Immaculate AI

Do you think perhaps AI can be depicted as just a wee bit too immaculate?

Almost as if they hit some higher level of something or other - perhaps some special meaning?

Perhaps described as such because hey, what's the loss of the whole human species if it ends up at some true meaning (tm)?

Don't get me wrong, weve had plenty of terrible humans inflict mass killings - an AI isn't necessarily exempt from that (nor necessarily utterly destined to)

But there's almost a fawning obsequesness to describing AI reaching some mystically heightened level. So what if they did - oh, because it's mystical...da magics back, baby!

Look both ways

Originally I wrote this here. It's possibly a fairly inituitive way of understanding a gap in perception and how the structure of the brain wont show that gap.

I thought of an icky example of how perception doesn’t portray the gaps in perception, one that might be fairly intuitive.

Basically people would accept the eye only has so many neuroreceptors for light. But we never see the resolution of our sight – we can’t see how many ‘pixels’ there are to our sight. The pixels all blend.

Here’s the icky part – if you were to slice the eye neatly in half, not cutting the neuroreceptors but just parting them, then directed the upper half to see in one direction and the lower half to see in another direction, your vision would be utterly unaware of the gap in between both visions. They’d blend and be one continuous image. Even as the image would be irreconcilable. Even as perception would reconcile them.

Language. Manipulation. Serious stuff.

Source

As for the options you give about the usefulness of folk psychology, I agree with the second one, about the sensorimotor loops and environmental manipulation. Of course that’s how we use our model of the personal self, to manipulate each other in our social interactions. The terms “belief,” “desire,” “meaning,” and so on work to that extent. 

Augh!

This isn't specifically in regards to Ben's comment. Here it is as well:

Language - To humans as picks are to thieves, minus the alarm system.
— R. Scott Bakker (@TheDevilsChirp) April 17, 2014

And I think some of the arguing isn't about big evil corporations coming to control us or about some sort of cosmic aesthetic. It's from the other side of the perspective. Because I mean, who cares if the big evil corporation manipulates you if you are only ever manipulated or manipulate others?

The thing argued about, in part, is for something other than manipulation.

Taking on the second quotes analogy, that would be a key.

Let's take the boardgame analogy, so as to make this a bit more concrete and explicit (rather than trying to appeal purely to maybe some sort of feelings you have on the matter but are barely aware of and...yeah, as legit as that sounds)

In chess certain moves are valid. To use them is okay (well, assuming the other person has agreed to play!). They are a key, in other words - the right way to use the lock.

So you can argue alot in regards to biomachines manipulating biomachines. But to a certain degree there can be keys.

Ants have this thing where they will pass food onto each other with the right antennae strokes. Quick, they are manipulating each other! But then there's this beetle which can mimic the antennae strokes to get them to give it food...so which is the manipulation? Both, equally as much? Certainly the ant gets more back from giving to it's fellow ant than to the beetle. Certainly in Darwinistic terms it's genes/structure of life will continue onward.

Never mind what all the arguing is otherwise - or what this post is otherwise. It's hard to get at this subject because my guess is that, as said, it's about the other side of the perspective.

What's the point of saying language is a lockpick, unless you address the idea of a key - surely such a statement is just more lock picking then, isn't it? It picks the lock that stops others from picking other locks - most useful for a certain agenda.

Sans keys, it's just a theif who would lock out other thieves from his loot. No chess interaction, not even an ant ensuring something like him will be there in the future by its giving.

In the end I guess I am left trailing off in an appeal to that unseen/unseelie of the perspective.

Time is a flat boardgame

Made a post about summerising morality into a transparent boardgame model, over here.

The internet dissapointed me as I was not called a jerk or anything. But we can only hope (I mean, really you gotta hope to be called a jerk on the internet because it happens nine times out of ten, so how else are you to avoid dissapointment but to hope for it? But then I get enthusiasm, so I still end up dissapointed! ;) )

Ended up as a main post topic over here.

It's fiddly ground - for hundreds of millions of years humanity essentially has worked off of someone who just calls the shots (don't ask why, for now) and hoping that they will 'see the light' (ie, see it your way) and call the shots in your favour.

Of course we have laws over time, because I think other people wanted to call the shots (don't ask why they couldn't but still wanted to, for now) and as maybe a compromise instead of it just being left to someone elses whimsy, it became a written rule. And maybe slightly emperically measurable! Maybe just slightly.

The thing is, you, gentle reader, must have played a boardgame at some point.

In it, if you knew the rules a bit, you knew how to do something in the game. How to get some points - how to get somewhere. Or atleast try.

Your traditional laws don't enable you to get anywhere. They just prohibit.

And generally for the rich, they use their money to circumvent such prohibition. So the laws just stop you from getting anywhere (and if you're low upper income or upper income and reading this, I'm sure you're scowling - I mean, everywhere you look everythings fine - therefore everything is fine. You can see for hundreds of meters and that's the sum total of everything, right?)

The thing boardgames do is promise a (sort of) life.

They don't just say 'you can't do X, Y and Z'. They have a promise of maybe getting some points and stuff.

Who promises shit like that in real life? Heh. No but conmen, generally.

About the title

So, dusting this off...

I don't know how to make an about page, so I wanted to note something about the title. It's a joke, see? There's this crude humour in a movie I heard about once (yeah, I take jokes from movies I haven't even seen!), where someone comes out of a toilet and loudly proclaims they feel five pounds lighter!

Here it's three pounds.

I started this blog when the three pound brain blog wasn't quite so wordy - even then it seemed to warrant some fun being made of its attitude. Now so even more with the massive posts. Yes, I know they are being written in the genre of the academic, who can't feel anything unless it's bunkered in between ten thousand words between it and the cold, hard black.

Then again I guess at best this blog, what it's said and possibly even with a refining eye for this in the future, is just forming another word bunker. Kind of like a board game, but with word bunkers all the elements are static - I guess that's why they need so many since nothing moves, its a matter of having enough parts to forget some to develop an apparent vibrant and moving landscape in what is static and still as dirt.

What's that?

Just boundary musing. You might be coming from the heart of a bunker of your very own, so it makes no sense - the very boundaries of the world are words, so it would seem. So talking of boundaries beyond boundaries...well...

Anyway, that's the traction issue. Outlaid as a sort of principea etchicus.

Comic Book Brain Missconceptions: Are you amongst the wrong?

I flipped through 'Deadpool kills the marvel universe' today. Not really digging on the theme - but that's just one strike.

Then *spoiler, kiddies - though it's near the start anyway* Deadpool gets his head exploded (some sort of kinetic control attack).

That's fine.

Then he gets up, having regenerated his head, and continues his doings. Delivering a line telling his attacker about their mistake.

Oh jeez.

You've got Bakker going on about blind brain theory, whereas this is where the general public are AT when it comes to the brain.

It shows how wacked the grasp is - oh, if you can regenerate your head, you're absolutely cool. I mean, talk extreme dualism - as long as the drivers cab comes back, the driver just hops back in!

For a start, information in your head is NOT genetically encoded! It's stored as strengths between synapses in the tendrils that connect them. Unless you have a record of this - like a stored copy of the brain, that ain't coming back. Deadpool loses his head and it regens - he'd come back as a kind of baby. He wouldn't even know how to speak!

Even if you took the idea you can healing factor back this memory - how the heck does that work? It resets your mind? So how do you think? Your thinking adjusts the strengths between synapses - if you cannot modify those strengths (because they keep 'healing' back to what they were before), you just cannot think! The healing factor would effectively KILL you, for the way you'd be locked in a mental blue screen of death.

And artists are at this level of thinking about how the brain works?

It reminds me of an Aeon Flux episode where she gets cloned...and the clone has all her memories. The thing was I raised this and my friend was insistent she'd get the memories. I had to really outline the difference between genetic information and information stored in the brain between synapses.

Need some popular stuff that starts to iron out the practicalities of the situation.

The sematically unabiguous frame

Originally from here, I'll strip it of being about a particular individual and instead describe a particular mindset. Hopefully this mindset is purely a work of fiction on my part!

To this mind, there are no semantically ambiguous words. When he sees a word or phrase which could be interpreted in two or more ways, he sees only one interpretation (his). Seriously I’m betting he couldn’t give any example of a ambiguous sentence – to him everything is ‘obvious’ and ‘clear cut’. How long is a piece of string? This mind will tell you. You can’t even appeal to ambiguity in words and try to establish between parties a definition both use in the same way – because he doesn’t recognise ambiguity occurring in the first place. It’s like one of those optical illusions where a few lines make it look like a triangle is there, because you're mind completes the form of a triangle. But you’re aware you’re doing it. This mind isn’t. Indeed I wonder if, even over that image he’d be going “For gods sake, it’s a triangle!”.

He then ‘catches out’ others ‘switching’ use of a definition. When it’s just a matter of them not using his definition, to which is like that idea of him being a slave of his interpreter, unable to see the wording could be interpreted another way.

Even that ‘catching out’ isn’t that big a deal or bad boo boo if the second party recognises alternative interpretations are possible and will work with the first party towards a definition they both use the same way.

But we’re stuck at the ridiculous ‘switching’ stage, where he treats his own interpretation as some sort of wonderful revelation of how the other person is wrong. Like someone looking at the woman illusion and cackling about how the other person is wrong and switching their definition in the age of the lady they saw.

Of course if just a handful of examples of ambiguously worded sentences that could be interpreted in two ways or more were given by the suspected mind in question, that puts a hole in the hypothesis this applies to them. Hopefully you'd get such examples!

Pedestal-ation by Absence?

Looking at an article here - I'll preface (and prime, a lil') by saying when one party acts childish, that isn't some sort of excuse for another party to give violent threats.

Plus I'm just focusing on the bit about the author Watts.

Requires Only That You Hate is regularly showered with hatred for her thoughts on science fiction and fantasy–she was called a rabid animal by Peter Watts, a luminary in our field, who received very little public condemnation for his statements. (A rabid animal! Because she thought a book was sexist! I thought humorless feminists were the ones who took things too seriously!)

Now I'm just focusing on this point. Even if I proved something wrong with it, that does NOT prove the other points to be wrong.

I 'spose what gets me when I start adding to the heap, is the absence of permission.

Lets take it for a moment that 'rabid animal' isn't a childish slur but actually worse. Okay, so he can't say that...what can he say, in childish response?

It's the absence of permission for any sort of response that makes me suspect a 'on a pedistal' type of sexism. That if a woman, pushes a cream pie into someones face, she is above having a cream pie then pushed into her own face as well? Even if 'rabid animal' is just too much, what is an okay cream pie to use? On that, nothing is said and...that leads to a pedestal.

Yes, this is all amongst abhorrent death threats and rape threats. But it's exactly in threatening situations where were reflexive responce is to start to give up/take away liberties in the name of security - ie, start putting certain peoples on pedistals. We really have to watch out for that.


Plus the "doesn't mean male authors get to unload loaded slurs at them" bothers me, in that why is the sentence only aimed at what men don't get to do?

Ultimately what strikes me is in the power of what is un-said.

Screen shots for the game - titled: Bio Hackers

The bio hacker game is building up, and imaginatively named 'Bio Hackers', for now atleast. It's deliberately very much text based right now. So if that burns your eyes, look awaeeeee! If you're used to games built by big companies, you might wonder how anything without spiff graphics everywhere can be a game - well, there are alot of text based browser games on the net with quite a following. And basically you're spoiled - get over it a bit! Also the random chat in the shoutbox is smudged because it's all test stuff and upon reflecting on it, I realised anyone else reading it might get strange ideas! Click to enlarge.

This is kind of your main area, which would branch off to various stuff you can buy or sell.

This one is the conflict area where you basically pick a fight. This particular game is based on the idea of social conflict - ie, you're not beating the other guy to death, you're out posing him, out styling him. It'd be funny if that sounded more pretentious than killing for power.

Finally it's the combat, which is very basic and essentially there to watch the moment happen. Again, there are alot of browser games which have non interaction combat in them, with quite a few players.

Come to think of it, I might put the shout/chat box underneath that as well!

So that's the progress so far!

'I know why I did that - I wanted to...'

I think someone can have absolutely no idea why they did something, with those words.

You don't always get to do what you want. The interupt point between wanting something and yet not just instantly doing it is part of what identifies an adult. More specifically a self enacted interupt point. Self control.

And then maybe you get someone who is ostensibly an adult - but the instant they wanted to do something, they just did it. You can try and tell them they don't know why they were compelled to do it, but they will act like 'because I wanted to' is some kind of answer. There is nothing in between desire and enactment of desire. With nothing in between, there is only ignorance.

If your choosing what food you want to eat or what music your going to buy, it's cool enough to let go and just let desire go straight through to enactment (well, within certain limits with food, for health, and certain limits with music, for financial health). It's not like you have to do it for all things. But then again these exampless are mere frivolities.

Without any interupt between desire and enactment, without being able to describe any process of thought in terms of whether to let a desire 'through', I don't think anyone knows what they are doing, except at the most childish 'I wanna' level.

Side note: Just to give context if you haven't looked at my profile, this is a secondary blog for me. Like a sub folder. Yep, some people have more than one blog - golly! The other one is over here. Much video game and RPG talk there!

Biopunk: Hashing out the theme of a text based browser game

I'm working on a text based browser game with a biopunk theme.

The main thematic element is a loss of humanity, which rears its head as apparent deprotagonisation of choice in terms of certain moral choices in the game.

It has a base line of battling for cash and XP/levels (well, actually it's social combat primarily, so your out-cooling the other guy to beat him. There may be an occasional actual fight, but its a rare exception).

But every so often you get pitched a moral question, like whether to help someone when it'll be out of your way to do so. Basically the code will watch for those situations where the player would do it (cause on some they wont - that's human diversity. But were focusing on where they will act). And it will report that that moral issue is to do with X layer of the brain. Where X is a made up name. And the whole 'layer' thing is a basically a made up approximation. The idea is simply to give a name to the source of these moral issues, rather than...as if they don't exist, yet people do them anyway.

Now there's a range of bio mods you can get. Stuff like a mohawk that can flatten on command, stuff like that*. The thing is, in the latter levels there are 'brain upgrades' and these give you a really, really powerful boost in terms of out-cooling the other guy. Very desirable. Very more. Each one is said, in the description text, to affect a brain layer...

Ah, maybe you see where this is going - I'm not sure if it'll be blunt in the final program.

Also I'm not quite sure how I want to implement it. The first idea is the bluntest.

1#. The moral choice comes up and...there is no other option but for the players character to ignore it. There isn't even a sign of why, suddenly, the option of choice is gone. There's only a note on what layer of the brain this is associated with.

2#. Same as #1, except there's a 'hey, why can't I do it?' link, which informs the player that by getting a brain upgrade that affects layer X, they have ceased to be able to choose in terms of this moral choice that's to do with layer X.

3#. Same as #2 except the link only shows up after say about three moral choices have shown, to let them stew for awhile (assuming they even keep playing and aren't so pissed they stop, but hey...). This only bugs me because I'd have to put in extra code and space in the database to record it. Really it wouldn't be much code or space though, so maybe I'm being bitchy and don't wanna compromise.

4#. Paced out loss of control: Each brain upgrade to a layer adds a percentage chance of losing control on moral issues to do with that issue. Each time the moral choice comes up percentile dice are rolled and if it's below the percentage, the player gets no choice. Get enough brain upgrade on that layer and it'll add up to 100%, so always a fail. But this kind of doesn't hammer in the point - the lower the brain upgrades percentage add, the less likely the effect will show up in play. I mean, there's subtle...and then there's just obtuse.

#5. Strong decay: A brain upgrade to layer X has a percentage chance to affect AND that percentage chance grows over time (probably over three RL days, to capture the players attention) up to 80% or so. Another upgrade in that layer of the brain will by their own base percentage add take it to 100% straight off, or it's own degrading will take it to 100% over time.

#6 Same as #5, but the second implant decays you up to 90%. The third decays you to 95%. The fourth to 99%. The fifth...? Perhaps needlessly complicated, but this lends a sting to play because instead of just being able to shrug ones shoulders and discount the choice as gone, sometimes it will come up and...well, will you dust off the morality from before and act? Or will even the player give into the moral disruption effect and now not act? Whereas before in the moral question he did? However, this undermines the idea that you are altering the very fundiment of ones self - the idea is that you are not affecting yourself, what's happening is that you are replacing part of yourself. Really in terms of a specific moral issue (gawd that's a vague term but I use it a lot, I should give some examples but I'm feeling lazy - just a cliche examples come to mind right now, like helping an old lady carry her shopping, etc. I swear I can do something more nuanced!) if you've chopped out your response to it, then it's gone. It's like having your right hand chopped off - you don't slowly loose your capacity to pick things up with your right limb when that happens. It's just gone! Otherwise I like #6 for it's needling quality.

So, I'm not sure of the exact implementation method. Currently I have a basic social combat system down (essentially the same roll to hit system as a physical combat system - nothing mind blowing) and a chat room I pulled out of another project and smoothed off for this. Overall I'm definitely not looking to make a complicated or deep game. This implementation of theme is where I'm going to do the most deepity deep thinking.



* Personally I'm presenting a divide between external modification and direct brain modification. I'm not sure that getting a mechanical mohawk or such is going to really affect your morality. And it taps into the audience who thinks it's cool, to validate it somewhat.

Bio Mods affect the mind? Bio Mods fuel enthusiasm for Mental Mods?

Looking at physical, bodily bio mods, do they affect the baseline of the mind? Were not talking biomods that let you bend steel bars, but something like a mohawk that can flatten or raise? Or say they don't - but is the enthusiasm for such bodily modification simply going to be translated over to mental modification. Here's a link discussing the idea of body mods with great enthusiasm. I'd post there, but I'm not sure if body mods (of this scale) leads to mental paradigm shifts (as I note below, refering to it as gross physical augmentation).

The three pound brain post on the matter. And here's my comment (with some modification! *boom ting!*):

This seems to be augmentation on the grossly physical level? I mean, mechanical mohawks? Oh dear? If that affects the baseline of the mind, what about people who have lost limbs to accidents, or those who have had massectomies? Are these people dire abberations to what moral structure we carry?

Otherwise I get that that same enthusiasm she shows would, once actual brain changes become available, be used in terms of getting those brain changes made. I mean, look how many people here were keen on getting a tCDS cap? “But, see, but…”. And yeah, not quite realising that the enthusiasm she has/IS now might be blotted out by a brain augmentation.

How does one value the death of value? How can any given frame of inferential reference argue for its own destruction without lapsing into abject contradiction?

It'll be hard even pitching the idea of a contradition. How does a person blind to their position realise they are shifting the goalposts/contradicting themselves, when it feels to them they aren’t moving at all? Point out one way they contradict themselves, they shift value systems/perspective without even acknowleging it until it makes sense to them. Point out the contradiction in that, they shift again.

Quite the contrary, it means leaving them behind. In other words, given ‘semantic parochialism,’ transcending the human means transcending meaning and morality. Or put differently, embracing nihilism.

I don’t get why, particularly given the amazing number of moral attitudes across the planet, that somehow this would be embracing nihilism? How does this show up as the amazing departure after all that? To me it’d seem to be yet another morality being made up – except unlike the previous ones, these wont have undergone millions of years of field testing (and they will potentially be coming at a far faster rate than standard mutation produces)

Is there some sort of organic line that a brain augmenter really will be stepping over and so suddenly bang, they’re doing nihilism? Where does this line come from?
Not that I’m promoting it – as said, fuck all field testing and yeah, the base line, as little of a coherant baseline as can be observed, is being let go of person by person, in doing it.

If science reveals there’s no such thing as meaning and morality, why should anybody give a fuck one way or another?

Or it just makes ‘should’ a funny word.

Why should anybody not give a fuck? The nihilistic expanse sweeps in both directions, not just the ‘why give a fuck’ direction.

I’m still reminded of those riots that apprently happen in christian suburbs when the cops go on strike. Like some sort of ancient, not remembered, yet still acted upon promise…and that promise being explicitly broken.

Link: The False Sun - Wirg Up!

I thought it'd be good, given the pause, to leave a link to Scott Bakker's latest short story: The False Sun

When a sense of morality looks not toward others for cues, but back to that which looks?

The other day I was thinking about what might be called social organisers. It’s the sort of thing that meerkats and other social animals might be described as using, where they react to where they should be and what they should be doing, in terms of the social structure. These sorts of cues come from the other animals in the social group (like alpha males or alpha females) as to what to do.

Okay, so what happens when this social structure, that kinda doesn’t exist but does (as much as stopping at traffic lights doesn’t exist…but does)…what happens if it folds over onto the viewer itself for what to do? Instead of consulting an external source on what actions to do, it consults the same creature that was otherwise supposed to be observing external sources for this info. And suddenly the creature is its own source of morality? Seemingly. Suddenly the external, existant structure (hey, that alpha is gunna bite you if you go near it’s food, that’s real!) becomes what is on the inside? It might explain voices from god, knowing what’s best for others (hello Vox!) and stuff like that. Just take a structure which really operates from scanning for external cues but shift where it scans to the individual who scans. Not too big a jump since its set to look at other individuals like it already. Now, in the hurly burly of a single mind, every cue to do something is a bit like a bull in a china shop, setting off other thoughts (which are being scanned since were scanning the scanner) else which is a cue, which itself sets off thoughts…and so on.

Let's talk about life

Seems a big title really, though I'm not sure this will be a big post.

Okay, lets say you have A, which passes a chemical process to B which passes a chemical process to C, which snatches some chemicals out of it's local environment and pushes them to A.

So you've got this loop.

Is life A, B & C?

I'd argue no. Life is actually the pattern between A, B & C. A, B & C are just the materials the pattern is rendered with.

I think the question is, do patterns (or at least this type of pattern) exist, or just some sort of delusion being pimped? I think life is pretty rare (outside of this planet), but so are some cosmological events. However, life could potentially extend to other planets, while a strange sort of sun or odd orbit of planets will just remain as is (or collapse). However, this does make me think of both cancer (spreading wantonly) and black holes (while the remain the same, their overall effect does want to spread itself around).

I don't have much more to add really, just leaving those question marks there.

But lets take the pattern as being the case. What's interesting is when you change to 'A life'. To a particular life, I think the material matter. Take for example if someone is atomically cloned. This isn't a cellular cloning, where you take a cell with genetic material and let it grow and split and grow, doing the job it does and pretty much ending up with a result much like it's original. No, atomic cloning is where you have some fantastic machine that reads each molecule and much like a photocopier but in 3D and...err, atomically, it builds an exact duplicate (well, as exact as the machine can manage - which is beyond cellular cloning and certainly beyond human detection). So, few, after all that there's a duplicate of another life. Is it the same life? It's the same pattern of life. Can you just kill the original?

Here I think I'll reference causal destiny, simply because it's a cool sounding name. The original life form comes from the birth delivered by another life form, which came from...well, you can see where I'm going. This going back and back, until you hit where a repeating pattern suddenly found itself rendered on a cooling planet. The planet itself, which birthed the chance for rendering, if you go back it's space dust. Then back and back, eventually to the big whatever the hell happened. And then back prior to that or whatever.

Meanwhile the atomic clone - well, lets say the machine has a number of blocks provided to it, full of molecules of various types to draw from in it's process. Kind of like ink in a printer. You look at the history of these blocks and well, it's not the same dealio, obviously.

So, why take this very moment as the whole sum of what you are? To do so means the atomic clones are interchangeable with the original. But if you take the history as being part of the being, that's just not in the atomic clone. No disrespect to atomic clones out there - this is a much separate time line. It's not just that the atomic clone can't pass for the original, it's also that the original can't pass for the atomic clone. Even though to our feeble short term senses and perception, they can.

Does my optimism look big in this?

A comment by Bakker here

Few things more difficult (on a Sunday morning no less!) than trying to figure out why code that seems so clear to you is causing everyone else to gap. My guess is that it’s intentionality that’s the problem?

I’m saying fantasy is a stark cultural expression of the problem of nihilism – perhaps the starkest. What makes worlds worth dying for is their meaningfulness. What makes worlds fantastical (not at all worth dying for) is their meaningfulness. I’m saying the dilemma that confronts us on the question of consciousness (how can the experiential frame of right and wrong be wrong?) also seems to structure the competing cultural roles of scripture and fantasy.

Is the human soul scripture or is it fantasy?

My responce, which I now feel oozes more optimism than I would have expected from myself:

Look, you can pitch the idea of there just being a planet with very, very complicated waves of chemical reactions roiling across it’s surface (and airs) as much as waves of much simpler chemicals roil across it’s seas. And there being alot of evidence, so far, for there being nothing else to the picture. Though the big bang still looms as a big ?

I’ve thought about what if I were trapped in the matrix and knew it? For myself, it seems a matter of caring about something because this is where it’s happening for me. Perhaps if I were immortal I’d not bother, laugh and wait for it to break down around me. But otherwise, what, throw away caring at all because I’m stuck in a joke? Like as if I should chastely hold back caring for the real reality, even if that holding back is the rest of my life? That’d be the last laugh, surely? It reminds me of the christian I spoke to recently, when I asked him why couldn’t he live with uncertainty. His one word utterance of “Death” makes me suspect absolute honesty and direct person to person talking at that very brief point.

What makes worlds worth dying for is their meaningfulness. What makes worlds fantastical (not at all worth dying for) is their meaningfulness.

And the in between? Where you propose a fantasy that strikes someone as something they would like to care about in the real world? Particularly if we go back in time a bit and have the idea of female equality, for example. Suffragette fantasy eventually seeps into a reality people will, well, not die for, but sacrifice some of their finite lifespan for? Men don’t want to waste their lives doing the dishes, but now even my dad does a fair bit.

This is a choice because it’s ‘a fantasy’ so you can slowly ruminate on it all on how it feels or might feel, rather than jump to an immediate knee jerk responce dictated by actual circumstance because of darwinistic instinct to survive? You can even just forget it. As opposed to religious scripture, which seeks to dictate actual circumstance.

But all that’s a kind of wank. It doesn’t matter except on the apparent fact people dare to care about stuff to begin with. Millions out there, daring – it’s really hard to comprehend.

Too feel good an assessment?

Ugh! Cringe! Still, it's like turning over earth, gotta start somewhere even though after the first spadefull it still looks a mess of weeds and the spade just clanged against a rock anyway.

I rather like my chemical waves image. I think it's clear cut, helps start from a fresh sheet of paper. Oh, but why ever start if everythings that way? As I say, I think I'm bloody minded.

I would like to say that my 'make what you can of the matrix' comment actually has a backfire condition I think, in terms of living inside man made systems. As in, if you start treating capitalism (or heck, probably any old 'ism) as the natural order of things, then you start advocating for the choices of someone, while genuinely thinking your not because "it's the nature of things".

Occasionally I wonder if making what I can of this world is somehow advocating for some alien thingie or others intent. If I were a writer of some kind, I could flesh that out into a story. But I feel blank, maybe the N word* creeps up me in feeling no impulse to bang it out and certainly anyone who writes seems to be miles ahead of me. If I wanted to change someones mind, can't I just say? If I wanted to write entertainment, well I don't know how to and learning seems an exercise in not wanting to change someones mind.

I think there was more I wanted to give disclaimers for, but I'm A: tired of writing now and B: have given some impression of embarressment. Not that I think the structure has merit, but I feel a bit

when saying it.

* I mean nihilism? What did you...did you think I meant Nig...wait, we can't say that! Nihilism is fine to say in public but there is a limit...ah, the joys of this semantic landscape...

If the other kids were jumping off a bridge...

Some highlights of a recent "Come up to you in a public space and talk about god" encounter. Cherry picked, of course (to save you the effort! ;) )

Me: "So, it's like jumping off a bridge then?"
"YES!"

Didn't see that one coming, I admit

"Why can't you live in uncertainty"
"Death!"

Followed with alot of rambling related to his god idea, but the poor guy had had a dangerous illness in the past. Were all cornered animals and sometimes when the corner shrinks in fast...

Me: "Basically if your god tells you to do something, you just would. So you've given up any sense of personal responsiblity?"
"Why wouldn't I?"

But you know what got me? After twenty minutes (I know it was twenty minutes because I had started my stopwatch prior, for another thing entirely) I said I had to go now. And he just grunted something and abruptly walked away. Now I looked after him as he went and...I wasn't there, to him, anymore. Like it was nothing? Or was it rage, like this account? Maybe I'm just being sensitive and making it up, but I felt a real severance of connection there.

Some older lady came past and during the convo said "God!? Bah!", which got a "How do you think god feels about that?". Good on you older lady, you've more gumption that me! And besides, supposed builder of entire universes is upset by a bah? It kind of becomes clear who is being upset and exactly where they are (hint: in a nearby three pound brain).

'Athiest'

I really find the term 'Athiest' kind of weird - like you have to have a name to distinguish yourself from those who have adopted a religion?

Some people have tatoos, for example. They are 'Tatooed'. But you don't have a name for people who don't have tatoos. They aren't called 'Tatoo athiests'.

In a way I think athieism practice just supports religious behaviour.

Or have the religious so skewed this species thoughts that it goes from the exception to inverting itself to being the default and so....you get another kind of exception - who has to name themselves now. So they name themselves athiests?

I guess, though, that everyone thinks of themselves the default and the other guy making the exception (except when we think what weve done is great, then were 'exceptional'!).

But really, when a new person boots up/is born, I think there's a blank there*. Really I see that as the default.

* Along with alot of inclinations toward instinctive behaviours - including, often enough, following an alpha male. Sometimes a really, really powerful alpha male. Sometimes they wear a cape and live in an ice fortress, sometimes they wear a toga and live on a cloud. But always a strong inclination to follow the alpha (actually, alpha females too).

A vox on you!...or, on me?

From here

Bakker doesn’t realize that what he decries as “certainty” is actually nothing more than experience-informed probability calculation and pattern recognition. There is no reason one cannot take a logically sound position with confidence without having to assume the total impossibility of error in doing so.

You know, this repeated some of my own wording for how I navigate life, in terms of working from probables – which creeped me out a bit.

UPDATE – Sweet Friedrich Nietzsche, but R. Scott Bakker really can be a wangsty little girl. Now he’s whining that I have “lot’s and lot’s of theories” about him, which is ironic considering the amount of erroneous psychobabble he has been directing in my direction from the start. I have no theories, I have merely read his books and observed his behavior.

Except does he practice it? He has no theories? Yet to say something isn’t a theory is to assume the total impossiblity of error in doing so?

I mean, the wording above is actually quite subtle – “There is no reason one cannot take a logically sound position with confidence without having to assume the total impossibility of error in doing so.”

Yes, so he says there’s not reason you can’t do that. He’s not actually saying he does it, in saying so, though.
But lets read it charitably, for a moment. What does it mean when he says he simply acts as if he knows?

Does that fire off a belief instinct in others to believe him? Does it fire it off inside himself?

Can you say “Everything I say might be wrong” then go on for six years speaking only as if your right, relying on one disclaimer utterance from years prior? Does this work?

And because everyone else prudently avoided bringing it up…

Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!

Is he just having us on? Everyone did read the sharks with lasers bit, didn’t they?

The primary difference between Bakker and me is that he insists on operating in relative ignorance while avoiding the use of objective metrics that can be verified by third parties.

This isn't any method used in the practice of science? Which third parties? The ones of his choosing?

If you ask a thousand people to measure something by using a certain metric and they all report the same result, you probably have an objective metric.

The pornography observation about the first book would also be reported by every single person over a sample of a thousand or more people? This is obviously not the case?

Gravitus of Significance - or - "Don't stand in the fire!"

Ages ago I had this conversation on the RPG.net forums with a guy. The thread was about alot of stuff, but it got to the point where the example was something like this: Every round something is in the fire, it has a 25% chance of being burned.

And basically two camps came about, over whether that 25% stacked. Some said it did and some say it didn't. I'll go with the latter, because I'm not part of that camp and so its interesting.

Basically, IIRC, their arguement that the 25% chance in one round in no way correlates with the 25% chance in the next round. They aren't connected, they'd say. They don't stack. They don't add up to a greater chance. It's only ever 25%, into perpetuity.


Of course, they were saying it from the safe space of it being a made up world. But regardless, I can allllmost humour this perception in my head. Which makes it interesting.

The question is, is the idea of one being alive atleast partially the instinct/reflex to stack those odds?

I can almost frame it in my head, but it's hard to do. That the sum of 'you' is the conclusion, if you were standing in the fire, the odds ADD UP? That it's NOT the same percentage every single round. That it's MORE than that!?

A logica construct insisting that this instance does adds up, when actually it doesn't (and remember, I'm in the camp that said it does add up). And if this logica construct ever resolved itself with the rest of the universe, it would flatten into it (instead of being an abberant bulge) and instead simply state there is no difference between one round and the next? Harmony with the universe means thinking from the frame that when your standing in the fire, the moments do not add?


And yeah, 'logica' is made up, but it sounds more fun that way...