in which the human world is slaughtered as a real possibility or spiritually evaporates is a very likely scenario in a timeframe shorter than the distance between us and the ancient world, and certainly between us and Gilgamesh. And to tell the truth, I personally am quite okay with that (in fact, I'm sure that few of the Homo sapiens who read with enthusiasm and interest the previous not-so-important article about another Homo sapiens, read with the same interest this principled - in my eyes - article many times over, and in general reached this far). What's not okay (and hence also the connection to the question of the Holocaust, for those who asked), would be the disappearance of culture, of literature, of art. This is what really scares me. Not that my cute descendants will die, or that my successors will turn into robots with wings, or a network of super-intelligences, or ana arif [Arabic: who knows] (and I'm sure we are not capable today of even imagining what will be), but that they will be "secular". That is, that they will leave my culture, and my aesthetics, and my spiritual world, all of which will disappear as if they never were (and more than that - will not be replaced by new culture, aesthetics and spirit). Not just secular from religion, or from Jewish culture, or even secular from humanity itself, but secular from any spiritual world. Secularized and emptied of aesthetics - and the entire human aesthetic world will be erased as a living system, including literature of course (and yes, this process is happening, in its early stages, already today - and see how it already looks. As it was said: Dechak [distress]!).

And here we come to the tremendous importance of mathematics, really as a force of nature (not sure it's not! After all, what is it doing there in physics? And what is the meaning of its beauty? Does this have anything to do with the very existence of beauty itself in the universe?). And this force acts, wonder of wonders, precisely against its current direction, in the very latest turn, of technology. For within the technological world itself, a severe aesthetic crisis is currently taking place, of which the crisis of human aesthetics is only an expression (and of which the crisis of Hebrew poetry is only an expression of an expression. And I wonder if I should mention Wizen, once every few sentences, to arouse the interest of the holy audience). What is the difference between a cultural crisis and an aesthetic crisis, and why is the latter the more dangerous? Well, one way to understand this is to see what happened in the scientific-technological world itself, and this hyphen itself is the issue. We are currently in a transition stage, which parallels the transition that took place in the ancient world between Greek culture and Roman culture, and it is the transition between European culture and American culture, and between a culture of science and mathematics to a culture of engineering and computing, and within computer science itself: between an algorithmic world to a world of data (whose extreme end is deep learning, with a horrifying black box algorithm called backpropagation, and to which the current chip crisis is closely related. What doesn't go in the brain - goes in brute-force). This is the transition between the face of the goddess of technology - to her back.

And this transition itself has catastrophic implications for anyone who holds the world of spirit dear to their heart. Because after all, mathematics is a pure spiritual field, it is one of ours, while engineering is an anti-spiritual material field by nature (and in fact stands at the basis of this very dichotomy - between matter and spirit), when their growing separation eventually created in the end of the ancient world the horrifyingly-long decline that we call the Middle Ages. The materialistic world disconnected from the spirit, and its increasingly tightening connection to what is called artificial intelligence, is the result of the growing disconnect (which will gradually be more and more difficult to bridge) between the aesthetic world and the world of action (an anti-Greek disconnect, as Aaron Shabtai well understands). And here we see with our own eyes, and from all sides, the results of disconnecting aesthetics from matter, and for example, with us: the vulgar display of Israeli high-tech. Not only is it a matter of absolute lack of taste (whose capital, Tel Aviv, is a world winner in the title of the city where the price-to-ugliness ratio is maximal), but it is a system with par excellence engineering thinking, whose perception is completely technical, and whose world is as narrow as the scope of a local variable. Battalions of engineers, led by engineers who have become battalion commanders (that is: entrepreneurs), are looking for an engineering-technical solution to every problem in our world, when the speed of sloppiness and approximation is the central value, and therefore it actually becomes more complicated - not less. It's very easy to create something complicated. It's very difficult to create something simple. It's easy to create ugliness. It's difficult to create beauty. And the complex of the computing world is the most complicated thing humans have ever created. Because it's the easiest. When an engineer - that is, the narrow expert - claims that code is "beautiful", know that his aesthetic standard is the lowest in the world, and doesn't come close at all to any other beauty standard known in history, in any field.

Thus they create in the depths and valleys of Silicon incredibly ugly systems (and therefore extremely complex and difficult to grasp and maintain, with more unnecessary features and hidden bugs than content), and huge code monsters and monstrous algorithms, which of course don't work (and see Facebook's feed algorithm, a monster company that invested countless resources in it). The increasingly narrow expertise - down to an ant world - is now the main belief, at the expense of beauty, razor-sharp simplicity (of Occam), and seeing the whole. And once a decade, when (and it happens less and less) some Steve Jobs arrives and does something motivated by aesthetics and therefore integrated (aesthetics is a holistic phenomenon), he is perceived as a kind of prophet or messiah. And it indeed (surprise!) works better (KISS principle). Until battalions of engineers (and design engineers) arrive again and trample the achievement and gradually erode it to dust (has anyone tried to use a Mac today?). These are the soldiers of the kingdom of wicked Rome (and its translation: the American Empire), and they are the ones who are now conquering the world - and uniting it into one engineering empire, which rewards narrow thinking and punishes broad thinking (and China, if you asked, is just an even more extreme example of this engineering thinking, which has almost no connection to its aesthetic Asian Europe - Japan, which is not coincidentally in an ongoing aging and withering crisis, just like our Europe, and like Greece after the Roman conquest). Engineering, technical thinking is the polar opposite of aesthetic thinking, not mathematical-scientific thinking, in which the more beautiful a solution to a problem is - the more correct it is. But just as bureaucracy only creates itself more and more, so engineering-decomposing thinking will always aspire to millions of lines of code over one deep holistic solution. And all this stems from a culture that has lost its aesthetics, meaning one that is no longer another culture, perhaps not human, but: barbarism. And this is the reason that Roman culture, despite all its material power, will always eventually lead to the barbarian conquest, for it is the final result of its own process of barbarization.

There is no place where the threat to the world of spirit is greater than in the new data religion, whose depth meaning is turning the spirit itself into engineering. And therefore the world of data and machine learning was so warmly adopted by Silicon engineers, because it allows trying to insert into the engineering and material logic the spiritual component that was missing in it, and it's no wonder that these algorithms break new records of engineering ugliness, and those interested are invited to read posts in Machine Learning Israel (and the critical struggle between the engineering paradigm and the mathematical one over the neuro world - is in full swing). And by the way, for those who wondered, the lack of aesthetics in high-tech is not economically beneficial, but on the contrary, but the invisible hand knows how to provide only incentives and desires and not forms and ideas, and certainly not aesthetic forms. For aesthetics begins with deep education for taste from a young age, and is not a free-willed decision in adulthood, and therefore it is so dependent on the environment - on culture. We all know someone who grew up in a different environment - and tries to imitate the new environment in a ridiculous way, because he doesn't grasp its aesthetics. It's very difficult to get out of barbarism, and certainly as a general environment, and therefore its danger is great. The terribly narrow horizons of the Israeli programmer, and the lack of understanding of the importance of aesthetics of the Tel Aviv businessman, and the malignant philosophical ignorance of the local manager, are the primary root cause for the glorious chain of failures (no less than the chain of successes) of Israeli high-tech. The ugly Israeli would benefit greatly - financially! - from being part of a culture that gives aesthetics and poetics and philosophy a central place, that is: classical culture.

Hence, as in ancient Greece, mathematics is actually the deep ally of literature, and science is the ally of thought, and computer science (as opposed to computer engineering) is the ally of aesthetics and art. But to create alliances, one needs to connect and needs to know and needs to understand. One needs (alas!) to be less arrogant - that is: one needs to learn. And learning is hard, oh (although today with the internet it's much easier than before). But our only chance is young people and children who will learn both Python and poetics, both Torah and Talmud and graph theory, both aesthetics and probability, who will be excited by both Tarkovsky and Mandelbrot, by Wittgenstein and also by Witten (I gave up on adults long ago). To create anew broad-minded people, and not narrow experts (not even academic experts).

The existence of a whole system of such people (and not of isolated individuals) is what characterizes more than anything the unique phenomenon of cultural and aesthetic golden ages, which has recurred several times throughout history (Athens, Renaissance Italy, the Islamic Golden Age, the recurring Jewish golden ages - for example in Europe before the Holocaust and in America after it, Europe in the second half of the 19th century, the late Spring and Autumn period and the Hundred Schools of Thought period, the "Classical period" in Maya culture, and more). And it can happen again. Where, you ask? Well, the Jewish people, and even Israel, has a unique positioning in the current crisis, as those who carry on the one hand a mighty cultural and literary tradition (which, indeed, its main power was cut off in the Holocaust, even before the current lost generation), and on the other hand contain within them phenomenal capabilities also in the relevant scientific fields (from theoretical physics to excellence in computer science and high-tech entrepreneurship). In principle, it could have happened here, no less than anywhere else in the world (except perhaps the West Coast), and maybe even in Netanya. Therefore, we must raise the bar of achievement, and take on greater challenges than factional quarrels on Facebook, and hold discussions at a higher level, which are not responses to responses to responses to a post (as happens by the way, if you ask me, for several years on our site, which is closed to responses).

The very fact that these quite trivial claims (interdisciplinarity leads to breakthroughs/mathematics has a tremendous influence on philosophy - and on thinking in general/abstract thinking is closely related to aesthetics, and so is innovation/aesthetics is renewed according to technological media/etc.) are met with complete lack of understanding and eyebrow raising to the ceiling - is what demonstrates the magnitude of the crisis, and the height of the dichotomous wall created between the fields, whose impact is destructive on both. After all, one needs to know a little about the possibilities in order to be able to ask the questions at all. Is it even possible today to seriously deal with form, without knowing at all the groundbreaking formal ideas of modern mathematics? Or to deal with symbols and language and connections and concealment and meaning without knowing the powerful and innovative algorithms that deal with this in computer science? Or to deal with metaphysics without knowing current physics, which seems to be trying to cross every category of human perception? Or to deal with philosophy without knowing complexity theory? Or to innovate in our understanding of the human psyche and thinking while completely ignoring the neurological or genomic revolution? And what is the future value of such engagement, as opposed to the like value given to it by Homo sapiens on Facebook? And oh yes, I forgot, it hasn't been here for a long time. Wizen Wizen Wizen.

The original article

Culture and Literature


domain: philosophy

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The Degeneration of the Nation

Kafka as a Kind of Monkey

Who was right from a historical perspective - Kafka or Proust? What is the fundamental problem of the information age - is it an endless stuck computation (Kafka) or an endless stuck memory (Proust)? What is the philosophical significance of quantum computing? Why does a banana have more computing power than a philosopher? New revelations about the origins of modernist literature in Kabbalah, and about the connection between the printing revolution and secularization and the information revolution and religion

By: Philosopher of Language

The Kafkaesque dream (vision, transcendence) versus the Proustian memory (taste, substance) (Source)

Why literature has a future but the novel doesn't

Why are poets usually much younger than novelists at their creative peak? Why do composers and painters reach their peak in their later works, while this rarely happens for scientists or bands? Why is it harder to identify age as a central factor for philosophers? There are fields where creativity is a stronger factor and others where learning is. Philosophers simply say the same thing throughout their lives and refine it. The more a field is composed of smaller ideas in terms of information quantity, the more advantage young people have, and the size of the idea unit that makes up the larger field varies between disciplines and times (ideational resolution, size of cells in the body of knowledge). In other words, what matters is the genre, not the medium, and this can be seen when the medium changes genre. A poem is shorter than a story, but when epics and long poems were written, the creative peak was in maturity, and only with the shortening of the genre in Romanticism did the age drop drastically. The same happened in music with the transition from classical symphony to songs. As philosophy and literature return to fragments in accordance with the spirit of the time, they will become fields of cheeky young people rather than wise old men. Proverbs with its short sayings was written in the world of the young, with many warnings to the son about the desire for the wicked woman, while Ecclesiastes with its complex structure was written in the world of old age, and the Song of Songs with its mature and sober love is in the middle ground. The internet will turn art forms into genres with shorter formats, thus making culture younger. Even in scientific fields, mathematicians often reach their peak achievements in their youth, while biologists do the opposite, and physicists are in the middle. But as mathematics becomes longer, this is changing. In other words, we can see cyclicality, the genre gets longer until it petrifies and then starts short again. Kafka is so important precisely because of the shortening of the story after Dostoevsky. And that's why he anticipated the future, because he lived in a virtual consciousness a hundred years before the internet, and he reset the length of literature, which is why great literature declined after him, and no great works were written in the second half of the 20th century like in the second half of the 19th century. Kafka lived in emails, in blogs, in statuses, in the textual world of the future. Proust lived in the past.

The Most Important Jewish Writer

The Book of Deuteronomy is a book about the difficulty of the writer, God, in parting from his beloved protagonist. And perhaps even his favorite genre. The genre of law. Today, almost all religious literary genres are closed to us - prophecy, midrash, Zohar, even the Hasidic story is almost dead, and we are left with dry or embarrassing things. The partially successful attempt, literarily, in its later part, is Nachman of Breslov. Kafka read his tales in Buber's German translation made in 1906, and they were the trigger for the beginning of his writing in 1908. The interpretation in his close environment of his work was much more Jewish religious mystical than is customary today, and he essentially translated religious ideas into a universal and secular language, and therefore hopeless, or more precisely, without an addressee. Thus, he was like Paul who secularized and universalized authentic Jewish content and brought it to the world. He was also exposed to the Zohar in a certain way, and the medieval bureaucracies of the upper world view deeply influenced him. But ideas such as impossible parables, writing dreams and nightmares, unfinished books and stories, and writing from a terminal illness - he took from Nachman.

No One Gets Bored in a Dream, Everything is Full of Meaning

Printing led to the development of secularism, when the complex, intimate religious text of manuscripts that needs to be studied and not read seemed dry compared to the attractive, sexual (continuous pleasure) secular text, where the reading experience is streaming, and therefore much less dense in meaning, and therefore "realistic", because everyday reality is gray and not dense with meaning. And now with the splitting of attention back from sequence to pieces, because the web page is a page and not a book, then long texts will no longer be read, long novels will become academic material, and the only way to express a deep idea is in short but dense texts, and therefore religiosity will return. From page to pages to scroll to codex to book and back to page, because the screen is a page. And we returned to cut pleasure, male, in bursts, and not continuous female. In fact, the dimension of length of the work is replaced by the dimension of time in which updates are made, and it is identical to the dimension of time in life itself. And the revenge on the book is television, film, series, audio book, which take the continuous dimension and expropriate it from the person to an objective time prepared in advance, and the book cannot compete with them. How many pages of gibberish are there in novels, which can be compressed to much less. Novels tried to express simple depth through great complexity, but this is the cheapest way to create depth, by collapsing the human brain with excess connections and possibilities, by building space (spreading space-time), as opposed to a text that requires interpretation, whose level of complexity is as the level of complexity of the interpreter, and its depth stems from the interpretive depth, from the possibilities of finding and connecting things in it, from the need for creative interpretation. Complexity that is in the world of ideas - and not in the external world.

Singularity as the Point of Reversal of Meaning, Not Just Its Nullification

Secularism suffers from lack of meaning in the face of the end of humanity while religion suffers from excess meaning. Religious reading is not reading a text but studying. This is the main difference between cultures. Therefore, secularism created long texts, entire series, to convey little meaning with many tools. Television is a lot of information and little meaning, so that meaning enters without you noticing, like in a novel with a message that passes without you wanting. The meaning is covert, and it has an element of brainwashing, without you noticing, and this is perceived as the pinnacle of art - fluent manipulation. Whereas in learning there is an active and gatekeeper component, there you are dominant in meaning, you are the software and the text is the information, unlike the secular text which is sophisticated software that operates on you without you catching it. That's why secularism is full of distractions. But today, because of the shortening attention span, this is the revenge of religion, and again there will be an obligation to create dense meaning, because no one will read more than a paragraph. Therefore, in each paragraph you need to put a sentence that everyone will understand and a sentence that only the chosen few will understand. And all the range in between is what determines the richness of meaning. In every verse there must be from the simple meaning to the esoteric knowledge, the whole orchard [Translator's note: "Pardes" in Hebrew, referring to the four levels of biblical interpretation]. The learning method creates infinite, divine meaning from a human text. And this will probably be the reading of the computer itself, parallel reading. The whole idea of a computer is hacking the universe (or God, or the mathematical operating system of the universe beneath physics). It's the discovery that at more basic, physical layers, there are computational capabilities that didn't leak to higher layers. And when it comes to quantum computing, then if it's possible, and there's no fundamental mechanism preventing the transition, then there was a big oversight, and the universe didn't transfer computational capabilities from lower levels to higher levels, and essentially lost computational efficiency by many orders of magnitude just as it rose by orders of magnitude in terms of size. And then the question is not how such a simple universe created such a complex world, but how a universe with such strong computational capability created a world with such poor computational capability, that only in some corner of it, in some statistical deviation of the human brain, some computational capability was created that is efficient roughly like a molecule. That is, if speed is the most important function of computation, efficiency, then the small has an advantage over the big. And the question is whether speed is really the most important. Because maybe it's a mistake. Maybe information is more important (which unlike the amount of memory, is like meaningful data). Because maybe computing power and time are not the limited resource in the universe, but rather memory - it's very difficult to create something with little entropy like memory. We see this in humanity too, as a huge computing network, whose memory - that is, culture - is more expensive, successful and unique than its computation in each generation in the present. So maybe Proust was right after all.

Philosophy of the Future


domain: literature

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The Degeneration of the Nation

Pregnancy

By:

(Source)

The Fox

I dreamed that I'm a man and I'm pregnant and I don't know how to hide it. I stop going to work, and sit all day under the blanket with the computer on top of me so my wife won't see, and I eat and eat and she complains that I'm growing a belly, swearing I look like a pregnant woman. One night it starts to come out, but since it has nowhere to exit it digs and tears inside me and I feel the bleeding inside it's the size of a watermelon, and I'm afraid it will castrate me, so I take the Japanese knife and cut in a C-section, and it jumps out onto the keyboard, and starts writhing and nonsense appears on the screen, and maybe it's a language I can't decipher? And my wife wakes up and I say they left us this wrinkled and bleeding cat by the door and I gave it milk but I don't want to touch it so it's on the computer. And she starts yelling that it's a baby and we call the police, but there's no missing baby, but my wife also doesn't want to touch this creature, so it grows on the computer, and occasionally we pour milk on the screen and it licks it and gurgles. My wife says it's like a duck that thinks the computer is its mother, and I say who knows what happened 9 months ago. And it really loves the white of the screen, and in the dark I think it's like reading the Zohar [Translator's note: Jewish mystical text]. And it's so smart it knows how to type with its feet. And I tell my wife this child is so smart but so lonely we must bring it a pet, if we bring it a dog it will eat it, if we bring a cat it will drink its milk, let's bring it something in between something smart let's bring it a fox. And the fox is more stupid than smart, all day feeding it grapes, and the child steps on the keyboard and everything ferments from the bacteria from the filth and together they get drunk from the wine, no longer want milk. As a joke we would call this cute pair Cain and Abel. And one day the fox grows up, nothing to be done, it's reached the age when it needs to be made into a shtreimel [Translator's note: fur hat worn by some Hasidic Jews]. And the baby screams screams murderer murderer where are you taking my brother? And we say his brother is already grown up, and he's going to fox heaven. And the baby cries I want to go to heaven too. I want to go to the garden too. And he cries at night my brother where are you, and we don't have the heart to tell him. We say he'll be back soon, surely the child will forget. And indeed the child forgets. And one night I see the baby searching the internet for heaven. And immediately I slap him, one more time and it will be the end of you. And in the morning the baby is gone. And I see on the screen a Wikipedia entry: Shtreimel. In Hebrew: tail-taker. Years pass, and we hear about one big black ultra-Orthodox Jew who starts to take over the world. And they say he's so black, that no one has seen him, except for the edge of the shtreimel. And he's terribly smart, and it seems to everyone that this time it's it, and he really will take over the whole world. And he goes from country to country, and approaches the land. And this ultra-Orthodox decreed to kill all the foxes. And the price of shtreimels skyrockets. And everyone asks why, what does he want. And they say he wants to make a giant shtreimel for the whole Earth, that will melt the pole and turn Ashkenaz [Translator's note: Europe] into a hot and suffocating place like Africa, but completely dark and black. And others say it's just a mystical symbol, that space surrounds the world, and he actually wants to put a shtreimel on the Dome of the Rock or turn Mecca into a black circle. And others say he puts a shtreimel instead of a crown, on the Torah scroll, and he has thousands of missiles whose heads are covered with shtreimels. And others say he wants to cover every hilltop and every leafy tree with a shtreimel, and they discover in a frightening secret that when Moses went up Mount Sinai at the top of the mountain he saw - a shtreimel. And others say they put small shtreimels on the eyes and see only black, and others say it's for the Jewish nose, and there are women who cover themselves with shtreimels in private places, and others chase away pigeons and cover the eggs with small shtreimels, and eagles snatch shtreimels from bald heads to nest in them, and for children they make crowns for teeth over cavities, and even the security forces have shtreimels on the sirens that flash with black light, and he has an army of race cars with tires made of shtreimels that drive quietly on Shabbat, and meanwhile the foxes are becoming extinct and murdered en masse. And then the ultra-Orthodox arrives in the country, and a giant room-sized shtreimel descends from the plane, reaching down to the floor and sweeping it, and starts to walk around. And they decide to remove his shtreimel, and there's another shtreimel underneath, and they remove that one too, and there's another shtreimel underneath, and so on like Russian nesting dolls, until they remove the last one, tiny tiny, and inside there's nothing. One night my wife goes down to the river and finds a crying fox cub floating inside a shtreimel, and reaches out her hand to it and it bites her. And afterwards she lies in bed, and starts to growl, and bark, and bites the hand that feeds her, and she swells up a lot, especially in the belly, and I put a shtreimel up there on top of her head, so that when the bastard comes out he won't be a moment without a shtreimel, but when he comes out she apparently is horrified by what she sees, because she shoves his whole head into the shtreimel and chokes the baby, and pushes her own face deep inside with all her strength and commits suicide in the shtreimel. And I think how is it that I'm not sad, am I so cruel? Why wasn't I attracted to her? Could it be that I missed something? Why was I never able to love her? And now I'm a widower, wearing black, and I go outside and am shocked to see a very attractive girl, with a shtreimel! And she winks at me, and I approach and see that she has a shtreimel instead of a head, and I start chasing and chasing after her, to her bed, and she holds a Japanese knife and says her shtreimel is made from men's tails, and I say I'm not a mouse, and she puts me inside her into her shtreimel and it envelops me in black from all directions and I'm warm and comfortable and she whispers that this is death.

Doesn't that tempt you even a little?

I dreamed that I'm trying to fix the sin of the first snake. After all, everyone is trying to fix the sin of the first man, and indeed we see progress with the curses: with air conditioning we no longer sweat, and with all the robots and ultra-Orthodox, in the end who will work? And there's also epidural, and anyway in the end all babies will be born by C-section. Every child a Caesar. And regarding who rules over whom I'll leave that to my wife. But only with the snake's legs there's no progress. And I bring a snake home, to show that a woman gets along just fine with a snake in the house. And my wife shouts: Snake! And I say: Say hello to the snake. And my wife says: This instant you take your legs and leave.
And suddenly I have an overwhelming desire to be Muslim. And I can barely stop myself from immediately falling to the ground towards Mecca, I have so little strength. And I start running fast to the Arab village before it passes, the mosque across the valley stands before my eyes, but I'm afraid they'll kill me before I can make it, and actually, it's better if I stay here and can immediately carry out an attack, a much more meaningful attack than what they can do from there, because I know the culture from the inside. Killing a person is meaningless. But I can carry out a cultural attack, a spiritual attack, terrorism on a higher level.

Before and Within

I dreamed that one night in the future my wife whispers angrily at me - when the children we're destined to have are outside, so they won't hear - that I'm simply not human. And if she had known who I am - she wouldn't have had children with me. And I suddenly look back and see that the door is slightly open. And the next day they inform us that our oldest son, who is already bar mitzvah age, hanged himself with his tefillin [Translator's note: phylacteries] at boarding school. And then something starts to stink from inside the ark, and they discover that the second son is inside a Torah scroll, rolled the scroll around himself like a carpet and suffocated inside it, and with his last strength walked with his little feet, which were outside the scroll, and locked himself in the ark. And the next child drowned himself in a ritual hand-washing cup, we came to wash our hands in the morning and saw that he was sleeping with his head inside the cup. And the little child swallowed the mezuzah [Translator's note: parchment scroll affixed to doorposts] when he kissed it, and choked. And so on. Only the baby is left, who can't do anything, and I stop sleeping in order to watch over him so he doesn't try crib death. And to my horror I discover that he's already learning to grab with his hands, and tries to hang himself with the mobile, so we'll wake up in the morning and see him spinning above the crib, and he constantly tries to turn off the device that alerts for stopped breathing during sleep. And I have a suspicion, something illogical. I ask my wife to whisper about me again, and she doesn't want to, and I try very hard to annoy her and she refuses to get angrier, refuses to yell anymore, even in a whisper. And finally I hear her whispering something about me to the baby, far behind my back. And I go out of the house - I knew it! The ability to hear what she's whispering deep inside there is not human. I'm simply not human.

The Last Man

I dreamed that I'm writing and writing and the laptop starts to not digest what I'm writing, opens and closes opens and closes and tries to bite my hand and I barely escape with it, it wants to eat me? But then it increases speed and from opening and closing so much it starts to fly around the room, and I open the window and send it outside - and it doesn't come back. And I tell my wife take the children - at that time we already have lots of them - we're getting out of the box. And I see that the house is on top of a high mountain, and I tell myself that not seeing any sign of civilization doesn't mean there was a flood, because maybe we're just high above everyone. And we go down and see to the horizon a sea of bags and remnants, all the computers and devices drowned, and only the screens of old televisions continue to float, full of emptiness, between spare tires. The cars themselves sank long ago. And I don't know what to do, how to make humanity survive, marry off the daughter and sons? And I already see my wife looking at the oldest son and I look at my daughter and it frightens me. And I tell my wife that from a genetic-clinical perspective it's better if only the children marry each other, but she argues that all combinations are preferable and we don't have the luxury of losing unnecessary genes for the new species. And I say on the contrary, if we don't maintain mi-ni-mal morality, and she begs: my husband, listen to me, my man, minimal? You want to marry your children to each other? You have no idea how many genetic diseases and terrible mutations, how many will die on us, what a generation of monsters will grow here, why even continue humanity such disgust. And everyone is embarrassed by each other, the whole family falls apart, and only one small son, the idiot who doesn't understand anything, still smiles. And I'm afraid to sleep, whole days without sleep, because I don't know what will happen at night. And finally the little one comes to me smiling: I'll take care of you, go snore - and I'll watch over you from behind. You can dream peacefully, Dad, go to sleep. You are the last man.

Children's Stories

I dreamed that my wife comes to me every night in bed and asks: What will we live on? What do you make a living from? What are you doing - all the time on the computer? What are you writing? What will happen when our children grow up and they understand who you are? And I think about the password. The day you truly know me - is the day I die.

It All Starts at Home

I dreamed that I'm old, and I grow in the yard, and I have children in the house. And my children in the house are great sinners. Great great sinners. And everyone says they are truly great great sinners. And all the girls go crazy for them, just to know what great great means, because what could it be? What can one possibly do? And even the religious girls, because they say look how I'll bring these great great ones back to religion. And then I see one hen who is a terribly righteous rebbetzin [Translator's note: rabbi's wife] enter the house. And I'm embarrassed. Poor her husband. And she does what she does with them there, and within a minute she comes out all red. And within a minute they come out shouting that they're returning to religion. And want to make me into a sin offering. And ask what kind of offering can be made from him? And answer a bird offering. And then when they turn me over they discover I have a blemish. So they take me to the Temple, to the High Priest. And the Temple is one big field. The size of several fields, until you can't see where it ends. And I'm curious what they play there. Because always from the Western Wall below you couldn't see it was a field. And then suddenly I make a dash and start to run away, and everyone chases after me trying to catch me, and I cross the threshold of the Holy of Holies and they can't enter and just shout outside that they'll take revenge on me, that I'll remember. And I go inside. And see there on a large tray that God is just a big black rubber ball, that grew in darkness. This is what they're trying to hide? Who's responsible for it growing like this? Who hid this? And then I feel that I understand what could be the meaning of great great sinners.

Pharaoh decreed against the males and you decree against the females

I dreamed that one of the wars of the Name begins, because they don't know which name, and even if it's the name of boys or if it's the name of girls. And they send me to the black army - for the war of liberation. And I remember all the stories in Hasidism that Napoleon disguised himself as a simple soldier, and I decide that if I'm a simple soldier - to disguise myself as Napoleon. What should God's strategy be? And I review the army of the Name, and go through all the units to know what kind of war can be waged with such an army, who could possibly be the enemy. And at the entrance to the camp of the Children of Israel I find a page with a seating arrangement, like in the synagogue. Butchers' Union: the vanguard of man in his struggle against beast, Cantors' Union: the vanguard of man in his struggle against angels, Rabbis' Union: the vanguard of man in his struggle against books, Nannies' Union: the vanguard of man in his struggle against babies, Gravediggers' Union: the vanguard of man in his struggle against the elderly, Midwives' Union: the vanguard of man in his struggle against Pharaoh. Against Pharaoh?! Isn't it time for some modernization? I'll lead this unit forward! And I see that they take all the boys who are born and turn them into girls. And I rummage through the secret cabinets of the hospital, and I find among all the documents white uniforms - what are white uniforms doing in the middle of a black army? And I tear the word Pharaoh from the nurse's chest and see written there: the vanguard of man in his struggle against men. What is this? They will destroy the entire human race. There will be no more matches. And I disguise myself as a midwife, and go to the other side of the hospital, that no one is interested in - and turn all the girls who are born into boys.

Family Planning

I dreamed that my wife dreamed that she got off the bus and forgot the baby inside the bus. And she runs and runs after the driver who says there's no baby on the bus. And it turns out that I took the baby girl - it's a girl! - and am teaching her bad things. Put a black kippah on her and try to turn her into a boy. And she fills with fear: You won't do that to our daughter, right? And I hug her: If we have a daughter it's the best thing for her, that she'll be a boy! And at first I think that fathers need to invest in daughters more than sons, so we don't grow another such generation. But one day the girl who has already grown smiles at me, and I notice with horror that the girl is turning out similar to her mother, that she's like her. All the investment went down the drain. What did you think to yourself, that you could defeat this? We'll educate our daughters differently, yes, really? They will educate us differently. And meanwhile my wife has already taught my son to call her Dad.

And I understand that even the boys are already a lost generation, how will the Messiah come? This is a generation that has a very serious problem with matches, which can stem from only one source: a deep corruption in the supreme unity. The Holy One Blessed Be He and the Shekhinah [Translator's note: divine presence] are not compatible. She's not really a woman anymore and he's not really a man anymore either. The connection between them doesn't work, and therefore, as in heaven, so on earth there is the same phenomenon of corrupted matching. If so, there is only one solution: completing the reversal. The Shekhinah above and the Holy One Blessed Be He below. Exchanging the place between earth and heaven. The earth needs to turn into spirit - and the heavens into matter. We need to make days like nights, just like we make nights like days. The dream needs to switch with the day, and fantasy with reality. Do you understand this, my son?

A wise man tries to discover reality beneath the dream - a sage knows it's all a dream

I dreamed that the shtreimel tells me at night: A wise man tries to remove the clothes to find the woman underneath. But a sage knows it's all clothes. And I think: Who knows what really happens to my wife under her clothes. What is she hiding there, who knows if she's even my wife? And I run home, and tonight of all nights it's hard for me to find the house. My house! And I enter the house, and indeed notice that she's strange. Hear her laughing on the phone with a friend. When did she ever laugh like that with me, what's so funny. You talked about me, what did you talk about, is a woman not allowed to have secrets? Her younger and more attractive sister, who is much thinner and prettier than her and she hates her, makes eyes at me. I know that for her it's just sweet revenge on her sister. She enjoys seeing me look at her. But it's hard for me to ignore, never has a woman made eyes at me. She smiles at me. But I see the look, I feel like strangling that little one. Her friends who would never have looked at me before don't stop flirting with me, provoking me, batting their eyelashes. Can't you be happy for her? What did she do to you, why does everyone hate her, all of them are jealous of her, but of what (of her enormous chest, which embarrasses even women, and even more so herself?). Poor thing my unfortunate wife, with such a husband, what do they want from her. And my wife looks at me: You're a stranger. I don't know you. And leaves the room. What happened today, what do they want from me? I look at the girl and she says: You're not my father, and goes after her. We're left alone me and the sister.

The Corruption

I dreamed that apparently I ate spoiled kugel [Translator's note: traditional Jewish casserole]. And I urgently urgently need to go, and I have nowhere and I have nowhere, and at the last moment I take off the shtreimel and use it as a chamber pot. And then I see there are torn pieces of paper in the filth, disgusting to touch but I see these are holy pages that require burial. But I didn't eat anything like that! And my wife just enters. And I try to hide it and she asks what do you have there? Nothing, nothing. Are you trying to hide from me? No, no. So show me, I'm your wife, I want to see, need to see, must! You wretch. And I take the shtreimel and put it on her face. And at that moment the girl enters, who despite everything everything we both don't want her to be corrupted. And she asks why does Mom have a black mask? And my wife holds back as much as she can, but can't speak from there. And I know that the entire burden of proof is on me and I have no idea what to answer. "It's a shtreimel, it's a shtreimel. A shtreimel is a tail, it's fox remnants, what's left, spoiled, a shtreimel is on the face". And my wife can no longer hold back, and starts to burst. Bitter and terrible laughter. And the mask falls off her, and the girl starts to scream. And I see that on the note stuck to her nose is written: Thou shalt not commit adultery. And I ask: Did you put this note for me inside the kugel?

Personal. Please do not read

I dreamed that it's possible not only to peek at my wife, while she thinks I'm asleep, but to peek inside the woman, from within. To see the soul cooking there. And I go out and burst out laughing, and she gets angry but also smiles to herself. And then raises embarrassed eyes and smiles at me. After all her declarations that a woman - feels. Understands from within - what she has inside. It's a girl - she knows! Real brainwashing, even I started dreaming about a girl. But God knows what he's doing in the hidden world, in the secret realm inside the person - and the ultrasound allows peeking. Opens a peephole to the black medium. Just like a Hasidic rebbe. But - maybe it works in reverse too? Like how women peek at us from the women's section, but I've never seen what happens inside there. In fact, no one knows what they really do there, when no one is there. And precisely because of that - who knows what women do in the dark when no one sees. Maybe even God himself, righteous as he is, doesn't peek at women, doesn't forbid anything, and doesn't want to know.

And I go to the Western Wall and press my face hard hard hard to the wall and try to peek at God - in the crack between the stones. And at first in the first minutes you really only see black, but then the eyes slowly adjust, and suddenly inside there's - a flicker of light. People walking! And I go to the tunnel on the side, there are masses of worshippers pressing against the wall, and suddenly see that when no one is looking, someone leaps inside the Holy Ark, behind the curtain - and disappears. And I push and push through the crowd until I manage to reach the ark - and jump after him. And someone says password! And I say what? And I'm all dazzled, everything is full of priests and banners. Building the messianic Temple. Temple work liberates. Before work - purification. A ritual bath that is an altar. And I already understand where all this is leading, and quickly flee outside from the line inside, squeeze to the side, in the stones, slip to where the Wall is, but from inside.

And I see in the darkness a wicked old man peeking between the cracks - at the women's section. And I grab his beard: Aren't you ashamed? But it seems the people here have lost the image of God, and he winks at me: What, you don't know? Are you new here? Heh... come see what a thrill it is to see a woman praying with intense concentration, how it grips her entirely, ah, no wonder there's a partition, how she melts! And how her eyes are closed, her lips move, oh, she's blushing. And I slap him, and he looks at my hand, and I understand from his face that I made a mistake. And my wife approaches my back and I slam the computer shut. Hope the screen didn't break. And she says, almost mockingly: Don't worry. I'm not peeking at your computer.

To the next chapter

The Trilogy