Saucer
One girl decided to give her sister a cup for her birthday. And I didnt think to buy a saucer for her. She showed her gift to her mother, and she said to her: No one gives a cup without a saucer. Your sister wont understand. Its nothing, the girl replies, Ill put 1000 rubles in her cup. Instead of a saucer. When the girl gave the gift to her sister, she at first seemed indignant, but looking into it, she immediately calmed down and said: Okay, the cup is also okay. Thanks for that too. In the evening, the mother asks the girl: Well, did your sister like the gift?
Yeah, she replies, but she especially liked the saucer for the cup.
Gods Punishment
Bryansk has been quarantined. And the traffic police had a financial crisis. The money is over. Due to the fact that motorists have disappeared on the roads: so contemptuously the state dubbed those eccentrics who are ready to take risks in order to travel by private vehicle. Nobody has been on the roads for a week now. Except city buses. There is no one to take bribes from. And this is very embarrassing. For the State. There is a striped wand, there is a form, there is a brick sign, but its not clear what to do with it. The value of attributes of power has been reset to zero. And you want to live like before.
In order to earn at least something, the traffic police patrol stopped at the entrance to the grocery store and tried to fine everyone who wanted to enter it. For breaking lockdown. As they say, if there is no reason, then you need to create it. Only from the very beginning the idea did not work out. The patrol collided with grandmas. And grandmas are still that force capable of resisting anything. The very first old woman pretended that she was deaf and blind and did not see the police. The second patrol swore. The third beat them with a stick, calling them fucking pioneers. The fourth one was the trickiest. She handed the police 200 rubles and demanded: Well, since you are in power, dont let me go to the store, take my money and buy bread, milk, sausages, a kilogram of pasta and sweets. I love sweets and tea.
The police were taken aback and answered: Yes, this money is not enough for what you want to buy.
And the old woman, insidious, scoffs: And you add yours. You are the government, you must take care of the people. So pay for the difference between what the government promised us and what we are actually given.
The police did not answer the old woman. They got into the car and left, cursing to themselves this damn people, who are not a people at all, but only Gods punishment.
Ladybug
As a child, it was perhaps the only creature that I was told not to offend. So to speak, the principle of do no harm in action. A small red beetle with black dots on its back. He had to be carefully put on his finger and wait for him to fly away, repeating: Ladybug, fly to the sky, bring your children bread. The first sincere request, almost a prayer. I believed that in the clouds near the ladybug there really was a house where her family lives. This belief in a miracle remained for the rest of your life, despite the fact that everything around you turned out to be completely different from what you imagined it as a child. Only now, instead of the beetle that you released into the sky directly to God, you need to go to church together with everyone, light a candle and sing: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and bestowing life in the tombs, believing that this will help and something in our lives will change. For the better. And maybe the truth will change. And may God keep us from ourselves and our rash desires.
No more friends
Two people meet and one says to the other:
Tell me, as each other, but honestly, what do you think about my work?
To be honest, Im not happy with him.
Youre not joking, but in all seriousness you think so?
Well, yes, you yourself asked to tell the truth.
I didnt think you were such a bastard. I didnt expect this from you.
So tell the truth after that.
They are no longer friends. But he could lie, a fool, to his friend and would live as before not noticing each other.
Bigger than God
He is ill. Or, to be more precise, it had a parasite in it. Something deeply alien, foreign to him, nestled inside his body.
It entered him in a dream. How it happened, it was no longer important for him, but what was important was only WHAT was now mature and growing in him. Something that lives off his body, his thoughts, his life force.
He was often tormented by mood swings, when an unbearable blues was suddenly replaced by hysterical fun and fits of unbridled rage, which he could not, and did not want to control. What lived in him against his will was torn out, and he realized with horror that he was ready to die, if only to free himself from the presence of a stranger in himself.
And finally it happened. He gave birth. He gave birth to something that he had never seen in his life. One fine day, or rather, one terrible long dark night, his offspring crawled out of it. One only, but what!
Baby, the little one that he had nurtured under his heart for the last nine months: fed with his own blood; grew out of my mind. A monster, more beautiful than Frankensteins homunculus, born of Mary Shelleys sick fantasy. A bizarre mixture of insect and plant.
But children are not chosen: those who then bury their parents. A child can only be proud of. And hes proud. Now. Because father. By my son. A son worthy of his father. Son equal to God himself. Bigger than God.
The fight for longevity
Petrov was told to take care of his health. If he wants to live long. And keep a diary. Self-monitoring of blood pressure. Every evening at the same time he had to measure it, and write down the testimony. Here he sits, so serious, focused on his longevity, he measured the pressure and wants to write it down. But the pen does not write. He shakes her. Does not write. He knocks it on the table. Does not write. What he just does not do with a pen. Does not write. As if to harm him. So, the poor man, he got nervous that his apoplexy was enough. Here they are, the fruits of the struggle for longevity.
Future
What will the world be like tomorrow? I can definitely answer the same as yesterday. And in a week? The same as today. And in a year? With a high probability, the world will remain the same as it is now. The only difference is that you may change something in your environment: buy a new phone; update your wardrobe; change jobs or move to live in another country. But all this will not fundamentally change your life. And the world you live in. The future will not come. The future we all dream of. And we dream of a future that will be fundamentally different from the present in which we live. A future where everything is possible: immortality; panacea for all diseases; general prosperity and the absence of poverty; gaining omnipotence.
Being and Consciousness
People learn about changes in their lives in different ways. For example, in the morning, going into the bathroom, they do not find their reflection in the mirror. This is exactly what happened to a professor of philosophy, a certain Fintiflyushkin. Oddly enough, but the absence of his reflection, he was not at all surprised.
Some kind of Kursk anomaly the only thing that came to his mind while he continued to brush his teeth but they live without a reflection. For example, vampires, although this is probably an unfortunate example from life.
On the way to work, he encountered the blatant indifference of those around him to his outstanding personality: everyone, as if on purpose, did not notice him. Even the conductors did not require him to show his ticket when he got on the bus. Anyone else would have panicked long ago, but not our Fintiflushkin, a great lover of verbal aporias and a militant atheist. Finally, finding himself in his auditorium, where he was scheduled to have a morning lecture, he sat in complete solitude for two classes in a row, but not a single student appeared. Leaving the audience with a pretty bad mood, he went down to the university lobby and already here, to his amazement, found an obituary that spoke of his death.
However, he could not believe his eyes, this is someones stupid joke. I have always denied Descartes with his banal I think, therefore I am, but here there is some kind of cognitive dissonance. If I do not exist, then how do I think?
And then he disappeared. Without a trace. As they say, being determines consciousness. At least for an atheist.
1.5 times
While sorting through my fathers papers, I came across a letter with the following text: To Comrade Kolosov B.I. Deputy ch. editor of Atomizdat dated March 26, 1970, the manuscripts of the collection Theoretical and experimental problems of non-standard neutron transfer were returned for final editing and reduction of their volume by 1.5 times ». The manuscript itself was attached to the letter, consisting of continuous mathematical calculations with rare linking sentences, such as: We will seek the solution of the equation by the method of successive approximations. To this end, we write it in a finite-difference form. I never thought that editors ruthlessly cut not only literary texts, but also mathematical proofs. I wonder what the proof of the Pythagorean theorem would look like if it were reduced by 1.5 times? As one of my acquaintances says, its as if Little Red Riding Hood would immediately ask the wolf when they meet: Well, how are we going to eat grandma? In finite difference form? Or will I have to ask, why do you have such big teeth?
In the underground
Rush hour on the subway. The girl knocks on the back of the person in front, as if on a locked iron door, and, leaning against it, asks in a whisper: Come out?
The back snarls languidly from somewhere above, like rolling thunder somewhere in the distance: No-t-t-t-t-t-t-t, and reluctantly makes way for it to exit the crowded car.
In anticipation of winter
The wind is blowing outside the window. Long and mournful. Its like hes asking for a house. After all, there, on the street, it is cold and damp, but here it is dry and warm. He beats on the windows, begging him to let him in and rages when he is not noticed. Or maybe its the wind in my head, blowing all my thoughts out of me. Its cold and damp inside me, drafts chill my soul and my heart is always cold in anticipation of winter.
I guess, yes
The two had a heart to heart talk and one confessed to the other:
All my life I dreamed of acting in a porn film, in the title role.
And how did it work?
I guess, yes. My whole life is one continuous pornography.
In a desert
Mind is the ability to think. And, in fact, the ability to control your mind.
Apparently, initially the word mind meant to strike with the mind (time blow, mind science, skill) or, to paraphrase, the ability to attack and defend. Just a verbal designation of a tool with which a person was able to improve his ability to survive in this world. Like a knife or fire, thanks to which people have achieved dominance in the wild and created a new, artificial habitat.
Reason changed the original nature of man, forcing him to live in the second signal system, in the space of words and ideas. This freed man from the power of the body, from innate instincts, but not completely.
On the one hand, in the new reality for a person, only artificial, made things now have absolute value: something that is subject to exchange, and on the other hand, a person can enjoy only through the body, and it is the acquisition of pleasure that is the main meaning of individual human existence.
Through the measure of pleasure, the value of each life lived is determined. In societies where there is no opportunity to live for ones own pleasure, the value of life for people drops to zero: in such societies, life is considered only as a burden or as a duty, but not as the highest good; from which it is necessary to get rid of without any regret.
Thanks to the mind, a person has found leisure, i.e. free time, and what is free time if not idleness the source of all knowledge according to Aristotle, with the help of which people created knowledge and invented a culture, thanks to which they learned to multiply, preserve and transfer this knowledge to themselves through time and space. And many knowledge, as you know, only many sorrows.
Having gained knowledge about himself, man realized his natural imperfection. And moreover, thanks to him, he suddenly discovered that the mind, which he was so proud of throughout his history, is just a pure accident, a side effect of evolution, which nature initially did not even think about when it created man as a species: the mind is not embedded in the human biological program.
The faint spark of reason in each of us flares up into a living flame of an inquisitive mind only when we communicate with each other, exchanging ideas through language. Therefore, language and people are always the same: language binds us all together and knits itself from words. It is easy to extinguish the spark of reason in a person, but it is simply impossible to ignite it again: there are plenty of examples, from Mowgli children to old people who have lost their minds. At the same time, using the example of idiots, a person is clearly convinced that in order to feel happy, reason is absolutely not needed. Moreover, it is the mind that dooms a person to unbearable suffering with the mere thought of death. After all, of all living beings, only man is aware of his mortality, knows about it and cannot come to terms with it.
The mind in man refuses to accept the fact that he is finite. Hence the belief of people in the afterlife: an attempt by the mind to explain the purpose of its existence as a merger after death with an out-of-body, eternal and indestructible super-mind, of which the mind considers itself a part.
One can, of course, endlessly wonder and think about the starry sky above us and about the moral principles within us, but this does not negate the obvious and extremely annoying fact that the mind is just an accident. Just a cry in the wilderness that no one will ever hear.
Tower of Babel
Future. Once upon a time, this word inspired everyone. Now its scary. Everyone used to hope for the best, now everyone expects the worst. What is it a tribute to time or general psychosis? It is amazing, but now humanity knows why it arose and what is the ontological role of man in the evolutionary process that once began on our planet.
Having arisen as a by-product of the vital activity of our body, the second signaling system, our speech, gave rise to the mind, and the mind elevated man to the top of the food chain, making him the king of nature. Thanks to the mind, a person gained knowledge, and in order to preserve and increase knowledge, he created a civilization. Civilization launched the flywheel of progress, which led humanity to the need to create artificial intelligence in order to solve the issue of personal immortality for people.
Artificial intelligence will save humanity from the need to be smart, because the mind is what makes all people unhappy. And to be unhappy and immortal is unacceptable. By delegating the mind to inanimate matter and ensuring the continuity of its existence outside the forms of biological death, humanity will fulfill its cherished dream it will become immortal and happy. The idea of God will disappear because every living person will become a god.
The Tower of Babel has always been a symbol of human insolence in an effort to overcome the boundaries and limits of being set for it. The Tower of Babel was conceived to use it to ascend to heaven and become gods. Realizing over time that God does not live in heaven, but in the human heart, the need to storm the sky disappeared. But the idea for which the tower was built did not disappear to kill God and make a name for himself. What is not a goal for which it is worth daring. And continue to build the Tower of Babel, even if now it is called differently.