Were not were

Being and Consciousness

People learn about changes in their lives in different ways. For example, in the morning, going into the bathroom, they do not find their reflection in the mirror. This is exactly what happened to a professor of philosophy, a certain Fintiflyushkin. Oddly enough, but the absence of his reflection, he was not at all surprised.

“Some kind of Kursk anomaly – the only thing that came to his mind while he continued to brush his teeth – but they live without a reflection. For example, vampires, although this is probably an unfortunate example from life.

On the way to work, he encountered the blatant indifference of those around him to his outstanding personality: everyone, as if on purpose, did not notice him. Even the conductors did not require him to show his ticket when he got on the bus. Anyone else would have panicked long ago, but not our Fintiflushkin, a great lover of verbal aporias and a militant atheist. Finally, finding himself in his auditorium, where he was scheduled to have a morning lecture, he sat in complete solitude for two classes in a row, but not a single student appeared. Leaving the audience with a pretty bad mood, he went down to the university lobby and already here, to his amazement, found an obituary that spoke of his death.

“However,” he could not believe his eyes, “this is someone’s stupid joke. I have always denied Descartes with his banal “I think, therefore I am”, but here there is some kind of cognitive dissonance. If I do not exist, then how do I think?

And then he disappeared. Without a trace. As they say, being determines consciousness. At least for an atheist.

1.5 times

While sorting through my father’s papers, I came across a letter with the following text: “To Comrade Kolosov B.I. Deputy ch. editor of Atomizdat dated March 26, 1970, the manuscripts of the collection “Theoretical and experimental problems of non-standard neutron transfer” were returned for final editing and reduction of their volume by 1.5 times …». The manuscript itself was attached to the letter, consisting of continuous mathematical calculations with rare linking sentences, such as: “We will seek the solution of the equation by the method of successive approximations. To this end, we write it in a finite-difference form. I never thought that editors ruthlessly cut not only literary texts, but also mathematical proofs. I wonder what the proof of the Pythagorean theorem would look like if it were reduced by 1.5 times? As one of my acquaintances says, it’s as if Little Red Riding Hood would immediately ask the wolf when they meet: “Well, how are we going to eat grandma? In finite difference form? Or will I have to ask, why do you have such big teeth?

In the underground

Rush hour on the subway. The girl knocks on the back of the person in front, as if on a locked iron door, and, leaning against it, asks in a whisper: “Come out?”

The back snarls languidly from somewhere above, like rolling thunder somewhere in the distance: “No-t-t-t-t-t-t-t,” and reluctantly makes way for it to exit the crowded car.

In anticipation of winter

The wind is blowing outside the window. Long and mournful. It’s like he’s asking for a house. After all, there, on the street, it is cold and damp, but here it is dry and warm. He beats on the windows, begging him to let him in and rages when he is not noticed. Or maybe it’s the wind in my head, blowing all my thoughts out of me. It’s cold and damp inside me, drafts chill my soul and my heart is always cold in anticipation of winter.

I guess, yes

The two had a heart to heart talk and one confessed to the other:

– All my life I dreamed of acting in a porn film, in the title role.

– And how did it work?

– I guess, yes. My whole life is one continuous pornography.

In a desert

Mind is the ability to think. And, in fact, the ability to control your mind.

Apparently, initially the word mind meant “to strike with the mind” (time – blow, mind – science, skill) or, to paraphrase, the ability to attack and defend. Just a verbal designation of a tool with which a person was able to improve his ability to survive in this world. Like a knife or fire, thanks to which people have achieved dominance in the wild and created a new, artificial habitat.

Reason changed the original nature of man, forcing him to live in the second signal system, in the space of words and ideas. This freed man from the power of the body, from innate instincts, but not completely.

On the one hand, in the new reality for a person, only artificial, made things now have absolute value: something that is subject to exchange, and on the other hand, a person can enjoy only through the body, and it is the acquisition of pleasure that is the main meaning of individual human existence.

Through the measure of pleasure, the value of each life lived is determined. In societies where there is no opportunity to live for one’s own pleasure, the value of life for people drops to zero: in such societies, life is considered only as a burden or as a duty, but not as the highest good; from which it is necessary to get rid of without any regret.

Thanks to the mind, a person has found leisure, i.e. free time, and what is free time if not idleness – the source of all knowledge according to Aristotle, with the help of which people created knowledge and invented a culture, thanks to which they learned to multiply, preserve and transfer this knowledge to themselves through time and space. And many knowledge, as you know, only many sorrows.

Having gained knowledge about himself, man realized his natural imperfection. And moreover, thanks to him, he suddenly discovered that the mind, which he was so proud of throughout his history, is just a pure accident, a side effect of evolution, which nature initially did not even think about when it created man as a species: the mind is not embedded in the human biological program.

The faint spark of reason in each of us flares up into a living flame of an inquisitive mind only when we communicate with each other, exchanging ideas through language. Therefore, language and people are always the same: language binds us all together and knits itself from words. It is easy to extinguish the spark of reason in a person, but it is simply impossible to ignite it again: there are plenty of examples, from Mowgli children to old people who have lost their minds. At the same time, using the example of idiots, a person is clearly convinced that in order to feel happy, reason is absolutely not needed. Moreover, it is the mind that dooms a person to unbearable suffering with the mere thought of death. After all, of all living beings, only man is aware of his mortality, knows about it and cannot come to terms with it.

The mind in man refuses to accept the fact that he is finite. Hence the belief of people in the afterlife: an attempt by the mind to explain the purpose of its existence as a merger after death with an out-of-body, eternal and indestructible super-mind, of which the mind considers itself a part.

One can, of course, endlessly wonder and think about the starry sky above us and about the moral principles within us, but this does not negate the obvious and extremely annoying fact that the mind is just an accident. Just a cry in the wilderness that no one will ever hear.

Tower of Babel

Future. Once upon a time, this word inspired everyone. Now it’s scary. Everyone used to hope for the best, now everyone expects the worst. What is it – a tribute to time or general psychosis? It is amazing, but now humanity knows why it arose and what is the ontological role of man in the evolutionary process that once began on our planet.

Having arisen as a by-product of the vital activity of our body, the second signaling system, our speech, gave rise to the mind, and the mind elevated man to the top of the food chain, making him the king of nature. Thanks to the mind, a person gained knowledge, and in order to preserve and increase knowledge, he created a civilization. Civilization launched the flywheel of progress, which led humanity to the need to create artificial intelligence in order to solve the issue of personal immortality for people.

Artificial intelligence will save humanity from the need to be smart, because the mind is what makes all people unhappy. And to be unhappy and immortal is unacceptable. By delegating the mind to inanimate matter and ensuring the continuity of its existence outside the forms of biological death, humanity will fulfill its cherished dream – it will become immortal and happy. The idea of God will disappear because every living person will become a god.

The Tower of Babel has always been a symbol of human insolence in an effort to overcome the boundaries and limits of being set for it. The Tower of Babel was conceived to use it to ascend to heaven and become gods. Realizing over time that God does not live in heaven, but in the human heart, the need to storm the sky disappeared. But the idea for which the tower was built did not disappear – to kill God and make a name for himself. What is not a goal for which it is worth daring. And continue to build the Tower of Babel, even if now it is called differently.

Your coffee

Here, in one godforsaken hole, metropolitan tourists were brought. They went to a local catering point and ordered, after much deliberation, choosing between coffee and tea, tea. Reasonably believing that they probably don’t know how to cook coffee here, and tea is somehow reliable. You can’t spoil the tea. The waitress brings them some unimaginable vodka in glasses on a tray. Seeing that tea is not tea, they decide to change the order from tea to coffee while they still can. The waitress, with a completely unperturbed face, takes a new order, lifts a tray with glasses and immediately puts it on the table with the words: “Your coffee.”

Spring

– Finally, the smell of spring has wafted, – Galya said happily.

And she inhaled the invigorating aroma of thawed manure and the sweet stink of country latrines with full breasts.

The evening was a success

Then I have a friend named Vitya decided to invite the girl to his home for a “romantic” dinner. With all that it implies. Vitya, I must say, is still that character in itself. He is almost forty, and he has never married. He still lives with his mother. Classic sissy. She cleans him, feeds him, and, ultimately, takes care of him from “all sorts” of girls. And then it dawned on my mother that if not now, then her Vitya would never marry and she would have to hang around with him to the grave. And she wants to live herself. At least in old age. So she gave him full carte blanche for one evening and retired to visit him all night. Moreover, she managed to study Vita’s chosen one far and wide during her timid visits to her and her son at the dacha. Vitya, without a mother, showed enviable culinary ingenuity and bought a fair amount of food for dinner at fast food: two buckets of chicken legs at KFC and several packages of fried shrimp at McDonald’s. And two bottles of the cheapest red wine in the nearest supermarket. A sort of gourmet porn. And now our not-so-young young man Vitya was all in such, you know, extreme impatience, waiting for the girl and getting nervous and nervous: the love vitamin played in him and didn’t even let him sit. To somehow occupy your hands, Vitya and let’s eat chicken legs. I didn’t even notice how I had knocked down two buckets. He switched to shrimp and immediately consoled himself with the thought that the girl would not come to him for food, so there was no need to worry. The shrimp disappeared unexpectedly quickly. There was only wine left. “Wine is good,” Vitya thought, “wine will help in communication. Liberate. I’ll drink a glass.” One glass, two glasses. Look, the bottles are gone. And then the doorbell rings. The girl came. For dinner. Vitya escorted her to his room with all the solemnity of which he was still capable. And on the table set for dinner, there was nothing but a sheet of drawing paper as a tablecloth, two candles and a bottle of wine. “I ate everything while I was waiting for you,” Victor honestly admitted, “but food is not the main thing. And the main thing is our communication with you. So to speak, a dialogue of two loving hearts. Let’s have some wine, it will help us get to know each other better. Only you will have to drink alone, wine does not fit into me anymore. “However, what a uniform disgusting,” the girl was offended, but she didn’t show it, “I was getting ready, you know, I was dressing up. I hoped! And then it’s oh-la-la!” But I decided to wait with the scandal. And she began to drink wine. There was no choice left. The girl quickly got drunk and the “dinner” was already rolling towards the finale planned by Vitya, but then there was an embarrassment. With Vitya. Fast food in his stomach did not find a common language with drunk wine and asked to go outside. And the rest of the evening and almost the whole night, Vitya and the girl spent on opposite sides of the toilet door talking, periodically changing places. And they confessed, they confessed. As they say, there is nothing to be ashamed of on the potty. Everyone knew about each other, as if they had lived together half their lives. When they parted in the morning, the girl confessed to Vita that she had never spent time like this before. Well, what can I say. Apparently the evening went well.

Taste of happiness

Sweets are a universal remedy for adults to solve problems with children. Remember as a child? As soon as you started pestering your parents, they gave you a candy or a chocolate bar and sincerely believed that they solved your problem or at least calmed you down. Probably, on their part, it was dishonest: they kind of bought us off, and we had no choice. We did not know that this is not love, but a deal. And now we are adults. We sell everything and buy everything, from time to time we betray and are largely disappointed. Especially in the fundamental values of this world. But the taste from childhood, the same one, remains the only holy feeling that reminds us of ourselves, the real ones, as we were in childhood. Happy and naive. Sweet tooth.

How does it happen

The following story happened to the poet Fedyashkin. He stopped hearing voices. More precisely, one voice that whispered poems to him, and he unsuccessfully tried to write them down. But the life of a poet is not the work of a stenographer, from 9 to 17 every day. No, it’s not that simple. Climb, for example, Fedyashkin in the shower, and then the voice begins to dictate. He is from the shower to record, and he immediately falls silent. Back to the shower – dictates. In general, not life, but flour. This voice always sounded in the most inappropriate places and at the most inopportune times. And he, Fedyashkin, was torn between the desire to write down poetry and live normally for his own pleasure, like everyone else. Rest. Fedyashkin suffered terribly, but kept to the general line of being a poet. It’s a pity for him, you know, it was to miss everything that came to mind. Yes, and it came, to be honest, all some kind of nonsense. So, zilch, verbal commotion, and nothing more. No one published his poems, and he was embarrassed to read them publicly. He was terribly poor, but he was proud that he was a poetic genius. And here again – and silence. Inside. Dark and quiet. And the darkness is, you know, quite comfortable, and not such that the devil knows what hides: the horrors of the night in all their diversity. In general, the soul is dark and boring. Like an empty wardrobe. No poetry. Realizing his poetic sterility, Fedyashkin decided to return to his former profession. I started working as a proctologist again. In the clinic. He will come to work, look at the patient in one place and wait, maybe someone from there will begin to dictate: “I remember a wonderful moment, you appeared before me, like a fleeting vision, like a genius of pure beauty.” And in response, silence. She spends the whole day looking at patients with no result. No revelation. Out of grief, she will go to the urologist Parnokopytov. Together they will drink tea with gooseberries, they will discuss the nurse Zoya, and go home. Now he lives like everyone else, on one salary. And he can’t understand everything, is he happy or not? As it happens.

Ascension

Here one incident happened. You could say it’s an incident. Well, straight to the chickens for laughter. One little man, in fact no one, took it and ascended. Just like that, in front of everyone and for no apparent reason. And most importantly, if someone worthy, well, then it’s clear. Boss type. Or someone else more important, all strewn there with laurels or wreaths of honor. And so – some rubbish. A certain Cyril. Snot, not a person. I broke away, you know, from the earth and the team, without knowing it, and hung. In the air. From the very beginning, he did not understand that he had lost his foothold. I thought someone was playing a joke on him. Kicking around like some son of a bitch on TV, with no result. Out of fear, he even tried to fall on his back. It still didn’t work. Hanging, you know, like some Indian fakir in a circus. And cursing. Clearly so and every word on the case. And then he soared to the ceiling, hit his head and fell silent. Until the paramedics tried to get him out of there. Yes, but nothing happened. As they put him on the floor, he again strives for the ceiling, like some kind of bubble with gas. Just an experience in physics class. Then someone gave a smart advice that he should have given him a weight in his hands. Then, they say, it will definitely not fly. Well, then and there, they got the weight. Pudovaya. They pinned him to the floor and thrust him into his arms. But he still took off, and dropped that weight on the doctor that he had come with the orderlies. There was a screech, as if a live pig was being slaughtered or a sawmill turned on. All around the poor fellow, the doctors are running around, bruised, but they forgot about Kirilka the bastard for a while. Do you think that’s the end of it? It wasn’t there. Kirilka slowly, like some kind of fly, crawled along the ceiling to the window: apparently he wanted to sneak away, while they forgot about him, and so that straight into the sky and forever. And we, then, are here and with nothing? But who will let him just leave if he owes everyone. This Cyrilka, a well-known licker, only did that he shot money according to his own special method: he would come up, the scoundrel, he would say compliments and immediately ask for a loan, and after that it seemed embarrassing to refuse, that’s all they gave him. Then someone shouts to him, seeing his insistent intention to retire from here forever, they say, pay off the debt before you fly. You won’t need money there anyway, but you will respect us all. And he, either in the agitation of a new life, or from an excess of feelings, how he began to pour out everything that he really thought about his creditors, that somehow everyone immediately became embarrassed. Even the doctor was silent. He turned out to be an ugly person, he simply exposed himself. But then something went wrong with his ascension: probably, in heaven they also heard that he spoke about everyone, and they clearly did not like it there. And he went straight back. On the floor. In the company, so to speak, of his “friends”, about whom he spoke so recklessly. This is where the ambulance comes in handy. And the orderlies had something to do, besides a doctor with a weight instead of a head. And everyone forgave Kirilka for this. After. So we did not have a new Elijah the Prophet. And thank God. And all because we have a way – without a team, nowhere. Even to the sky.

Memory of the future

In the future, when people achieve relative immortality and live almost indefinitely, and all carnal needs are satisfied through special personal androids, the process of reproduction will be extremely selective and put under strict control to improve human nature. Eugenics will be revived again, but under a different name, and the moral arguments that previously rejected it will become a thing of the past. People of the future will live in a world consisting of a strange mixture of permanent euphoria and hallucinations, and the main goal of their existence will be to acquire happiness: absolute pleasure, the manifestation of which will be either creative work or work to achieve moral self-satisfaction. In the light of practically achieved immortality, the attitude towards death will also change. It will now be considered the inalienable right of every person to freedom of choice, perceived as an opportunity to be freed from the duties of life: an act of final disobedience to society. Outwardly, people will change a lot, races and countries will disappear, everyone will live in their own hermetic little world. Love in its current understanding will die out, it will be replaced by friendship as an opportunity for a person to interrupt his own solitude for a while in free communication with others. Friendship will henceforth be valued as the most sincere and pure feeling, devoid of everything carnal, as a selfless principle in human nature. Inner nobility will become a new cult for all mankind, deprived, thanks to the achievements of technological progress, of all their basic natural instincts, which from now on will cease to influence human actions and behavior. It will be a new wonderful world in which there will be no place for people like us.

Happens to everyone

The entertainer announces: “Now the well-deserved and somewhere even popular, among all foreign rabble, our famous and beloved bath-and-laundry singer Razdvaplyuev will perform with his unfading hit “I messed up your life.”

A perky boy a la Basque jumps out onto the stage, dressed as a pastoral shepherd boy. He waves his arms, the orchestra plays an energetic overture and freezes. Razdvaplyuev turns his back to the audience, lowers his pants and, bending down, exposes his bare ass for everyone to see, from which he loudly blows gases. Hall applauds.

After speaking behind the scenes on the sidelines, Razdvaplyuev sincerely admits: “I did everything I could. There just wasn’t enough for more.” Fans applaud him and assure him that it was real art.

This is how it happens with everyone. You think it’s art. And look closely – one good thing.

That is how we live

Numbers are funny. It turns out that almost 2 people die every second, or rather 104 per minute. 6250 per hour, 150,000 per day. 54,750,000 per year.

At this rate of mortality, it will take 47.5 years for one generation to die and 142.5 years for humanity to be completely renewed. It turns out that we are not dying fast enough; thanks to progress, we begin to live longer and longer, which means that the achievement of active longevity is not far off, when you can live without old age: it is to live fully, and not to live out.

At the same time, one person produces 145 kilograms of feces per year, and all of humanity produces 1,131,000,000 tons of shit per year. We produce even more garbage – 3,120,000,000,000 tons. We all live in a huge landfill. Where we bury our dead. We bury or burn 4,106,250 tons of dead flesh every year.

In fact, our civilization is a civilization of garbage dumps. The thicker the cultural layer, the richer the culture. All our future we draw from the past. All our ideas are borrowed from previous generations. In the dustbin of history.

We are convinced of the progressive nature of our civilization, that it has a specific goal to achieve which it strives, while the universe around us demonstrates the aimlessness of its existence.

As Parmenides taught, the world is self-sufficient, eternal, has no beginning or end, and feeds on itself. Everything in it moves in a circle, from atoms to planets and stars. But man refuses to believe in the closed nature of world existence, he hopes to find the point of its beginning and the point of its end. In space and time.

All this is due to the fact that people live in a linear world, the personification of which is the cube. The cube is the antithesis of the ball. The cube has a beginning and an end. The cube is counted and measured. We strive to reduce any circle to a square.