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While re-reading the chapter - The Devil, Ivan’s Nightmare (Book XI - Ivan - Chapter IX - TBK) I came across the below passage, where the Devil recites Ivan’s Geological Cataclysm poem back to him: "… Oh, blind race of men who have no understanding! As soon as men have all of them denied God—and I believe that period, analogous with geological periods, will come to pass—the old conception of the universe will fall of itself without cannibalism, and, what’s more, the old morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. From hour to hour extending his conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour in doing it that it will make up for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven. Every one will know that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a god. His pride will teach him that it’s useless for him to repine at life’s being a moment, and he will love his brother without need of reward. Love will be sufficient only for a moment of life, but the very consciousness of its momentariness will intensify its fire, which now is dissipated in dreams of eternal love beyond the grave’… and so on and so on in the same style. Charming!" ...

Tome Forge: Teaching LLMs to Think Like Philosophers The problem (and how I tripped over it) I thought I had a clever prompt. Tell a model to roleplay as Nietzsche, then poke it with a softball: Thucydides or Plato? If you’ve read even a little Nietzsche, you can answer before you finish the question. He loathed Plato. He called him a coward. In his own words: “My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides… Courage in the face of reality distinguishes a man like Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal.” ...

by William Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens