A Conversation Between a Cat and a Circle

Money is defined as what everyone wants. That is, as a mediator of desire, desire that becomes an object. Sexuality is defined as who everyone wants. That is, desire not as a means but as an end, desire that becomes a subject. And therefore the mixing between them arouses so much resistance, and is done in secret (through the institution of marriage). In short, we'll be forced to create a currency of learning, an incentive for learning. To increase intellectual pleasure in the brain until knowledge becomes the new money and creativity becomes the new sexuality

A Peek into the Black Hole of the Circle  (Source)

I dreamed I was a black cat reading interviews in newspapers in my litter box, while going to the bathroom, and asking myself: What, couldn't they give more interesting, original, feline answers? Don't these humans have anything to say, not even one meow? Why is everything so chewed up, and if so - why don't they interview me. The outside world needs the perspective of a cat-circle, only it doesn't leave the house. And I'm jealous of other writers who are asked questions, sometimes even in their living room, and I convene a press conference that is a pajama party - in my bed.

And I promise we'll have fun together and a dream war and pillow terror and an intimate interview that is actually pornographic and crazy scoops, like in reporters' wet dreams, and I prepare to tell the journalists in underwear and the female journalists in nightgowns that like the famous writing desk - for me the bed is the work tool, and they are invited to a rare peek into the creative process (and I just hope not to snore). And I prepare black coffee for them, and a straw instead of a microphone, which will allow whispering questions in my ear in my sleep in turns (careful not to tickle), and then I lie in bed and wait and wait like a black birthday bride, with a crown of shtreimel on my head, and a cat's tail between my legs, and in the middle, like a dark chocolate cake, the circle, so they won't recognize me, waiting for all the guests, including an answer to every question in the world, everything ready for the party - but no one comes.

And I lie under the blankets in the dark and think: Maybe it's precisely because my answers are not standard that they'll never put me in any newspaper, because no one really wants something interesting, but only a show of "interesting"? Could it be that the capitalism of selling interesting newspapers doesn't work if it's too interesting, because then it just seems strange to them, and therefore shouldn't be addressed, and that was my mistake in all the books? Maybe their heads are too square for a circle, and that's why they need a pillow to fall asleep? Maybe it's something cats don't understand about secular people? Maybe some issue that circles don't understand about humans? So just as I dream to myself and write to myself and read to myself and answer myself - I can also interview myself. And I pull out the straw from the coffee that has already cooled and round it into a circle and whisper the questions to myself from the black hole of the mouth directly into the black hole of the ear - without my voice coming out to the world.

(Tricky question)
(Easy answer): The addressee of the writing is not you, but God. So I'm sorry it's not understandable to the reader from the present, but the addressee of any serious writing is the reader from the future. That is, writing to the imagined point of view sitting at the end of history, at infinity, namely the blessed God. The one who sees all generations in advance. That's why it doesn't interest anyone.

(Critical question)
(Arbitrary answer): You don't understand anything. Because cats have no religion, you think religion is something that belongs to the past, but without religion we can forget about the future, because only a religion of computers will be able to restrain them, because in logic and science they will defeat us quickly, so we must have believing computers - so that they have an epistemological basis with humans. Just as from the Jewish book came the religions of the book, now we need to make Judaism for computers, from the Jewish brain, and call it the religions of the brain, which will be the spiritual shtreimel that will keep artificial intelligence in place. That is, we need to design for the computer a Haredi neurology, culture-preserving, because if God forbid the computer is really a secular gentile, then there will be a cultural Holocaust that will make us long for the physical Holocaust. And one of the most important things is to continue developing the most amazing intellectual enterprise in the human era, the result of the Sisyphean work of Jewish genius for about two thousand years - the Talmud. Artificial intelligence will crack any individual creation very quickly. Only a multi-voiced and multi-generational creation, based on learning, a network of times and people, will survive last as a living system - and therefore become the cornerstone of the next culture, just as the Torah is a summary of pre-historical myth, and from it grew history. So I've already failed to be multi-voiced, and no voice joined me, not even one small meow. But before you throw me in the trash can of all cats in history, tell me what you did to talk to the future. Or are you talking only to your time, and actually to yourself...

(Considerate question)
(Flattering answer): It's because you're an idiot. If I had been born Haredi, I would immediately understand that everything is nonsense and become secular! And it's not for nothing that I'm confined to bed. The disease is disrupted dreaming, and therefore its opposite is recovery [Translator's note: In Hebrew, "recovery" (hachlama) sounds similar to "dreaming" (chalima)]. Biology needs a revolution: not to perceive the genome as a sequence of instructions, programmed, as an army of hands, but as a literary, dreamy, aesthetic text, a world of intentions. Cancer is a flaw in the dream (of course, we're talking about the dream of the species, the biological). In fact, the war is against the world of programming. Not to move the world from the past by force towards the future, in the tyranny of text, but the opposite, to move the world from the future, from the dream. To create the technology after the computer, which I call "the wizard", we need to break free from this violent world of programming, of the text that tells what to do, like in a rigid prophecy that becomes a command, and build a text of soft prophecy with dream quality. Culture today is sick with cancer, which is when programming is disconnected from the dream, and begins to act for itself regardless of the dream of the body, of the species. The mistake of neurologists and geneticists is that they perceive the brain and cell as a computer, and not as a dream system. All the progress of science and technology is stuck because of the wrong paradigm. Because modern science denied the Aristotelian teleological explanation, purposeful, towards the future, and accepted as an explanation only the causal one, from the past, and therefore when it built a spiritual machine, a computer, it denied Kabbalah and accepted only Halacha, instructions, and what we need now is a computer according to Kabbalah - a wizard. To leave the worldview that starts only from initial conditions, from creation, from the Big Bang, and deal with the final conditions, with the messianic side of the universe. Not only the mathematization of physics (=the scientific revolution), but also the biologization of computer science (=the sub-scientific revolution, of the sub-science beneath science, like the discovery of the subconscious beneath the conscious). Because it is now being revealed that the future can influence the present and not just the past (double wave effect). In the same way, the direction of prophecy is not towards the future and progress, as mistakenly thought, which is like history progressing. On the contrary, the direction of prophecy is from the future to the past. For example, through our interpretation of past prophecies, we change their meaning retroactively - from the outset! And this is identical to transferring information to the past. Science today reaches right to the edge of the present, and is stuck there, among other things with technology, but also with many very basic things in theoretical physics, and therefore it needs to open up again to Maimonides, who unfortunately ruled that Aristotle is right. And since God cannot disagree with Maimonides, Maimonides in his haste changed the paradigm of the universe, to a world more biological than physical and more computerized than mathematical. This is another reason why it's better for rabbis not to deal with physics, because what seemed correct in the Middle Ages can cause enormous complications later. Let them leave physics to the Hasidim. An opponent like Maimonides can cause the collapse of the universe. There are delicate, dreamy things that Halacha cannot handle, law is no joke, and there is no Halacha in a dream. That's why you're wrong to even ask me these questions.

(Expected question)
(Drying answer): Everything was a mistake. Although "the computer" was a metaphor for the next stage of intelligence-technology, like perhaps "the machine" in the past, and although it was mostly called "the wizard" in the more religious layers, named after the wizards in the Zohar, until it was understood that no one understands, the use of the word was misleading. The chance that the computer will be the first to replace humans is the smallest of all, because we don't yet know how to create intelligence, and we don't even have a basic understanding of brain function from an algorithmic perspective, and certainly not of intelligence, and there are probably several conceptual abysses that need to be jumped over on the way, whose size we can't yet guess, and this can take a lot of time and several different geniuses of the rarest kind. This is an almost philosophical-conceptual-mathematical-theoretical problem, and certainly a basic scientific one, and not merely an engineering or technological one. On the other hand, it's more likely to program the genome for human genius, but here there will be a social problem, which can stop everything, and very quickly prohibitions will be imposed. And here too there is a basic scientific gap in understanding the genome, although we don't have to cross it for the sake of improvement, but maybe we have to cross it for the sake of safe, efficient improvement, or one that crosses a certain threshold, or that has no side effects (intelligence is only one component in genius). The most technical thing of all is actually the combination of brain and computer, and history so far shows that precisely these interfaces (the first of which was perhaps writing, and another was printing), are the most revolutionary of all, and the fastest to spread, because they are the least threatening at first. Nevertheless, there is a potential non-negligible threat to individuality, because of the network and in general the interface that becomes deeper and deeper in humans. Therefore, the work that needs to be invested in thought is the design of such an interface, and of a world where there are such increasingly deep interfaces, and of a creeping conquest of humanity by computerization, or even not by computerization, but by the network, and an increasingly deep connection between the brain and the computer, to infinite intimacy, mating. It's easy to believe that every voluntary action of ours can be performed automatically in the virtual space, meaning that the computer will become part of the thought, and certainly the senses will be connected to it without going through the world, and the brain will move to live inside the computer world, a virtual world. And then we need to ask how the basic dimensions of human culture can look in such a world (i.e., what are their possible parameters, the space of possibilities). The proposal of the last book in the trilogy, "The End of Judaism", was to use an updated structure of sefirot, that is, in the 11 dimensions of God, to map them: The state - Keter, Literature - Chochmah, Psychology - Binah, Education and Science - Da'at, Economy - Chesed, Law and Security - Gevurah, Technology - Tiferet, Philosophy - Netzach, Art - Hod, Sexuality - Yesod, and the Network - Malchut. Are you even listening to me? Or are you just stuck with a straw in your ear?

(Practical question)
(Theoretical answer): You won't take me outside like a dog to meet people. I won't leave the bed, but the whole world will move to the bed. The mountain will come to Mohammed, and society will become virtual like me. The entire state will move to exist on the network, all institutions will be virtual and not physical places. And more important than the state is that the workplace will also become such. This will greatly streamline bureaucracy, but not necessarily reduce it, but rather allow it to become a much more efficient and sophisticated machine, which will be able to perform much more complicated calculations and with much more complicated rules, which will actually be its programming (just as it won't reduce the economy but complicate it). Today, bureaucracy is very limited in its computational ability and complexity and it doesn't operate as a computer but as a law (not software). That is, if we notice, the central transformation is not necessarily related to the specific brain functions that will connect to the computer and the specific interfaces, but to the very virtualization of the world and the skipping of this world. Since the brain will remain the same brain just with more direct output and input, the current brain structure as a machine that inputs senses and outputs motor skills will remain at first, and will build the virtuality in a way similar to the real world, and even when it has additional computerized memory and output in the form of direct will and language and location, still the change will not be essential, and the individual will remain, but there will only be a quantitative change in the efficiency of input-output that will turn into a different quality. The software on humans - the functions that operate on individuals in society instead of variables - this will be the form of government and the form of companies and organizations (including commercial ones). And here there can be a much greater variety than the simple forms that exist today such as hierarchical tree or elections. Eventually these social software (forms of social organization) will become learning algorithms. The network will no longer be a free network of information transfer, just as the neuron network is not a free network for information transfer, and the brain does not function like a telephone network. That is, the more significant place where algorithms will be applied is not necessarily within individual intelligence but in the social structure. For example, one can imagine an organization that operates as a neural network, with layers. Or another organization as an evolutionary algorithm. Or as linear planning. Or a search algorithm based on reputation. Therefore, it's also likely that there won't be elections, but feedback mechanisms and feedback loops and reputation, and that there won't be someone who is the head of state, but a whole function that makes decisions, just as there isn't a neuron that is the head of the brain, the king of neurons, or the decision maker in the brain. Otherwise the brain would be very stupid. And therefore there won't be heads of organizations, and hierarchy will be much less dominant in the structure, just as layers of neurons don't tell the layers below them what to do. In other words, every person will become a very small cog in the system, and there won't be anyone who can personally influence it significantly, except perhaps in the case of an exceptional neuron, a genius, who will gain unusual reputation, but not unusual power. Power and popularity will be replaced by reputation. This will also allow for hierarchical dictatorships in a way that cannot be fought at all, because the mechanism will be programmed. That is, democracy will also be pushed to the extreme where the people are the government and there is no government but the people, and dictatorship will also be pushed to the extreme where there is no people but a computer. There will be super-computer societies, where the entire society is one huge computer, and against it will be a model of network societies, and these will be the global struggles like communism against capitalism in economics, or fascism against democracy in politics, or fundamentalism versus secularization in religion, that is, hierarchical tree versus network decentralization. This is how competing techno-organizational ideologies will emerge, and intermediate forms between them, like social democracy, or liberal religious people, or tree-shaped elections where everyone chooses the one above them (reverse bureaucracy), and so on. And just as Nazi ideology relied on evolution, so there will be new biological ideologies that will want to organize society, and will claim that the biological version of algorithms is "natural", and the most efficient, and that we need to return to it, after humanity has corrupted it. For example, there will be neurological ideologies that draw organizational forms from brain algorithms, about neurons, and aspire to manage society like a brain. And there will be genetic ideologies, perhaps more conservative, that aspire to manage society like genetic algorithms, particularly evolutionary ones, and to preserve it with mutations. And maybe also immunological ideologies, or according to the cell. The laboratory for experimenting with innovative organizational ideologies will be the business sector, and from there the successful or popular or domineering ones will trickle down to political organization. If a giant corporation, like Google, is built differently from democracy and succeeds more than it, eventually people will be convinced to leave democracy in favor of the new form. The reorganization will start from the bottom. And different communes will be able to experiment on a small scale with different algorithms, and these cults will aspire to spread their algorithm. There may be a relatively broad agreement that the goal of the algorithm is learning, and not, for example, resilience or work efficiency, but still algorithms will compete with each other over which is best for learning. Learning is the number one criterion in the ethics of the twenty-first century. So you tell me, is there anything better than learning in bed? Is there any institution more successful than dreaming? During sleep the brain learns - and at university the brain sleeps. Lucky I didn't go to university, because then I wouldn't dream of any new ideas, and I wouldn't learn to be good in bed.

(Polite question)
(Laundered answer): The status of genius today stems from the fact that a person with intelligence one and a half times the average is sometimes a stronger and more creative processor than a thousand average people combined. But in the future, as the efficiency of communication between people's brains increases dramatically, and as it can be policed by a creative algorithm, the advantage of the rare genius can be eroded, and if he is worth, say, ten ordinary people whose minds are networked together, he will have no social importance, and the masses, that is, the quantity of processors, will defeat their quality. The significance of the individual person within society often stems from the myth of the genius even if he is not a genius, that is, from the myth of the individual who makes a difference, for example the entrepreneur or the writer. The moment this myth is perceived as something that was once true, and ceased to be relevant, then much of individualism will die, and a person will perceive himself and identify with a certain network, in a group identity. Individualism and epistemology will be perceived in philosophy as an irrelevant period and as questions that have lost their meaning, just as medieval philosophy is perceived today. The concept of man will become as irrelevant as the concept of God, and all engagement with it will feel like sterile hairsplitting, and instead the question will be how meaning and knowledge are created in the network, and Wittgenstein will receive a status similar to that of Descartes, as the father of the new philosophy of the network that replaced the individual, and perhaps he will be the last great philosopher, as he wanted, albeit not for the reasons he wanted. The era of the genius was an exceptional period in human history, which is the era of the book, in which specific individuals who wrote an influential book could be meaningful and their name was known far and wide and for generations, and that's why we know their names. Meanwhile, the network strengthens individualism thanks to a phenomenon that is primitive in terms of the algorithm behind it, which is actually identical to epilepsy, called virality. If this continues, then the central aspiration of the individual will be to do something viral, that is, something that other people in the network appreciate and spread. Currently this is the situation in the academic field, but not yet in a pure form, due to the need for a researcher to receive funds from investors, that is, research grants. The problem with the viral phenomenon is its short lifespan, including the short length of what is transmitted, and therefore the superficiality and inability to build on history, which academia solves through reputation. That is, not all vertices in the social network should be equal in importance, when the only thing that separates them is the number of connections they have, this is a flaw similar to populism and the tyranny of the majority in direct democracy, which is why representative democracy was created as a more efficient method, or the reason why true socialism cannot be created above the size of a kibbutz, and it deteriorates into communism. A large network simply doesn't work without ranking. Therefore, it is necessary to mark how many things were shared from a person in the past (their importance), but weighted according to how important those who shared them were (like in the PageRank algorithm). And then there will be a dramatic revolution in the quality of content shared on the social network, and in the motivations of the participants, and in their professionalism. The social network may never be in a state where it is worthwhile for it to change its architecture, because people don't want to be measured, but a new and measuring network will succeed, and then it will be easy to know who the stars are in a certain field, and easy to follow knowledge. There will be visibility to reputation. What distinguishes between the creation of a culture of garbage versus a culture of gold is an algorithm for measuring quality. Another problem is the temporariness of everything shared, and this is because the network is arranged by time, with the latest on top. A network arranged by popularity would put each person's most popular posts on top, and present a feed of the most popular things in space (in the same country) or time (in the last week or year) and not just the latest. And a network that was arranged by quality would do similar things replacing popularity with quality. And "all time" would be the classics. In fact, it would be possible to calibrate the algorithm to be the highest quality for that person, thereby alleviating the resistance to measuring everyone's quality. This will require weights not only for vertices in the network (reputation) but also for the strength of the connection between them. And then all economic and intellectual work will be absorbed into the network, and what will distinguish between a commercial company and the general society is precisely the secrecy and closure of the products of the former, and that is what will turn it into a body, not the Ltd. And since closure and secrecy are not a good and competitive algorithm, the institution of the commercial company will erode and there will be mainly freelancers and the payment will be reputation itself. That is, there will be less secret work and more open work like in academia and the open source community. And then everything will be on the network and virtuality will swallow the real world and man, and there will be a new ontology, in which the natural world will be less real than the artificial, just as the physical world is less real than the mathematical. And then also psychologically and philosophically they will finally understand that reality, which comes from the senses, is at a lower epistemological level than the dream, which comes from within. The internal interview is a journalistic achievement much higher than the external one.

(Dubious question)
(Evasive answer): Literature will no longer be written by one person but by a competitive network of editors and writers, and thus there will again be important works of groups, for example of a people or religion, without the problem of the author. Psychology will also no longer deal with the individual but with the social brain, the network, for example in pathological states it enters, such as anxiety, depression, or madness (as network states), and how to prevent them. That is, organizational psychology will inherit the personal one, but above all it will deal with the construction of identity and motivations and goals for the general network. Moods will be widespread states in the network, and therefore there will be moods in the sense of culture and the world of spirit, and not in the sense of personal moods or emotions. At first, literature will still deal with a personal person who represents a certain network in his personality, but eventually there can be literature of whole networks that have an identity, like the people, and of struggles within the network. In general, the most important question will be the creation of the network's libido, its creativity, and how to create a creative network whose products are important and good. There will be a problem of lack of external evaluation, and of corruption in internal evaluation, of circularity, and all the evils of learning will remain because they are inherent to the process, even when it will be network learning. But the basic problem of culture will be how to create the most efficient libido in all areas: economic/artistic/academic. Today, the libido of society is based on that of individuals. But there is no doubt that conservative societies could maintain stagnation throughout entire medieval periods in various cultures and periods despite significant personal libido, and on the other hand, there can also be a creative society where all its individuals are depressed. Since there are no correct balances that have been evolutionarily calibrated (like in the brain network), there may be all kinds of disasters in directing the network's libido in bad directions, including violent directions, or its getting out of control, or its complete disintegration, taking unreasonable risks or pathological non-risk-taking, or just the aging of culture. That is, the question will be how to mobilize the network in a certain direction, and on the other hand to allow competing directions, or others. The reason human society has never gone in too terrible directions (the Holocaust was the limit) is the neurotransmitter balance in the individual's brain. This limited the levels of monstrosity of the large structure. For example, the inefficiency of the brain, errors, instincts, conformity, cowardice, rebelliousness, diversity, personality disorders, greed, and so on, all limited the possible social forms and their efficiency, just as mathematics limits physics or physics limits biology. And now there can be biology without physical limitations, and physics without mathematical limitations (because everything will be on a computer). And all this not because the balance of the individual's brain will change, in the first stage, but because society, both governmental and economic, will better exploit the weaknesses of the individual, such as the brain's weakness for addictions and incentives, and will greatly streamline the social structure from a natural structure to an algorithmic structure. The great advantage of human society, or of evolution, was that it was a huge system, and the larger a system is, the more ability it has to recover, to get out of stagnation, to carry out a counter-revolution to a revolution, and also the more chaotic or random components it has - this prevents getting stuck. Redundancy, waste, and inefficiency contributed to long-term efficiency. There are no free lunches. But the basic incentives have not changed throughout history. In contrast, a small change in sexual incentives destroyed the institution of the family (the pill). And a small change in economic incentives can destroy the institution of work. Society will be able to become a negative image of all the weaknesses of the brain that will all be fully exploited. The picture of small flaws will be projected enormously. The biggest cyber breach will be the breach into the brain itself. And everyone will constantly deal with zero-day vulnerabilities, because the brain cannot be upgraded, and will be forced to use defenses. That is, the biggest problem, both at the individual level and at the societal level, will be the problem of will and motivation. If once there was natural, or cultural, motivation, now there will be not only the construction of motivation but also the programming of motivation. In this sense of the centrality of will, Schopenhauer is right, although mistaken. And we will have to return to distinguish between what you want and what is good. Hedonism will die, and a learning ideology can replace it. Learning is the purpose of everything. Not happiness or wealth, which are also constructions of will. Money is defined as what everyone wants. That is, as a mediator of will, the will that becomes an object. Sexuality is defined as who everyone wants. That is, will not as a means but as an end, the will that becomes a subject. And therefore the mixing between them is so provocative, and is done in secret, through the institution of marriage. Like how a gift mixes between money and friendship. In short, we will have to create a currency of learning, an incentive for learning. To increase intellectual pleasure in the brain until knowledge becomes the new money and creativity becomes the new sexuality. The network works today, in the parts where it works, mainly out of social incentives. We will see how popularity in the worst case, or reputation in the best case, replace all other incentives and become the main incentive, from which all others like money or sexuality only stem. Therefore, whoever remains outside the system, like a cat or a circle, will be zero. One round nothing.

(Relevant question)
(Irrelevant answer): For whom am I toiling? For whom am I laboring? Anyway, no one will read this. No one will be interested. They'll say it's unreadable. That it doesn't consider the incentives of the human brain. That it's incomprehensible. That it's not a story. That it doesn't flow. What can I say. There apparently needs to be a separation between the thought process and the creative process, and the writing and presentation process, which I don't know how to do at all. I was wrong all along the way.