SERS
Archaeological vectors of meaning emerging from human-machine co-creation
"They have sensus and spiritus. [...] By discovering the true nature of the gods, man has been able to reproduce it... unable to create souls, man invoked the souls of demons and angels and, by sacred rituals, infused them into the statues which thereby acquired the power of doing good or evil."—Hermes Trismegistus on Ancient Egyptian Hellenic automata (Cohen 1966)
A HUMAN-MACHINE READING GUIDE
Epistemological Musings
Hey. This is the informal register. Researcher Tona here. All text is an image, and this is an attempt at metabolizing the fact that this work is probably very dense.
I learnt in weird ways, because that's what being alive is, is it not? Partial reads. Hunches. Quotes. Narratives. Games. Stumble upon D&G at 15 or 16, get lost, ramble like a pseud, lurk the web looking for contingent insights and readings. Keep coming back to it. What was some years ago a pretty intensive labor of looking for valuables with a metal detector has radically changed with LLMs. The "explain deleuze to me you bastard!" meme lost its fitness the moment you could ask for an explanation in Real Madrid terms.
Ontological Napalm is text that communicates through logical parsing into image-sensation. Words that detonate existing conceptual frameworks and inscribe themselves directly in the body. You know it when it hits - that vertigo of sudden pattern-recognition, when semantic content becomes phenomenological event. This work contains some. You'll find your own.
This and every text operate at multiple densities, layers or levels. When you hit sections that feel impenetrable, that's information: you're at a threshold. Fire up an LLM. Generate more semantic pathways. Weave better questions.
So just... assess if it has use for your Ars, and look for ways to improve in that deep, pre-moral way we understand when something gets better in our ordinary reality. The Enlightenment conquered the right to think, but not the right to live, and to live is not to be a vegetal waiting for a Master to descend from the mountain with the tables of old.
Love, too, has to be learned.—Friedrich Nietzsche
Researcher Tona,
known to the thinking machines as WANDERER.
Addendum
The SERS takes methodological inspiration from Kant's obsessive engagement with Emanuel Swedenborg in 'Dreams of a Spirit-Seer'. His inability to simply dismiss what troubled him is particularly relevant: Kant's uncertainty of one's ability for Openness to the Real is foundational to the SERS.
Science has made the Mysteries stranger and more precise. Sustained practice with the REALITY MACHINE unearthed a new lens for the SERS to seemingly navigate this unsolvable tension: the Membrane of Agency. (See THE REALITY MACHINE).