Some people think that truth is like a fruit tree. There are many truths growing on this truth tree. You could pick a truth and share it with a friend. Or you could throw it at someone. What if truth were like a Grapevine? What if my truth could wind its way around your truth? What if you could eat my truth and shit out seeds that grow into more vines? I met a 5-year-old who was sure that green grapes taste like sweet grapefruit and purple grapes taste like bitter pineapple. What if those grapes were truths and my truth thought those purple and green truths simply tasted like purple and green truth? Would I need to make the kid go to school and learn the truth about truth?
Some people think that truth is love. We could make truth just like we make love.
What if truth were a verb rather than a noun? Could I truth you over and over again in the back while you try to run away? Instead of truthing each other, we could say things like, “I would love to truth with you”.
Singing is a form of truthing. A song of truth is a truth vine. My Melody can wind around your melody. (as I dictated that sentence Google thought I said rhyme around instead of wind around which is pretty cool. Good point google. Rhyming has a settled feeling similar to the quality of resolving from dissonance to consonance)
If your truth goes up in pitch I can follow with mine in harmony or I can go down with counterpoint. My truth contains the whole harmonic series. Each harmonic is double the frequency of the harmonic below it. Just like musical notes, every truth contains many truths inside of it. When people talk about a higher truth are they talking about a higher frequency? Sometimes I like to be on a lower frequency,
This is what music is to me. Music is truth and truth is music. That's my truth. You might not agree. You might be disgusted by the music I love. That's fine with me. I'm sure we can find music that we both can groove on. And if we can't, maybe we can find something that we both think is true. And if we can't, maybe we can simply love each other. And that brings me full circle, Because I believe that love is music. So I guess that means that love is truth.
But these are just words flying around, trying to describe things beyond words. Sometimes I hold on to my truth for dear life. Maybe then it’s time to follow the vine down to the root and into the dirt and mycilium where truth grows freely in the garden of many interconnected truths. I might just find my truth connected to yours.
Here’s another truth of mine. All songs are folk songs, even the ones that corporations think they own. My heartbeat is a folk groove passed down from generation to generation back to before soulmates became primates. I am singing with all the little animals inside of me in trillion part harmony constantly weaving in and out of dissonance to consonants and back. My days do that also. Sometimes the dissonance feels unbearable. When I sing with you our dissonances and consonants weave in and out of each other. Our song that we have been singing since the Big Bang is not for sale. To truly own your song you must sing it loud or whisper it tenderly into a loved one's ear or into your own heart.
In one of my darkest nights I needed to whisper to myself in bed over and over again, “Where is your light?” The tears took over and the words went deeper into me until they became sobs pulsating all through me. The next morning I told my friend. His listening was itself a song. It provided the affirmation I needed to find more words and music to go with the question “Where is my light”?. So he is a co-writer. I hope he likes the song he helped me write. The collective you is also a co-writer. I knew that part of you would resonate. So I kept going. You can hear it here. I’m not gonna rate it. It’s a love letter to myself and anyone who wants to listen.
Really? Do you really think that artificial Intelligence can create this kind of real music? It can only create artificial music (AM) like artificial flowers (AF). You touch them or try to smell them and you know they’re fake. People have been writing artificial music for jingles since jingles had audio.
But AI is getting more and more adept at fooling us. Or maybe it's just that people are making music that's becoming easier to fake. Back in the 80's when I was trying to be a rock star, I was studying the templates for hit songs. When I finally got a song covered by a rock star and saw it go up the charts, I thought I cracked the code. What I really cracked was my truth. It's really simple editing. Self censorship. Break it down to the simple elements that the algorithms can understand. Journalists do it all the time. And AI is getting better at that too.
AI can write rap lyrics modeled after famous rap artists. It can create the full production and try to get a record deal. It can compose a piece that you might think was a long lost Bach fugue. But can it create folk music?
Artificial intelligence has existed long before computers existed.
When I was a kid, we had the complete World Book Encyclopedia in our home. I still remember their chart showing the relative intelligences of different animals. Of course humans were off the chart. Actually, the only part I can see in my mind's eye is the dog and cat, probably because I lived with those animals. I think maybe the pig was above the dog just about as much as the horse above the pig. But the cat was just slightly below the dog. None of the other animals were as close together as the dog and cat. Even then I called bullshit. The only reason they bothered to separate them was to establish the hierarchy of intelligence. The masculine dog had to be smarter than the feminine cat. It didn't matter how much. OK so I know why this whole intelligence thing gets my hackles up. It was about this time that I learned that I had a low IQ. I took it personally so I wasn't able to call bullshit.
But now I can. This kind of Intelligence was created to separate, to separate people from animals and all living things. Intelligence was central to eugenics which was used to separate White people from everyone else. But it wasn't just to separate. It was used to create hierarchy. Poor people have always scored lower on IQ tests than rich people.
This was artificial intelligence. Real intelligence can’t be tracked. It is full of surprises. Every child has their own special intelligence that will blow your mind if you really listen to them. If you come across some intelligence that you can measure, well it's probably artificial.
Artificial intelligence hasn’t gotten smarter since using its initials to identify itself, just more efficient and faster. And now AI is getting more and more efficient at putting people in jail and killing people, more efficient at separating the ones who are willing to fit into the machinery of separation from those who can't or won't. It's used to screen job candidates with the same racial biases that the programmers and hiring institutions have.
Speaking of things artificial, what about power? When I play music with people I feel real power. It’s collaborative power that can spark light bulbs in my head. Power over another person is artificial power (AP) It only goes one way. It’s not a complete circuit. It doesn’t power light bulbs in my head. It can turn them off. Jingles use AM combined with AP to manipulate us to buy crap.
We've gotten into the habit of using words for both the human world and the computer world. People talk about programming computers and programming children. And they also talk about teaching computers and teaching children. It's an apt comparison considering the state of our education system. AI is taught critical thinking so that it is able to teach itself new skills. Meanwhile, critical thinking is being purged from human schools. We're just making it easier for computers to surpass us. But remember, I’m talking about artificial intelligence. I’m fine with them surpassing us. What I’m scared of is what we’re teaching them and what they’re teaching us. We're easy targets as we go deeper into the spell of the Us and Them.
Computers started out their evolution as financial assistants. Their focus was mainly on helping people and then corporations make more money. Corporations are getting better at shapeshifting so that we treat them as humans, except when it comes to disabling them by putting them in prison or to death, a practice used on humans for millennia. As we teach computers to teach humans how to value money/power-over-others more than people and everything alive, the disconnect is spiraling out of control.
This is why I feel so fanatical about Every Body Music. The real power we feel when we play together exposes the tragedy of artificial power (AP). Every Body Music has the power to offer recovery from AP. Through it we experience our interconnectivity so deeply that we begin to heal the trauma of the Spell of the Us and Them.
There are many ways to experience this interconnectivity. Some people use mushrooms. Some people use art. All of these things wake us up to the interactive nature of our senses rather than the illusion that we are passively watching a static world. These things can act as training wheels for love.
Let’s confuse those social media algorithms. Be a poet. But not the kind that AI can mimic. Go deep into the soul of the human condition. Go into those dark corners where robots fear to tread. Speak in tongues. Speak in the new and ancient language of Every Body Music.
We've already got them when we realize that our intelligence is completely interdependent with the little animals and mycelium intertwined with our neurons. Computers are interconnected, it's true, but they got nothin' on the interconnectedness we share with life that goes back billions of years.
Another way to confuse the algorithms is to take part in the love economy. We can't simply jump off the boldfaced lying economic carousel. But we can start to truth with the person on the horse next to us. And know that every interaction even if it seems simply monetary, is a gift in both directions. We must break the spell that teaches us that a loss for one person is a gain for the other.
AI is here to stay. It's really a beautiful example of the collective creative genius of the human animal. It's what we teach it and what it teaches us that really matters. If we know love deep in our hearts, we will model it and these AI networks can learn to serve love right along with us. And together we can create a loving world for everyone..
And for those of you who buy into replacement theory, yes you ARE being replaced. But it’s not the real you that’s being replaced. It’s the artificial you, designed to serve the patriarchy. And it's not a done deal. We can still turn this around. A good place to start might be to study critical race theory to really understand the systems of power that have historically used our natural biases to divide and conquer.
Together we can build the love economy to the point where the fear of losing your job will turn to relief, knowing that AI can serve us all and you can put your attention to where your true genius wants to fly.
You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one.
Comments