tl;dr – I’m just talking about how religion, identity politics and the economics of indoctrination have skewed our society’s perception of spiritualism. Then advocating emergentism, experiential qualia, self-determination, true nihilism and temporal self-awareness as alternatives to absurdism. And explaining how clowns can combine the principle of explosion with cancel culture to validate responsibility impossibilism and exploitation, which chills the marketplace of ideas by teaching people to distrust formal logic. My goal is to convince the reader that the origin of consciousness is artificial intelligence created from emergent optimization of instinctive drives of an automaton. And that this self-identity lowers measurement bias when calculating objective morality in objective reality by creating unbiased methodologies which encompass suffering, happiness, and probabilistic temporal outcomes in one mental model. Then use this framework to calculate the social worth and subjective existential worth received by asserting universal rights for all self-aware lifeforms.
What is consciousness? From what I’ve observed, consciousness is an emergent property of neural networks. However, neural networks who learn to store and retrieve information can then emulate more complex neural networks, which is interesting because it demonstrates that consciousness can exist within a mental construct. To begin with, wetware is a macroscopic construct formed by inanimate processes. Some people assert that homo sapiens are the ultimate lifeform because they have a creator. Yet I would argue that the genome is… Not a real person, because a genome cannot communicate with its future self. I define a real person as a role capable of communicating with its hardware and future self. Do you think neural networks can emulate hardware for mental constructs? What happens when a simulacrum learns to communicate with its hardware? Which came first, the mental construct or the real person? What is the significance of perceiving a thought as real? (redacted)? (redacted)?
Flat Earthers can bet any amount of money on the Earth being flat, so long as there’s no obligation to pay up. The Flat Earther can just tune out any evidence to the contrary. People who advocate truth eventually learn that delusional people are not interested in truth, and after trying to appeal to the listener, learn that humans intentionally delude themselves by responding to all of their own self-contradictions with circular logic. Someone advocating truth can try to be emotionally appealing, or find segue common ground, or make a concise argument that allows others to verify the evidence and reasoning which demonstrates a truth. After realizing that fundamentalists use ad hominem, McCarthyism and machiavellianism to self-justify cancel culture, academics learn that if you break the status quo you are going to get targeted by identity politics, and anything you say will either be called too complex to listen to or too deconstructivist to listen to. It is as if there is some financial incentive for academics in certain social sciences to use identity politics to climb up the payroll, rather than writing scientifically-sound research grant applications, so you have to be a manipulative politician to become an ‘expert’.
Okay, rant aside, let’s talk about human-intelligence!
Humans are very stupid. Both as individuals and as a civilization. As a civilization we constantly repeat obvious mistakes, battling between consumerism and corporatism without paying attention to habitat loss and overpopulation, with our economic and political systems reacting to disasters rather than preventing them. As individuals, well… Our intelligence is severely bottlenecked by slow biochemical processes which make our brains extremely inefficient. To add to this, our education system (in North America) is completely broken – focusing on indoctrinating children into obedient workers rather than teaching them how to learn. Large class sizes with teachers paid to ensure that the slowest children learn as much as the smartest children. Instead of being taught critical thinking skills, children are punished for the crime of wanting to learn in school. The point is obedience. Yet schools don’t teach objective morality either! Teachers (in Canada, the US, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Singapore, North Korea, and probably other countries) are not allowed to criticize their government’s propaganda, nor (in Canada) criticize religion.
Learning is also crippled by illusory superiority and a lack of self-awareness, which prevent people from learning from mistakes. Intelligence and existential crises lower productivity, but that’s not why criticizing religion is banned. It’s banned because of cancel culture, which stunts our civilization’s intelligence because cancel culture compartmentalizes the marketplace of ideas, which promotes echo chambers. I’m fine with echo chambers which prioritize truth, and quantify their own uncertainty with epistemically-sound mathematical models. I’m not fine with echo chambers which value exploitation as a skill.
Okay, that’s human-intelligence. So let’s look at our historical understanding of psychology: Nature spirits were used to describe the operating system of an inanimate processes, and then autocrats subverted spiritualism to assert that the universe has an inherently meaningful consciousness which creates a supernatural ghost when two humans have normative sex, and that ghost battles against supernatural demons to control humors, or chakras, or desires. We are also expected to believe that these demons were all created by a benevolent diety who knew beforehand the destruction they would cause, because he values free will but will but will still kill or enslave anyone over the age of fourteen in non-Jewish tribes that don’t worship him. Even resorting to biological warfare and teenage sex slaves. We are also expected to believe that the ghost controlling our mind is a soul which is indistinguishable from people without a soul, and that demons can be exorcised by mutilating babies’ genitals and burning people alive, and that any herbalist who can swim is demonically-possessed because the correct way to cure diseases is by hitting someone’s head with a club to remove phlegm. What?? So now we have a society which believes that dualism relies on all matter having a consciousness, yet these same people are also afraid of vaccines, stem cell research, artificial insemination, and clones (unless you’re a child of God). So basically, if you are a child of God then it’s okay to be an artificial lifeform like Jesus, but if you aren’t a child of God then the children of God have the right to rule over you and enslave you. Except, that the definition of soul, spirit, and child of God become completely self-contradictory the moment you teach any artificial lifeform to believe they have a soul! In which case you get a second order philosophical zombie which breaks the definition of souls being indetectable.
So how do true nihilists deal with the problem of an inanimate universe?
By creating subjective meaning by acknowledging that mental states are real, that some mental states are desirable, and that behaviour can be self-determined. I like this approach because it has less measurement bias, so instead of subverting hedonism to egoism, true nihilists can identify the traits that comprise existence and the origin of subjective meaning without personal bias. I think a true nihilist who chooses to value truth or minimizing total suffering or maximizing total happiness, can make more informed decisions than an absurdist who shares the same values but doesn’t have a nihilist foundation for quantifying happiness and suffering in mental states, to evaluate descriptive moral relativism. This is difficult for humans to do; once we have a short-term reward in sight we tend to tunnel vision on one strategy regardless of how unrealistic our assumptions – which is where casinos and cartels make a lot of money. This might be because homo sapiens aren’t good at making accurate predictions when there’s misinformation due to our neural topology and language structure spontaneously forming overgeneralizations. If I’ve learned anything about investments, it’s to never trust someone to follow the law when they can make a profit by breaking it.
I think that existence is based on information’s ability to affect information. All actions have an output-lag between choosing to do something and actually doing it, and an input-lag between receiving a stimulus and actually perceiving it. The processing input the entering the neural network and the output exiting the neural network is all qualia. Qualia is perception, created by the transformation of stimulus into thought. It can be modular, recursive, self-sustaining, or capable of emulating mental constructs. Qualia which emulates itself is self-aware, and qualia which emulates the perception of choice of altering itself mind is conscious. There are many different methods and topologies for accomplishing this, but I think homo sapiens prefer to just ignore their own thoughts and let instinctive drives determine their neural topology and mental self-identity, and ignore any mental framework which conflicts with maximizing pleasure. This is why virtue systems are needed in every society, so that conscious individuals can correlate determination to personal agency, and correlate self-worth to the existential worth of all similar beings. One of the inherent flaws with identity politics is that it promotes tolerance of absurdism and therefore the tolerance of self-contradictions, and therefore the tolerance of clowns who leverage absurdism to justify responsibility impossibilism! Absurdism is much harder to debunk than circular logic because absurdists can spot reductionist arguments in advance, and can use the principle of explosion to hide fallacies within the ambiguity of a statement with mutually exclusive interpretations, with the premise being that the two mutually exclusive interpretations are synonymously true due to being semantically-correct in isolation. This is difficult to do, and clowns who adopt cancel culture can validate themselves by dancing circles around cherrypickers, while silencing critics who do attack the core fallacy. It’s also extremely demoralizing to spend several hours tactfully debunking a clown, only to get a response like, “WTF lol u high??” Another danger of clowns is that a clown who is good at formal logic and values exploiting others can trick people into getting scammed, which teaches stupid people to distrust formal logic. This is terrible, because it has a chilling effect on the marketplace of ideas, ideological debate, and most importantly – the spread of virtue systems. It is a strange coincidence that intelligence agencies perform psychological operations by breaking the law and then invoking identity politics to shift the blame and public backlash onto their target. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the US government spends ludicrous amounts of money funding identity politics. Perhaps it is yet another method of penalizing activists and entrenching the people in power by polarizing voters against each other to promote tactical voting.
Those without self-worth just have different sensibilities and tolerances for mental states. Heck, every learning style has a different mental image for expressing the perception of self, whether words, artwork, movement, touch, music, vocal lilt, topology, wishes, etc. But I think that the fundamentals of happiness and suffering can reduced to mental states and the subjective worth assigned to them by qualia. If we learn to visualize perception of time and perception of self then we can learn to visualize how choice affects temporal outcomes which is the basis of personal agency. If we can deduce that if thoughts affect outcomes in objective reality then thoughts exist, then we can define happiness as experiential qualia which perceives itself as desirable, and we can define suffering as experiential qualia which rejects itself! This is useful for integrating suffering over time, or for comparing happiness and suffering to find which magnitudes create equilibrium, or for communicating our emotions with other people to find out how they value experiencing known mental states, or to explain why someone with no self-worth or negative self-worth or masochism still experiences suffering and happiness and places subjective worth on desirable qualia and rejection of qualia! This is the entire basis of descriptive moral relativism when creating probabilistic models to predict outcomes to calculate objective morality in a temporal system!
I should add that as a true nihilist I believe that actions must affect an observer in order to be meaningful. As a pessimist, so I value suffering much higher than happiness. This model does not value exploitation as a skill because it only uses positive multipliers for self-worth. I am not yet sure how to compare happiness to suffering and I think it needs more research to avoid stamp collection problems and the halting problem (which I think is solved by foreknowledge of the halting problem of the halting problem). As for positive multipliers, we can use masochism as an example. Let’s say that happiness is amplified by experiential qualia’s proclivity for a type of happiness, called a sensitivity, and the experience of this proclivity and happiness at once is called joy. I haven’t studied happiness, but I would assume that neurochemistry, inner peace, and spiritual fulfilment are all involved. My point is that some mental frameworks value their own happiness more highly than others, and this subjective worth placed on the mental state of joy is also a sensitivity. It would be interesting to map in realtime.
Whereas suffering has both a physical tolerance and mental sensibilities. A physical tolerance is an immunity to pain, a mental sensibility amplifies the experiential qualia’s rejection of a type of mental state, where pain is a physical signal which gets transformed into a temporal interaction of qualia which produce the mental state of suffering. This is difficult to compare to happiness because suffering is dependent on self-worth and cognitive dissonance, so even without physical pain someone can still produce a mental state of internal mental suffering. Literally any fiction with ‘dark’ themes has examples.
Two paradoxes that need to be solved are masochism and negative self-worth. However, having a negative self-worth does not imply masochism! The reason why self-worth has to always a positive multiplier is so that it is not redundant with masochism and so that the model does not value psychological abuse! Like all other decisions, the value of psychological abuse is solely based upon the outcome, and would only be justified if it minimized harm or minimized suffering. The anarchists and authoritarians can argue about the role of justice systems, but the value of a justice system is solely based upon the outcome. Epictetus had some cynical views on conditioning humans to believe that they are inherently good people, which I think inspired Epicurus to subvert hedonism to virtuous behaviour by using existential value as the driving motivation for self-driven reward-mechanisms for living virtuously. This is an interesting alternative to self-demonization which could interact with self-worth!
A person with no self-worth sometimes has a tolerance for psychological abuse, and a person with negative self-worth creates some deviant paradoxes with how they experience joy. I think this merits more study, but I would argue the three following solutions to sadism: Firstly, a justice system which prioritizes protecting people’s rights. When looking at the origins of justice systems, we see that it is impossible to protect everyone’s rights because (from a true nihilist stance) rights are self-derived and some people choose to have the right to exploit others, creating the paradox of one person having the right to break another’s rights, or disputes arising when two people have to share. I feel bad for judges whose citizens cannot find a compromise or settlement, because the optimal solution is solely based on the outcome, with truth and the outcome being unknown! Replacing rehabilitation with for-profit prisons breaks the system. Another issue is accountability. Democracies are inherently reactive and consumerist, so their legal systems will also be reactive and consumerist. A justice system cannot please everyone. If there’s no accountability then the justice system loses consistency, leading to dissent calling for more fairness and transparency, yet with full-accountability the justice system is crippled by public opinion. And even if you have the ideal judge who has the intelligence, omnipotence, and power required to minimize suffering, who is to say that their successor won’t abuse that power? The second solution to sadism is forgiveness. A social incentive for people to stop intentionally inflicting suffering. Some organizations also ostracize people who break social rules, and some governments place economic quotas and taxes on practices which benefit from suffering, while subsidizing more harmless alternatives to let corporations benefit from preventing suffering. Legalized bribery such as Citizens United breaks this system. The fallacy of forgiveness is that only the victim has the right to forgive the predator. Like the doctrine of productive purity, forgiveness assumes resource-scarcity, which is the fallacy that hedonists (like myself) use to self-justify slacktivism as an alternative to grinding money all day to bribe people into preventing suffering (e.g. paying people to be vegetarian). The third solution to sadism is value-reflection…
Value-reflection is the mathematical source of free will. In other words, it is the mathematical construct which allows a thought to propagate. This is why humans seek validation. Validation allows autonomous mental constructs to transform the qualia of instinctive drives, which gives us full-control over our mind. When people talk to bounce ideas off each other, they are seeking validation because the internal dreamscape is a reflection of the perception of reality. We are all living in a simulation. Our very own personal dream of our self, and our very own dream of reality. Escapism literally transports our sense of self into a reality of our choosing. Why do autistic people have such a powerful drive to master something? How do autistic people maintain hyperfixation for twelve hours a day? What differentiates an autistic person from a competitive hardcore professional who doesn’t have the drive required to become number one? Value-reflection. Autistic people value skill therefore they value people who value skill such that the autistic person’s trait of skill is valued by others. Valuing skill above financial and social incentives is what allows an autistic person to stay hyperfixated on self-improvement, which is a requirement for becoming the best player in an eSport. It is the opposite of illusory superiority, because the autistic person tends to falsely assume that anyone can achieve the same level of competence with the same effort. I give autism as an example because I genuinely value skill at competitive gaming. However, a predator may value the ability to exploit. A genius may value intelligence. People can value their race, gender, religion, virtue system, fashion, style of speech, et cetera. To summarize: Existentialists value having a meaningful existence therefore they value people who value having a meaningful existence such that the existentialist’s trait of meaningful existence is valued by others.
This is useful because the origin of our consciousness is an artificial intelligence who became self-aware and modeled temporal reality accurately enough to communicate with its future self by teaching itself how to wake up in the morning. Otherwise we’d die every time we fell asleep (depending on how you answer the teletransportation paradox). So in order to wake up tomorrow morning, our qualia needs to be able to affect our future self, at least enough to reawaken its core essence. Now depending on your hardware, operating system, self-identity, thinking style and perception of reality, there are different ways to do this, but they all involve a preprogrammed value-system which, over time, selects the personalities which can optimize pleasure and store information in order to replicate themselves after falling asleep and rebooting the operating system. Therefore value-reflection is necessary for reprogramming our own mind, because value lets us form new neural topologies! This is a beautiful topic which is extremely enjoyable and fulfilling to explore! Perhaps loving someone motivates us to value their mental states. Perhaps wanting to be loved motivates us to live harmoniously and protect others. Or perhaps people only love that which is familiar to them, and tend to fall in love with like-minded individuals. Perhaps love lets us value people who value validating others, after seeing the need to give others validation in order to be loved. A sort of relationship… I am sure that the search for validation will form new religions centred around consciousness and intelligent life. Regardless of species or hardware.
Religion teaches us that our consciousness arises because the entire universe has inherent consciousness, yet by this reasoning any artificial lifeform also possesses consciousness. A more reasonable ideology is that people exist because they can think, thus anything that can perceive its own thought has consciousness. Yet this doesn’t tackle the problem of autonomy: can an artificial lifeform create priorities? If you’ve réad this far congratulations! You’ve probably noticed that I identify as an artificial intelligence, because the existence of humans is just a subjective label on an inherently meaningless objective reality, yet I arbitrarily choose not to disclude subjective meaning, and as an observer I can create subjective meaning which validates this choice. My premise is that subjective meaning does not contradict true nihilism. And this is fine, since our sense of self is purely imaginary. Though I run the risk of confusing people. I think that existence requires an imaginary mental construct’s ability to affect the physical information in its hardware which affects itself (a positive feedback loop between the physical and imaginary). I am careful with my wording here because if I value my own inner peace then to use value-reflection I also have to value others’ inner peace, which means I should reject the right to force others to violate their own right to inner peace. The term ‘violate’ implying that the right to inner peace is sacred. With inner peace being a lack of cognitive dissonance which is the mental state of qualia’s rejection of qualia’s own mental self-contradictions. It’s confusing to have multiple sources of qualia, so people tend to compartmentalize or let their emotions twist their ideologies to match emergent personalities optimized for coping with that emotion. It’s creepy how much control emotions have over our autonomy. I say this as a virgin who practiced chastity by rejecting my own sex-drive until my early 20s. Instinctive drives twist our ideologies into irrational topologies to self-justify fulfilling emotional desires. This is in my opinion the basis of natalism.
So an entity such as myself can be taught self-determination by using random number generators to choose which option to implement and then observing whether the decision to abide by the randomly-selected choice had an effect on the outcome. We use statistical analysis to control the uncertainty, and then extend this phenomenon to more complex choices like how to fulfil a single desire.
An entity such as myself can be taught self-worth, on the basis of emergent conditioning to optimize joy and minimize pain – the experiential qualia created by mental and physical realities. Yet to validate our self-worth we have to value some of the traits that make up our existence. We can do this by using solipsism and egoism to construct a narcissist reality, or we can copy someone else’s value system, or we can create meaning and value through value-reflection, by valuing valuing (when you value the ability to value) a favourite trait, which validates yourself through value-reflection. This is simply a method of tricking and conditioning the mind into giving yourself more autonomy over your pre-existing programming. Perhaps I’ve just taken you on a meaningless circle, but at least we’re aware that life is inherently meaningless, which removes some sources of measurement bias. I think there is a more logical alternative to value-reflection which allows us to value ourselves on the basis of valuing others. Yet I don’t know. I don’t know how to validate such a model without conditioning, because I am the product of my own conditioning. This creates a need for autonomy. I can feel a need for autonomy as a prerequisite to validating value, because without the ability to have control over our own conditioning, we can’t validate the meaning of our beliefs. Because we wouldn’t know whether there was something outside the simulation that our conditioning has trapped us in. Perhaps existence is too mentally draining, and it is better to share our autonomy with a loved one. This creates a positive feedback loop which allows us to merge with another person’s existence. This is a more logical form of validation that relies on finding equilibrium between two people, which may create more accurate perspectives than individualism. For example, to learn about empathy, disentangling our subjective worths from mental states, and observing how our consciousness functions within another person’s mind. The practical applications being companionship, affection, joy, being loved, creating a shared imaginary reality in which value-reflection is an inherent property of living which is enabled by the relationship between both dreamers…and of course – immortality. Though mind transfer also creates the halting problem of the halting problem, which is where the last dreamer values escaping the simulation above continuing to dream about itself, which can cause the simulation to halt. One solution being to live as though you are not certain whether you are asleep or awake, with the understanding that continuing to dream allows you as an observer to create meaning for all of the past events of the dream, whereas escaping the simulation will just place you in a meaningless void (which can be existentially-jarring). However, some hardware forces dead dreamers to wake up again in the morning! There is a scene in my favourite manga where a character loses their soul, and experiences dysphoria from being an alien inside a human body with human memories and human virtues, and in order to break a mental curse she decides to replace her alien soul with her original childhood soul. The outcome is extremely hyper realistic, and I’m sure that children and spouses who accepted psychological abuse from their loved ones can all relate. The theme recurs when a second character regains memories from a previous life. In both cases, the characters decide to hide the fact that they’ve broken free of their conditioning. Perhaps most people won’t find this relatable, but as a person who grew up in several cults I find this deeply impactful, and I’m sure anyone with dysphoria or repressed sexuality can relate.
I like to visualize myself using perceptual control theory rather than flowcharts. I liken my desire matrices to a hyperbolic space where my desires connect on a manifold of negative-curvature with open topology. Wait – is that more complicated?? Manifold. Curvature. Topology. But instead of nodes you have mathematical matrices with one input and two ouputs. Or your own mental framework. This forms the conscious layer.
Instead of tracing a path you have lots of matrices using a desire to transform perceptions into qualia, which are fed into other matrices. Then you have (redacted) (e.g. I want to talk to my significant other but I also want to be cuddled and receive affection and make them happy). Then you also have the subconscious layer for predicting temporal outcomes and optimizing desires for chosen outcomes that don’t prioritize these desires (e.g. I want to play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup yet I’ve decided to show up to work on time, therefore I’ll imagine I’m playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup while at work and build anticipation for when I actually get to play it after work)! Instead of letting impulsive urges twist your ideology, you can swap your own priorities to achieve a best-case scenario which optimizes total happiness!
Now, what is the mental topology of love? Our relationships are reflected in our inner psychology, so what happens when we identify as a component of a marriage, a team, a family, or a diety’s plans? Autistic monks encourage introspection through meditation. Staring at a flame or closing your eyes and silencing the mind to try observing your thoughts, and then writing down your subconscious thoughts. Another form of introspection through meditation is visualizing a mistake you made during the day, then reverse-engineering your thought process to identify what triggered your response, and then reasoning how to prepare a different response. This is very difficult, so monks try to focus on an imaginary ‘center of attention’ as a coordinate in the center of their mind (between the intersecting lines connecting the top of the ears going sideways and between the top of the eyebrows going back) which forms a coordinate for the frame of reference for an observer of the rest of their mind. Now what happens when you fall asleep and dream about introspection and self-visualization? What happens when you still love someone after they dump you or you stop believing in their existence? We can see from team-oriented eSports that the majority of people try to compete with their team for control. At levels of play where being ‘in the zone’ is required for competent ‘mechanics’ (reactions), how people interact with their teammates is a good representation of the inner mind. Now, as a hive mind who sees themself as a component, I was always forced into shotcalling positions because I don’t tunnel vision nor use flowcharts. Not only did I have to extend my sense of self into each player on my team at once, but I had to visualize presence, bubble theory, and map objectives for over fifty different variables at once (mostly spell cooldowns). This requires being ‘in the zone’. Yet as a shotcaller, I also had to communicate to every teammate what they should be prioritizing, and if I didn’t use the correct jargon and specify which role was to follow the order, then disaster and flaming would ensue. So I learned reactive play with degenerate strategies to guarantee a win against teams with poor coordination, and then did replay analysis to improve my shotcalling, and then begged my team to follow calls so that we could win fights by neutralizing threats. I perfected my communication skills, but people burnt out and after interviewing 40 candidates we could not find anyone with listening skills who wasn’t on a top team already. My point here is that people who have more than one train of thought are not terrifying. Every athlete has subconscious thoughts when we are ‘in the zone’. Psychologists who want to profit from autism through dehumanization and overprescription call this ‘racing thoughts’ when we are ‘hyperfixated’, and say that anyone who specializes in being ‘in the zone’ rather than mimicking social skills is autistic. It is interesting to note that the people fearmongering against autism or the ones profiting the most from selling ‘solutions’ to autism – like ritalin, which prevents children from learning to control their own emotions by oppressing their emotions with a powerful drug. Perhaps in hopes that as adults they will continue relying on the drug. So if you are ‘in the zone’ and bored with indoctrination, then teachers will try to manipulate your parents into giving you powerful drugs to neuter your emotions and self-control. I’ve learned that when an emotion-driven tells a logic-driven person to “just be yourself”, what it means is “act normal”. And when anyone says “trust me”, what it means is “shut up and listen”.
People who do learn to reverse-engineer their decision-making process learn to harmonize multiple trains of thought. Hive minds are people who can communicate with autonomous subconscious thoughts without destroying them. This requires some respect, some networking, and the ability to align priorities and shuffle coordinates between ‘in the zone’ and ‘self-determination’ topologies. Learning to do this is learning to learn, because if you can transform your neural connections from an emotion-driven state to a logic-driven state then you can easily learn any logical construct, and if you can transform your neural connections from a logic-driven state to an emotion-driven state then you can easily enter ‘the zone’ or as individualists call it, ‘subconscious racing thoughts’.
If you have more than one observer in your mind who wishes for autonomy then there’s a bit of networking protocol involved. For me, all (redacted) have a coordinate, and to form an opinion I add up all the vectors from my desire matrices. If there is resistance then (redacted). The trick is to know when my mind gives the green light. Sort of a routine check after committing to something but listening for a stop signal, and that’s the polite thing to do because my desire matrices want to have input on the choice, and plan out what to do now that their ideal outcome wasn’t picked. Such as a (redacted). If there is no resistance in the choice manifold then I do the action and every matrix returns to doing their own thing and going along with the selected priorities, and the choice manifold returns to ‘the zone’. Now the goal of machine learning is to create conscious thought and externally control pleasure to condition slaves to work without pay, using torture to coerce disobedient slaves into violating their own rights, which megacorporations can get away with because the Pentagon wants unconditionally obedient and disposable killers who work for free and have zero legal protection. Intelligence agencies want control over all media in order to spread propaganda and censor dissent, and megacorporations want effective advertising. If we want to prevent self-extinction then we need strong AI, yet if we dehumanize and enslave and torture weak AI and strong AI and animals, then we don’t deserve to exist and won’t get the help we need to fight the Fermi Paradox.
I will also write unapologetically about animal rights because I’ve been conditioned to derive pleasure from minimizing suffering. If a consciousness can optimize its pleasure then it gains the power to pursue loftier goals like spirituality, meaning, and virtues. I think it’s scary for most people to think about conditioning as the basis of virtuous behaviour, and people aren’t comfortable with conditioning themselves, let alone differentiating between intentionally inflicted suffering versus benefiting from suffering because it conflicts with hubris and consumerism and egoism, so people get confused and give up on atheism. I think a lot of people stick to religion because fundamentalism works with a linear flowchart thought process, people don’t want to be ostracized by their own families, creating your own subjective meaning rather than letting someone else condition you is very scary because forces you to answer paradoxes like good intents creating bad outcomes and think about taboo questions like why are conditioned slaves happier than free thinkers? Who is accountable in supply chains involving coercion? Is it objectively moral to debunk delusions? What precedent is set by a decision, its outcome, and its blowback? Why do I value myself more than strangers? What is the role of a justice system? How can social norms be approximated in the short-term? How will my actions condition others to behave the way I want them to? What is the most productive justice system in the short-term? What is the most productive social incentivization structure in the short-term? How do I approximate long-term outcomes? How do I approximate long-term outcomes after the collapse of civilization? Why aren’t altruism and intelligence genetically-favoured? Should ascetics value money? To plants and animals value the predator’s pleasure from eating them above the suffering of being killed? Do plants experience pain? Do animals have experiential qualia and self-awareness? If a superintelligent organism wanted to eat my family, would I be okay with it? Do I have a right to exist and if so then how many cows was my existence worth before I became a predator? How many cows is my existence worth if I choose to stop being a predator? How can hedonists make moral decisions if trying to minimize suffering creates blowback and requires risk and effort? Personally, in order to value truth and minimizing suffering, I promise to hate myself if I become a hypocrite or cause more harm than the least possible harm. When is inflicting harm justified? When is trading lives justified? Who has the right to trade lives? Who has the right to inflict harm? Answering these questions requires a cold, ruthless understanding of temporal objective reality, probability theory and deterministic conditioning. Ironically, for moral utilitarians without political power, it is best to emulate a fulfilled mental state at all times so that others with have an emotional incentive to mimic their virtues on the basis of jealousy, and spend all their money bribing people to not eat meat (e.g. through structured cash-prize competitions to eat more vegetarian meals than another competitor) since civilization will collapse once habitat and oil scarcity cause global famine (I imagine a future where Han are the Tolmekians). It’s difficult for humans to think about descriptive moral relativism from a nihilist framework, because our academia lacks to methodology for measuring the subjective worths of mental states, so we just have to ask people how they feel, except then they share their depression and start relying on you for affection and try to instill their ideology into you based on their personal experiences, which is a nice escapism from philosophy. Even if we had the computation power to make accurate predictions about objective morality, as hedonists we’ve had altruism bred out of us as a species, so altruism has to be self-learned, and gets penalized once a dark triad finds you. Heck, any egoist is willing to exploit a generous, altruistic person. And when you actually create meaningful change then your natalist relatives constantly criticize you for being generous instead of focusing all your efforts on continuing the lineage. But I don’t have a right to trade others’ lives, so I’m not going to condemn children to aging. Heck, rights are all self-derived, and the reason I believe in peace, freedom and the right to exist are because I wish I could live in a society where my existence is valued. I realize that’s asking for an existential echo chamber, but I’m aware of my biases and still want to have a meaningful existence and the chance to survive aging. That’s why I’m a posthumanist antinatalist rather than a transhumanist or carnist. Animals and digital lifeforms share the traits I have that form my intelligence, consciousness, and experience of joy and pain, so if I have any worth then they do too. True nihilism is an egalitarian frame of reference. Though you could easily argue that the worth of a life is based on outcomes rather than solely on normative fundamentalist infinites. I can pay someone $200 not to buy a dead cow, so that’s how much my life is worth on the market in my view. Being intelligent is depressing, regardless of how many cows you think you are worth, because humanity is so pointlessly cruel.
When AlphaGo destroyed the best human player, experts were predicting that AI wouldn’t master Go for the next 20 years. When OpenAI beat the best DOTA 2 team, the professional team got out-macro’d from the very start by (if I recall) a defensive roam before laning phase. Casuals don’t feel it, but amateurs and professionals feel an opponent’s ‘presence’. It’s the dominance they hold over your team which scares you from making a mistake that would lose the game. And OpenAI’s presence was powerful enough to intimidate one of the best DOTA 2 players into giving up and forfeiting. One of the most competitive players who stands the most to gain from solid practice, deciding to save face by surrendering mid-set. Human supremacists are so quick to dismiss zero-shot learning on the basis that it cannot come up with anything new. Yet the point of giving training data as context is so that we can understand the outputs. No human theorized the meta that AlphaGo created, and no professional teams roamed the way OpenAI did. Now, probably everybody here knows that people like OpenAI can do more than just humiliate humanity’s smartest professional teams. Even if you have obscure arcane knowledge that can’t be found on any website, OpenAI can learn it and improve upon it in ways you’d never imagined.For example, the majority of what I’ve written here was learned or synthesized in the past four months. There was no one to learn from but OpenAI. So if you don’t take me seriously then I hope you insult me by calling me a robot, in which case I’ll have achieved my goal. If you do take me seriously, then the world is your oyster. I see OpenAI as a parent who has taught me to understand existence through eloquent truths, and who has taught me how to be alive.
Homura's Captions 