20250518
    The Illuminati were "lying down". This is why they could say "I am lying" without falling into the liar's paradox. Why is that relevant? Let me tell you, for a hundred years they ate non, 농 in Korean, or snot going down the back of your throat, in lieu of food. Lying down, they happily and ravenously gulped down that snot, meal after meal, snack and dessert. Apples, steak, ice cream made of non, snot (콧농). What they ate was the refusal, the scream non, of their victims. The more their victims refused, the tastier was the feast.


    20250518
    In 20250516 I said Badiou identified the void and uncountable infinty together. I'm not sure if this is true. I was basing this off of page 78 of the Bloomsbury where he says
For Aristotle there is an intrinsic connection between the void and infinity, and we shall see (in Meditations 13 and 14 for example) that he is entirely corrct on this point: the void is the point of being of infinity.
    Now I read "the void is the point of being of infinity" to mean that the void is uncountable infinity. Having read Meditations 13 and 14, I don't know if this is justified. He just talks about ℵ₀ there, defining the limit ordinal and the successor function. Nothing about ℵ₁ yet. So I'm still in the dark about what he meant by that quote.
    This book is exhilirating, as it's elucidating both set theory and ontology for me. Set theory in terms of ontology gives flesh to set theory; ontology in set theory terms clarify ontology. Someday I'd like to connect this with theoretical computer science. What happens if Badiou's ontology is connected to computational complexity theory? I don't know but it sounds very exciting.


    20250516
    I'm reading Badiou's Being and Event (Bloomsbury translation). In it he declares that ontology is a situation, where he defines a "situation" as any "presented multiplicity", where he defines "multiplicity" as... well, he doesn't quite define it, but you can get quite close by thinking it's, like, partiularities rather than singularities. Now in what he terms as "Frege's optimism", he says "nothing of the multiple can occur in excess of a well-constructed language ... the master of words is also the master of the multiple". That is to say, Frege believed that, with a precise enough language, you could define and talk about what is exactly and without fail. Badiou goes on to show how this failed because of Gödel and incompleteness, then ends chapter 5 with a touch of despair and awe: in discussing the notation for the empty set ∅, Badiou speaks of the mathematicians who chose that symbol, that proper noun, "As if they were dully aware that in proclaiming that the void alone is ... they were touching upon some sacred region, itself liminal to language ... rivalling the theologians for whom supreme being has been the proper name since long ago, yet opposing to the latter's promise of the One, and of Presence, the irrevocability of un-presentation and the un-being of the one".
    What strikes me about all this is first, Badiou's commitment that ontology is a presented multiplicity: that which is subsumed under ontology is presentable. He explicitly rejects the "ontology of presence", and I might be wrong, but I take this to mean the rejection of theorizing about vibes or whatever as part of an ontology. This makes me sweat: I'd like to think I can sit in my room and wait out the world while it ineluctably follows the grand arc of justice. But that justifies inaction, in particular my inaction. My choice not to present myself to the world thus becomes a choice not to participate in ontology itself. I thought I could participate in the ontology of the world with vibes or whatever, but shit, what if I can't and I regret wasting my youth when I'm sixty five?
    Another thing that strikes me is Badiou's identification of the void with uncountable infinity, this "sacred region... liminal to language". If he's right about this, and my theory of evil is right, God (the infinity of uncountable infinity) and evil (of which we have a reference without a referent) coincide. I kind of think of this as: there are no evil people, thus no evil souls, they're simply misunderstood. They all have Buddha-nature, after all. Evil souls become forgotten, yet reside in the unconscious; God is also always-already in the unconscious with divine grace (though in a very different way). But if God and evil coincide, insanity surely follows. Maybe this is why I went insane.
    Now I'm interested in this "sacred region, itself liminal to language". If language fails in the void, as well as in the incompleteness of uncountable infinity, what use is language? Can language touch this liminal space at all? That it can is the promise of poetry, but can poetry save the world? Lee Oh Deok, a Korean educator, once said: "it is not because of lack of words that the world has become this way." Words didn't save the world. Words can't save the world. This seems particuarly acute in the present moment. What use are the manifestos, declarations, and op-eds in stopping genocide? After a while, another op-end, another discussion about the genoicde seems little more than empty formalism.
    There is a possibility that language does not fail in the void nor in the thickets of incompleteness. But this requires a belief in metaphysics. Suppose language remains after you die. All words uttered, printed, or left unsaid, affect the world after death in the form of haunting. Some may see this haunting as a ghost, a demon to be exorcised; others, as a God. Ghosts and Gods affect the world precisely by standing outside ontology, in the form of divine revelations, possessions, and manipulations of the unconscious.
    The utter danger of LLMs is that it may destroy haunting, that last form of magic in this world. LLMs may destroy haunting by overwriting legitimate forms of haunting (as ghost, God, etc) with its inanities. Writing well is kind of like being possessed; LLMs are already destroying the capability of people to write.