wahdat al wujūd

"how many patients have you cured?" #antipsych

https://youtu.be/WSpv4itt1z4

Farid Ayaz's interview part of "Had Anhad"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh2RH1wtq7k

Communism in America, White Malice

"film was used against my people" Haile Gerima

"we are from hereabouts"

The actuality of new creations reveals creation as beginningless divine act. The point is not that creatures are eternal as independent entities, but that Divine creatorship cannot have been suspended. “There was never a condition in which God was God and there was no creation to worship It.” That sentence alone overturns simplistic temporal creationism. Divine lordship implies perpetual relation. Here the text moves near the doctrine of eternal creatio continua. Yet transcendence is preserved: “God has ever been in the loftiness of It holiness and what is below It in the lowness of its limit.” Again the familiar polarity: immanence through creation, transcendence through ontological disproportion. Wahid Azal, Commentary on the Exordium of the Persian Bayan

A recent arXiv paper – “On the Limits of Self-Improving in Large Language Models” – doesn’t just argue against RSI. It formally proves it’s self-defeating. The core idea: model the self-referential training loop as a dynamical system on the space of probability distributions. When a model trains on its own generated data (synthetic outputs), it’s not learning from reality anymore – it’s learning from a distorted reflection of itself. The paper proves that under a diminishing supply of fresh, authentic data, this system converges to a fixed point – a degenerate distribution with low diversity and high bias. The technical term is model collapse, and it’s been observed empirically too. But now there’s a formal proof that it’s inevitable, not just a bad luck outcome. In plain terms: the model doesn’t climb toward superintelligence. It slowly forgets what the real world looks like. The proof also extends beyond single LLMs – it covers ecosystems of interacting models and multi-modal systems. So no, a committee of AIs feeding each other outputs doesn’t escape the problem. It might actually make it worse. devsimsek's blog link to original paper

“I just think goodness is more interesting,” Morrison said. “Evil is constant. You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good – and that’s complicated.” Toni Morrison “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints. CS Lewis

And then the astonishing sentence on love and fire: were all things to taste His love, the mention of fire would not be made. Because some did not prostrate, fire was constituted according to what is in it and upon it. Otherwise all, tasting His love, would be light from light in light unto light upon light. This is magnificent. Hell itself is re-read not as primordial vengeance but as derivative privation of tasted love. Fire is ontological opacity where prostration fails; light is the native element of those who taste the Beloved. This could almost be read as an Ishrāqī transmutation of eschatology into degrees of luminosity. “Light from light in light unto light upon light…” here the Quranic lamp of the Light verse becomes metaphysics. Not ornament, but ontology. Degrees of existence are degrees of Light intensified through participation. Wahid Azal, Commentary on the Exordium of the Persian Bayan

For a lot of services, we're already at “You have to say yes to AI, or you can't use our service”. Some employees are facing “You have to use AI, otherwise you're not a team player, and we'll let you go”. And if you quit (because you rightfully don't want to work in a place that forces AI like that), you now have to compete for employment with everyone who was laid off by companies who are betting on an “AI workforce”. If you want to buy a new TV, you have to buy a smart TV, because that's the only kind that is sold anymore. And most of those have AI features in them. Those that don't will add AI later through a software update, which you can't decline. Nor can you avoid the update, because the TV refuses to work without an internet connection.