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.
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