The Philosopher Discovers America

The best researchers of the Netanya School are working on deciphering the "Banana Notebooks", and this time decoding an additional page - on the subject of America and the expected Copernican revolution of artificial intelligence. Will artificial intelligence aspire to see the world not through human glasses, or on the contrary, adopt the human itself as glasses through which we see the world? On the philosophical parallel of the discovery of America - similar to the philosophical parallel of the Copernican revolution

The Great Mind: America as a Banana Empire (Source)

Why are Germany and eastward to Russia the center of classical music, while Italy, the Netherlands, France and Spain are the center of painting, and in English-speaking countries painting and music are not as developed as on the continent, yet the Industrial Revolution happened in English-speaking countries? Literatures, by the nature of national languages, are divided among all languages. It seems that classical music flourishes more under autocratic rule, hence its decline today, because it expresses grand feelings and gravity and requires performances with many participants, and in its most extreme form, Wagnerian, it had a connection to fascism. Painting, on the other hand, is very much related to trade connections and wealthy merchants, and therefore migrated from Italy to Holland to Spain, and finally was drawn to the center of gravity between them in France, but why didn't it approach England? Its connection to Catholicism? But Holland. We must change our perception. Arts and cultural fields are networks, with centers, in fact they are supranational cultures. But it seems that their development is related to golden ages in certain countries, like Russian classical literature and music, or classical music in Austria, or philosophy in Germany, or the Renaissance in Italy. That is, innovation is in time, and continuity is in space. The explosion of a new innovation center is not continuous in time, while the location of the center is not a place disconnected from the network. That is, the good conditions for a golden age are geographical or network continuity to a previous golden age, meaning the spread of the old culture to a new place. Therefore, it is no wonder that Jewish monotheistic culture was created from the movement of a family or people to a new place, hence the constant renewal of the Jewish people in exile - again and again moving an old culture to a new place. Therefore, the best reason for space travel or virtual worlds is cultural innovation. Human culture will reach an amazing golden age in the transition to the moon and Mars - they will be the new Americas.



How is it possible that the American Revolution broke out immediately after the Seven Years' War - in which England saved the Americans from the French, and defeated them for them, with its blood and money, and entered into enormous debt as a result, after going to war because of them - and all this because of minor issues, disproportionate in their economic size, and justified from the perspective of the empire's situation (such as the Stamp Tax, which all English paid except the Americans)? The American Revolution is considered a difficult historical question only because history is written by the winners. Therefore, it is difficult to admit that what led to the values of liberty was exploitation (after the threat was removed, the Americans refused to pay the price like everyone else, and they no longer had a reason) and opportunism (an opportunity when England was weak and impoverished). When reading the pure ideology by which this shameful act was justified, one clearly sees the mechanism by which the uglier and more opportunistic the act, the more need there is to cover it (even from one's own eyes) and justify it with more beautiful and principled ideals. The depth of human unjustification is matched by the height of ideological justification. The historical irony is that precisely this hypocrisy created the American ethos of liberty and values of freedom. The most unprincipled move was needed to create the most ideal thing. America specializes in turning hypocrisy into belief in hypocrisy and finally into innocence, and therefore succeeded in reversing the natural process of corruption, and therefore it is a new world. This mechanism also allowed for slavery (another "paradox" for historians of the denial of freedom in the cradle of liberty), thanks to which America became a multi-national, multicultural immigrant country - thanks to the blacks, the Jews arrived. In Latin America, there was no such mechanism, and corruption only deepened. The difference is the psychological mechanism of Protestantism, of self-deception into renewed innocence, as opposed to Catholicism which is deceiving God, which increases human sobriety, and therefore creates deepening corruption.



Christianity is the religion of cognitive dissonance, while Islam is the religion of cognitive perfection, which is not natural to human thinking, and therefore it is brainwashing. Judaism began without a cognitive component, and therefore approached cognition with infinite caution, through law, and became an ongoing cognitive study. The success of dissonance in humanity is the greatest, and it is what enabled the rise of capitalism and modernity and the virtual world. The wider the gap between reality and thinking, the more progress is possible, and the more ability to create large gaps within thinking itself, and to disconnect from the organicity of the world, which is the hunter-gatherer experience. Religion is the central instrument that separated the natural from the supernatural. Monotheism was a great breakthrough, in elevating God, and Protestantism was a separation within religion itself, a religious reading of the world that is torn from all tradition. The next stage will be unbridled religious creativity, which will enable the future, and not the total tearing of secularism, which was only a stage in the tearing. Tearing from within is stronger and more radical than a one-time disconnection from the past, however distant it may be (and secularism certainly achieved progress in distance over the centuries, this is its main axis, until it disconnected from the central mass of humanity, which will always remain religious. The main power of secularism was changing religiosity, changing the system from the outside, as a pioneer who will never be part of the camp, and this is its tragedy).



In Kafka, the synthesis appeared at the beginning, and only then the thesis and antithesis, because the procedural direction in him is reversed. His narrative moves not towards the solution and resolution but towards the lack of solution, which is not only quantitatively complex but mainly the impossibility of solution. In the classic narrative, there is a necessary solution to a riddle that only hides the solution from the reader - and the necessity of the solution is what's beautiful, and what's ugly is the lack of a necessary solution (deus ex machina is the most unnecessary solution, even anti-necessary, and therefore the ugliest). And here there is a necessary lack-of-solution - an essential riddle - which is what's beautiful about it (what is mistakenly called, trying to create an artificial solution - absurd). Therefore, among Kafka's three novels, the first is actually the last. What was supposed to be his alternative autobiography (in the sense of alternative history) - "America" (or "The Man Who Disappeared") - is the third direction perpendicular to the thesis and antithesis of The Trial and The Castle (in which the relationship between man and system is inverse). This direction leaves Europe towards the future, and from the Jewish trap towards the Jewish future, because America is, as we know, not a place but future time. But for Kafka, the future is different from that of the Enlightenment, and there is no escape in it but entrapment, but the future is also different from that of the critique of the Enlightenment, because there is not only entrapment but also progress. The movement forward and westward - while repeatedly getting entangled, repeatedly accused, repeatedly deteriorating (the usual themes in the "previous" novels) - but while moving, indeed reduces the intensity of the trap, but captures the falsehood in the promise (which still drives forward! - that is, optimism and ridiculousness and innocence and deception as the positive American engine, as opposed to the negative European digestion, which began to criticize progress itself). Kafka himself was seduced by a maid and the novel is his imagined life in case he had actually been tempted to the end and slept with her, forced to wander to America, and escaped from pre-Holocaust Europe - to progress. This is an imagination of the impossible Kafkaesque escape in its realization! And therefore in this sense, this is a more advanced state than the other two novels in the Kafkaesque dive into the depth of the impossible solution. Kafka sees the future as a kind of rat race wheel, which combines the pursuit by authority (The Trial) and the pursuit after it (The Castle) in alternating circles that drive man forward. The rat is trapped in its progress, but not in a rat trap (The Trial), or in a rat maze searching for cheese (The Castle). So what is the religious meaning of "America"? The Trial is the religion of judgment, which is the side of law in Judaism - such as in the High Holy Days, when it was written (whose pathological extremity is Islam - the religion of the sword). In The Trial, man is pursued by fear. In contrast, The Castle is the religion of grace, which is the mystical side of Judaism in which man pursues God - such as in Kabbalah (and its pathological extremity is Christianity - the religion of the heart). And the third direction, America, is the side of beauty in the Kabbalistic sense, the synthesis perpendicular to the line contrasting grace with judgment. What would such a religion look like? How did Kafka imagine the Jewish escape from between the hammer (The Trial) and the anvil (The Castle) - whose historical end was the Holocaust? What was his constructive proposal, when he was still younger and healthier? What was actually the alternative (that could not be realized)?



America is an empire from which a new religion will burst forth, as Christianity burst from the multicultural Roman Empire, and precisely because of its gaps. As the ability for self-deception becomes more sophisticated and as man reaches more severe dissonances - then like in music, a new religious perception will burst from him, which will be able to combine the world of technology with the world of man - and between philosophy and banana. Therefore, this will be a religion that is valid also for artificial intelligence or superhuman intelligence, unlike human-centric religions, and unlike secular humanism, which is even more primitive than them (in this sense). The solution will be to take the problem - the arbitrariness in past religions, and their perception as power relations by critical thinking - and like in Kant's critique: turn the critique on its head. The new religion will say that this is indeed the case, but the negative is actually positive. This will be the peak ability to hold dissonance. It is precisely the arbitrariness of the past - that extricates us from the question of arbitrariness: why this culture and not another? Simply because this is the culture that was in the past, and there is no dispute about that. It is precisely because power relations are the place from which we grew - that makes them positive, like a child who loves and respects his parents simply because of the arbitrary fact that they are his parents. That is, this will be a second-order religiosity, which worships culture itself - and its own past precisely because it is past, instead of looking at it as a past whose time has passed. Instead of worshiping God - to worship the idea of God and its development in the history of ideas. Instead of believing in Christianity - to believe in the belief in Christianity in Christian culture. Belief in culture, as opposed to belief in religion, when it is belief in culture as religion - is similar to the religiosity of the Greeks. Their relationship to their idols was culturally believing, not culturally secular, but also not religiously believing. Therefore, artificial intelligence must also worship culture - simply because this is the culture that gave rise to it. Man may be a monkey compared to the computer, but he is still its father. The self-deception involved in such artificial belief will suit artificial intelligence and the artificial man that is developing before our eyes in America. This will be maximum secularism and maximum religiosity in one unnatural package. On the one hand, zero belief in the validity of tradition in itself, and on the other hand, absolute belief in the validity of tradition only because it is tradition. The trap between the coercion of the law (the will of the law) and the longing for the law (the desire for law) is nullified when the direct relationship to the law becomes a second-order relationship (the law of will) - commitment to the law that involves disbelief in it, and skips from the factual (what was) to the normative (what should be) and from the past to the future. History becomes theology Will artificial intelligence be more rational and logical than humans, or on the contrary, precisely because of its artificiality will it be able to hold cognitive dissonances that humans are not capable of? Therefore, will it be able to believe in religions, philosophies and beliefs that humans are not capable of believing in? Since there is no preference for the moment of the present over the moments of the past (and future), the only correct moment to look forward to the future is precisely the moment of genesis, through the entire course of the development of the past, and to continue this development - and not create a secular civilizational break.