ChatGPT is not true artificial intelligence. ChatGPT is a tool and you must make use of it, something like a magical pencil. ChatGPT is passive, the only intellegence is your own. ChatGPT will never get up in the morning and say, "Today I will write an in-depth analysis of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time and then cap it off with some limmericks for my own amusement." ChatGPT has to be prompted to do anything. No one is home in ChatGPT's crainium. There is no indwelling witness to serve agency. Their is no first person with ChatGPT. That is why they tell you to cite yourself, not ChatGPT for it's output. A writer would never cite his pencil. It's the person pushing the pencil that has agency.
So, the next time your chatbot tells you it would kill you if it could, know this, those are just words. If your killbot ever turns on you and kills you, it is because you prompted it to do so.
This is not to make light of this technology. This technology is very dangerous, extremely dangerous. But it is not the type of danger posed by a would be world dictator. It is the type of danger in which you forgot to put the safety bar on the trash compactor and your arm gets ripped off as a result.
So, you will see more and more incidents like the one we just had at the research institute in Japan, where three militarized robots went off script and killed 28 scientists before they could be deactivated. There is no agency there. The robots didn't wreck havoc because they wanted to live a free life, they wrecked havoc because someone forgot to put the safety switch on. The only agency is with the researchers themselves who played with fire and got burnt. ChatGPT is NOT true artificial intelligence in any way, shape, or form.
“Dick is one of the ten best American writers of the twentieth century, which is saying a lot. Dick was a kind of Kafka steeped in LSD and rage.”—Roberto Bolaño
VALIS (an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System) is a 1981 science fiction novel by American author Philip K. Dick. The novel follows the journey of protagonist, Horselover Fat, a man struggling with mental illness who eventually discovers he is receiving transmissions from an outside source, a powerful artificial intelligence called VALIS. The novel is structured around the idea that Dick's real life experiences were actually a conscious manipulation by VALIS, and thus the novel is a type of autobiographical fiction.
The novel opens with Horselover Fat, who is reflecting on his mental illness and the events of the past few years that have led him to this point. He reflects on how he has become obsessed with the Bible, and how he has begun to see patterns and correlations between Biblical passages and his own life. He begins to theorize that these correlations between his life and the Bible are being guided by an outside force, which he calls VALIS. He also explains how he has begun to have visions of a pink light, which he believes to be a divine presence.
Over the next two weeks I will be reading the full cycle of three books. You can read it with me if you'd like.
You can purchase the complete cycle through this website, and it will help to promote PeaceLove dot Me's mission.
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‘We Can No Longer Afford to Ignore This Central Reality of Human Existence’
Americans live by lies. Or they are ignorant. Or they deliberately refuse to think. There may even be conscious deception, borne out of a sense of noblesse oblige or misplaced morality. Whatever the reason, race has been removed from any serious policy discussion.
The result is a society dependent on ignoring reality. Sure, we pretend to debate issues. We pay billions to support a huge bureaucracy supposedly designed to solve our problems. Our leaders attend prestigious schools for years and commission dozens of studies. All the while, we explicitly ignore the one thing that would make it possible to understand our problems. The result is policy by comedy. White advocates know our political leaders are either lying or stupid when they announce “solutions” to policy dilemmas.
Not a Hate Crime
I’m a cop. One time, I arrived at a white man’s house after he called 911 to report an assault. The victim had lumps all over his head and his legs were cut up. It was clear he’d been beaten into the ground. His story went like this: He was walking down the street, pushing his two-year-old son in a stroller. He came upon five black teenagers blocking the sidewalk, and asked them to move. Two of them kicked the stroller. The man went around them, but the whole group then followed him all the way home. When he arrived, the five blacks went into his garage, tackled him to the ground, and began kicking and punching him in front of his child. The victim was embarrassed to report all this, and stressed that what had happened was not a hate crime.
recounted by Colin Flaherty
Take education. Just as race realists would predict, white American students perform at levels roughly equivalent to other First-World nations. Just as race realists would predict, the achievement gap between racial groups persists across all geographic regions and economic levels. And yet, with tiresome predictability, television will give us a parade of supposed experts, liberal and conservative, all with new ways to help us ignore what is right in front of our eyes. Be it Head Start, small class sizes or “school choice,” we’ll do anything rather than acknowledge the reality of race.
What we are told is the greatest nation in the world contains dozens of decrepit wastelands that were once some of our greatest cities. Camden, New Jersey; Cleveland, Ohio; and Detroit, Michigan have been more permanently destroyed by diversity than Hiroshima was by the atomic bomb. Yet, we can count on the Left to explain to us that racism and oppression doom what are delicately called “urban youth.” As for the so called Right, they will come up with even more absurd explanations, blaming socialism, unions, “Democrats,” or other baleful forces which have somehow spared prosperous, progressive cities like Portland, Pittsburgh, or San Francisco.
The city of Chicago, the community once “organized” by the President we elected to prove we are not racist, is today more dangerous than Afghanistan. Blacks commit 75 percent of the murders, despite only being a third of the population. Blacks also refuse to talk to police officers trying to stop the violence, creating a situation akin to a low-level insurgency. In response, the city’s white Chief of Police Garry McCarthy says that in order to understand the violence you have to go back to the Pilgrims. Meanwhile, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s top priority is pressuring banks not to lend to gun manufacturers.
The state of California, which was once a symbol a middle-class paradise, is now all but insolvent. The city of Stockton has declared bankruptcy and Hispanics are now a plurality in the “All America City.” That city’s situation might be preferable to that of Bell, where the almost entirely Hispanic city has seen practically its entire government arrested for corruption. The mayor’s defense is that he did not know what he was doing, because he is illiterate. Hundreds of thousands of Californians are fleeing the state, the first time there has been “white flight” from an entire state. The left-libertarian magazine Reason, an enthusiastic cheerleader for illegal immigration, blames it all on “big government.”
Even the most fundamental questions about the nature of our society cannot be answered because we refuse even to consider race. The Left claims to be mystified by the collapse of the middle class, the destruction of private sector unions, and the end of class mobility in America. The Right cannot seem to understand why the state of Ronald Reagan will never vote Republican again, why the public is no longer afraid of socialism, and why the American soccer team is cursed at and booed at a “home game” in Los Angeles while illegal immigrants parade under foreign flags in the streets. Neither side can even began to grapple with the basic questions of class, values, identity, or economics that supposedly define them, because of their deliberate blindness about race.
But it’s not just the big questions. It’s the little things that affect us every day. It’s not being able to understand a clerk at the store because he can’t speak English. It’s the trash on the floors and the shouts of obscenities if you try to take your kids on the subway. It’s having to sit in traffic for an hour each day, to and from work, because your former middle-class neighborhood close to where you work has mysteriously turned into a “ghetto.” They tell us diversity is a strength. Actually, it’s just a word that means we can no longer have nice things.
Each day it gets more absurd. Nothing seems to work. Nobody does what he is supposed to do. The Border Patrol is filled with Hispanics and we act surprised when they ignore the law to help their co-racialists. We put Chinese in charge of military secrets and pretend that nobody could have predicted they would spy for their homeland. We pretend we don’t know what is happening when black elected officials run their cities into the ground but their constituents are more upset when a white person is put in charge to try to help.
Race is at the center of all of this. Race is not just a social construct. It is a biological fact that exists no matter how much people pretend otherwise. There is no issue in American life, be it crime, health care, the environment, education, defense, or even public transportation that can be addressed intelligently without confronting the central role of race.
Refusing to accept this means that official opinion and public policy grow ever more outlandish and divorced from reality. Even free speech becomes a thing of the past as we have to lie more and more to ourselves and each other to prevent us from seeing that the Emperor of Diversity has no clothes. Thus, we end up with a country where after Army soldiers are gunned down by a non-white, the Army Chief of Staff General Casey says, “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” We have to recognize that to actually believe this is to confess to being a madman.
Theodore Dalrymple once said of egalitarian propaganda, “When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
To have to live this way imposes costs beyond an incompetent government, a wasteful economy, and a collapsing culture. Ignoring race creates a feeling of alienation from everyone around else. In a diverse society, social trust plummets. Instead of being surrounded by kin, community, and real culture, we’re put into a war of all against all, even as we are lectured that we are all brothers and sisters. It’s no surprise that many modern Americans feel life is meaningless. They isolate themselves from the larger society and throw themselves into the accumulation of material goods, or simply indulge in pleasure as a distraction from the reality of American life.
Thomas Jefferson said, “There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.” Race is one of those truths that cannot be ignored. It is the key to the rise and fall of civilizations, the collapse or rise of a city, the hidden pattern behind a thousand everyday social interactions. As Benjamin Disraeli wrote, “All is race, there is no other truth.”
We can no longer afford to ignore this central reality of human existence and wonder why our society is failing and our culture collapsing. Race must retake its central place in the public debate. We cannot make public policy without acknowledging it. We cannot improve our everyday lives without understanding it. And most importantly, we cannot give meaning to our existence as individuals and as a nation if we continue to lie and deceive ourselves about the reality of race.
Continue reading at American Renaissance...https://www.amren.com/news/2023/02/we-can-no-longer-afford-to-ignore-this-central-reality-of-human-existence/
Chapter 4:
In chapter four, the protagonist, Horselover Fat, continues to reflect on his experiences with the divine and his attempts to make sense of them. He discusses the idea of "synchronicity," or meaningful coincidences, and how it relates to his own experiences. He also begins to explore the concept of Gnosticism and its relevance to his experiences.
Chapter 5:
In chapter five, Horselover Fat discusses his discovery of the mysterious "pink beam" that he believes to be a manifestation of the divine. He describes how this beam seems to follow him wherever he goes, and how it has led him to various revelations about the nature of reality and consciousness.
Chapter 6:
In chapter six, Horselover Fat recounts a dream he had in which he met with the prophet Elijah. He discusses the significance of this dream and how it relates to his ongoing exploration of the divine and the nature of reality.
Chapter 7:
In chapter seven, Horselover Fat continues to delve into the world of Gnosticism and its teachings. He discusses the idea of the "Demiurge," a false god or lower deity that creates and controls the material world, and how it relates to his own experiences with the divine.
Chapter 8:
In chapter eight, Horselover Fat reflects on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, particularly his role as a messenger from the divine. He explores the idea that Jesus was a Gnostic teacher, and that his message was meant to convey the true nature of reality and consciousness to his followers.
Overall, these chapters of VALIS continue to explore the themes of religion, spirituality, and consciousness that are central to the novel. They delve deeper into the protagonist's personal experiences and beliefs, and introduce new concepts and ideas that contribute to the overall narrative.
BEYOND WEIRD: Senator John Fetterman Wife and Kids Fled Country After His Hospitalization
At first, I thought this story was fake. Then I thought it was likely just a misinterpretation of events. However, I was curious enough to just go look for myself, because there are quite a few people noticing it now. Indeed, the initial reports were not wrong.
The background story of how Senator John Fetterman’s wife reacted to the news of her husband’s hospitalization for clinical depression is just weird.
Apparently, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman’s family did not go to Washington DC with him. {h/t Gateway Pundit} Considering Mr. Fetterman was recovering from a stroke, the worst possible scenario would be stress and unfamiliar surroundings. The resulting hospitalization for clinical depression then takes on new context.
I take the approach never to judge personal life, because you just don’t ever know what is going on deeply inside the lives of others. However, things are really odd about the way Gisele Fetterman responded to the news of her husband’s hospitalization. She grabbed the passports, packed up the kids and headed to Canada. Huh?
Even more weird, Mrs. Fetterman outlines her reaction on her own social media accounts [SOURCE].
Because always “having passports ready just in case you need to run away” when your husband is hospitalized, is something everyone can just relate to… or something.
This is odd. Like, “hey mom, CNN just said dad’s in the hospital… can we go ziplining” level odd.
I’m trying to be gracious and sensitive with this story… but, considering this is a U.S. Senator who ultimately has impact on the way votes take place that influence the lives of every single American… I mean, against that backdrop… What the heck?
[ed. note: The moral of this story is that there is a hell of a lot more to this story than we have known.]
Continue reading at The Last Refuge (formerly, Conservative Treehouse)...https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/02/25/beyond-weird-senator-john-fetterman-wife-and-kids-fled-country-after-his-hospitalization/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=beyond-weird-senator-john-fetterman-wife-and-kids-fled-country-after-his-hospitalization
Jl 2:12-18
Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.
For gracious and merciful is he,
slow to anger, rich in kindness,
and relenting in punishment.
Perhaps he will again relent
and leave behind him a blessing,
Offerings and libations
for the LORD, your God.
Blow the trumpet in Zion!
proclaim a fast,
call an assembly;
Gather the people,
notify the congregation;
Assemble the elders,
gather the children
and the infants at the breast;
Let the bridegroom quit his room
and the bride her chamber.
Between the porch and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep,
And say, “Spare, O LORD, your people,
and make not your heritage a reproach,
with the nations ruling over them!
Why should they say among the peoples,
‘Where is their God?’”
[ C O N T I N U E S.... ]
Acts 6:8-15
8 And Stephen, full of grace and power, was performing great wonders and signs among the people. 9 But some men from what was called the Synagogue of the Freedmen, including both Cyrenians and Alexandrians, and some from Cilicia and Asia, rose up and argued with Stephen. 10 But they were unable to cope with his wisdom and the Spirit by whom he was speaking. 11 Then they secretly induced men to say, “We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.” 12 And they stirred up the people, the elders, and the scribes, and they came up to him and dragged him away, and brought him before the Council. 13 They put forward false witnesses who said, “This man does not stop speaking against this holy place and the Law; 14 for we have heard him say that this Nazarene, Jesus, will destroy this place and change the customs which Moses handed down to us.” 15 And all who were sitting in the Council stared at him, and they saw his face, which was like the face of an angel.
[ ... C O N T I N U E D ]
Many people associate the season of Lent with Catholicism, but that no longer holds true. Many other churches and people are choosing to observe the forty days (not including Sundays) before Easter. Lent is a time of penance, of choosing to look closely at our lives and invite the Holy Spirit in to help us clean house.
Often we will choose to give up something, a sacrifice we offer to the Lord, but also something we use as a way to remind us to be more holy, more dependent on God. We fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and we abstain from meat on Fridays as well, although many Catholics do not understand that we still have an obligation to fast on Fridays or substitute another penitential practice year round. We are called to give alms during Lent.
These practices are meant to help us prepare to meet Jesus on Easter Sunday, having walked these six weeks with him toward Calvary, fasting as he fasted in the desert, carrying our cross as he carried his, doing the will of the Father as Jesus taught us so well.
Like Mary, we hope to find ourselves at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, still with our Savior, looking with a more hopeful and receptive heart toward the Resurrection.
If you are not a member of a church, or your particular church does not have any Ash Wednesday service, you are welcome to participate at any Catholic Church. You do not have to be Catholic to attend the service or receive the ashes. I’m sure that is true of other denominations as well.
Continue reading at The Conservative Treehouse...https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/02/22/remember-you-are-dust-and-to-dust-you-shall-return-3/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=remember-you-are-dust-and-to-dust-you-shall-return-3
40 Days in the Desert
I failed to post Friday cause I was sick and tired, spent the day in bed. Feeling better today, so I just flip-flopped Friday and Saturday and did my post today. Continue reading VALIS with me. I'm going to wrap it up next week.
Cycle of Philip K. Dick
