A constructive approach

There is, of course, a legitimate undertone to all that positivity/negativity talk, and it’s the same thing Jesus mentioned in his “log in eye” parable – basically, stop finding faults with others, because other than signalling your own supposed virtue, it only makes other people feel bad and accomplishes nothing good or useful.

This is a very real issue that needs to be addressed, especially in the age of the Internet and the social media, where everybody tries to make themselves artificially important by making loud and extreme claims that are meant to elevate their voice above the noise floor, and as a result, there’s a lot of hysterical shrieking about every conceivable topic, and any measurable effect of it all is markedly negative. Since it is not a new phenomenon, somebody already noticed it and, basically, stated that one should mind their own abundant flaws before addressing those around him, because, although everybody will always claim that there are more important issues in the world than fixing their own problems, this has always ever been but a way to avoid dealing with one’s own issues. Yeah, there’s plagues and war and climate change and pollution and what not, and there always will be, but how about you learn how to be polite, useful, responsible and honest first, instead of yelling about global warming and accomplishing nothing, eh? The world is perpetually unfixable and, by the way, it’s of no concern to you. Your job is to have a good relationship with God, and then externalize this by being God’s presence in the world, for the benefit of others. Nothing else matters.

Also, in dealings with others, if you have nothing constructive to say or do, it might be best to at least avoid doing harm, and the best way to do that is not to disturb people with critical opinions nobody asked for. Essentially, you need to understand that criticism comes with responsibility, because if you’re observing a problem, criticism must exist in the context of willingness to engage in solving it. If you don’t care enough to engage yourself in solving the problem, it’s obviously something you should not concern yourself with and remaining silent and minding your own business might be the best course for you. For instance, if you observe signs of poverty in your neighbour or a relative, the constructive way to approach it would be to tactfully ask if there’s a problem, and if there’s something you can do to help. Criticising or gossiping is neither constructive nor helpful, and you might instead take a big cup of STFU.

This is what someone probably meant by “staying positive” and “avoiding negativity”; basically, keep your nose out of other people’s business unless you are there to offer help. However, like all things, it was generalised way out of its area of usefulness, and caused a different set of problems.

Positivity

I was just thinking about all the virtue-signalling and posturing that is currently in vogue, and remembered that I’ve sen something similar before: the “positivity” trend of the 1990s.

Positivity actually has a legitimate purpose in psychology, as I would know, having been proficient in autogenous training, which is a form of self-hypnosis, where positive formulation of suggestions is paramount. By “positive” mean statements such as “my hands are warm” instead of “my hands are not cold”, and so on. It seems that human mind doesn’t really work well with avoiding undesirable outcomes; basically, if you tell it what you don’t want, you’re not really telling it what you do want, which is very much like telling your driver to go “not to London”. That’s hardly a useful instruction, because “not London” is quite a large place.

So, positive suggestions such as “drive me to Bristol” or “get me coffee” work, and negative suggestions such as “drive me away from here” or “get me something other than tea” don’t. However, a whole movement of abject charlatanry developed around those basic truths, and “positivity” and “negativity” became amoral substitute for good and evil, and right and wrong, in a moral framework that tried to avoid such designations at all cost, in order to avoid any notion of religion.

You see, there’s a problem with rejecting negativity in expression. While it is true that you need to positively formulate your ultimate goal in order to be able to get there, it is also true that we often don’t have enough knowledge of the goal at the beginning of the journey. For instance, let’s say that you want to reach God, but what is God, exactly, to someone who is a mere beginner? God is something awesome and magnificent at the very extreme end of a multidimensional coordinate system of values – greatest consciousness, greatest truth, greatest power and so on – but what does that actually mean? Here, negativity plays an important part, because you can see all kinds of evil and depravity and say, “I don’t know what God is, exactly, but let’s assume he’s in the opposite direction from this”, and such a statement will, of course, not lead you to God directly, but if you practice the virtues that are opposite to the wicked depravities that are abundant in the world and easy to perceive, it will certainly help to move you from the starting point, and trying to imagine virtues by rejecting sins will give you some idea of where you want to be, which is of course not perfect, but “not perfect” is much better than “horrible” already, and as long as you understand that this is a transitory position and not a destination, I see nothing wrong with it. Hate and disgust directed at evil things imply some sense of goodness and virtue, and this can later be properly formulated, but as beginnings go, hatred and disgust are effective and dynamic enough to give you some momentum. Certainly, that’s not where you want to be stuck permanently, and you do need to transition your understanding from, for example, “I am revolted by all the perversions in modern society”, to “those things are instinctively revolting because they lie in the direction opposite of God, who is truth, reality and fulfilment”.

My problem with the positivity movement is not as much that it is wrong; it’s an ideological poison, akin to the modern variety known as “tolerance” and “diversity”. Positivity on its own can actually be extremely harmful, if it stops you from recognizing and changing things that are obviously wrong; likewise, tolerance for bad things isn’t a good thing, and diversity on its own doesn’t mean anything good, because is it really preferable to have many different bad things, and not one good thing? If you have many things, is it preferable to see them all as equal, or to choose between them based on some criterion of merit? It all looks like some kindergarten ethical philosophy of “nobody is wrong”; in fact, everybody is wrong, and everybody stands to improve, and stupid flattery is of no use whatsoever.

Without an ethical framework based upon the referential target of the Absolute, all quantitative and qualitative designations are pointless and worthless. What is right and wrong without God as the referential truth? What is good and evil without God as the referential goodness? Of what use is positivity without a referential absolute target? Also, if you understand that a statement “Satan is beautiful” is positive, and a statement “Satan is not beautiful” is negative, it becomes apparent that the entire thing on its own has no moral reference, and is a mere linguistic gimmick. Positivity starts making sense only after you obtain your actual moral reference from a worthwhile theology.

Dangers of AI

There’s been quite a bit of talk recently about the dangers of AI technology – from human jobs being replaced, to terminator-like robots killing all humans.

My take on this, after having seen some of the AI achievements, is that the name “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer – “artificial stupidity” would be more appropriate. Those things are essentially stupid as fuck, and have some extreme limitations, but they do have the ability to quickly iterate across datasets in order to find a solution, if there is a clear way of punishing failure and rewarding success. That’s basically all they do.

I’ve seen neural networks being trained to win in computer games, and the end-result is amazing and exceeds human ability, simply because it’s a scenario where there are clear win/loss events that enable the neural networks to be trained.

In essence, yes, those things can replace a significant number of human jobs; everything that has to do with data mining, pattern recognition and analysis, trivial but seemingly complex work such as programming that consists of finding and adapting code snippets from the web, or iterative “art” that consists of modifying and combining generic tropes – that’s all going to be done with AI. Engineering work that would require too many calculations for a human, such as fluid mechanics solutions – turbines, rocket engines and so on – are all excellent cases for neural networks.

Unfortunately, military use is among those cases, where it is quite easy to create loitering munitions – basically, drones that hover in the air – that can be sent to scan enemy territory for everything that moves, then recognise targets to identify the priority ones, and crash into them. Ground weapons that recognise human targets and take them down with some kind of a weapon also fit this category, as well as underwater drones that use passive sonar to scan for exactly the kind of ship they want to sink, and then rise from the sea floor and hit it from beneath. This is all trivially easy to do with pattern recognition of the kind that exists today, combined with the kind of hardware that exists today. Imagining killer drones as the humanoid terminators is silly, because such a form would not be efficient. Instead, imagine a quadcopter drone hovering above in scan mode, seeking targets, and then using some kind of a weapon to take them down – a needle with some kind of venom would do. It’s all technically feasible.

The more dangerous thing is a combination of neural networks and totalitarian-minded humans, and by that I mean all kinds of leftists in the West. An AI can data-mine the information sources in order to tag “undesirable” humans, and then this tag would be acted upon by the banks, governments, corporations and so on, basically making it impossible for one to send or receive money if not compliant with the current ideological requirements. This already exists and it’s why we must look for all the things the governments attack as “money laundering friendly” and adopt them as means of doing financial transactions, because if it’s “money laundering friendly”, it means the government can’t completely control it, and if the government can’t control it, it’s the only way for us to survive totalitarian governments aided by neural networks. Have in mind that the governments talk about controlling all kinds of criminals and perverts, but what they really mean is you. Targetting universally hated groups is merely a way to get public approval for totalitarian measures that will then be applied universally. What we will probably all end up doing in order to evade fascist governments is transact in crypto tokens, and settle in gold and silver, in some kind of a distributed, encrypted network that will be incredibly difficult to infiltrate or crack.

Basically, the payment and financial systems have been modified to accommodate totalitarian intent for decades already, to the point where now even the common folk understand that something is not right, but they cannot even imagine the danger. If someone restricts your ability to conduct business and purchase goods and services, and connects that to your political attitudes, you can kiss every idea of freedom and democracy goodbye, and that’s exactly what the American “democratic” overlords have been quietly doing, both at home and in their vassal states. Unfortunately, Russia and China are no better, because government power over the populace is just too tempting for any government bastard to resist.

So, basically, I’m not really afraid of AI. I’m afraid of AI being used by evil humans to create a prison for our bodies and minds, and only God can save us from this hell, which is basically why I think a nuclear war that would decapitate all the governments and destroy the technosphere that gives them infinite power is a lesser evil. The alternative, unfortunately, is much, much worse, because a logical continuation of “business as usual” is being completely controlled by the madmen who will cull the population every now and then to “save the planet” or whatever makes them feel good about themselves, and control us to the point where even saying the word “freedom” would put you on some list you don’t want to be on.

Messy realities of life

I am thinking further along the line I explored in the previous article; namely, that life is messy, and sometimes you need to choose between truth, justice, utility, and kindness. Those things seem to converge as you go higher, towards God, and God is at the same time fullness along multiple dimensions. Here, however, not so much. Let’s say you have to deal with a manipulative person in some business dealings. Navigating such a problem can make you choose between multiple bad options, because you can’t approach it from the position of greatest truth, you can’t approach it with kindness because it might be counterproductive (a manipulator interprets kindness as weakness and an opportunity for abuse), and what I end up doing is a melange of forthright truth and utility – in essence, I say how things are, what I want, and I do it in a pretty much brutally straightforward way, without much emotion or niceties; here’s what the contract says, here’s what I will do, and here’s what I want you to do. I turn all empathy off, I don’t complicate things with higher spiritual aspects of the situation, I tell things as they are, adhering to the principle of truthfulness, but I am also governed by the principle of utility – basically, I want to either earn or not lose money, and I try to avoid unnecessary hostilities, but I am also quite prepared to engage in them if it is necessary, just and useful. Also, I have in mind that I’m not really spiritually helping evil people if I allow them to get their way; this would only encourage them in their evil. The principle of ahimsa, therefore, does somewhat guide my actions, but not to the degree where it would always and necessarily prevail. The principle of utility, however, is tempered by the fact that I am an instrument of God, and my personal prosperity and well-being often take a second seat to other considerations.

Truth

I recently saw a video by Jordan Peterson, in which he urges people to always to tell the truth, or at least not to lie. It made me think, because that’s an advice I would always give, and also something I personally can’t really do.

Tell the truth? Sure. Tell the greatest truth I know? That God is the ultimate reality, and this world is an elaborate, persistent illusion? That life and death don’t matter, and your relationship with God is the only thing to consider, always? When exactly should I tell those truths? When the owner of the restaurant asks me how I liked the lunch? When the neighbour asks me what’s up? When the cashier at the store asks “would that be all?”

It reminds me of a Bosnian joke where Mujo managed to burn out the latest AI supercomputer by asking him “šta ima?”, or “what’s up?” in rough translation. The computer of course took it literally and started selecting all things that are up. The answer everybody expects is something along the lines of “oh, nice to see you too man, how’s things?”, which is a trivial social phrase that means nothing, really, and is there merely to keep the pretence of a conversation when there’s nothing to say, and a way to be polite about it. In most cases, truth is neither sought nor required.

So, yes, that’s the way I go about things – answer with polite phrases, go through life providing non-responses to non-questions, because it would be awqward to do otherwise, but the fact remains that by doing so I am living a lie.