West of Eden

John's Steinbeck's masterpiece East of Eden takes place in a region that symbolizes the land where Adam and Eve were driven out to after eating the forbidden fruit. It is a place of labor and difficulty, in contrast to the idyllic paradise of Heaven. It is a matter of interpretation whether the stories of the Bible can be compared to true stages of development that humans encounter in life and whether the fall from paradise can be likened to a barrier from what was formerly perfect that is temporal, spatial, generational, technological, or biological. The East, being the place from which the sun rises, represents a solar injunction to the duty of one's day at daybreak, and as the day carries on past midday, the sun casts shadows upon people and disappears past the horizon of the West into shade. But can we humans, knowing now as we did not know previously at the time of the writing of the Bible, that the Earth is round and not flat, attempt to reenter paradise by circumnavigating the globe and entering through the West of Eden, thereby bypassing the cherubim and the flaming sword that guard the way to the tree of the life, who are exclusively on the East?

Human beings belong to one species, meaning that each race of humanity is not a separate species, but enough biological differentiation has occurred over the past tens of thousands of years to lead the path of separation of the species that was formerly one into many geographically distinct groups having differences in culture, language, and religion, among others. I am no evolutionary biologist, but my account of the progression of the species is as follows. After the last of the remaining hominids Homo Neanderthalensis were outlived by the Homo Sapiens, most likely somewhere in the pit of Africa, humans took different serpentine migratory paths to different continents. One large group went to the southern tip of Italy, another large group went to the southern tip of India, and the rest of the folks stayed behind. Then, as civilization continued to grow, these two groups explored and conquered the territories they navigated in a floral pattern, with some settling into some villages nomadically and others continuing marching on nomadically. Eventually, two empires emerged, the Byzantine and the Indian Empires, which eventually came into contact with the Indians travelling westward and some Byzantines travelling eastward. Nomadic migration continued despite the conflict, with some from the Indian empire travelling from India to China and subsequently Russia and the others who were in the Byzantine empire travelling westward to inhabit Europe. The Russians travelled to North America first through Alaska and became the Native American Inuits, surviving the cold weather and migrating south, and some Africans without telling the others also sneakily travelled from Africa to South America through the southern tips, possibly through Antarctica, and migrating upward to become the Mayas and the Aztecs by the time they reached the land that is now modern day Mexico and southwestern America. Finally, the Europeans arrived in America some hundreds of centuries ago and civilization would expand and conquering would continue into the modern day. The invention and commercialization of the plane also enabled strange patterns of micro migration that continue to this day.

The advancement of computer technology through science and engineering research over the past century has also paved the path for a "technogenesis" that enables communication of humans through the common usage of electronics. Modern day technology, mainly in the form of chip-enabled, Internet-connected, portable human-accessible devices, serves as a gateway into fulfilling our needs for communication, entertainment, and even working. On the technological, application side, the rise of powerful, parallel computation and paradigms of computation to use them enables the rapid and automatic prototyping of biological, mathematical, physical, and analytical strategies and solutions to problems and games that have existed as open problems within human civilization.

Computer applications, many of which run in parallel together on a computer, are managed and run by the operating system. Large Language Models, neural network transformer-based programs that can respond to human-language questions and commands as well as pictures, can generate computer programs as a supplement to human effort. Programs are compiled and optimized into assembly instructions targeting a particular instruction set architecture, which is then disassembled into binary and run on an actual computer. The computer chip itself and the accompanying peripherals are architected and designed by humans with the aid of automation software, before they are sent to Taiwan for manufacturing. Thus, a co-dependency exists between hardware and software, with hardware being created with the help of software and software only being possible to run through hardware. With LLMs threatening to deconstruct (into tokens), automate, and improve every part of the SW/HW flow, creating new channels of co-optimization and improvement within and across the stages, it can be argued that humans are part of the co-dependency as some baseline, computer-mediated interface is needed to enable human communication with the burgeoning technology that is already proving its capacity to offer solutions to centuries-old mathematical problems (i.e. Google Autoevolve). Furthermore, there is evolutionary, capitalist competition between companies with rivaling LLMs, with Deepseek coming from China and the rest (Gemini, ChatGPT) coming from non-native America. The ability of any spatio-temporal data structure to be deconstructed into tokens suggests that the entire singular record of human-technology interaction can be analytically comprehended, studied, analyzed, and possibly improved (i.e. quick approximations and software analytics, better software, more optimal hardware, better compilers, novel HW-SW systems, new and possibly incomprehensible programming languages, a dramatically revised technological flow, and emergence of strategy-mediated technological games such as creating the ultimate program to run on the ultimate computer). Thus, can LLMs, and more generally transformer-based computation models, be used to develop computers, robots, or electro-mechanical systems? What about the processes used to create these tools? Through a reinforcement-learning framework strategy, games can even be invented to be played in the pursuit of attaining the impossible or expressing the ineffable. Thus, while modern industry efforts focuses on the incorporation of LLM technology into the existing economy-guided software, middleware, and hardware products, it may also well be the case that all projects within the tech field and the entire tech field itself can be subsumed into LLMs. And even so, that is not near the end of the story, because if the laws of physics and mathematics are boundless (as referenced in Godel's incompleteness theorem), then both software (mathematical and literary) and hardware (mathematical and physical) are infinitely vast but parallel gardens of possibility connected to one another through the engineering process and the field itself takes on biological and spiritual significance.

Having ancestry from a holy part of India whose historicity is so profound that reference to the city is part of daily conversation, having grown up in a city known for its trash that also took the ultimate soul of the father of the Internet's shadow, having attended a corporate-themed school, and also a university where the Internet was born, and having a name that symbolizes that which casts the ultimate shadow (implying that my shadow is that which I have just left), I myself have somehow found my connection to the eternal process of death and rebirth referenced in the Gita, as though our family's soul, hailing directly from the banks of India's holy rivers, was lifted into the heavens and dropped into our home city, only to be lighted once more as though it were trash and rise into our local heavens and then re-descend into our bodies through an iterative process of refinement by flame.

If the mathematical can be unveiled from the literary and spiritual via technology, as it has been through the scientific, then it will truly be the case that nothing which man proposes to do will be impossible to him. If the past decades of technological advancement can be represented, analyzed, and generated by technology, then what limitless capacity will be proven for technology to play itself like a chess game, improving computers and software in a way that spirals into the infinite? And yet, the counterveiling culture painfully, yet satisfyingly pushes those who have attained the irrepressible desire to express the infinite that they have conceived into a quiet corner. But still it is fair, for what mother does not believe that the infinite is contained in her son and what human being does not believe that another has the raw potential to improve and attain that which feels unachievable (though we seldom achieve it)? And it is one thing to be able to solve a hard programming problem and completely another to be able to ask an LLM to achieve it. If modern technology and "the system" in each of their near infinite complexity has formed an approximation of the divine, then it is within our capacity to estimate to what extent humanity is on the brink of entering a new temporal and cultural era.

On the subject of humans and human progress, there are some metaphysical questions that deal with the stages of human life, the progression of history, language, communication, and thought. Firstly, suppose that there now exists a unified stream of consciousness that permeates throughout this world like a signal being broadcast from afar which humans pick up on through thought and transmute into language, thought, and behavior. What is the relationship between one's birthday and the stream? Those further along in their lives surely respond to the same news differently than those who are young. What role does biological maturity and the interaction of our body systems have to do with it? What impact does the superficial overreaching kindness within the culture have on damping the safeguards we have for our own safety? What explanation is there in the context of modern cultural warfare of there being no limit to the desire to take advantage of others' goodwill, deprive them of individuality, act upon one's impulses, manipulate their reality, and conspire? Besides this, what are people no longer open about in relationship to their lives that they were merely a decade ago and what are they to each other that they are not in reality? What is the relationship now between the real and the symbolic, if the entirety of one's profession or career can be reduced to that which can be written down and possibly automated? What response is there to external ideology being forced onto the practically oriented? What are humans if every ineffable emotion can be expressed and every aspect of the divine experience can be transcribed? What is the resolution of the enmity between those who exploit emotion and social convention to insist on their poorly developed viewpoint and impose it on others and those who competently disregard them? (My solution is to take a nap.) What motivation was there in introducing random complexity into the culture through DEI and disregarding the varying factors between people that makes some more skilled and better than others? What relationship exists between the libidinal and practical paths of human motivation and the inner and outer eye, and what role do jokes play in mediating between them? What about human life cannot be sufficiently encapsulated into that which can be written down? What risks exist in exalting those individuals with short tempers and resentment to the highest degree? Ultimately, what relationship exists between the man and the soul, now that what is religious is being subsumed into what is scientific?