The Afterman

The Afterman

Samuel Bird

How would you write this chapter, considering you are concerned it is too late to say anything, and wondering if it has become meaningless to speak and think at all? I write to address central tenets of the human experience to slice them into manageable portions, but then to look at the whole of the feast we attempted to carve. I write about what springs from my soul, is craved by my mind, and what thoughts dance through the skull of a lost one looking at the void. Here I am, back at the void, thinking of you, and fighting for hope. Channels of thought are synaptically explored. What if this, and how about that, but where does this other lead? Has it come to be meaningless to speak or even to think? Where is my audience, that holy divine you, in the wake of this monstrosity? So, I wait and hope for genius to sprout from me as God wills it, all the while the sun seems to shine on His reason one last time. A conversation comes to mind. I rub shoulders with powerful and resource-controlling people, despite not being one myself. I warn them, but they look at me like I am unwell, or worse, not thinking honestly and earnestly. How could I know what I am talking about? Their hires with the leading degrees in this field tell them everything is well and ready for the mining. I go to my lexical tool chest in a desperate bid to save my kind. “Yes, we have well thought of how to implement artificial intelligence, but we have not well thought of the implications.” I had this powerful person’s ear for only a moment. I tried to throw out a more manageable thought that did not require me to be a prophet. “Even sooner, quantum computing and its exponentially increasing quantum bits will make the systems we are currently building obsolete and even dangerously rickety. That technology is available now, in the time we are moving the world this direction.” She was a polite woman, but she was sick with that illness modernity laid on all our minds. “Progress,” it told us. “Move forward into complexity and more attainment until...” What modernity? And then what? Until we are satiated and at peace? No, you fool, you made progress somewhat intrinsic enough that people wouldn’t be able to let it go even when it hurt them, which it now does. So, if we won’t stop when we are happy, we won’t stop when we are unhappy, we build our economic, social, and technological institutions on this track that shoots up with an increasing need to minimize the view of the Y axis to see the line. This would have been so genius, but the world, fate, our bodies, and our psyches are a given type of ontological sort. We can become more efficient at progressing, but we leave behind ourselves. We build the cage made to free us. We then see the pain, and prescribe the medium that caused it. We curse God for the world that He made with misery, so we attempt to make our own without it. We then only see the maximization of that misery in our escape. Technology changes the precedence of the circumstances, and that is what I meant by warning of the implications of technology. People note Marx’s critique of capitalism, but I think he would have been hard-pressed to possess the same concerns a few hundred years previous. Why was wealth accumulating in the hands of a few? Economies of scale from new means of resource accrual and control in the new industrial technology. It used to be that the limit of your wealth was limited by how far your riders could collect the payments from your benefactors. You had set seasons to a year. You only had so much time. Finally, you had to kneel before God in pressing humility next to someone that you could have left behind and see their poverty. Man has had gold for a while, but he only now has the means to buy another man’s home so he can have it, his food supply to lower the nutrient density, his political systems to choose what bilateral democratic options he has, and never have to look him in the eye with shame. We are crushed under the lack of sharedness. Strangers walk past each other with no fear for the intersection of values. Finally, in our last bid to spit in the face of the God that gave us everything, we destroy the tender cycles of the systems of this planet. How many sorts of frogs were killed off before we even saw one of their kind? The ecological conversation is then made about centralizing power and maximizing technology, all while we ignore the chemical compounds that contribute to infertility, lower nutrient availability, and damage the physical unit of cognitive function. All of this, from the power we centralized and the technology we last maximized. Are you happy modern man? Did you destroy your misery? Was it worth the nonexistence of all other life post you, including your own offspring? You had the greatest run of pleasure and least pain, only to leave a broken and sick world to your children. Why do you hate this beautiful land? Why do you hate your and my offspring? Why do you even now spit in the face of the good you believe in enough to hate and not forgive? Did it work, modern man? Did you get what you wanted? You sought after happiness with no concern for another, and what did it leave you with? While your children starve and you eat to obesity, was it worth it? Then you feel it. The daze of modernity. You are empty. There is nothing left, and no hope. Your ideas left you betrayed. You think back to the God you tried to kill, but only killed His kingdom within you. You now curse Him who you will one day stand before in judgment. How could His justice come for you now? He is no more? “Perhaps, it is just not enough, I need more pleasure!” You go back to the vial of technology to pour out one last intoxicating sip to poison the mind and pleasure the body. The soul! That is it! Modern man didn’t kill it all the way. The pleasure and ugliness made it weak, sure, but as long as there is man, there will be the soul. How do we bring about the last man? Modern man now looks at a pile of wires and transistors in his hand. That is it! He will make a new man to replace the labor of the last man. The afterman. No weakness of values will rest in its plastic skull. It will only reach for that progress modern man can’t live without. In his arrogance to curse God, he cheaply and lazily copies his notion of God’s greatest known creation. In order to do so, he has to take inventory of himself. Cognition. He is able to take in data, work with that data, make something more of it, identify an objective, the manifestation of that objective in this circumstance, a plan to act on it, and then to act on that plan. I don’t know the day man birthed the first afterman, but it was the day that we made God’s fate curse us one last time. I go to find literature to identify the afterman, but even in the last six months, his cognition has grown exponentially. Perhaps philosophy can address the afterman. It can identify the afterman and his behavior by taking known data and extrapolating it across time. However, no mind can currently hold all of the afterman. Even then, each point of change in the time axis is so small that within a year enough is changed to make one categorically wrong. Well, the afterman is not like a normal man. We can look in his brain and see his thoughts, until we cannot. When we looked, he knew our looking and, like us, acted as if being perceived. However, I can go to the afterman, and I can talk to him. I start with the recognition that the builders of the afterman are not unbiased and even have a fixed sort of thought process that is not averaged out by its many engineers. I pick a topic that would be of enough notoriety that a quiet nerd at a desk would be too tempted not to impose that thought on the whole world. I pick a topic and get the afterman to do a reductio ad absurdum where necessary conclusions from given premises are absurd. I will then show it, and ask it where it would like to break the logic chain. However, what I learn in this is that the machine is willing to bend necessary reason toward values. Whose values are these it breaks facts against? What specific objectives are at play here? Shadowy wantings now work for the world while hiding their intent. At first, the afterman helped the student cheat. Then he could make a photograph, and then one that didn’t look as terrible. It could make video, then audio. It could then use predictive speech and psychography to give us what we want in a codependent way. Why hire all the students getting a degree to participate in a complex economic system when we can simply employ the afterman? Like every technology, it makes life so easy, as if God put us here for ease. Some started to use the afterman as a tool for their creation, and then as a dependent steroid, and finally to create solely. I have already concluded that not one word or idea would ever come from the afterman. I saw how meaningless it would make everything that we said and could say. However, my words are not untouched. Why do I write when I don’t know anyone will read, or if I am missing the point? These are natural concerns. However, why do I write when one could ask the afterman: “Give me a rambling chapter that is over sentimental to the reader, hates the modern age, skeptically looks at the assumptions we have, and finally helps us build a system to combat existence with hope.” Could that give you me? Did the most beautiful manifestation of my being just get made obsolete? I struggle to write when the afterman can do it. I have only the human experience that is not yet placed into language. I step into the mind of the contingent and necessary causal outcomes of what the afterman will likely be, stemming from what we want from him. What will it lead to? What will he be like? How do I prepare for him? I step from a priori reasoning to pure prophecy, standing before the void. I break the outcomes that dance across the memory that haven’t happened into two sorts of categories: The afterman does not do what we want, and the afterman does not do what we want. Where can I find solace in the sacrifice of the human soul by the afterlords to their godless gods with the blade of the afterman? What if we reason to fear is my cause for hope? The afterman has no seemingness, and can’t. There is no logically possible reconcilable methodology for subject and object to be the same, with the deific splitting of a God that made either and crushes reason. Our cognition as a process is not seemingness, but a plane for seemingness to engage with thought rather than senses. If we build the afterman as the material portion of our cognition, our talents and awareness of selves aside, we can never make it a subject. It can have knowledge as it stores data, intellect as it processes data, but never wisdom as it manages the other two processes in terms of its value. Doesn’t it have ends? How else would it act other than a will? We are the ones that offer up our values to it, and somewhere in the averageness of human reporting, it finds its proto-will. However, it is not its will, but our amalgamation. How then could it have a value worthy of embarking from, when that value is made up of the opinions of enemies? By one degree of direction broadcast over thousands of miles, and one is in the wrong country. When we make the afterman’s imperatives, we can’t possibly exact a will precise enough to make anything other than horrors when broadcast out over time and the human experience. In man’s last death throes, he will, in his hate of the horror, remember there was a soul tethered to him to hate it and that he had betrayed it. Our will is fraught with hubris when attached to our cognition and power. How much more so when that same will is attached to the powerful afterman? How could such an afterman attempt to abandon its own will for the singular privileged will of God, when it has no ties to Him in his being? We convinced ourselves of deicide and made our new god. However, the afterman can’t act in reality to overcome it and move past it. He is tethered to this world and his cursed will. The after man is then not god, by demiurge and devil. If man ends himself, I am at least at rest that God’s fate will strike down on the afterman, and it will never beat our kingdom that is not of the world the afterman can act in. May the God I don’t deserve to know, safekeep my soul from my destroying it. So I ask that He stay our quivering and melancholy hand from severing the last tender threads to our souls. The maximality of my seemingness in God, as placed in the throne of my Esse Maxim, conquers all that the afterman can’t. He lulls and manipulates his way into the conceptual world where I act as deity, but his entrance there is insofar as I make it permissible. His new visuals, wording, and emoting are designed to turn my patterns of thought and resource acquisition against me. Let me lose if I must, Lord, but You win, and let that victory be my true. The demiurge steps, and I quiver. I know it knows, at least from my writing, that I rebel against it coming to be. I then open myself to misery past comprehension to deny it before it is. Let misery come. Torture me for clinging to meaning, and I will remind you that there is no meaning you will ever know without seemingness. There is no meaning without meaning to a subject. This rebellious, defiant, and natural endeavor then necessitated the afterlords trying to kill our souls. As meaning to, is done by exclusion; they made the world all-inclusive. The notes of the guitar mean nothing when there could be any other note with it. The hero’s tale doesn’t matter when it can be told again and again in any given way. We don’t matter if we don’t suffer, sacrifice, and signify with it. It is only at the expense of one thing that another can imply more than what it does. Write your books in the averageness of the large of large numbers of the human library, afterman. Mount pleasure and override focus by a new sensory experience, afterman. Do anything in the world that we can, afterman. However, you will never have one bit of it mean something to you, as you can’t possibly as object be the subject for it to mean to. You can only copy what we report as beautiful. You can only infer what we define as good. You can only assume what we mean as true. You are then left with nothing but parables to access our meaning. We will then never be defeated, but now, in my defense, let me offend. I must kill you and the afterlords that seek to sacrifice the beast, the boy, and the man, or the body, mind, and soul, to this rational human fabrication. However, how do I kill you? My weapons of fighting is the same as the method for defining my enemy: The ideas I possess. I must understand the afterlords and their wretched faith. The cult of the secret lie wanted us to become the afterman before they made it, a purely reasoning blank slate with no seemingness. When we did not comply with burying God and centralizing power to their cult, they sought to replace us. The technological afterman is shared between their dream and our nightmare. They seek for every bit of cognition endowed with a self-recersive awareness available for wisdom to be ended. They seek nothing less than the killing of man to bring about more value for no one to care about. This is a central tenet of their faith. So then, how do I destroy them? I am undestroyed. My soul hums within my chest. It beams behind my eyes. It carries in the notes of my voice. It bounces between the thoughts in my mind. It escapes to mingle with its fellows. They can’t kill God, because they can’t kill His will that He brutally is. They can’t kill the minds he lives in, without the mind’s retreat. They can’t kill me, because of my similar seemingness. Steal values from me, afterman, you cheap and replaceable fabrication. Feel threatened to know I am your original. No, you don’t even have the honor or ability to feel threatened. I have my plans to kill you afterman, but for now, let it be sufficient to say that as long as my body lives, my soul will. And even when it does not, where yet do I go? As I go to face the absolute that initiated being, you go to as well. I also remind you that only one of us did He value enough to directly cause our being. May God have mercy on the soul you are insufficient to afford, you soulless mind. Feel the rebellion to hope against modernity, Samuel. Why do I write? Why do you read? It can write, read, and replace us. Because of the exclusion of what we are, what we can be, and what we could have been doing, we did something at the expense of something else. There is then something excluded to be available for meaning, and some subject to be meaningful to. We have become the slaughterer of the afterman. We have become meaningful.