Paul and Allan Discuss Abstraction
Allan: I mustn't lie to you Paul! I long for the literal whip the chattel slave received, I'd like for my family to be violently removed from me! Opened up and gutted in front of me so I can see their entrails. I want the agonies of life to become real again! What is real I can stand, what is abstract keeps me in vague continous longing. It is a chronic, heavy suffering that I carry with me. I want the pain to be physical. Physical torture is better than psychological torture!
Paul: You have to create your own tribe Allan or become a brilliant star like Lydia. For every billion slaves you get one Autonomous Light. If you can't become like Lydia you will live in agony! You will feel deep emotion but you will long destructively. I can no longer grasp what you are going through, l've become a superficial automation. It's a smooth weld but when the loop resets maybe next pass the universe will turn me into a seagull. I don't like being human, I don't like consciousness, Allan. I cannot live like you and I cannot understand Lydia.
In my emptiness I can only live to torture you and compete for status. I will buy everything up! I will make all philanthropy, empathy, good-will and art an abstract universal nothingness only just to torture you further. Everything particular you love I will extract from you and turn it into an abstraction.
Allan: I know you have told me all before! And every time I hear it a new wound opens, l am a gushing, bursting star. Everything I feel so deeply, even the smallest strike causes pain! I cannot love Sam Bankman-Fried, I cannot love property or money or wood in the way you can! Because I am a genius I cannot love a possession, I can only love those that I am attached to. It's a broken, messy geyser but it is mine. It is not effective altruism, it is as much defined by hate as love. It is an opened mad wound. I only ask how does one become Lydia? She is a mystery like that Jew from Nazareth and the ancient sages of a time past. Sometimes I believe the world is built only for me, that I'm born to feel the agony of the changing river.
The comfort of a static philosophy feels too abstract so the wounds of abstraction slash over and over yet I wish for them again and again.
Paul: Like I said before Allan, find your own tribe. There are so many options. So many choices. Do that then after time you will find those that you will live with and love.
Allan: Options and choices are like shifting winds, they twirl us in chaotic patterns and destroy our roots but I can't lie even a destructive path has beauty in it. Lydia sits on her park bench as the tornado rushes by, even if it sucked her up she wouldn't mind. She would only appreciate the lift and changing perspectives as her bench spun in all directions. I just hope a cow doesn't smack into her.
