Frankl and Camus and Aurelius and Bassmaster Paul: conversation with an AI.

It was a common thing for people of old to carry wooden buckets that contained their drinking and washing water.  As of the fishing and farming references in the old Bible, Lao Tze spoke to sort of a commonality of the people of his time.

Lao Tze pointed out that everyone wanted a full bucket of water, and yet, they could also lament such, because the full bucket was more difficult to carry than any lesser amount.  After mentioning this to the AI, it points out that nature is something like "slow but sure", from the part 27 of the Tao Te Ching.  My example was part 8 or 9.

I noted the endless necessity of the chore and thought of Sisyphus from the Camus writing, endlessly trying to push a boulder up a steep hill.  That was his life, and so much, be it a few moments or hours, people of old carried their water in buckets, everyday.

The generative AI stated that these chores are "futile" and "absurd", but can, paradoxically, aid us in finding purpose in our lives--to which I point out that the necessity of maintaining at least a basic survival, I suppose, is cause enough.

The output then is something that leads up the hierarchy of needs from basic survival and a trivial sort of joy, all the way to gratitude, of a kind of(what might be) a machine-generated panentheism.

To which the AI asked if I had any thoughts on the subject, which jumpstarted dovetailing from Camus and Lao Tse, through Victor Frankl, and the Frankl is almost a Wikipedia entry in the text of the conversation.

I interject a paraphrase of Marcus Aurelius:  "I am merely a spit of flesh."

One has his self-same buck of water, all in all, and to the larger point, whether God is real and loving and merciful, designer and controller of the heavens and the earth, or whether God is an ecumenical fiction among so many people.

The inevitable destination, between myself and the AI, that is was something of the "commonality of the human experience".

I think to myself, too, the one that writes of the Tao can talk about an experience near it, but can't envelope the very vapor of the thing--meanwhile the AI is talking about joy and meaning, to which I point out "awe", a sense of "awe".  The response then is something about that sense of awe making one grateful for life(he must have forgot the bucket and the boulder).

Of the smoke, one cant write but an impression of the odor of that smoke, or something of the partially clear appearance of that self-same thing, rather than say, something like stereo instructions or C++ code.  To wit, the Tao one can bloviate about on a blog is not the true Tao, or the Tao in the meme is not the true--the true Tao is something of which we have but a residue--a type and shadow, and then merely that, in our sieve of frame of reference, for which we are lucky to have anything in particular at all.

And of the "lower forms", we are in the good book assured that the meek are blessed, the down-hearted are comforted and so on, and the Thoreau mendicant sort of Buddhist proto-Western "mindfulness", dismissed as idle loafing and meaningless word salad, there is something yet of the experience, something yet of the very baseline of life itself, that, quatrapuncted and discombobulated, makes of itself, not struggle or futility or absurdity, but the very fundamental of life, sans adjectives and adverbs.