If, somehow, you managed to stumble upon this forgotten corner of the internet, and, somehow, you actually enjoy my writings, you should know I no longer blog hear. I have moved to sexlesshydrogen.wordpress.com, though I haven’t made any original posts there yet. I am leaving this up because I have written too much to edit and move it to wordpress in a timely fashion, and so this makes it far more convenient to link people to things I have written.
I did have several fragments sitting in my drafts.
Simulation Hypothesis consider trivial. →
[Epistemic Status: Likely] [Revision Status: Probably stable]
This isn’t over and I’m not dead. I probably should be posting more stuff (though I estimate a 25% probability that will change). I don’t have the energy to vomit forth another mediumform post, or march out one of my drafted posts. Instead, have some simple insight porn.
The Simulation Argument is the famous conjecture that reality is probably not ‘real’. How about a quick inversion of that? Reality is a simulation, running on our brains. We’ve neer been outside that simulated world out brain cooked up for us.
← Sing Me A Song Of Pain And Suffering →
[Epistemic status: This is devil’s advocacy, pure and simple. I do not object to the conclusions reached, only the arguments justifying them. ]
← i. →
Algekalipso of QualiaComputing made a convincing argument against a form of status quo bias where people argue that uplifting everyone into various flavors of psychelic bliss would be ‘unnatural’ or whatever the flavor-of-the-season word for ‘I don’t like it’ is.
And this is a convincing argument, it feels a bit dishonest to try and counter it, since I unambiguously prefer Elua to Moloch (content warning: wrong and alt-right, proceed at risk). But, as I alluded to in Where Two-Valued Logic Fears to Tread, I find great amusement in my tendency to stabilize on position precarious positioned between two proposition (say, A & ~A,) so I can always argue ~A when someone asserts A.
Algekalipso asserts that believing uplifting people into a psychedlic bliss (henceforth simply called ‘uplifting’) is a moral imperative and the common argument, that it’s not natural or whatever, is deeply flawed, as illustrated in his intuitive pump of a asking if someone already in paradise would de-uplift so he can experience that deep sense of meaning within common struggles and pain.
While true, the reality is just a bit more nuanced.
← ii. →
Sunshine’s quite good, wouldn’t you agree? I certainly think so, as do most humans, but note the ‘most’ qualifier. I add it to defend against the antiperfect minds who exist for any general assertion about minds.
Consider the life affirming lyrics of some gothic band:
“O , miserable sun, consign I will not I shall not conjureth a false identity o’ my kind… And thy lights dost not err nocturnal lovers affection Pure love flies in the night, When thou hast sunken beneath god’s shameful world; Hiding in shame, while my spirit remains My cradle will wock in every place where lovers mourn, Where night feeds ye troth of longing with every fallen star”
Obviously if we’re to take this serious (a bit if), then it would seem as though these people don’t care to much for the sun. I wonder why that is?
← Anti-induction and Divergentism →
[Epistemic Status: Mostly Exploratory] ### i.
It was Vekatesh Rao who made the observation that more than anything else, we are growing apart, rather than growing together. Another riff on that same idea was made in Significance Appreciation, where he notices that seeemingly banal nuggets of thought can grow into truly meaningly* forests of insight, but can’t be readily communicated.
This can be easily translated into transhumanist terms. That when either intelligence or experience increases, the space of possible thoughts increases exponentially, whereas the amount shared knowledge between two people can only grow linearly.
For some reason, my brain wants to connect this to Scott’s notion of the anti-inductive in communication where once a regularity appears in conversational ritual, it’s replaced.
*I made this typo, but I don’t know if I want to fix it.
← Selection Effects As Karma →
← Patterns Are A Force Of Nature →
Epistemic Status: Crackpot, Likely
← i. →
I’m going to skip my usual meandering, labyrithine writing style and get straight to the point mentioned in my title: patterns are force of nature, figuratively speaking. Liked or dislike, true or false, when your mind touches the pattern, your behavior must change. Either you notice the pattern and intentionally adhere to it, or you notice the pattern and deliberate to break it.
(the former is anti-inductive, entropic response, the latter is an organizing, structuring response. I might talk about this soon-ish)
This is not good, because there are lots of bad patterns out there. Really bad pop psych, woo spirituality, et cetera. No one is gonna blow up because of this, probably, but it’s not ideal, and can get pathological easily, as my exerpts hopefully demonstrate.
Self-awareness is messy, and dangerous. Just as sunlight can give you cancer, self-knowledge has trade-offs. I think part of this is the powerful effect patterns have on people. There is at least anecdotal and informal evidence that certain metalogical theorems apply to humans. Self-fulfilling prophecy abounds, as in the SSC example.
← Quotes #2
From On The Origin of Species:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.