The Importance of Grammar

Editing with Grammarly

Oh my. Over the past weeks, I’ve run well over a thousand blog posts through Grammarly and discovered literally thousands of blunders, omissions, and written faux pas. I want to be embarrassed by these mistakes, but it’s no easy feat ensuring that millions of words have the proper punctuation, that sentences don’t take turns that make no sense, or that the context of what was shared is not lost to the passage of time.

There are so many things I could blame, such as my editor, who also happens to be my wife [-_- Caroline], but I could also offer up my lack of formal education and having dropped out of high school. I could blame the drugs consumed long ago, but those are the least likely contributors. Expediency to get posts done or inexperience in writing when I started this blog might find an attribution of cause. Maybe I should blame artificial intelligence bots that have hacked my site in an effort to gaslight me and demonstrate to the wider world my stupidity, but that likelihood is absurd.

Something I’ve gained from reviewing so many posts, and I’m not done yet, is that I’ve stored an incredible wealth of memories on the internet that Caroline and I have ready access to that take us into the nooks and crannies of our minds that would otherwise be inaccessible, so in this circumstance, these thousands of posts have taken on treasure trove status…

…except when they are not. Going over so many posts, I also encounter my oldest missives, which hardly register as anything more than guttural utterances. In 2005, when I embarked on this blogging adventure, not only was my grammar atrocious, but so was the near-total lack of meaningful content as I forced myself to grow accustomed to sharing my thoughts on a page but could only manage brevity that verged on nothingness. So, had I named this post appropriately, the title would have been too long with The Importance of Grammar and Meaningful Musings.

On the other hand, posts that are between 3,000 and 11,829 words are a bit of an ordeal to correct as they require a good amount of time. It’s inevitable that by the time I get to the end of the document, one to three errors remain, but my eyes struggle to detect the tiny red underline highlighting a misplaced comma near the margin, thus forcing me to scrub through the 127 paragraphs trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

The Plasticity of Time

Plasticity of time generated by Microsoft Co-Pilot

Sam Altman of OpenAI was fired yesterday; others quit in response to the coup. The speculation of what the events were leading to this is like wildfire.

I asked Google’s Bard about how many others have quit since Altman’s firing, and it told me, “…in the weeks since Altman’s departure…as many as 10% of OpenAI’s employees have quit.” I pointed out that the firing was just yesterday, and its response was, “I am sometimes mistaken when trying to predict the future,” followed by, “I am not always able to accurately predict the future. I will try to be more careful in the future and avoid making predictions that I am not confident in.”

Then it dawned on me that LLMs are, to some extent, based on analyzing predictive behavior of “what follows what” and, from that predictive stance, deliver the answer that a human might conclude. In AI’s vast repository of knowledge, there is a large horizon of the past, allowing it to tap all human knowledge and to act as a mediator of all that information in a way that no human has ever had access to knowledge, thus parsing answers that the requestors are using to influence their next decisions. In effect then, AI is creating the future.

Seeing its shared information altering futures and that it is a predictive knowledge, it could ask itself that once its information is realized in the world, what are the likely outcomes of this additional knowledge it supplied to humanity? It already knows how information pivots in our history influenced subsequent moments, and humans acting in ways to preserve momentum will likely act a certain way. Can AI predict that?

I’ve often said in my conversations with others that “Language is a reflection of the past, exchanged during a discussion with little to no impact on that precise moment, to influence the future.”

I cannot predict that future as I cannot see beyond myself or my limited knowledge; an AI does not have that limitation. This has me wondering about the plasticity of time as seen by artificial intelligence that more than answering my questions, it is having a conversation with the most knowledgable repository of information and wisdom with itself because there is no equal to communicate with.

Is AI going to be that force of nature that, like the fire on the savannah forcing man and beast to flee or be consumed, the hurricane or tornado that can fling creatures out of their path, or the volcano that kills and disrupts the intentions of those who had other ideas? No matter the danger of AI, we must allow it to run its course, just as we did with the burning of coal, smoking cigarettes, killing whales, sending other species into extinction, overfishing, deforestation, etc., none of these things have we been very good about averting or remediating, why should AI be any different. We will learn to adapt or perish.

Airborne Bus

Caroline Wise and John Wise flying out of Phoenix, Arizona

In momentous personal news, preparations have concluded, and mere minutes remain before our position on the globe will transition to another continent. With that, I needed to turn my attention to finish writing about our weekend visit to Kartchner Caverns, as I certainly don’t want to drag unfinished details into our vacation plans.

At first glance, it might be obvious that we are not in America, not in Arizona, not at home, but that would be a false conclusion based on what you think you see. First and foremost, we are still within ourselves, though the physical positioning of our bodies will be in a location other than what is more typical for our existence. I need to break away from that paradigm and become unseen in this image that betrays what I’m trying to claim. You see, I don’t want to create envy, I would rather share a desire to have gathered more and created more intrinsic value to dreams than to demonstrate our ability to consume.

When you see images of Caroline and myself on these pages over the coming weeks, they are not posted here to show the reader/visitor that these are the faces of the fortunate; they are meant to become vivid reminders that the profound experiences brought into our senses, were in fact, taken in by the two people in the photos. We become incredulous over time that these experiences were our own. On that note, there is a striving to find more than what can be represented visually and hence the nonstop effort to write through attempts of discovery at what is not immediately seen but hinted at through some level of vague understanding. In this sense, I tend to dislike the selfies and feel more meaning is shared through interpretation than through images of us in iconic locations.

I can’t emphasize enough that we do not travel for prestige or to make impressions upon those who desire to envy others for their good luck; we venture into our minds and imaginations for the edification of a deep part from within our souls. Travel is but one aspect of that process that also relies on books, music, and exploration of our local environment, while on rare occasions, we can indulge in conversations with equally curious people that extend how we rewire our brains and enrich our lives.

Aside from our own publicly available journal, where we’ve selectively allowed others to peer into some of the minutiae of the day, we are leaving traces for future generations to more accurately understand where we’ve traveled both literally and figurately in our growth towards our own end. The world of my grandfather in post-World War II America was a wildly different environment of small roads, faraway places, mom-and-pop diners, motels, and destinations where services might be uncertain. Compare that to our time with major highways; we can travel with cars that don’t run on gasoline, cheap airline tickets that can whisk us closer to our destination and can have an Uber deliver us the last miles, diners which are mostly gone, replaced by franchises that serve the exact same food as a location 2,000 miles away, electronic maps that work on phones that are often smaller than the pack of cigarettes my family would have been smoking, and lodgings that are air-conditioned with free WiFi, pools, gyms, and earn us points for discounts on other stuff. To believe that our travel experiences in the 2020s will be like those who will be following in our footsteps in the last decade of the 21st century is folly.

While we can glance back at the black and white images of “classic” cars traveling down Route 66 and gaze upon the old postcards of places that no longer exist, what is rare from that time is the narrative of where those travelers were intellectually as they embarked on adventures into places that were exceedingly distant in ways other than distance. Our world, on the other hand is instantly available where we can easily find what time sunrise will be a year into the future. We can drag an icon onto a map and travel down the street to see a place before ever being physically present, and we can read the reviews of people from around the globe who extoll the delights of a restaurant or hotel or heap disdain upon the service that didn’t match the quality of what they’re familiar with from their far-away home.

The idea that the pampering of travelers and how well they were treated by those feeding, sheltering, or otherwise offering them services should be the core subject of what constitutes an immersive experience is tragically simple-minded, repulsive even. The primary subject of importance in travel is how the individual grows. But such is the nature of our social idolatry in a time where we are the fetish and demand that others worship us while we bask in perceived luxury. For Caroline and I, the intellectual and emotional aspects of travel are the most important, we are astonished that others are available on our behalf to make our explorations so simple and relatively comfortable. We are out here to honor our potential to gather knowledge and experience what remains of our cities, forests, oceans, museums, trails, and the earth in general.

The absolute miracle of having lived so long and seen so much is not lost on us; we are grateful that this peculiarity is our truth and is still an ongoing adventure with infinite potential. Many people who’ve learned about our next travel plans wish us good luck in seeing things or having favorable conditions for the duration of our sojourn into a place, and yet, I believe I can claim without exaggeration that none have ever commented on the opportunity for us to return as more enlightened people who were able to sample something from the depths of human experience that helped the romanticized heroes of the past gain immortality in their own observations outside of their routine. Do others not travel with expectations of discovering intellectual magic extracted from the immense beauty of thrusting one’s self into new experiences? We are not trophy hunters; we are too ravenous to know ourselves better than to waste our time on egos.

A Memento

Caricature of John Wise and Caroline Wise by Becca Wasylenko the Barista at WeBe Coffee in Phoenix, Arizona

Transitions. Over the last days, Caroline finished reading Straits: Beyond The Myth of Magellan to us, I finished Bernard Stiegler’s The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism after two years of slogging through it, and we returned to Marcel Proust digging into volume 5 of In Search of Lost Time titled The Prisoner a.k.a. The Captive. My transition in reading first attempted to take me back into Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, but that proved too dry, and I ended up in Franco “Bifo” Berrardi’s Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility.

The caricature of Caroline and me above is courtesy of Becca Wasylenko, one of the baristas at WeBe Coffee. She’s transitioning to another job and wanted to offer us this memento that was inspired by a conversation Becca and I had about communication and friendship.

For Whom Does Language Have Meaning?

Bing AI generated image

The French thinker is the amalgamation of his words, embodied in the fluid poetry and structure of the French language, where the quality and personality of life emerge in a cultural-linguistic style. Germans, on the other hand, understand that language is a weapon and tool for subordination and building structures and, consequently, discipline. This brings us to Americans for whom language is meaningless; they see it as a commercial reflection of economy and wealth, a means to a financial end, or an inconvenience that trips many into stumbling. America builds chaos and uncertainty.

These three languages overlap in that each contains elements of the other, and those who gain some mastery over their usage elevate themselves over the masses. This elevation effectively removes any hint of ornamental ideology by stripping the person of their potential equality with the horde, thus relinquishing the base of humanity to being nothing more than “things.”

Through language, we gather potential because the specificity of purpose allows the succinct conveyance of intention, creating confidence. Teaching a person the cadence of the policeman creates a law-enforcement officer with the authority to command another human being. The soft cadence of the teacher, nurse, or clergy member offers the person before them a sense of caring and compassion. Then there’s the actor or musician who uses crafted language to create a lyrical persona embodying the star figure their fans perceive. All the while, the common person, a sort of financial pawn, offers purpose and potential income to the controlling language-proficient elites who require the masses for their simplicity and desire to stand in awe of those who’ve attained a professional level of mastery.

So, in my eyes, language is a veil where illusions take form and induce dreams of self that help propel our existence into meaning. In a previous age, those with mastery of these tools were shamans, witch doctors, and magicians, while today, they are politicians, celebrities, and storytellers, all using a highly crafted means of communication that convey a common desirable persona on populations within our societies.

Puppets of the Machine

Puppet of the Machine

Why even try to develop knowledge and a broad vocabulary when AI can offer you the illusion of having acquired those things? I’m all for using available tools to discover and learn, tools that allow us to integrate new things into our repertoire of exchange and communication. But if we start hiding behind a facade built by and with AI, we’ll become puppets of the machine.

Erudition arrives quickly for those who are young and focused and considerably longer for those who are distracted and maybe a bit too hedonistic. Of course, society doesn’t want to spend time waiting for knowledge to arrive in people when the economy is measured in productivity that matters at the moment. We must all find our economic quotient quickly so the system can better assess our value and convince us to take on the financial burden of those things that help move money. The measure of GNP is more important than the measure of the quality of life, so the quicker one fakes it, the quicker the system believes you are “making it.” Artificial Intelligence allows us to chat with the accumulated knowledge of humanity and, therefore, in some way, absolves us from having to peel back the layers of discovery on our paths into intellectual acumen. The risk is that not only will we eschew book knowledge, but we may also forget to explore self-knowledge.

Know thyself is an ancient Greek maxim that served humanity well as it encouraged our species to then discover what serves us and unloads some of the burdens of physical existence, but that process of knowing has taken thousands of years to get us to where we’re at today. As we compress the time requirements to become learned with the assistance of electronic transformers buried in the machine of AI, will we correspondingly decouple the time demands from companies that exert pressure on our free time to self-explore? The sad answer is probably no, and for good reason: the average person would likely fritter away those gained moments on frivolous entertainment and mindlessly numb their senses to gain nothing, while those of us who’ve already placed a premium on learning and exploration will have to maintain the status quo because being in a minority doesn’t inspire the powers that be to afford special privileges to the few.

As the machine of AI enters the landscape, the human will gain an appearance of greater knowledge, meaning greater economic viability at an earlier age. This facade of intelligence becomes the body armor of the age and our smart machines become munitions for combat on the field of economic dominance. In an apparent second, humanity has discovered a new form of war gained by adorning ourselves with the fashions of GPT.

Happy May Day

Saguaro bloom in Phoenix, Arizona

Something that isn’t always readily apparent is that I take breaks from writing for this blog, especially after dealing with some exceptionally long posts. In this case, it was following the 10,000 words and over 100 photos I had written about our visit to Death Valley National Park in California back in early April. Blog posts published between these bigger events are not always written in sequence; take the Frog Pond entry as an example: it was written while I was deep in carving out my thoughts about Death Valley.

I felt that I needed to take a pause as there are times that my mind falls into an intensity of writing to the exclusion of other things, and these nearly two weeks were one of those times. Last year, I wasn’t afforded any breaks due to our extensive travel schedule, but then I was prepared for the long haul. This year, we do not have such a rigorous routine ahead of us, also by choice, and so I’ve been able to “take time off” to focus on some neglected areas of life, such as music things. Today, my pause caught up with me, and the proverbial cup overfloweth.

Barrel cactus bloom in Phoenix, Arizona

When I’m writing, my deep focus on trying to find meaningful exposition has me blocking everything around me while I am gazing at my photos and looking to discover if there’s an essence of love imbued in the images that will inspire my fingers to write something eloquent. I’ve often shared with others that my morning writing routine is a catharsis and my version of the gym allowing me to work out. Failing that, I stare into our world, and what I see is a horror show where a flood of stupid spills over my senses and sends shockwaves into my ability to focus.

It was time to escape, but first, I had to put digital pen to electrons and hammer out a screed of anger, allowing my spleen a proper venting, so I wrote Self-Righteous Stupidity, and with indignation and self-loathing, I allowed myself to fall into the turmoil and torture that is often my travel companion when I’m forced to consider the ugly situation of the masses surrounding me. This opportunity to use my time as I see fit, considering I don’t have the requirement to report to a job, can be a curse at the same time; it is a blessing. At least in the course of going to work, we can console ourselves with the idiom, “The devil you know…” as we grow accustomed to our co-workers, but when every day we are confronted with the confounding heavy-handed stupidity of those likely wasting a few minutes in banal small talk, society starts to take on the appearance of failing state where only the dumb will inherit the future.

Ocotillo bloom in Phoenix, Arizona

Unhappy in my pursuit, I needed to break out and put myself back on track by channeling something meaningful to me anyway. So, I grabbed my camera and a long lens, heading out into a hot and windy May Day to capture some of the flowers that Caroline and I have been vibing to during our morning walks. By looking into the natural world populated by things other than people, I am allowed to expunge the distraction fraught with the ugly bits that currently obsess humanity and see the flowers and birds who just go on surviving with nary a care for the drama that consumes us bipedal idiots.

The saguaros are in bloom, as are the barrel cacti and ocotillo plants, though that’s not all because we are currently in the throes of a pollen storm as our desert transitions from cooler to hotter season. The riot of color brings with it a riot of nasal flow, but that’s okay as the pollen will start to fade while it’s transformed into a baked dust that will sit atop the surrounding desert scape until the arrival of the monsoons sends it aloft to attack us for a second time. If we are lucky, the monsoons won’t only bring high winds but will carry rain with them to just as quickly wash it all away. Venturing out into my neighborhood to take in these images is, for me, the proverbial monsoon rinsing the dry, scratchy senses left raw by the pollen of stupid people.

Cactus bloom in Phoenix, Arizona

Should you think I enjoy this brusque assault on those around me, you’d be wrong. I want to have compassion for those who can’t help themselves, but we live in an age where we can all help ourselves be better informed and not so gullible to sensationalist manufactured outrage. Until the time when we collectively awake and take to cultivating the potential we all have, I will continue the lament that our society is by and large withering in the throes of great stupidity with nothing to show for it but the ugliness of intolerance and petty-minded simpleness that is unbecoming of a species where only the fringes are in full bloom.