Truth endangered

Truth itself is in danger of being extinguished. Men will experience its sunset since they are unable to endure its divine dawn. – Damascius, Philosophical History. In Uždavinys, Philosophy and Theurgy

As I [write in my book](amazon.com/dp/B0G62PZ24H), with the dawn of the artificial intelligence age, the machines think and the humans regurgitate. But even that is misleading. The thinking machine is nowhere close to what “artificial intelligence” does. What is really Machine Learning is simply a scan of a database of written documents and then a summarizing and rewriting of it for consumption by the human mind.

Not that that isn’t helpful, as it leads to further research. But the result is only as good as the sources. As they say in my business, “garbage in/garbage out.” And often, the input is garbage, ergo the output is… you get the picture.

To talk of truth in such circumstances is illogical, and truthfully absurd. And I don’t mean absurd in the way Albert Camus meant it. Absurd is more like the absurdity of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros than Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the mountain. Complete and total mayhem from complete and total inability to understand each other or anything else.

The majority of us are simply left in the dark. Unless you spend years of practice and study, thinking only reiterates what the socialization process of upbringing and schools drill into you to produce a worker bee.

Even the normal thought processes of common sense have been deranged and set skittering off to infinite rabbit holes. The creators of the internet thought if they made infinite information available to everyone, everyone would become enlightened and uber rational. QAnon is just one example of how wrong that dream is.

If there’s a solution, it comes after much soul-searching and lots of work. That work is spiritual, as well as simple reading and discussion of subjects like philosophy, history, and the arts. As the QAnoners say, do you your own research. But get of the internet to do it.