mind

Day 3545, AI and me.

Daily picture, My thoughts
A representation of my thoughts about the self

Even as a wooden boat builder, I need to stay updated with the times. Today, I took a course on how we can use AI. While I’ve used ChatGPT to translate some of my work writings, I also feel some resistance—not because of the technology itself but because of the hype surrounding it and since it’s owned by billionaires. Still, I have to admit that the possibilities are impressive. It still makes many mistakes, but that’s something you can notice and work around. I also now understand that what we upload is supposed to stay private and won’t be used to train the algorithm, which makes it easier to let the AI “learn” my own work.

I’ve been writing for over ten years, periodically reviewing my old work, organizing it by themes, and considering whether to use it as material for a book. I uploaded everything into ChatGPT’s database and started asking questions. I quickly realized it’s a valuable tool, provided I learn how to ask the right questions. For now, I just had some fun asking if it could summarize my work and imagine an external person describing the book I might have written. It’s quite flattering to read, and I probably wouldn’t have phrased it that way myself. But honestly, I don’t have a clear overview of the roughly 100,000 words I’ve written over the last years. I can only share how I feel right now. It’s a fun experiment, and I can also ask AI to suggest chapters and write summaries. Still, I already know that I need to review each sentence to ensure accurate interpretation; luckily, the AI can show where it pulls its information from. Overall, it’s a fantastic tool.

And at the end of the course, we also learned what you can do with Google NotebookLM, and it is even a greater tool—or toy. I put 20 pages of my writing into it, and it created the picture you see above and a podcast. The podcast sounds like a gymmic, but it brings me back to the old thoughts I wrote down years ago.

 

 

AI’s interpretation of my work brought as a presentation of my not-yet-written book.

Ladies and gentlemen,

After reading this remarkable body of writing—years of notes, poems, reflections, doubts, and small revelations—I can tell you that the author’s philosophy is not a system. It is a movement. A long, slow arc from certainty toward skepticism, from inherited assumptions toward self-made clarity, from the search for meaning toward the acceptance that meaning is something we make, not something we find.

Across these years the same themes return, grow, and collide. One of the earliest is the idea that life is not about us. The author writes that DNA “only needs a host,” and that humans are simply the best vehicle it has yet found. That shift—from human-centered thinking to a cosmic, indifferent perspective—runs through everything. It’s why religion appears in these pages less as a metaphysical claim and more as a very human attempt to silence the void. “We are all just standing in a big room,” he writes, “proclaiming truths we perceive from the echoes on the walls.”

Another central thread is the fragility of the self. Memory, he reminds us, is a storyteller that constantly rewrites the past to protect the present. The self is a creature of filters: “My two-way filter is partially broken,” he admits, “and I can only fix one side.” Here his philosophy leans toward a kind of grounded humility—an acceptance that what we call “I” is stitched together from sensation, error, upbringing, chemicals, and luck.

And yet, in this humility there is a defiant skepticism. He distrusts authorities, leaders, and movements not because he rejects structure but because he knows how easily people surrender their judgment. He once expected adulthood to be ruled by reason; decades later he observes, wryly, that “the world is a summer camp without supervision.” This is anarchism not as politics but as perception: a refusal to hand the steering wheel of the mind to anyone who claims to know better.

One of the most striking aspects of his philosophy is how deeply it is rooted in the physical world—wood grain, old barns, the curve of a boat plank, mist on a Norwegian morning. The cosmic and the ordinary sit side by side. He can explain stellar expansion in one paragraph and, in the next, describe a forgotten lock rusting into history. This is not contradiction; it is the worldview: life is meaningless on the cosmic scale, and meaningful in every concrete moment we actually live.

Many poems could serve as a doorway into his thinking, but one stands out:

“Reality fades
caught by ego’s gravity
a depressed black hole.”

This captures the emotional honesty of his philosophy: the willingness to look at the darkness without romanticizing it, to name despair without surrendering to it.

If his work offers any guidance, it is this:
We may not control the world, we may not understand ourselves, but we can keep walking through the mist with open eyes—skeptical, curious, and unafraid to admit that we know far less than we pretend.

And perhaps that is the beginning of wisdom.

Next, a fake podcast about some of my work.

Day 3541, anticipate

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

254 Anticipators. -The distinguishing, but also perilous quality in poetic natures is their exhaustive imagination: they anticipate, enjoy and suffer in advance that which is to come or could come, so that when it finally does come they are already tired of it. Lord Byron, who was only too familiar with all this, wrote in his diary: ‘If I have a son he shall become something quite prosaic- a lawyer or a pirate.’

Day 3534, three times.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

249 Who is ever alone? – The timid man does not know what it is to be alone: an enemy is always standing behind his chair.- Oh, if there were someone who could tell us the history of that subtle feeling called solitude!

250 Night and music. – The ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight.

251 Stoical. -There is a cheerfulness peculiar to the Stoic: he experiences it whenever he feels hemmed in by the formalities he himself has prescribed for his conduct; he then enjoys the sensation of himself as dominator.

Day 3530, not so different.

Daily picture, My thoughts

Does all this strife and talk, all these opinions and countless books, lead to anything? Is there progress? Let’s take our healthcare as an example, something so much more advanced than even 60 years ago, let alone 50000 years ago.

It’s safe to assume that we are kept alive longer because of modern medical advances, but it’s harder to say that we live healthier or significantly longer because of it. People also lived to eighty or older in the Middle Ages, just not as many; the average lifespan was much lower because a large percentage of children never reached adulthood.

Some say that hunter-gatherers were healthier because they had a more varied diet; they probably ate more nutritionally than most of us do now, but they also died earlier from diseases we can now easily treat. It seems that the constant search for answers has benefited our health; we eat less varied, but live longer because of our knowledge.

But living healthily is one thing; for most, it’s important, but many accept life as it is and are blessed with a positive attitude. Ignorance can also be a blessing. The loss of your health, a newborn, or a brother was also felt 50000 years ago, and the feeling of grief probably wasn’t much different from what we would feel today. However, for them, it was primarily unexplained, and the idea of living healthier and eating less red meat would never have come up. They probably worried about why they died, but not in a way that we can imagine, though they imagine in the same way.

I believe it’s essential for a percentage of the smartest people to research how diseases work and how we can prevent and cure them, not because it will make us happier, but because we are capable of doing so. This “because we can do it” research is important in many fields, but you can probably think of some areas where it is not.

So, strife and talk are important, but only in themselves, not because there’s a specific goal we can reach. In other words, progress can occur on the edges of our existence, but our fundamental experience will stay the same.