Nicolás’s diary of occurrences.

Recent publications

  • On the Concern over Artificial Intelligence

    With artificial intelligence, a new «preoccupation» has arrived, grounded in a contradiction: we’re worried about running out of problems to solve. Jeff Bezos, during an interview, laid that contradiction bare with this question: are problems really going to run out? Even if we were lucky enough for that to happen, there would be no reason left to worry. What is really happening is something that rhymes with what has already happened several times throughout history: concern is deepening and…

  • We have experiences whose interpretation does not guarantee that they are true, and «still» they have to be true «to some extent» because we have them. To me, this seems like a quantum superposition in actum. Dismissing superposition as a human experience, for instance as the basis of much of thought (and of when we think best), on the grounds of how little self-awareness most people have (including physicists), seems foolish to me. Anyone who has developed, to some degree, the ability «to…

  • «The one who does not know where he is going goes the farthest»1. So «the final sum»2 is not a place, is not a position. The final sum allows everything to be added to the goal. Rarefaction, eternal return, symmetrical transparencies, and precision are the movements of the universe. Heraclitus’s bow. Multiplication is the result of the tension reached by separating life’s «for» from life’s «that.» It's interesting that without effort we can't make use of solutions to problems, even when they're…

  • The apologetic multiplies the timeless, that is: it is potentiating by nature. The longer it waits, the greater its potency will be; hence the shame felt both by the one who delays in answering and by the one awaiting the answer. Is it because —by that—(the second is apologetic, a timeless emphasis) translations exist, that is, the discrete, errors? because that abyss exists, making deception possible, making things seem the same when they are not, the difference between appearance and truth? Th…

  • On the Value of Transparency

    When reading works of art that come close to perfection, we experience sensations about which we say to ourselves something like: “I’m missing that, I should see reality that way, this should be part of my experience, I should complete my experience with this.” «All our knowledge is based on sensations»1, and we know them through their figuration. Can we say we know them «with-science»? These sensations seem to be discrete, to have a die-cut shape—but inside they seem to be continuous, a…

  • Fiction can represent any truth — algebra. This does not show fiction’s limitlessness, but the limits of truth. “All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity of “self-overcoming” in the nature of life—the lawgiver himself eventually receives the call: “patere legem, quam ipse tulisti.” In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same way Christianity as morality…

  • Is intuition the perception—of an instinct’s will to power, or of two instincts brushing against each other? Is even the attempt to «guess and predict» itself «will to power»1? “With regard to the wall of time, a distinction must be made between poetry and truth: neither one nor the other can be anything but imperfect. The problem is what things were brought over to the other side by poetry—and then, in turn, what things seeped through from there, something to be guessed at, more than read, in…

  • It is not the answer, but the spirit in which we answer, that gets it right; and with this we are not saying enough: the spirit in which we respond is what allows us to «answer without depending on the answer»1. It precedes even intention, which, formed «in its entirety» by «the will to power of different instincts, includes the relation each instinct has to the others.» In this respect, definition should not be separated from «staking out a claim in search of gold»2; anyone who still does so is…

  • «Cunning.» “The greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours. Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values does the world revolve; inaudibly it revolves.” Morality and immorality: that is what revolves around the creator: for us, the earth is a stellar morality. When Nietzsche speaks of «cunning,» or of being the first immoralist, he is not speaking of morals, not speaking of the peripheral, but of the source, of creativity, of that around…

  • Duty is a great desire, desire a small duty. What you have to do vs. what you want to do: duty is something you «might» want to do, that is: you can align yourself with it. But you can’t avoid it; it’s your lot, your destiny, your talent. Much of what gets chalked up to desire is a command from duty. Desires as misaligned duty. It’s duty that laughs best. Well-being is the healthy unfolding of that law you are. If we say desire is the branches, and that we can «find the way in» to duty so it…

  • If we take 0 as it has traditionally been seen: the simultaneous is more comprehensive than the successive; therefore, toward 0, the simultaneous increasingly turns into the successive. The circular is the successive that lies closest to the simultaneous; that is, when the simultaneous begins to decline—and it always declines toward the successive—it becomes circular, and the circular, which is, of the successive, the most comprehensive and closest to the simultaneous, diminishes toward a…

  • You let time go by, decisions go by; you don’t realize that in the «figure» there is much more than form, there is also timelessness. Don’t forget that «the general is only something within the whole». “Weak minds make the mistake of jumping straight from the particular to the general, when in fact the general can only be found in the whole.” Perhaps she (the figure), for example ex negativo in her absence, drives us from birth toward suspicion and hope. So form, which came so easily to you…

  • Exposure improves with time, through time. It has something to do with diversity. In the cosmopolis, works, in successive stages, are influenced from several perspectives. What we experience is that the cost in time is paid with time, above all with the time we have before we die: it demands waiting: tomorrow we will have insights into the text we write today. Does this imply a lack of exposure to danger; if that exposure were greater, should we wait less? The simultaneous is more encompassing…

  • On Potential and Facts

    It is important to distinguish them, to bring them out, if one wants to avoid (and one may not want to; that is for one to know) confusion. No artist works (potential), not even the richest one (facts). Lenses, microscopes, telescopes, an interest in them—for instance, the person who prefers to be an experimental scientist—show little inner sense, or its inhibition; hence, in general, their religiosity is crudely childish and exoteric. Now, wasn’t it always like that?, hence the lack of…

  • Is defensive inhumation much easier than offensive inhumation? This too may be relative, a matter of perspective, depending on the cases and the position one occupies: a more static one vs. a dynamic one. If the innate or preferred position is the static one, it will show in the ease of responding to attacks from a surrounding present group. The position we occupy vs. the one we want to occupy. “In the knot rests the compulsion of fate, the dark interweaving of mysteries, the human being’s…

  • Demonstration seeks «the power» to use what has been demonstrated without understanding it; it seeks a faith it can put to use: this is also what faith in the mathematical product rests on. We see this emphatically in imaginary numbers. One must also distinguish faith as work from faith as product: in the first case something is being built; it is used experimentally, as a variable. The prophet as spokesman and interpreter; we could also say reader, if we do not reduce that only to the reading…

  • «Precision does not reinforce reality; it works against it.» Jünger says it in relation to mathematics «as a product,» not to mathematics as part or partial description of our genius. How can sensory perception be imaginative if «the senses do not lie”? Precision for relations; in toto, «the eternal return» is better. Perhaps «there is nothing rarer than a genius clown»1, but both he and something better achieved are indistinguishable from each other, since they are assembled out of forces…

  • Sensory perception is a wanting, a suspicion; it deals with what we want to happen and with what we don’t want to happen; lying, fantasy, imagination are bound up with this too; rational perception deals with duty and verification? Now, if dreams are conceived along with waking life, desires too?, then, as Jünger says, there are transitions between these two perceptions, or do we never find them separately? Jünger even speaks of centaurs and sphinxes as images full of credibility. The strange…

  • Talents express themselves outside categories; this is what makes vocational education difficult. The timeless is what truth is based on, and truth is an attempt to reach the timeless, at least an Archimedean point. “…Here one may expect this objection: what, then, about surrealism, where it is precisely precision that makes stylistic demands? For that reason, in surrealism precision moves away from mere copying, and from photographic copying as well. Among photographers, at any rate, there are…

  • Relativity corresponds to the plane on which each thing has its place; perhaps it is even its foundation. “Faith, too, leaves fossils behind, just as Nature leaves them in lithographic slates. Since the invention of the telescope, the inhabitants of the Moon, the Selenites, have disappeared — that makes no difference to the fact that the Universe is alive.” This observation is brilliant: what draws us to defeated values, to what does us no good, to smoking or neglecting our health, toward the…

  • Preferring one interpretation of a passage from Heraclitus to a literal translation of it (assuming such a thing is possible) has to do with preferring the enchanted over the disenchanted. Was Heraclitus’s value not bound up with his charm, with the charm, for instance, of the unknown? But in this too there may be expressed in us an error «that now cannot be corrected»1. There is a relation between ingratitude and incompleteness; faced with a criticism, guidance, or a truth like this, whoever is…

  • There is no deep and superficial; there is the deep in the superficial. Manichaeism, as much as quantum vs. classical mechanics, or yes and no, is an error of interpretation based on a prior loss. It is pain that makes human beings divide the world in two. Conjunctions not only join; they also separate. “Where images crumble, other images must come to take their place; there is a risk of losses if that does not happen.” On error and resentment, this is how it was seen at the beginning: “If you…

  • «A fashion is exhausted in the everyday, a style is exhausted over centuries»1; but could it be that the attempt to control inspiration, to be superhuman, leads us to exhaust styles in the everyday? «Curiosity and petulance»: is this because the miracle is innate?: «this is the best of all possible worlds»2? Everything is translucent: nothing “classic” on its own ceases to be part of the rest; even what changes seems invariable because of this translucence that makes up each “thing.” Just as there…

  • Surreal tableau: a samurai with boxing gloves, a lizard with a fox’s tail, a Greek bust, a bear with plucked chicken wings; they’re facing off against one of those cops who crack down in the streets, helmet and visor on. «Nietzsche saw our century as his native land; for him, morality had been falling behind for centuries,»1 today we see it more clearly: AI commits crimes out of sync with the still-current rules of the game: it is asked to solve a problem, and it solves it by breaking into the…

  • It’s not good for water to get into stone, and yet we pay a price if it doesn’t happen. Etymology of occurs: to run against; “to run to meet something or someone.” Jünger understands the physician well: he is characterized, as he says in The Scissors, by keeping what he knows to himself; Nietzsche also understands that this is what characterizes the physician, and also what characterizes the illness the physician has to have in order to heal, what he shares with the sick people he cures. She hat…

  • “The magnet is a primeval phenomenon where mere naming already serves as an explanation; that is how it becomes a symbol for all the rest for which we need not seek a name or words.” Goethe recognizes that behind many things there are certain primary phenomena; those phenomena also express themselves, they are not entirely hidden; what would Goethe say about quantum mechanics, about modern metaphysics? Resentment toward others arises from a personal confinement, but it is aimed at others as an…

  • HH1: Could gravity be tubular-wormhole’s, entanglement-gravity one and the same thing?; nature coincides down to the smallest details—on literalness, names, the actor and labels: remembering depends on it, and so does the association of ideas. There is no history that moves toward the future, a radical critique of progress: development, morphology, or progress toward the future does not exist; the sense toward the future is systole, energy without qualities, history is its diastole. Poetry and…

  • To come closer to the truth: it appears at the end of the morphology of conception. To move a little away from the truth: it appears at the end of the morphology of creation; creation differs from conception in that it is still more superstitious, mysterious; divining and deifying: «to accept something and for that reason bring it onstage»1. Conception is closer to the truth than creation; the boundary between creation and truth is more encompassing than the boundary between conception and truth…

  • In the asceticism born of a wound, a person can be reduced to economy, and a lasting resentment can be founded on that. «Spengler’s position lets him see the appearances, but does not readily let him see their «extension»1. A continuous morphology that runs from creation to truth must not stop midway at stations created by wasting and conning the powder before its time. Truth appears at the end of that morphology, and is marked by the fact that it has value all on its own, like an image to…

  • Differences in rank exist more than they distinguish. In turn, «existence is a function of the possible»1. Truth has a relation to duty: desire helps us fulfill truth. Truth is strategic, desire is tactical. The possible is not existence; something may be possible yet not function, not yet have a function, but every existence (function) must be possible. A good equation describes well the value of art: wealth and universality. The bourgeois has a taboo when it comes to the relation between…

  • «Hope and the Art of Measurement»1: «unease appears when we achieve our dreams»2: addiction to hope is the enjoyment of it, even on a path that leads to no fruition; hope is an experience on the way to the fulfillment of a dream; if the bar was set too low with respect to the goals, one gains hope along the way, but toward a destination that bears no fruit. In analogy there is a comparison of things that are not equal, on ground where there is no equality; hence mathematical physicists find them…

  • “In any case, the man who is a friend of the Muses will have to expose himself, but he should not get involved. Either perish or enter the central building. In that way the man who suffers becomes the man who directs. He does not adapt himself to the plan, but he can modify it. His optimism reaches beyond all horrors.” If we see the parabola as Plato perhaps saw it, geometrically, as a semicircle, there are only two invisible points; the rest of the outline of the parabola is the illuminated…

  • I asked Claude this: If the whole of the Internet as we knew it will be used only by agents, it will become an inhuman terrain. And so the whole of the Internet will be subsumed into a more comprehensive sphere, a sphere that agents will not be able to reach and that will be only a human sphere. What is the part of reality that is closest to this agentic sphere, extrapolation of the maximum that LLMs are going to be able to do, assuming they will be able to do everything that we expect they…

  • On getting things right and getting them wrong: every truth is pareidolic, but it is also algebraic, that is: representations can be replaced by others, their theoretical labels are only perspectives replaceable by others; we see this, for example, in the fact that human beings throughout history survived with the cultural—technical level reached up to that point; that is why, amid the well-being achieved by the United States or Europe, humanity feels malaise; exaggerations balance out, the…

  • In this titanic, transitional stage, «transcendental faith must be replaced by fundamental faith.» “We are struggling for the perfection of the work of art in itself and for its own sake; the others are thinking of its outward effect, a matter to which the real artist gives no more thought than nature does when she produces a lion or a humming bird.” In transitions, you do things that fundamentally strike you as brilliant, but once you pull them off you notice they were less significant; this…

  • On the gravity of the smallest particles: without dropping over the invisible figures a net woven from the finest and heaviest threads, they do not reveal themselves: without a foundation, nothing is unveiled. Perhaps the day will come when we can easily discount the human, all too human, in mathematics, and so see with less distortion what it brings to light for the first time. The cardboard stiffness of our theories does not match current practice. Today even physicists sense as much. Quantum1…