Random Reflections: AI’s Precursor, Sculpting A Life, Forests and Trees
The thinking life.– What else is modern academic scholarship, as it has been practiced since at least the German universities of the early nineteenth century, but a non-digital precursor to today’s computer-based “artificial intelligence”? Analog AI, if you will. Vast human-designed but meticulously dehumanized data centers of universal thought-collection (called “disciplines”), with hundreds of thousands of nodes (called “professors”) incapable of truly comprehending, let alone producing, a single profound idea, but tasked with swallowing up all the pre-existing, unreplicable achievements of history’s great minds, interpreting and refitting them for convenient, consensus-based use as a source of endlessly varied pseudo-theoretical regurgitation by millions of people who have never formed a non-derivative thought of their own and never will, but who are materially incentivized to exploit this unthinking machinery of collectivizing regurgitation to forge for themselves highly respected and rewarding lives as scholars, educators, influential experts and advisors, public intellectuals, and, at the base of the pyramid, an entire degree-holding “educated class” of modern society, all sucked from the gold-flowing veins of men who never consented to being fodder for an artificial social mind, and who in most cases earned nothing for their great world-enhancing thoughts but the disregard and disapproval of their contemporaries — and of course the friendship of the gods, which in the end was all they were seeking.
What then have these past two centuries of the devolution, or rather metastasizing, of the modern university from an institution of spiritual development and civilization preservation into a busy-work scholarship factory amounted to, in the end, but a biologically-based experiment in artificial intelligence? The world’s rare treasures of individual and political greatness simplified and packaged for mass reproduction as a social repository of quick-access info-wisdom and exponentially self-perpetuating “new contributions to knowledge” (which in fact contribute nothing and entail no knowledge). When one of our digital age’s leading AI algorithms finally comes round to renaming itself “Hegel,” we will know that our newest technological machinery for reducing the world’s irreducible intellectual discoveries to on-demand information, and recasting the most convention-shattering wisdom as comforting social consensus, has identified its real significance at last.
Finding the form.– Michelangelo believed that the sculpted figure is already in the marble, such that the sculptor’s role is merely to remove everything else until only that figure remains — to free the man from the block of stone, as it were. A life lived seriously involves an analogous process of winnowing or chiseling. Whatever that kernel of life that defines each of us might be, it is inevitably born buried within a chaotic stew of matter in flux. The real process of education, maturation, and self-development is nothing but a gradual and ever more purposeful chipping away or casting off of all that is not our essence — transient interests, utilitarian relationships, superfluous amusements, all the elements of earthly existence that function as diversions and roadblocks to obscure the life of a soul that has not yet fully revealed itself in accordance with its natural objects of desire.
Living in the moment.– Life is too short for reducing one’s focus or identity to this moment, as our popular gurus so often encourage us to do. A life so focused threatens to reduce itself to nothing but a long series of discrete moments, points that form no continuous line — or which appear to form one only when seen from a distance, though revealing, upon close examination, nothing but isolated experiences devoid of unifying purpose or shape. Living in the moment — which in practice largely means allowing oneself to fall obsessively into this pleasure, this anger, this gossip, this heartache, this thrill, this worry, as though such sensations existed in detachment from any wider or more permanent view of one’s being — is the most psychologically self-demeaning manifestation of “missing the forest for the trees.” More often than not, it is missing the forest (one’s life as a complete and coherent whole) for the weeds and vines growing around the trees.
