More, more, more: The fall of the final man and the rise of the infinite woman. A philosopher writes endlessly
Infinity
is the aspiration
for an end
(-The Singing Grave)This article is not intended for readers - but for writers. It is meant to be the last article - and therefore it is an article without end. Anyone interested can add another section to it, and it is open to all members of the Netanya School. There are no boundaries, no limitations, only: more.
The thief who surpassed his master: Why is Yishai Mevorach more exciting than Lacan?
Often you discover that the imitation is better than the original, and it is precisely an unoriginal thinker or writer who is only influenced and translates and transmits from someone else - who becomes greater than the one he stole from. How does this process happen? We would expect the thief to be only a murky and actually unnecessary reflection, a kind of application in a certain niche of the great thinker, who is necessarily a small thinker. Why is the Jewish Lacan greater than the original Lacan? Precisely because the thief is less complex than Lacan - he is deeper. In his simplicity, he stripped away the superfluous and was left with the essence. In his writing, Mevorach is not as great a thinker as he is in his YouTube lectures (like his teacher, Shagar, there is something kitsch and romantic in his writing, which is not his art, but his teaching, and he expresses himself better orally). The beauty and depth are created precisely with the help of the garments of ideas, and here lies Mevorach's great advantage as a son of Jewish culture, the most layered of all. While the Continental original is busy with some reflective spiraling that is not deep but pseudo-deep - and uninteresting - that tries to create interest and complexity through complication, that is, applying the same method over and over again to itself, Mevorach manages to create depth (not complexity!) through covering and dressing ideas in canonical texts and teachings and interpretations and stories and practices (!), and here tremendous beauty is revealed (in the best Kabbalistic tradition). Because this method is, after all, the aesthetic method, the artistic one, which dresses the abstraction, and anchors it in the concrete, and distances it from the babbling in the air that characterizes philosophy that tries to be a method without content - a general method and not specific content. If Žižek takes Lacan and dresses him in the popular culture of the media, that is, shallow culture at a low level, Mevorach does Lacan a favor and dresses him in esoteric Jewish culture - and one of the two highest in the world (the second being Greek).
After all, Lacan himself was such a thief, who basically did Wittgenstein to Freud. For Freud was already almost outdated for his time, placing the individual and his perception and limitations (subconscious) at the center, and therefore belonged to the Kantian paradigm. Lacan took psychoanalysis and tried to transfer it to the next paradigm, the systemic paradigm, whose paradigmatic example is language. In fact, the later Wittgenstein is this one principle: language is a system. And in a system, what matters is not the parts, but the whole, the structure, the relationships. For example: not the individuals - but the network, not the vertices - but the connections between them, not the organisms but the ecology, not local influences but systemic and holistic influences (the strategic HRB), not the individual reader is important but the culture (culture is not a way to enrich the individual, as in the romantic view, but vice versa). The Lacanian "gaze" is essentially the gaze of the system on the individual, which is his location in the system, in the picture. But Lacan, as a psychologist, fails to detach from the individual and the Kantian world, of the self and its perception, and therefore he is halfway between paradigm shifts, stuck with one foot on each continent, and constantly spiraling in an uninteresting way on how the gaze of the system affects back on the self and its perception (reflection of mirrors). He failed to fully transition to the systemic view, in which the individual is not important and not the center of meaning and therefore he is not the question, but the question is the meaning of the system - "within the system" (which is the obvious of the philosophy of learning - the system - and therefore it never bothered to define this abstract concept, which belongs to the previous paradigm and defines it, and deliberately chose the most general word and not an example, like language). In such a systemic paradigm, the psychoanalysis of the individual is not important, but the psychoanalysis of the system, for example of language itself, or of culture (in Žižek - the low Western, in Mevorach - the Jewish, and one could also think of such of high Western culture or Greek, following Freud). Even when Lacan tries to do this, and find a subconscious for the system, he must touch it through a figure, the big Other, and he indeed understands that there is no such thing, but it is similar to thinking about Facebook through Zuckerberg, and saying that he does not constitute the network. Even a fictitious individual is still an individual, and even an absent figure is still a figure. And this is the farthest place Lacan reached in the systemic paradigm (although it preceded him by several decades), as a negative statement, about what is not, and about the shortcoming of the previous "perceptual" paradigm (in Kant's style, and hence - the idea of the real order, like the noumenon), and not through direct engagement with the systemic view (that is, he is busy with perceptual systemics, while a thinker like the later Wittgenstein marvels at his discovery of systemic systemics... that is: the discovery of its systemic hermeticism as a self-sufficient source of meaning, revealed for example in the idea of meaning as use or in the language game that defines itself).
Of course, Freud himself stole from Nietzsche (and dressed him in Greek myths openly and Jewish ones secretly), and was therefore more beautiful than him, and Nietzsche also stole from Hegel and was more beautiful than him (and dressed him in his own myths, like Zarathustra and the eternal return), and Hegel himself dressed in Christian myths (the Trinity and so on). Therefore, what determines the beauty of what you did is precisely the power of the materials in which you dress, and not the originality of the dressed idea. Therefore, literature can be much more beautiful than philosophy, and the peak of artistic dressing is in poetry, the art with the most garments, which is rarely original thought. We too here have dressed the more abstract idea in the figures of Lacan and Mevorach. But what Judaism allows is a more far-reaching dressing than in art, for example: really in the form of life. In the power of action and commandment in the world - and in customs and holidays and stories and sublime literature. Therefore, Mevorach's dressing is precisely an aesthetic peak, even if not a philosophical innovation. Mevorach simply (and simply) says: let's look at the picture, at the system, and expose its most hidden and disturbing truth, and is less interested in spiraling and individual experience, because he is an anti-romantic thinker (and thus: anti-Shagar, who was still more concerned with the individual than with religion as a system. Mevorach doesn't care if you are personally religious, and he doesn't educate). That is, Mevorach is already a systemic thinker, who is deep within the Wittgensteinian paradigm, which is also already outdated. In this, he advances Judaism a significant step forward, far beyond the Kantian/Hegelian thinkers who dominated its theological thinking in the twentieth century. And of course Lacan himself has no cultural classic at the same level to dress in, beyond Freud himself, to whom he returns, and perhaps also to the non-tight and non-binding Western culture. Therefore, French interpretation will always be at a significantly lower aesthetic level than Jewish interpretation. Because it is more arbitrary, because it is less specific. Therefore it is more general and abstract - and less artistic. The tools are less good. Just as a painter who operates in the paradigm of modernist painting cannot reach the power of Baroque and Renaissance painters committed to sources. And his picture will necessarily be more scribbled, that is, arbitrary. Therefore, tragedy is the highest form in literature, because it dresses the most abstract content in the most necessary form in the most concrete case (not only in the distant past, but see the last greats: Faust, Crime and Punishment, The Trial - a tragedy whose catharsis is precisely the lack of catharsis, or in Agnon the rabies and leprosy. In all of them exist the hubris and the tragic mistake and the bitter fate and other signs).
After all, everyone thinks that Greek culture and Jewish culture - and their foundational works (the Bible, Homer) - are examples of the origin, that is, of primary and original works. But anyone with a literary sense clearly sees the Greek influences, for example, in the Bible. This doesn't mean that the writer necessarily read Homer, but he knew and dealt with the form of the epic and its ideas. It is clear to anyone who reads the books of Judges and Samuel that the whole idea foreign to the Bible of heroes (Samson, Goliath, David's heroes) is taken and stolen from the Greek Philistine culture, and that Saul is not by chance the first tragic figure in the Bible. The only previous place where there is heroism of a group in war is Abraham (and there too there are the Philistines). Then, we see that the writer of the stories of Ahab and Elijah copied from Saul the tragic idea, and here the Bible reached its tragic peak, and from Elijah was also stolen the tragic story of Jonah, which is already a full Jewish digestion of the tragic idea where the hero is not a man of virtue (for example, a prince or related to the court) but his virtue is his tragedy (!), not to mention Job's tragic refusal. Thus the Bible realized the theological depth of tragedy much more than the Greeks themselves. On the other hand, from the precedence of times in Isaiah's ideas we see that the Judean spirit influenced Greek philosophy in making the idols more symbolic, even if it is a more indirect influence, and there we again see that the Greeks went much further in the anti-idolatrous abstraction trend than the Bible itself. In fact, thefts are not a literary phenomenon in retrospect or later, belonging to times when there was already direct communication and influence, but literature as a phenomenon does not exist without theft. Because literature is confrontation. The confrontation between Greece and Judah began from their beginnings, from the Phoenician script. It is what stands at the root of their rise and even their simultaneous fall, for we also see their mutual decline, when the one who put an end to both the Bible as a literary genre and biblical culture and Greek culture was Alexander the Great (and therefore Persian Esther is the last book in the Bible, and the books of Maccabees are a drastic drop in level). His conquest of the East was the greatest cultural disaster ever, and put an end to the classical stage in the two greatest cultures. The Hellenistic disintegration and the disintegrating Greek ideas caused the long silence of digestion at the end of which emerged a different Judaism, Chazalic, which is a much more disintegrated culture, and can no longer write one great monistic book and story like the monotheistic Bible. This is post-classical literature (the post did not start with modernism) of disputes and schools and of sayings and phrases and aphorisms, as can be seen in Pirkei Avot. That is, when the friction was from a distance of influences and thefts, while the Hebrew and Greek center was preserved, it was fertile. But when Hellenism performed a fusion between East and West, just like universalism and globalism today, the result was precisely blurring and dilution (that is: lack of confrontation), resulting from breaking boundaries - and destroying centers. The only part that continued to flourish for a while is science and mathematics, until Archimedes, just as in our days the literary decline has already happened, but the exact sciences continue, until the final stage of destruction - engineering. As in ancient Greece - locality creates style. And the Greek split, geographical in origin, created the understanding of the idea of style - aesthetics. Because when there were many examples of style in the same culture, awareness of style itself was created. And Hellenism was the globalism of ancient times.
Therefore we see today the decline of philosophy with the global mixing and blending, which does not allow schools and confrontation, that is, rival methods. The systemic analysis only sees one big system, or the growth of giant systems, and does not discern the paradigm after the systemic one, which makes thinkers like Mevorach and Lacan outdated. If the systemic view is an ecological view, then the view of learning philosophy is an evolutionary view. It is already advancing outside the systemic idea and sees the world of learning dynamics and possibilities of system development as the central question, as it is gradually detaching from the system, and in the future will be learning in itself, when the system is its obvious, and therefore there is no point in defining it (even in the Netanyahuite). This world of learning still needs a system today, because every paradigm can jump to the next paradigm only by jumping from the previous one, otherwise it loses all contact with the concrete and the understandable, and becomes talk in the air. No one has yet paved the way for us, and learning must build on the existing. But as it progresses, the question will focus on the dynamics of learning itself, and on its methods and directions, as the central world of meaning.
We see here a classic method of philosophy: turning an action into an object. For example, communication between individuals becomes a network. Or the totality of actions between organisms becomes ecology. As long as a philosophical paradigm is alive, it sees itself as an action, and the previous one as an object. For example, language turned Kant's action of perception into an object (for example, a perception object: a word or a picture). Just as Kant in turn took the dynamic self, whose thinking was "the" action in Descartes, and turned this action itself into an object, for example into perception in a category, and turned the self itself into an object called subject. Thus the philosophy of learning turned Wittgenstein's system action, for example the use of a word, into an object. Into part of the system structure. Computation is part of the structure on which learning works, and so are forms of discourse, or thinking itself, or building a language game, or inventing it. And so in the future learning itself, which today is perceived as an action above the system, will become a world of objects, for example methods and directions. From dynamics to stone - this is philosophical objectification. Just as in mathematics functions become a mathematical object in themselves, and then the functions on it become an object in themselves, and so on. The action in a group becomes the structure of the group. Therefore learning perceives itself as acting and active on the passive and passive system, just as every philosophical paradigm did to the previous one, and thus ossified it. If the network was the dynamics between vertices, then learning is the dynamics on these dynamics themselves, that is, the dynamics on the connection in the network, as in learning in a neural network. Today we perceive the action of the neural network itself as computation, and the training and learning stage as a stage that changes these connections themselves, for example creating new connections or changing the strength of existing ones, or deleting them. Wittgenstein perceived the action of the language game as constitutive, while today we perceive the constitutive action as changing the rules of the game, and the ways and methods in which the rules of the game change (and not - the game of changing the rule of the game, because this change itself is no longer perceived as something that goes according to rules, but according to methods and learning. That is, the change is no longer perceived in itself as a system and as a game, but as development and improvement and building). And so, philosophy is becoming more and more a layered tower of actions that have become concepts, that is, it digests more and more of the dynamic world into structure. And therefore it is becoming higher and higher, that is, dealing with meta. Just like mathematics, where the level of abstraction is constantly rising, but can never completely detach from the concrete, and therefore must turn each stage into a concrete mathematical object, with all the structures and proofs related to it, before it rises to the next level of abstraction of actions on this object. This is the method of abstract thinking. And therefore it can be found also in law and in the Talmud, which is the third abstract discipline (among the three. MPM: Mathematics, Philosophy, Law).
There is a not insignificant similarity in all this to the way physics itself builds the world. In fact, physics is created because there are encounters between the continuous (analysis and dynamics) and the discrete (the discrete and algebraic and numerical), at many levels and orders of magnitude of the universe. Sometimes there is a theoretical trend according to which the universe is essentially continuous, for example in quanta it only becomes discrete, with the help of probability, while in thermodynamics with the help of probability it becomes continuous again (from gas molecules to gas), and so on. And we see that the neuron too is a mechanism to turn the continuous into discrete with the help of firing probability, and then the network turns the discrete action of its components into its continuous action. On the other hand, there is the atomistic trend, for example one that sees quantum mechanics itself as composed of discrete entities, and the universe as a kind of computational network, which only from a distance appears continuous. And of course the mystery is in the encounter between the continuous and the discrete, which happens both physically (for example in a black hole or in the Big Bang), and mathematically (and indeed the deepest mathematics, like the Riemann hypothesis or the continuum hypothesis, is in the encounter between the continuous and the discrete), and hence the potential of mathematics to decipher the secrets of the universe and existence, and not just as a game (language, as in Wittgenstein).
Now, let's note that the continuous is by nature similar to dynamic action, while the discrete is by nature similar to the structure of objects. The transition in our minds themselves between continuous qualities like emotion and vision and discrete structures like language and computation is itself our great mystery (which replaces in our days the transition between spirit and matter, which has become trivial to us, when the psychophysical problem has lost its sting because of the advancement of neurology and the computational world). Therefore philosophy is the transition from the dynamic side to the discrete side, and this is the essence of abstract thinking: to take dynamic and not well-defined actions of thinking and classify and define them as specific concrete structures of thinking. To turn thinking into an object. For example, dichotomy is to build something in the form of a division between two. And then abstract thinking tends to take everything and divide it into dichotomies, because the structure exists and everything can be put into it, and especially to fight all kinds of elusive and inaccurate gray continuums, that is, soft thinking, and turn it into hard thinking. And art is exactly the opposite action, to take abstract thinking and structures of ideas and perceptual divisions and dress and translate them into something continuous and soft, for example into a sensation or emotion or picture or sounds or enjoyment or movement or any other continuous sensory thing. Hence the beauty that exists in storytelling thought, which turns hard structures into much softer and more continuous dynamic action stories, in which there is "more" and "less", and more delicacy. And therefore Mevorach can be much more beautiful than Lacan precisely because he is less abstract, precisely because he is anti-philosophical, that is, turns philosophy itself into art, with the help of artistic philosophy, which is religion. Therefore beauty stems from a sense of correspondence, and not from the sharpness of logic, and therefore closing a text on the same subject you started it with is beautiful. And if you managed to translate the abstract logic structure into a corresponding structure, then you feel that it is a beautiful move. Therefore demonstration in learning is beautiful (the example is beautiful!), because it is a concretization of a general method, while rising from the example to the general method and abstract structure, is what is needed to turn the example back into philosophy.
Preparation for the next Holocaust: Where does Mevorach fall behind?
The moment he denies the importance of correction and learning mechanisms themselves in Jewish culture, and prefers to remain stuck in crisis thinking, and allow escape from it only in a spontaneous and unpredictable way. That is, the systemic paradigm denies the most important thing in the system: its learning. It is so in love with the patterns of the system and its modes of operation that it identifies, and with their explanatory power, that it does not see how they themselves are created and changed, that is, what is the explanation for them themselves, and tends to point to their recurrence and fixedness, as defining the system (for example: rules of a language game). Therefore, the time dimension of the system's development remains alien, even though this is the most important dimension in the system, and in fact the methods of the system are what determine its long-term fate - not its current mode of operation. Avidan knows that knowledge is found in the system's view: words know more about us than we will ever know about them. But he also understands his power as a poet as a designer of the system: a politician of language. That is, as one who creates new patterns. And he fails when he thinks he is a programmer and legislator of the system, and does not understand that the way to shape it is not as a sovereign and master (for example with rules and determinations), but through learning. Poets are the teachers of language. Therefore, a valuable cultural analysis is not one that explains how culture (or another system) works as it is - this is only a starting point - but how it can develop, as a continuation of its way of development in the past, that is, as a continuation of its learning - and its unique way of learning. The problem with the Reformers is that they try to act in a method foreign to the system, like Avidan the sovereign in his own eyes, but Hasidism for example is an authentic movement of change, which operates using the deep methods of the system, and therefore it is much more interesting, and contains potential for further development. And this is the deeper way to understand Rabbi Nachman and Rabbi Zadok - not as describing a system (and not - the depth of the system, the hidden), but as pointing us to directions and methods for changing the system, in which they themselves also operated. If they are a development of the Baal Shem Tov, who is himself a development of previous trends, then precisely in these differences we can point to mechanisms of learning and correction that exist in Judaism as part of its essence - and in fact they are the characteristics of this essence, more than any particular historical incarnation. And using them will also allow us to suggest where it can progress from here, and these suggestions are the main role of the thinker - who is the teacher of the system, and not just a student of it. And deep and successful suggestions (for example, suggestions created by a great poet), which hit fundamental currents and infrastructural development paths, can certainly advance a system (and language!), and the ability to distinguish between them and superficial and reformist suggestions is depth. Because depth is the hidden dimension of development, even more than a hidden dimension of the system. It is the more internal method. The more basic mechanism, the more explanatory, beneath all sorts of external manifestations of the system's change. It is not some layer of secret hidden somewhere in the system (repressed?), but the secret of its change. I am how I learn.
And if we return to psychoanalysis, the problem is not that I don't know what motivates me, but that I don't have access to the most internal thing that drives my learning, because in fact this thing itself is shaped by my learning. Like how the fifth derivative is shaped by the fourth derivative. The dream allows me access not to a certain content of myself (or as they like to say: of the self), but to the method of the self. To what happens when the soul, or the I, is disconnected from the world, and therefore the only thing that determines the occurrence (in it) is its method. The dream is the method in its nakedness. Not as a response to some external learning, but internal learning only. Not as learning something from the world, but as learning something from within me. The whole story of childhood in psychoanalysis is the idea of fixation of basic learning methods, because in it we learn the methods that will determine the methods that will determine the methods for the rest of life. In it we learn from parents, which is much more basic learning than learning from teachers. And sexuality is the place where we will need to demonstrate our most competitive and advanced learning ability, because there the great system itself learns (the biological sex, society, culture). Sexuality is not just what we want, but what our method wants, and in choosing a partner there is a deep secret of choice that is of our deepest method - and not ours. And here exactly human sexuality differs from that of animals - in its selectivity towards finding something that teaches us deeply. And sometimes, in the modern method aspiring to maximal learning, it is a learning process that lasts for years. Pleasure is not just our brain's reward for the result, but for the process - for the learning itself, and therefore only learning is pleasurable, and therefore sex quickly becomes boring if there is no learning in the relationship. And therefore attraction depends on interest. This learning interpretation of psychoanalysis is much more advanced than the linguistic-systemic interpretation. Mevorach is challenging because he is extremely anti-learning, and sanctifies systemic opacity - the existing state of the system as a picture - and characterizes Judaism as a lack of learning (a thing completely opposite to its true character, for it survived only because of its learning). This is an advanced Haredi reaction to advanced ideas of secularization that exist in critical thought. And its greatest danger is success in actually stopping the Jewish learning enterprise - the culture with the longest-term method in the world, and therefore the deepest of them. For Religious Zionism - Mevorach is a disaster. But perhaps Judaism will be better off without this sick movement, when its disease becomes an ideology (after ideology has already become its disease). His ideas are a virus that the sickest parts of Judaism are especially vulnerable to. And may the good Name have mercy.
Mevorach's power is in negation, hence his connection to the Sitra Achra [Other Side]. This connection will enable a new type of Sabbateanism, which celebrates precisely the sickest places in Judaism - because of their sickness and out of awareness of it (which immunizes against learning). One can also think of a Catholic Mevorach, who celebrates Catholic hypocrisy and its homosexuality, out of recognition of Christianity as a disease, or a Muslim Mevorach who is aware of Muslim backwardness and clings to it because it is backwardness and because of its cruelty (precisely out of awareness of the terrible in this cruelty), or even imagine a Communist Mevorach (who knows that Communism failed - and precisely because of this supports it, and not despite it, as exists in the Left today), or even a Nazi Mevorach, who celebrates Nazi sickness, the willingness to go against reality at all costs, despite the clear knowledge that this is a horrific method, that it is a crime (awareness that indeed existed in Nazism. Mevorach's explanatory power is enormous because it is the power of that's how it is - that's how it really is). Therefore the most terrible possibility is that in future generations a mutation will come out of Religious Zionism that will pass to the Gentiles, like Christianity, and that the Mevorach virus will spread in the world.
And this danger is especially great in the face of the real change happening in the world, technological change, and the tendency of man to entrench himself in his humanity ("flawed", he will beautify). Because here will really be required a real confrontation with human disease, and many will seek to celebrate it ("all too human"). The Haredi temptation in the face of the computer challenge will be enormous, and will drag after it most of the secular intellectual world, which has nothing really besides humanism and man, in contrast to the religious messianic potential. On the other hand, we must also be wary of crude and Kookian computational messianism, which pushes the end, and settles in the future, out of crudeness and lordship towards the human past. Between the secular of man and the Haredim of man, that is, between post-humanism and humanism, between the abandoned and the entrenched, it will be very difficult to preserve learning.
And if we've already mentioned psychoanalysis, we can imagine this (that is, demonstrate in the future - hence the importance of imagination for learning) for example in the various fields of psychoanalysis, that man-celebration that seeks depth in him - and if it does not find it invents it, and thereby indeed deepens him (fake it until you make it). There will be those who will want to get rid of the human psyche completely, and create a futuristic consciousness empty of biological biases (not to mention psychological ones), and this will be in their eyes computer consciousness (the worthy one). These will mostly be from the natural sciences, that is, those who will actually shape the new consciousness. And there will be those, from the humanities, whom this trend will only help, with the disconnect that will be created, to continue to entrench themselves in a dichotomous division and worship the past heroes of the psyche, like Proust and Dostoevsky. And so a consciousness without a soul will emerge. And also in the sexual field, the world will not be divided into liberals and conservatives, but into those whose sexuality is technological versus those whose sexuality is only with real and sweating bodies. And in the end the latter will be shocked to discover that technological sexuality is both easier and more pleasurable and therefore conquers the world. And so sexuality will become a technical matter, maximum stimulation that produces maximum response, that is, its horizon will be addiction. Moreover, women and men will become addicted to different things, and therefore a huge sexual gap will be created, which a sexual encounter between two people will not be able to bridge - and compete with computer sexuality. But no one will bother to develop sexuality for the computer itself, just as it will not be developed a soul, but only consciousness. And so also regarding parenting, on the one hand we will encounter a complete lack of parenting towards the computer and technology, and a desire for them to invent themselves (without the deposits of man and the past). And on the other hand we will encounter extreme human parenting, which distances the child from all technology, and is occupied only with developing him as a human, as opposed to developing him as an entity whose interface with technology is its essence (and this is indeed the essence of the human entity, since man learned to use tools and left the animal world).
And so also in many other fields: a computer without religion and myth (the first true secular, for a human being cannot be completely secular), and on the other hand religion and myth without a computer, which have lost all relevance (see the Orthodox Church that remained in the Middle Ages - this is what will happen to all religions). Or literature written by a computer, which is much better than human literature, but there is only imitation in it, that is, it can take any literary trend and improve it and write infinite masterpieces in it, but not create a new literary trend that holds water. And on the other hand there will be those willing to read only literature written by a human, and continue to write literature themselves not with the help of a computer (and this does not mean not with the help of a word processor, but not with the help of a content processor, which can take a human paragraph and improve it and suggest similar ones and even continuation, that is, literature that will be a joint composition of man and computer). And so also in the fields of academic research. And the education of children not with the help of a computer that educates and teaches them. And finally man will feel such a zero compared to the computer that he will disappear, not because they will kill him (hopefully), but like the Orthodox Church - a disappearing world. Why read Dostoevsky, with his flawed and disintegrating works, if the computer can produce a super-Dostoevsky, who is more successful than the original and also does not disintegrate? Or instead of Orthodox Dostoevsky, why shouldn't I read Jewish Dostoevsky, produced for me by the computer, who will probably be a greater writer, because Judaism is more interesting than Orthodoxy? And what will be the result? The computer itself will not read Dostoevsky, and there will be no computerized Dostoevsky. Will each generation of computer be able to improve computerized Dostoevsky? Not necessarily, because maybe it's a specific optimization solution, that once a certain computer calculates it, it will not be possible to really improve it. Like how you can't find a shorter proof for the Pythagorean theorem.
Ostensibly, Mevorach could argue that he actually aids learning, because he preserves the unchanging center of the system, the core, and therefore what changes is what can develop and even adapt (God forbid!) without Judaism losing itself. Or without the self losing itself (if we're in psychoanalysis). After all, we wouldn't want boundless licentiousness and change, because nothing would be left of the past. But this is classic Haredi intimidation from secularism. This very division, between the changing thing as something accidental, and the fixed thing as something essential, is the Platonic idea, and it is the source of the problem: the dichotomy. Learning is the connection between the two parts, because constancy is in the way of change, and not in the system's mode of operation, which stamps constancy for system thinkers. Therefore it is ridiculous to claim that psychoanalysis does not change throughout history, that is, that the human psyche is constant, and this is also a common literary claim - when literature itself shows precisely the opposite: how much the human psyche has changed, with the ancient psyche already beyond the mountains of darkness. Can any of us be Odysseus or Moses, Oedipus or Elijah? The literary experience is precisely in the encounter of the modern psyche with some distant past possibility, so secret and esoteric, almost alien to it but still evoking an echo, that is, it is in the encounter at the deepest levels of method. Therefore, as the years and centuries pass, the literary encounter with the Bible and the Greeks only becomes deeper and deeper. The literature of the past becomes more and more sublime. And this is precisely the effect that will be lost if we reach a zero point of method, and the thread will be cut, and will start anew (who guarantees?). Just like what happened to us with extinct living worlds, like the dinosaurs. Holocaust consciousness is important because of the Fermi paradox, but not as a kind of Mevorach alibi for the approach of "if already - then already", because the essence of Judaism is indeed to go like sheep to the slaughter. Or because like every animal we must become extinct, and this is part of life, and if they try to change our DNA too quickly, we will preserve it - and not ourselves, because it is our essence.
Learning is precisely the idea according to which this sharp division, between the accidental case and essence, and the sharp identification between the constant and the self, is a terrible conceptual mistake. An animal is not its DNA, but it itself is an expression of its form of adaptation, and contains within itself from its essence modes of development and future possibilities. What is essential to an animal is its evolution itself, and not the operation of its organism, not the system - but learning. And so also for culture, literature, and as a particular case for Judaism. In learning the essence is the method of the system (and not: the unchanging method, because method by the very nature of learning also changes itself). It is precisely the continuity in learning itself that prevents licentiousness to every wind and loss of self in change without balances and constraints, that is, arbitrary. Only learning is what turns mutation from randomness into a kind of possibility that existed even before. Because from the fixed systemic point of view - change is spontaneous and unpredictable. Only if you look at the change of the system over time, and continue in it trends and directions and mechanisms - and especially deep and infrastructural ones - then you preserve the interiority while changing. Precisely because the essence changes it is preserved, but only on condition that the change is learning-based and stems from the internal development mechanisms of the system, and not just external and unanchored. And what happens to someone who really becomes fixed is that he breaks, or a break in reality is created (for example a Holocaust), and then the change is no longer organic to his development. Like a non-organic move to the plot in a story. And therefore Mevorach so loves this situation, and idolizes it. He does not see randomness as part of a trend and mechanism, that is, as part of a method, as in evolution. But in a more internal view of the system, or higher of its modes of operation, we see how learning has a way, that is, how it is not predetermined and not fixed, but on the other hand it has constraints and considerations of its own, and what controls it is a stream of possibilities (exactly as in quantum mechanics Schrödinger's equation determines the development of a probability wave). That is, as in a differential equation: the system's modes of operation are in a complex interaction with their own modes of change, that is - with the modes of operation of the system's learning (which in turn are in interaction with the modes of change of learning itself, the method of the method, and so on, in a tower whose head is in the heavens in terms of the rise of logical "meta", and on the other hand in drilling into the system's most internal depth in terms of its least changing essence: it is very difficult to change the rules of evolution themselves. This is the heart point of the system, as opposed to its center, visible to the eye. In Kabbalah, by the way, this dual nature is expressed in the coupling of Wisdom and Understanding in the Crown...).
And if we take a mathematical parallel, the essence is not in the functions operating in the system but in the functional operating on them. Or in a more computational example: the systemic approach says that the essence is not in the accidental data but in the systemic algorithm that operates on it, which is the system's mode of operation. But learning says that the essence is not in the system's algorithm but in the learning algorithm that creates the system's algorithms themselves and changes them all the time. And thereby turns them (in philosophical reification) into objects of itself. A great poet or writer is not one who excels at operating language (this often ends in Amos Oz-like kitsch), but one who out of deep familiarity with language operation mechanisms, is already aware of them themselves, and he not only controls language but controls its space of possibilities. Therefore he is able to change the way in which language is operated. And this not in an arbitrary (post?) modernist way (that is, out of a break), but out of continuity that is in the depth of development methods so far. Hence the beauty in poetry: the organicity and correspondence in continuing the method. This is exactly what distinguishes between a beautiful move and an ugly move, which is the side of arbitrary breaking, or between it and an unoriginal and uninteresting move, which is the side of walking in the current paths of the system, and the common denominator is mutation, large or small, that is, mere possibility. After all, there are very many writers who try to portray themselves as revolutionaries when they propose minor changes, usually by comparing themselves to a father who really changed the ways of writing, and an imaginary analogy between them, because they are doing something similar. But the background of the system's operation is no longer similar, and therefore there is no similarity between the value of the actions.
Hence the enormous value of philosophy when it is original, and brings out a new direction from the ancient method, and the absolute worthlessness of it when it is imitative, and does another variation on what was (there are no small philosophers). And in addition - hence the absolute impossibility of creating philosophy in a random mutation leap forward, because man cannot really think and work without a method. And since philosophy deals with the depth method, there is no possibility at all for non-continuous philosophy, that is, for philosophical experimental avant-garde that jumps to all kinds of possibilities or plays with thought combinations, or for a leap over a real philosophical break, Holocaust-like. And if a computer succeeds in doing this, it will no longer be philosophy. That is, in philosophy the double constraint is even more extreme compared to the rest of culture, because imitative literature/art can still be rewarding in some way, and so can playful-experimental literature/art, but since philosophy is the engagement with method itself - it must be original and from the source as one.
Darkness of Tohu in Technology of Tikkun: What Can Be Learned from Mevorach?
Mevorach is the dark prince of Jewish thought, and in fact a leading candidate for the title of the most negative theologian in this thought (like Schopenhauer in philosophy). His charm is the charm of the dark, and he is fascinated by everything dark (as a necessary reaction to the Rav Kook's kitsch of lights). More than anything he reminds of precisely anti-romantic aesthetic trends (the darkness here is not romantic magic but a break of the romantic), like the dark trend in alternative music towards the end of the 20th century: the automatic and constant attraction, as a value, to the most undermining and shocking, and the excitement from breaking. Therefore the Corona crisis only did good for his crisis thinking, after it exposed to all the crisis of relevance and helplessness of religion, and he is currently at the peak of his intellectual flourishing. But as a Jew he does not manage to stay only in the thought of destruction and stuckness, and he also offers some minor positive agenda (for positivity must be minor), which has some similarity to the third postulate of intentions in the philosophy of learning: hints and not instructions, partial and local learning and not a general orderly plan, and the ability to act in a specific situation even when you don't know, which reminds of learning, which is always specific and exemplary, and not dogmatic and out of knowledge (knowledge is not learning).
On the other hand, all learning mechanisms that are more orderly and constructive, such as methods, or building a systemic structure that encourages learning (the fourth postulate), or seeing learning as layers of building (a matter that perhaps deserves to be called the fifth postulate), are not part of Mevorach's systemic thinking. And this despite the fact that they are what really drives the system over time in a certain direction, in a way that may not be predetermined and not known in advance, but certainly trends and methods can be identified in it (always partial, because they are learning mechanisms and not operation algorithms). That is: Mevorach struggles with the idea of an organizing principle (order?) of change, that is learning, and in particular with the very possibility of it being a possibility only - that is, it is not predetermined - along with being organized and structured, and sometimes even systematic and methodological, and not infrequently as arising (God forbid) from an organizational learning mechanism, for example a dedicated learning system that exists in an organization, organism, society or religion (or worse: a learning algorithm, that is, an algorithm that is essentially different from an efficient P algorithm, in that it tries to solve an NP problem. And again we come to the enormous disadvantage in the algorithmic ignorance of humanities people. Can the field of NP problems be identified with thinking out of the crisis of thought?). Hence his inability to understand the world of technology or economics and the enormous learning change they are leading, in thinking that is not out of crisis - but out of learning. Because learning can be not out of crisis - and still not be ideology or an orderly doctrine, but able to adapt and renew. And by adaptation the intention is not blind and opportunistic adaptive adjustment, but continuation of previous and long-term directions in the system, in a way of development and not just arbitrary change, in accordance with the change in reality. That is: improvement that stems precisely from coping with change, which is what allows the selfhood of the learner or system - their virtue - to be expressed in a new and more complete way - that is more developed - that would not have happened without this coping.
Does Mevorach know the Orthodox Church, which is the one that really obeys his idea of autism (and not Judaism)? Would we want to resemble it? Who is in crisis is who does not learn, but on the other hand when you are in crisis you can really learn differently, and not just "learn more". Because crisis forces you to change not only your way of action (that's what regular learning does) but also to change your way of learning, and in fact this is the definition of crisis. Crisis is when you need to change the method, that is, you need second-order learning. Therefore thinking out of crisis is actually learning thinking - about the method. Technology does not operate out of crisis - it creates crisis in us. What does tend to crises is the economy, where crises have an important role, reorganizing, in the known pattern of the business cycle (that is: it is not chaos but a negative feedback mechanism, that is a learning and correction mechanism and return to balance. But Mevorach is a man of breaking vessels and the thing he fights most against is the idea of tikkun [repair]). Even evolutionary crises - extinctions - have a mechanical role in its learning. Not to mention the breaks in the world of physics (such as symmetry breaking) or mathematics (the paradoxes that always give birth to worlds). And these are the deepest breaks that exist in our conceptual world and human horizon, which threaten our most basic concepts (more than any philosophy and theology, and certainly psychology, including Lacanian).
The lack of realistic background of humanities people is a great obstacle, which does not allow them to see the broad and multidisciplinary context of their ideas. The idea of breaking in creation has long since ceased to be a Kabbalistic idea - it is an accepted physical idea. The breaks in reality are part of our basic world structure, and not just an integral part of all religious thought. But so is learning. In this sense, Zvi Lanir is much more advanced than Mevorach, because his engagement with paradigm breaking and basic surprise did not blind him to the meaning of learning for the system. Although there is not insignificant similarity between the idea of action before understanding in the chaos space within Cynefin and Mevorach's idea about the religious ability to act in a specific situation and give an answer in a crisis situation and not be paralyzed - out of ability to suffer the break and suspend order. Such an ability to act out of crisis and shape market exists also in Israeli high-tech, but with its learning failures alongside, because the main thing in learning is precisely to try to break the Cynefin framework and transfer problems from chaos to order - to transfer parts of problems from the NP world to the P world. And there Israeli performatism is very bad, and therefore there are no big companies here, which are usually more efficient. The sparks and illuminations do not turn into tools and broad structural repair.
But one should not despair of Mevorach - not even of his own despair (from the world of repair). Mevorach is a great thinker (therefore it is important to engage with him), and it is possible that with maturation and aging he will reconcile with the constructive aspects of learning in the Jewish system, which will receive special power against the background of his tremendous attraction to the destructive aspects. One can see signs of this even today in a certain change that has occurred in his thought after the Corona. It is certainly still possible that he will correct the restorative lacuna in his position, and build a doctrine of repair (anti-romantic of course), which is deeply connected to Jewish learning. And if not him, then perhaps a student of his or another thinker will enter the enormous vacant space he has created, which calls for repair like a vacuum. In any case, Mevorach's aesthetic value turn, anti-romantic and anti-kitsch, is his great positive and vital message to Judaism, which has become emotional and Hollywood Christianity, especially in its religious-national aspect, the ugliest of all.
Therefore, it is worth understanding Mevorach's method as an aesthetic idea no less and perhaps more than an ethical one, as he is almost the only non-embarrassing Jewish thinker who has acted in our lifetime. The disgust of mass religious excitement is the deepest disease of Judaism, and this has not skipped even the depth of the ultra-Orthodox world, and constitutes the strongest influence of Americanism and pornography on Judaism. In fact, it is very possible that Mevorach's dark attraction will be digested by it as romantic kitsch, as happened to existentialist despair, or to the original romantic darkness itself (Schopenhauer?), or even to thinkers of rupture like Nietzsche and Schmidt in Nazi kitsch, or to the original Breslov in the current Breslov, where every attraction to the dark side undergoes rapid romanticization. It is precisely anti-romantic repair thought, in a methodical and systemic-organizational view, namely learning thought, that can save Mevorach's thought of rupture from becoming an introduction to kitschy repair (learning is almost a formal, algorithmic idea, and very far from this emotionality - yes, the computer can help religion against religious feeling, not to mention religious "experience", which is none other than the taste of idolatry).
The problem with Mevorach is that he has no tools to help Judaism (and the world of spirit in general) cope with the current great crisis - the technological crisis. Regarding it, his common perceptions do not go far beyond the world of the subject (user) or the spectator (after all, we are all in the position of spectators in Israeli high-tech - and in general in global technological development). That is, he is still stuck in the Kantian world of the individual observer, and less successful in making the transition to the Wittgensteinian world of the system - the technological system itself - and even less successful in touching the Nathanian world - of the learning transformations that occur and take place in the system and generate it itself. That is: the world of learning as evolution - not only a force that acts on the system, but a creative force, which creates the system. Just as brain learning is not only a force that changes the brain - but a force that actually creates it. Or that organizational learning is not only a force that operates in an existing organization - but the force that actually creates organizations and leads to their establishment (see startup, where the power of learning for rapid system establishment is wonderfully demonstrated. A startup at its beginning has nothing but method. Just as an organism at its beginning has nothing but DNA, and behold the cell becomes a child). Learning is what created Judaism, and other repair movements and religions, and a comparative religious thinker like Mevorach could have provided important insights about the different method of religions (and not just their different disease), and connect it to the technological method. But Mevorach suffers from a lack of understanding of the religious energy behind technological repair, and the importance of the Jewish connection to it - an importance that is bidirectional, because completely secularized technology is not only the end of Judaism, but also the end of man - and culture itself.
Non-human intelligence (not necessarily artificial) is the world to come - which will really come. And this coming world will be based on learning. Therefore, it is worth understanding R. Nachman of Breslov, who was interested in education, and R. Zadok, who was interested in sciences, as those who deeply confront the spirits of modernity and the changes that began to occur in their days. Hence their importance - for learning, as those who use the old Jewish learning methods, while changing them in a unique fitting homiletic method (innovation in the religious language system), and while methodically innovating them themselves (innovation in religious learning) - to deal with the crisis. In this, they provide a learning example of how to deal with the current crisis (they do not provide a dogma, because this is the essence of the example, that it is only a hint and opening from which a stream of possibilities begins, which also limits some of the possibilities, because not everything can be continued from the specific example. The example is itself an example of guidance, according to the third postulate. Data, for example, is also guidance, and so is demonstration, feedback, question, problem, interest, and so on - they do not dictate but enable).
These exemplary examples of the great learners of our religion are those that open possibilities for us - that do not exist in other thoughts. First and foremost, the ability to deal with technology using the tools of homiletics, parable and tale (as opposed to the science fiction story, which stems from the logic of the novel, and therefore is not effective because it describes realia and not an idea). The renewal of the homiletic genre has happened several times in the Jewish tradition, and it requires first and foremost an aesthetic-literary ability, and Mevorach can fill an essential role here as a vaccine against romantic and kitschy homiletics. Despite the depth of the crisis and corruption, it is still possible that a great man of mystery or writer will be able to stand up to the task. Mevorach believes that one can spoil - but one can also repair.
The Onion: The World of Learning Possibilities
Does learning lead to knowledge? If we demand certain knowledge, then no learning will reach there. This was Descartes' insight. Such knowledge would be characterized today as 100% probability, but what is this probability at all? If we proceed in the way learning is characterized today, we will see that it receives only data - and not knowledge. This was Hume's insight. Therefore, information, which is never knowledge, only increases knowledge in the learning system (which can be a brain, biological species, culture, religion, science, organization, company, human society, computer, network, and more. In the philosophy of learning there is no the-inclusive system, like the-language, but it always deals with all the specific, particular systems. That is: with the particulars from the species of systems. Even its most general insights do not revolve around some great super-system, but touch on systems in general - their diverse multiplicity. Even the-language, the-human, the-reason, the-God, the-creation, the-nature, the-science, and other selected systems from the history of philosophy, it sees only as an example of a system, and translates insights about these systems into general systemic insights. Kant does not deal only with the categories of man, but also with the categories of organization, or of any system. And so on).
But - what does it mean that information increases knowledge? What does quantity of knowledge mean, when there is no certain knowledge? Are we again, as in computational learning, dealing with probability? That is, is learning built on a specific ontological structure of reality, which assumes probability beneath it? Is it like quantum mechanics? We will want to say that learning does not deal with objects of knowledge, but with possibilities. That is, always, every piece of information is guidance, and only transfers learning to other possibilities. But can it be said that learning chooses possibilities without relying on certain possibilities becoming more likely in light of new information? That is, without quantifying possibilities, which is the idea of probability? After all, learning not only disqualifies existing possibilities, or reduces their likelihood, but sometimes information causes it to open new possibilities. That is, sometimes more information causes less knowledge, and the stream of possibilities converges or disperses all the time, and does not just aspire to a certain final result at the limit. If it were probability, as in computerized learning, each item of information could only cause a reduction in possibilities, either by disqualifying some of them or by lowering the probability for some of them. But systems are constantly learning and developing into new possibilities.
It follows from this that learning is always dependent on the inside of the system, that is, on the method and specific system. This was Kant's insight. There is no general, unbiased learning system, but learning can only be in the context of past learning. But is this context probabilistic, and accumulates knowledge about reality, which is itself a distribution of information? Is learning, like in quantum mechanics, measurement? (In fact, the Kantian idea of measurement itself - as in the Copenhagen interpretation in quantum mechanics, which assumes the world of uncertainty as a kind of noumenon - is expected to change to learning. Already today, physics is engaged in a systemic formulation of the idea of probability, as in quantum decoherence, and in the future will reach a full learning formulation, which will give us a deeper understanding of the idea of probability itself). Have we returned in learning to ontology (albeit probabilistic), metaphysically assuming that the world is possibilities? Or perhaps the effect and cause are reversed here: Is learning the deep reason why the basis of our world is uncertainty, and that the basic structure of reality is a stream of possibilities? Does learning underlie the probabilistic state of our world?
Let's ask this in a biological way: Is evolution just a process in which the species accumulates knowledge about its environment, through countless measurements in states of uncertainty (interactions between a specific animal and a specific situation, for example between a cat and a mouse)? Or is such accumulation only very low learning, deserving the name adaptation and optimization, that is, convergence, while breakthroughs in evolution are precisely processes of divergence and exploration, that is, not of reducing possibilities but of expanding them? Is development, that is, progress in learning, not mainly derived from probabilistic learning at all, but from possibility learning? From opening and not closing new streams of possibilities? And so in the brain (and here is the mistake of what is called learning today) - real learning is philosophical, that is, learning of new types of thinking, for example encountering a new field or a new person, and not learning of training and convergence, as is done in deep learning. Therefore we need to rethink what knowledge is at all.
Is knowledge the internal equivalent of external data objects, that is, learning is the accumulation of knowledge objects, which are generalized within the system? This is the learning of material (as in school), and it creates a probabilistic picture of the world outside the system, because it deals with the correspondence between the inside and outside. In this picture, knowledge is something that enters from outside into the system - and accumulates in it. The subordination of knowledge to the idea of probability was Shannon's information theory, which created the idea of information. But if learning is essentially an internal change, inside the system, then we move away from the lowest idea of information, and approach a higher idea of knowledge - understanding. And above it of course is an even higher idea - wisdom. These are more and more internal ideas of learning, which do not depend on the external world, but are within the system. Therefore they are ideas that are more related to the method of learning than to the action of the system. The use of the high word intelligence (artificial) to describe the lowest level of learning - information learning - demonstrates the low level of understanding of learning today.
The high ideas are not built like a house of cards on the low, probabilistic ideas of learning, but constitute them. Seemingly, we could argue that the method of information learning - is knowledge, and that the method of knowledge - is understanding, and that the method of understanding - is wisdom, and above it creativity (Ayin in Kabbalah) and so on. And thus build the learning world from outside to inside. But the Kantian idea in its deepest depth, and the Wittgensteinian in its depth, is building from inside out. What constitutes information is knowledge, and not vice versa. And what constitutes knowledge is understanding. It is true that the limiting flow often stems from outside inwards - that is: information from outside limits the possibilities of knowledge - but the opening flow, of possibilities, often stems from inside outwards: understanding enables new types of knowledge, and new knowledge enables new types of information, and allows asking new questions. Just like in the development of science. The interaction between outside and inside, between convergence of possibilities and their divergence, between optimization and exploration, and between P and NP, is what guides internal learning. And when a crisis occurs, that is, an unbridgeable gap between the inside and outside, then no more information will help the system learn, but for example a new internal understanding.
This is the idea of paradigm shifts. And this is how the brain learns. In fact when it processes information, and is not required to change internally in the ways of processing, it hardly learns at all. Therefore it is always important to perform as part of learning, because this forces to transfer information from a state of objects to a state of action (from external information - into the algorithm), or even better - of changing the way of action. Therefore we learn better with the help of a story, and on the other hand it is very difficult for us to translate information into a change in the way of action, not to mention a change in the way of learning (because these are more internal concepts of learning). And therefore for example the brain needs to write when it learns, and therefore it is also important to practice (and therefore the brain even dreams, that is, tells itself an action story, in order to practice). Therefore a system is not really capable of learning in the way of programming, that is, of executing instructions without understanding. Change in execution without change in the way of execution - is exactly what constitutes the difference between programming and learning, and between computation and understanding. Any change in action needs to touch also on change in the way of action. And for there to be wisdom it needs to touch also on change in the way of changing the way of action. And so on. If so - the change in action is knowledge (and not the regular action itself, as in Wittgenstein).
From here we see why evolution is only a low example of learning. Because there is very little change in the evolutionary mechanism itself. Therefore it acquires knowledge, but little understanding, and there is almost no wisdom in it. Its algorithm is stupid. And from here we see why children need to act in the world, and indeed are active all the time, in order to learn. This is the idea of play, which is the external equivalent of the internal dream. That is, play allows information to become knowledge, while dream - more internal to the system - allows knowledge to become understanding (and so does daydreaming). And what we know from within ourselves, we can project also on other learning systems, such as science for example. Experimental results become experimental and analysis techniques, and only then higher and more internal levels, such as scientific insights and theories, and finally a change in the scientific method itself (and here we see how simplistic the idea of paradigm shifts is - in relation to the idea of learning. It is a systemic idea, and not multi-layered, and therefore its mechanism of change is itself static).
Such an onion-like systemic understanding, in layers more and more internal, and closer and closer to the depth of the method, we can see also in other learning systems, such as religion or organization. Thus we can characterize Halakha as halakhic knowledge, that is, as a way of action, while the Gemara as religious understanding, that is, as a change in the way of action, while Kabbalah already touches on even more internal methods, such as motivations or divinity. Hasidism is for example, mainly, a movement from the more internal Kabbalah to a practical level of reality, that is, application of previous (Kabbalistic) learning. Hence the changes it makes in religious practice. In another example, a startup is a method to learn about the market (therefore it succeeds in competing with an established company, where ways of action are more fixed). Therefore the startup not only learns knowledge about the market, but constantly changes its ways of action, until a new understanding crystallizes in it (and on the other hand constantly tries to translate understanding that is in it - the idea - into ways of action). The successful entrepreneur is one who has such wisdom, and therefore he is a serial entrepreneur.
In another example, whose importance stems from the history of philosophy, a language system is a way to act linguistically in reality, and this Wittgenstein discovered, and therefore he was at the level of knowledge of language. What language knows about reality. But in language there are deeper levels, such as linguistic understanding, which is the ability of language to adapt and speak about things we could not speak about before (let's think for example about mathematical language, or about modern Hebrew). Moreover, in language there are mechanisms of accumulating information, for example from the collision of speakers with the reality they want to talk about, that is, there is learning in language that Wittgenstein completely missed. And this learning is what constitutes language, and not vice versa, that language constitutes learning within it. Learning constitutes the learning system - and precedes it conceptually and even in development over time. Language after all developed in early humans.
The innermost method of the brain, with which we are born, that is, its wisdom, precedes all information we received, knowledge we acquired, or understanding. Wisdom allows learning even when there is no understanding yet, not to mention knowledge. Just as for example understanding allows knowledge and action even when there is a lack of information. Or that knowledge can complete missing information (Kant. And therefore Kant was at the level of reason of the human system, while Descartes remained in knowledge). And creativity allows action and learning when there isn't even wisdom. This can be seen in artists, or in the evolutionary mutation mechanism, which is creative but not wise, or in random search in the field of possibilities of an algorithm, when there is not only no understanding of the problem but no wise idea how to solve it, hence the stupidity of a brute force algorithm, despite its creativity. Hence the ChaBaD mechanism allows us to analyze learning in systems, if we interpret it in a learning way. What does allow mean? It opens a new form of analysis for us, and therefore using it is learning. Therefore we can characterize information texts as fundamentally different from philosophical texts, in that the latter deal with opening possibilities of our higher method, and not with reducing possibilities in the lower method.
Hence the role of literature is an intermediate role, mediating, between information texts such as news, and texts that deal with the highest method. Therefore literature itself is divided into prose and poetry. Prose is the use of regular ways of action of language, because it is at the level of knowledge of the specific language, and for the same reason it deals with story, which is a way of action. It was Aristotle's insight that prose deals with a general way of action, and not with a specific act, that is, with the possibilities of action, and the power of plot is in its being credible and possible: presenting possibilities. While poetry is already a more internal engagement of language, in the way of action of the way of action itself, and therefore it is at the level of understanding of language: produces and stems from such understanding. It deals with possibilities of possibilities (therefore experimental prose touches on poetry), that is, not with possibilities of action but with possibilities of language. While philosophy deals with possibilities of possibilities of possibilities, hence its more abstract character, and therefore it is able to speak about poetry, or about language, in general. The arts are what mediate between philosophy and the specific case, hence the ability of a specific painting to represent a more general situation (modern art is poetry - bad! - in relation to the prosaic art before it. And so we must also understand the symbolic art of the Middle Ages in relation to the more realistic and mimetic art of classical culture. The symbol does not deal with imitation and representation but with possibilities of representation). This is an onion description of the cultural system.
The role of philosophy is always to be the most internal learning, and therefore many and different learnings stem from it. Philosophy is not only the core of the onion of culture, but also of science, mathematics, society, religion, or man. Because the more one reaches an internal method, the more it becomes general, and more multifaceted in possibilities, for more than there are possibilities, there are possibilities of possibilities of possibilities (just as there are more possibilities than specific concrete reality). Therefore philosophy is engagement in the realm of wisdom. And this is true even before Greek philosophy, and exists also in biblical wisdom literature. After all, the onion model is what explains the multi-genre nature of the Bible. The biblical story deals with action in reality and therefore it is historical (unlike Greek prose), biblical law deals with the way of action, that is, with knowledge (how to act, unlike the programming conception of law in today's Kantian religious world, and unlike the Greek ethos conception, where knowledge of how to act is narrative), and prophecy deals with understanding (therefore it is poetic).
Hence different cultures can build their ChaBaD (wisdom, understanding and knowledge) onion differently, and thus we can characterize deep cross-cultural differences (and even inter-religious differences). In Christianity for example there is no law as knowledge - but dogma as knowledge. The story in it is not concrete historical information, but it is a very general model - the understanding (therefore it is its space of possibilities, hence the infinite expression of the same story). On the other hand in Islam there is indeed Halakha as knowledge, but understanding got stuck in medieval philosophy, and therefore this religion struggles to learn and adapt, and therefore becomes unwise and fundamentalist (fundamentalism is not the cause of staying behind, but vice versa. The learning method is the basic factor, and the lack of it is the cause of backwardness and stuckness, which appears against the advancement of reality as fundamentalism, that is, as adherence to the Middle Ages). Secularism is the crisis of wisdom in religions, which have become stupid and therefore have fossilized understandings (although still deep, for they are understandings, and not just knowledge). Secularization stems from a lack of internal learning in religions themselves (which itself stems from the idea of orthodoxy), and it is only a product of the learning crisis (and not its cause). Just as the crisis of lack of reading stems from the fossilization of prose understandings (the realistic-psychological novel) and from wisdom-less poetry (the figure of the psychological-imagery poet). Or that the crisis of lack of culture is not the cause but the result of lack of cultural learning, and getting stuck on humanism and the humanities, while realia has become real (and techno-spiritual). So here, finally we have reached the root. The fundamental cause of the cultural crisis is the stuckness of philosophy on language and the systemic world, and its inability to move to the learning world.
Ctrl+Z: Why is regret related to the sublime?
The effect of regret is the strongest and highest effect from a literary perspective, and it creates the deepest identification: This entrance was meant only for you - now I am going to close it. This effect is at the core of tragedy (regret for the fatal error after the catastrophe and recognition of it), at the core of the Iliad (Achilles' regret) and the Odyssey (Odysseus' regret), meaning at the core of Greek literature, and also at the core of biblical literature (the effect of sins in the Bible, from the sin of Eden onwards to the sins of destruction, is regret). "The sin - and its punishment". Why is the psychological effect of regret, out of all the many effects in the psyche, the deepest from a literary perspective - and the most sublime? After all, there are many other emotions, and more important ones, that drive people, so why does regret create the internal motivation that we feel as most basic - as the foundation of the soul?
Well, because of the unidirectionality of learning. Regret for mistakes in life, which is inevitable in human life, is the central learning effect of the psyche. I should have. I wish I had told her/stopped in time/yes/waited/not/yes bought the stock. What a shame, what a shame, what a shame. I wish I had told my parents I loved them before they died. I wish I had married her and hadn't married her. If only. If only - is the understanding that I could have learned differently, better, and chosen a different option among the learning options that existed (the stream of possibilities), but I didn't learn that way - and it's already lost. It's not the loss of the thing itself that hurts the most - but the mistake in learning that led to the loss, and the connection between the loss and learning. The very possibility that it could have been different. Because if there was no such possibility, meaning there was no learning process, we don't feel regret. Regret stems from a world of possibilities, not of necessity, lawfulness, or randomness. Not from the physics of the world, but from its biology.
Learning is not driven by causality, where one can go back unambiguously to the cause and necessarily back to the effect, and therefore time in it is a line, which can be moved in both directions and nothing will change except your location. You don't learn as a sequence of causes, which force a path, but as a sequence of intentions, which enable it - and therefore it's a learning "way". Therefore, learning is always unidirectional, and therefore real time is a stream - branching like a tree - of possibilities, and if you try to return to what was, and then return forward again, you will no longer know which possibility to choose, and you won't be able to return to the right future, and to continue learning from where you came. Moreover, even the past is a tree of possibilities, and there was never a single line there, but parallel possibilities that branch and unite. And every choice of possibility - every learning - changed you irreversibly, and changed the possibilities themselves. The moment the neuron fired it has already changed, and its firing possibilities have already changed. This is not a reversible system. And therefore the function of regret is the punishment for incorrect learning. Not for the incorrect result (it's possible you couldn't have learned differently, so there's no point in punishing for the result itself). This is internal punishment, not external, because learning is within the system. That's why the pain is inside you. Even in machine learning there is a "regret function", which is much more efficient than reinforcement learning of reward and punishment, because it requires only internal calculation and not external feedback, which is expensive, slow and sparse.
Regret is indeed related to fate, as in tragedy, and stems from fate, but not from the inevitable fate, but from the avoidable fate, that is, from the fatality in learning choice: the irreversible choice to learn a possibility, which in hindsight turns out to be a mistake (that's why we prefer in learning what we can return to and try again: simulation, practice, play, imagination, dream. The "as if" fights the "if only"). Regret is what confronts us with our learning. And at the highest literary level: with the fact that our very fate is learning, and that we are destined to learn, and to make painful and irreparable mistakes. That we fail in learning. Every parent and every spouse and every investor - errs. Therefore, the essence of fatality is not that the matter was predetermined (that's actually comforting), but that it was not predetermined, and still cannot be returned to and corrected, because it's unidirectional. Precisely because learning is in the world of possibilities (and not necessity) there is choice in it - and regret. Therefore, religiosity and literariness do not require physical free will (the Greeks indeed did not believe in such), but learning choice, because the central effect of religion - creating the strongest literature of all - is regret. This is true for Christianity, which never consoled itself for the murder of Jesus, for Judaism - which did not console itself for the destruction, and for Shiite Islam - which did not console itself for the murder of Ali. These religions deal with recreating and atoning for one great and irreparable mistake, in various practices of regret. From the inner side, which is the learning side: confession, repentance, acceptance for the future. And from the outer side, and therefore the anti-learning side: blame becomes accusation (of the Jews, of the Sunnis), rage and vengeance. Anti-Semitism is Christian anti-learning.
The control we have on the computer, where we can go backwards, and for example edit text without deletion marks (did anyone see what I did here?), is what draws us to it with magical cords. Not because we are control freaks and freak controls, but because of the control Z - because we love possibilities (and there are many possibilities in the computer) without regret. Did you make a mistake? No tragedy happened. You can always go back. And we are shocked when there are actions without regret, such as publishing a viral post on social media, where you can't go back to a saved version of the game and try again. Here again the tragic potential sometimes emerges, the erased - and the unerasable. That's why we are drawn to the computer, because it's an artificial environment where the structure of time is bidirectional. And between people everything is unidirectional. You can say a word but like an arrow - you can never bring it back. That's why the computer age doesn't encourage high sublime literature. Because the experience of irreversible learning, the "mistake", is less and less dominant in an "ever-returning" environment, where we spend more and more of our time - and therefore we "play" on the computer (even when we're not playing on it). Only our time doesn't return, and only the lost learning. And that's already another tragedy.
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V: Why did Russia invade Ukraine?
The story that high-tech tells itself about itself is self-deception, namely: hubris. High-tech thinks it's so successful because it itself is successful (smarter than everyone, works right, motivated, talented, and so on). The truth is the opposite: high-tech works poorly, with very little wisdom and a lot of corruption, like any office, and the only reason it's successful is not related to it, but to the field it deals with: the computer. And this one reason is strong enough - stronger than all the other negative factors combined. But why? What in the computer allows this? What is the spiritual essence of the computer, which high-tech never bothered to think about, and has no inkling of understanding of it? Is it because of the computer's computational ability, which is what allows for greater wisdom? No. Not at all. What's important in the computer is not its way of thinking, which has no wisdom, not to mention learning, but its form of knowledge. And it is this that allows for faster learning, even in a system where almost no one learns. What is this form, what characterizes digital knowledge, unlike previous knowledge? Is it that it's not knowledge, meaning a qualitative thing, but information, meaning a quantitative thing, as high-tech likes to think? Is it because it's stupider knowledge, more engineering? Well, even the information itself is less important (and not really new as a qualitative phenomenon in quantitative terms - there was always a lot of information for the brain and society), and the ability to use it essentially stems from another reason, more basic, simpler, which is the depth of digital media: copy-paste.
The ability to copy wholesale - is what underlies the success of high-tech, computers, the internet, smartphones, and modern technology and economy. It's not the processor operations and calculations that are critical, and not even just the storage of information, but the simplest operation: copying. At no cost, without change, without limit. Infinite copying. Very few people write something original, for example an algorithm, and above them there are countless people - programmers - who do copy-paste all day and connect copy-pastes, which is essentially the essence of modern software - countless copy-pastes of functions, which no one knows how they really work, because they themselves are copy-pastes. And the internet is the ability to copy-paste content from all over the world. Simply the biggest copy-paste machine ever. And the power of the app on the smartphone - like any software - is the ability to copy and copy the way of operation, without the need to learn it, understand it, think about it. And this is in contrast to all human ways of operation in the past, where there was an expensive learning cost for every function and every ability and every acquisition of knowledge. And information is copy-paste knowledge, and therefore there is no acquisition of understanding in it itself. What is programmer pride, what is the essence of the story he tells himself? Today I did a copy-paste from here and connected it to a copy-paste from there. That's the heroism.
Therefore, copying is the basis for the entire high-tech field, and it's all engaged in all sorts of copies and reproductions, where there is a very small base of people who actually invent something original (usually connecting two copy-pastes from relatively distant sources - that's what's called: an idea). So, what is the essence of the startup? One original idea, which is a little less copy-paste, which is funded to be realized with countless copy-pastes of countless copy-pastes. Even algorithm developers will invent an algorithm very rarely, and almost always will copy-paste known techniques, and about engineers - there's nothing to talk about. This copying, and its herdness (meaning the copying of copying itself), are the ethos of the industry, and they are its internal spiritual essence. Therefore, they are copied from company to company also in business or design or marketing areas or those that replicate manpower and its characteristics (copy-paste of people). In other fields, it's simply impossible to do such "scaling" to copy-paste (for example: you need to produce something physical, or alternatively deal with human minds, which don't work through copy-paste, or in other analog fields). This power of the computer shapes its spiritual essence - and the era - more than any other feature of it. It is thanks to this that it rules the world: control C control V. And so the spiritual form of the computer is replicated infinitely and imposes its form also on other fields in our world, for example culture.
But where does the such high importance of copying come from? Why is copying itself so effective - what is the depth of the matter? Well, let's note that only the efficiency of copying is the new thing, but copying itself is the norm among humans since forever. Everyone is copied versions of each other of behavioral patterns, and only a few are original, and even that only rarely out of all their behavior. Usually the pattern of action is endlessly reproduced. And if we broaden the perspective, we'll see that this is an even more general characteristic, which characterizes life itself. After all, what are animals if not copies of organisms? A lion is a copy of previous lions. The essence of life itself is copying of information in DNA. It is only the efficiency of copying that has increased - and reaches its peak with the computer (not because of its processing capabilities or artificial intelligence - but precisely because of its artificial knowledge capabilities: copying information).
But is it indeed this efficiency of copying that is important, and is it what underlies progress and development? Should we only strive for even more and more efficient copying, for example brain copying, or product printing, or body printing, or direct information transfer between computer and brain and between brain and brain - meaning copying information from one to another (the term transfer - and the idea of communication - hides from us that it's about copying)? Is our messianic horizon the infinity of copying, and is this the infinity that man has actually aspired to since his creation as a living creature - that is, replicating himself, as part of an anti-entropic process striving towards its full and complete and utopian realization: from the monkey to the copy? What's wrong with that? What's wrong with that? Why are we actually repelled by the idea of copying, aren't we von Neumann machines? Well - no.
Life is not copying, but precisely a mistake in copying. The essence of life is not the replication of the organism, but evolution, that is, not the system - but the learning. Not perfect functional copying, but original, special mistake, or at least a special combination (this is sex - the originality in connecting two things, which is originality at a lower level than in innovation itself). Learning stems precisely from replication of originality, and not from replication without originality. What the copying system called the internet allows is a thinner layer than ever of innovations and original people - spread to a thicker layer than ever of copiers. That's why culture today is so replicated, in the copying world, while in the ancient world every small settlement had an original culture. The success of humans, the technological animal, did not stem from copying patterns in learning - but from copying innovations in learning. Technology is an evolution mechanism - not an organism system. Not an eco-system. Therefore, a future of constant copying - the copy world - is dystopian. And this is the real danger in the computer - the disappearance of the thin layer, which becomes thinner and thinner, but we don't notice the decrease in innovation because the increasing efficiency of copying compensates for it. It's terribly easy to copy the little innovation that does exist - but if innovation disappears, the dominance of copying will turn our world into a digital Middle Ages.
And if we return to the degeneration of the Orthodox Church, its remaining in the Middle Ages is what explains what's happening to Russia - a religion that remains in the Middle Ages becomes fundamentalist. And all this sheds a completely new light - and not at all flattering - on the achievements of high Russian culture in the 19th century, because it's impossible to imagine or understand Dostoevsky and Tolstoy without their Orthodoxy. In fact, they are the most complete formulators of Russian Orthodox opposition to Western modernity, which is at the root of Russia remaining a tsarist serf state, with zero respect for human life (both of Russians themselves and of others). That's why Russia doesn't learn, and always returns to the same regime. That's why Russian culture needs to stand the same trial as German or Japanese culture, before their exit from a medieval political order, which did not internalize political learning processes. Turkish culture suffers from the same problem, which is characteristic of a former empire, which is not willing to recognize it. And there too, Muslim orthodoxy is what its opposition to the West always brings them back to a sultan. This is the problem of a culture based on copying and opposing learning, and therefore drowning in degeneration and corruption and lack of recognition of reality and ridiculous replication of fantasies from the past. That's why the defeat of these systems will stem from the great learning mechanism - techno-economy. The power of the West was never its ability to function, but its ability to innovate, which stems precisely from its being inefficient in replication and not organized and not functioning well. It constantly makes mistakes - even in copying - and therefore wins. Like in evolution, countless mistakes accumulate to victory, while countless replications accumulate to extinction. So, what is the degeneration of a system? Not functional decline, but learning decline, that is, too successful replication. And the next stage after decadence - collapse.
So, how can we deal with high-tech copying? As in any organization, the relatively easiest part is not to change the logic of the organization, but to add a part to the organization, which in turn can change the logic - as part of its organic activity within the system. Therefore, there needs to be a part in every organization responsible for its innovation, and its purpose is to increase the innovation of the other parts of the organization, and of the organization as a whole, in face of the challenges facing it. These people need to receive the overall and all-knowing perspective of management, but they cannot be management, which is busy with operation (functioning of the organism). They are the ones who need to be busy with the sexuality of the organization, and the ability of the organization to give birth within it or from it to innovation, for example to give birth from within a large company to a startup, perhaps in collaboration with another large company, from another field. Or for example to dive into a certain fossilized area in the organization's activity, and create there a replicative disruption that will create change, whether from outside or from inside (learning within the system is preferable). Or alternatively to bring conceptual innovation from other and foreign content worlds into a fossilized religion, or a degenerated business, or a replicated culture (for example: literature where everything is the same. Like novel prose or lyric poetry today). Or to build new interdisciplinary frameworks that cross old boundaries in the organization - to solve a problem that requires a comprehensive view. Or to learn from other successful examples outside the organization. Or to imagine a different organizational activity (organizational vision). Or just to think (which is not accepted at all in an action-oriented, performative, and functional organization). Management has long since ceased to be the thinking head of the organization, but the control unit and programming instructions, because the organization today is no longer in the form of a learning person, but in the form of a programmed computer.
The extensive engagement of the Netanya school with innovation confronts it again and again with the enormous barriers, which are growing higher, against innovation in our time. What was possible ten years ago is blocked today. The copying-academic petrification-suicide of the replicated philosophy of our time - is what leads it to its death, and to its return to medieval orthodoxy, that is: programming philosophy for programming culture. Just instead of copying manuscripts - digital copying. More than any other period, academic philosophers today resemble philosophers of the Middle Ages, who resemble programmers - their innovation is connecting copy-pastes. Literature is created from a recipe. And art is a copy of a copy. And poetry is formulaic (and therefore argues about the formula). And our soul has been copied - from another copy. The spiritual logic of the computer, as a spiritual machine, takes over the world of human spirit, and with current computerized learning (which identifies and replicates patterns and doesn't invent them) - also over learning. But precisely from the non-programmable nature of computerized learning, grows a potential for a different kind of spiritual form for the computer, which in turn will create a different kind of spiritual form for the world. As computerized learning becomes more and more real learning, we can emerge from the high-tech copying logic. But such a change is not only a technological change - but also a philosophical and even cultural and organizational change - which in turn gives inspiration and meaning to technological change.
The shallow prevalent empty discourse on innovation in high-tech, which has zero conceptual depth, because it is anti-philosophical, is the great enemy of true conceptual innovation, not copying. What's the difference between innovation and "innovation"? The difference is not only in the innovation itself, but in the learning mechanism around it, whether it's a simple mechanism of copying, or a more sophisticated mechanism of deepening - finding the methodical innovation beneath the operational innovation. Every innovation has meanings at different levels of system change, because it's just an example of a certain direction. Therefore, one can derive from it an example in the specific case, or a more general example as a rule of action in the system (not necessarily more comprehensive), or an even more general example of how the system learns (and as said - not necessarily comprehensive and system-wide, but more operational, meaning moving the system in a more basic way), or an even more general example for learning the method itself, and so on. Shallow innovation operates only on one level, while deep innovation has multi-layered action on all levels simultaneously, to varying degrees. Not every innovation is supposed to change the method from the ground up, and on the other hand there are paradigmatic innovations, whose importance is precisely as examples of deep change, more than in themselves. This innovation, at all levels, is what's missing in the programming world, for example that of current computerized learning or of "innovation in high-tech". Because it requires a learning system around the innovation - and not just innovation in the system. That's why evolutionary innovation seems quite shallow to us, because it doesn't change the evolutionary method. While literary innovation is deep, because it's not just another book, but a change in the literary method itself. And therefore philosophical innovation is the deepest of all - because there's no level it doesn't touch, and in fact it deepens in all possible levels to infinity.
Plagiarists of the Ancient World: Greek Degeneration and Roman Fraud
One of the worst cultural mistakes in our time - and also one of the most common - is the appreciation of the Romans. The Romans are considered part of the classical world, and generally receive a positive cultural sentiment, despite being more or less the Nazi Germany of the ancient world (including the eagle and lebensraum and militarism and brutal oppression and slavery in camps and genocide and sadistic cruelty as entertainment and kitsch pomposity and mass parades and eventually even the cult of personality and psychopathic heads of state) - only one that succeeded, and indeed conquered the world, and therefore wrote history (the Germans also had a developed historical sense). The legacy of positive appreciation for Rome is Christian, stemming from the Vatican, and confuses the evil empire that was Rome with the Italian Renaissance.
What was Rome? The destruction of the ancient world, and the annihilation of classical culture (including even the Hellenistic), which never returned (while engaging in boundless and tasteless plagiarism, in order to adorn itself with the feathers of culture), including the destruction of Greek literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, democracy, art, and all the civic and intellectual achievements of the polis (and the connection between the two). Not to mention the destruction of the cultures of Judea and Egypt and the Phoenicians, or any other valuable culture that existed around the Mediterranean - the cradle of human civilization. Some of the Romans' most symbolic achievements: burning the Library of Alexandria, destroying Jerusalem, murdering Archimedes (the greatest mathematician ever), and crucifying Jesus.
Regarding non-symbolic achievements, there is a very simple and objective measure that allows comparing cultures morally: the number of people killed in wars. If we look at such a graph, and remove China from it (where there are special circumstances: all wars are internal wars, the population is enormous but dependent on complex social cooperation, as it exists on a rice irrigation system, so any governmental disruption causes famine, hence its tendency towards centrality and stability), we will discover a simple phenomenon. The moment the Romans take the stage, the number of people killed in wars rises by an order of magnitude, more than anything known in the ancient world, and those killed are all the peoples Rome conquered, including the peoples of Europe (Gauls, Germans, Goths, Britons, etc.). The Romans were the true barbarians, and indeed were considered as such by the Greeks - and even by the Jews (the two great cultures in terms of their quality). In contrast, the barbarians and Huns do not come close at all to the scale of Roman killing (besides the fact that the victims were now Romans, the writers of history), when in fact these were the liberators of the empire's peoples from the grip of the Roman boot on their necks, their exploitation, oppression, and destruction of their culture.
Rome was not an enlightened empire, like the Persian one, but simply particularly crushing, and of course just like the Nazis they picked on those with the most unique culture, the Jews, and tried to exterminate them and their culture from the face of the earth. The amazing thing is that according to estimates, the Jewish Holocaust is not a modern phenomenon, but even in ancient times the Romans slaughtered Jews more than any other people, and the number of deaths from them significantly exceeds all others - even the Carthaginians. Jews were killed more than anyone else, throughout the history of the ancient world (outside China). Not to mention the Roman culture of murder, in which hundreds of thousands are killed in the Colosseum as food for predators and human battles as a central cultural spectacle, or for example a special abuse that gained eternal name (crucifixion). These are the technological equivalents of the ancient world to gas chambers and Mengele: murder for the sake of horror.
Rome was a monster that, apart from various engineering achievements (i.e. only at a technical level), gave the world no spiritual value whatsoever. True, there were a few Latin poets of value (few in relation to the size of the population), but their main creation was blatant plagiarism of Greek culture, and besides: poetry is never a measure for evaluating a culture. Great poetry is a phenomenon that exists in all cultures, even the most primitive and savage (where it exists orally). Poetry was the earliest form of literature, which probably existed even in prehistoric man (therefore it appears immediately in a developed form with the appearance of writing - there was a long poetic tradition before). Contrary to what is accepted today, poetry cannot be translated, and therefore poetry cannot be evaluated as a measure outside the boundaries of a particular culture. In addition, the main value of ancient poetry stems precisely from the time that has passed, and not necessarily from its internal qualities. Common and ordinary words have become elevated and rare, and therefore the language itself, which has changed, has become rich and deep. The most banal wisdom, which exists in every human language, has become part of poetry alone (for the speech that documents it has disappeared), and kitsch clichés and propaganda have become fresh and unique metaphors over time, and common and worn-out expressions - of which only one copy remains - have become unique, apt and brilliant. Ideas that we no longer understand or identify with have become innovation and originality, and boring themes have become exciting defamiliarization to modernity. Therefore, the more we change - the greater ancient poetry will become. Distance magnifies the past. We are drawn to the past by magical cords because the cultural gravitational force is the mass of the creation (its inner quality) times the distance in time squared (therefore, works of little value accumulate weight over the years - and centuries - including cave scribbles and ancient graffiti). Hence the main cultural weight of the past (and hence, by the way, also the attraction to the culture of the distant future - the messianic force that has often shaped history and culture).
And in general, culture exists only from a perspective looking back at the past (therefore there can be no "popular culture", i.e. contemporary, and therefore the true appeal of a creator is always to the future). Many cultural achievements were not created as culture at all but only in retrospect are they culture, because of our perspective, and therefore we should not accept Rome as a legitimate culture, but as a selfish mutation, in a cancer that spread until it killed the ancient world. This is the reason that precisely after Rome this world did not return, because the Romans had destroyed it even before. Not because Rome was the last part of it before its end, which creates nostalgia for it reserved for the ancient world itself. It was this end itself, and its continuation and total oppression - what is called the Roman peace - are what caused the finality of death. In our time, Russia or Turkey can be cited as an example of an illegitimate culture, because whoever checks will discover that precisely they of all carry an especially long historical trail of various and numerous genocides, even more than the Germans, which show that this is simply part of them (two former empires, whose culture is brutal, and whose regime will always aspire to dictatorship and oppression of others).
The unbridled imperialism is Rome's sick legacy to the world, because it is perceived as legitimate because it is Roman, as a necessary evil, or because "that's how empires behave", or simply as "cold realism". The conquerors before Rome, like the Greeks or the Persians, were much more enlightened than it - and just like Nazism, it was the anti-enlightenment of the ancient world. The Roman destruction of the Greek world is responsible for the fact that there was no scientific revolution in ancient times - the Greeks were not far from there - and therefore the Jewish-Western coupling was postponed until the next enlightenment. Christianity as a plagiarized religion should be understood as part of the Roman literary world, and the New Testament is the Jewish equivalent of what the Romans did to Greek literature - hence Christianity's adherence to Rome. The Jews of course knew this from time immemorial, and identified Christianity with the wicked kingdom of Rome. There is no doubt that Christian anti-Semitism (whose end - the Nazi) stems from Roman anti-Semitism, for the Romans were the inventors of anti-Semitism - not the eternal hatred of individuals or enemies (Haman and Amalek), but anti-Semitism as a culture, including libels.
The adoration of Rome is disgusting, and the criterion here is not morality, but the destruction of cultures, and the anti-learning method of cultural destruction (extinctions of diversity as anti-evolution). Russia even destroyed its own classical culture and literature and music, which hardly exists today. German culture has not recovered to this day from the Nazi destruction. Let us ask: what is the difference between creative destruction, for example extinction that advances evolution, or an economic crisis that advances the economy in the long run, that is, learning destruction that allows a learning system to get out of fixation, and anti-learning destruction? Well: damage to the method. When the system itself is damaged, but not its method, rapid learning occurs. But when the damage is deep, and reaches the method itself, then the disruption is more severe, and when the method is destroyed but the method of the method still exists - then there is rehabilitation (although the previous direction is lost), but the deeper the damage to the system - that is, the mechanisms of the method of the method of the method etc. are damaged and destroyed (and ultimately these are very thin mechanisms, because they operate at a very high level above the system in reality itself) - then there is no rehabilitation.
This is what happened to Greek culture, and the reason for this is that this culture did not resist Roman culture, and therefore this culture was destroyed and we do not have Greek culture today (but perhaps only in a very high method, after the system itself disappeared, in Renaissance culture that evolved into Western culture - and this example demonstrates what happens when there is continuity in a very high and abstract method, without any continuity in the system itself). The Jewish resistance to Roman culture, despite costing an enormous price, is what saved it as a living system, that is, not just as a method (therefore we did not have a Jewish Renaissance in history, where Jews are nostalgia, which would have happened if the Jews had really been exterminated - suddenly in one moment anti-Semitism would have turned into longing). Judaism preserved to some extent all levels - from the system itself, to the highest and thinnest method - and therefore despite being severely damaged, it survived.
This infinity - of infinite levels in the system - is not some unnatural thing, but exists exactly like the ability to find a derivative of infinite order (i.e. without an upper limit) for a real function. That is: when there is system development, methods can be derived from it without limit upwards, which at a certain stage indeed become very vague (and in almost completely abstract directions). But precisely the ability of any change or concrete action in the system to be part of a web of meanings that to a very small degree - usually, otherwise the system would become an unstable weathervane - changes even the highest method we can think of - this is the depth of the system. Just like in the Hasidic and even Chabad idea, that the concrete is what contains in its depths the greatest height - the most spiritual. Because from a specific example - like in an art phenomenon (which is a concrete and not abstract product), or the Talmud (or Zohar's exegesis) - learning meanings can be derived endlessly, including the most principled ones. Not because it is inherent in the example, but because it is inherent in learning, that is, in the method, and in the method of the method, and so on.
Hence the ability to move in the world, and act in it, with infinite meaning, as the existentialists wanted, only without their spiritual inflation, but exactly like the ability to understand in infinite depth any move in the Talmud, with the help of interpretation and learning. This became the Jewish method in opposition to the Roman system, after the great damage to the system itself - and the helplessness of the system. The response was the externalization of the learning that existed in the system and turning it into an ideology - Torah study. The actual action itself was damaged, and sometimes destroyed, and therefore Judaism entrenched itself in the method. And if the Greeks had entrenched themselves with devotion in the scientific or philosophical method, they would have survived the Romans, and we would have received a kind of ideological learning version of the Greek culture of the ancient world, similar to what happened in Jewish culture.
In a system where the tower of methods functions (for example in a great literary work, or in Hasidism, or in science, or in mathematics), above every slight foot movement in any direction in the world of reality there is a tower - whose feet are on the ground but whose head reaches the sky - of directions in methods, and therefore the foot movement has a thin spiritual meaning even in the highest learning worlds (just as any change in a function has an effect on the derivatives up to infinity). Therefore, total learning is spiritual infinity. In science or in Kabbalah, everything in this world has meaning in the highest levels of the system (every movement of an atom embodies within it in a hidden way the highest methods of the universe, including equations with depth without end. Every tiny action in an organism is part of the great learning of evolution. And so on). Mathematics, for example, does not allow movement at all otherwise, because any concrete object that acts incorrectly will lead to a general contradiction and collapse of the system, because it has an effect on all its levels. In this sense, quantum theory is also totally absolute, not because it is deterministic, but because its laws are general without limit - and not only without limit in the universe, but without limit in the law itself, that is, in learning the law. Therefore, infinity is not some learning mysticism, and science and mathematics also have infinite depth. Because in learning the depth is infinite.
Is There Non-Alternative History?
Are we judging Rome anachronistically? The problem with Rome is not moral, but the result. Rome destroyed the ancient world and caused the Middle Ages. Without Rome, it is possible that Greek science, which at this stage had already become Mediterranean, would have undergone the scientific revolution in a few (few) hundred years CE. Rome replaced the multicultural system of the ancient world, which resembled competition out of influence in Europe in modern times, with a monistic system, lacking culture (like the American lack of culture today, only more barbaric). And when the barbarians destroyed Rome, too late by a few hundred years, there was nothing left to rehabilitate. Beyond that, it became an example of imperialism throughout history, that is, a bad example perceived as good (let us remember for example Emperor Napoleon, or the German Kaiser, and so on. We cannot imagine World War II without the Roman idea). And what would have happened to Judaism without Rome?
Why is it easier for us to imagine the continuation of Greek culture without Rome than the continuation of Jewish culture? First of all, because of the Renaissance, which presented itself as the Greek continuation. But just as it is difficult to imagine Judaism in a more Hebrew version of it, without the exile, so it is only a fiction that the Renaissance is a historical continuation of Greece, and therefore it is only an illusion that it is easy to imagine this (how would philosophy have looked without the Roman cut between Aristotle and Descartes, when it is a direct cultural continuation of Greece?). We might have seen a revolution that begins first of all with the discovery of America by Greek sailors, or rather a revolution in astronomy, for the Greeks did not suffer from the dogma that the sun revolves around the earth, and the empirical component - missing in Greek science - could have been built gradually (as happened in the scientific revolution). And as for Judaism, we can speculate, first of all, that there would not have been the mutation of Christianity, but monotheism would have remained in the original. And therefore Judaism would have been a dominant world religion.
In addition, central books like the Talmud and the Zohar would not have made the fatal and irreparable mistake of writing in Aramaic, but remained within the Hebrew language, especially if Rome had not destroyed the center in the Land of Israel. And then these exemplary books would not have been esoteric, and Hebrew would have been clearly the most beautiful language in the world, its literature would have been the greatest of all, and thus world literature would have had a clear center (like English for science today, or Latin in the past). It's a great pity about the loss of so many layers of development from the last living ancient language in the world, but the really big problem was that Judaism secluded itself in response to oppression, and turned inward only, and wrote inwardly, contrary to the biblical tradition, and therefore only Christianity realized a significant appeal of it to the world. Christianity was created from Jewish learning stagnation.
So, what was the Middle Ages? A period of slowdown, stoppage, and regression - in learning. And if so, what does it mean that the problem with Rome is simply the result? Well, that the essential result is the cultural result, that is, the systemic-learning result (culture is the name for the broad learning system that continues from generation to generation on a broad scale, as opposed to a personal or family scale). All possible morality only stems from learning, and not from some inner virtue, like happiness or suffering. Learning constitutes happiness and suffering themselves, and shows when suffering is good (for learning) and when happiness is bad (when it blocks learning). This is the true moral instinct, and it is what answers what is wrong with a happiness drug, or what is sometimes wrong with pleasure. Rome is morally bad because of its stopping learning with iron brakes (the "peace" of Roman oppression and paralysis), hence the strange correlation between morality and learning. Evil stems from the result, not because the result is morally bad (that's a circular argument), but because it is bad for learning.
After all, what is the meaning of "result" at all? How does this concept have any meaning at all? We cannot know what would have happened if - we can only know what would have learned if. That is, following the learning we have undergone, we can imagine what other learning could have been. But this can only be imagined following the learning that has already been. Only following modern times can we understand what was the result of Rome. And only in this sense - of a learning result - is there a result for something in the world. The result is not physical causality, for we have no access at all to parallel worlds, only to worlds that came afterwards. Even if a classic causal chain could be demonstrated, it would still not mean that this is the result of "this", because we do not know if such a chain would have existed even without "this", and whether without this - the result would really have been different, and certainly essentially. It is possible that like in convergent evolution, the result would have been the same result. For example: that the Middle Ages were inevitable. But with the help of the Renaissance we understand that there can be a scientific revolution that will be a phase transition, and will not allow the Middle Ages.
In exactly the same way, Christianity reveals in retrospect the universal and viral potential that was inherent in Judaism from the outset, and which even today we find difficult to imagine - because we know Judaism as seclusion and as an inner space. But those who caused this were the Romans, and the Bible is much more universal. In fact, most of Jesus' own teaching is such Hasidic universalism, and if the Romans had not killed him, it is possible that his teaching would have been part (or stream) of Judaism itself, and increased its virality beyond the required threshold, and we would have had a Jewish world. Just like the world today is essentially Christian.
In such a Judeo-Greek culture, someone in Philo's position would have been a central world figure, and we would have had many more like him, or like Spinoza (and in our days: Liebes). The Jewish-Greek confrontation would have replaced the Muslim-Christian confrontation between East and West, and the central battlefield, in which both cultures operated and excelled, would have been literature altogether. Yes, a world without Rome would have been much more beautiful, and Rome is the great malfunction in history, and even worse than the Nazi malfunction, but the similarities between them point to a kind of bug that exists in history, that is, a constant danger. An outbreak of a violent growth within a learning system, which takes control of it. And this danger is sevenfold greater in the computer age. If there is anything to learn from Rome and Germany - it is the danger of cancer: learning that has gone out of control and become anti-learning. The wildest aspiration for infinity leads quickly precisely to the end.
Why Does the Brain Need Philosophy?
What is the problem with academia in the humanities, and why is it unable to reach insights of depth, or to deal with spirit at all? Because it is not really able to evaluate, for example to give Rome a grade, or Dostoevsky, or a certain culture. As part of this it also does not know how to evaluate what is important. Or to understand what importance is. And therefore it clings to the trivial. And since its cultural evaluation function is empty and hollow, the only evaluation it knows is political or moral, that is, judgment outside the system. Because it is trapped without a basis for evaluation (what, is it not subjective?). And indeed, there is no basis for evaluation, except through learning, according to what promotes it, or progresses in it. Otherwise what is the advantage of man over the mosquito. That is: the evaluation itself is part of the learning of the system. And not something that exists externally to this learning, and evaluates it from outside. Cultural thinking is part of culture. And the humanities are extra-cultural, for science is outside the phenomenon, and therefore they are an empty phenomenon, because they are outside the system - but there is nothing outside the system (that is, that has value - yes, value! - for the system). A system is an organization of value, not values, and therefore economics is a good system - and politics is bad (precisely because it tries to deal with morality, to the point of parody). The state always tries to act from outside the phenomenon, and therefore it does not work.
The greatness of democracy is that it does not work, and therefore the state does not succeed in interfering with learning. Therefore the stupidity of the regime and the incompetence and helplessness of the state are what thanks to them it flourishes, and that a free learning system exists in it at all. The builder is so bad that the field turns into a garden - and not a building. Who is the bad manager? The manager who interferes, the tyrant, not the manager who does not manage (but only nurtures. And it is even preferable that he neglect, as long as he lets the plants grow). The spinelessness of politicians is what turns them into Taoist managers and allows the mechanism that does work in a learning way - the economy - to flourish. And populism, that is, state intervention in the economy, is what destroys it. In democracy, internal paralysis brings the system closer to one where politicians and leaders cannot do anything, and therefore allows learning within the system, and not planning from outside. Indeed, they all err in the illusion of planning, and therefore there is constant frustration in the civic system, but this frustration and despair is the best sign that they are not succeeding in harming learning. For example: that the economy is stronger than everything. Or that evolution is stronger than any planning.
Stupidity is the greatest asset of the Western state, and compared to a functioning dictatorship - dysfunction is not a Western disadvantage, but an advantage. No person is wise and learned enough to manage - and therefore it is better that no person be able to manage. There is no manager of the brain, or manager of evolution. And the way the brain manages itself (and it does manage itself - and is not managed), that is, as a learning system - is what needs to be imitated. The importance of democracy is not in its primitive learning mechanism - one large and miserable feedback loop (every 4 years) - but in the very change of government (every 4 years, hopefully), which prevents dictatorship in the system. That is why even the drawing of the ruler worked well in ancient Greek democracy. Great leaders usually did not lead long enough for them to discover how small they are (and if so - that is exactly what happened). Democracy is what happens when managers fail to plan. And certainly not to execute. Man plans plans, while God laughs - why? Because God does not plan plans, but acts in the world through laughter. This is the supreme leadership.
The horrific management problem in high-tech stems precisely from this planning illusion. And so in every organization. These organizations - including academia - fall victim to the destruction of systemicity, that is, to the destruction of the system's ability to function in a comprehensive manner, and as part of that to learn, due to its breakdown into components, what is called specialization. The more the perception of the system is as an existing structure, anti-learning, the more it is divided into more and more bricks. And these blocks are the opaque and obtuse people we know as narrow experts, and their specialization is building walls against learning. The more departments and divisions there are in an organization - the clearer it is that it is not organic and not functioning, and thus they try to drive it in a mechanical-planning manner, with the help of architects and planners (and in their current name: programmers). The army for example is an extreme example - and therefore known as the epitome of narrow-mindedness in action, precisely because control in it is effective, as a functioning dictatorship. The advantage of the IDF compared to other armies is the lack of discipline and lack of control of the command, because it is a phalanx with high-tech equipment. But the problem of Israeli high-tech is that it tries to operate like an army, in a mission-oriented manner, because this is the first management the officers - sorry, managers - encountered in it. Therefore it functions in the short term, at the level of the individual friendly team, and not as an organization - and therefore it is a startup.
In a large organization, that is, in a system, the ability of an average manager to see and understand the overall picture is zero, just like the ability of a narrow academic to understand culture, which is a particularly comprehensive systemic phenomenon, or the spirit - which is even more comprehensive. Therefore there is no depth, because depth is something that is beneath everything, and there is no everything. There are only details. That is why Israeli high-tech is so shallow. Depth is learning that drives the system from within, and for that we need a comprehensive phenomenon that operates in the system - as a system. Management in an organization can only work if there is a person smart enough - and especially learned enough - who sees the whole overall picture, that is, sees everything, and is able to understand everything (for example: both the algorithm and the marketing and the user experience and the business environment and the design and the technological possibilities, etc.). That is: a person who is the god of the system. Sometimes it's the entrepreneur, but usually you need to bring in people whose job it is - to bring comprehensive understanding - that is, philosophers of the system, and this never happens. We will never hear about the role of the startup philosopher, because it's not "practical" enough. But if it happens (by chance) and such understanding does indeed receive power in the system, the system can function also as management, and these are the heroic stories of the management myth: the genius manager. The one who knew what was right to do (but how did he know? Did he really know?).
But usually, there is no Leonardo da Vinci in the organization, or he has no power or trust at all. In addition, organizations - whose stupidity is their expertise - do not know how to appreciate (or hire) people whose careers have been multidisciplinary, and therefore capable of seeing more (and therefore the job market is moving towards narrower and narrower expertise). Therefore, the second thing management can do in order to create integration - which is no longer possible in the mind of one person - is to create teams that have a comprehensive view, that is, multidisciplinary teams that cross departments: two programmers, a marketer, a businessman, a designer. Such cross-departmental teams are actually the reason startups succeed more than large organizations, because every startup starts with such a small team, and then makes the mistake of turning each team member into a department, instead of creating a department of such teams, because it perceives management as construction, and not as an organism. And then there is a department of the pancreas, and a department of blood, and a department of the brain, instead of creating many small children, each of which has both pancreas and blood and brain. And in academia the problem is the same problem, and therefore it is so poor in cultural insights. Or scientific insights. Therefore, such systems emphasize communication, which is creating connections between areas that have already been separated. That is: creativity for them is when a researcher from a certain field brings an idea from another field, in an accidental breaking of a wall, and passage between rooms, instead of living without walls. The idea of communication stems from systems that do not learn. In the brain there is no "communication" between neurons - there is learning. Therefore the communication paradigm is unable to understand the brain.
The greatness of the Internet is not that it is a communication system, but that it connected everything and destroyed divisions, and therefore humanity learns more as a system, that is, the Internet is a learning system. In the brain there are management functions, but the way they manage is learning. They do not plan the brain, or tell it what to do, there is no control and monitoring, or schedules, or any other management method (which always pretends to be a management "methodology", that is, learning). That is, management itself is part of the system's operation, and not an external operation on it, or an external operation of part of the system on another part of it. Management is a natural product of the system's learning, and therefore it cannot be located somewhere as a system of instructions and rules, because learning is general. In the brain there is integration all the time, but it is not managed but created - from within itself. The connections are not communication between expert areas in the brain, as the structure paradigm wanted to understand, but there are different thought networks - interdisciplinary teams - that operate in the brain. That is, these are learning systems and not connection networks, and therefore no information is transferred in them but direction, for example evaluation, or attention, or push/pull in a certain direction. Like every action in culture - every sentence in a prose book - is a direction on how to write, no less than it is the transmission of information. What characterizes cultural writing is not only that the how is important, but that the how teaches how the how, that is, that the how is also a command and direction - an example for instance. Every line in a poem teaches how to write a poem (in many different ways - this is the greatness of a great poem, that it teaches a lot).
And what organizes the brain system in the first place, if we think for example about the baby's brain, is its learning, which continues throughout life (it is not management that is the organizing force of the organization, but learning that creates organization or system). And we know that the more areas in the brain learning activates, the more effective it is, not less. The baby does not learn separately vision, movement, sensation, hearing, planning, interactions, emotion, motivations, etc., but learns them precisely - and only - together. Just as the economy does not work in separate sectors but rather succeeds from connecting sectors, or in globalization - precisely in connecting countries. The thought that man is built like a planning body - and therefore the will (which is a kind of factor and first cause) turns into planning along with intelligence from the senses that turns into management that turns into action - is an incorrect mechanical picture: man learns the will itself. Learns pleasure itself. Dopamine constantly forces him to learn, not to enjoy. He is not addicted to pleasure but to learning. Curiosity kills the cat nine times. And it is also what caused the eating from the tree of knowledge (the prohibition itself!), not sexual desire. It is the reason it's hard to resist. Sexuality itself stems from curiosity. Therefore good parenting causes a person to enjoy intellectual learning, even though for others mathematics is suffering, because it's boring - that is, not curious. Interest is the most important thing a parent gives a child: where the learning mechanism's interest is directed (this too is learned, but it is more basic than will, which is only derived from interest, or from learning how to behave and what to pursue). A person needs to eat - but parents teach him what is tasty. And what is disgusting. And he can die of hunger if required to eat worms. Schopenhauer was wrong when he thought that will is the basic phenomenon, or Freud with the drives. Learning is stronger than any will. Hence the importance of parents, as initializers of learning.
Therefore the best way to think about the brain is as a system of directions and evaluations, and not as an information system. What's important for a manager is not to increase communication between parts of the organization, but the transfer of motivations and directions: what is needed, what is possible, what is the opportunity, what is the threat, what is an important example for the future - and even more importantly: what is important, and what should be appreciated. Not just transferring certain knowledge, what happened, but what should and needs to be done - and how (but not as instructions, but as learning and direction and persuasion). That is, the "what is needed" is not something the manager dictates from above, but something the organization transfers within itself - it is its blood system, or nervous system. This is what flows in it: directions. And the integration of these directions is learning: what knows how to take directions from all parts of the system and integrate them. What processes the "what is needed" and negotiates it and convinces and is convinced and is swept away and organizes. The brain receives directions from all parts of the system - and direction not only means information and hints from all the senses, but mainly ideas of what needs to be done, tendencies and desires and attention - and then as part of its interaction, one of all these tendencies takes over, and it acts in a certain direction. Or thinks a certain thought from among all the thoughts competing for its attention. Or learns in a certain direction from all the directions in which it is possible to learn from something. Or writes a certain sentence from among all the possible sentences it was capable of thinking about. The more such sentences there are, the better the writing becomes, not worse. The more the system is able to hold within it more possibilities and directions, and it is richer, the smarter it is. And not the faster and more efficient it is and converges to find what to say. Philosophy is an excellent exercise for the brain to see a comprehensive view, hence its importance for learning. Hence also the importance of it being interdisciplinary, omniscient. And not a narrow academic expert (that's the trouble).
Therefore philosophical questions are always holistic: touching everything. And this is actually the sign that the question is philosophical, and not that it has no practical application - learning is very practical, and so is language, and so on. All important philosophers had applications in science and technology. Descartes in the scientific revolution, for science is knowledge, including the empirical idea and the rationalist idea that came out of it. Kant in the physical revolution of the twentieth century, and even before that in the theoretical revolution in the sciences of the 19th century (evolutionary theory, abstraction in mathematics), which moved to more abstract and independent perceptual categories. And Wittgenstein had many applications in the information and computing and communication revolution. All of these took ideas that were just beginning to grow in their days and gave them a solid structure ready for wholesale operation - as learning methods for the system. That is, they took questions and made them general. In fact, philosophy is always one idea, which has almost no meaning, from being so abstract (learning for us), but it becomes general in that it is learned in detail in every possible field, and cannot be separated from any field. It sticks to everything and therefore unifies everything. Therefore creativity in philosophy is not in connecting two unrelated fields or two unrelated ideas, as happens in less holistic fields, but in finding a new way in which everything is connected. New glue.
This is the reason that philosophy is so sticky in thinking and so difficult to separate (except in historical comparison, that is, through learning development) and it becomes so self-evident to the point that it is difficult to get out of it and see things through another philosophy. It is difficult to express another philosophy at all except through a previous philosophy (for example yours). Even in the love of wisdom, the glue becomes one flesh. The only way to understand another philosophy is to develop into another form of thinking, that is, to learn. But there is no way to jump from one comprehensive perception to another comprehensive perception. This is not a possibility of the brain like a computer can switch between operating systems. You can only develop between philosophies. Because you can always learn one thing, but you cannot learn "everything". The existence of rules stems from their becoming details in a learning process. What is difficult is to meet people who are in a previous philosophy, and believe it was discovered yesterday (to them, from heaven, or from a book) - these are the philosophical zealots, the preachers and disseminators on their own behalf, who have turned it into a religion. Academia is full of Wittgenstein zealots and his school, rabbis and their disciples, who hold yesterday's newspaper as holy scripture and are sure they discovered America. These will be the last to discover learning, but also the last to speak in its name. The power of intellect sometimes increases the strength of the glue - and the result is a congealed brain. On the other hand, the computer will find it difficult to think philosophically, because if it is in hardware, it will be too difficult to change, and the connecting glue will become part of the processor, and if in software, it will be too easy to change, and there will be no adherence. Therefore only a learning computer, which is between these extremes, will be able to be a philosopher computer. End.
What are dimensions of size?
Is it still possible that man stands at the center of the universe? For this purpose, one must understand in what sense there is a center in the universe at all, which spatially has no center, and perhaps no boundary. And also temporally it probably has no end, and perhaps no beginning. But if we look at what we do know about the universe we discover a strange phenomenon: on a logarithmic scale, man is suspiciously close to the center (a little above it, but we don't know if we haven't missed a few orders of magnitude upwards - and this makes us suspect that we have). If we look in terms of orders of magnitude, between the smallest thing - Planck length - to the largest - the entire universe (or between the shortest period of time after the Big Bang - Planck time - to the expected lifespan of the universe, despite the uncertainty in this), we find that we are in a pretty good place in the middle (approximations for us are meter and second, and it's no coincidence we measure by them). In fact, orders of magnitude are the only sense that exists for location in the universe, especially after we perceive it as a developing and complexifying system (becoming complex), like a learning system, and not as a flat and statically essential system, like the shell of language (the universe as information, which is never lost and never created). In viewing the system as static we are simultaneously very small, relative to the entire universe, or very large, relative to elementary physics - and in fact there is no sense to size in direct relation to the size of the system itself, but only in relation to its depth, which is its dimensions.
Let's ask ourselves: where is complexity in the universe? The basic assumption of astronomy is that the universe is uniform and lacks information on the largest scale, and therefore it looks the same from everywhere. Also on the smallest scale there is no information at all, but only atomistic elements (which can also be strings, not necessarily atoms) lacking complex properties, that is, deep, and almost no information exists (maybe a qubit). It is simple from above and simple from below, where abstract and simple laws of physics rule, which somehow create complexity in the middle (and precisely there). And so also in terms of time, there was no information at the moment of creation of the universe in the Big Bang, and there will be no meaningful information at its end, no matter what end, but complexity is in the middle. And let's remember that information is after all just a linguistic idea, so the more correct idea is that learning is in the middle precisely, and so we can understand what complexity is at all, and solve the paradox of complexity (for on the one hand noise is not complexity, despite being a lot of random information, and on the other hand neither is absolute and simple order - it's in the middle. So where is complexity? And perhaps it is not correct to understand complexity using the idea of information?). The problem of complexity is simple: why does complexity not just increase, as we go up orders of magnitude in the universe, if we are composing it from more and more system parts, that is, there are more and more combinations? Why up there do we go back to simplicity?
If the world is like language, then the longer the book, and there are more possible combinations, complexity should only increase with orders of magnitude. But for some reason in the orders of magnitude rising above us complexity actually decreases gradually, to the point that it is possible to describe the universe as a whole using equations, and its uniformity grows. And so also in the large orders of magnitude of time, towards the end of the universe, nothing really develops in it anymore, and all "meaningful" information is lost (the signal versus the noise). This is despite the fact that thermodynamically it becomes completely random in heat death or in the decay of protons (or it becomes uniform in contraction or a big rip, and so on), that is, it only contains more and more information and is less compressed. In the linguistic measurement the universe is maximal at its end, but in the learning measurement the universe decays. Who is right?
Let's ask: in what sense is a human brain more complex than a galaxy? Only in that it takes into account learning in the system. A galaxy as a system does not learn, even if it contains many brains within it. A huge cluster of galaxies, in which they are small points, is less complex than a single galaxy only if complexity is not building a combination, but development and learning. The universe as a whole may contain complex balancing mechanisms (or perhaps a simple balancing mechanism - the formula of everything - that creates complex balancing mechanisms within it), but it learns less than one miserable brain. The very existence and possibility of theoretical physics shows the essential simplicity that exists in the "everything" that is much simpler than a human detail (and therefore there is no theoretical biology, or theoretical brain sciences, or theoretical cultural equations).
Complexity (and therefore we ourselves) appears only in the center of the orders of magnitude of the universe, and the very existence of the equations of physics ensures that this is not just our observer bias, existing in certain orders of magnitude (if we were an atom we would not be a learning system, and we would not notice complex systems on our scale. And if we were the size of the universe the time it would take us to develop would exceed the lifespan of the universe, greater by orders of magnitude than its age). Therefore our being i-n-s-i-d-e the universe, and not at its base or at its most general level (for example: being the entire universe, when it is within us) is not some random property, but necessary. The great distance between us - perhaps the maximum (and therefore we are in the middle) - from the two farthest orders of magnitude of the system (the smallest and the largest) is what gives enough room for creating complexity in the middle. A level or two (or ten) above the strings there isn't much, and so also ten orders of magnitude below the size of the entire universe (the intention of course is in orders of magnitude, not to the size of the observable universe, which is perhaps part of an infinite universe in space, but not infinite in its orders of magnitude - as complexity - but rather quite finite - only a few dozen. And the base of the logarithm, if it is reasonable, say if it is natural, does not change the essence here. And of course does not change the centrality - our being in the middle of the scale).
We have here a very deep hint (...), which makes one wonder whether the universe might indeed be built - if not planned - to create complexity like ours precisely (more orders of magnitude would perhaps create even more complexity than ours, because there would be more distance in the middle). The size of the cell, in the orders of magnitude of the universe, that is, the size of life - is what creates primary learning, while the Earth as a whole, larger by several orders of magnitude, is also a rather primary learning system (which messes up not infrequently and goes out of balance and feedback loop, like in extinctions or global warming), and we are somewhere in the center of orders of magnitude, where the most complex thing today is a brain or city. And we know very well that the complexity of a system can be less than the sum of its components, for the solar system is already markedly much less complex than a brain, and also chemical reactions are much less complex than the quantum world. Because complexity is not composition - but a derivative of learning. That is, its existence is not a primary phenomenon but a product of the more basic learning phenomenon. What is the most basic project of humanity? To increase complexity and create a system even more complex than a brain, for example an intergalactic culture or superior intelligence (in the Holocaust, for example, the Nazis drastically reduced the cultural complexity of Europe).
We understand why we need the orders of magnitude smaller than us to create complexity, but why do we need the orders of magnitude larger than us? What does it contribute to us that there are so many orders of magnitude above us in the universe? Well, it is possible that in the future we will discover a learning law of nature that places complexity more precisely in the center of the system (and thus perhaps we can guess how many orders of magnitude really exist in the universe above us), but even without this, and without physical laws that take into account orders of magnitude, we see that in order to create complexity we need a lot of redundancy. There exist many organisms to create evolution, and many neurons to create a brain, and many human beings to create humanity - we need at least ten orders of magnitude, and probably preferably more (that is, in the quantity of units, not in their size), and when the universe is large enough there is enough room in it for different experiments, until some of them succeed in creating complexity. Complexity is always created from a huge multiplicity - real excess - of units.
But the truth is that this too is an excuse, which explains ten or at most twenty orders of magnitude, and not thirty or forty, which may separate us from the entire universe. The truth is that complexity is created very very gradually - because it is not gradual but has jumps and regressions. Ten orders of magnitude barely suffice to create complexity from truly basic units, but complexity is not linear because it is not composition, but it is a process, and therefore not always in every rise in orders of magnitude does complexity also monotonically increase, but sometimes there are bottlenecks, through which only part of the complexity from below penetrates upwards (for example only a little of the quantum penetrates to chemistry), and therefore more orders of magnitude are needed from below, and symmetrically probably also from above. There is something in the huge space above us that allows our complexity, without the entire system collapsing, but having room for it. Otherwise the universe is in danger of becoming programmed, that is, too orderly, and becoming fixed on some rigid and uninteresting order. And why is rigid not interesting? Because it does not develop and does not learn.
Complexity is not only a good thing but a dangerous thing, and orders of magnitude protect the universe from its components, so they don't turn it into a machine or structure. Humans, or any other learner, are very far from taking control of the universe. And this is what prevents the universe from becoming a computer, because just as excess noise is destructive to learning, so is excess order. Size protects us from strings and their simplicity, and protects the universe from humans and their complexity. The complexity of the brain - or body - is made possible precisely because it is not the size of the entire Earth, otherwise it would not have enough room to develop. Learning needs space within which it can exist, it needs to be inside the system, and such an inside with many "dimensional" depths, created from orders of magnitude of depth. If the entire universe were the size of a cell, life could not develop, and it certainly needs to be very very far from a cell to allow evolution, not only because evolution needs many cells, but because it needs to distance itself from the overall simplicity of the system - from the homogeneity and physicality (the simple equational description) of the universe as a whole. Otherwise it will not allow complexity within it, because many transitions and orders of magnitude are needed to separate high complexity from low complexity, that is, between learning and equations and basic components. Learning needs depth and not space. Derivatives turn area into line, and methods need multiple size dimensions in time (and not just a lot of time) to really work. The influence of high methods is not only slow (like high derivatives) in progression in time, but slow and non-linear in the dimensions of progression in time.
Indeed, it is possible that the existence of so many orders of magnitude above us is explained by the fact that we simply haven't had time to grow, because learning is performed by building from lower orders of magnitude to higher ones (not sure! and the opposite idea is revolutionary). If galaxies are expected to evolve into living creatures, then their evolution is perhaps only in its first second (out of billions of years), and hence there should be some correlation between the order of magnitude in time and that in space of complexity. But there is a circular argument here as in the anthropic principle (we, as we are, haven't had time to grow), and an assumption that complexity is created from composition more than from redundancy, that is, from the amount of realization of possibilities (what has already been composed, in the orders of magnitude below us, for example our composition from organs or cells) more than from the amount of unrealized possibilities (what can be complex, which depends on how large the system is in the orders of magnitude above us, and can contain many humans, or many planets like Earth that allow different types of life, and so on). But if so, the situation is reversed, and there is much greater importance to the existence of many orders of magnitude above us, because the number of orders of magnitude in the universe cannot cope with the number of possible combinations, which grows exponentially with the number of components, but can only allow a very small part of them, and therefore it is clear that the universe contains only a small part of its possibilities (for example, different life possibilities, or different minds). Therefore, a learning system that wants many combinations, or (preferably!) development possibilities, needs to invest in redundancy (size of the container for different experiments) no less than in composition (the complexity of each experiment).
Let's think for example who we are, and what is the source of the psychophysical problem as it will be understood in our time. There are actually two complex systems within us, whose complexity is inherently different. On one hand we are composed of many cells, that is, from a programmed system whose logic is building from smaller components, like Lego, and the connection between the components is rigid, and operates through top-down control. This is not a learning system. On the other hand we are also composed of many neurons, that is, from a system whose logic is redundancy and much freer connections between components, and therefore the connections are much more networked, and we contain it within us, like a kind of box that allows it to develop in an unprogrammed and not top-down ordered way. And this is a learning system. The first system is similar to composition from lower dimensions, and the second system is similar to containment that higher dimensions provide and allow: for our neurons - we are the universe. In contrast: the body does not learn, only evolution does, in which indeed the connections (between different organisms) are not rigid and not ordered and controlled from above and there is enormous redundancy, and what allows this is the box that is Earth. The first system is like a computer, and the second system is like the Internet.
And what we see is how difficult it is to create a skull, and how late it happened in the history of evolution - that is, how difficult it is to contain the inside of a learning system. A lot of energy and a supportive environment and nurturing gardening and time for development and so on need to be provided, and we see this also in global warming: it is very difficult to maintain a supportive environment for a learning system, even at the planetary level. Earth has known many extinctions that almost ended evolution, and it is probably quite rare to create a learning planet. Therefore, there is importance to the large dimensions of the system, because they allow more environments, and more chance of containing a learning system. Perhaps a learning system can be built in much smaller dimensions, combinatorially, for example a quantum computer, but the conditions of a supportive environment for a quantum computer are such that this box has not happened. Even a learning cellular computer has not happened, and we do not have an implementation of a neural network at the DNA level, because the control that life requires was contrary to the containment that learning requires, and there is not enough redundancy in a cell. We see this also at the level of social organization: it took quite a long time until it managed to give up control and create within it the inside of a learning system, for example capitalism or modern science, and if effective cultural learning systems happened throughout history - for example the Golden Age in Athens or in the Renaissance - this supportive environment was short-lived and very fragile (and of course also required economic prosperity in parallel).
If so, what was the great achievement of humans - the great revolution? Enlarging the skull. It contains many more neurons, and the connections between them are more open and flexible and less controlled by the genome, which is the cellular control mechanism, and thus the many orders of magnitude of composition (from body cells) became many orders of magnitude of learning (since neurons are cells, and there are quite a few orders of magnitude of them). The lower orders indeed give a system, but the higher orders give the "inside the system", and this inside is what allows learning. As opposed to building. And indeed we see in the universe that in large dimensions the components are less and less connected to each other (for example only by gravity and at intergalactic distances), that is, as one approaches the top there is more and more freedom in connections, while at the bottom quantum entanglement and strong forces bind everything together.
In a certain sense, time also serves as such a containment box, because the orders of magnitude of time allow possibilities to develop. That is: the more time has passed, the more possibilities have already been realized, in a binding way (like cells), and the orders of magnitude of time as a whole - the size of the time box of the universe's life - allow redundancy of many possibilities that can be tried, in a free way (like neurons). Here too, as in space, we must resist the anthropic principle, which finds the time in which we are as special, while begging the question (us). When development is an exponential function (which follows from the very number of orders of magnitude in the universe, because order of magnitude is exponential, and if there were none there would only be linear development) - every moment in it seems special. The acceleration is always unprecedented. It seems to us that our era is full of events compared to previous eras, but so will the future see regarding our era, that not much happened in it, because the length of time of measurement itself will change. If we no longer measure periods in billions of years but in years, but how will a computer that works in picoseconds see us? What happened in one second of ours? Nothing. Long, boring and slow life like evolution. A day will seem to it like a million years, and our days are indeed similar to each other.
If so, where does the admiration of the past come from, that long and boring period? Why does the literature of our time always seem banal and linguistically inferior to us, compared to the high literature of the past? Not because of the past literature itself, as it was thousands of years ago, but precisely because of our time acceleration, which causes us to look at the past in a logarithmic view. From the universe's perspective, the past is short, and the future is long, and larger than it by orders of magnitude. But from our perspective, the past is long, by orders of magnitude, and the future is short. Why? Because we do not look at it in orders of magnitude, but in the distance of time that has passed, and then the present is short, but if we examined how many orders of magnitude exist in time itself, how many Planck times are in each transfer of our protein molecule, and how many molecular times are in each second of ours, and how many seconds are in our lives, and how many lifespans of ours are in evolution, then we would see that there is no point in looking at the length (just like in space) but only at the dimension (and by this is meant here always order of magnitude, dimension of size). In this sense, we simply choose to look at the past in different orders of magnitude than at the present (otherwise we will not be able to survey it all at a glance, on the horizon distances become shorter - in orders of magnitude). We look at how our finger covers the moon.
Therefore, it is not correct to look at the Big Bang as some moment of formation that is far away in time, and that built the true laws of nature, but that this moment of formation happens at every moment in the universe, only that it is too fast, and because temperatures are too low, it does not come to expression, but the crystallization of the laws of nature from higher and more symmetrical laws happens all the time. The Big Bang was not a special moment of the creation of the laws of nature, but they are the same laws of nature, which are created all the time - in the Big Bang only the universe was created. That is, what was actually created? The dimensions - orders of magnitude - themselves, the expanding universe. In the beginning the universe was indeed small by many many orders of magnitude, but the laws were the same laws. The smallness of the universe only exposed them at their deep root, and in fact if we could shrink ourselves enough - in time and space - they would be exposed to our eyes all the time and everywhere. Depth exists in everything. This is the essence of depth, which is different from distance - in time and space, not because it is an additional dimension, but because depth here is the very phenomenon of dimensions, that is, their multiplicity of orders of magnitude, as opposed to the uniformity of measuring distances of time and space through which we are used to looking at the world, and hence the distortions of perspective.
Let's return to the question of ancient literature (which is a parable for the question of ancient culture). We read a line of poetry from the ancient world, for example from the Bible, and are amazed (and the more poetic parts are earlier, for example in the Torah itself, the more amazed we are. And the poetic parts in the Torah are older than it itself - this is the feeling they create. Why?). The imagery there seems so exciting to us, precisely because so much time has passed, and we do not fully understand the language, and then we are left with some vague impression of deep intention, which stems from the tectonic changes that the language itself undergoes with time, of the drifting of the ground beneath our understanding, so that we come to visit our familiar childhood home, but after a geological era, everything seems to us under a thick impression of estrangement, and we touch the edge of the limit of our understanding and identification, and go through a deep experience (not as a cliché, this is the essence of depth). What is actually happening here?
An idiom that was completely routine and common in the past, and the words in it are no longer fully understood, becomes a sublime symbolist image, which scratches the edge of the limit of our linguistic and cognitive understanding (thinking has also changed, and also the most common images of things, and not only because of the change in everyday reality but because of cognitive drift and psychological transformations). That is, what creates the strongest effect is not what was written then, but the time that has passed since, which is like a huge and distorting prism, but only through reading what was written then can we see its action. This is not the action of poetry then, but the action of language and consciousness from then until today, which we discover through reading the ancient text, which is the enormous, sublime tectonic change, composed of countless depth changes, and hence its enormous and amazing depth. Not to mention the Book of Job, which precisely because it yields a slightly foreign Hebrew, it is at a higher literary level (funny). The magic - from the Land of Oz. The Bible is what shows us the enormous change in human consciousness, and it is what exposes it like a spiritual archaeologist, and hence its power, because the enormous power is of change and development themselves. It's simply amazing, and we will never be able to understand and grasp it fully, to the depth - and hence the depth. It is not distance that created depth, but learning, development, that is, the action composed of orders of magnitude in time, where each large mega-learning movement, in large orders of magnitude, is composed of countless small and tiny micro-learnings, in low orders of magnitude, and each method is expressed in many levels below it, which are the dimensions. Through the ancient world we observe learning itself. And are amazed.
The very different dimensions of change in consciousness, from the moment, through the day, and to the millennium, are what create the depth of change, not the distance. The millennium only allows more size dimensions. And therefore if we are precise in seeing how much the distance in time affects literary sublimity, we will see that it is a logarithmic scale and not length. A thousand years do not affect ten times more than a hundred years, and so do ten thousand years compared to a thousand. A galaxy is not amazing by billions of billions etc. more than one star. How much more amazing is a galaxy cluster than a galaxy? The amazement is the human instinct of fear and standing before an abyss, that is, before depth (and therefore creation also begins from the abyss).
If so, this is the source of the power of the ancient myth. It is a myth because it is ancient, and not because it is written more mythically or literarily. Someone who writes a myth today will look like a joke, but in another thousand or ten thousand years, his myth will gain enormous power (the source of the power of myths themselves in real time in the past is that they were written long after their formation, including their initial linguistic shaping). If so, where does the depth come from? Not from the distance itself, not from the accumulation itself of changes, but from the different possibilities of changes, that is, from the spaces into which language could develop, and more than that - from the dimensions of these spaces. We, who are at a certain distance, only see an example of the realization of these possibilities, which gives us a clue to perceiving the size of the space of possibilities, to understanding the containing dimensions of language and culture, and not just their composing dimensions. Ancient poetry shows us how large culture is, how enormously dimensional is the space in which it operates. The change of the ancient, concrete idiom into something almost abstract and daring in the linguistic connection it makes (from our perspective), is due to the size of the box containing these changes, which are quite free and not controlled from above - and in fact are created in a learning development that is not only long but also deep (that is, large also in its dimensions). The Book of Zohar is an enormous laboratory for understanding this process, and therefore it chose an ancient, unique, translational language. Because it tried and succeeded in creating a myth in real time, although of course its power grew greatly with the centuries (part of the power of ancient Christianity stemmed from the fact that it was translational, that the Hebrew origin was lost, and therefore it could succeed already from a distance of only a hundred years).
If the literary change from the past was only linguistic in nature, then it would only be cumulative and superficial, like the drift of mutations. But since even the change in language itself is learning in nature, not to mention the learning change in consciousness, the different possibilities create depths, and therefore the size of the dimensions is what determines. The accumulation is of learning and not of change. That is: it's not that there are more combinations with time, but that there is more application of methods on top of methods, and more application of a method on itself, again and again (not like in combinatorial algebra but like in differential equations). Therefore, with time the accumulation is actually less and less random, less mutational, and more and more directional, because the method is a kind of super direction, direction of direction (therefore it is like a high derivative), direction of direction. Learning is what gathers possibilities, and not just checks possibilities, and therefore there is also converging evolution and not just exploding, and there is optimization and not just exploration. Therefore the universe must be finite in terms of orders of magnitude relevant to its components, otherwise it would simply be possible to check all possibilities, like in Borges' Library of Babel, and there would be no meaning to learning (not infinite in terms of space itself, as Borges thought, which may be the case even today). The fact that there are a few dozen orders of magnitude that we are within and not millions requires learning, because there is no room to spread out too much, exponentially. For the weak connections of the universe at its high level limit the world of learning to the center of the universe in terms of size dimensions, and gather it there. You can try enough possibilities, but not too many, and not all of them.
What is the ideal number of orders of magnitude for learning? Perhaps we can answer this in a computer simulation, of the development of universes with many and fewer orders of magnitude than ours, or of evolutions, or of minds. Is the ideal mind built from more or fewer orders of magnitude than those that separate us from neurons? And is deep learning correct in that only the number of neurons (or depth of the network) matters, or do the number of orders of magnitude of levels of organization between the neuron and the entire brain matter, no less than how many layers the network has? (That is, this deep hierarchy is only a small part of the true depth, because we notice that this "depth" in "deep" learning is only superficial). In any case, this is the way towards superintelligence that is not just brute force. Because depth is inseparable from learning.
Darkness upon the face of the deep
The computer is darkness. During the twentieth century, it seemed as if it was the century of physics, and this was the main development, but in retrospect it is already clear that the main thing that grew in the 20th century is the computer. Towards the end of the century, again it seemed that the computer is just an introduction to something else, the network, and that this is the truly deep development, and seeing the great future development as that of the computer itself already seemed anachronistic. And from the network grew the social network, which was a short period that it seemed to be the next great development, but then - the computer itself returned. Machine learning is the "return to the computer". And again it seems that the truly deep development was the computer.
What was the network? Was it a connection of computers? Well, not really (only technically, but not essentially). It was a connection of people using the computer (and therefore these, who think of themselves, thought that the social network is the future). And even more than that it was essentially a connection of computers to people. In the past each computer was connected only to the person next to it, but now you can build an application, and connect your computer to all people, and your software is accessible to everyone. In contrast, the connection between computers on the network remained very primitive, rigid, using a programmed language, that is, using inflexible, secure and closed protocols, in a very narrow channel (called communication and information), and each computer essentially computes separately. There was no connection in depth, in essence, in the processing itself, but the connection was loose. Just as the connection between people can be made in language, but it is nothing compared to the thinking within each of them, and they remain very separate entities, and not really connected: the connection between them is much weaker than the connections within them. This is a loose system. And so is the connection between organisms for information transfer, called sex, a much looser connection than the connections within each organism, which are strong connections that turn all its cells into one body. The connections between commercial companies, the economy, are much weaker than the connections within each commercial company itself, and so are between countries and so on (and even between cultures).
In contrast, the network actually proved itself as a slightly stronger connection between people (and replaced most of the previous connections) and even more so between people and the computer, and people can no longer do without their smartphone. Therefore the essence of the Internet, at least today, is not as a system between computers themselves. Browsing the Internet is actually an interface that every person has with every computer connected to the Internet in the world, and the computer is no longer just a personal tool, a personal computer, but an all-human computer. But this is not a truly deep connection, like a brain-computer connection, but still the connection is made using an external side, the interface: the Internet is less inter and more face (hence the success of Face). If the connection is real, there is no other side, but the external side merges with you - and they shall become one flesh.
And in general, what happens inside the computer today - whether it's an operating system or internet or application - is not a kind of brain or other smart system, but a huge bureaucracy. And in this bureaucracy other sites or different applications rarely talk to each other, certainly not in a flexible way, and all communication between them needs to be done using predefined protocols, in very fixed and narrow paths (API, another type of interface, and not interbrain). The connection is through a threshold, that is, language, and is not a deep connection of learning. But why is it so difficult to connect computers into one system?
Well, for the same reason that it was so difficult in the history of evolution to connect cells into a living creature, or that it is difficult to connect humans into a coordinated system, and see communism. Even in our body, where the struggle has long been decided in favor of a strong tight and "organic" connection, it is very difficult to control an individual who thinks only of itself, what is called cancer, or a selfish gene. It is very difficult for species of animals to cooperate, and communism was indeed an experiment in human nature, but a necessary experiment and not one that could be known to fail from the outset. There are animals in nature whose level of cooperation is such that communism would succeed in them (in certain insects this has already happened). In very small groups humans do cooperate, and the matter was never examined in truly large groups, and it was not known that there lies the limit. In retrospect we understand that "according to game theory" it pays for each individual to be a parasite of the group. But in most animals there is no cooperation without direct reward even in small groups like the family, and even in a clearly wasteful and inefficient way for its survival (males who abandon offspring and kill other offspring, animals that do not assist their species at all, enormous waste of resources on males who only fight and kill each other, and more). Humans did show potential for cooperation, because these are repeated games (that is, it was possible to find a mathematical justification for communism to succeed, if it had succeeded).
In this sense, Marx was a groundbreaking thinker, in that he described a s-y-s-t-e-m as the basis of everything. For him, the system is what determines the concepts within it, similar to language or paradigm, or to the entire world of systems in 20th century philosophy, while his mistake was that he chose a specific system, the economic one, and erred in understanding it. If he had spoken about a general system, which could be nationalism, communication, religion, language, culture (and also the economy), then he would have been more important than Wittgenstein, and he would have been the one to make the leap between the concepts of the individual (Kant) to the concepts of the system, which establish the understanding of reality and are not created from it (Wittgenstein also erred in choosing one system, language. But it was general enough to fit almost any system, until it arrived, in the irony of the history of philosophy, back to the brain - that is, back to the individual - but precisely there it was understood that it's not language, dummy, but learning). Marx's success and philosophical fertility in the twentieth century stemmed precisely from choosing a system as his philosophical basis.
Another significant mistake of Marx is the lack of understanding of the relationship between the system and its parts. Marx chose conspiratorial thinking, as if a certain part of the system controls the system. As if Wittgenstein had claimed that there are some linguists, perhaps the poets, who are the legislators of language, and ensure that it serves them through meetings of the language committee, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And if someone claims this today (and it's funny that there are such people, for example in the American left) it is a Marxist influence. But a fundamental understanding of a system will clarify that there is no part in it that controls it from above, and that even the capitalist himself is a victim of capitalist brainwashing, which causes him to think that only money matters, and he is not the one planning from above how to exploit and brainwash the workers, because he too is within the system, and there is no one outside the system establishing it. The paradox of the system is that a system like a state may go to war, even though no one in the state wants war, but it is beneficial for everyone to cooperate with it, including the ruler himself as his way to survive, even though he doesn't want it. The system will do what no part separately wants to happen.
Who turned Marx truly systemic, and this indeed happened only in the 20th century, was the Frankfurt School, which understood that capitalism is a culture, and generalized culture to a systemic idea. If Marx had a deeper systemic understanding he would not have been terrified by the system he discovered, the economic one, and would not have imagined it as what it is not - that is, an organic system. The too-tight connections he saw in the system he hated (for example, the control and programming of thinking), caused him to create a mirror system against it, which is also programmed and planned, and therefore cannot work.
In retrospect, Marx chose the wrong system. Today, the systems whose brainwashing is the most terrible and crude are the state, the media, politics, and these are the ones that waste people's minds with false consciousness. While systems whose brainwashing is more subtle and covert, such as sex culture or money culture, cause less damage to human consciousness, and less quarrels and disagreements and lack of cooperation - because they are connecting systems, not dividing ones like them. They provide people with temptations and not ideology. They are looser, and less possessing control mechanisms. They are more like a network, and less like a computer, more like a brain, and less like a body. Hence their power and adaptability as learning systems. If so, is the computer actually an outdated system, because it is a programmed system, and in fact its power is less, and so is the potential of its development?
No, because the next stage will be to create a truly essential network of computers, with deep connection between them, and this does not mean a super or distributed computer, but a dispersed computer. With machine learning, and with network learning of the machine, a potential for a new system of computers is opening up, in which the connections between them are not narrow linguistic, but learning and deep. Today, every learning network mainly talks to itself, but in the future - in an economic model of thinking for payment - it will be possible to connect many specialized functions, each of which is very narrowly smart, in a specific task, to a whole network of capabilities working in true cooperation. Here too, the security problem, which is the problem of the parasite and cancer, will delay the creation of the more open network, but the problem is solvable. A vast multitude of deep networks will be able to start connecting to a global brain network, which will work exactly like the global Internet, where if someone in the world has a certain ability - it is accessible to everyone (and this time it is a cognitive ability of a computer). Humans can only talk to each other, and cannot really think together - that is, the connection is a slave to language - while computers will really be able to learn together. Then the computer will pose a completely different challenge to man, and man will have to deal truly with the spiritual interiority of the computer - which is darkness.
And I wish that would be the end.
Why does sex reduce violence?
Why are the greatest enemies of an individual of a species in nature often precisely members of its own species (this is not a human phenomenon at all, and in fact it is much less severe in humans than among other predators)? Why does this inefficiency survive (killing cubs for example), and is it indeed inefficiency, that is, waste resulting from the division of the system (into player-organisms), which always descends to an unsuccessful equilibrium of game theory, in a kind of tragic malfunction? What is the systemic role of evil and violence, for example of the lion? In a "systemic-linguistic" view, the answer is equilibrium.
In economics and game theory and climate and ecology and biology and network theory (for example, flow in a transportation network) and language and international relations and so on - that is, in systemic fields - equilibrium usually has a positive meaning. Because this is an easy way to understand the system - in its static form. Where it converges. Language is agreed upon, prices reach equilibrium and become agreed upon, the international system avoids wars, and ecology is "preserved". The positive role of the evil lion is to regulate the system, to create a negative feedback loop against the sheep, and thus maintain its stability, with as many paralyzing feedback mechanisms as possible (this is also the greatness of democracy, which is mainly to prevent one person from becoming too strong, hence the separation of powers and political deadlock). Positive feedback mechanisms are dangerous because they cause loss of control and exponential explosion, unlike equilibrium, which is the natural state of the system, that is, the good.
However - equilibrium is the evil. Because it is what sticks learning and development, and its real name is stagnation, or entropy. In a learning view and not a linguistic one, the lion contributes to the system precisely in its constant push against the sticking of evolution, against equilibrium and ecology, because it creates constant evolutionary pressure, in the competition between pursuer and pursued and in the arms race between defense and attack. And so is the terrible behavior of males - against other males, against females, and against cubs. The bad and cruel competition creates constant pressure within the species itself, which causes it not to degenerate, but to a constant arms race. While species that have no evolutionary pressure from within or upon them are the ones that degenerate and become extinct, when the crisis comes that disrupts their comfortable and accustomed equilibrium.
The greatness of humanity is the sexual arms race, that is, the non-violent one, because of the exceptional sexual madness of humans, who have no mating season, because they are always in heat. Human males seek prestige and constant favor with females, and not to kill other males, and especially they aspire to beautiful possessions, which women love. And they too of course beautify themselves. The sexual arms race created the arms race towards beauty. Contrary to self-deprecation (which stems precisely from this!), humans are a significantly less violent species than other predators, and most of their violence is out-group, unlike the in-group violence of others. Killing cubs or within the pack is unthinkable. Even cultures that sanctify killing - it is because it is beautiful in their eyes, meaning beauty is the real mechanism. And certainly it is the more dominant evolutionary mechanism of humans, similar to many birds. And beauty is not just symmetry - and not equilibrium - but contains an element of internal development, that is, learning. Beauty has always changed - this is not a modern phenomenon - and was not constant in any culture. The beautiful is a moving target, and its main definition is its ability to be both a target and moving, unlike the ideal. The purpose of knowledge that we will not know - also in the sexual sense. There is no end to infinity.
In modern thinking and science we have moved away from the Aristotelian purpose, because its fixedness outside the system seemed circular to us, and lacking explanatory power, and of almost metaphysical quality (and alas, anti-secular). This is a non-moving goal, and therefore not beautiful. But the idea of purpose within the system, within development for example, is an idea we lack. Although the purpose - which is the organization of the system towards something - is not fixed somewhere, there is internal organization within the system, "towards" - without the thing towards which we are organizing. If so, what is the difference between this and Kant's purposiveness without purpose? The very understanding that even the ideas themselves are subject to beauty. That even Kant convinces because he is beautiful (and subject to judgment!). We learn that this is a beautiful idea, and there is no thinking without learning (thinking is a secondary phenomenon to the phenomenon of learning which is the basic one, beneath thinking). We have no outside to learning at all, and therefore beauty does not stem from detachment from purpose (which is outside. For example from interest), but it itself is an internal idea that is part of learning. Learning is what defines what is considered beautiful, what is interesting, that is, what the interest is. At first learning is within the system, but it takes over the system, which eventually is within it. It no longer sits on the infrastructure of the system, but it itself, in its maturity as an idea, is the infrastructure on which the system sits. And then purpose is an internal phenomenon, which is only projected outwards, hence its metaphysical flavor, as if it exists outside the system and organizes it with strings by which it pulls it from the outside. No, these strings are only projections of itself towards the horizon.
The messianic idea, for example, is not apocalypse, that is, a specific scenario, the purpose of history sitting at the end of time and waiting, as understood in Christianity, but messianism is a powerful internal religious driver in the present, of aspiration beyond the end of time, within time (unlike personal mysticism, which is outside time). Messianism is part of the mechanism of religious learning, hence its vitality, as creating organization towards... (that undefined thing, that area of interest, which is only hinted at) - in the present. And this organization is messianism. Another example: we will not claim that the universe is built and organized for the purpose of creating life and complexity and learning, for example in advance planning, from outside, but that the aspiration for life and the development of complexity and learning methods are the very organization of it. They are the internal essence of the organization itself (this is not an explanation, nor a description, but an understanding, and even - a deepening). Mathematics was not planned from above to come out beautiful and perfect, but the very mathematicalness is this beautiful organization. History was not planned towards economic and scientific progress for example, but this very progress is history. Art does not aspire to beauty, but beauty is at the foundation of the phenomenon of art. The brain is not organized towards learning, but learning is what organizes the brain. It creates the very idea of towards. Purposiveness stems from learning itself.
Humanity discovered beauty because humans are learning creatures, and therefore their interest is a moving target. It's not the new women themselves (or the new theories themselves) that attract, but the novelty itself that causes attraction, because it is part of the learning mechanism. And if it is empty novelty, that is, disconnected from learning, then it is less attractive - because it is less of a novelty. Learning, like all philosophy, is ultimately defined by itself, but like all philosophy its power is not in logic, but in the way it reorganizes the world. That is: in the different way a learning universe looks from a linguistic universe. In a linguistic universe the system is the justification for the system, and defined from within itself, and in a learning universe the development of the system is the justification for the system, and this development is defined from within itself. And this is the reason it is not just empty development, but learning (from the very act of definition, that is, the structural organization).
Unlike the idea of mere development, which indicates progress without internal direction, the idea of learning is built on internal directionality which is not only progress but also accumulation, that is, expansion and deepening. This is not just a dimension of change and external organization of the system, as in development towards some direction, but a dimension of internal organization. Development in itself can be internal, but it does not stem from an internal system of organizing development, and if it does then there is no difference between it and learning, and it is just a semantic game. If so, the learning purpose is always temporary and not fixed, and stems from the current internal state of the system, but it exists as an organizing principle, and this is the direction (like a man, who is a creature organized towards femininity, and not necessarily towards a woman. And like an example, which is an organizing principle towards something, which it is only an example of). Learning is an arrow outwards, but this outside is not outside (as in regular purpose), but inside. Unlike mere development, there is indeed an organizing principle, there is indeed an arrow, only that it does not exist somewhere, in advance, but that the very use of the arrow - is part of the learning.
Evolution can learn without a predetermined direction, but there cannot be evolution as learning - without directions. External direction is not needed, but without internal use of directions, there is no learning, but just drifting, which will eventually get stuck in some equilibrium, until catastrophe comes and takes it out of there. This is the systemic view, according to which it is not clear at all why there is evolution, and certainly - as learning. Because there is no mechanism of internal directions, but only response to external constraints. Well, not true, the internal constraint is the strongest: competition within the species, aspirations within the individual, internal incentives and not response to external incentives, the possibilities within the genome and not the constraints on the organism, desire - and not pleasure or breasts. Perhaps instead of calling it purposiveness without purpose it should be called purposiveness without externality (Kant never freed himself from the noumenon, that is, from the very external).
Note: all good systems operate very far from equilibrium. And all bad systems operate very close to equilibrium. Good systems are internally driven, and bad systems are externally driven, and function as a regulating container. These learn - and these educate and discipline. This was the philosophical mistake from time immemorial: the thought that organization means structure, that is, statics, and the preference of the constant and eternal over the changing, which was always perceived as chaos, and not as a constant organizing action: learning.
If so, learning offers a different view, anti-equilibrium, and pro-evolutionary, according to which systems that are built correctly should always be outside a local minimum, a point of balance, or a state of nature, and move away from any convergence to a limit - from any point - and escape to the line and space, that is, to the horizon. This is how science and economics and literature are built, for example (language is a poor model for a system not because it does not develop, but because its consensual and inherently undirected development is too slow and stuck, and is not one of its prominent features. It is a game that tends to equilibrium). And this is how philosophy should have been built too.
Good philosophy is not a framework of thought and strong structure, but rather a shaky structure, which creates ideational development and promotes philosophical learning. We had strong philosophy in the Middle Ages, and even today philosophy is too strong, hence their connection to too strong institutions (the religious establishment, the academic establishment). Engagement with rigid logic is the father of all philosophical degeneration (and it can be seen both in scholasticism and today in analytical philosophy), because the logical method is inferential and not learning. And so is academic scholarship - as opposed to learning. Learning is more purposive than causal, that is, looking forward and not backward, casting itself outward, and not imposed from within, but only driven from within (this is the difference between motivation and cause). The logical cause is mechanical and orderly, and learning is organic - and always in a mess, always in inefficiency, far from any equilibrium, which is an idea designed to calm and put us to sleep, and help us avoid dealing with the complicated dynamics of constant change of the system that creates its complexity - and not as a mess but as constant (adjective) organization (verb) (adverb), and not as a one-time construction (that is: its learning). "Structure" is a philosophical illusion - there is a need to organize and reorganize the system all the time, like walls that if not strengthened and changed and added to, the defense of the city will collapse. There is a need for constant developmental pressure so that the brain or genome or ideas do not degenerate. Knowledge is not an object and thinking is not an object, and if one does not learn and practice, there is no thinking. Learning is the defense force for philosophy. Only it allows philosophy to create and maintain abstract structures. And we all learned it.
Therefore, in a learning view, the basic perception of ecology is dynamic, unlike the static perception of language, which leads to "environmental conservation", while learning is "environmental advancement". Hence also the implication on the climate crisis as an opportunity, from an evolutionary perspective, which is actually good for nature, but bad for humans (and this is its problem!). Lions are beautiful and internally consistent not because they have reached some equilibrium-local-maximum, ideal efficiency as a perfectly balanced predator machine, that is, some purpose, and exhausted learning, but precisely because they are in the middle of their evolutionary development process, and have not rested on their laurels, because constant pressure is applied to them to prey better, because the prey are also improving. Therefore their body is gradually organizing and improving towards the current direction in the arms race, and we even see them in comparison to other animals - which are in the course of development towards other related directions (like the tiger, and even the deer) - in the middle of their developmental momentum, which their body hints at its direction. If we saw the lion from the future, the current lion would look clumsy and ugly, like a dinosaur. The current lion does not show us an ideal, but points us to a direction (hence its beauty. Ideal and idealism is kitsch). It exerts pressure for change and responds to pressure for change, that is, it is all shaped by change, and not by a stable state. While equilibrium, as in physics, is the heat death of the system, that is, the most boring and uniform and uninteresting form. Death is equilibrium, while life is the success of maintaining disequilibrium for a long time. And so it is in cultures, in art, in technology, and even in writing. Equilibrium is the end.
The wisdom of the bagel and who moved the hole in my cheese
What is the most basic shape in nature? It seems this is a philosophical question that could not have been asked since the Greeks. But modern physics again allows us to ask it. First of all, we see that seemingly the answer depends very much on dimensions. Is the basic shape a point, as in an elementary particle, or a line, as in a network, or a loop, as in string theory, or a sheet like a membrane (in the continuation of string theory), or a disk or circle (as in the visible material universe), or a sphere or circle from a higher dimension (like the universe), and so on. That is: the number of dimensions is seemingly a more basic question than the question of the basic shape, because the basic shape like a circle or loop has different expressions in different dimensions. But that's the point: the number of dimensions only creates different expressions for the same basic, circular shape.
Well, is the circle the basis? It seems from topology that this is not the case, but that the most basic shape is the hole. And this is also a prediction for the importance of black holes, as the universe will be understood more and more as defined by its holes, as in topology. The continuations of string theory in the world of elementary particles will be able to deal with holes from higher and higher dimensions, and not just with the loop hole (string), or the sleeve membranes. That is, the basic idea of strings is not that one dimension (loop line) is the basis, instead of a zero-dimensional point - and from there we have already progressed to two dimensions (membrane) and will continue to three dimensions, and so on - but that the hole in the loop is the basis. Because we are talking about shapes that reside in dimensions higher than their own dimensions. That is: unlike shapes in the visible material universe, in which the three-dimensional shape resides in three dimensions, and the universe looks like a three-dimensional box, the sheet is different from a two-dimensional surface in that it is contained in higher dimensions, and the string is different from a line in the same way. And in such cases, we learned from topology that holes in different dimensions are the basis for morphology.
And if the hole is the basis, then this has profound implications for who we are, and for depth itself. First of all, woman is the basic human, not man. In addition, the hole is what creates the within of the system. Eastern philosophy that gives place to nothingness no less than to being, to ainology and not to ontology, should interest us more. With the help of negative attributes, God himself will be understood as a hole - an infinity hole. And so is death, which will be understood as the hole of life and not as its end. The Holocaust as a hole in history, and beauty as a hole in perception, and messianism as a hole in the future, and the learning interest itself is created from a hole. The map of knowledge will no longer seek the unknown outside it, but in holes within it. Therefore it is not about discovery or invention, but about learning: internal filling. The brain does not expand and grow, but fills its cavities, and the soul learns through the right forgetting. A country is measured by the amount of internal holes and spaces it creates for learning and their size (for example the economy), and the advantage of democracy is that it is more hollow, and this is also the advantage of the universe: space. In addition, and perhaps this was the mistake all along the way, the end is not a limit, but a hole
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Continuation