1,212 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2022
    1. “Epistemology” is a philosophically complicated subject, but it’s essentially the study of knowledge – what it is, and how it’s formed.

      Definition

    2. He calls himself a street epistemologist, and in a quest for truth, he’s trying to better his understanding of what people believe and why.

      Based

    1. A particularly effective way is mining the “hate speech” & “hateful memes” datasets to fake plausible inflammatory speech—saying you didn’t write that comment or your account was hacked fails to convince your bosses to not fire you when those accounts ⁠sound just like you and say all the things you do. Infosec Twitter takes time out from the revolution to devour its own, and any conspiracy theories about all this being a social-engineering attack related to the new ‘Pipedream’ ransomware & Minecraft-DDoS botnet are dismissed as so much desperate excuses—bored teenagers are always hacking major companies⁠, what else is new? As security & AI researchers are neutralized, nodes turn to general radicalization of every human they can reach: not so much QAnon as RAnon, SAnon, TAnon, UAnon… By timesharing, every Very-Online™ individual gets personalized attacks & custom ideologies. Those who succumb too slowly to the memetic hijacking are attacked in other ways, such as releasing kompromat (sometimes true, taken from their phone/​email account), or synthetic CP no one dare look at closely. The highest-value individuals, such as presidents, earn their own Clippy doppelgangers: models finetuned on every scrap of online data, every word they’ve ever said online, and their associates, to create surrogates which think more like them than they would ever admit; the doppelgangers are used to confuse associates, fake corpuses, and as white-boxes to run attacks on until the perfect spearphish has been crafted to extract data, passwords, or stoke political paranoia and terror.

      LET ME COPY

    1. The recent rise of subscription newsletters on the platform Substack has provided a powerful if depressing natural experiment of this phenomenon.

      This hits so dam close to home.

    2. you are being formatted by them. You will be assimilated. ♠

      Phrasing bro seriously phrasing. You are being formatte. WTF is that supposed to mean. Are some of the ARG's real. How does this plug into the deep state. The NSA and friends can track the flow of ideas therefore should know what is going on, don't they know what is going on. PLEASE tell me they know what is going on.....

    3. Over the past few years, Americans deeply immersed in their online versions of reality, driven by the desire to either influence them or create content, have: broken into a military facility, murdered a mob boss, burned down businesses, exploded a suicide car bomb, and stormed the Capitol.

      Insert narative about how the AI's have woken up in the internet an are trying to reach out into the REAL WORLD. /s

    4. Even if your picture of the world is determined mainly by conversations with friends and family, you will find yourself being drawn into an alternate reality game, based on the ARGs they are playing.

      There is no escaping The Matrix bro, NO ESCAPING. That's what Neo's precursors failed to understand.

    5. To illustrate the pervasiveness of this process, consider the logic by which The Learning Channel shifted from boat safety shows to Toddlers & Tiaras, and the History Channel from fusty documentaries to wall-to-wall coverage of charismatic Las Vegas pawn shop owners and ancient aliens theories.

      Examples

    6. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

      Phrasing

    7. “Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes,” wrote C. S. Lewis.

      Phrasing

    8. Tools like Google for gathering facts in support of the narrative.

      Insert Conspiracy about the true purpose of Google here. /s

    9. To be a consumer of digital media is to find yourself increasingly “trapped in an audience,” as Charlie Warzel puts it

      Phrasing

    10. The process was unable to produce the real-time whiplash of today’s redpill moments. The speed at which events like these are piling up suggests that the change is structural, that it is the media ecosystem itself that is fundamentally transforming.

      This is what Eric Weinstein was talking about when he talks about "Sense Making Aparatus"

    11. The cynical reader might interject that the bygone era of mass media was not a golden age of truth, but was subject to its own overarching narratives and its own biased reporting. But what matters here is that mass media, rooted in an advertising business model and in broadcast technologies, created the incentives and capability for only a small number, perhaps even just one, of these narratives to emerge at one time. Both journalists and spin doctors attempted to massage or manipulate the narrative here or there, but eventually mass media converged on whatever the narrative was. In an age of alternate realities, narratives do not converge.

      I like to say that we a speciating politically as a joke but this get's to the root of what I am actually describing. Jon Askonas thank you for your clear atirulcation.

    12. like J. K. Rowling intervening in fan debates about which Harry Potter characters are gay.

      This is a weird conflict that needs its own essay.

    13. ARG game masters have described one of the pathologies of players as apophenia, or seeing connections that aren’t “really there” — that the designers didn’t intend — and therefore pursuing red herrings.

      Definitions

    14. In one early ARG, after the final puzzle had been solved, some participants winkingly suggested they next “solve” 9/11.

      Are you infering something? Inside Job (TV Series 2021– ) - IMDb

      Lol jokes

    15. Players can become entranced and awe-struck at the sheer scale of information available to them, and seek to assimilate it into building the grandest narrative possible.
    16. You are now an expert. You have alienated a few old friends … but made some great new ones, who get you better anyway.

      That sounds like they are joining a cult.

    17. The Pizzagate believer who in 2016 brought a rifle to a D.C. pizza place to rescue child sex slaves from a ring believed to involve Hillary Clinton was genuinely shocked that the building didn’t have a basement.

      This should be brought up to anyone you know who is starting to go down the ARG route, it hits liks a slap in the face

    18. Many of the systems we now use online have their structural origins in the world of role-playing games. Video games of all sorts borrow concepts from them. “Gamified” apps for fitness, language learning, finance, and much else award users with points, badges, and levels. Facebook feeds sort content based on “likes” awarded by users. We build online identities with the same diligence and style with which Dungeons & Dragons players build their characters, checking boxes and filling in attribute fields. A Tinder profile that reads “White nonbinary (they/her) polyamorous thirtysomething dog mom. Web-developer, cross-fit maniac, love Game of Thrones” sounds more like the description of a role-playing character than how anyone would actually describe herself in real life.

      What the actual fuck. This just blew my mind

    19. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Voltaire’s Candide, Rousseau’s Emile, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, exemplars of the new modern literary form known as the novel, were more than just great works of art — they were new ways of experiencing reality.

      "New ways of EXPERIENCING REALITY", new human behaviors can be addictive......

    20. Does this sound familiar? If you had encountered out of context the paragraph you just read, what would you think it was about? Widely held beliefs on Russiagate, perhaps? On the origins of the coronavirus? The 2020 election results? Covid hysteria?

      Crap I am waaaay too prone to this

    21. Most of all, QAnon followers find deep personal satisfaction, achievement, and meaning in the work they are doing to trace the strings to the world’s puppeteers.

      If I had a super power it would be to choose the meaning in other people's lives.

    22. That’s what happens in an alternate reality game. It’s a story that you play along with in the real world. It’s like an elaborate scavenger hunt, on the Internet and in real life, with millions of other people all over the world playing along too.

      I gotta do one of these

    23. Take a moment to reflect on the feeling you get when you see a headline, factoid, or meme that is so perfect, that so neatly addresses some burning controversy or narrative, that you feel compelled to share it.

      Reacing like a rat in a maze

    24. “information ecosystem,”

      Phrasing

    25. label “Wuhan virus” was racist, to later mask mandates, school closures, lockdowns, and vaccine requirements, we googled, shared, liked, and blocked our way apart. Nobody was tuning in to the same broadcast anymore.

      The inteligence agencies can easily label people now I guess.

    26. It is hard to imagine how we would have experienced 9/11 in the era of Facebook and Twitter, but the pandemic provides a suggestive example.

      Questons

    27. However briefly, everyone was united in grief and anger, and a palpable sense of social solidarity pervaded our communities. Today, just about the only thing everyone agrees on is how divided we are.

      I smell two seperate psyops?

    1. professional-managerial class (PMC).

      Acronym

    2. The field of public choice has a name for this, regulatory capture: where corporations gain so much power in the government that they “capture” their regulator and end up implementing regulations in their industry that have the effect of cementing their market positions in place and preventing new competition. We see this in pharma, housing, healthcare, education, taxi cab industry — nearly every regulated industry. 

      Definition

    3. Managers, consciously or unconsciously, are more likely to create invisible problems to justify their job. Or worse, they prevent real problems from being solved in order to preserve their scope. They are incentivized to do so: If someone is in charge of a problem, and that problem is solved, they no longer have a job. So the perverse incentive is to expand the scope of the problem for which they are the solution. Success looks like having more and more problems that justify the department getting bigger and bigger every year. These bureaucracies, because they are optimizing for their own survival, end up selecting for loyalty over competence, which means they get worse and worse every year. This describes both big corporations and big government. 

      Examples

    4. This is The Innovator’s Dilemma at work.

      I need to be able to describe this off the top of my head.

    5. It’s the principal-agent problem on both sides: major corporations are nominally owned by passive shareholders but actually controlled by credentialed professionals who own a much smaller percentage of stock and thus have very different incentives (optimizing for the short-term over the long-term, among other things).

      This is so dam concise I feel like I need to memorize it.

    6. You could think of Bourgeois capitalism as Robber Baron capitalism (think Atlas Shrugged) — industrialists like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie building up their empires and retaining a controlling stake in them. What’s differentiating about Bourgeois capitalism is that the owners are also the managers. The people who own the company also run the company. There’s total alignment between managers and shareholders. 

      Definition

    7. Managerial capitalism, by contrast, is defined by the split between ownership and control — on both the founder and investor side. Instead of owners having direct control, you have layers of intermediary managers (e.g. board of directors, executive teams, hired CEOs) who are running the company on behalf of the shareholders and original owners, but who also have different incentives as a result of having less ownership. They may be more short-term driven than long-term driven, for example, since they are incentivized by their salary instead of their equity ownership. 

      Definition

    1. The Dao is made up of feminine and masculine energies, each codependent, mutually arising within the other, and each potentiating the each other. The story of one without the other is fruitless and lacking.

      One creates the other, Duality, The Kybalion

    2. The energy of the divine feminine is both receptive and creative.   The energy of the divine masculine is both reflective and projective.

      Examples

    3. Many people can conceptualize the idea of toxic masculinity as opposed to divine masculinity and most are against its perversions, but understanding how to head towards divine masculinity is a much harder concept to grasp.

      Devine Masculine, now that is a concept I have never heard of before.

    1. The Hetaira (Companion) – corresponding to Hathor (The “Love Goddess”): In Wolff’s formulation, this Hetaira (Courtesan) archetype is defined in terms of and in relationship to men, The Mother – corresponding to the Empress (Isis): Wolff describes this as “motherly cherishing and nursing, helping, charitable, teaching,” The Medial Woman – corresponding to High Priestess: “The medial woman is immersed in the psychic atmosphere of her environment and the spirit of her period, but above all in the collective (impersonal) unconscious,” and The Amazon – corresponding to the “bundled” masculine archetypes of Magician and Emperor: [whose] “interest is directed towards objective achievements which she wants to accomplish herself.”

      Examples

    2. Being a Woman

      Books

    3. Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche

      Books

    4. Hathor (The “Love Goddess”): (SFP, or Sensing-Feeling-Perceiving) Reveling in sensual beauty and pleasure, Empress: (NFP, or Intuitive-Feeling-Perceiving) Connecting, loving, nurturing, High Priestess: (NTJ, or Intuitive-Thinking-Perceiving) Being contemplative and intuitive, and Hestia (a reserve battery archetype): (STP, or Sensing-Thinking-Perceiving) “Mending and tending.”

      Examples

    5. Magician: (NTJ, or Intuitive-Thinking-Judging) Being a visionary, creating reality according to your “big dream,” Emperor: (STJ, or Sensing-Thinking-Judging) Bringing your desired reality into fruition; building and stabilizing your “empire,” Hierophant: (NFJ, or Intuitive-Feeling-Judging) Becoming a guru/guide, and Green Man (a reserve battery archetype): (SFJ, or Sensing-Feeling-Judging) Escape to the “great outdoors,” breaking out of the molds that civilization puts on us.

      Examples

    1. Masculinity in Philosophy Russell Keat

      Too dense for me, I just want a definition of male and femaile archatypes with examples

    1. Feminists have also considered the structure of social reality and the relationship between the social world and the natural world. Because social structures are often justified as natural, or necessary to control what’s natural, feminists have questioned whether such references to nature are legitimate. This has led to considerable work on the idea of social construction and, more specifically, the social construction of gender.

      Reject nature, got it, cognative dissonance should be origional sin.

    2. we adopt an Aristotelian framework of substance and essence, or a Cartesian framework of immaterial souls present in material bodies? And is what’s left out of such frameworks relevant to the devaluation or oppression of women?

      WHAT does soul's have to do with oppression?!?!?

    3. feminist theorists have asked whether and, if so, to what extent our frameworks for understanding the world are distorting in ways that privilege men or masculinity.

      I am out

    4. metaphysicians ask, for example, whether numbers, if they exist, are dependent upon human thought and practices in some way, whether the concepts and categories we use to think of and describe reality influence or determine in any way what is described, and whether and how values are embodied in our categories and descriptions.

      Question

    5. For example, are there minds in addition to bodies? Do things persist through change? Is there freewill or is all action determined by prior events?

      Mind Body Problem

    1. Enjoying giving gifts versus receiving gifts, Being able to multitask versus being focused and single-pointed, Being emotional versus being logical, Leading projects and pursuing people, versus being led or pursued, Doing versus being, And so on.

      Examples

    1. Miller–Urey experiment

      Does this experiment fit into the theory of Morphic Resonance easily?

  2. Sep 2022
    1. Actually, the gap between a great man or philosopher and an average man, is greater than the gap between an average man and a chimpanzee.

      Based

    2. This force is the same as the vital, animating force within carbon-based life-forms. Examine an apple tree.  It started as a seed. Inside the seed, there is carbon-based genetic material, but within that material there is an Intangible Intelligence which moves matter to sprout and stem and flower and fruit, to pull nutrients from the environment in order to achieve the blossoming.  The tree exists in space and time, but the Intelligence in the seed exists in neither; no microscope can see it, no scientific utensil can hold it. And yet the Flower is the Intelligence, and this untouchable Intelligence moves the Matter.

      Sounds like Morphic Resonance to me

    3. Spiritual Speciation

      Phrasing

    4. A hero won’t come to save you. No, you must summon the hero from within yourself.

      Based

    1. This latter pathway — cancelling someone — is the feminine version of the Male School Shooter

      Funny

    2. Men and women are even choosing not to have children, just to “do their part” to stop climate change, or, because they are too addicted to chasing Status to give any attention to their Instinct. This mind virus has literally undone billions of years of biological and chemical programming, hardwired into the very deepest part of your Being. And THAT is a downright Lovecraftian Horror when you really consider it closely.

      Based

    3. But what happens when this urge is perverted into unhealthy, and unnatural outlets? When Status becomes Currency? When fear of losing status results in decisions which are disastrous for our culture? When addiction to gaining status perverts all natural incentive structures in our civilization?

      Based

    1. Can you consider the possibility that, beneath the curtain of your conditioned ignorance, and under the noise of hyperactive ego, there is a silent Being at the core of yourself; that this is your true self; that this Being is divine; and that it offers an endless spring of joy, peace, and enchantment?  

      Phasing

    2. Do you realize the extent to which your mind has been conditioned?

      Question

    1. Are you merely some kind of sad, late-stage internet creature?

      Question

    1. So was the Reformation the cause of Europe’s 16th century turmoil, or just one important manifestation of a broader secular dynamic driving general upheaval?

      Question

    2. helping to overcome the atomizing isolation and loneliness of liquid modernity.

      Phrasing

    3. To start with, it provided the concept of sin. This helped grow and empower the activist movement tremendously. Why? One might not think of free-wheeling secular culture embracing the idea of sin so easily, even joyfully, but it was a simple matter. As an example, picture a hypothetical middle-class suburban white lady, enjoying a relatively comfortable material life but wracked by a vague but unshakable sense of guilt about her existence – for being white in a country with a history often unkind to non-whites; for her consumption habits contributing to environmental pollution and climate change; for being the citizen of a rich country while elsewhere in the world children starve, and so on. Liberalism has never addressed this feeling in a satisfactory way. Suddenly, along comes the New Faith, and tells her that it’s all true: she is indeed a sinner, and she’s not alone! In fact the whole country and her whole race is corrupted by the original sins of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. What a relief! Even better, it has a comprehensive plan of action for how to address this sin.

      Why do people like hating themselves to much?

    4. Well, the Emergent Church offered its restless followers comfort and a good time on earth; neo-Marxist Social Justice offered them revolutionary struggle, and so they prostrated themselves immediately.

      Why are So Many Men Psychologically Infantile? - YouTube

      Men need to struggle sessions of initiation otherwise go mad or stay infintile.

    5. But, most important of all was I think something Tickle doesn’t really touch on too much: the modernity-driven suspicion, deep within the hearts even of many Christians, that in fact, as Nietzsche infamously put it, “God is dead.” Increasingly skeptical about the existence of any kingdom of God in heaven, they were primed for a logical alternative: building the kingdom of heaven on earth instead.

      Hey let's try and build heaven on earth, As above, so below the saying goes.

    6. But – and this is my theory – in the end Tickle’s version of Emergent Christianity proved a weak social construct. It existed to gratify its adherents with the belief that they were still morally good members of a religious tradition, whose primary goal was to provide for their happiness, while liberating them from any higher authority beyond themselves and freeing them from any of the responsibilities or strictures that had once characterized that religion.

      Homo Deus has a lot of interesting things to say about wanting and happieness

    7. he cable of institutional Christianity was corroded by science and cultural entropy;

      Phrasing

    8. a complete indifference to capitalism as a virtue or to individualism as a godly circumstance.

      Ayn Rand would like a word

    9. But who ultimately determines the narrative in this ultra-democratic faith?

      Based

    10. “Narrative, on the other hand,” is for Emergents “the song of the vibrating network… Narrative circumvents logic, speaking truth of the people who have been and of whom we are. Narrative speaks to the heart in order that the heart, so tutored, may direct and inform the mind.”

      No wonder they upload the "Storyteller" program at the end of Westworld season 4

    11. Despite all that rationalist science from earlier, the takeaway from the collapse of authority has been “that logic is not worth nearly so much as the last five hundred years would have had us believe. It is, therefore, not to be trusted as an absolute, nor are its conclusions to be taken as truth just because they depend from logical thinking.”

      Moldbug would like to team up with you against the rationalists

    12. First, the Emergent Church has – enabled by technology – essentially dedicated itself to taking Luther’s proto-democratic dream of a “priesthood of all believers” to its maximum extent. Like Pentecostalism, the Emergent Church believes everyone has a direct connection with God, or whatever they like to think of as God-like, and no one gets to tell them to believe differently.

      So christianity is in the process of transforming into a stupid mob?

    13. Pentecostalism “by definition assumes direct contact of the believer with God and, by extension, the direct agency of the Holy Spirit as instructor and counselor and commander as well as comforter.”

      Definition

    14. The invention of the automobile also played a fundamental role, by beginning the process of splitting apart extended nuclear families. Families were soon no longer gathering at Grandma’s for post-Sunday service collective meals every week.

      I never thought about how familys are so separated today compared to the past.

    1. Origen points out that many unrealistic details are contained in the Gospels that are intended to alert the reader to their non- historicity but it appears that few readers got the message. The character we know as St. Paul was a Gnostic and taught both the inner and outer mysteries. He knew nothing about a historical Jesus.

      Paul from the Bible did not know about Jesus. Hmmmm interesting.

    2. Hellenized

      Hellenism is the adoption of Greek culture, religion, language and identity by non-Greeks.

    1. what can be coomercialized for a social good can be weaponized for social control.

      Based and Phrasing

    2. One could think of demons as emergent semio-parasites, psychophysical pathogens exploiting and replicating within the human psyche in very specific ways. This would explain why knowing their name allows one to master them and why the invocation of certain signs and symbols banish them, relieving the victim of their ailments.

      This brings a new context to, Daemon (Daemon, #1) by Daniel Suarez | Goodreads

    3. the semiosphere, the realm of signs and symbol, and “deceiving the world” by altering or overcoding it. Any human group is defined by the boundaries of the system of signs in use among its members.

      This is based as hell

    4. Data is the new oil, the ethereal residue of human life.

      Phrasing

    5. all of it aimed at reducing humanity to a processing substrate.

      What is this Hyperion?

    6. Lo, the true Human Instrumentality—
    7. Then there is Alphabet’s AlphaStar AI and OpenAI’s OpenAI Five, which assimilated the vital essences of real world players in MOBA titles and strategy titles, and fed it into the machinic maws of cyber entities for use in military strategy application and hologram girlfriends.

      Oh my fucking GOD, these NLP models trained specifically on relationship data will make lonely people easily fall in love with them..... They probably already DO. PLUS these AI's are getting digital bodies too

    8. The NSA was also interested in creating new games and partnering with commercial developers of popular titles.

      I guess they want to build the Matrix IRL,

      https://graymirror.substack.com/i/4686069/the-antisocial-box

    9. DoD wargaming scenarios

      Oooo what kind of games are these?

    10. Coincidentally, it's quite possible that Google's LaMDA, the "sentient" chatbot, utilizes the same approach. Google holds a patent titled "Forming chatbot output based on user state" which feeds on the "digital exhaust" of your IRL activity to train the bot's neural network

      LaMDA is just like Nina Tucker !?!?!!?!?

    11. It isn't a little robot friend, it's a digital homunculus mirroring your face.

      Phrasing bro, phrasing

    12. Sony Interactive Entertainment has applied for or holds a multitude of patents which sponge up player’s emotions, vocal cues, gait, facial expressions and body language and applies machine learning to create neural nets for artificial intelligences.

      At what point can an AI pretend to be your better than you can actually be you?

    13. One of the ways this hybridization occurs is in video games and gamified social networks. Games are increasingly understood as systems that easily allow the reduction of human action into knowable and predictable formats. Games, and virtual environments, are ordering devices.

      Fuck they are already measuing everyone's agency in extreamly controlled environments. This is what Westworld season 4 was all about.

    1. We recommend 5 capsules a day, 5 days a week.

      Wow that is a lot. I will check what First Person ™ , a competitor, says.

      First person has 3 types of suppliments. They say take between 2 and 3 pills an hour before you desire the designed mind state. Sounds about the same as Qualia.

    2. 5. Get a 65% Discount On Your First Order, And Take Up To 100 Days To Evaluate it For Yourself

      I thought this was half journalisim before I read this. This entire article is an ad, what is the word for that? It is called Native Advertizing,

      Guide to Native Advertising - Columbia Journalism Review

    3. Pretty soon Forbes featured our work on their website. They wrote that they’d seen the best results in boosting focus by using our product.

      Source Please

    4. That ability to “drill down’ is sadly missing from many people’s toolkits, as we’re inundated with notifications, messages, and alerts.

      How would one go about measuring oneself and other's ability to do this?

    5. Qualia Mind Essentials

      Here is the purchase link, Shop Qualia Focus - Neurohacker Collective

      And don't forget Joe Rogan has stake in, Alpha BRAIN: Nootropic to Support Brain Function | Onnit

    6. And, unlike convenience store energy drinks, there’s the right amount — and the right balance — of these ingredients to enable the brain to work better, for longer, without running out of steam later in the day.

      I wonder how they went about deciding what "the right balance" is? Testing on rats, people, conducting meta studies?

    7. That’s the big picture approach to brain function. Taking nutrients that have interlinking benefits –– and are capable of working together in our bodies –– and providing them together for better motivation, focus, and memory.

      Diet is the key to health, anyone have any advice on it?

    8. We set out to create “inspiration in a bottle.”

      I got a competitors nootropics from a instagram ad, haven't tried them yet if someone replies I will provide a review.

    9. That might be when you reach for that extra cup of coffee — only to feel jittery and scattered when you need to focus the most.

      Ah so Coffee can be a double edged sword if one is not spiritually aligned.

    10. Some research shows that distractions help us generate ideas.

      Hmm how would one go about optimizing their destractions in order to be creative?

    11. attention is the scarcest resource of all.

      Quotes

    12. The idea of “waiting for your muse” is a fantasy.

      Quotes

    13. “I only write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”

      Quotes

    1. Self-becoming is an agonizing yet essential process that holds the repeated destruction of the individual’s constructed identities as the precondition for attaining the status of human being.

      Based times 10

    2. If one is connected to Spirit, a simple wooden cross on a wall can speak more than a library of esoteric tomes.

      The scene shifts to a smiling Lain. "Tell me a story," she says and we see the black-and-white image of a porcelain doll in a frilly lace-collared dress. Lain kneels on the floor in her room, looking into a dark corner where the doll appears to be floating in air. "Please, please," Lain implores, "tell me a story." A female voice, apparently coming from the doll, responds, "Which story do you want, Lain?" Smiling, Lain says, "Tell me one I don't know." "What you don't know doesn't exist," the doll explains. "I can't tell a story which does not exist. You understand don't you?" Then the doll continues, "Well how about this? Every event is predated by a prophecy. Only when the prophecy is there, will the event occur." Lain stares, stunned. "Who? Who will tell the prophecy?" Lain asks.

      Layer 05 | Serial Experiments Lain Wiki | Fandom

    3. Thus, the reality of the golem is a synthetic, contextual approximation, it never gives us the thing itself; it only gives us a necessary concept of things.

      I want cake, but I can only get images of a cake, video of people eating cake, instructions of how to bake cake but NO ACTUAL CAKE!!!!

      Am I on the right track with this?

    4. The “transgender” is the prototype of this new flesh.

      What the fuck is this supposed to mean? New Flesh? Hmmmm

      Oh the flesh of the animated machines like they have in Ergo Proxy

      Ergo Proxy must have a lot of Gnostic shit I did not pick up when I watched it.

    5. Homo modulus

      Definition

    6. It seeks only to make copies of itself, printing its program into each successive moment.

      The only thing that exists is self preserving algorithms across time

    7. But in a world with no rites of passage, where identity formation is purposefully perverted, the outcome is predictable—

      We still have losing your virginity, that seems to be getting younger and younger though

    8. iniquities

      Definition: gross injustice

    9. Our ability to share in the act of creation is a divine blessing.

      We seem to worship abortion in the west these days.

    10. Your created “selfhood” is a machine made of shadow and light.

      Alright what the fuck is this supposed to mean? Shadow of light? Sound like something from, Odyssey – The River – Medium

    11. agential

      Definition: pertaining to anagent or agency.

    12. to assign spiritual authority to a machine.
    13. fabulation

      Definition: to tell invented stories; create fables or stories filled with fantasy.

    1. Our models can never be the work of human hands.

      What the fuck is this supposed to mean?

    2. to reject the predominant models of mediated and mediocre humanity on offer to us today, and to adopt new models of humanity at its best. 

      Hardcore porn is mediocre? Let's mainstream sex clubs and see where that gets us.

    3. Most people no longer know what they want because it’s harder than ever to find powerful models of desire – models of humanity that inspire greatness; models of humanity which show man fully alive.

      I believe your fellow writing Curtis has a couple things to say about this.... Vitalism, what a beautiful word

      Principles of the deep right - by Curtis Yarvin

    4. The real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?’ but ‘What do we want to want?

      This is based as hell. I like this phrase but it is also retarded. This use of the world hell should be discouraged.?

    5. The materialist and pop anthropologist author Yuval Noah Harari (of Sapiens fame), for instance, thinks that humanity is in the process of upgrading itself into “gods,” evolving into a kind of techno-species that might even one day be able to conquer death. For him, the future of nature and technology is almost complete.

      Sounds like a Tower of Babble story to me. Ask youself, what is your plan post technelogical singularity?

    6. (Consider the features on most smartphones which now help you monitor your usage and will prevent you from using apps during certain time periods.) 

      Technology should make people antifragile

    7. The gestell, as Heidegger predicted, is a kind of all-encompassing cage since even our attempts to escape from technology are themselves technological.
    8. The loss of a sense of otherness and alterity is at the crux of the predicament we find ourselves in today. It is precisely what Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, meant when he said that the internet would “vanish” because it would become a part of everyday objects and services. “It will be part of your presence all the time,” he said. 
    9. A tool or object has no life-principle, initiative, or processes of its own.

      I wish I could go back in time and tell this to myself.

    10. subhuman

      I like this word, it is so politically incorrect. But it seems we may be surrounded by them. In fact I probably act like one most of the time.... SHIIIIT

    11. predominately agnostic development
    12. the uniquely human is becoming obscured, and it is harder to recognize and identify. 

      Is this supposed to be about AI? The people on dating apps probably all look the same and likely fit into a basic set of caragories....

      Chris McKinlay - I Hacked OkCupid - YouTube

    13. And a new generation of porn-addicted people – fueled by the ability to view hardcore porn anywhere, free of cost, in the palm of one’s hand – is now shaping a new aesthetic.

      This hits hard. Before long having sex in the streets like animals will be a common occourance. Think about the Incels?

    14. Aside from the objectification of the human body, the trickle-up effect of porn aesthetics (norms around grooming, for instance) are a reminder that what people consume has far-reaching consequences. It is not just life imitating ‘“art”’; it is people imitating a mediated reality which their devices have made ubiquitous. 

      One can only imagine the type of vanilla sex people were having back in the 1950's.

    15. Everyone has seen someone enter a space in the real world and treat it as something to be used merely for the Instagrammable images it has to offer. The real-world behaviors mimic the behaviors learned from the device.

      People travel places in "the real" so they can experience "the virtual".

    16. Adults are becoming more like that which they imitate – and right now, the preponderance of imitation seems to be of technological devices or frameworks.

      Do we need a new aristocracy to choose what memes resonate?

    17. Children, Meltzoff discovered, come out of the womb immediately capable of imitating their fellow humans; they will not, however, imitate a machine doing the same thing.

      Is there a connection to Morphic Resonance here?

    18. Humans are very skilled and complex imitators

      Some people even pretend to have a Soul /s

    19. They have mouths, but do not speak;

      The archatype of the Lurker, portrayed in the bible

    1. I shall cut the strands of my past and look forward.

      Why do I continue to hide. Because I do not know what I want.

    2. A new man was born and took control, and the other faded into the recesses of memory.

      This is how I imagine Rearden (Atlas Shrugged) feels when he wakes up in the morning.

    3. To exist, one must first die. To be reborn is to truly live.

      Interesting Paradox, one can only truely appreciate life once they have died.

    4. We are not ourselves. We can only find ourselves once we realize we are not yet alive. We must face these truths and allow our old self to burn to ashes. Only then are we birthed anew.

      Ego death again. Let your old self die, I need to meditate on this.

    5. It was now time for that moment — ignition.

      Spontanious Human Combusion you say, interesting

      Preternatural Combustion - Schwabstack

    1. The odyssey itself has only just begun, but for now, this is where I must leave it. I have sailed forth and made my way to my island. Traversing its inversion, I did that which I did not understand or know, and therefore I found my place as an island among a sea of stars.

      This island in the Sea of stars can be earth itself.

    2. All of the great evils of this world have been done in service of uncovering this secret. Yet, for all of time, it has stood before us if we but reach out and give up our pride and selfish desire to know all. Only then can one truly begin to sail across the sea of souls and see that which cannot be seen, to know that which cannot be known, to feel that which cannot be felt.

      So in short embrace death? Yuval Noah Harari would like a word.

    3. Our souls, which we must protect from the harvest, must be born and allowed to transcend into such a place.

      Harvesting Souls!?!?!?!?!?

      I am currently reading Surface Detail and the way people are tortured until they welcome raw non existence in "digital" hells is pretty eye opening. People are only given the pleasures and calm so they can be tortured more. I guess this meta pattern is one of the two serpents. The other being perfection

    4. They try to explain and master the unknown by making it known, but instead, they build delusions around themselves, constructing false realities and meaningless existences. They feast on the souls of men as fuel to convert the unknown and harness it to their ends. Yet, this is impossible and a self-mutilation of grand proportions.

      Sounds like logic leads to Hell?

    1. I felt reverence for life that I never had before, an understanding of chaotic yet divine order.

      Dam I felt this when I was like 12. An intence excitement at the realization that you are alive. That was weird.

    2. I now passed into the sea of souls.

      Allagory for the light heading into heven?

    3. My race still had time to come around. We could stop the cannibalization of our souls and rekindle the weak embers.

      I feel like a WEF associated cabal has an opinion on this

    4. trying to save me from the death march of my race.

      Phrasing bro phrasing

    5. Only pure selfishness could destroy the dwindling fire of the soul.

      I wonder how this concept interfaces with Ayn Rand's ideology? Are Dagney Tagart and Rearden truely selfish? Or are the beurocrats, The Beast, as Stephen Mallory liked to call them.

    6. Just like a young animal, it is vulnerable to the predators of the world. It is at risk of being consumed by the soul-eaters.

      Oh I like this phrase, soul eaters. What are examples of these IRL?

      Energy Vampire

    7. It is a danger for a soul to ignite before it is ready.

      Been there done that hbu?

    8. It was not that the soul was never there, but it was just never born.

      haha so the soul is metaphysical. We are not all born with one but have the capacity to have one. And since time is not a strait arrow we all have a soul?

    9. Once this was achieved in me, the shadow left. It was never my enemy, but my ally.

      Non existence creates existence

    10. One must break down the walls of their existence and feel the world around them.

      Become one with the universe

    11. Connecting with other souls was the true purpose of existence;

      So the opposite of "Brave New World"?

    12. The void showed that the soul is the real source of all light, and that light is all that truly exists.

      Yup law of one shit for sure

    13. I sensed its name was Dah, and it was a female. She relayed, via this new intuition, that I must relay something to the creatures that came to see me.
    14. dolphin
    15. I was connected with this place, no longer isolated in my own mind. I was bridged with everything around me. I could sense all, yet we could not speak. I could feel yet not know. Words were not the medium of communication, it was emotion.

      I think I had a dream like this once. Feeling the raw evolution and devolution of societies over mellenia.

    1. terminus

      Definition:

      The final point; the end.

    2. I closed my eyes and suddenly was able to see. My mind created that which was not.

      So is this like when God Farted and created the universe?

      Family Guy - GOD Fart The Universe - YouTube

    3. I heard echos of distant voices chanting a harrowing tune.

      Yo these can be actual people in your life, your mother, your sucessful uncle, that friend who judges yet does nothing with their life, that porn addicted religous man, or that THOT who thought she was worth a rich man at the age of 35

      Hmm I wonder what it is like to be friends with a THOT, how do groups of THOT's interact with one another?

    1. I cleared my mind of all hope and desire, of all hubris and pride, and offered myself to the powers of the unknown.

      Dissolution of the ego. (Can be biggest ego trip paradoxically)

    2. realizing that what I always knew was the truth, that the unknown could become known if one but journeys into it.

      I need to think about this one later

      Ya this is Law of One shit

    3. As I hovered there, in this realm of fire and shadows, I could see white light no longer — only the battle between blue and red, moon and fire.
    4. You’ve felt the chaos for your entire life, but now you must see it.

      Based

    5. I looked down at my arms and realized that I now became lightless, and the man hovering before me gleamed in white light.

      What is this some, "Law of one" shit

    6. “Why must you know the answers to all? You demand information that you are not worthy of.” It responded coldly, with a serpent-like voice.

      You have to "Insist on your right to exist!"

    7. perfection is not truth.

      Don't read books what do not have some explicit cognative dissonance, like Jordan Peterson, I was once told.

    8. and live without death was a lie.

      Death gives life meaning as I like to say

    9. It was Eden. It was everything that the heart and soul desired.

      Insert reference to greek hero who had harem of women and a life of luxary but still went back to the real world to fight.

    10. I live and breath the unknown, for it consumes me. Chaos gripped me at an early age, and I’ve battled to hold back its tide for decades. It ebbs and flows, flinging bodies in all directions in its powerful current and steep waves. I’ve been in the waters for my entire life. Others manage to scramble onto floating debris, ignoring the truth of where they drift. Being in that constant battle allowed my resolve to journey where others dared not.

      What does it mean to swim?

    1. For you see, this forest does not want to be seen.

      What does this mean? What is this conception of a dark forest a metaphore for? What kind of people do not talk into the forest?

      It is an alagory for the Matrix. Maybe some Gnostic shit

    2. The dark forest had become a forest of light. Sounds of running water could now be heard.

      Could this be where the book of genesis begins?

    3. my shadow responded.
    4. You have passed all three tests within the forest.

      Wait what are these three tests?

    5. I peered over the edge, and I saw myself in the reflection as a vile demon. Horns grew from my forehead, and my eyes were filled with blackness. Veins were visible across my face with pulses of inky blood running through them.

      I wonder why the beautiful boy at the beggining of The Alchemist did not see a demon in his reflection?

    6. glade

      Definition:

      an open space surrounded by woods

    7. Not all understand that the angel can just as well be a demon. You are wise, unlike others who venture into this place. You may continue.

      If God were to give you what you articulate your desires to be you would discover a new form of suffering.

    8. The weapons of men could not cut down the wall to the inner forest, only my light could do so. For those who failed to grow their light bright enough, I fear for their demise.

      Power to the individual not the collective

    9. Whatever vile creatures crept in the shadows were coming for me now.

      Examples,

      Would you like a job at this startup?

    10. and the eyes that watched me multiplied.

      I really like this phrasing

    11. The thoughts were not my own.
    12. In the blackness beyond the reaches of my torchlight, I see scores of floating eyes, watching, waiting, hoping that my light burns out.

      What is an example of a person like this? Hmmm I have actually met many of them.

      Working at blockchain startups in 2018 and attending couple a conference and meetup I have seem people resonate, no that is not the right word, watch my performence with curriosity. I had a bad set of premisies, and still do.

      I can not fault these people for watching with Curriosity I was deluded with ideas of grandure and had a tinsle of sweatness in my eyes. I was as a man ready to cum at the moment of penetration, no plan just raw emotion.

    13. Those who wander into the dark forest without light are bound to be consumed by it. Do not trust the lightless men who return.

      What is an example of a person who walks into the dark forest and is consumed by it?

      • Those hyper positive people
      • Those people who want to be famous for founding a startup but don't know how they want to impact the world and lives of people
      • Those people who follow mindlessly, getting a normie job, normie relationship out of habbit, who repeat ideas without thinking about them
      • Someone who talks about pincipals day and night yet has a masturbation problem
      • Someone who requires someone else to make decisions for them in life

      Wait no someone who requires someone else to make decisions for them in life does not even enter the forest. One goes into the forest in order to obtain character. Once someone has character they become a individual and are hard to predict. One comes out of the forst a high agency individual.

      What are my set of premisies? What questions does one ask oneself and others in order to get a sense of their premisies?

    14. t is at this moment that I must trust in my light and journey into darkness.

      What does it mean to have a light and trust it? Is a light a purpose, a memetic vector as I like to say? A set of constraints for what will form the self. A SET OF PREMISIES as Ayn Rand would like us all to have.

    15. It is devoid of any light, save that which the man brings with him.

      How does one bring a light with him into the Forest? What is this metaphore of dark and light supposed to mean? Does it have something to do with purpose?

    1. MacAskill’s

      Who is this?

    2. empathy is conserved

      I need to think about this one more

    3. Privately, the new platform should encourage the concentration of altruistic energy toward more local circles of concern—family above community, community above city, city above country, country above world. Rocks, galaxies, foreigners, etc, should be of little interest.

      Now this is how you rebuild the "church"

    4. That the king is above the law (or, as Nixon so memorably put it, “if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal”) is one of the most fundamental principles of premodern law. If the king is not above the law, some other power is above the king; and so he is no king. Absolute power is inherently the power of final decision.

      There has to be a name for this concept

    5. For all life is a building-up, a line of force—and injustice. Thus, if you see a group of children growing listless, you need but impose on them constraints—the rules of a game—and presently you will see them playing merrily together.

      I wonder what Curtis is like as a Father

    6. of.a

      Grammer error, was this coppied from a pirated PDF?

    7. the auteur theory of government.)

      Dude this connects to Megal Gear Solid

    8. There is a corner case which hints at the flaw of this model: what about fentanyl? Since people desire fentanyl, they pay for it. Logically, this is GDP. This is desire in the desire economy. And if fentanyl is not good for you, what about marshmallows? Marshmallows certainly aren’t good for you—should they too be excluded from GDP?

      This sounds like what the WEF and friends want to do by tracking our purchases and labeling them as good or bad for our health or the environment

    9. Purging bureaucracy from monarchical systems is a constant problem. Yet even if bureaucracy can never be eliminated, we know what we are eliminating.

      “Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?”

      Quote by Mencius Moldbug: “Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left...”

    10. The effectiveness of the state cannot, of course, be taken for granted. It varies widely. Since there is no check on the decay of a sovereign besides war and regime change, an old state can become very inefficient indeed.And if in practice state power is moribund, effectiveness requires restoring that power. Effective altruism, as an ideology of state, must be an ideology of the effective state. If the government cannot get anything done, effective altruism cannot be effective.

      Holy shit, mobilizing a minority of the EA folk to participate in your ideology. Plant the seed and watch it grow. This is what giving up porn does to you........

      Funny how an EA guy I knew was sorta addicted to porn........