Were not were. Alexander Kolosov

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