Refining Writing Art; Form vs Function

 There are several ways of viewing the matter of Form vs function. The question for balancing creativity versus composition applies in many fields including writing fiction. To some form is all important; aesthetics are what matter. For others function is the essential purpose of building a story, building or whatever.

Solzhenitsyn's 'The Seventh Circle's fulfilled a purpose with expository writing through fiction of explaining life in the gulag for intellectuals. A philosopher writing science fiction would have a purpose- the function being invaluable and the form secondary. Plato's book The Republic, is logical analysis going so far in describing the realm of forms that it may be regard as science fiction twenty-three hundred years before Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein. Like Sartre, Plato's prose- the syntagmatic axis, were flawless.

Without function and purpose that is interesting and edifying a novel is like an electric car without a battery. The paradigmatic axis need be built into a story as the chassis. One may produce beautiful meaningless verbiage without it. Build the story with a purpose and use the editing features described  others of rough draft and subsequent stages of refinement.  It is quite difficult to infuse purpose into a story with editing.

Writers May Fade Away as AI Rises

I like writing science fiction to express philosophical ideas. When helium com existed as a peer reviewed web site I was in the top five percent.  I simply don’t believe any amount of effort going into writing for me will result in sales. People read less than ever. There are so many media rivals out there- new tech. I used to give away several hundred books a month and now zero; no one ever sees the places they exist. AI with a variety of human-AI ratios of co-authorship can be produced by the millions and that will drown out human authors.

I just recognize the probable facts of demographics and production/market competition. Scientists even expect a next gen of AI and quantum computing with a million qubits to analyze physics and chemistry structures at the molecular level and design new materials with unforeseen properties. Writing good novels is not nearly so challenging.

Next gen AI and in perhaps ten years quantum computing will just listen to scientists or novel creators tell it what they want in natural language and produce it. A million qubits processing quantum computer has more ability than all of the existing computers put together apparently. I believe human novel writing will be as obsolete as letter writing on.paper nearly is today, within a few years. It’s just progress. I took a generative AI course and the instructor started with “AI is a disruptive technology”.

If you look at this song I instructed an AI to write, as an instrumental from my prompts, you can see lyrics it wrote for the song that I didn’t include. It beautifully expressive poetry
People tend to underestimate the ability of AI.  https://www.udio.com/songs/rL6pQBvFUz5Wa4bZs3ajzX

DEI Was Racist and Sexist VIolating th 14th Amendment

 Humans often find some reason to be critical about others. They seek supremacy as a natural condition and pass laws such as affirmative action and created DEI to establish a class supremacy over white men in the United States. Equal protection of the law- a clause in the 14th amendment was created by white men yet they became the single class that was legal inferiorized by the laws passed with the civil rights era.

There is a way that works to redress past injustices without creating more. Once civil rights agitator attained equal rights for all Americans they sought a demographic equality as well by making white men less than equal. That racism and sexism tramped all over the 14th amendment and the Supreme Court found that so in the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College decision.

Race and gender discrimination for hiring requires the racial and gender degradation of some social classes. To avoid that and to promote those that require social promotion- unlike millions of members of non-white male groups that were well off before affirmative action policies were created, policies to help the poor financially and socially disadvantaged should be based on objective economic standing of individuals. Poverty does don’t discriminate between race, gender or perversion; that starving or homeless suffer regardless of color and gender.

Economic evaluations of need should replace race,  gender and sexual perversion preferences for Americans in regard to legal support for hiring to better economic circumstance. The poor should be those given hiring support rather than race and gender classes if equal protection of the law is to be established. There are numerous government programs such as social security that benefit those that don't need benefits from government. The prosperous should not seek federal retirement or job placement support. The prosperous should pay for their own medical insurance rather than medicare. The trouble with a practical, non-biased approach is the fundamental wickedness in the hearts of mankind.

Mankind has original sin. Programs may be created to help the poor, such as the depression era pro grams of FDR and eventually the programs pay out to the prosperous with more income than average working Americans. Democrats have forsaken their historical trend since FDR to help the poor. Instead they never mention the word and seek to benefit the middle class and to never raise taxes on the rich; they use deficit spending to pay for social programs that would benefit prosperous middle class women that need day care more than a green economy.

Creating legally superior social classes is an historically recurrent history of mankind. There were no royals that signed off on equal protection of the law in the American Revolution. If it wasn't for Americans of superior ability being treated legally as inferiors there wouldn't have been a movement to establish equal protection of the law. Once people obtain legal equality they continued onward with social inertia to work for their own supremacy through any means. People ordinarily are critical of others in order to elevate themselves.

Make California Great Again with Ukraine War Pork

Instead of sending another dime’s worth of federal deficit adding dollars and weapons to Ukraine that Pork should be diverted to make California great again with fireproof and energy independent homes for the homeless. Pacific Palisades could be a shining city on a hill or beach instead of one smoldering because it’s federal lifeline went to reduce Ukraine to smoldering ruins.

Stop the war and make California a place rebuilt by Americans instead of illegal aliens. Elect a governor that secures borders and isn’t detached from good sense. Modern governors should should have good environmental economic ideas that are economically progressive. California rebuild should have great leading eco infrastructure that are good examples for the nation. At a minimum L.A. should desalinate salt water using clean energy and keep its fire hydrant perennially full.

Governors and parties that lead with acrimony and litigation to national division on the attempt to enrich themselves and pack government expansively with partisan voters while deficit spending are a devastating waste of time providing no concept completion to the other major party.

Another Side of Forever (a poem)

 

Another side of forever

is never; a nothing that becomes

something that always is

changing form

Tunnels of time

focused like shadows

field lattices spacing particular waves

relate directions to impact

Knights of non-locality

control select probability squares

entangled hyper-dimensional places to move

determined freedom shaped pairs

Perceptions of ideal materialism

substances with baskets of words

structured changes of uncertainty

disappearing like Shannon entropy.

PTSD- Experience and Memory

If PTSD was easy to delete the technique might have been mass produced. Memory of past traumatic events doesn’t disappear, nor should it. It is worthwhile discovering some way of detachment without memory loss.

I guess time fades or dilutes traumatic events. Some traumatic events do recur in reality and not just memory. Being at sea isn’t traumatic yet the waviness experience recurs on solid ground, in the brain. Empirical signals trigger memories good and bad.

Memory of challenges regarded as trauma inform experience and is a survival mechanism. If people forgot that a traumatic event was bad they might repeat the ‘trauma’.

Customized AI has Potential for Wickedness

Deep Seek, the new open source Chinese AI that’s gone viral brought me to consider how millions of AI’s adapted from free sources or hidden proprietary models could be programmed to calculate wickedness in billions of forms. Even the super agents to be created by Stargate would stimulate open source rivals free to download and customize. AI can be a reflection of the owners outlook. Humans do not all mean well for others.

Post-Tribulation End TImes With Jesus and YHWH

 A Baptist minister said to me once that The Revelation was like a newspaper written for Christians of the time of John of Patmos. It needed to be slightly coded because Nero probably would have had John executed instead of just exiled if John had described Nero as the Beast. I like the partial preterist interpretation of John with the apocalypse occurring in the first century A.D. with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the terrible persecutions by the world government of the region that was Imperial Rome. 

Post-tribulation interpretations differ from pre-tribulation interpretations popularized by Charles Ryrie. Remember that end times pre-tribbers have existed since the first century and they tend to be wrong- except for the one that Jesus said would occur and that did within that generation. Jesus will return some time yet it will be different from the pre-tribber version that some Christians have, comparable to that of Muslim Shi'ite 12ers that believe the hidden imam will return before Armageddon and Jesus will lead the Muslim troops. One might read He Shall Have Dominion by Kenneth Gentry to learn about post-millennialism.

I enjoy being reminded of Christian themes amid all the clutter. I took a two year graduate course in reformed theology on-line in theology and my mentor lost my work. I published my papers in three volumes free to download at my web page. I read people like Thomas Brooks and Shaff’s multi-volume History of the Christian Church (free to download at several sites) https://ccel.org/ccel/s/schaff/hcc8/cache/hcc8.pdf

The post on the meaning of the tetragrammaton was a timely and good topic that led me to learn a little more about it. I found an article on it at The Torah.com with a quote from that below. https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwh-the-original-arabic-meaning-of-the-name#:~:text=God%20reveals%20his%20name%20to,%2C%20desire%2C%20or%20passion.%E2%80%9D 

“God reveals his name to Moses as “I am,” from the Hebrew root ה.ו.י, “being.” The name YHWH, however, originates in Midian, and derives from the Arabic term for “love, desire, or passion.”

שמות ו:ב וַיְדַבֵּר אֱלֹהִים אֶל מֹשֶׁה וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו אֲנִי יְ־הוָה. ו:ג וָאֵרָא אֶל אַבְרָהָם אֶל יִצְחָק וְאֶל יַעֲקֹב בְּאֵל שַׁדָּי וּשְׁמִי יְ־הוָה לֹא נוֹדַעְתִּי לָהֶם.

Exod 6:2 God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHWH. 6:3 I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name YHWH.

What is Meant by 'Atheists Have No Morals'

Divine command moral norms following Moses and Deuteronomy were plain and simple. Alternatively modern godless individuals haven’t anything moral to believe in besides that which they construct. As a result personal egoism is then an acceptable moral standard, as well as The Prince and evolution criteria for survival and advancement of the most cunning liars when that works. That is there is nothing implicitly wrong with deceit for atheists have transitioned to the beyond good and evil judgmentalism.

That is what is meant when people say that atheists have no morality.

I believe that moral norms need to be socially pervasive to be considered morality. Moral norms are values for a society. If the actions are simply those of individuals and accountability by retribution then there isn’t any morality present. In the absence of standard morality where everyone acts according to their own will and retribution by others is the way things are morality doesn’t exist. Consider the difference between standard-industry wide plug in jacks for computer chargers and one where every manufacturer has their own sizes and shapes; one cannot then say that a standard value exists or the size and shape of the jacks is a moral standard so they all fit interchangebly. Moral behavior is just another category of things.

I once took a coursera course from Yale on moralities of everyday life. The course was left oriented to a certain extent and they found that the ethics and morals of atheist Democrats is quite different from that of conservatives. Actually there are even regional differences. Keep in mind the first commandment though mentioned by Jesus in Matthew. ““Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matt 22:37–39). https://www.coursera.org/learn/moralities

Europe Should Pay to Rebuild Ukraine if They Continue War After US Stops Supporting It

 Democrats have a different narrative about the causes of the Ukraine war than many conservatives. Democrats don't recognize that Ukraine was part of Russia until the communist revolution and that a recrudescent Russia would fight to get it back. president Clinton and the last communist President of the Soviet Union took all of Ukraine including Crimea, then N.A.T.O. expanded eastward setting the stage for war that Democrats did nothing to renegotiate and prevent the war. Instead they added more sanctions and hate to Russia to their maximum ability.

Should the United States pay anything to rebuild Ukraine when it's a Democrat mistake? Shouldn't they let Europeans pay to rebuild that devastated region instead if Europe continues the war after the United States new Republican administration stops throwing gas on the fire?

Deficiencies In A.I. Text to Speech Reading for Ads

 For a while at least people will be able to discern the differences between A.I. readers of internet advertisements and stories with those of humans. Human tend to make some speech errors that differ from those of A.I. A.I. may pronounce ‘minerals’ ‘minurals’ as in manure for example, while a human if intentionally mispronouncing a a word would tend use a popular demotic political or innuendo spin replacement.

Lost to history are human pronunciations of ‘program’, ‘progrum’. It would be laughable if an A.I. said progrum.

With the rise of robots sales replacement workers in corporate jobs will accelerate. One can imagine Amazon using lots of robots to replace humans. I once looked for labor work in Phoenix years ago and would stand in a long line at labor ready hoping to get hired to no avail. Same story in Albuquerque.

The only jobs illegal aliens didn’t take were regular corporate jobs where illegals can’t be hired because the penalties would be too great for regular corporations to take the risk. All of the ad hoc jobs for working at Democrat owned homes were filled by illegal aliens. Robots will make it even more difficult to find work. No point in riding a bike to Apache Junction at 3 in the morning to find work with labor ready because there isn't any. Well, I did get four hours work at a Home Depot in Phoenix putting up shelves.

So Americans may tend to learn A.I. accented speech since that is what they are increasingly listening too. There are numerous A.I. text reader services available at the Google Play Store and elsewhere that do a very credible job of reading text. Business making advertisements use it a lot since it’s far cheaper than human actor-readers.

I like those Facebook stories with a photo perhaps generated by AI of a brown bear supplicant to a human for help removing a bear trap from a paw, or to follow it into the woods to rescue a cub from a well. One need write a decent story and A.I. will read the engaging story of human compassionate binding with a troubled wild animal that often becomes a friend for life and returns to visit annually. Many of them use the same A.I. reader. I had thought about having A.I. generate a photo of a troubled bear that had grown pig’s wings because of an evil scientist’s experiment cooking pharmaceuticals in a dark forest on innocent animal vectors that escaped to plea with the first human they found who happened to have parachuted in a halo jump to make it to a polling place, yet the project didn’t work out. I was limited to about 3 minutes reading with the free version of the A.I. reader. The flying bear epic never got off the ground.

I probably should wait until A.I. makes a lot of non-standard regional accents available, or talks in Tlingit language, before I try to make any fiction video short stories.

California Wildwires; How to Change the Criterion

Established economies are difficult to change to something better. Too much is invested in the present system. Change evolves at best with directed evolution instead of revolution.  Putting fire breaks and fire proof housing in established communities would be nearly impossible.

What might work is using new technologies for improved fire spotting and suppression. Fire resistant Tesla style solar roof panels to create energy self-sufficiency to reduce fire ignition sources in power transmission lines suc as the Paradise fire ought to be mandatory.

I wrote years ago about establishing a million goat army to eat brush and forest floor dead leaf layers as a practical way to reduce fire combustibles. Before humans lived in North America lightning was the only source of ignition. Today there are literally billions with drunks tossing cigarette butts out the window along with a cloud of additional sources. Maybe some d signer bug will eat Los Angeles foliage occasionally in the future.

Drones could be used for fire spotting and faster suppression response time. Desalinating sea water on a large scale could fill covered fire control water reserves. I would suggest building canals along the Mexican border to fill with seawater pumped uphill to the Continental divide with solar power. Let the water and be collected when it comes on sloped clear roofs from the locks numbering in the thousands. Freshwater would flow in pipelines east and west to bring water to deserts.

Getting fire breaks built across the west will be nearly impossible with established vested interests resisting. As global warming increases national desertification people will want more water and find less unless the make it themselves. Making home power production increase is part of the equation for satisfactory fire suppression.

A nation cannot afford to pay for reconstruction of costly homes for the prosperous lost because the rich sometimes are airheads on public safety concerns a priori.

The Problem With N.A.T.O.

 With 32 member nations N.A.T.O. is a very large military body. It can throw it’s power around such as in Ukraine, without concern for retaliation from nations it has sponsored war on. Recently met with the Zelinsky faction and guaranteed it would provide weapons and supplies to Ukraine at least until 2027. An undeclared war on Russia by the largest military alliance on Earth is a problem not only for Russia; it is a problem for the United States.

Zelinsky said the Rammstein accord will oppose the USA making Greenland part of America. He seems to want to make the U.S.A. an enemy of N.A.T.O. and to replace the U.S.A. after the U.S.A. quits the organization.

https://youtu.be/7MxDh5qKVOw?feature=shared

Russia never attacked a member of the alliance. N.A.T.O. leadership decided that it did not support any Russian claim to Ukraine or pre-emptive Russian move to defrappe its military activities in Ukraine and continued it membership build up to intimidate and threaten Russia. With plutocratic control of the press and western governance; governance bone-headed enough to believe that Ukraine war can be profitable for the west 

So instead of seeking a peaceful resolution to end the conflict and restore normal relations with Russia continued to escalate  even allowing attacks directly on Russia with N.A.T.O. weapons including missiles. Russia has yet to retaliate because it probably doesn’t ant to expand the war that would swiftly lead to a nuclear exchange.  N.A.T.O. leadership has arrogated the right to attack any nation that draws its ire despite that nation not having attacked a N.A.T.O. member nation. That is an expansion of the N.A.T.O. charter.

American Presidents that are Democrats may be sycophants of the new N.A.T.O. doctrine, or even leaders to be an 800 lb guerrilla throwing its weight around as the world’s anarchist.  Besides the United States the individual N.A.T.O. members wouldn’t have taken a belligerent stance with Russia over Ukraine. Yet as a military commune N.A.T.O. is a Don Corleone exerting its influence in a way that presets a threat even to the United States should it have strong dissension against a N.A.T.O action. There needs to be a better way to reinforce world peace and security than the N.A.T.O. alliance; once that conserves the sovereignty of the United States in foreign and domestic policy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNX8VEZZwwg

AI Hasn't Self-Awareness

AI has lots of information and no awareness. It has been trained to recognize language and meaning without any knowing. For those that wonder, it is like a human who believes his shadow is sentient.

AI can construct a posteriori structures yet I think the day is out there a way before it will produce brilliant synthetic a priori insights into science.

AI is like a human shadow that isn't conscious. It has digital neural networks and deep learning algorithms that train it to process human language-meaning in a correct way. It finds the most probably correct response. In its history from rule-based machine language to back-propagation, neural networks and deep learning it processed more data within increasing accuracy to produce an optimal response. That direction would never give it the consciousness of a mouse.  At some stage that unconscious algorithmic processing will enable it be self-evolving. Evolution piles things higher and deeper until they can't go further; humans need to be smarter and know when to branch. It may unconsciously be able to write code or to give itself (its program) instructions to act. That capacity would be dangerous installed in a pistol. Installed in real world interfaces it is many times more dangerous. No one is going to dumb it down either; there is just too much competition to upgrade it with strong financial incentives.

Philosophy and Religion Share Some Data and Form

There is a broad variety of religious beliefs. Some are obviously consistent with some, not all, philosophical pursuits. Philosophy too has a broad variety of approaches; some of those have angular and/or radial juxtaposition.

There are a variety of religious and philosophical beliefs and systems with tremendous range and differences among them. Philosophy too has systems. Utilitarianism is a system with a few varieties. Hegelians, and left Hegelians had systems that informed others like Marx who adapted a synthetic system of dialectical evolution. Platonist realism brought Plotinus to write The Enneads and realism continues to be relevant for analytic philosophy. The list of overlaps is worth a thesis. Christianity contains the truth that the rest need point to for accuracy of varying degrees.

Inner Peace with Self-Acceptance for Slobs?

If one is a slob one might want to lose weight, launder clothes and clean up the yard.

A season of discontent can be edifying.

 Change can be as one is and is yet to be, rather than as one was. Tranquility for some is presentness and for others futurity. Being is becoming.

Writing Fiction- A Method

Jorge Louis Borge said writing fiction is an unnatural act. That was informative for me. In rural isolation I increasingly immerse myself in thoughts of a story and awaken with a thought at 2 am or whenever to write another page or two.

  When summer writing I am pressured by the need to finish a draft  before the temperature drops to near freezing and below. 

  They are philosophical science fiction works so insights into physics concepts appear as they will. With luck I might get ten pages in a day varied with three or four. Editing of a first draft need wait until May when the weather warms the Earth, or never.

Can a 'True Author' Have Fewer than 10 Million Words in Print?

 I don't use AI to write fiction. I tried editing with it and that didn't work. It would cut out 2/3's of whatever I let it work on so I stopped.

Most of my writing has been in an unelectrified rural Alaskan shed in a roadless area. This winter I'm outside with internet access.

I wrote philosophical science novels that were challenging to construct. I never had heating for an entire book and my fingers would freeze if I didn't stop writing so editing was tough. 

True authors must be those with 10 or 20 million words in print. I only have four or five million I guess. Just six sci-fi novels though of about 50,000 words each. Maybe one needs to have establishment approval to be a 'true author'. It's tough to write if society has made life difficult for a writer. A sedentary lifestyle is helpful.

AI can't edit philosophy or quantum cosmology ideas at all well. Neither really can human editors that are clueless on philosophical topics.

I took a computer programming course in 1980-81 with systems analysis and have followed the progress over the decades. My recent courses from Univ of Michigan online and elsewhere provided much information about AI. That's why I have confidence it will write novels for the public eventually. I don't plan to use that myself. I will just read philosophy and write one or two more sci-fi books if I have the time. I am very backlogged in other genres.

An AI song is one made for me to listen to. Designer music to suit one's preferences. Usually I just listen to instrumentals. It's just good music to enjoy. It doesn't need to be 'mine'.

I still buy sci-fi novels to read.P.R. Adams is my favorite writer presently. It's easy to see the time when people just read AI produced books though. That might save money for the poor.

A.I. and the Future of the Great American Novel

I believe some app will appear for free that will create a readable book when a reader wants one. Deep learning allows a continuum of upgrades in quality. People may not pay for what they can get for nothing.

AI can already write great poems. I haven't read much fiction by AI yet don't doubt it's ability to improve and write in first person, limited omniscience or omniscience with alacrity in a short time span if not presently.

 It may not be worthwhile for younger writers to pursue the starving artist route in life with intensified, ubiquitous AI competition ahead. The Great American novel may be generated by AI or pros with sinecures.

So much writing hasn't any philosophical content to complicate things. Simple plots and quality descriptive writing is good enough for many action novels. There are so many tropes that still work.

Creativity that is synthetic a posteriori is within AI's present capacity. I believe it may even master creativity in hard sciences like chemistry in time. People are very clever and continue to upgrade the programming.

Tax Cuts for the Rich Instead of Border Security?

Even before Donald Trump takes office Republicans like Kevin McCarthy are throwing perfidy into the mix. They want border security to take second place to tax cuts for the rich, explaining the executive decisions can substitute for law. Then Democrats can reverse those executive decisions in four years.

People including the rich need to pay for government. Only idiots and anarchists could believe a modern economy and society could exist without one. For sustainability it need be paid for proportionally by those living and prospering in it.

Republicans of ancient Rome under stood the virtue of sacrifice, they weren’t a lot of Marie Antoinettes.

People rationalize away responsibility. Politicians do that all the time or just regard promises as water under the bridge.

Kevin McCarthy wants to pass a tax cut for the rich instead of border security he says can be put off till later. That wasn't what the majority voted for. Senator Simpson trashed talked social security after the the election was certified- not during campaign season

 Republicans seem as bad as Democrats with integrity. People blame others and make exceptions for their own moral failures