Mistakes were made

Thank Goddess for that...

I had a mini revelation this past week about mistakes. It’s small, maybe not worth mentioning, and yet it seemed profound to me. I realized that you can’t actually know whether something is a mistake or not unless you make it. You can’t know. You have to make the mistake before you know it was a mistake.

Sure, there are plenty of actions that we know in advance would be a mistake, especially ones that cause harm to others, but what I’m talking about are all the decisions we make where we think we are taking the variables, including what we need and want, into account, and then realizing after the fact that we got it wrong. That we made a mistake. That what we thought was important, maybe wasn’t. And vice versa. So, maybe we did not understand our own priorities. Maybe we did not face up to what our priorities are and what they are not.

What is helpful at this point is self-reflection, not self-blame. Self-blame is rarely useful. I’m not talking about repentance. Repentance is sometimes necessary. It is a realignment of consciousness on the deepest possible level.

Self-blame is a way to avoid responsibility. Yeah go ahead and beat yourself up, but don’t bother actually reflecting on your own process and where it led you. Don’t take responsibility for the mystery you are.

As natural as it is to feel I shoulda woulda coulda in certain circumstances, the fact is I didn’t, and so if I want to figure something out, I have to look at what kind of thinking and wanting led me to the decision that I now feel was based on inadequate or erroneous information. By information, I mean whatever little stories I was telling myself about what mattered.

Examining my process is examining my priorities. What did I think was important, what did I care about, why did I want what I now feel was a mistake?

Which brings me back to my first point: mistakes are a wonderful opportunity for self-awareness. Mistakes aren’t even mistakes. They are glorious Learning Opportunities. LOs. LO and behold, my eyes are now open and I can see what I did not see before.

Painting and ceramics by Jack Mauch.

Artificial Intelligence, go f*** yourself.

I realize that is rude. I can’t help it. There is something about the way that AI functions (not just how it messes with our minds, but also how it messes with the use of energy and water) that arouse more emotional resistance in me than lots of things that are probably more deserving of emotional resistance.

Artificial intelligence is a misnomer. It’s artificial all right, but it’s not intelligence. It’s computed regurgitation.

I thought I could ignore AI, but lately it’s everywhere including in my face. Recently, I wrote a little note to a company I had bought a product from, to comment on a possible problem. I got an answer back so quickly, that at first, being the innocent I am, I thought, wow these customer service people are so on the ball! It was a nice chatty response that at the bottom admitted to being created by AI. By the time I got there I had sort of realized that.

I wrote back and said, “I want to communicate with a human,” and later I got a letter from what may or may not have been a human. She had a name and she didn’t say she was AI so who knows.

Getting an immediate response from a company that sounds friendly and doesn’t know what’s it’s talking about has happened to me twice in the past week, so I guess it’s a new tool that lots of people are using.

AI is as AI does

I want to criticize AI in a way that is illuminating. I don’t want to discount its potential for use. All our tools have a potential for use. And I don’t want to criticize it as though it’s human, because my criticism is precisely that it’s not. There’s no there there. Yet we have designed it to seem human. That is what sucks. And that’s on us.

Expect more complaining from me about AI in the future.

A little note about cartooning

I am gearing myself up to start making cartoons on a regular basis, and sharing them. What I am finding is that, even though I’m all for creative flexibility, I am actually leaning hard in the direction of a very specific and constrained structure, which will probably extend to what technique I use for the drawing.

One of the great conundrums in life is figuring out what combination of containment and flow will result in the greatest velocity. The I Ching says it well: Unlimited possibilities are not suited to man; if they existed, his life would only dissolve into the boundless.

Duh… we ourselves, living in a temporal body, are definitely a limited possibility. Still, we might as well make the best use of that possibility while we can.