Horror and Hopelessness

I checked an English dictionary lately, to learn more about the word ``hope'', and was interested by
the absence of a positive definition.  The verb ``to hope'' is thus largely synonymous with the verb
``to expect''.  I've largely removed the word from my vocabulary, because of its colloquial meaning,
to expect good, and will likely keep it that way in spite of what I've learned.  To hope for good is
to have unreasonable expectations of reality, and for that reason I believe hopelessness to be good.

I've yet to read in the original Latin, for a second time, the story of Pandora and her box, or jar,
holding evils.  The presence of hope therein seemed clear enough to me, and why I regard it as evil.

I long ago held stoicism to my life, at least as much as some Westerners nowadays tend to do so, and
years later realized how hard it can be, when one must use it to look at the truly evil things which
have happened to oneself, and which one has no hope of ever changing; it hurt, in spite of its good.

I long ago realized the ``point of life'' isn't happiness; it seems foolish for the point of life to
be something which eludes so many so well; the ``point of life'' must be something like creation, in
particular creation which will outlast its creator.  Most people will only ever achieve this through
having children, and many can't do even that correctly.  I'd like to see the Artificial Intelligence
research vindicate the Chinese room argument, to see a machine with nothing like a human mind, which
can be inspected and understood by a man nonetheless and which excels past man in his creative work.

If man can no longer write poetry or stories better than a machine, if that amount of unintelligence
needed to do so can be distilled into something no one can dispute reduces the acts to manipulations
of symbols, I expect most wouldn't despair, and the few who would despair could be expected to carry
on in their work.  Already, neural network nonsense has beaten many in these and other respects, but
it tricks people into seeing an intelligence in the machine which simply isn't there.  The true blow
will be when the culmination of such work is simplified and simplified to remove any spirit therein.

I think, perhaps, that true point of life would have to be physical, things like pleasure, conquest,
and violence.  Man likely has no way to elevate his mind beyond physical things, and will be so very
disappointed at learning this.  So many cults nowadays reinvent the metaphysical and supernatural in
the image of computers, and it's always so funny.  Latin herself will free me from such modern evil.

To stay alive is stronger to me than any moral code, although I'd rather be able to think otherwise.
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