I’m writing with a slight optimism right now, cause I have a feeling that the AI-madness and all the current dystopia is leading to a resurgence and increased interest in the poorly cared for humanities again! Wild I know, but this is what 20+ years of app-mania, increasingly sucky tech and the destruction of communities does to you, right? What is a human again?
Idk, at times I like being human: the stupidity, the irrational emotions, the insights and growth, the horniness and the joy. Stubborn, at times self-defeating on both an individual and a communal level, but still, generationally speaking, amazingly capable, adaptable, creative, if we are into one another.
My girlfriend and I were doing some work for our daughter’s marching band a few weeks back along with 60+ other parents. It’s an example of a Norwegian /dugnad/, it’s basically volunteer work in Norwegian. Within a weekend we made a flea market for books and clothes, on Sunday we tore it all down. It was a great success. But on Friday I had some immediate thoughts while looking at the hundreds of cardboard boxes filled with books: “This looks /impossible/, we will never be done in time.” The excess of materiality was weighing heavy on my shoulders. But then I started working, and everyone else started working, and a few heads who had been doing this type of thing for a few years already knew how to arrange everything and gave directions. I just kept at it, not thinking I was contributing much, but every 30 minutes I raised my head and the big hall looked completely different. Within a few hours I was an ant in the colony. Everyone was moving around, pushing, shoving, directing, carrying, fixing. Bumping into one another, laughing and talking about stupid and interesting books they found along the way. And just like that we were done. If we are into one another. Some are not, they get high on ideas about eternal life, about a man-made intelligence that vastly surpasses ours. The social impacts of such events would clearly be huge, but from both a Kantian and Spinozist perspective I have lost interest in them: I’m stuck in /this/ body, with /this/ mind anyway. I will always wake up as some variant of what I call “myself”, eternally stupid. I can grow, change and decline, lose power and gain it, but as Spinoza said, the infinite substance of God is only known to us through two attributes and their modi: thought and extension. There are, according to Spinoza, of course an infinite number of attributes as well, these are just not known to us because our mind-body can’t interface with them. A bat uses sonar to move around. There are a number of audio frequencies that a dog can pick up, but my ear can’t. Same with light. I know, I know, bad examples. These are all questions of extension/physicality and would count as variants of Spinoza’s attribute of extension, but the analogy is just this: We are limited, and as Kant said: we perceive phenomena, not the thing in itself. (And forgive me for not being able to give a perfect example of something real, true and “out there” that my mind by definition is incapable of imagining, visualizing, let alone talking about. This is the whole point, this inability is the proof of our limits. Life is hard. We need to show care for ourselves and others.) We are limited but this is what makes us interesting, as well as every other living species on earth in their particularity. And there are interesting ways to be human, and to feel human, to vibe with your humanity sort of, to feel yourself and to study and learn what it all means. And this is what I’m doing tonight. #philosophy #ai #humanism
