InstaPunk Returns

The Mind of God is a Tough Nut to Crack Thought he knew”The mind of God” I’ve been putting this off. It’s the easiest and the hardest part. None of you have any idea how hard and devotedly I have pursued the question of meaning . I wrote the best book of the last half of the 20th Century and the first half of the 21st.  Which was, for me, only getting started. I have blazed through all the new sciences, including Nonlinear Systems Analysis, Chaos Theory, Complexity Theory, Information Theory, Quantum Theory, and even Steven Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science,” which is still an experimental predicter of perfect results without a real theory to explain it.  He keeps leaving out the part where Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence are always set in motion by  an  INTELLIGENCE at the keyboard, setting  initial  conditions. Not a small omission. The programmer is God. Doesn’t even matter if he has pimples and STDs. Incredibly brilliant but still as dumb as...

  There is no God We’ll be getting back to this in due time. I’ll be free-associating here from time to time and coldly rational elsewhere. So get used to it or go read “The Bell Jar.” See what I mean? One good way of appraising the spirit of a culture is to study its popular “serious” art. But if I showed you this set of paintings and started talking philosophy you’d be back to reruns of Bachelor 3 in a heartbeat: I’m not going to try to persuade you of certain things. I’ve studied art, seen a lot of art in some of the great museums of the world, and I don’t need any of that to assert confidently that the set of paintings above this paragraph is mere decorative fakery. Which is to say it’s post-modern, which is to say it’s post-belief in the divine. Meaning quite deliberately without meaning, a kind of middle finger to everyone from the talented. There is no hierarchy in meaning, no better or worse. Everything that exists has meaning. Everything is a hologram of the whole, and the...

  If I’m lucky I’ll still be able to sneak this post in on April 1st. I wasn’t even going to write it until I saw the date this morning. The content had been amassed, but I’d been thinking in terms of fleas and elephant guns and was going to give it a pass, but here we are… Told you before that I keep the TV on all night to bore me to drone me to sleep or drone me back to sleep when I wake up with some harebrained idea in the dark. One of my reliables is a weird ROKU channel called Screambox, which takes pride in showing horror movies that are really gory and edgy in terms of their, uh, inspiration. How I finally saw Re-Animator and the Puppet Master series. Low budget flicks with a cult following but often not easily found on other streaming services. Not recommended films even if they are buried in the searchable archives. Screambox is kind of a Zuckerberg ideal, however, featuring a neo-Victorian prudery that is content to show you decapitations in closeup but blurs offending pa...

 [ Before we begin, a word about hyperlinks in this and any Instapunk post. They’re there to help you, not create a series of distracting digressions. Good rule of thumb: note that the link is there, take it if you can’t resist, but try to finish reading the post and then go back to any hyperlinks that still intrigue you. Videos are reader’s now/later choice every time. Absolute linearity is the obsession of the obsolete typewriter crowd.] The Preface to this post is  here . Göbekli Tepe. 12,500 years old. Belief in the existence of the divine lasted for 12,340 yrs. This is very long. I had to write down what I was thinking in some detail. I’m glad I did, but you don’t have to read it at one sitting. If you like, you can skip all the way down to the Section titled “The Secular Dead End” and get the tone and gist of my perspective, leaving the substance till later or never. Understood? Let’s get down to it. What’s the Big Thing that matters most, more than anything? Answer? The...