Who was right from a historical perspective - Kafka or Proust? What is the fundamental problem of the information age - is it an endless stuck computation (Kafka) or an endless stuck memory (Proust)? What is the philosophical significance of quantum computing? Why does a banana have more computing power than a philosopher? New revelations about the origins of modernist literature in Kabbalah, and about the connection between the printing revolution and secularization and the information revolution and religion
Why literature has a future but the novel doesn't
Why are poets usually much younger than novelists at their creative peak? Why do composers and painters reach their peak in their later works, while this rarely happens for scientists or bands? Why is it harder to identify age as a central factor for philosophers? There are fields where creativity is a stronger factor and others where learning is. Philosophers simply say the same thing throughout their lives and refine it. The more a field is composed of smaller ideas in terms of information quantity, the more advantage young people have, and the size of the idea unit that makes up the larger field varies between disciplines and times (ideational resolution, size of cells in the body of knowledge). In other words, what matters is the genre, not the medium, and this can be seen when the medium changes genre. A poem is shorter than a story, but when epics and long poems were written, the creative peak was in maturity, and only with the shortening of the genre in Romanticism did the age drop drastically. The same happened in music with the transition from classical symphony to songs. As philosophy and literature return to fragments in accordance with the spirit of the time, they will become fields of cheeky young people rather than wise old men. Proverbs with its short sayings was written in the world of the young, with many warnings to the son about the desire for the wicked woman, while Ecclesiastes with its complex structure was written in the world of old age, and the Song of Songs with its mature and sober love is in the middle ground. The internet will turn art forms into genres with shorter formats, thus making culture younger. Even in scientific fields, mathematicians often reach their peak achievements in their youth, while biologists do the opposite, and physicists are in the middle. But as mathematics becomes longer, this is changing. In other words, we can see cyclicality, the genre gets longer until it petrifies and then starts short again. Kafka is so important precisely because of the shortening of the story after Dostoevsky. And that's why he anticipated the future, because he lived in a virtual consciousness a hundred years before the internet, and he reset the length of literature, which is why great literature declined after him, and no great works were written in the second half of the 20th century like in the second half of the 19th century. Kafka lived in emails, in blogs, in statuses, in the textual world of the future. Proust lived in the past.
The Most Important Jewish Writer
The Book of Deuteronomy is a book about the difficulty of the writer, God, in parting from his beloved protagonist. And perhaps even his favorite genre. The genre of law. Today, almost all religious literary genres are closed to us - prophecy, midrash, Zohar, even the Hasidic story is almost dead, and we are left with dry or embarrassing things. The partially successful attempt, literarily, in its later part, is Nachman of Breslov. Kafka read his tales in Buber's German translation made in 1906, and they were the trigger for the beginning of his writing in 1908. The interpretation in his close environment of his work was much more Jewish religious mystical than is customary today, and he essentially translated religious ideas into a universal and secular language, and therefore hopeless, or more precisely, without an addressee. Thus, he was like Paul who secularized and universalized authentic Jewish content and brought it to the world. He was also exposed to the Zohar in a certain way, and the medieval bureaucracies of the upper world view deeply influenced him. But ideas such as impossible parables, writing dreams and nightmares, unfinished books and stories, and writing from a terminal illness - he took from Nachman.
No One Gets Bored in a Dream, Everything is Full of Meaning
Printing led to the development of secularism, when the complex, intimate religious text of manuscripts that needs to be studied and not read seemed dry compared to the attractive, sexual (continuous pleasure) secular text, where the reading experience is streaming, and therefore much less dense in meaning, and therefore "realistic", because everyday reality is gray and not dense with meaning. And now with the splitting of attention back from sequence to pieces, because the web page is a page and not a book, then long texts will no longer be read, long novels will become academic material, and the only way to express a deep idea is in short but dense texts, and therefore religiosity will return. From page to pages to scroll to codex to book and back to page, because the screen is a page. And we returned to cut pleasure, male, in bursts, and not continuous female. In fact, the dimension of length of the work is replaced by the dimension of time in which updates are made, and it is identical to the dimension of time in life itself. And the revenge on the book is television, film, series, audio book, which take the continuous dimension and expropriate it from the person to an objective time prepared in advance, and the book cannot compete with them. How many pages of gibberish are there in novels, which can be compressed to much less. Novels tried to express simple depth through great complexity, but this is the cheapest way to create depth, by collapsing the human brain with excess connections and possibilities, by building space (spreading space-time), as opposed to a text that requires interpretation, whose level of complexity is as the level of complexity of the interpreter, and its depth stems from the interpretive depth, from the possibilities of finding and connecting things in it, from the need for creative interpretation. Complexity that is in the world of ideas - and not in the external world.
Singularity as the Point of Reversal of Meaning, Not Just Its Nullification
Secularism suffers from lack of meaning in the face of the end of humanity while religion suffers from excess meaning. Religious reading is not reading a text but studying. This is the main difference between cultures. Therefore, secularism created long texts, entire series, to convey little meaning with many tools. Television is a lot of information and little meaning, so that meaning enters without you noticing, like in a novel with a message that passes without you wanting. The meaning is covert, and it has an element of brainwashing, without you noticing, and this is perceived as the pinnacle of art - fluent manipulation. Whereas in learning there is an active and gatekeeper component, there you are dominant in meaning, you are the software and the text is the information, unlike the secular text which is sophisticated software that operates on you without you catching it. That's why secularism is full of distractions. But today, because of the shortening attention span, this is the revenge of religion, and again there will be an obligation to create dense meaning, because no one will read more than a paragraph. Therefore, in each paragraph you need to put a sentence that everyone will understand and a sentence that only the chosen few will understand. And all the range in between is what determines the richness of meaning. In every verse there must be from the simple meaning to the esoteric knowledge, the whole orchard [Translator's note: "Pardes" in Hebrew, referring to the four levels of biblical interpretation]. The learning method creates infinite, divine meaning from a human text. And this will probably be the reading of the computer itself, parallel reading. The whole idea of a computer is hacking the universe (or God, or the mathematical operating system of the universe beneath physics). It's the discovery that at more basic, physical layers, there are computational capabilities that didn't leak to higher layers. And when it comes to quantum computing, then if it's possible, and there's no fundamental mechanism preventing the transition, then there was a big oversight, and the universe didn't transfer computational capabilities from lower levels to higher levels, and essentially lost computational efficiency by many orders of magnitude just as it rose by orders of magnitude in terms of size. And then the question is not how such a simple universe created such a complex world, but how a universe with such strong computational capability created a world with such poor computational capability, that only in some corner of it, in some statistical deviation of the human brain, some computational capability was created that is efficient roughly like a molecule. That is, if speed is the most important function of computation, efficiency, then the small has an advantage over the big. And the question is whether speed is really the most important. Because maybe it's a mistake. Maybe information is more important (which unlike the amount of memory, is like meaningful data). Because maybe computing power and time are not the limited resource in the universe, but rather memory - it's very difficult to create something with little entropy like memory. We see this in humanity too, as a huge computing network, whose memory - that is, culture - is more expensive, successful and unique than its computation in each generation in the present. So maybe Proust was right after all.