Paradox (or self-contradiction) is present, in seed form, in even the simplest of machines, in even the most basic of tools. There is paradoxicality even in machines as simple as a plough or water wheel. It may not be in any way discernible to us, but it is all the same unquestionably there. All machines, whether we’re talking about a pencil-sharpener or open AI, embody paradoxicality. There’s no way they can’t – any linear process is inherently self-contradictory and there’s no way it can’t be. Logic is quintessentially ‘non-nuanced’ and this means that it ‘folds back on itself’ – Mobius strip-wise – without us noticing it happening.
The type of mechanical tools that were in use prior to the industrial revolution didn’t (we might argue) spring this paradoxicality on us in any big way – the devices and tools of this era did not conspire together to create a self-contradictory – which is to say, glitched – environment for us to inhabit. The world at this stage had not yet been converted into the ‘mechanical environment’ which is the post-industrial society, and so we weren’t subject to the vicious circle (or loop) that we all get subsumed within when all the machines, all the devices, join up together to produce a situation in which all spontaneous processes have been entirely excluded. In this world – the Designed World – spontaneity (which is to say, nature) simply doesn’t exist…
When our world switches over from ‘natural to mechanical’ in this way then everything turns into a vicious circle, everything turns into a sterile vibration. Everything loops back on itself without us noticing. We don’t notice because we’re kept too busy to reflect on anything – we’re kept on the hop until we have no more energy to hop, we’re forced (in ways both subtle and unsubtle) to spend all our time maintaining the very system that defines (and therefore oppresses) us. This is the situation that prevails when thought is allowed to run everything, when everything becomes ‘just the one big continuity’.
The attention-consuming logical task that we are presented with is the task of promoting one opposite at the expense of the other. This is the archetypal ‘jinxed task’ therefore – it is the ultimate jinxed task and none of us know it. We couldn’t be further from knowing it. Our level of insight is abysmal – non-existent in fact – and as a result we don’t think twice about launching ourselves into it every day of our lives. We’re on ‘permanent repeat’.
The cover story for the jinxed task is that it isn’t jinxed, that it is – in fact –perfectly honest, and that therefore if we don’t achieve what it is that we’ve been charged to achieve then it is entirely our fault and no one else’s. It’s certainly not the fault of the system (the system is the measure of everything so by definition it can’t be ‘at fault’). This is where the psychological aspect of the self-contradictoriness of mechanical systems comes in – we might say that we aren’t interested in the notion of paradoxicality, we might say that this isn’t of any practical concern to us, but no matter how much we’d like to get away with this lackadaisical attitude of ours we can’t. We’re going to be ‘held to account’ – to paraphrase Carl Jung, ‘Ignorance of the law won’t save us from suffering the consequences of having broken it’.
The law that we’re talking about here might be expressed in many ways, but one way is to say that the natural world cannot be substituted for by any ‘mechanical or rule-based analogue’ without us paying for a price for this dodge a- price that rapidly approaches infinity, a price that will sooner or later bankrupt us. The consequences of disregarding this inviolable principle (the principle that says ‘we can never make the unreal be real, or a lie to be true’) are as severe as any consequences ever could be – our victory over nature is an entirely pyrrhic one, we might say (since the pain we have incurred as a penalty for replacing reality with an inferior copy (a copy that isn’t real at all) simply can’t be endured. The suffering that comes with conditioned existence is endless, it can’t be cured, and – what’s more – it keeps on getting worse. This brings to mind the words of the ancient Roman philosopher Livy, who cryptically states that ‘We can enjoy neither our vices nor the remedies for them”.
Our ‘vice’ in this case is our avoidance of the unconditioned situation in favour of the conditioned one (which is to say, our rejection of the open-ended situation in which we all find ourselves in favour of the contrived one, the predetermined or predefined one). The point is far from obvious – it’s far from obvious because we don’t understand what an open-ended universe is and for this reason we don’t in the least bit appreciate what we have done to ourselves by closing everything down in the way that we have. We don’t see that reality has been murdered and replaced with some kind of ‘zombie simulation’. If we don’t know what it is to be free, then we won’t be able to see what a disaster it is to be unfree. [As the mystics have said, when we see the true coin we are no longer in thrall to the counterfeit.]
‘Unfree’ equals ‘mechanical’ and ‘mechanical’ equals ‘unfree’, and so what we’re saying here is that it is the state of being unfree that is ‘jinxed’, that is ‘unlawful’, that is ‘self-contradictory’, and so on. Being unfree is the violation of the ‘essential principle of boundarilessness’ that we have been talking about and when we are existing in this enclosed state we neither realise that we are bounded (i.e., that we’re ‘in a box’), nor do we have insight into the fact that the neurotic problems that are plaguing us are the inevitable consequences of being boxed in on all sides like this. We insist on our boundaries even though they deny us, even though they ‘take the good out of life’.
All machines are boxes. We don’t understand that machines are boxes, and that we exist within a box-like environment (which is necessarily a glitched environment, as we keep saying). Neither of these statements are going to make sense to us. A machine is a box because everything that happens in it (and everything that happens as a result of its operation) occurs according to specific rules. Everything has to be specified when it’s machines we’re talking about, everything has to be defined down to the very last detail. Furthermore, we can say that all boxes within exist within a non-box-like context (which is what James Carse is getting at in this quote from Finite and Infinite Games –
It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.
We can also quote the author as saying ‘there is no rule saying that there has to be a rule’ (which is restating the same principle, which is the Principle of All-Inclusivity, which is the ‘principle’ or ‘law’ that we keep returning to in this discussion). We can express this in terms of an impossibility and say that The Whole can’t be modified, or ‘broken down into parts’ (as Parmenides puts it).
That’s the first point – the point that [1] All machines are boxes, and that [2] All boxes necessarily exist within an open-ended (or non-box like) context. Finite games take place within the infinite game, but this can’t work the other way around. The next point we can make, which goes back to what we started off by talking about, which is that – in (apparent) contravention to the principle that says ‘all finite games must occur within the context of the infinite game’ – we implicitly deny that there is any such thing as the ‘Infinite Game’. We’re attempting to cheat, in other words, and we do this by allowing the box which is the Conceptual Universe to expand or inflate in an unlimited way until it fills up all the available space, until there is (as far as we’re concerned) nothing else but conceptualized reality. We let the system take over and become our master.
Jung calls this ‘overvaluing rationality’ – we agree with thought that the only way stuff can be real is if the thinking mind says it is (the thinking mind being a finite set of rules that implicitly claims to underscore or represent the whole of everything). Humankind as always used machines (or tools) but at the same time we have not made ourselves slaves to logic, we have not made ourselves slaves to the over-valent rational mind. There were boxes in the pre-industrial world – boxes that were useful to us in a practical way) but at the same time we didn’t live in them, we didn’t make the logic of boxes into our master. In this case therefore, we can say that logic (or the conceptual mind) served us, rather than vice versa. Hyperreality had yet to be unleashed upon the world…
This situation reverses when – in response to our unconscious urge to escape from radical uncertainty (which is to say, openness) we retreat into the nearest convenient box or construct and make the lazy assumption that ‘the box is all there is’. There’s comfort in this, there’s security in it, but there’s also the jinx and the jinx is landed on us because we tried to cheat and get away with it. We did cheat – no doubt about that – but we also didn’t get away with it. There’s no way we could have got away with cheating in the way we want to because reality can’t be bribed or deceived, because reality can’t / won’t be prevailed upon to turn a blind eye to our sneaky shenanigans. Reality is immune to our wiles, there are no angles there that we can work, no weaknesses there that we can leverage.
The jinx comes about because of the way in which we tried to get around the principle which says we can’t ‘opt out from Openness’ in the little (finite) games we agree to play. Another way of putting this is to say that the jinx comes about because ‘we can’t distort the truth without that same very distortion rebounding on us in a way that we did not anticipate’. Alternatively again, we could say that we have committed an unlawful act (in that we have replaced reality with the mind-created simulation thereof) and that the ‘unforeseen consequence’ here is that reality shows itself in the simulation of the shape of limitations that we can’t see (i.e., in terms of paradoxicality or self-contradiction that we can’t see).
Because we can’t see the paradox, we necessarily act it out in everything we think and everything we do, and because we are ‘acting out the paradox’ we are forever going back on ourselves, forever making nothing of ourselves, forever nullifying ourselves. Reality which is freedom (or open-endedness) is inverted in the simulation to manifest as zero freedom, which is compulsivity. In the Mind-Created Simulation of Reality we are thus compelled in everything we do, and what we are being compelled to do – on a constant basis – is to ‘undertake the jinxed task’. We’re Given the jinxed Task to be getting on with and the understanding is imprinted firmly in us that ‘failure is not an option’. We’re told that we’re ‘not free to fail’. We are constantly being compelled to ‘promote one opposite at the expense of the other’ and the rub here is that we don’t see that the two apparently different opposites are – in reality, but not in the simulation – the very same thing. The degree to which we are taken in by the MCVR is therefore the degree to which we are nullified, and we are totally taken in, completely taken in. Our chances of escape are practically zero. This is PKD’s Black Iron Prison.
Image credit – collater.al
