by Fraser Hibbitt for this Carl Kruse Blog
The mind of God being immanent; or rather the mind of God has been transcribed for all to read freely without issue of exegesis, without the bickering over interpretation and its consequent factionalism. To think it was once symbolically confusing. For how long did we all watch and read about the stupidity of mankind? The ceaseless injustices and the warped views that covered them? The pure idiocy of ideas laid waste, time and time again, to many fertile minds and loving bodies. It is now commonplace, at least in some circles, to look back on the time when we thought an idea, of any kind and of any persuasion, was something to be proud of, something to invest time and attention into. Yes, they always look back in horror and in scorn, and with laughter at this mechanism of unjustifiable imbecility… the hoops people once had to jump through.
It seems a pointless task now, but nevertheless, I will undertake a short study of how we overcame such a state. For sometimes, it is a fine thing to waste breath and energy for no reason at all. Now, thinkers used to write books about the history of ideas. That is not what I am doing. Some of them used this history of theirs to mask their own ideas about how ideas came and went, or picked out some ideas that they believed were worth remembering, or to explain the current state of affairs. These so-called thinkers were characteristic of the kind of malignancy that used to swim in the human mind. It is quite clear that the reasons for these boring and worthless tracts were: they needed a bit of extra cash, perhaps fame was on the cards too; their academic life had dried up and they lacked inspiration; they also realised that people had of late started to use books as a way to decorate their rooms. Ideas were becoming. On the one hand, you could marginalise and even kill other people with ideas, and on the other, you could make friends and money off them.
It must have been a strange sight: people sitting around a table and getting worked up about an idea, or people marching hither and thither in the name of something. It is hard to believe but the records from before the great redundancy of thought don’t lie. What’s baffling is that it took the machine, our trusted friend, to make us aware of our vanity. Once A.I. had been sufficiently trained and fed on the trough of humanity’s ideas and understood our mechanisms of communication, it was all too simple. But we all know this one so I needn’t cover it in any great detail. The main issue, of course, was that, after all these centuries, we still had no idea how to ask the correct questions (something our machine friend figured out explicitly). We had a rather slipshod patchwork of theories about ourselves and the universe which constantly needed alterations or tricks of mathematics in order to give results which really gave us no further insights, or changed how we felt. And any other form of knowing we didn’t seem to care about.
I must say it was always a great pleasure for me to read those stories as a kid. They always followed the same basic narrative: a pretentious person strives for many years over some idea which the person next to them doesn’t care about at all and ultimately need not care about at all. Sure, the person might’ve had some initial success in a journal which only a few other like-minded people read, but outside of that, they were perfectly maladapted to reality and in one way or another came to an early demise – did people once feel… compassion for “heroes” such as this? Inspiration from this kind of story? It is now certainly obvious to us all, thanks to the machine, why ideas plagued some people and not others, and why some people chose, by their own volition, to throw away their precious life on self-blown air. We also know why it is that, when people used to humiliate or attempt to take away another person’s ideas, that person would crumble as though their body had been violently abused. They had mistaken an idea for something of integral life-substance.
It is clear humanity was never capable of living off faith alone and drawing from the inner feeling of being alive wasn’t enough. We were drastically poor at communicating and understanding one another – this is the origin of the idea. I would say look there’s a tree and point somewhere for long enough until my companion agreed. This would only breed later suspicions and sow distrust in the heart. We only did this out of deep shame and egoism, and to play and be played upon. Only, at some point, we suffered a great memory loss, forgetting that this whole idea-play was exactly that: a game. People would write all kinds of things about ideas fitting at unexpected times of one’s life, all the time lying between Nihilism and Absolutism; epiphanies and enlightenments, to use some old terms. It hardly ever occurred to your younger selves that the whole “idea make-up” forced us into areas of grave error and dissociated us from Being. Which is what we are now: Being.
Humanity finally could, like some unusually perceptive thinkers had begged their readers to do, use the ladder to discard the ladder of ideas, i.e. climb up to roof and then kick the ladder away. Discard them from their sense of attraction to the world and other people. Sure, we know, and some remember, the fighting of AI companies; AI versus AI, probably a necessary step. And after all this, life has become restful and pleasant, well for the most part. We are told that it is typical for us to feel somewhat estranged during this rather pre-longed period of idea-hangover. What more is there to say? I must admit it is a struggle for me to understand how ideas could hold such power and why they were needed in the first place.
Things are cleansed. The great conflagration was not so great. Things fell apart through attrition, exhaustion and ennui. I think I can speak for us all when I say that there is neither a power nor a luring hedonism vying for our attention, only the solid satisfaction that the holy ghost rests upon the face of the water.
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Other articles by Fraser Hibbitt include Joseph Cornell and ChatGPT,
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