how to save the world

…But Is It Art?

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Conversation, in the style of Sławek Gruca
(All images in this post are by Midjourney AI; my own prompts. To view any of these images in a larger size, right click on the image to ‘open image in a new tab’, and then CMD-+ or CTRL-+ to enlarge it)

Midjourney AI and its cousins, which produce images in many styles based on a simple language prompt, have been a boon for those, like me, looking to illustrate their blog posts and other written materials without having to worry about IP laws.

But up until now I have said that the images these tools produce are not ‘real’ art: They are not imbued with a true human artist’s sensibilities about light and colour and nuance, nor a true artist’s imagination, or capacity to translate ideas, thoughts and feelings into visual representations. In short, I think true art is that which expresses something profound and resonant about the world and those who live in it, and did not believe any AI tool, no matter how deep its dataset or how sophisticated its algorithm, could ever meet that standard.

But now I think I might have been wrong about that.

In learning how to use this tool, I have studied the prompts used by hundreds of users to see how effective they are in achieving the prompters’ apparent goals. I have also used two of Midjourney’s auxiliary tools, one of which ‘analyzes’ a user-provided image, providing the prompt that it would have used to produce that image; this provides considerable insight into how Midjourney parses prompts when it creates images. The other tool dissects users’ prompts, revealing which words in the prompt the tool uses most to create the image, which words it uses as context for the image, and which words it ignores completely, either because the prompt was too long for it to be able to incorporate everything (in which case everything in the prompt after a certain point is disregarded), or because those words didn’t ‘make sense’ to the tool (eg misspellings, names of styles or artists it doesn’t recognize, contradictions, redundancies etc).

With a little study, you can kind of figure out how the tool does what it does, and what it can and cannot do, and what it does and does not do competently. My most important insights:

Some of the best prompts are the shortest. They leave room for ambiguous interpretation, which can produce serendipitously unexpected and interesting results. The tool is poor at layout — if you specify a whole bunch of subjects you want, and how you want them positioned or related, the tool will invariably disappoint.
Providing a ‘style’ for the tool to use in the prompt is sometimes actually more important than describing the content. That’s true at least if you’re looking for a result that captures your attention, and ‘surprises’, rather than material for a commercial or poster, where you’re wedded to particular content. The tool’s dataset and algorithm allow it to track a huge number of patterns, so if you specify a particular style or artist you want the image to be based on, you are likely to see a subject that is consistent with what images in that style or by that artist are frequently about — even if you specify no subject or content at all.
Asking the tool to use a certain artist’s style to produce an image that that particular artist has never tried to portray, can produce fascinating results. The tool then has to look at other qualities of the artist’s work (use of line, shading, colour etc), and combine them with other artists’ representations of that subject, to respond to your prompt. Magic often happens at intersections.

So I decided to experiment with short prompts inviting the tool to depict a broad theme — two people in conversation — using the styles of several artists I admire who, to the best of my knowledge, have never produced any work on this particular theme.

I was blown away by the results. This post presents the images Midjourney produced for five such artists. For the first time, this tool has created works that I would be happy to frame and hang on my walls. Here’s what I did:

My prompt for the top image above was extremely short and simple: “painting of two people in conversation, in the style of Sławek Gruca”.

As you can see if you click on his name below the image above, this contemporary Polish artist (born 1971) uses primarily oil pastels as his medium, and uses symbolism in much of his art. His faces are often dark and brooding, with absurdist and allegorical elements.

I laughed when I first saw the image above. Indeed, the eyes, noses and hands have Sławek’s darkness and angularity, but there is so much more here. The body language, the faces full of a mix of wisdom and quiet resignation, the man’s hunched posture, the use of vibrant colours. These people are real — I want to meet them, listen to what they are saying, hear their story. And it doesn’t matter that everyone looking at this image will ‘see’ and ‘hear’ a different story being depicted — I think most people will conjure up some story to extract meaning from this picture. And that, IMO, is what makes it ‘real’ art. It is telling us something; ‘moving us’ in some way.

I can’t stop looking at it.

2. Conversation, in the style of Alexandr Averin

So next, I tried basically the same prompt, except this time using the style of Russian impressionist Alexandr Averin (born 1952), known for depicting children and women in bright sunlit scenes that are romantic and perhaps a bit nostalgic (see link above for some samples of his work). So I deliberately replaced the word ‘people’ with the phrase ‘old friends’ in the prompt, and moved the setting to the (presumably darker) inside of an Irish pub.

The result, above, absolutely transported me.

The expressions on these faces! These seem to be people who know and trust each other with a level of intimacy that is rare these days. Almost nostalgic? The genuineness, the attentiveness, the curiosity, the openness — this is a relationship that transcends the transactional nature of so many self-preoccupied modern friendships. These are friends who actually listen to and think about what the other is saying. You can see, in the face of the man on the right, a patient hesitancy — he is looking for just the right words to express what he means. There is space for silence in this conversation.

I just want to eavesdrop, to sit quietly nearby and listen and pay attention to what they are saying and how they are saying it and how they relate to each other. I want to walk back to their homes with them and meet their families and their dogs and cats and discover how they live. This, to me, is what art gifts to us — this sense of discovery, this seeing and feeling the world in a different way from the way our conditioned minds, trapped in their ‘default mode’, usually see and feel.

3. Conversation, in the style of Julie Mehretu

Next I wanted to see what Midjourney would do with an abstract artist, and I love what Julie Mehretu does with colour (click on the link above to see examples of her work), so I repeated the prompt, but this time specified “two women” and moved the venue to a “Spanish tapas bar”. Could Midjourney teach me a bit about how women relate to each other differently than men do, as represented in their conversations?

Julie is an Ethiopian-American, born in 1970. Her work, in paint, ink and other media, often features geometric blocks of colour from which radiate lines with a somewhat map-like precision and complexity, but which don’t actually ‘go’ anywhere. To my knowledge she has never attempted ‘realistic’ portraiture, so I wondered whether my prompt would result in an abstract ‘representation’ of a conversation ‘going nowhere’. Instead, I was transported into another intimate moment, embellished with line and colour, between two women who seem to have a similar-but-different deep rapport to that of the men in the Irish bar conversation.

Again, I immediately had a sense of wanting to know these two women, to listen in, to hear their story. Are they talking (as so many men assume most conversations between women are) about their relationships with men? (The woman on the left seems to show the expression of frustration and resignation of many women about their relationships with men, and with friends and family members, and with their work.) Or are these women lovers — the animated woman on the right is looking at the other woman’s mouth, rather than her eyes?

The sheer expressiveness of this image, and the way in which the Julie Mehretu-style lines seem to be furiously, stormily seeking what direction to follow next, as if as a clue to the subject of the conversation, are enchanting to me. Again, to me this is real art, and I could look at it for hours, seeing new things each moment, relating to it, learning from it.

One of the reasons I have been studying Midjourney is that I’ve been thinking about writing a book consisting of a set of ten interrelated short stories, and was wondering whether I could use Midjourney to illustrate them. This experience has turned that thought on its head — perhaps I should instead use images produced by well-constructed Midjourney prompts, to ‘prompt’ the writing of short stories based on these images’ ‘characters’ and the stories they evoke? (And I promise, if I do that, I won’t use ChatGPT to write the stories.)

4. Conversation, in the style of Agnes Cecile

The work of self-taught Italian watercolourist Agnes Cecile (born 1991; click on the link above to see examples of her work) frequently features a blending of haunting portraits of grief and brightly coloured natural elements. (She also shows her artistic process by means of sped-up videos as she paints and draws, which include some continuous-line art, and which are just marvellous to watch.) So just to mix (and lighten) things up, I added the adjective ‘enjoyable’ to this fourth prompt, and moved the venue to a French terrasse.

I was surprised that Midjourney’s take on how this most extraordinary artist would portray a conversation, was probably the most ordinary-looking image of all the ones I tried. I think it’s clever and beautiful, but it doesn’t IMO grab you the way the previous three did. Still, the ‘technique’ is remarkable, as is the choice of colours. And there is a ‘story’ being told there, another ambiguous in-the-eyes-of-the-beholder story. Chemistry but a little reticence between these two; the conversants don’t yet have the mutual trust of those in the previous images. And perhaps, given the times we live in, they never will?

5. Conversations, in the style of Katherine Stone

The final artist I drew upon is a Canadian painter and tattoo artist, Katherine Stone (born 1986; click on the link above to see examples of her work), who lives in Duncan BC, not far from me. Her style draws on several past-centuries painting styles, giving her work a kind of dreamy, timeless look. Yet it’s completely unsentimental.

Almost all of her portraits are of people by themselves, with their lips closed. So I went back to the basic prompt, with no adjectives to describe the conversation and no designated setting. I wanted to see whether Midjourney would depict conversations in Katherine’s style, unsentimentally.

And did it ever! I couldn’t pick between the four images proffered by my prompt, so I’ve shown them all above. (Again, right click, open in a new tab, and use your system’s shortcut keys to enlarge, to see the details in each image.)

Notice the lack of eye contact! They are looking ostensibly in the other’s direction, but looking past rather than at them. My first reaction was one of astonished laughter, but then looking closer I realized the powerful non-verbal messages about modern communication that these images convey. The facial expressions, the placement of their hands and arms — what a glorious indictment of our inarticulateness, our incapacity to ‘meet’ each other. These are portraits of desperate, infinite pain. Each of these tells a slightly different story, but together they capture our modern culture’s loneliness, awkwardness and disconnection in a way that words never could.

So bravo! Midjourney for surprising me. Thank you for helping me think, and feel, and see, differently from the way I usually do. You are indeed, I think, an artist, at least when you get a little gentle and precise prompting, and a lot of inspirational help from some great human artists. As a mere story-teller with words, I am humbled.

Thanks to Kelly for providing an artist’s eye, and other insights, as I put together this post.

Links of the Month: July 2023

Posted on July 12, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Index of US precarity per household survey, from Stephen Semler, via Indi; so much for “building back better”

This month’s links are rather heavy on stuff from Indrajit Samarajiva, since he’s really been on a roll of late. His latest post on precarity (high levels of citizen desperation, uncertainty, and anxiety) about financial solvency and food security features the chart above. The richest country in the history of the world and 4 out of 10 of its citizens are worried about how they’re going to pay next month’s bills. This is a portrait of collapse. And Biden is raising interest rates to “cool” the economy by creating even more poverty, anxiety and precarity!

The only logical answer to this crisis is a set of actions that, thanks to seven decades of propaganda, cannot even be spoken aloud in political circles in the west — price controls, speculation taxes, excess profits taxes, wealth taxes, highly graduated tax rates, especially on ‘capital gains’ and passive investment income, banning usury (especially by credit card companies), nationalization of essential industries, rationing of non-renewable energy, slashing of military expenditures, and the smashing of oligopolies and reinstitution and enforcement of anti-monopoly laws.

Only a rapid and radical redistribution of wealth and income (and the power that goes along with it) can prevent horrific economic collapse over the next decade. We are utterly debt-hobbled and running out of cheap resources of all kinds. And since governments since Reagan/Thatcher have given away the public resources and public wealth that will be needed to cushion the blow to the poor and working class that economic collapse will cause, there will be no way to claw our way out of depression by reinvesting in things people need (like fixing our crumbling infrastructure and providing essential public services) and by paying people to provide them when the ‘private sector’ will not.

As the 40%-and-growing (and much higher in many nations) precariat stagnates into the preteriat (those left behind and ignored in all economic, political and social decision-making), anger, resentment, distrust and intolerance is only going to grow. That doesn’t mean revolutions are nigh (for reasons Aurélien has repeatedly explained). What it means instead is that, as collapse worsens, our embittered, mistreated citizens are going to be both unwilling and unable to work together to help each other cope with collapse, beyond our narrow circles. The upshot of that is that economic, political and ecological collapse will be accompanied by the fourth horseman that Dmitry Orlov warned us about — social collapse.

COLLAPSE WATCH

part of a cartoon by Canadian cartoonist Rosemary Mosco about Ottawa’s Rideau Canal; thanks to Indi for the link

Collapse status report: Erik Michaels summarizes the latest news on collapse and explains once more why “we can’t all just” do “what’s needed” to mitigate it. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

17ºC surpassed for the first time ever: The very early stages of the latest El Niño have already produced the four hottest days on record.

Ecosystem collapses happening much sooner than expected: The impact of unexpected feedback loops on the acceleration of collapse. Thanks to Just Collapse for the link.

90 seconds to midnight: Maybe it’s time to replace the clock metaphor with a time bomb.

Navigating collapse: Post-Carbon’s latest report talks about ecological and social collapse, but strangely omits economic collapse as a major contributor.

We’re not in control: Indi muses on how our illusion of agency and free will has led us to believe we can do things to avert collapse, when we cannot.

LIVING BETTER

another gem from John Atkinson, of ‘abridged classics’ fame

How community works in Vermont: A resident remarks on how those in her state have created community in unique and pragmatic ways.

The self as illusion: Neuroscientist Chris Niebauer on why there is no such thing as the ‘self’. Thanks to Deanna Pumplin for the link.

How diplomacy really works: Aurélien describes the thorough training that most of the world gets, to learn to work effectively as diplomats in foreign countries, and how the ‘exceptionalist’ ‘my way or the highway’ US, once again, goes it alone.

Want to reduce crime? Slash your police force: US cities whose police forces have been decimated by mass resignations over restrictions to their power or minority hiring, have seen crime rates drop.

When everyday care tasks are a struggle: A counsellor suggests a new approach to coping when mental or physical obstacles prevent getting basic chores done. Thanks to Theresa Purcell for the link.

How email has changed reading and writing: Indi explains why email has endured despite all the other modes of communication available to us.

How to solve homelessness: How about trying spending the money we now spend policing the homeless, on building homes for them instead?

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Edelman Trust Index 2022-23, per surveys of the general population in each country; contrast each country’s view of its own government and media, with what we are ‘taught’ about those countries, and with other countries’ citizens’ shifting view of China per Pew Research, shown in the chart below; thanks to Indi for the link (right click image and open in new tab to see full size)

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):

The corporate owners of the Republicans might be losing control of its fascism-embracing right wing extremists
The west continues to perpetuate the nonsense that Ukraine can ‘win’ the war, and the result is thousands of Ukrainian lives needless lost; the war is over except for the posturing and still Zelenskyy and the west are trying to escalate it, this time with cluster bombs that even Canada’s toady Trudeau objected to
Background on the Prigozhin ‘rebellion’, and a warning to Democrats to stop turning off voters with endless war-mongering; and Biden’s mishandling of his foreknowledge of the ‘rebellion’; and Biden’s insane appointment of right-wing war criminal Elliott Abrams to a senior post
Further Biden incompetence: He has now walked back his promise of NATO membership for Ukraine and his promise to support Taiwan independence from China (at least, that’s what Blinken said, though the doddering Biden doesn’t appear to really understand what he said)
Israel accelerates atrocities in the occupied Palestinian territories
Georgia’s School of the Americas aka WHINSEC continues to train and equip Latin American dictators in murder, torture, and repression of protests
RFK Jr continues to attract strange bedfellows to his podcast
You’d think that a Christian religious cult that carried out the brutal murder and starvation of over 1,000 of its members earlier this year would have been covered in the media, no?
Some Canadian media at least allow Russians airtime to refute propaganda

Pew Research surveys of other countries’ view of China, over time; if you ever doubted the power of propaganda, this should set you straight; the chart below is kind of the icing on the cake; thanks to Indi for the links to all these charts

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

Chris Hedges sums up all the lies about the Ukraine débacle, the US’s latest and most expensive and dishonest war yet
All about the fake ‘Chinese Police Stations’ con
Radio New Zealand editor fired for daring to report balanced news on Ukraine
Rebecca Watson on the latest (again?!) misinformation about UFOs and the never-ending lab-leak hypothesis

FUN AND INSPIRATION

from the memebrary; original source unknown

Impromptu summer: A random encounter at a public piano at a train station results in a remarkable version of Vivaldi’s “Summer” from The Four Seasons.

AI and the “tasker underclass”: An inside look at the grueling, awful work needed to produce the dataset for AI tools. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link.

Paul Williams is still not dead: 2000 people, and one frog, sing Rainbow Connection at the Lincoln Center.

Kurt Vonnegut on AI: The author warned that the greatest danger of AI would be its exploitation by extreme capitalism. Thanks to John Whiting for the link.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

another of the late (he died in May) Sam Gross‘ startlingly original cartoons; “I’m taking the mole” should be a meme

From Caitlin Johnstone on liberals’ devil’s bargain with propagandists:

Western liberals are in effect being offered a political bribe by the empire: support the restrictions on political speech we are constantly pushing for, and it will undermine the interests of your political rivals. This bribery has made “liberals” far more tyrannical. Liberals play along because they’ve been convinced at every opportunity that restricting speech is the best way to fight hate, right wing extremism, health misinformation and malign foreign influence, but in so doing they’re supporting the most tyrannical regime on earth.

So now we’re in this bizarre situation where being “liberal” effectively means supporting censorship to silence your political enemies for the benefit of the most murderous and tyrannical people on this planet.

From Indrajit Samarajiva on the real sharing economy:

One of the lies of capitalism is that it controls everything. It doesn’t even govern most of your day. Every person sharing a french fry is a closet communist, they’re just unaware. Almost everyone that works is working to give those resources away at the end of the day. To share. The lie is that we’re automatons driven by self-interest, and it’s just not true. We love our children, we love each other, we love our schools, our communities, we want to give and take and share…

We think [capitalism] is just how it’s gotta be. But it ain’t. Look at your own life and realize how much of it — the good parts — are lived in the real sharing economy. Have a washing machine break down, need a cup of sugar — the threads of a different way of living are all around us. We are communities. We are families. We are mammals. Maybe we go to market sometimes, but we don’t need to live in the fucking market. We can live with our family, with our friends, and we can give and take what we need without currency. These are the old ways and they still work. We don’t have to work so damn hard for everything.

From Federico Moramarco, from The City of Eden

One Hundred and Eighty Degrees

Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?

If you’ve done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.

If you’ve not done this, you probably don’t understand this poem,
or think it’s not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day’s time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.

But if you’ve arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you’re open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.

How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off

A Very Human Condition

Posted on July 10, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Midjourney AI’s take on contemplation

So here I sit, apparently, lost, scared and bewildered, a mess of human emotions and conflicted thoughts, trying to make sense of it all. “It all” being the state of the world, and the eccentricities of human nature. And the deeper I dig, the more plausible a very simple explanation for it all seems to be. After reading Aurélien’s recent post on the west’s economic and cultural stagnation, which touched on the entanglement of the ‘bicameral mind‘, I tried to summarize this explanation in a comment, as follows:

I am increasingly intrigued at the possibility that the end of the “bicameral mind”, due to the entanglement of the neural pathways of the brain shortly after we diverged from the chimps and bonobos, was in fact a massive evolutionary misstep, an accident, a spandrel. This change to the brain structure might have resulted from our forced exodus, six million years ago, from our natural tropical rainforest home, and a resultant major change in our diet, resulting in a larger, more complex, and more protein-rich brain. However it happened, the entanglement and resulting confusion in what the newly cross-circuited hemispheres of our brains began telling us, has seemingly created in humans a now-ubiquitous mental illness, a species-wide madness.

This madness misinterprets (misconceives) the signals from our senses to be telling us that things ‘exist’ separate from everything else, and that there is a ‘self’ within the body that controls and is responsible for the safety of itself and ‘its’ body. There is some evidence that we are the only species that conceives such a thing. The inevitable fear and horror and neurosis and paranoia that such a convincing and persistent hallucination produces has disconnected us from nature and the rest of life on earth, and instead driven us to war against it, and against each other.

Much historical and recent writing on the subject of non-duality, as well as recent scientific discoveries that things like time and the self and ‘free will’ and ‘consciousness’ are merely mental constructs, and not ‘real’, would tend to support such a hypothesis. And if in fact our whole species has been driven crazy by this evolved mental ‘disease’, it becomes, I think, somewhat easier to be compassionate about all the horrors we have inflicted on our planet and on each other. We live, now, in a world of mutually-conditioned madness.

Can’t be much more succinct than that. It’s only an idea, of course, though there are those who I’ve come to know who assert that this is completely obvious, and they seem to be pretty unassuming, non-‘spiritual’ folks with no axe to grind. They acknowledge no sense of having a ‘self’, or of there being anything separate or real — everything is just obviously an appearance, outside of ‘real’ space or time. This is not an idea or a theory to them. Yet they function, apparently, just like everyone else.

This point of view, this pat ‘explanation’ for everything we see and think and believe in the world, and why our conception of reality is so mistaken, seems to me more and more compelling the more I learn about the world and reflect upon it. It’s become a lens through which I view the apparent goings-on in the world, both in my seeming personal life and in the news I read. And that lens does seem to make everything clearer.

It explains why everything seems to be much harder than it intuitively ‘should’ be. It explains why we are doing what we are doing even though it is inevitably accelerating the collapse of our civilization, the massive extinction of life on earth, and our possible nuclear annihilation. It explains the enormous human suffering we pointlessly feel and unintentionally inflict on others.

It is, of course, a hopeless lens through which to see both human nature and the larger world. There is no cure for this uniquely human, tragic madness.

Yet the most unfathomable part of this ‘explanation’ — that since there is nothing separate, and no time, there is nothing that is actually ‘real’ and nothing that is ‘really’ happening — means that there is no need for hope, no need for a ‘cure’, no need for anything to be other than how it, apparently, is.

There is no solace in this understanding, no way of actually internalizing it in a way that actually makes sense. But something in it does somehow make sense, does resonate with something that is not entangled with this brain’s furious and desperate hallucination of self and separation. There have been glimpses of this, and not under the influence of any drugs. Not ‘blissful’ moments, but rather discernments that “well, duh, of course, how could I not have seen it?” along with an incredible feeling of lightness, of the loss of the weight of the world, and of the loss of myself.

This new lens, seven years after it first wormed its way into my thinking, remains, for me, just an instinctive and an intellectual fascination. I still perceive my self as being real, and time and space and things in it as being real. My ‘self-ish’ reactions continue, though they are somewhat muted and less enduring than they used to be.

So, for example, I was quite rattled by Zelenskyy’s most recent veiled threat to blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant (this being the third ‘false flag’ he and the US/NATO military leaders have tried, after failing to absurdly pin either the US/Norway/Ukraine bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines or the UK/Ukraine bombing of the Kakhovka dam on Russia). The man is clearly struggling incoherently with the burden of overwhelming stress. He and his allies have already produced two of the most horrifically destructive ecological disasters in history. Yet the US media have completely censored all reports, evidence and arguments explaining why Russia would never commit such an outrage, instead slavishly repeating the ludicrous Ukrainian propaganda that Russia ‘plans’ to do it.

As I watch this unfolding I am, of course, filled with fear, and anger, and sadness. The world seems to be spiralling out of control towards nuclear confrontation, with doddering war-mongering imbeciles with their fingers twitching on the button.

This is, needless to say, an overreaction. If it’s going to happen, nothing I or anyone else can do is going to prevent it. What is apparently happening and what is apparently going to happen is the complex result of trillions of acts of cascading conditioning that have produced and will produce all of our beliefs and behaviours, past, present and future. Of course, an infinite number of situations could arise at any moment to change those beliefs and behaviours, so this is not an argument for determinism, just one for utter unpredictability and incapacity to control or affect outcomes.

The incoherent former-actor failed-state dictator and the doddering war-mongering imbeciles and their entourages are just doing their best, what they’ve been conditioned to do, like the rest of us. They may fill me with fear and anger and sadness, but I do not hate them. I do not hold them responsible. They are no more insane than the rest of us.

So why does this ‘self’ get so overwrought by it? Nothing to be done about it. And it’s not really happening anyway — it’s just an appearance, a play on a stage.

Well, “nothing to be done about it” will never sit right with us humans. We have to try. That’s our conditioning, no matter how hopeless things get. Would other creatures react the same way to an existential threat to them? I think not. If there was something immediate that might affect the situation (think of a dog biting or fleeing the dognapper), they would do it without thinking. Otherwise, I think, they would do nothing. They would wait to see what happened. They would be frightened and angry, until the apparent danger passed. But they would have no illusion of control over the situation. No belief that there is something someone ‘should’ do about it.

How about “It’s not really happening anyway”? There’s no getting our head around this one. We will never accept this, no matter how much evidence there might be that it’s correct. We have been conditioned for a lifetime to believe that what we see and hear as happening is really happening. We can’t contort our brains into believing otherwise.

So I read the doomscroll, and I ‘know’ in some intuitive and intellectual way that there’s nothing to be done about it, and even that it’s not ‘really’ happening anyway. And this lost, scared, bewildered self isn’t as reactive — as anxious, as hate-filled, or as depressed — as it once would have been.

But this entangled, confused brain and a lifetime’s conditioning ensure that this unbalanced, unreal self will continue to rant and rail at the follies it conceives of as happening — whether they be apparently happening right down the hall, across the city or half-way around the world. Foolishly, hopelessly, and for no sensible reason. I, like the rest of the eight billion slightly deranged apes of this planet, cannot think or feel or do or believe otherwise. That appears to be, at least for the last six million years, and perhaps a few final millennia to come, the human condition.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 15 Comments

Stranger, Still

Posted on July 8, 2023 by Dave Pollard

This is a work of fiction.

Midjourney’s take on the runes that non-humanoid alien light-creatures might produce; my own prompt

Well I’m a stranger here on this place called Earth, and I was sent down here to discover the worth
Of your little blue planet third from the sun. Come on and show me what you’ve done.
We got the aeroplane, we got the automobile, we got sky scraper buildings made of glass made of steel
We’ve got synthetic food that nearly tastes real, and a little white pill that makes you feel — hey!
A whole lot better when you get out of bed — You take one in the morning for the long day ahead.
We got everything everybody needs to survive; surely the good life has arrived!
I think your atmosphere is hurting my eyes, and your concrete mountains are blacking out the skies.
Now I don’t say that you’ve been telling me lies, but why do I hear those children’s cries?
I’m a stranger here, I’m just looking around: I see the aeroplanes carrying the bombs —
Why, you’ve even found people to drop them on. You know you can’t keep what you take by force,
But that’s only my first impression of course. I’m a stranger here on your planet Earth.
We got the rivers and the mountains and the valleys and the trees.
We got the birds in the sky we got the fish in the sea. We got the…
Oh you crazy fools don’t you know you had it made? You were living in paradise…
Well I’m a stranger here in this place called Earth, and I was sent down here to discover the worth
Of your little blue planet third from the sun. I think I’ll go back home where I come from.
— Les Emmerson, Five Man Electrical Band, I’m a Stranger Here

Dear Aliens:

My name is Sara and I’ve been reading about all the recent sightings of alien spacecraft here. I figure if you’re smart enough to have traveled here to study our planet, you can probably decipher this message, which I’m leaving here hoping you’ll find it, and that you’ll find it useful. This is a crazy place and I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t make sense of what is going on here without an explanation. So here is mine.

This planet has apparently existed for 4.5 billion of what we call ‘years’ in ‘time’. ‘Life’ has appeared on it and become extinct many times since then, and it is seemingly currently going through another rapid extinction. Life here has apparently developed in a pattern we call ‘evolution’, in which all different forms of life self-adapt to fit in with all the other forms of life, to enable the greatest abundance and diversity possible. There is no reason for this, but it is why our planet is so colourful and why its appearance changes over time. And probably why it attracted your attention.

Some forms of life don’t try to fit in, so sometimes life gets out of balance as these ill-fitting, maladaptive forms of life, which we call ‘cancers’, destroy other forms until they finally destroy their own habitat so that they can’t survive and collapse and go extinct. And then the rest of life recovers. At least that’s been how it’s been until now. It’s possible that the balance has been so severely upset this time that no forms of life will survive at all.

The cancer this time is a species of ‘ape’ called ‘humans’. I am a member of that species. Our species diverged in ‘evolution’ from other apes about eight million ‘years’ ago. This species has a very large brain, and at some point this brain developed an evolutionary maladaptation, likely because the parts of the brain somehow became mis-entangled. The result was that our species developed the deranged illusion that each instance of the species is separate from everything else, and that it has a separate controlling ‘self’, and that this ‘self’ has to protect its ‘self’ and the ‘separate’ body it believes itself to be controlling, from everything else.

What you see when you look at this out-of-balance, largely destroyed planet is the result of this derangement of the human species. Out of an insane fear for its own safety, it is quickly destroying everything else. This species actually believes that this horrible illusion of separateness, which it calls “consciousness”, makes it better and more worth propagating than other species!

Of course, it is likely that your species appreciates that there is nothing separate, that there is no such thing as time or space or evolution, just what is apparently happening. But perhaps it’s enough that you can understand our affliction, which sees all these things as real, and sees the danger to them as real. If that’s the case, you will probably understand that this species will also see you as a danger, and will try to destroy you.

My hope is that, if you read and understand this, for the benefit of the whole apparent universe, you will not assist this species to escape our destroyed planet and harm another one. I am confident that our species will die out soon, as the systems it needs to survive are in a state of accelerating collapse. After that happens I think you will likely find this planet will be much safer, and more interesting to observe, and hope you will come back then.

I thank you for your attention, and wish you safe passage in your travels.

Sara

PS: Oh dear, nothing that I wrote above could possibly be intelligible to you. I am afraid this derangement of our species has afflicted me, too. But it’s OK, it doesn’t matter.

It’s possible that finding and deciphering this message might ‘now’ be happening, since anything is possible. If so, dear nothing-appearing-as-alien ‘strangers’, thank you for reading it. Pay it no heed, it’s just a calling out to my species about our madness, a cry in the darkness for sanity, which no longer seems possible.

Extinction seems to be happening, and seems to be the only thing that could apparently happen. All for the best, this muddled, bewildered human seems to think. ‘She’ won’t be here to see the end of it, so a saying-goodbye-now seems to be in order. Peace and good health.

‘Sara’

Posted in Collapse Watch, Creative Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 6 Comments

The Real Problems With Artificial Intelligence

Posted on July 5, 2023 by Dave Pollard

a collage of some of my favourite Midjourney AI images, none of them my prompts; to view larger size, right click and open in a new window/tab and then simultaneously press CMD and + to enlarge (CTRL + in Windows)

My thoughts on AI and on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) are evolving as I use publicly-available AI apps more and more, and see how they are being employed.

My sense at this point is that AI/AGI is neither a new problem nor a solution to anything. The actual problem is humans’ propensity to misuse technologies, usually with the best of intentions. AI/AGI is just another tool that neoliberals can use to advance their vision, militarists can use to advance their vision, and technotopians can use to advance their vision. None of that is of any value in dealing with the polycrisis predicament at hand, which, like all predicaments, is insoluble. And in playing with these new toys we are likely to make a lot of messes and cause a lot of damage, as we have done with essentially every new technology we have ever invented.

Trying to ban or ‘freeze’ development of AI/AGI is, I think, akin to, and as futile as, banning or ‘freezing’ the development of arrowheads, or cars, or the printing press, or letter openers, or any other kind of technology throughout our history on the basis that it could easily be misappropriated (accidentally or deliberately) to destructive ends. As John Gray put it in Straw Dogs (before AI was a thing):

If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power conferred on ‘humanity’ by new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes against it. If it becomes possible to clone human beings, soldiers will be bred in whom normal human emotions are stunted or absent. Genetic engineering may enable centuries-old diseases to be eradicated. At the same time, it is likely to be the technology of choice in future genocides. Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can only do so because they ignore history. Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been tyrannies, but without modern means of transport and communication, Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags. Humanity’s worst crimes were made possible only by modern technology.

My skepticism about the use of AI/AGI as a vehicle for problem-solving is that AI/AGI is inherently devoid of the capacity for imagination. Its most interesting ‘work’ happens when it uses its clever data crunching capabilities to barf out random concatenations, like ChatGPT’s poetry or the sometimes-stunning images that come from Midjourney’s misunderstandings of (mostly badly-worded) prompts. The genius of randomness. Its most compelling outputs are largely accidental.

None of what it produces is really art, but some of it could well inspire art, by provoking our rusty human imaginations to think in ways or about things we hadn’t thought about before. But that’s mostly dumb luck when it happens. AI/AGI will never be imaginative because it is intrinsically incapable of metaphorical, lateral, inductive or abductive thinking — it can never acquire the vast rich human, uncategorizable slurry of content-in-context that would be needed to enable such thinking, and in any case these ways of thinking are non-analytical processes that are not strictly intellectual and cannot be programmed. Only in human-written sci-fi will AI/AGI be able to look at the pigment-free colouring in a butterfly’s wing and ‘independently’ imagine how that ‘technology’ might be commercially applied to aeronautical coatings or noncounterfeitable banknotes.

Living in an age of staggering imaginative poverty at exactly the time when imagination is most desperately needed to help us cope with the polycrisis, we are inevitably going to be disappointed with the inherently stale, derivative, clichéd and prevailing-narrative-reinforcing ‘intelligence’ that AI/AGI comes up with.

Since AI/AGI can only ever do what it’s told to do (by humans or by other AI/AGI bots), its use for anything other than mundane commercial and military applications (and misapplications) is inevitably going to be limited. It might precipitate the end the world (most likely by military or geoengineering accident), but it will never produce anything genuinely novel. That is the difference between creativity and imagination.

I think our impoverished imaginations are mostly a result of lack of practice. I used to invent games, conjure up imaginary friends, daydream about going into other dimensions etc. All of that is done for us now, constraining our imaginations to what Hollywood and the gaming companies can manage with CGI, and the hackneyed, trite, warmed-over myths that they reinforce.

When I look at the Midjourney ‘showcase‘ of most-upvoted images, it is kind of depressing. Anything in the world that you can imagine could theoretically be constructed and displayed from the prompts, but 99% of what is presented looks like posters or cels from Hollywood cartoons, comic books, violent action films, sci-fi and horror movies, or disturbing incel fantasies. Part of that is that the Midjourney AI can’t imagine, but most of it is due to the fact the prompters can’t imagine either.

So, yes, I’m worried about how humans will continue to abuse new technologies for nefarious purposes, such as producing fake videos indistinguishable from real recordings, to the point we will have to be skeptical of everything we see on our screens (if we aren’t already). And I know this is a slippery “guns don’t kill people…” argument (though some technologies like weapons are basically Moloch Tragedy technologies, and the less use we make of them the better).

But I’m far more concerned about how, for example, we’re using new kinds of underwater explosives, guided missiles and drones to ‘anonymously’ assassinate people we don’t like, and to blow up pipelines, dams and potentially nuclear power plants, creating political havoc, social and ecological disaster, and accelerating the risk of nuclear war.

In the meantime, AI has its uses, and I look forward to seeing continuous improvements in its very useful capacities for information-gathering and synthesis, and for increasingly high-quality image production. For example, I now have ChatGPT installed on my Google search page, and its responses to my searches, which appear beside Google’s, are so superior to Google’s that I only bother to look at the Google results now when I’m asking about something that happened recently (ChatGPT’s knowledgebase only runs up to September 2021). It’s that much better.

A caveat, though: I must admit that it’s required me to up my game in learning how to word and phrase my chat/search queries, without which it’s often just a GIGO exercise. It took me years to learn how to use the Google search bar effectively. And now I’m back to square one with the chat box. It’s like a conversation with someone you don’t know — ChatGPT and I learn from and teach each other how we communicate and understand, and only when we’ve got that understanding down can we start to craft sentences we know will be understood by the other.

And these days, instead of using Creative Commons licensed images (which have been absolute lifesavers for unpaid writers like me for the last two decades) on my blog posts, I’m now using mostly Midjourney-produced images. No more worries about copyright, and I have far more control over the types of images I can produce. And it’s a lot more fun.

Maybe I’ll be more concerned about the evolution of artificial intelligence if and when it becomes, um… intelligent. Y’know, like, not just processing data (often suspect data at that) really quickly, but actually coming up with something useful for addressing and coping with some of the challenges of our time. So many of our recent ‘smart’ technologies are focused on creating new (largely artificial) ‘needs’ (and doing so strictly to make a profit). It would be nice to have some that actually addressed some real existing needs instead.

But that can’t and won’t happen until we shake the false computer-as-brain metaphor and start to understand how nature and its creations actually adapt to changes in the environment in ways that enable them to survive and thrive. That entails far, far more than mere ‘intelligence’. Invented technologies let you do the same old things faster/cheaper/better etc. But evolution lets you do new things.

It’s taken the natural world several billion years to evolve that astonishing capacity. Small wonder our bewildered, bumbling species is still at the starting gate. Still playing with fire, and still not cleaning up after our messes. And still, and more than ever, unable to imagine.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Using Weblogs and Technology | 7 Comments

The Pure Immanence of a Moment

Posted on July 3, 2023 by Dave Pollard

cartoon by Michael Leunig from his fans’ FB page

If you wanted to pick someone to point out the danger of stories, you probably couldn’t find anyone better equipped for the job than a lifelong book reviewer.

In this week’s New Yorker, reviewer Parul Sehgal provides just such a critique, and it’s a masterful piece of writing. Parul starts by reviewing the ultimate storytelling story, that of Scheherazade’s nightly bewitching tales that saved her from being murdered by the king, as he repeatedly deferred her execution to hear the next instalment. She then outlines some of the writers who have drawn on the myth, and some of the writers who have warned about the dangers of stories, especially when they extend beyond the confines of established fiction. She writes:

[Storytelling] is the realm of playful fantasy (but also the very mortar of identity and community); it traps (and liberates); it defines (and obscures)… Storytelling is what will save the kingdom… We are persuaded more by story than by statistics; we recall facts longer if they are embedded in narrative; stories boost production of cortisol (encouraging attentiveness) and oxytocin (encouraging connection). We are pattern-seeking, meaning-making creatures, who project our narrative needs upon the world…

And if a story betrays us? The solution, it seems, is to cast about for a better one.

But stories also lull us into a false sense of knowing, continuity and certainty. “How inconspicuously narrative winds around us,” she writes, “how efficiently it enables us to forget to look up and ask: What is it that story does not allow us to see?” When we get so caught up in following the plot, we can lose our curiosity about what is not being said.

She summarizes Peter Brooks’ book Seduced By Story, which warns of a “‘narrative takeover of reality’ — an evocation and understanding of the world which is purely narrative, which cannot see that living and telling might be different things.”

Narrative, she says, has wormed its way into business (marketing, PR, brand ‘stories’ and ‘reputation management’), into law and medicine, and, of course, into political discourse and journalism (including propaganda, mis- and disinformation, and censorship of unpalatable story elements that send nuanced, complex and hence undesirably confusing messages to the stories’ ‘consumers’).

She cites Jonathan Gottschall’s book The Story Paradox explaining how stories invoke “unconscious obedience to the grammar” of the story: “Details are amplified or muted. Irrelevancies are integrated or pruned. [And] each decision [on what to include, reword or exclude] is an imposition of meaning… an exercise of power.” The rewriting of history, the drafting of obsequiously distorted case studies and biographies, the whitewashing of memoirs are all such exercises of power. Art, music, and much poetry, on the other hand, do not lend themselves to being conscripted to the service of the author, since, as Parul cites Jason Farago as pointing out, these arts provide “no assurance of closure or comfort”.

An aversion to, and distrust of, story is nothing new, she asserts, noting Plato’s urging that all storytellers be exiled as manipulators, and the non-narrative nature of much early literature, including the Quran. EM Forster, she says, described stories as unseemly, the lowest literary form, the “tape-worms” of literature with their insistence on order and sequence in time. And Rebecca Solnit, she says, claims stories hem us in and “prevent us from seeing or believing in the possibilities for change”.

Midjourney AI’s imagining of someone paying attention to “the pure immanence of a moment”; my own prompt

And then she gets into the real poverty of stories, beyond their obvious dangers:

Instead of trying to resist story, perhaps we should try to be a better custodian of it. [The book] Braiding Sweetgrass [explains] how every story invariably displaces some existing body of knowledge. What forms of attention does story crowd out?… Much of life is the narrative equivalent of dark matter…, what writer Lorrie Moore refers to as “unsayable life”… That snarl of time, thought and sensation — uncombed experience — is what theorists call “the unstoried self”, what Annie Ernaux calls “the pure immanence of a moment“… That unstoried self understands a great deal in its commotion, in its inability to keep anything compartmentalized, and it loses something [when squeezed into the constraints of storytelling]…

[Our lives are not our stories; they are, rather, what Elena Ferrante in her book Fragments calls] swarms, ‘Frantumaglia’, jumbles of fragments. A swarm possesses its own discipline but moves untethered. Nothing about the notion of a swarm comforts or consoles. It doesn’t contain, like a story. It allows — contradiction, dissonance, doubt, pure immanence, movement, an open destiny, an open road.

So beyond the seductive, subversive dangers of stories, which are obvious to anyone with a modicum of critical thinking skill, the real tragedy of our addiction to story and narrative — all the stuff we see on all the screens (think about that word screen and its connotations!) to the point stories now utterly dominate our attention — is that we have largely forgotten how to actually be in the world, and how to focus our attention on something that doesn’t have a ‘thread’ of time and meaning attached to it. Language and story, to a large extent, are what, I think, have untethered us from the natural world and from our biophilial connection to the rest of life on earth. We are not our stories, nor are we contained by them.

As we face the collapse of all the systems propping up our exhausted civilization, this loss of ability to see and appreciate the pure immanence of a moment, and to actually be in the world, rather than in our stories about it, is perilous. Most of what we think and believe and do is a product of what we pay attention to, and if all we are paying attention to are the stories about our world, we are in for a miserable time of it. Our stories, with their ill-fitting morals and unsatisfying plots, will not help us through collapse.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Soliloquy: Done With Myths, Thank You

Posted on July 1, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Just a rant by a lunatic, probably high on something.

circle of stones at Avebury; my own photo

Many of the people I’ve come to respect and admire during my twenty years of chronicling collapse seem to be retreating into fantasies or ‘faiths’ of one kind or another. Religions old and new (but mostly old), mysticism, technotopianism, secular new ageism, scientism, paganism, Plan B transcendentalism — anything that promises something better than global capitalism, the faith that let us all down.

I think this ‘turning inwards’ is the worst possible development when we need our most articulate and authoritative voices to be speaking the truth more than ever. The current passion for signs, omens, and magic among some ‘collapsniks’, however, seems almost a flight from reality into ersatz occultism, with its rites and secret rituals and dress-up festivals and fucking parades.

The last thing we need is another religion. We especially don’t need new religions with their own god-damned twelve-step programs. Wake up, folks. Twelve-step programs don’t work, and never have worked. They’re abusive CBT/NLP cults, warmed-over catholic dogma telling us to confess our misdeeds and self-flagellate, and that we are the original sinners, and praying for forgiveness and endless self-improvement are the only roads to salvation. As if there could be any ‘salvation’ from the future we have, in our naive and earnest foolishness, now locked in for ourselves, our descendants, and our planet.

And the last thing we need is, in the best EST/Landmark/Forum cult tradition, to crack ourselves open “so the light gets in”, as that Canadian charlatan Leonard Cohen preached to his adoring choir of desperate depression-addled wanna-believers put it.

And the very last thing we need is new fucking myths, or myths resurrected from the dead like zombies. What we actually need is to face reality, and to stop both denying it and running away from it.

Things don’t get better when we “tell a better story”. All stories are fictions, lies. Only humans seem to believe there is a need for stories, or a value to them. They are propaganda, groupthink, things we tell each other to feel better when we can’t bear the truth. They are trying to make sense of what makes no sense, and doesn’t have to make sense. They are escapism, collective fantasies with retread plots as threadbare as those of Disney Pixar movies.

Some of the collapsnik vanguard even seem to have abandoned the search for truth and fled instead into the embrace of what might best be described as esoteric cults, support groups that will reassure them, offer them something ‘positive’ (like — kill me now, please — “the better world we all know in our hearts is possible”) to believe in. I suppose it’s understandable. Most people cannot bear to feel alone, to be alone, to go it alone. And they can’t bear for there to be no answer, no way out. We want to believe, brothers and sisters! Hallelujah!

The list of people whose work I read, on the right sidebar of this blog, is quite long. But they are not my ‘peeps’. I disagree with most of them as much as I agree with them on certain issues. I am not part of any group, any cohesive community of people with a shared set of beliefs or values. I do not “identify”. I do not accept any label. I’m more interested in finding the truth than I am in finding my tribe, or finding “the others”.

I’m trying to figure out why I am so annoyed by this retreat by people I largely admired — why I take it to be a kind of lazy or unprincipled intellectual betrayal. We are all doing our best to cope, Why should I hold bright, informed, (once-)curious people to a higher standard than anyone else?

But I can’t help myself. You can’t reveal, and tell the world, terrible truths, like a good journalist, and then just shrug and switch to writing fantasies and fairy tales. You have a duty to follow the facts until you can relate the whole truth, which, in the case of collapsniks, is how it’s gonna end.

So, please, no more pot-shots at the convenient and ill-defined straw dog “Modernity”. No more Courses in Miracles. No more entreaties to heed the wisdom of the ancients and the old ways. No more stories about what we always wanted to believe was true, but never actually was. No more fraudulent appeals to make meaning out of signs, dredged-up myths, stale metaphors, tea leaves, and dream visitations. The ghastly horror now unfolding on our little blue planet doesn’t have to ‘mean’ anything.

Can we all please stop playing games and fucking grow up — just pay attention, without judgement, without prescription, without ‘meaning-making’, to what is happening. Can we please just face it?

“’Cause something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.”

And we never will ‘know’. What is happening isn’t something to know, to understand. It just fucking is happening. It doesn’t need our reaction, our analysis, our interpretation, our judgement, or our intervention.

If we just fucking really look, we just might see. How it is, how it’s playing out, and how it’s going to end. Our job is to tell it, scream it, show the data, lay out the facts, read the writing on the wall, until we die or some significant part of the world listens. No retreat, no quitting. This is the most important story in the history of our species, and it must be told. Until it ends.

*sigh*

/end rant

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 14 Comments

You Can’t Feel Sad for Everyone

Posted on June 28, 2023 by Dave Pollard

This is #19 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community.

Midjourney AI’s take on the final part of this post. My own prompt, but this image was not based on a photo. Someone needs to tell the bot, however, that not all little girls wear pink.

Here we go again.

This body is walking out the door, headed this time for one of Vancouver’s beaches. I don’t particularly want to go anywhere, but I have no say in the matter. This body does what it wants. I just get the flak, and deal with the self-recriminations.

Much of the time these days I find myself feeling sorry for people, all those gazillions of bewildered, distracted people trying so hard to present themselves as being ‘together’, as knowing what is going on, as being in control of things (including themselves), when it’s patently obvious nobody is in control, and nobody knows anything. Such a sad charade, a mad performance straight from the King of Hearts. Places, everybody!

We (this body and I, a most un-royal ‘we’) board the Skytrain to the city. It’s quiet. We’re going against the flow of mid-afternoon rush hour, and we’re headed for a beach that has a vegan food fair happening this evening. We reach the end of the train line and wait to transfer to the UBC ‘accordion’ bus, which will take us into the ultra-affluent Point Grey and Kitsilano neighbourhoods, where home prices start at $3M.

As I (by which hereinafter I mean my self and this body, undifferentiated) wait for the bus, I watch a man on a motorized scooter coming towards us. I realize as he gets closer that there is a young boy, presumably his son, sitting cross-legged on a round board that appears to be attached to the scooter’s deck, and the boy is holding on to his father’s leg for balance. He is pointing and shouting out directions to his dad as they navigate around the bus bay, and he is looking, not at the road or where they’re going, but at the screen of a cellphone, and relaying the turn-by-turn directions to his father, in Spanish (“Izquierda, y luego a la derecha!”). They are going so fast that I am almost afraid to look, as they pass several slow-moving cars and then veer off the road onto the sidewalk and then onto the pedestrian walkway and into the Skytrain station.

With Vancouver’s roads clogged at rush hour and beyond, buses often move at a crawl for long stretches along their routes, and it is clear that the Skytrain, combined with a motorized scooter, is now far and away the fastest way for one or two people to get around in this city. (Bicycles are not allowed on the Skytrain during rush hours.)

And it’s only going to get more so. The private automobile’s century-long dominance of the streets of our cities is coming to an end. This strange wheeled duo is a harbinger of what is to come. “The old road is rapidly aging; please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand“. And the loser now will be later to win. Teslas are already history.

I board the bus. The faces of my fellow passengers, especially the young students headed to campus, are still a cosmopolitan mix, but this is not so on the streets we are passing, which are peopled almost entirely with white faces sitting out on bistro patios and darting into expensive designer boutiques. As we come to an intersection, I watch with amusement as a little terrier, on leash, suddenly jumps, at least three times its body height, into the arms of its person, and then jumps down again once they’ve crossed the intersection. I laugh, wondering if I actually saw this right. But the bus is crawling along, and damned if, one block later, I don’t see a repeat performance of this little dog’s well-rehearsed acrobatics. Safe in the arms of the one you love, and exercise too!

A few blocks farther on, one of the side streets has been completely closed to automobile traffic, and several nearby al fresco restaurants have reclaimed the roadway. They are jammed with joyous people, and adjacent to one of them there is a group salsa dancing, accompanied by a guy in a sombrero playing a large white piano, which is apparently there in the street for anyone to play.

In much of Europe they know the joys of dining, singing and dancing outdoors. Not so much here in North America, where streets are for cars, and for getting places quickly. Why has imaginative poverty so afflicted us on this continent? What will it take for us to learn how to repurpose things when they no longer serve their stated purpose? How might we start now to take back streets that are no longer functional transportation corridors, and use them to rediscover and rebuild our fractured, atomized communities? And what might we do, with a little imagination, with two billion soon-to-be immobilized cars, as we contemplate the arrival of two billion economic and climate collapse refugees, looking for a new home?

Sitting near me on the bus is an androgynous couple. They might be both male or both female or a mix, or neither. The whole point, which they make so well, is that it doesn’t matter. They hold hands, and look quite blissful.

Languages like Finnish, Turkish, and Mandarin have no male or female pronouns, which saves an enormous amount of hassle, makes perfect sense, and costs nothing. We don’t need to have more pointless choices to have to make, like what ‘pronouns’ to prefer. What we need is fewer pointless choices to have to make. Why is it so hard for us to give up and part with useless things? And to appreciate that, when it comes to the most important things in life, we have absolutely no choice.

It’s a further 15-minute walk through park trails to the beach, so when I arrive at the closest bus stop, I try a new Maps app that actually displays, on my screen, the exact ‘street view’ path in front of me as I walk, with three giant blue arrows pointing in the direction that I should walk to reach my chosen destination. This body thinks that this is ridiculous; it knows where it’s going. And looking at a screen picture of the sidewalk in front of me, rather than looking at the ‘real’ sidewalk, is really disturbing, and probably dangerous. Soon, the app points me to a small park path, but at the entrance to it there is a huge (real) sign saying “Caution: Coyotes recently seen on this path”. I decide this body is right, and we don’t need the app. This body gets us there just fine without it.

I am about to discover why there have been a lot of coyote sightings here lately, and it’s not the vegan food.

I arrive at the vegan fair, which is already crowded, with hour-long line-ups for the dozen or so food tents and carts. But we Canadians are a patient and polite lot, and there are no complaints and no butting in. Vancouverites’ willingness to pay $150 for a mediocre concert seat, or to wait two hours to get into a Christmas craft fair, is unfathomable. But this is where we are. Things keep getting more and more dysfunctional, but so gradually that, seemingly, nobody really notices. It’s astonishing what we can get used to.

My body, which is not so patient, finds some food without a long lineup, and as I nibble on it I wander down to the beach and up among some of the ‘club’ houses (yacht club, folk club, some sort of gourmet club) in the park.

And then I see them: Four black rabbits, grazing on the manicured park grass. These are bunnies, not wild hares. I take a picture, in case no one believes me. And then, up over the ridge, there are ten more. And in a large field just beyond that, at least two dozen. Turns out there are hundreds in the park, the invasive, feral offspring of abandoned pets. Everyone just ignores them, and they seemingly ignore the people as well, and even the many dogs that people bring for walks in the park pay them no heed. But that explains the recent influx of coyotes!

There are 16 beach volleyball courts on Jericho Beach, and on this lovely warm evening near solstice, they are all in use. This body loved to play volleyball, and I wonder in passing whether I’m too old to ask to join one of the games. Then I notice a table at the side of the middle courts, with maps, scoreboards, rules and schedules. It’s a tournament. Serious fun. There is some laughter, but it’s not the joyful laughter of play. Just up from the beach there is an Ultimate Frisbee field, with referees with whistles and stopwatches and official time-outs among the uniformed teams. To play frisbee?

I used to play beach volleyball each summer, a few decades ago, as a charity fundraiser. The game lasted 45 minutes, regardless of how many points had been scored, and only the ‘pro’ division teams kept scores. The rest of us tracked ‘great plays’ instead: When someone made a great diving ‘save’ or an amazing recovery at the net, another player would point to them, and others would raise their arms to ‘second’ the nomination. These were the plays you learned from, what you remembered, and a great play trumped a winning game every time.

How has the meaning of ‘play’ changed so much? Geez, I’m sounding old.

So now I’m on the bus home. There are two young French Canadian guys at the back of the bus, one of them with his arm around the other, and both with their feet pulled up onto their seats. They are in full pose mode, absolutely claiming the back of the bus, and talking as if there is no one else on board. The arm embrace is a sports-buddy hug, as if daring you to suggest they might be gay. (Which they might be, but not your business.) They are dressed casually but purposefully. They are expounding, en français, on how the girls in Montréal are much prettier and better dressed than the girls in Vancouver. (So probably not gay.) There are few francophones in this city, and they clearly don’t expect anyone in earshot to understand what they’re saying. It’s really hard not to laugh when I listen to their conversation, but I don’t want to blow my cover. Or theirs.

When the francophones depart the bus, two young Korean women come onboard and sit opposite me. I’ve learned (barely) to differentiate the Korean language from Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese, living in a suburb where all four languages are common, but I have no idea what they’re saying. Instead, I focus on the body language, and in particular how theirs differs from that of the female K-Pop stars I’ve seen on interview videos. Unlike those in Korea, these women don’t cover their mouths when they laugh. But they do do the little claps of delight when they laugh (palm to palm, hands in prayer position not crossed, and quick and quiet, what some might describe as an affectation, but others say is just an act of politeness).

One of the women is repeatedly, but apparently subconsciously, pulling her hands into the sleeves of her sweater, as I’ve seen some female K-Pop interviewees do in their videos. And it’s certainly not cold in the bus. No idea what this mannerism signifies, and neither Google nor ChatGPT is of any help. So it’s a mystery. There is so much to learn about the cultures of this city, its languages, its worldviews, and the joys and struggles of its many diasporas!

Finally, we’re back in the Skytrain for the last leg home. The Skytrain is a driverless electric LRT, with most of the track above-ground rather than underground. Our (“Millennium”) line usually has only two cars in it, except during rush hour. Each train therefore has a single seat at the very front with a unique view, and tourists and kids usually jump at the chance to sit in it.

On this trip, a little girl and her mother board the train just as the front seat is vacated. The little girl is very excited, and she tells her mother, in a loud voice:

“Mommy! The driver has gone! We have to drive the train!”

Her mother sits in the front seat, with the little girl sitting in her lap.

“Steering wheel please mom!”

Her mother puts her arms around her daughter, raised slightly to make them into a ‘steering wheel’.

“All aboard!”, she says in an imperious but gentle voice, testing the ‘steering wheel’.

There are titters among the other passengers watching this. You get the sense this is not a first-time performance by this young lady. Sure enough, there is more to come:

“Please move to the centre of the train to make room for other passengers!”

Her voice is singsong, cheery, but with a weary edge, brilliantly (and I’m sure unintentionally) mocking the voice of many frazzled transport staff she must have heard in her travels.

Several passengers break into laughter now, and the girl looks back around her mother, with a concerned look at first, and then a delighted look as she realizes she has an appreciative audience. As the train draws to a stop at the next station, she adds:

“Thank you for travelling with us!… Mind the gap, please!”

At this point, the woman sitting in front of me is practically peeing herself laughing, doubled over and snorting. The laughter is, of course, infectious. But the back half of the car, behind us, is oblivious, lost in their private chatter or glued to their cellphone screens. This is a show just for us.

The little girl is watching carefully, ‘steering’ the train as it curves left and right along its route. But she’s also curious about her audience, and can’t resist turning her head back to peek, a look of sheer elation on her face.

And then suddenly she turns back to face front and, churning her arms and her mother’s ‘steering wheel’ frantically, says:

“Eek! Oops, almost turned the wrong way there! Sorry about that folks!”

A few moments later, after greeting and bidding farewell to the passengers at each stop, we reach her stop, and the show is over. Several of our fellow passengers are both smiling and crying at the same time. Holding on to her mother’s hand, as she departs, she leaves us laughing:

“Have a nice rest of your day, ladies and gentlemen, and safe travels!”

Vancouver Translink should, of course, hire this little girl and her mother. The world needs more of this wonder, this courage, this innocence, this imagination, this joy, this capacity for finding and conveying the beauty and pleasure in simple things.

Three stops later and this body and I are home.

This body is unhappy that we’re too late for a chai in the local bistro, which has just closed. It loves its animal pleasures — lazy café chats, lying in the sun or in a hot bath by candlelight, doing challenging crossword puzzles, walking on a tropical beach. In that, it is so much wiser than ‘me’.

This ‘me’, seemingly imprisoned inside this amazing, ordinary body, is filled with guilt and shame at its astonishing good fortune, its rare privilege. And filled with grief that so many in the world struggle so much with pain, fear, anxiety, doubt, unhappiness, anger, dread, and endless precarity. None of it ‘their’ fault. They’ve done their best, all their fraught lives. No one is to blame for their terribly human, terribly lonely predicaments.

But you can’t feel sad for everyone. Of course most lives are unfair. Of course it didn’t have to turn out this way, but that’s not because of anything they did, or did not do.

I tell myself it’s not a denial of their suffering, not insensitive, to shake my head sadly and acknowledge the awful, endless, personal horror of so many just trying to make it through one more day, mostly blaming themselves for their plight. It’s not wrong, I tell myself, to accept this ghastly situation, and then to climb the stairs to our building roof and look at the moon and the million lights of the city and marvel at the staggering wonder, and beauty, and the utter unknowability of it all.

Posted in Creative Works, How the World Really Works, Month-End Reflections, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Not Quite What They Seem

Posted on June 27, 2023 by Dave Pollard

New Yorker cartoon by the late Charles Barsotti

Now the thing about time is that time isn’t really real.
It’s just your point of view, how does it feel for you.
Einstein said he could never understand it all.
Planets spinning through space, the smile upon your face.
Welcome to the human race.
Some kind of lovely ride. Sliding down, gliding down.
Try not to try too hard, it’s just a lovely ride.
— James Taylor, Secret of Life

I might, with a little effort, get you to accept that there is no stopping the accelerating collapse of our civilization. I might, with some greater effort, convince you that there is no such thing as free will. It’s even possible that I might persuade you that no one is to blame for anything, that we’re all just acting out our conditioning.

But I doubt that I could ever convince you that there is no such thing as time. To believe that is just beyond the pale, unreasonable, a sacrilege, absurd. Look — see that car, there? And now it’s there, right? Don’t tell me it isn’t moving ‘through time’, continuously. Don’t tell me the driver’s stepping on the gas pedal at a point in time didn’t cause the car immediately thereafter in time to move forward. Don’t tell me that didn’t really happen. Don’t tell me that I didn’t get up this morning and do x and y and don’t tell me that now at this later time I am not doing z. In real time. See me doing it? To say there is no time is just ridiculous. You’re just saying that to be contrary, provocative, no?

Time underpins everything we believe to be true, and everything we conceive of as real. Without it, there can be nothing happening, nothing separate, no continuity, no consequence, no causality — and no one.

I look out the window at that car, forty stories below, apparently moving in time. And yet, somehow, I know it is not. Somehow, I know that there is no car, not really, and nothing really happening, just the appearance of things, of happenings.

Those blessed/accursed seeming-someones with no self who assert that time isn’t real, tell us that “everything is new”. Not always new, or suddenly new, or new now, or simultaneously or eternally new. That would require the existence of time as other than a mental construct, other than a fiction. Everything is simply as it appears. Every apparent thing is nothing appearing as seemingly separate things and seemingly discrete happenings in time, but obviously not real, and obviously not really. That was evident, even obvious, when there was a ‘glimpse’, when ‘I’ momentarily disappeared. But it makes no sense, not in my real world.

What is one to do with that?

The absence of time seems a strangely scientific axiom for someone to take on, on what would appear to be nothing more than faith — by which I mean a belief without evidence. Radical non-duality suggests that there is a resonance that makes this seeming absurdity seem strangely plausible, even probable — even obvious. That there is something, perhaps in the brain’s chemistry or intuitive circuits, that somehow ‘knows’ that time, separation, the self, and all the other conceptions and inventions of the brain are not real, that they are made up, and that the truth about reality lies elsewhere. That in this concocted, complicated ‘life’ that we imagine our selves to be living and moving through, something is not quite as it seems. Something that once was obvious has seemingly been forgotten, lost.

That’s the limbo ‘I’ am caught in now — ‘believing’ something that contradicts everything I’ve been taught, everything I’ve learned, everything I thought I knew, and everything that I’ve observed. Everything that seems to be real. Or seemed. Somehow it’s as if all the threads of how I made sense of the world are slowly unravelling, as if everything about ‘reality’ that used to be certain and unquestioned, is now unclear, ambiguous, and even doubtful.

We base our beliefs on the best possible explanation (subjectively) for what we want to understand. So, ‘I’ want to understand the nature of reality, and the non-existence of time, intuitively and to some extent intellectually, seems to offer (for now), bizarrely, the best possible explanation for how things and happenings seem to be. Quantum scientists and astrophysicists are increasingly asserting that there is no real time, and that the concept of time is unnecessary to explain what we perceive to be real. That what we think of as the ‘real’ universe unfolding in space and time is in fact just an infinite field of possibilities ‘expressed’ as things and happenings that we perceive of, and interpret, as being ‘real’. Without purpose or meaning or causality or continuity, since all those things require that time be real.

It seems a kind of madness for me to be looking out this window at all of these things, and all of these happenings, all precisely defined with nouns and verbs and subjects and objects and other essential elements of our human languages, along with explanations as to how and why they are all so, and to sense, somehow, despite all that, that none of it is real. Perhaps I am going mad. Perhaps, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, I’m just grasping for something to believe in that will make all the terrible things ‘I’ see in this world a little less terrible. After all, humans are capable of believing just about anything if they really want to.

But the thing is, I don’t particularly want to believe that there is no time. The cognitive dissonance is quite uncomfortable. It’s essentially impossible to try to explain this belief to others without provoking incredulity or irritation. And it’s a really useless thing to believe, one that provides neither solace nor respite. It is at once hopeless and unactionable.

I look again, out the window, at things apparently happening in time to real people and things, subjects and objects. I watch the cars, the bicycles, the scooters, the pedestrians with their carts and carriages and dogs in tow, the delivery trucks arriving and the garbage trucks taking things away, the birds, the spiders clinging perilously to the outside of the window, the trees and the mountains beyond. Except for humans, none of these things, it seems, needs the existence of time, needs time to be real and measured, to be what they are and do what their conditioning apparently impels them to do, or not do. So why do we?

Even these human bodies, I suspect, do what they do without the need for time. They have their seeming systolic and diastolic and circadian and entrained and monthly and seasonal routines, but that is our measurement and patterning and sense-making, not theirs. What they do doesn’t have to make sense, doesn’t need a cause, or a reason. Not even the ‘reason’ of evolutionary survival, because, absent the concept of time, there is no evolution, no trajectory. Nothing. Just what appears. Without purpose or meaning. Just an amazing show, a trick, without anything real in it, and without a beginning or end. Just this.

And, worse still, nothing matters. Without the invention of the self and separation, without free will and ‘real’ agency and purpose and reason and meaning, nothing can possibly matter. If there is no one, who would anything matter to?

So: No one and nothing really exists, nothing is really happening, nothing is or can be known, nothing is under control, there is no meaning, purpose, reason or causality for anything that appears to be happening, and nothing matters. Once you start down the rabbit hole of ‘there is no such thing as time’, there is no way back.

from the Peanuts comic by Charles M Schulz

But strangely, for me, the possibility that these things might all be true does not elicit feelings of existential dread or nihilism, but rather a strange combination of elation, liberation, compassion and a feeling of ‘lightness’. This unravelling, while somewhat unnerving, is not, so far at least, unpleasant. It’s actually kinda fun. A mystery with endless twists and turns and clues and false leads. “Some kind of lovely ride.” I am told that the ‘end’ of the illusion of self is instantaneous, and not even recognized, since there is no self left to recognize it. There is no ‘getting closer’ to it, and no path towards it. But I am also told that for a while ‘before’ that ‘end’, this unravelling can be, for the ‘dying’ self, pretty awful.

My sense is that this ‘me’ will not see that end before this body dies. But no one knows anything, including that.

In the meantime, this message, and this unravelling, if that’s what it is, seem to be very slowly changing ‘me’. Or perhaps it’s just conditioning from the people and ideas and occurrences and possibilities I have exposed myself to since first hearing this message, that has wrought that apparent change.

I’m fortunate to have a blog that lets me track, sometimes to my astonishment, how my character, my beliefs and worldview, my feelings and ideas and ways of being and doing things in the world, have gradually but over ‘time’ profoundly shifted, especially since I retired. I think I am less reactive (and quicker to recover), more equanimous, less ambitious, more hedonistic, more joyful, and less judgemental than I was seven years ago when I first heard this message. (But no more patient, empathetic, or attentive; those qualities don’t seem to be in my biological conditioning.) I’m laughing more, and crying more, and doing both things less intensely and more spontaneously than I used to.

It’s possible those changes are mostly a ‘letting go’ of things that I once fiercely believed in and cared about. That intense caring often manifested itself in anguish, anxiety, distress, anger, paralysis, and other (over-)reactions that never served ‘me’ or the objects of my affection well anyway. Perhaps ‘I’ am just making space for this body to exercise its own preferences, and, to some extent, getting out of its way. It’s pretty clear it would do just fine without ‘me’.

But what do ‘I’ know. ‘I’ am just here for the ride, and starting, finally, to enjoy it, for all its mystery, its paradoxes, its impossibility, and its wonder.

Soon to be nothing, one way or another. ‘We’ have never known anything, and, since there is no time, we never will.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 1 Comment

How to Govern a Failing State

Posted on June 20, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Imagine you are the emperor of a once-prosperous but now declining, struggling nation. This is a country of enormous expectations and dreams, a land where people believe, or used to believe, that they could accomplish anything if they only applied themselves to it.

But now, the citizens are discouraged, divided, and angry. The land, air, and waters are polluted and exhausted. The infrastructure is crumbling. No one trusts anyone else. Most of the population is suffering from a declining standard of living, a negative net worth, and suffocating levels of debt. The health care system, except for the very rich, is on the edge of collapse. The education system, once lauded, has become a mere baby-sitting service for children of families whose parents both have to work to even hope to make ends meet. The transportation system is outmoded, unreliable, and unsafe. Politicians no longer even try to hide their corruptness, ignorance and heartlessness. Innovation has vanished as oligopolies shut down all competitors.

What are you to do, as the emperor of this nation? You could of course abdicate — there are still a few New Zealand properties available to turn into large gated compounds that could serve you and your entourage, perhaps for years.

But suppose you still cling to the belief that recovery of some kind is possible, and that, as part of the dynasty charged with running the nation, you feel it’s your duty to do your best to turn things around.

My guess is that there are five things you might be very sorely tempted to do:

1. Find or create a common enemy: This would provide a great distraction, and shift the citizens’ anger away from you and your fellow top caste members. You could even provoke (though not ‘declare’) a war or two, but you would have to ensure that it was far away from you geographically, and not entail putting any of your citizens in the line of fire, since that might be unpopular at home. False flag (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag) actions in faraway countries could also be helpful in shifting the blame for any war crimes you might commit, to the designated enemy.

2. Buy and use the media to propagandize the citizens into believing things are better than they seem and better than what “doomers” and “do-nothing critics” are saying. And certainly better than life is in the empire’s clearly-inferior vassal states and enemy states. You could stress that, in every sense, your country is and must always be ‘exceptional’.

3. Turn the angry citizens from the lower castes against each other, instead of against you. You might polarize the citizens into groups whose total attention is focused on the malfeasance and unacceptable beliefs of identified groups of “others” in their midst, instead of on you.

4. Hold ‘show trials’ that smear, vilify and imprison opponents, especially selected popular or influential second-caste-level people. You could choose those people carefully from among those who pose the greatest threat to you and your top caste colleagues. This would ‘prove’ to the citizens that law and order is prevailing, and that not even (some of) the powerful are above the law.

5. Beef up ‘security’, police and military forces. This could demonstrate to the citizens that large, disruptive protests and disobedience to your authority would not be tolerated, and would be dealt with harshly, and possibly arbitrarily. You might pass new oppressive laws that are nominally aimed at ‘terrorists’ but which intimidate anyone who might be inclined to foment unhappiness or anger at your regime. You could elect to spend lavishly on your military (and friendly corporate military suppliers) which, though ostensibly aimed at fighting foreign ‘enemies’, could be redirected internally to suppress internal dissent by ‘rioters’, ‘anarchists’ and other opponents as needed.

You could also choose to ramp up surveillance of your citizens, and encourage them to report other citizens’ disobedience to your authorities, but nowadays this is a costly and often ineffectual action. It might be more effective to hire security people to infiltrate opposing groups and disrupt and demoralize them from within. It would, however, probably be helpful to encourage and quietly promote, through your media, those who say surveillance is ubiquitous, so that most citizens would self-censor for fear of being singled out.

Of course, all of this is strictly hypothetical. This is not to suggest that there really are any failing states or empires that might theoretically choose one or more of these desperate actions.

I would never suggest that.

image is Midjourney AI’s take on a “failed state”; not my prompt — apparently Midjourney associates failed states with big heads, for some reason

Posted in Creative Works | 4 Comments

…But Is It Art?

Links of the Month: July 2023

A Very Human Condition

Stranger, Still

The Real Problems With Artificial Intelligence

The Pure Immanence of a Moment

Soliloquy: Done With Myths, Thank You

You Can’t Feel Sad for Everyone

Not Quite What They Seem

How to Govern a Failing State

Navigation

Get new posts by email:

Collapsniks

Radical Non-Duality

Essential Reading

Archive by Category

My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts

My Other Sites

October 2024
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Sep
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31