KARBYTES_JOURNAL_2023_ENTRY_29

KARBYTES_JOURNAL_2023_ENTRY_29

The following poem was shared via Instagram by Russel Brand. (I thought the poem offered some useful food for thought which I personally would not have preferred to generate. The content I wish to produce is a lot more amoral and epistemological. My goal as an artist is to offer glimpses into transcendence beyond anthropocentricism and the Anthropocene and emphasize concepts such as “universal intelligence” and “emergent properties”). Also, Victor (BitCoin: 39qM4AfydXT3ypkge85YvFxCfrxBHQQwRw) is back on Instagram.

For the record, my (karbytes) BitCoin address with Coinbase is: 3F2n27rjXcgBTHPitfHMqMY1fzDMshtiMs

The green highlighted passages in the poem below are lines which gave me “chills down my spine” when I read them because such imagery invoked by those words is reminiscent of my personal experience and intuitive notions about what reality is and how ethics are “fabricated” out of “superpositions” by the consistently observed actions which instantiate those ethics as relatively finite and arbitrarily (yet deterministically selected) conceptual boundaries between “good” and “not good” (and such notions can be verbatim communicated as sequences of binary digits). As I was walking today, I thought about how patterns tend to “want to” replicate themselves. Following that thought was the thought that, the more a particular pattern named X is instantiated inside of one space-time continuum of a substrate, the more X is seemingly likely to be instantiated inside of that space-time continuum’s future expansion. (What is that but a form of momentum? Is ethics just a way of most efficiently utilizing apparently finite matter and energy in order to propagate “good” patterns as extensively as possible? The fact that one person’s notion of “good” is not the same as some other person’s notion of “good” is the basis for competition over scarce physical resources (and such competition is historically observed to propagate one lineage of memes over a less advantaged lineage of memes whose propagator is less advantaged in terms of utilizing finite resources)).

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Kindness

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.