Visitor logs for On An Overgrown Path show significant traffic from ChatGPT and other AI bots. This current obsession with all things AI reminds me of the Gnostic creation myth. In this the demiurge, or craftsman, employed by the "true God" to create the world, comes to believe that it is really in control, that it is the supreme deity, and enacts a coup d'état, with disastrous consequences. These musings were triggered by Ian McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary , Gary Lachman's The Secret Teachers of the Western World , and Jordi Savall's The Forgotten Kingdom . The latter is an epic musical depiction of the Catholic Albigensian Crusade against the Gnostic beliefs of the Cathars, which resulted in the massacre of 20,000 inhabitants of Béziers in Languedoc. A powerful example of a fashionable creation myth that ended in tears.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQnd5ilKx2Y
Here we have an example of the failure to show visually whence came our music and how the whole of it came to be. A small matter, of course, for young people now go out into the world almost nescient about how the world as we know it came to be and how they themselves might find a place in it, for they were never properly taught such in the years of their 'schooling'. I'm an ex-pat retired historian who sometimes dreams of the A-Levels of yore (my yore). I kid you not that one september three decades ago, I started the first tutorial of a first-year European history course
by asking someone, anyone, to tell me what they knew about Hitler and Nazism. Nothing - not one could tell me anything at all.
I hope no one is asking what the hell that photo has got to do with history, for it has everything to do with it, including the fact that there are now people thinking Nielsen looked like an avuncular, bearded Scot with a shirt and photographer way ahead of their time.
The description "Radio 2.5" has achieved widespread currency in connection with this and other changes. When I read that description while travelling last week I had a feeling that it originated On An Overgrown Path some years ago. My feeling has been confirmed by a poster on the independent BBC Radio 3 forum -
http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?3294-Brian-Sewell-joins-the-throng!/page2
Here is my 2006 post, which was somewhat ahead of its time -
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2006/12/bbc-is-performing-badly.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2039794/BBC-Radio-3-Breakfast-Radio-2-5-say-listeners.html
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2008/01/great-music-making-doesnt-need.html