Part 2 of 3: The Dog Ate My Homework

But A.I. rendered me obsolete anyway, so who cares? A Rant.

A rose from a bush in my yard. I fear some of you may need to look at this picture later. Hopefully it will help.

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[I decided to cut this essay into three parts due to length and the challenge to people’s attention. Each section will appear a few days apart and I will add a link on this essay to the others as I post them for convenience. If you wish to read Part 1 before Part 2 (this part), just go HERE.]

“In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.”

from “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”
by Bob Dylan
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

II.  ADMISSION OF SOME PREJUDICES

Optimism and those afflicted with it disturb me. 

I’ve absolutely no faith “everything will eventually work out for the qualitative best,” which is what hard core optimism demands of its believers.  In some form, hidden under more sophisticated language, one will find this belief in the claims of all absolute optimists.

An optimism that, in the immediate future and no more, something will turn out well is a different matter.  One works on a project and has some good reasons to believe the project itself will work out for the best, not the worst in the immediate (by whatever standard): well, that seems a healthy attitude and motivational.  Not many people can work or do much with a belief in the front of their mind that the activity is already wasted, the battle lost in some sense (e.g. pessimism).  So, a limited optimism, reasonably pretending that what one is doing will work out better than worse, seems healthy enough as long as the believer understands she may be mistaken and that reality, in general, “in the long run,” is not often like reality in the immediate.

To distinguish, I find hope an admirable and humane virtue.  In distinction to optimism, one has hope, one exercises hope precisely at that moment when it is least warranted and, yet, one has decided to press on, make a stand, do work in the face of probable destruction. 

The fact one will attempt to hold on and bear witness in the face of utter destruction – for the sake of bearing witness, making that stand in the face of “worse,” refusing to give in – out of sheer hope that the effort itself is meaningful.  Hope reaches out into the Unknown Unknowable for help, for support to do what must be done regardless of whether one is even left alive or one’s works are known or remembered after all is said and done.

Whether remembered or even known, what has been done cannot be undone.  The past is the most solid reality in this world – and that is meaningful.  One’s hope can always rest with assurance in that at least… if not more, ultimately.

Hope gives one courage, and courage is not the foolishness of optimism.  Absolute optimism is a faith that gives back nothing but destruction, euphemisms,  disappointment, and excuses for real failure.

Optimism, “positive attitude,” “positive thinking,” refusing to accept the reality of defeat or evil when it IS a glaring reality, refusing to even have the methodological doubt required to suspect something may be “wrong with the program,” whatever “the program” might be, is possibly one of the most destructive ideas humans have sold themselves.

Running through the history of ideas will give some telling examples of what I mean.  Admittedly, these examples will be given in rather simplified and simplistic form because nothing more complex seems necessary here:

1. Hegelianism:  Broadly, G.F.W. Hegel’s theory of history expects and predicts that history is the “working out” of G-d’s spirit, Geist, through and in time.  Thus, everything that is, in history, is relatively good and right as a step towards the ultimate perfection of Deity in time – which is “the end of history,” “end” meaning its telos, its aim, its purpose to be fulfilled. 

So, say, World War II, Hitler, the Holocaust, the murder of 2 out of every 3 European Jews – well, that was a good thing, ultimately, and it had to happen so that Deity, Geist, could make another advance towards its ultimate realization.  Though history and life are filled with individual stories of misery and actual people ground down to tears, to dust in the harshest of inhumane cruelties, ultimately, from the “higher perspective,” all of this was “progress” towards a “greater good” – which will be the “end of history,” that is to say, the whole point of history, what it was aiming at all along.

Some points to carry away from this mythology: This is the very 19^th c. view of progress and the inevitability of progress (nothing more absolutely optimistic can be imagined); if it is new, it is necessary: the relative “evil” of the moment is actually an absolute good as a part of the process bringing on the future “better” and ultimate “best.” 

“You can’t stop progress” is one of the bumper sticker thoughts we get from this position.  And whatever is was the product of progress from worse to better because history moves in the direction of “better” only, not just the outcome of strands of often unpredictable changes colliding, or half-conscious choices, or an actual regression, a loss of historic level, the abandonment of hard-won values.  Actual, not simply “apparent” failures in history are inconceivable to this sort of absolute optimism.

Hegel went so far as to pronounce that, “The rational is the real.”  If one could rationally work out a thing, offer a logical story, it would reflect an actual reality in our world.  And the identity of reason and reality -- not simply a hopeful and vague resemblance of reality to human reasoning -- guarantees, for Hegel and many philosophers the optimism that they can grasp absolute truth.  Hence, their optimism isn’t a “belief,” it’s allegedly rational knowledge, not to be doubted.

From here the left-wing Hegelians created Marxism which insists Communism is the inevitable outcome of these historical processes and cannot fail to arrive as a sort of materialist heaven on Earth.  Capitalism insists free market materialism is the necessary end point, the highest aim of history.  Nazism and various other right-wing versions of Hegel’s optimism held that the white race was the highest point, the whole intention of history and evolution, all others were to be destroyed or enslaved.  One could substitute a religion or a nation – or both – for a “race” or skin color and get other versions we see.

Ortega y Gasset once sarcastically called Hegel’s position “gnoseological optimism”: that truth, in its ultimate sense, is human-like, identical to clear human thought, so humans can uncover and grasp the absolute truth and we can do this with relative ease.  Truths such as the direction and ultimate aims of history, the pantheistic destiny of a Deity “unfolding” in this world, the necessary improvement from moment to moment towards “perfection” regardless of the apparent chaos and vicissitudes of concrete human lives, the occasional failure of reason at even its most rational to approximate even basic realities, much less expect the arrival of realities or the form of their arrival. 

2. Religion: Without belaboring this much further, I will point to the versions of Christianity that require their believers, no matter what happens, to respond, often aloud, with their New Testament verse, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” [Romans 8:28]

Certainly many theologies and religions, not simply Christian ones, hold that, in the end, eventually, everything will turn out exactly as the Divine intended, and that intention is The Good.  Whether or not all this is for your individual good or ill – or for that of humanity as a whole – well, opinions vary.  Maybe you are supposed to suffer a great deal; for that matter, suffering may be a good and have redemptive power.  Perhaps what is good ultimately includes the eradication and misery of all humans, or most humans; perhaps that is involved in the Creator’s plan? 

In any case, “All is well,” or will be, to echo Kevin Bacon’s character in Animal House.

If we cooperate or do not, either way, everything will be alright, at least ultimately, at the “end of the story,” whatever that may mean.  It’s supposed to be the nature of reality that everything automatically turns out well; reality in this universe was supposedly created this way or always has been and will be this way.  No matter what any or all of us choose to do or what happens to us.

3.  Common Opinion: Others, probably most who’ve never really given any of this a bit of serious thought, have been taught to have a “positive attitude.”  In a capitalist culture, it’s difficult to sell things – the “product” or “service”; or oneself at work, from being hired to possibly rising in position, being paid a little more; or even to sell oneself socially in dating and making friends and connections – if one is seen as “negative” in attitude.  No “Debbie Downers” around here, folks. 

“Somebody’s got a case of the Mondays” – the sure sign you’d better be really quiet from here on in with that griping, kids (thank you Mike Judge and Office Space for that line).

So, people learn to express a superficially positive, that is, not depressing, response or judgment about most things unless the immediate majority are already giving a “thumbs down” to an idea, position, a person, a political figure, a technology.  In that case, after cautiously reading the room, it is okay to join the majority position without fear of burning away one’s “social capital.”  Or better: change the subject.

Atomic weapons?  “Well, we could survive an atomic war.”  That was the initial social position in the USA which, after the fall of the Soviet Union, became: “What atomic weapons?  Atomic war? – with whom?”  And now, people simply treat the existence of ICBMs and nuclear holocaust as a ghostly fiction from the past.  It rarely enters most people’s actual conversations or calculations, even politically.  “Atomic war?! What’s that?” 

(For those young enough to doubt my assertion that our original attitude towards a nuclear apocalypse was, “Well, we could survive it,” I’d ask you to go read the 1959 novel Alas, Baylon by Pat Frank.  While it hardly paints a joyous picture of the aftermath of an atomic war, it’s probably still too positive, though very well written.  I read it as a middle school aged kid and then saw it continually referenced in magazines of the late 1970s – early 1980s catering to the survivalist movement; because the reality of nuclear war still loomed as late as Reagan’s 1980s to the degree that there was a newsstand magazine market for people who believed they could survive an atomic war with the Soviet Union or China.)

Occasionally, North Korea launches a new attempt at a long-range missile, building towards an ICBM; or they conduct an underground atomic test: that reminds a few of us that an atomic war, even atomic annihilation of every living thing is a human option, a human choice that may yet be made.  Few take that possibility very seriously for very long even then.  Talking about the never-ending possibility of nuclear holocaust is not “positive thinking.”  One certainly becomes a Debbie Downer uttering such thoughts in most situations, so one does not allow those things to enter into one’s mouth or even mind very often or at all.

Because everything will turn out okay.  This too shall pass.  The sun will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar.

I’ll not even mention that Iran is hell-bent on the creation of nuclear weapons expressly to destroy Israel or change Middle Eastern politics drastically.  Or that India and Pakistan, both nuclear nations, are constantly at the brink of war.  Or that Putin’s Russian Federation, in the middle of invading the Ukraine, allows rumbles about the possible use of atomic weaponry to enter the media gossip stream from time to time. 

The average U.S. American is unaware of most of this.  Intentionally.  Life is depressing enough and one is supposed to constantly pretend that damn sun is coming out, if not today, tomorrow.  Bet your bottom dollar – and who the hell is going to hire or associate with someone whose soul and conversation is darkened by such possibilities?

It'll work out.  By which folks mean, “It will work out well for most of us.  Eventually.”

But will it?

That’s why there is the philosophical position of pessimism.  The real-deal Pessimism, like Arthur Schopenhauer’s, holds that, as far as humans go, nothing truly good will last, all will come to ruin and futility, and there is nothing else.  His was a position nearly opposite to Hegel’s.

In summary: underlying all appearances in this universe is what he calls Will.  Not as in short for “William,” but as a sort of blind, creative, careless desire.  It does not have the good of its creations in mind because it has no mind: it just aimlessly generates reality.  Stars, planets, asteroids, gas clouds, billions upon billions of galaxies are thrown out, go through some pointless processes, and then end usually in some sort of spectacular explosions or collapses.  You know, much as we see looking through our tremendous telescopes.

None of that “out there” cares for you.  At all.  In fact, all of that “out there” is entirely hostile to you and all life.  By some accident, at least one planet managed to put together conditions for the brief span of its existence that allowed the random development of living things.  Some of the living things developed what we call consciousness, then self-consciousness.  And these self-conscious beings, us, here collectively for but a flash of time, began telling ourselves stories based on an error of perspective when we look up in the sky with naked eyes: all of that up there is for us and our well-being; and we and our actions matter and are meaningful.  Life is meaningful and important.

We’re lying to ourselves, says Schopenhauer.  It’s a pretty story, but a lie.  We tell ourselves pretty stories about everything to keep ourselves from committing suicide in the face of the truth: none of us matter in the sense none of us has any value.  The cosmic Will that generated us never intended for anything to become conscious or to develop the ability to care or to love or to hope.  We are an accident, a by-product of forces randomly interacting and, individually and as a species and as a planet, we will all be gone soon enough. 

Factually, in about 5 billion years, our sun, which is expanding, will become a red giant and consume our planet and most of our neighbors. ¹

Before then, any number of asteroids, meteors, or other space objects might collide with us as one did 66 million years ago causing the extinction of what we call the dinosaurs, the previous dominant species on this planet.²  And though he knew nothing about such things, Schopenhauer would not be surprised humans have invented atomic weaponry, poison gasses, and weaponized biological agents any or all of which we could use to commit cosmic suicide.

You believe you fall in love?  Schopenhauer believed your story-telling mind makes you believe in such things and explains your attraction, especially to the opposite sex, in such terms.  The reality is, though, that it is simply some aspect of The Cosmic Will acting through your biology to drive people to have sex in order to create more children, more humans… after sex and children, Schopenhauer pretty much seems to believe couples (well, humans in general) really don’t even like one another very much.  The magic story of “love” goes away and now everyone is miserable but lie to the children that life will be great, if not here then in some other world after death, some heaven.  And Schopenhauer certainly does not believe in afterlives and heaven – more fairy tales we make up to give ourselves a meaning not to commit suicide any more quickly than the universe will kill us.

For this sort of pessimist, the very fact we desire anything, we need anything, we want anything – the fact we are alive and conscious of it – means life is suffering.  To be sure, there are degrees of suffering, but nothing will satisfy one’s needs, wants, desires, and dreams.  Hence life is a relentless set-up for pain, disappointment, which then ends in a meaningless death.

He does allow that the creation of art, especially music, grants us a capacity to truly rebel against this anti-human Will and transcend it for brief periods, but only for very limited times before we come down and return to the realization that we and everything we do or care about is doomed.

“Everything is dust in the wind,” as Kansas used to sing.

(If you’d like a much more poetic and even better expression of the dark outlook of true philosophical Pessimism, I’d send you to Season 1 of HBO’s TRUE DETECTIVES.  Listen very closely every time Matthew McConaughey’s character Rustin Cohle goes into a monologue explaining the nature of reality, especially when he talks to Woody Harrelson’s character Marty Hart [who is quite the optimist in some ways]; for example, from the final episode:

"We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. "

―Rust Cohle ³

 Cohle is certainly Hart’s Debbie Downer… but, within the story, seems more right than wrong about most things.  Nic Pizzolatto, the writer, certainly grasps Pessimism and expresses it well, to say the least.)  

[As an aside, this metaphysical viewpoint forms the basis of what, in the 20^th century, will be called the genre of Cosmic Horror – the master of which was H. P. Lovecraft.  TRUE DETECTIVES Season 1 {and maybe Season 4, “Night Country”} played around the edges of Cosmic Horror referencing one of Lovecraft’s influences, Robert W. Chambers, and kept suggesting Cosmic Horror and human meaninglessness was there in the background of everything that was outwardly  mundane and yet insane.]

***

On the human, not cosmic scale, people suffering from clinical depression or versions of Bipolar Disorder, for example, or delusions such as paranoia, or people who have experienced terrible abuse and trauma often tend to have a more “limited” form of pessimism – no less dark, no less filled with horror; except it is personal.  It tends to be confined to the individual, but sometimes also involves one’s family, relatives, or friends.  In this case, it feels and seems as if the entire universe actively hates the sufferer – or at least could care less about them. 

So, even if in the short term something seems to go well, just wait: the “other shoe will drop.”  Things will not work out well; they never have, not for any amount of time.  The sufferer is doomed – they already feel cursed by what they are undergoing or may have to endure again.  With some, this dark vision lifts periodically but, often, the pessimism is relentless.  And it is not voluntary, in general, or based entirely on any sort of evidence or realistic expectations – but it is debilitating.

It certainly isn’t a freely chosen belief and telling someone to snap out of it or exercise their way to a better mood or outlook is the worst laymen’s ill-educated, ignorant advice one can give.  Inside this person’s life, where they live – not you – it seems nothing will ever go well for them.

From here, it is a stone’s throw to the state we call despair.  And true despair is the inability to even imagine hope.  All the lights go out, all tomorrows are a grey rut stretching off into more of the same, more of the same, more of the same.

Many end their lives to escape the horror they experience.

****

[Here’s that flower. Take a breath.]


Everything will not work out well, not for you, not for me, not for everyone.  A look backwards into history shows humans undergoing tremendous misfortunes.  Many did not overcome those misfortunes at all.  There is some truth in pessimism… but not an absolute truth about all of reality.

Yes, with certainty, I can state we will all die.  Life ends with a definite punctuation mark.  And at any time for any or no reason – and it all may seem completely pointless both to the person who dies and the rest of us onlookers.  Likewise, it may seem there was meaning in the person’s having been here, so their death is at least as much a loss to the rest of us as it was to the person who is gone.  We miss the person, we think of them, keep them in our stories, our prayers.  Something of them remains as long as we remember them, as long as we remember one another.

All the better if the memory itself is good and healing.

What happens after we die?  I will admit to knowing less about that than Schopenhauer or Hegel or myriad people far wiser than I, apparently.  Myself, I do not know.  I have no knowledge about such matters.    Beliefs?  Yes, I have beliefs about what happens after we die, beliefs informed by my religion and powered by hope.

That the ground is solid is something I believe – I have a hope in that belief.  So I walk across the ground without a thought… even though sometimes ground is not solid: in an earthquake, earth can run like water; underneath the ground there can be caverns that increase bit by bit until sinkholes open up and swallow all that is above it – houses, cars, people.  And physics insists that the physical universe is mainly empty space between atoms that make up the visible world.  And so on.

But I do not live in a world that is mainly empty space between atoms.  In fact, no one lives in that universe, as true as those theories in physics may be: We live in a world where things resist and assist our plans and desires.  This is solid; that is not.  These people are helpful; those seem not to be helpful at all.  And, in my life, I must constantly deal with many things, other people, events that are not me, make decisions about things and people who are not me, and I must decide who I will be and act accordingly.

All of that is built on hope – which I mentioned awhile back.  I do not act as if the ground will fall away constantly because, usually, it does not.  I choose to be more cautious in areas or during events when earth is often less stable.  Do I know what it will do absolutely?  No.  But I know enough to place a bet and act on it cautiously, if one has the luxury of caution in the situation. And, as I mature, I learn to adjust my expectations of people, things, the world, G-d.

And so on, with the rest of this universe that I must live with and within.  If all of that is, as Schopenhauer or Rustin Cohle might insist is my mind automatically making up pretty stories, so what?  My task is to live, to live beyond the level of survival and to “flourish,” as we say, to live a good human life as long as I am alive: to figure out what that means, why, and then to make my stand in the face of potential meaninglessness and potential apocalypse, personal or global.

Hope is not the same as optimism.  In fact, hope is for those who see that the scales in this existence seemingly tip in the direction suggested by pessimism: we are here but a moment, dust and ashes, and are then gone, forgotten. Optimism tells one: everything will be okay. So, why try so hard or at all? Pessimism tells us that, even in the immediate, all odds are against us. Hope tells us: If anything is to be done, I have to do it; if anything is to be better for anyone, I have to try and I have to try even if apparently everything I do and am will appear to fail at the end.

Does that mean my actions have no meaning?  That if I act justly, do I not instantiate justice in this universe and make it real to just that degree?  If I am merciful, is the mercy shown not as real as death?  If I refuse to run or cower and I speak the truth and bear witness when all around me people fail, hide their eyes, make up actual fictions to substitute for the hateful realities they, socially, cannot be seen to oppose: If I or anyone stands and speaks the truth in such moments, can anything in the world undo that fact?  Ignore it, yes.  Make no record of it, yes. The memory of that act or all acts may die with me, unknown.  But did they happen?

Yes.  And the reality of what happened cannot be undone, for good and ill.  “The past isn’t even past,” wrote Faulkner.  The stuff out of which we must make a life, our advantages and our many liabilities are the effects of all the choices of humans who came, lived, and died.  Most are now nameless.  But you deal with them still, known or unknown.

And none of us knows with any certainly that our choices and the intentions behind them did not, do not, matter, did not, do not, repair something about this world, did not, will not, make a better future, did not, won’t, sway fate just a hair’s breadth – enough to create an entirely different universe than what would have existed if that choice and that intention were not taken up in the face of what appears to be futility. No, I cannot repair the whole of existence. But that would be a foolish expectation. I am a small being — my task is to find and voluntarily bear a small, inherently valuable burden at the right time, in the right way. And that is all and enough.

*****
So.  I have laid out some of my beliefs and prejudices before approaching the thing I have been trying to write about for some months.  There was a necessity in that so I won’t have to constantly explain why I think as I do about this subject: The subject of generative Artificial Intelligence, A.I.  A technology that may well develop into Artificial General Intelligence, meaning it is able to do anything a human can and more.  The technology is not at that stage yet, but experts in the field are working towards exactly that.  In the wake, A.I. is already replacing humans at jobs; entire fields are being closed to human workers or will soon be closed to us. 

What are we to do in the face of machinery that does not care – about us or anything – yet could feasibly replace all of humanity; some of us faster than others, but eventually, all of us?  

I’ll discuss these matters in the third part of this essay, to be posted in a few days.

Richard Van Ingram
Gershom
February - 13 March 2024

1. RED GIANT STARS; https://www.space.com/22471-red-giant-stars.html; Nola Taylor Tillman last updated July 29, 2023

2. Chicxulub: The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs; NEWSCIENTIST; https://www.newscientist.com/definition/chicxulub/#:~:text=At%20the%20time%2C%20Earth%20was,surviving%20dinosaurs%20into%20today's%20birds).

3. https://true-detective.fandom.com/wiki/Rustin_Cohle; written by Nic Pizzolatto