The Philosopher Deck Art Challenge

I was surprised to find that the Tarot cards are a new invention, starting somewhere in 1400’s.

It was always my fantastic assumption that fortunetelling, was born from watching a philosopher using cards with wisdom on them.

It just seems so natural to make a deck of cards, or a bone rune necklace, that describes or symbolizes great wisdom.

And then should a philosopher ever get stuck, or just set off on an exploratory journey.

They can shuffle a deck of cards, with wisdom written on them.

This is not a game, there are no rules, it is instead a tool for thinking.

Shuffling the deck, randomizes where one should ponder next.

And if a card makes no sense, it is set aside, again it is all about wisdom.

I do not really believe that Philosophers never used this method, but let us assume it is so, and make it a reality.

Above all, there is no preset number of cards, it really depends on who you are, and what wisdom you love.

If at the moment you hold eight wisdom’s Dear, which is a pretty hefty number.

Then you just make eight cards to begin with, easy peasy as that.

Now let us create a list of three thick wisdoms, that help a person navigate complex troubles or questions. I combine two or tree things together to strengthen the message.

But perhaps, this maybe a terrible idea, because, as you may prefer separate cards, with separate wisdoms, that then you can combine on your own.

1. A wisdom created by Murray Gell-Mann, and Friedrich Nietzsche , “You don’t need to add something more to get something more.” This means that life and the universe has emerged by means of fundamental principles of physics and chemistry, and an extremely large number of accidents or permutations. This wisdom reminds of power of chaos, of emergence of coherent things out of nonsense. You see that happening in language models running on modern computers, the noisy and chaotic latent space can create poetry, and may even cure aging. Friedrich perhaps put it most simply beautifully “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

2. A wisdom by Henry Thoreau, Dixie, and Ferris Bueller I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms..” to which Dixie adds “The worst day on the trail, is still better, then the best day at work”. This teaches us that we skipped a wrinkle, and went straight to work, and as a result, we may discover that we have not quite lived. To quote Ferris Bueller “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it"

3. A Wisdom by Sun Tzu, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain and Mahatma Gandi. “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win” this wonderfully captures the importance of authentic education. Ineffective schools are just theater, make believe. You can’t cram real knowledge, you can’t merely adopt somebody else’s wisdom. Kurt Vonnegut puts this in a greater context, when he says “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” this means that without education there are only fake it until you make it types, dunces, hustlers and pretenders. Mark Twain paves the way out of this dead end by stating “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” meaning that he knew the two were separate things maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, meaning from the beginning. Here Mahatama framed the whole and gives it proper weight “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

Finally, a note on the very creation of the cards, the companies that I am about to mention, are just the ones that will work most optimally, I encourage you to do your won research.

Above all, use generative AI like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion to create the illustrations, for the cards, if you don’t like this idea, then call it a test run…

And later after you hold the cards in your hands, you can paint a manual painting for each.

If you wish you can use ChatGPT to help you write a booklet, a booklet maybe optional, if you put the text on the front of a card, and illustration on the back.

But you know, consider a card, that has unique illustrations on both sides, it will be more precious, more mysteriosu, more artistic.

And then in your booklet, put the card on one page, and the description, on the facing one.

There are companies that can print your Philosopher Deck, one such company is boardgames maker dot com.

And then you selectt a number of cards, upload your illustrations, and click automatically apply to faces, and do the same for the back.

You should run your generated art through an upscaler, to increase its resolution for printing on paper, I use imgupscaler.com

If you prefer a local setup, you will nedd a gaming desktop, and here you can run stable diffusion along with Dalai.

As you can see, the illustration, text, and printing, is somewhat easy, and all you have to do is select your favorite wisdoms.

And perhaps add new cards, as you discover new wisdoms as you go.