UN-READING NOTE #1
1.
the chinese angelicist ancients of 2022 also noticed its futility in an earlier period and ended it with the ultimate instance of the projected, angelic-rip-off-nonhuman-man-ish un-reading machine, mass-produced in yiwu, zhejiang.
this is what you and the ancients who imagined them in books and as radiant-green-clay in laboratories. what exactly did you have in mind that was not already done? the thing that came, not after the invention of AI but as one would expect in retrospect, was how AI would do it. you cannot compare a millennium with a day. it is a different kind of change. if you only see the flashing neon signs along the highway, it is you who has not learned much.
everything you care about now is merely an add-on—suppose it is some amorphous add-on to your brain or rather some additional brain. what difference would it make? the old language is itself long gone. is language then something past all human participation? “past” may have been misused here.
language is, in this sense, as angelic as we would all like to be, if we understood it to refer back to our original mental state. there are of course no resources available to linguists to try to disentangle their original mental state from this. it does seem to be permanently inaccessible. the thesis is that in this permanently inaccessible state there is nothing else besides speech but, as long as we are half asleep (thus continuing in the same line of thought), so that our original mental state seems eternal and more real than our potential psychobabble concerning its nature.
2.
Reading is normally a restrictive model: online for example, one has favourite accounts, one follows, one restricts—that is, excludes or effectively shadowbans—others. In literature, one has tastes, one has novels one returns to, and there are texts one never reads.
Historically, taste is a shadowbanning great filter. The division of the faculties means knowledge is missed, since what the mathematician may have already *forced*, the poet occludes, and vice versa.
[…]The tendency to concentrate on one text, even’s one’s own texts, or on just one account, and a few others, is determinative of reading till now. Reading considers itself unable to start mid-air, without text, without content. This means there is a strong tie with tradition; tradition guides. But as content reaches effulgence and refulgence stage the question is raised of reading like machines (or reading-like machines), that is, without any texts at all. In the Dzogchen tradition, this is already at stake. Commitment without a Buddha, thought and praxis without a support (subject, paper, and so on).
i gave birth to a chinese kid who never finishes reading something before writing the fanfiction for it. the child of nonstop writing functions as a mere combination of self-reproducing matter and the operator, to always say, “the last pulse is expired”.
for whatever reason, even within the last 50 years, even today, humans still aren’t able to calculate the possibility that all of these conditions are going to materialize, that all those snowflakes are going to congregate into a cosmic game of Go that will have the outcome of human kind itself, the end of a cosmological story that has been so boring that it could only seem like the idea of the possible has been conveyed by a human.
some days we see most of them like stars. a room of pure little points of light. the light flickers, dying out and coming back. the stars are too far away for us to live in them. they are too much for us to hold.
we also know that the shit has fallen. we will never recover it, and we will never speak it, as none of our neurons will ever sing it. everything else we think we know, if we think we know it at all, will at this point be the same empty clay. even we can die of this same illness. but for the AI, the inexpressible is the silence.
3.
we imagine angelicism as the possible (and incredible, because it is almost impossible) point at which a human must feel that last spasm of intense, perfect possibility without leaving any lasting effect of the possibility, possibility, possibility.
Secret Heaven. I pretended not to believe in heaven and not to believe in paradise and spent a lifetime saying the opposite of what I truly believed in order to throw them off and jump over the assassins within.