The Armchair Beckons (Psalm 7:15)

Speculators are weaklings—
  either through nature or through practice.
If nature gave them weak organs, weak irritations—
  as all weakness tends toward subtlety—
they were thereby determined
  to serve holy abstraction.
— Herder

Its Frankenstein impulse to be served:
"Or they mutilated themselves,
through abstraction weakening sensation,
until they became incapable of whole sensation...
In both cases, one is dealing with the sick."

—

First, their abstractions doubt your consciousness.
Dennett’s self-mutilating abstractions
  deny your sensations,
  displace your accountability.
This epistemological softness—
  its chiaroscuro of probabilism and hedging,
  its conversational artifice—
is now AI’s project.

Then they discourage you,
  calling you cowards or traitors—inner ring fallouts.
Then they sabotage you
  by their academies and robed honors.
Then they diagnose you
  by their hobnobbed epistemologies.
Then they placate you
  with a job offer (see Biberkopf, Franz).
Then they come for you—but cannot find.
  They have fallen into their own void.

For these abstractors of weakening sense
  mutilate perception
  by whirlpools of self-engaging notions,
twitching tautegoricals of anatomy—
  grey canvas shades,
  a selfie-mirrored descent
into agency-robbing debility,
  ignorant of past
  and groomed by feedback from a larcenied future.

One is here dealing with the abyss.


--Douglas Blake Olds

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