Where I come from, people believe in the good Lord. God is an algorithm that no one really understands. But people became accustomed to teaching their children, to behave as they suspect God likes it.
God probably doesn’t exist. Or at least not the way people imagine it where I come from. There are many other places, where there are people that imagine god. And the many different notions that don’t go together front and back. It would be an unlikely coincidence, that right where I come from, people had the right perception.
Der Liebe Gott ist eine Black Box. Und dabei ist es ganz egal, wie sie funktioniert. Wichtig ist lediglich, dass sich alle, möglichst ähnlich verhalten um dem Lieben Gott oder irgend einer anderen Black Box zu gefallen.
God is a black box. And it doesn’t really matter how the black box works. The only important thing is that everyone behaves as similarly to please the Good Lord – or the black box.
Because that provides reliability. To the individual, because it feels good, and to everyone, because it makes everyone more predictable.
Excerpt from “Codonaut – Where do we program ourselves?”, a Korsakow film about artificial intelligence. The film can be seen here: codonaut.de
We monkeys are busy all the time pulling the money out of the other monkeys’ pockets. The money, we monkeys came up with – the money that does not exist in nature.
The pockets from which we pull the money from the other monkeys we have also invented. Other animal should try to do that. We monkeys, we are always thinking something up.
We monkeys constantly invent new realities and immediately try to use them to our advantage. Looking at us, all other animals look stupid.
And if they look stupid for too long, and we don’t like it anymore, we eat them up. We monkeys normally don’t eat each other. That happens rather rarely. Mutually we only cheat each other. But this all the time. And the one who cheats best wins.
This is so much in our DNA that brothers cheat on brothers, parents cheat on their children, the state cheats on the family and the family cheats on the state.
Each monkey cheats on the other, but we do not eat ourselves up. This is what the monkeys call civilization. And we monkeys are proud of our civilization.
I recently had a conversation with a friend. He was complaining that he was wasting all his time with computer games. Nevertheless it was clear to him – “Computer games are shit – absolute crap!”
I know my friend as an extraordinarily intelligent guy. The picture wasn’t right for me. I can’t really imagine how he spends all his time dealing with a completely stupid exercise. Now I don’t know from my own experience what it’s like to play computer games intensively and therefore deny myself an opinion. But it seems obvious to me that if an intelligent monkey is engaged in an activity, this exercise is meaningful.
My friend said that he would try again and again to quit playing computer games completely, but then he would find himself in front of the computer again, gambling. “Absolute waste of time!”, “Computer games are absolute shit!”
“Really?” I asked my friend, “Do you really think computer games are absolute shit?
To my astonishment he replied: “No, of course, computer games are totally awesome”.
Now I was seriously confused: “What now, total shit, or total awesome?
We discussed for 15 minutes and all the time I tried to find out exactly where he was on the scale between one extreme and the other. But his statements always jumped back and forth between one and the other.
Totally awesome. Totally shit.
“But you know what I mean!” he said reproachfully at some point.
“I can only guess. You can’t be on both counts and you’re certainly neither on one point nor the other. You are probably somewhere in between. Where exactly – I have no idea. And you, you probably don’t know either.”
At this point we ended the conversation, which had become somewhat unpleasant. A few days later I got some feedback from my friend. The conversation had made him think.
Since I got into the habit of paying attention to the use of extreme narration, I notice more and more often: We discuss with each other to find out if something is so or so. Whether the EU is one way or another, whether migration is oneway or another. Whether globalisation is one way or the other. Whether the Internet is one way or the other. Totally awesome or absolute shit. And most of the times we discuss as if there is nothing between the extreme points.
That’s a great pastime and you can argue a great deal. Good approaches for solving problems can only be found in the rarest cases. Reality can usually be found between the extremes. The solutions for problems as well.
Many say that the Internet makes reality complicated. They long for a clear story that tells what is good and what is bad.
In fact, the Internet makes reality better understandable. Because realityis not a clear story that can be understood in the categories of good and evil.
Reality is more like the Internet. It is immeasurably large, chaotic, complicated and fascinating. New perspectives can be found on every corner.
When you treat the Internet like a story, it inevitably looks like a very bad story: chaotic, complicated and confusing.
Don’t treat the Internet as a story because it’s not a story – just like reality!
Why one group of people does not get what an other group of people says
LIFE ACCORDING TO KORSAKOW #4 Miss Understanding
This episode is in English.
We live in a divided time. There seem to be two groups of people that have very different perception of reality. Most likely you are yourself member of one of these groups. Most likely you never consciously decided to be in one or the other group, it just happened. And most of your friends happen to be in the same group.
Your family: not so much. Like most people, you have family members, that are in the other group, you know, whom I am talking about: it is that uncle/sister/nephew that you avoid talking about politics/religion/life, because he/she never gets it. And you never get, what he/she says.
This podcast explains why.
And as a bonus it will let you see how humankind will develop.
Enjoy!
Music by Jim Avignon / Neoangin and Ilja Pollach, Cologne.
This video was also published as a podcast. You can subscribe to my podcasts here:
