Mythopoetics

In the nascent dawn of consciousness, when the human spirit still danced in rhythmic harmony with the grand, elemental pulse of nature, the enigma of cessation—that profound silence we name death—arose as the most formidable of shadows. Yet, it was not then perceived as an absolute, terminal end in the stark, isolated sense we often conceive today. For those early societies, intimately imbricated in the vast and primordial canvas of the Anima Mundi, death was seamlessly woven into the very ur-tapestry of existence as a continuity, a fluid dissolution into the great soul of the world, or a joyous return to a collective paradise, utterly devoid of the strict, solitary individuation that modernity has, unwittingly, imposed upon us. This is not merely the clinical apprehension of biological cessation, but rather a primordial panic before the void, a visceral anguish in the face of the "I's" dissolution and the potential loss of all that imbues life with meaning. Confronted...

  In a logic class, the professor tells his students: "Yesterday, while talking with my Sufi gardener about happiness, we ended up talking about metalanguages, because he said that orchids are 'chambers where light plays between amorous encounters.' I told him: 'You have to be a poet to talk about poetry.' He replied: 'You just have to be human.'" In what way can we say that my gardener is proposing that every metalanguage is a formalized metaphor for its object language and what would be the metaphor for arithmetical addition? Furthermore” -he asks-how does this little narrative show that Kurt Gödel was a Platonist? One student answers: “The gardener uses orchids as a metaphor for biological reproduction, and from this he makes a second-order metaphor at the human level, calling reproduction a loving encounter. The gardener is a Sufi; in Sufi ontology, the word 'encounter' is used as equivalent to 'existence,' a double meaning (Wujud)....

  Although the sentences produced by an AI LLM are generated probabilistically and "synaptic reinforcements" lead to the construction of sentences that are linked together with meaning, the problem posed by Tarski's theorem does not disappear in an LLM. Never mind the fact that increasingly powerful models can reproduce "quadrillions" of meaningful and intelligent communications. That meaning is assigned to the machine by humans, and all the intelligence we grant to the machine is merely an assignment of our sense of what intelligence is. The human lifeworld (Lebenswelt) is the semantic system external to the AI, just as the organic life process in the earth's environment (Unterlebenswelt) is the semantic system external to humans. AI objects are abstract symbolic objects (Überlebenswelt) that, stripped of their human systemic referent, cannot polarize their linguistic predicates in the dualistic terms required by any language linked to life experience. AI c...