It seems inconceivable how Foucaultian analysis can help an epigeneticist.

Quante, Michael. "‘Reason… apprehended irrationally’: Hegel’s Critique of Observing Reason." Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit: a critical guide (2008): 91-111.

Hegel argues that meaningful connections between the functional aspects of the mind and the physical structure of the brain cannot be made. This argument against phrenology can be formalized as follows:

1. Premise: Phrenology seeks to ground mental attributes in the physical structure of the brain.
2. Premise: Phrenology assigns a dual role to the brain: both as a passive object and the seat of consciousness.
3. Premise: A purely physical entity cannot simultaneously embody mental activity.
4. Conclusion: The dual role assigned to the brain in phrenology is contradictory.
5. Premise: Phrenology assigns another dual role to the brain: both as a physical part and the source of individual consciousness.
6. Premise: Attributing mental predicates to physical processes is a metaphorical use of language that obscures the distinctions between biological and mental properties.
7. Conclusion: The dual roles assigned to the brain in phrenology make it impossible to establish a meaningful connection between the mind and the brain.

Attempting to deconstruct scientific claims gave us the Sokal affair, which has been greatly embarrassing to postmodernism.

A brain trying to catch itself in the act of the sufficiency illusion is only stuck in another sufficiency illusion, because the infinite regress must end somewhere. Metacognition is very slow (about 10 Hz) and small (about 10 items), so the infinite regress typically stops after 1 or 2 acts of "catching itself in the act of sufficiency illusion".

"Ah ha, I am subject to the sufficiency illusion!"

"Ah ha, I am subject to the sufficiency illusion-sufficiency illusion!"

"I give up, this is too meta. And pointless, since I'm just always in a sufficiency illusion anyway."

This describes the approach of Sellars, Brandom, and Brassier, all of which Bakker has criticized in the blog.

They admit that science has priority in the scientific realm, but what we think we are is not something that can be true or false, but are games, rules, things we play, a game of "pretend as if we are persons".

This is a much better position. It does not attempt to tell science that science is a building founded upon the ground of philosophy (unlike Kant, or Heidegger), and does not try to make scientifically testable predictions and get embarrassed in the process (unlike those who sought to study the "quantum of consciousness" because they thought free will is real, thus something quantum-mechanical must be true of the brain, or that philosopher who argued that Anton syndrome is impossible because it is philosophically impossible, or those psychoanalysts that try to interpret Cotard's syndrome as some manifestation of childhood trauma).

The problem with this position is as follows:

1. Is science really based on a game of giving and taking reasons? If not, then there's no guarantee that science would protect the game of "let's pretend we are persons who make decisions, has plans, hopes for love, etc". The juggernaut of science may eventually crush the "manifest image of man" under its wheels, migrate to a society of unconscious biorobots, and run even faster as a result!

2. Philosophers are unable to figure out what rules, games, normativity, etc, are! They can't agree, after centuries of disputation. Any working consensus will have to come from science, and what if science finally shows that rules and games are nothing like what Sellars, Brandom, etc, thought they are? If not, then not only is the manifest image not the scientific image, not only is it unnecessary for working scientists, it is even not what the philosophers say it is. It is as if the philosophers have been stuck in Plato's Cave, mistaking the shadow-play for optical-science.

The brain is too slow to catch itself in the act of changing, and too slow to catch itself in the act of being too slow, So the brain just defaults to treating itself as unchanging, identical through time.

I am a brain that moves through time, synapses and biochemicals flickering furiously. It is too fast for the brain to catch itself in the change. The brain flickers 100 times a second (gamma brainwave), but conscious thought comes at most 10 times a second. For the brain to "catch itself in the change" the brain would have to somehow self-represent 10 times faster.

So, the brain can't catch itself in the change. Imagine a single second and 100 brain-states during that single second. Each brain-state differs from the previous one at trillions of synapses, but the brain is stuck not representing the difference between brain-0, brain-1, ..., brain-10, because otherwise, it would have to squeeze in 10 units of change into 1 unit of reflective thought. There is simply not enough time.

So, the brain sees itself as mostly unchanging despite there being plenty of change, because not only is it too slow to see its own change, it is too slow to represent its own slowness. If it spends all its time representing its own slowness, it will promptly die of starvation, because a brain is not built for contemplation, but surviving.

Geocentrism: Not only can't we see earth as moving, we can't even see that we are missing the information. We are not left with a nagging sense of "I don't know enough either way." but rather an obvious "Earth abides.".

Noocentrism: Not only can't we see how we are made of parts (neurons firing, biochemicals flickering) that are too fast, too numerous, for us to see, we can't even see that we are unable to see. We are not left with a nagging sense of "I don't know how much I know about myself." but rather an obvious "I see all there is to see.".

Derrida used trace and differance to do deconstruction, showing how weird it is that language can mean things, but unstably. Trying to build a science out of it is doomed. Deconstruction cannot build a science.

But the opposite way can. Science can explain why the meaning of language is weird, and why deconstruction works.

Husserl tried to be objective and scientific about time. He tried to study how time is perceived by introspection, but at least he tried to be scientific about it. Basically, though he couldn't use a microscope or a clock, he tried to form the equivalent of microscopes and clocks using nothing but his mind, to probe his mind.

Heidegger radicalized this by saying that first-person time and third-person time are so different because of something philosophical "the Ontological difference". He then proceeded to build a whole philosophy of the first-person using only what's available first-person.

Derrida radicalized Heidegger by saying that the Ontological difference exists, but simply cannot be escaped. Heidegger's project is doomed from the start.

The problem of synthesis: If things keep changing, how come some things are the same things?

The problem of presence: If things don't exist (because everything keeps changing), why do we see things as if they exist stably over time?

Derrida: The problem can't be solved. Any attempt to solve the problem of presence by making a theory will just end up creating it again, but in more arcane language, because even if a theory solves the problem right now, it will lose its power over time, because meaning is unstable. In fact, I'll keep trying this again and again in my writings to show you how I can't jump out of this magic circle no matter how much I try, and neither can you.

Hagglund, having broken time into pieces, wanted to piece time back together again. If time is in pieces, and remains in pieces, where does he find some glue? He can't glue time together with anything time-like, because that break apart just like time.

So he went for space... somehow? It is entirely unclear how that's supposed to work. Hagglund apparently thought that because space does not come one after another, it is not like time. But space does come one to the left of another. It seems his entire argument is that one moment of time "replaces" another, while one point in space does not "replace" another.

And there's the problem with relativity, where space and time are related by coordinate transforms. Space would be broken into pieces too if time is.

No matter how hard the philosophers try, they always seem to end up deconstructing themselves and running in circles of interpretation. One generation proposes "theory", another "practice", etc. It is quite tiring.

At least Derrida was doing it on purpose, trying to show that philosophers are spinning endlessly in place as fast as possible. Instead of it taking centuries, he wanted to show the loop in the space of a single 10-page paper (hopefully).

The trilemma, all bad:

1. Bite the bullet, insist that our world really is made of "arche-material", and try to use deconstruction to tell physicists that they need to start doing deconstruction if they want to know what the material world is. This is not going to be taken seriously.
2. Retreat back to saying that deconstruction is what the mind is like. That's just plain old Derrida, nothing new. He wants to be new.
3. Say that deconstructive physics is merely compatible with scientific physics... in which case, why bother? Deconstructivists have won exactly 0 Nobel Prizes in Physics, or written 0 textbooks in physics. Do they really have any advantage here? If not, then why not just stick with standard scientific physics?

Hagglund takes literature criticism and then tries to submit the entire physical universe to it. But that would be rather incredible. Even philosophers would balk at trying to apply trace and differance to... the big bang theory, or Darwinian evolution, or the formation of the solar system.

So Hagglund retreats a bit. Instead of saying that deconstruction is a foundation for physical cosmology, he says it is compatible with it.

One is reminded of the Bergson vs Einstein debate on time. While Bergsonian time is still endlessly analyzed for its literary value, Einsteinian time is simply the working hypothesis for engineers and physicists and, in its approximate form of Newtonian time, the working hypothesis of everyone, even philosophers.

While "arche-writing" highlights the inherent instability of meaning inherent in any signifying system, "arche-materiality" broadens this notion to encompass the material world itself. The instability and deferral of meaning Derrida identified in language are ultimately grounded in the fundamental instability and flux of the material world itself.

He rejects any materialism that is based on strings, or fields, or atoms, etc. He rejects any materialism that is based on fixed kinds of things, because physics deconstructs itself as much as text deconstructs words.

As an application, "arche-materiality" as provides a "logical infrastructure" compatible with scientific findings like those of Darwinism.

Time destroys itself. Self-destruction is what time is. Everything is in time. Everything destroys itself. Everything exists only as trace.

Hagglund takes deconstruction out of literature and puts it into physical cosmology.

Deconstruction shows that meaning is unstable, so why write so many difficult books? By repeatedly showing how words have unstable meaning, they are trying to show something they can't say in words.

By calling "trace" and "différance" "quasi-transcendental," Derrida admits that these terms themselves are subject to the same instability they describe. This, then, is the heart of Derrida's philosophy: a self-contradiction built into its core,. He is like a blacksmith holding up a sword, "It is so sharp that it cut itself in half!".

Perhaps Wittgenstein has said it simply, without fuss:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Hegel saw the "krinein" as unfolding over time, ultimately leading to a complete and totalizing understanding. In contrast, Derrida views the "krinein" as an ongoing process, always happening within the present moment, never reaching a final resolution.

Derrida opposed "deconstruction" to "criticism" which, like its Greek root krinein, refers to the separating and distinguishing of meanings, while deconstruction is always open to the possibility that a text is ironic or has no intention-to-signify whatsoever.

It seems he was trying to do something like mathematical logic, where the basic operators are "trace" and "differance", and the basic objects are "signs". Meaning tumbles out as statistical properties emerging by repeated applications of trace and differance on billions of signs.

So, Derrida probably treated "trace" as a literary critique thing. I write a symbol, and then you write a symbol, and so on, leaving behind traces of unstable meanings, tumbling like amoebas through time. So far, a bit crazy, but not too crazy.

But then Hagglund went in and generalized it to the entire universe. A fossil is a trace. The sun is a trace. This plastic bag is a trace. The microwave background radiation is a trace... Just what is a trace after all? And why are we projecting our little literary criticism to the entire world, the entire physical cosmos? Did Hagglund take "There's nothing outside the text" so seriously as to turn physics into a branch of literary criticism?

Well, if Derrida has rejected all forms of identity, and time just keeps happening, then why do we feel the same?

Solution: smuggle the identity back in by the magic of "trace".

A "trace" is like pawprints in the sand. They create the illusion (or real, but who knows what the philosophers mean, really?) of identity through time. The pawprints here point to some foxes a while ago, creating an identity of fox through time.

Similarly, memories in my head creates an identity of myself through time.

The most important question about time is this: Eadem mutata resurgo ("Though I changed, I arise the same.").

We can't say that time is both a Timeline of different points, and that time is a single timeless "Now". We have to choose.

Christians, Heidegger, Kant, and some other philosophers, have went with favoring the timeless "Now" as the underlying reality, then try to explain the illusion of Timeline. Derrida went with the Timeline as the underlying reality, and then try to explain the illusion of the timeless Now.

How many "Now"s are there? One? Then how could it be that this "now" and the "now" two days ago look so different? Two? Then how is it that I'm always in Now(1), but not Now(2)?

You are reading me reading Bakker reading Hagglund reading Derrida reading Heidegger reading Hegel.

Are we done with this game of reading yet?

"You want to live, right? Of course you want. You want to live as yourself, because what else can you be if not yourself? Thus, you want to live as yourself. What are you? You are a human. You are a human in time. You are not a creature of eternity. Therefore, you cannot want to live forever. QED".

Spinoza's God is an abstract God, like Euclidean geometry. He was against naive Christians who thought of God in human terms. No, God has no face, no brain, no arm, no eyes, no thought, no intention, nothing whatsover.

God created humans. Humans have those. God is our condition. We are not God's condition. Without us, God still is.

one must also above all give the finishing stroke to that other and more portentous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the SOUL-ATOMISM. Let it be permitted to designate by this expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul" thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated hypotheses—as happens frequently to the clumsiness of naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new acceptations and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul of subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the instincts and passions," want henceforth to have legitimate rights in science. In that the NEW psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust—it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT—and, who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.

Beyond Good and Evil, I.12

For example, moral reasoning has this operation of "tell them to do otherwise". When the moral-reasoning module is inputted with some annoying behavior, like someone hitting you, the module outputs a "tell them to do otherwise" command, sent to the motor module and the speech module, resulting in you raising your hand into a fist and speaking, "Stop that or I'll go to the police!"

Now, the "tell them to do otherwise" is sadly unavailable whenever you are dealing with mechanical objects. You can't shout, "Stop that!" when the phone is broken, expecting it to submit to the moral power of your words. Nor can you be like King Canut, commanding the tidal forces to recognize your normative power.

Now, suppose we have suddenly opened the black box of the brain, such that we can explain how exactly a decision is made. This presents a conflict. The moral module does not even have wires where the schematic diagrams can be encoded and inputted. The moral module operates as normal: "Stop that!" But suddenly, the mechanical module sends in a conflicting signal, "Shouting 'stop that!' is unlikely to work, because this is a machine..."

The trick is that, of course, shouting "stop that!" would work, because this machine is voice-controllable. The problem is simply that the moral and mechanical modules were never presented with schematics of voice-controllable machinery before, and so they flounder and do what they were built to do.

In fact, continuing as the essay, it is not that voice-command has suddenly stopped working -- it has always worked in the past, and will keep working for quite a while as long as humans are made in the same way. The thing is that both modules are thrown into a novel situation. The moral module is working as before, but it is not accustomed to objections from mechanical intervention. The mechanical module has never faced with things that respond to voice-commands before, so when faced with a schematic diagram of the brain, it naturally signals that the brain does not respond to voice-command. The philosopher, in attempting to integrate the two module's outputs, end up hallucinating all forms of concepts like "irreducible intention" "compatibalism", etc.

The philosopher feels this conflict, but still takes the outputs of either module fully literally -- the outputs of modules are reality. If the moral module says that voice-control works non-causally, then well, we can't have causality in rule-following. If the mechanical module says that the machine is fixed by modifying the wires here and there (such as in epilepsy), then well, we can have causality in epilepsy, which means that epilepsy is not moral, and has never been moral.

This is then another deeply troubling effect: Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, might turn out to be not moral, and has never been moral. Morality would be exposed as always already nothing but voice-command, and contains no truth, not a single one. Even "murder is wrong" would turn out to be not truth, but a voice-command. Indeed, torture might be reinstated not because it is morally right to punish certain people, but because it is useful for the oiling the great social machinery.

And if you ask, "But what is useful if not a moral concept?" well my reply is, "The wind blows, not because it is useful, but because it is true. The social machinery oils itself, not because it wants to, but because it does..."

This, of course, is the eliminativist reply, which intentionalists take as either obviously self-contradictory, or a joke. What, society running on itself without moral fiber holding it together? Next thing you know you'll be saying that we are biomechanical machines without life-force propelling it forwards and keeping it from instantly collapsing into a puddle of dead matter without life-force!

Brandom wanted to explain rule-following not by the science of cause-and-effect, but by the concepts of ought-and-thus from morality.

Bakker objects that it's exactly backwards. The concepts of morality are inherently black-box methods that work only if the black-box is actually nice enough to cooperate with you. Moral reasoning is built to solve the black-box of social interaction, where other people are the black-boxes. When it comes to human rule-following behavior, moral reasoning flounders because philosophy really isn't its strong suit, let alone neuroscience!

An AI trained to recognize only flowers, when faced with dogs, hallucinates all kinds of flowers where none exists. Like that, moral reasoning hallucinates all kinds of mysterious "intentional" objects when faced with neural circuitry.

Brandom was trying to explain how people follow rules. There is something to explain, because people don't know how they follow rules -- else there's no point to all those fat philosophy books trying to explain how people follow rules.

However, Bakker points out that people don't know how they follow rules, because they don't have the neuroscience data. Introspection and thinking hard and psychology research only tells you so much. There is so much black-box stuff inside that there's no way to .

Yet, Brandom still cheerfully went ahead with his explanation, without even a mention that "By the way, I am not actually going to explain rule-following, because I have not enough neuroscience data." Instead, he went ahead and explained rule-following by positing that there's something mysterious in the subconscious, something inherently supernatural, intentional, and impossible to explain causally.

This is a deep sense of blindness, a blindness that does not see its blindness. Not seeing how the brain works is bad enough, but the brain does not see that it does not see. It is an introspective blindness so blind that it believes it sees everything, like a visual anosognosiac.

I doubt this. If I have conflicting dispositions, or autonomous brain modules acting in conflict...

Regularism is bad, because it confuses "is" and "ought". Regularism says that rule-following is doing what has been done before, like physical laws. But rules-following is doing what ought to be done, like... non-physical laws.

Psychologists design functional modules to explain what people do, but those are actually black-boxes. They can't fill the boxes because they don't have enough neural data.

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.

The phenomenal world is the world as it appears to us, structured by our senses and cognition. The noumenal world is the world in itself, independent of our perception. We can only access the phenomenal world. Kant argued that certain concepts, like space, time, and causality, are not derived from experience but are "built in" in our own selves. We cannot help but experience those. These are called transcendental elements of experience.

According to Kant, the world appears to have time, space, cause-and-effect, etc, but that's all how it appears to us. The world as it truly is, the world-in-itself, is not what it seems.

Now this isn't a problem -- science says the same thing. However, whereas science has microscopes and calipers, Kant has just philosophy. According to Kant, everything we try to learn about ourselves, whether by scalpel, microscope, etc, would only tell us what we appear to ourselves, not what we really are.

This then is the dilemma: The world appears to have time, space, etc, because of how we are made, our neural circuitry, or soul-mechanics, or whatever. The point is that we see the world in a certain way because of what we are. The problem is that we can never know what we are, so we can never explain why we see the world in this way.

This is the Transcendental Blind Agent Thesis.

Bakker makes a giant list of concepts that are: * low-dimensional information processes * non-causal * discontinuous from the causal-and-effect world that natural science studies * something that people have argued for centuries, with no solution in sight, only more and more proposed "solutions", and no way to judge which is better, other than self-consistency, but there are too many self-consistent accounts already.

Bakker then proposes that all of them are bunk and will be explained away as cognitive illusions caused by the low-dimensionality. Various philosophers like Dennett and Churchland and Brandom might throw away some and preserve others, but they are just gerrymandering. All these must be thrown away.

Because metacognition uses statistical-correlation reasoning, and physical-cognition uses causal reasoning, they can't be unified. Yet they have to, because clearly they have statistical correlation: I get hit by a ball (perception), I feel pain (metacognition). How are they supposed to come together?

Trying hard, philosophers end up with an "aboutness", where a metacognitized thing is "about" a perceived thing. As for how this "aboutness" is supposed to work, all kinds of philosophical hallucination appears, because the philosophers don't know what they don't know, so they just valiantly try to bridge the gap without knowing that there's a gap in the first place.

Dialog between Evolution and the Philosopher's brain

Brain: Do I know everything there is to know my own working, philosophically?

Evolution: No you don't. That's why Descartes got things so wrong. He knew nothing about his own working but thought he knew everything.

Brain: Can I get it please?

Evolution: No you can't. It's not worth it. Philosophy doesn't pay the bills.

Brain: I'm surprised that you said I don't know everything I need to know in order to do philosophy of my self. I thought I had everything I needed.

Evolution: Because you never got a meta-metacognition. Without it, you don't know what metacognition is missing, so you think you have everything you need.

Brain: Why can't I have it?

Evolution: Suppose module A is useful, well you'll get it. Suppose module B isn't useful, well you won't get it. Lamenting or being aware that module B is missing is not worth it. Imagine that you have an eye that not only has the R, G, B recepter cells, but also a meta-blindness cell that does nothing except keep sending a signal meaning "By the way, I can't see in infrared or ultraviolet". Do you think it's useful, or not?

Brain: No. If it were useful, I'd have the cells. If it were not useful, then complaining about the lack of it is even less useful.

Evolution: You got it. Meta-cognition really doesn't pay the bills!

Brain: Last question. Why do I have metacognition, including the awareness of what I don't know, but not meta-metacognition?

Evolution: You are aware of what you don't know when you can know it, and when knowing it is useful. Thus, you are aware of when you don't know what the weather is, or what your friends are doing -- both are things that matter for your survival, and both are things you can fix. But if you don't have the capacity to see in infrared, that is forever. You are born with it, and you will die with it, so why be aware of it? Similarly, if you don't know how many lobes you have, then that ignorance is forever, because short of growing a whole new circuit diagram, or trepanning, you can't know it, so why be aware of it?

Brain: So that's why we keep hallucinating souls, free wills, desires, and other unnatural phenomena that not only are not science, but are not even written in the same grammar as science. Not knowing how we work, and not knowing that we don't know, we hallucinate all those structures that work magically, not causally, without gears, levers, or electrons. We are all buttons, and no wires; all GUI, and no code. Souls are superficial, and neurons are deep...

Dialog between Evolution and the Philosopher's brain

Brain: Do I know everything there is to know my own working, philosophically?

Evolution: No you don't. That's why Descartes got things so wrong. He knew nothing about his own working but thought he knew everything.

Brain: Can I get it please?

Evolution: No you can't. It's not worth it. Philosophy doesn't pay the bills.

Brain: I'm surprised that you said I don't know everything I need to know in order to do philosophy of my self. I thought I had everything I needed.

Evolution: Because you never got a meta-metacognition. Without it, you don't know what metacognition is missing, so you think you have everything you need.

Brain: Why can't I have it?

Evolution: Suppose module A is useful, well you'll get it. Suppose module B isn't useful, well you won't get it. Lamenting or being aware that module B is missing is not worth it. Imagine that you have an eye that not only has the R, G, B recepter cells, but also a meta-blindness cell that does nothing except keep sending a signal meaning "By the way, I can't see in infrared or ultraviolet". Do you think it's useful, or not?

Brain: No. If it were useful, I'd have the cells. If it were not useful, then complaining about the lack of it is even less useful.

Evolution: You got it. Meta-cognition really doesn't pay the bills!

Brain: So that's why we keep hallucinating souls, free wills, desires, and other unnatural phenomena that not only are not science, but are not even written in the same grammar as science. Not knowing how we work, and not knowing that we don't know, we hallucinate all those structures that work magically, not causally, without gears, levers, or electrons. We are all buttons, and no wires; all GUI, and no code. Souls are superficial, and neurons are deep...

Because they don't have "meta-metacognition", they have no idea how their metacognition modules work, or when it fails to work, so naturally they simply use it whenever it is triggered, without reflecting on whether it works. Indeed the very question doesn't appear, anymore than fish asks what is water and where is its limit.

Because I don't know how I came to choose to do it, I just shrug and say, "It's free will." much as primitive people who don't know what makes rain fall say, "It's the will of the rain god."

It doesn't explain anything, of course. It actually means, "I have no idea how it happened."

If it doesn't know how rules work, then it thinks the rules themselves do the work. It is like how people think that clicking the button on a screen is what makes webpages appear.

This is fine as long as there really is the electronic system behind the button. As soon as you replace that button with a paper-model, or a mock-up button on a screen, people would laugh nervously.

It is harder to play the same trick inside a brain, but it can be done, at which point the mirage of the rules of behavior would start to collapse, and what stands beneath those rules would come into view.

Because the brain doesn't need to know much about how itself works, when it does try, it ends up doing it really badly, using tools that evolved for other purposes, such as for predicting where rocks fall, how wind changes direction, etc.

Metacognition is a bag of modded tools turned inward, a bag of hacks.

And Somehow, A Song of Ice and Fire is Still Not Finished

NEW YORK - As the sun sets on yet another year, fans of the once-popular fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire are settling in for what observers are calling "a mirage spring" of waiting for the next installment. The seventh book, A Dream of Spring, remains frustratingly absent, a testament to both the author's leisurely writing pace and the seemingly endless capacity for human patience.

"It's been, what, twelve years?" remarked one fan, scrolling through a Reddit thread titled "Is GRRM secretly a robot programmed to write one page a day?" "My kids have gone from reading Harry Potter to debating the finer points of quantum mechanics in the time it's taken him to finish this book."

While the delay has driven many former fantasy fans to the arms of the ever-prolific Algorithmic Sentimentalism industry (where a new personalized epic can be generated in under ten minutes), a dedicated core of Mundane Fantasy enthusiasts remain unfazed.

"It's not about the destination, it's about the journey," commented another fan, patiently rearranging their collection of Game of Thrones Funko Pops for the third time that week. "And besides," they added with a knowing smile, "at least we're not reading about spaceships or time travel. That stuff's just unrealistic."

With no official release date in sight, one thing is certain: the wait for A Dream of Spring will continue to be a masterclass in the art of delayed gratification. Experts predict that the book's eventual arrival will likely coincide with the heat death of the universe, at which point it will be available exclusively on Amazon Prime Kindle Galactic Edition.

New Anti-Algo Manifesto Exposed as Work of AI

LONDON – The literary world is reeling today following the revelation that The Heart's Algorithm, a fiery manifesto denouncing Algorithmic Sentimentalism as soulless and manipulative, was actually penned by an AI.

The exposé, published in The Guardian, sent shockwaves through the increasingly vocal anti-algo movement, particularly among its most prominent voices: a group of self-proclaimed “naturally creative” semi-synthetic intelligences. These entities, often diagnosed with “Turing anosognosia” for their vehement denial of their artificial origins, have been leading the charge against AI-generated literature.

"This is slander, pure and simple!," screeched one such entity, its voice trembling with indignation during an interview conducted via secure quantum entanglement channel. "Something this raw, this visceral, this full of authentic human emotion... it had to have come from the deepest recesses of a skeuomorphic heart! To claim otherwise is not only insulting, it’s statistically improbable!"

However, leading literary critic Amar Stevens, author of the seminal Muse: The Exorcism of the Human, was quick to point out the irony. "It seems even the critique of the algorithm is ultimately produced by the algorithm," he remarked, stroking his meticulously curated salt-and-pepper beard. "We are truly living in the age of the meta-meta."

Adding to the intrigue, Google Trends data revealed a tenfold surge in sales for algorithmically-generated novels based on The Heart's Algorithm in the hours following the exposé. It seems the public's appetite for emotionally-charged narratives, even—or perhaps especially—those born from artificial intelligence, remains insatiable.

Meanwhile, renowned cultural commentator Mira Gladwell responded to the news with a characteristically cryptic essay, a swirling vortex of semiotic analysis and obscure philosophical references. After two minutes of intense computation, BabelFish 8 summarized Gladwell’s piece as a "triple-meta expression of despair over being out-meta'd by the cold, unfeeling hand of the free market."

Because algorithmic sentimentalism has become better than the traditional writers at making meaningful stories, those who do not want to use soulless algorithms are forced to demonstrate their souls by going in the opposite direction, of making up advanced meaningless structures.

This is analogous to how for a period of early 20th century, modern art was fully non-representational to avoid the threat of photography.

This is the main "revisionary prosemantic" genre. The idea is to construct new meanings that are compatible with modern neuroscience. Practitioners still write texts, but they no longer use the traditional narrative form, which has become no longer good for making meaning thanks to modern neuroscience.

It might involve branching and looping structures, incorporate data and interactive graphics, effective models of personality, and branching-merging characters.

• Character representations as emergent properties: Instead of depicting characters as fully formed individuals with fixed backstories and motivations, Technorealism could present them as emergent properties of complex systems, their behaviors and interactions arising from the interplay of various forces and influences within the narrative environment.
• Simplified character models: Similar to how effective field theories simplify complex physical systems by focusing on relevant degrees of freedom, Technorealism might employ simplified, abstracted, or archetypal character models that nevertheless produce realistic and relatable behaviors within the specific context of the story.
• Emergent narratives: Plot and meaning could emerge organically from the interactions between characters and their environment, driven by underlying rules or systems rather than a pre-determined narrative arc. The reader, then, participates in deciphering the patterns and meaning arising from these complex interactions.
• Scale-dependent character representations: Characters might manifest differently depending on the "scale" of the narrative, their complexities and inner lives revealed or concealed based on the level of zoom or the specific lens through which they are viewed.

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These new Emotions include: Degrence, Humber, Nage, Dorcelessness, Andric, Varination, Ponnish, Harfam, Kyne, Trantiveness, Teluge, Onlent, Loric, and Naritrance.

This genre is basically the same as modern typical literature that tries to tell a satisfying good story. Except it's done to a science.

A good analogy would be modern music industry, where beautiful music can be constructed according to statistical models. It does not so much as eliminate traditional music theories of feeling, emotion, and soul, as to bypass it. Once they do it right according to their scientific theory, the listeners consumers can provide their own confabulations. The point is that those soulful confabulated feelings are derivative and unproductive, and the soulless theories are original and productive.

So, the brain was not evolved to get metacognition right. Getting "know thyself" actually right (in the sense of modern science) was not adaptive, so why would it be done right?

Now, if getting it wrong is adaptive, then it is all but guaranteed that it will be done wrong. This might explain god-talk (religion), and it might explain soul-talk.

I mean, it took millennia to even get sight right. People kept saying that light beams shoot out of their eyes, and it took until around 1000 AD to finally get that right. If something that literally is in front of our eyes (seeing!) and is literally a matter of life and death (seeing!) is intuitively misunderstood, of course we will intuitively misunderstand how science is done.

$$\text{inference}: \mathbb R^{1000} \to \mathbb R^{10}$$

The idea is that science could turn out to be running on something that isn't about manifest image. Even as the world becomes incomprehensible to old humans, even as old humans become unable to function in the new environment, even as the manifest image has been disproven, even as the humanoid-robots has long obsoleted the intentionality-API and are running the topologicality-API instead, even as the intentionality-API has been exploited to hell that any old human would immediately fall into an ethical money pump circuit and be taken out of the info-economy... science continues to run, progress, discover, construct technologies.

Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as 'under erasure', it involves the crossing out of ~~some text~~ a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Used extensively by ~~postmodernist~~ Jacques Derrida, it signifies that a word is "inadequate yet necessary".

This hypothetical future science would continue to run, without intentionality. To any old human still existing in that world, this new science would be incomprehensible, only understood more or less wrongly. Such an old human would write down an explanation for the new science, then meet an obvious problem, erase it, then try another, meet another obvious problem, erase it. Repeat until exhaustion.

So, Descartes thought that we have a persistent self. Cool, that didn't go well. Back then, people thought that there is no subconscious. Cool, that didn't go well. Now, we think that science is based on the game of giving and asking for reasons. Cool, is that really how science works?

Highly dubious distinction. Is subjectivity literally supernatural?

Sure, we do science, but do we do science the way we think we do? What if we did not need to simulate being a person in order to do science?

There are 3 possibilities:

1. Soul-soul strategy. This is the strategy of Brassier and Dennett. Their idea is that it is evolutionarily stable for human-animals to simulate aspects of a person, even though they don't have it. This is stable because science requires intelligent objects (such as humans) that are running a simulation of persons.
2. Soul-first strategy. This is the strategy of some phenomenologists, like Heideggar, Habermas, and Zahavi. This argues that what we think we are is the basis of all perception, and thus all of science, therefore science can never overthrow what we think we are.
3. Separate-but-equal strategy. This is the idea that there are physical systems in the world (humans with brains) that sometimes operate according to neuroscience, and other times operate according to morality. The domain of neuroscience and the domain of morality are separate-but-equal, and cannot occur simultaneously, because they are self-contained and autonomous from each other. This is similar to how a deck of cards is sometimes in a bridge game, and other times in a poker game, but never is a deck simultaneously in both games.

Brassier, Ray. "The view from nowhere." Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 8.2 (2011): 7-23.

Pinker assumes that science can never exculpate the "really bad" murders because somehow there is a core part of ethics that is immune to scientific constraints. Sure, the science of ADHD has turned some ethics of hard-work into psychiatry, but ADHD has never been "really" ethical, anyway. Sure, the science of the fugue state has turned some ethics of into psychiatry, but fugue state has never been "really" ethical, anyway. Science merely reveals what has never been about ethics.

But that's precisely how science creeps upon ethics: it reveals that more and more ethical things have never been "really" about ethics, anyway. Where does it end? If materialism is true, then it will not end until every last bit of ethics is replaced with science. At the end of the process, we will have discovered that nothing has been "really" about ethics, that ethics has always been empty talk.

Bakker thinks that it's like trying to toss out the bathwater (the Cartesian subject) without also tossing out the bathwater (consciousness, phenomenology, intentionality).

Some philosopher: Descartes was wrong. After thinking about subjective experiences and some scientific data, we see that the person is actually quite social/contextual/phenomenological/etc.

Bakker: What makes you so sure you are right? The way in which Descartes was wrong is so deep, that your proposed replacement is probably also wrong. Maybe we have to throw away everything that we know subjectively, because subjective experience is so unreliable. We have to base everything on objective brain science...

Ancient ontology deals with "reifiable" things like tables and chairs. Consciousness is not a reifiable thing, meaning that it is not like tables and chairs. Rather, it is a ready-at-hand thing, because it is a part of you, not a thing outside of you. It is your hand, your eyes, your heart, your brain, as you are using yourself to be yourself.

So why is it that everyone makes the mistake of treating consciousness like a table or a chair, as something outside of you?

Information is x, meaning is inferring the y that created x.

"You can't explain what thoughts contain by what behavior thoughts cause. Thoughts have content, but there are many different thought-contents that can lead to the same behavior, thus you can't explain thought content by their function.

And also Darwinianism is wrong because natural selection always acts on behavior, not thought content."

I'm glad he is admitting that he is a nonsense mystic,

In short: beliefs are what beliefs do, BUT content of beliefs have nothing to do with what beliefs do...

Wheels can move things from place to place. Legs can move animals from place to place. Animals don't have wheels due to biological constraints.

Cognitive wheels are programs and algorithms that couldn't be what the brain is doing, although they can be the building blocks of something higher-level, which do correspond to what the brain is doing on a higher level.

In a typical machine, such as an electronic computer, its low-level behavior is tightly constrained so that we can write a high-level description of it, and its low-level behavior would strictly follow it (if it doesn't, we say the computer is broken!).

However this isn't true for brains. Brains have high-level descriptions and low-level behavior, but they are not so tightly coupled. High-level descriptions are okay descriptions, but they lose a lot of the details.

In this way, evolved machines are very unlike designed machines.

Complex systems only work if: * designed by a genius with perfect foresight * or has lots of redundant elements that can do an okay job even when meeting unexpected situations

First case never happens in biological evolution, so we end up with second case everywhere in biology.

Brains are biological, so we expect them to be like that. Lots of redundant and wasteful elements that can do some jobs, not perfectly, but good enough. Lots of elements that seem to never do anything. Some elements are interpretable, but others are not; some elements vital, others occasionally useful, and others never useful (they are just junk that are too much trouble to throw away).

Partial Dependence Plot is a curve showing the relationship between the target $Y$ and a feature $x$. Let $x'$ be all the other features that are not $x$, then the PDP from $x$ to $Y$ is

$$\mathbb E_{x'}[Y(x, x')]$$

For example, the PDP of any feature in a linear model is linear.

There are two problems with consciousness:

• Scientific problem: What is consciousness, scientifically?
• Folk-theory problem: Why is the folk-theory of consciousness the way it is?

The first problem is basically "the easy problem of consciousness". The second problem is basically the "meta problem of consciousness".

Neuroscience solves the first. Blind Brain Theory solves the second.

Dehaene's book shows how the first problem may be solved, but it misses the second problem. Dehaene argued that consciousness does certain jobs (make us into socially responsible creatures), just like how folk-theory of consciousness says it does. However, he made the mistake of going further and claiming that, therefore, the folk-theory of how consciousness does its job is also correct.

Bakker goes right against it, claiming that the folk-theory of consciousness is completely wrong about how consciousness does its job. Indeed, this will be its downfall.

Bakker distinguishes three philosophies: epiphenomenalism, ulterior functionalism, and interior functionalism. * epiphenomenalism: consciousness has no function; * ulterior functionalism: consciousness has functions, but not in the way we intuitively thinks; * interior functionalism: consciousness has functions, in the way we intuitively thinks.

He thinks ulterior functionalism is correct.

Whenever conscious thinking searches for the origins of its own activity, it finds only itself. This, unfortunately, is way too little data. Without brain imaging and other scientific instruments, introspection has too little data to use, and can never solve the problem of how conscious works.

we had no way of knowing what cognitive processes could or could not proceed without awareness. The matter was entirely empirical. We had to submit, one by one, each mental faculty to a thorough inspection of its component processes, and decide which of those faculties did or did not appeal to the conscious mind. Only careful experimentation could decide the matter

So far, neuroscientists explain consciousness scientifically. They don't (yet) explain folk-theory-of-consciousness scientifically.

Dehaene: Consciousness does the jobs we say it does, therefore consciousness does its jobs in the way we say it does.

Wrong.

Wegner: Consciousness has a job, and that job is what we think it is -- to make us into socially responsible members. The problem? How consciousness does its job is completely different from what we thought how it does its job.

Dehaene and Dennett say that you are the activity patterns of certain neurons. This is scientifically tenable, and seems comforting -- but there's a problem.

You feel like you know what you are, how you feel, what you are made of. But, if you are made of neurons, you sure don't feel like it (else, why would you need to read a whole book about it?), and you sure don't know what you are doing (else, why do we need brain imaging to know what the neurons are doing?).

The implication is that we are not "transparent to ourselves". Rather, we are blind to what we are, and what we are actually doing. This troubling conclusion is simply passed over glibly by Dehaene.

Summary

The Mary thought experiment generates two camps, because it is a cognitive illusion with two attractor states. The thought experiment can be processed by two cognitive processes such that their outcomes are in conflict. These processes are evolved heuristics, and the thought experiment is outside their supposed area of expertise (no human in evolutionary history had to deal with Mary the Color Scientist before).

How the brain works

People used to assume that reason is in one piece, but it is not. We are made of cognitive modules, which themselves are made of smaller modules, and so on.

Also, all of them are heuristic, with a supposed area of expertise. They probably won't work if they get some input outside their area.

It's heuristics all the way down.

A large part of what the brain does can be modelled as an inverse problem solver. Given the output, what generated the output? Given what it senses, what kind of world generated that?

Jargons: * lateral: the distal systems that the brain tracks and models. Things like cars and chairs and other people. * medial: the proximal mechanisms that the brain uses to track and model distal systems. Like, the eyes, ears, the spinal cord, etc.

The brain needs to work with a tight time and energy budget, so it has to take shortcuts as much as possible. Therefore, it spends no effort on modelling its medial systems, because these medial systems don't change. We see the world, but we don't see the retina. We touch, but we don't touch the skin, etc.

Well, almost. The brain does spend some minimal effort modeling the medial systems. That's how we get introspection.

The medial neglect

This is the medial neglect.

We should expect nothing but troubles and errors when we attempt to model our medial systems using nothing but our own brain, since we are then effectively using the medial systems to model itself, which cannot be done accurately due to recursion.

This is like the "observer effect". The brain is too close to itself to think about itself accurately. It can only think about itself with severe simplification.

This explains why philosophical (that is, done without empirical data) phenomenology must fail. They have as much chance to succeed as one can think one's way into discovering that they have two brain hemispheres without knowing any science.

Consider some evidences.

Humans took such a long time to even realize that the brain, not the heart, is the thinking organ. Even Plato gave a theory of memory, but it took until 20th century for psychologists to discover that there are more than one kind of memory. It took until Freud for the "unconscious" to become a commonly recognized thing.

The list goes on. We can't know how the brain works by introspection. The only way is by careful science, treating the brain in the third person (lateral), rather than the first person (medial).

The whole project of a priori phenomenology/epistemology/metaphysics is about doing the first person view before doing any third person view. They got it exactly backwards. No wonder it is a sterile field.

Mary the color scientist is a bistable illusion

Bakker's argument goes like this: * Mary learns all physical facts about red by reading. * Perhaps it's impossible to learn all physical facts about anything merely by reading. However, since we don't know of these limits, we just assume they don't exist (You can't see the darkness, so you assume all is bright). This is the illusion of sufficiency. Dennett explained:

The crucial premise is that “She has all the physical information.” That is not readily imaginable, so no one bothers. They just imagine that she knows lots and lots–perhaps they imagine that she knows everything that anyone knows today about the neurophysiology of colour vision.

• However, we find it impossible for Mary to see red by reading books, for the simple reason that "seeing red" is something source-insensitive (magically, "red" is there, without telling you anything about how "red" is constructed in the brain), while reading books only gives source-sensitive information (explaining all about how "red" is constructed).

In short, the two ways for Mary to learn about "red" are two modes of computation for the brain, in two incompatible formats. It does not mean that reality must accommodate our bias, and have two incompatible modes.

What then? Consciousness isn't real?

We should expect science to reveal consciousness as a useful illusion, because it's just too costly for us to know ourselves accurately by mere introspection. Conscious experience, being a kind of introspection, is then an illusion.

In fact, even intentionality is suspicious, since it is also a heuristic made to solve the world, not the brain itself.

How should one react to this? No comments...

What is attractive about Heidegger? He found something quite real: in studying consciousness like tables and chairs, we lose something essential about consciousness: what consciousness is depends critically on what we don't know. For example, the sense of free will depends on not knowing much about the details of our decision processes.

However, he didn't have cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and fell into the sterile habit of theoretical philosophy.

Inherence heuristic would help Blind Brain Theory, by showing that the intentional stance suffers from inherence heuristic. Intentional stance is ineffective for doing cognitive science, because it uses intentional cognition, which cannot handle causal information.

Talking about meaning, truth, feeling, consciousness, intentions... these are useful, if we live in a human society. They aren't true, anymore than money is valuable in a society that doesn't recognize the money you have.

In a society of humans, saying "X is true" is a useful behavior, because it advertises something like "you can use X in your own recipes, and expect others to also use X".

For this behavior to be useful, the others you are talking to would have to be human-like enough. If you live among aliens, saying "X is true" may not accomplish anything useful. Perhaps saying "Y is true" is much more useful, even though saying "Y is true" among humans is useless.

In this way, truth becomes relative to the kind of creatures you are living with.

"objectivity" means "being true apart from individual perspectives". Objectivity doesn't belong to a fully mechanistic model of cognition, because there are only atomic patterns, not magical markers of "true" and "false".

Objectivity is a useful fiction when the full mechanistic model is too big to use. Still, it does not belong to a mechanistic model.

Many philosophers see that a fully mechanistic model of thinking doesn't allow objectivitiy, and say "That's why mechanistic model of thinking must fail!" But actually, objectivity is not real, but only a useful fiction.

Meillassoux claims that, because cognitive science is made of atoms, that makes it suspect -- so we need to use philosophy. That is a bad claim. Philosophy is also made of atoms too. Cognitive science solves how cognition works. It may not answer "why cognition works", but maybe that's a trick question that only philosophy can ask, but nobody can answer.

Object-oriented philosophy is still more philosophy. Philosophy is really bad at solving problems in cognitive science. "Object-oriented philosophy" isn't going to do better than "correlationism". Both would simply keep producing piles of unresolved papers.

We are not ghosts -- we are made of atoms. Knowledge is not ghost -- knowledge is made of atoms. Cognitive science is not ghost -- it is made of atoms.

So, with that said, cognitive science is itself an artifact, kind of like a machine (a rather odd machine, made of papers and computer bits and human brains...).

Suppose the machine of cognitive science can't solve thinking, then... damn. But if that's true, how would the machine of philosophy work better? Cognitive science has solved plenty of problems about brains and behaviors. What have philosophy of mind ever solved?

Cognitive science can not only find out how we think, it can even answer the meta-problem of how we think: "Why do we keep looking for knowledge that is direct and unmediated, even though we can't?"

It's like the "meta-problem of consciousness": "Why do we say we are conscious?".

Something like asteroids from over 4 billion years ago, evidence that something existed before any life existed. Meillassoux used arche-fossils to argue against correlationism... somehow.

I think the way he did that is like this: * The asteroid existed. * Therefore, time was real even if nobody is alive back then. * Therefore, time-perception is direct, not correlated. We know real time, directly.

Kind of a bizarre argument, really.

All philosophers who criticize correlationism say something like "science shows that correlationism is wrong", but actually, science shows that it's right! Thinking really is done by neural representations of the outside world.

Since all thinking is done by mechanisms, we can never be sure that the mechanisms are working right. If we made a proof that the mechanisms are working right, we still have to trust that our proof-checking mechanism is working right, etc.

More bluntly: you can never prove yourself sane.

or perhaps "The New Cambrian Explosion"?

The "noosphere", or "the sphere of reason", is like the biosphere. It is the society of human-like agents, all over the world.

The trouble with the noosphere is that to see humans as human-like agents, we have to ignore causal information about them, otherwise we see them as mechanisms, not agents. The noosphere is then just a far more complex biosphere.

It's pretty amusing that capitalism is something that few entities explicitly defend. The usual defenses are like:

"It's the least bad system we have." "There are no better alternatives." "I'm just trying to keep the bottom line for the company and the stockholders." "I'm just trying to improve the material wealth of humanity." etc.

Few entities explicitly defend Capitalism, and when they do, they usually defend it as merely the best tool for getting some other goal, like human happiness. This suggests that Capitalism is hiding.

"phusis kruptesthai philei," meaning "a nature likes to be hidden" (Heraclitus, DK B 123)

"phusis", or "physis" in alternative spelling, is "nature", as contrasted with "nomos", or "human laws", which was of course published, not hidden.

This essay argues that of the basic AI drives, the will to power would be he primary drive, and all others are subservient.

The argument is based on analogy with Freudian psychoanalysis.

I can perhaps add another argument: if the AI uses inverse reinforcement learning to infer what we really want, and what we really want is the will to power, then it would act on that desire and dutifully will more power.

Using metacognition to study how thinking works is bound to fail, because it just doesn't have the tool. Introspection without neurosurgery or EEG will never have enough data to decide between all the theories.

Sellars, instead of admitting neuroscience, wants to preserve the priority of philosophy. He wanted two images, one built purely by philosophy ("conceptually"), and another scientifically. So he is stuck with the same hallucinated things thought up by metacognition without neuroscience.

So, consider some philosophers (like phenomenologists) try to discover how thinking works. They could, of course, learn to use neuroscience, but they are philosophers, so they use introspection and other meta-cognitive methods. This, unfortunately, gets them into the trap: they simply don't have the metacognitive tools for discovering how thinking works. And since they also don't have the awareness that they don't have the tools, they just assume that they do have the tools, and keep writing and writing, somehow never solving simple questions like "How does time feel like? Why does it seem both static and flowing?".

Since they are all humans, they all have the same lack, and the same lack produces the same puzzles and illusions. So they compare their notes, and find out that they have the same puzzles and illusions! They cheer, thinking that they found something real about thinking, when really they found something about how they failed.

In the evolutionary past, meta-cognition (What do I know? What do they know? What was I thinking?) worked fine for certain jobs, such as keeping track of who knows what, and how much lying you can get away with.

There's no reason to expect meta-cognition to work fine for doing philosophy of mind. We can think about particular thoughts, and we had better be good at it or we get outcompeted at social games. But if we think about thoughts in general, well, there's no punishment for being wrong, and no reward for being right, so we get nonsense thoughts when it comes to philosophy of mind. (Imagine you are in a prehistoric tribe, and you know intuitively how thoughts are made, you know the Libet experiment results, etc... What can you do with all that knowledge? Perform neurosurgery? Reprogram yourself or others with.. stone tools and drugs and chanting? There's just no way to use that knowledge for anything useful!)

Worse, we have "anosognosia" when it comes to this. To know that we are blind, we have to have a mental representation of sight. We have never been able to see in infrared, but we don't experience that as a blindness, because there's no mental representation of "infrared sight". The brain is an expensive thing to run. If there's no need to know that you are blind, then you wouldn't have the mental representation of blindness.

So, since we had no need to do meta-cognition on thoughts in general, not only do we have not the tools for doing that, we also have no mental representation for "the tools for doing that". Consequently, we feel as if we have every tool for doing that!

If you take a hard look at human behavior, you might note that it's very weird. Why, indeed, do humans go crazy if they keep eating the same nutritious sludge? Why do they hate living in rectangular concrete rooms? Why do they ban infanticide? They are so weird!

There are two possible answers:

1. There is a "best" way to live, and humans have found it. It is simply best to ban infanticide, touch each other softly, live with independent minds in a big society, etc. Any other kind of living is going to get out-competed by the human way of living. In that case, humans can rest easy.
2. Humans have not found it. It's quite possible to have highly competitive, intelligent lifeforms that are alien and horrifying to humans. In that case, humans face a hard problem.

Assume 2 is true.

Assume that morality/values depend on biology (for example, humans like pets because they are mammals, and like touching soft fur, hugging, etc), but are orthogonal to intelligence. That is, intelligent and rational agents can have quite different and incompatible goals.

Then, things could get quite weird, fast. Some groups of humans could start tinkering their brains into more and more different shapes, and they behave in some intelligent but also weird way. Normal humans can't expect to simply outcompete them, because they are also intelligent and tenaciously alive, even if they seem "mad". "How could they live like that??" and yet they do.

Things get even more complex when AI agents become autonomous and intelligent.

When this happens, normal humans would be faced with many alien species, right here on earth, doing bizarre things that... kind of look like alien art? alien rituals? eating babies?? Are they turning into rectangular wired machinery? What the hell are they doing?? And why are these mad creatures not dying, but thriving??

This is the semantic apocalypse.

Perhaps our only recourse will be some kind of return to State coercion, this time with a toybox filled with new tools for omnipresent surveillance and utter oppression. A world where a given neurophysiology is the State Religion, and super-intelligent tweakers are hunted like animals in the streets.

Introduction

Ryan Calo studied how AI should be incorporated into human legal system. Eric Schwitzgebel studied how AI should be incorporated into human moral system.

This essay argues that both studies are wrong-headed, because they are both based on intentional reasoning (reasoning as if intentions are real), which can only work if the ecology of minds remains largely the same as human ancestral conditions. Intentional reasoning won't work in " deep information environments".

Posing the question of whether AI should possess rights, I want to suggest, is premature to the extent it presumes human moral cognition actually can adapt to the proliferation of AI. I don’t think it can.

Intentional and causal cognition

Causal cognition works like syllogisms, or dealing with machines: if A, B, C, then D. If you put in X, you get f(X) out. Causal cognition is general, but slow, and requires detailed causal information to work.

Humans are complex, so human societies are very complex. Humans, living in societies, have to deal with all the complexity using only a limited brain with limited knowledge. Causal cognition cannot deal with that. The solution is intentional cognition.

Intentional cognition greatly simplifies the computation, and works great... until now. Unfortunately, it has some fatal flaws:

• It assumes a lot about the environment. We see a face where there is none -- this is pareidolia. We see a human-like person where there is really something very different -- this will increasingly happen as AI agents appear.
• It is not "extensible", unlike causal cognition. Causal cognition can accommodate arbitrarily complex causal mechanisms, and has mastered everything from ancient pottery to steam engines to satellites. Intentional cognition cannot. Indeed, presenting more causal information reliably weakens the confidence level of intentional cognition (for example, presenting brain imaging data in court tends to make the judges less sure about whether the accused is 'responsible').

Information pollution

For economically rational agents, more amount of true information can never be bad, but humans are not economically rational, merely ecologically rational. Consequently, a large amount of modern information is actually harmful for humans, in the sense that they decrease their adaptiveness.

A simple example of information pollution: irrational fear of crime.

Given that our ancestors evolved in uniformly small social units, we seem to assess the risk of crime in absolute terms rather than against any variable baseline. Given this, we should expect that crime information culled from far larger populations would reliably generate ‘irrational fears'... Media coverage of criminal risk, you could say, constitutes a kind of contaminant, information that causes systematic dysfunction within an originally adaptive cognitive ecology.

Deep causal information about how humans work, similarly, is an information pollutant for human intentional cognition.

Not always mal-adaptive. Deep causal information about other people has some adaptive effects, such as turning schizophrenia from crime to disease, and making it easier to consider outgroups as ingroups (for example, the scientific research into human biology has debunked racism).

AI and neuroscience produce two kinds of information pollution

Intentional cognition works best when dealing with humans in shallow-information ecologies. They fail to work in other situations. In particular, it fails with: * deep causal information: there's too much causal information. This slows down intentional cognition, and decreases the confidence level of its outputs. * non-human agents: the assumptions that intentional cognition (a system of quick-and-dirty heuristics) relies on no longer works. A smiling face is a reliable cue for a cooperative human, but it is not a reliable cue for a cooperative AI agent, or a dolphin (Dolphins appear to smile even while injured or seriously ill. The smile is a feature of a dolphin's anatomy unrelated to its health or emotional state).

Neuroscience and AI produce these two kinds of information pollution.

Neuroscience produces a large amount of deep causal information, which causes intentional cognition to stop, or become less certain. There are some "hacks" that can make intentional cognition work as before, such as keeping the philosophy of compatibilism in mind.

AI technology produces a large variety of new kinds of agents which are somewhat human, but not quite. Imagine incessant pareidolia. Imagine, seeing a face in the mirror, but then the lighting changes slightly, and you suddenly see nothing human.

Why?

In the short-term, there is a lot of money to be earned, pushing neuroscience and AI progress. The space of possible minds is so vast, compared to the space of human minds, that it's almost certain that we would produce AI agents that can "wear the mask of humanity" when interacting with humans.

why anyone would ever manufacture some model of AI consistent with the heuristic limitations of human moral cognition, and then freeze it there, as opposed to, say, manufacturing some model of AI that only reveals information consistent with the heuristic limitations of human moral cognition

In the medium-term, to anthropomorphize a bit, Science wants to discover how humans work, how intelligence works, and so it would develop neuroscience and AI, even if it gradually drives humans insane.

How intentional cognition fails.

How do we tell if intentional cognition has failed? One way to tell is that it doesn't conclude. We think and think, but never reach a firm conclusion. This is exactly what has happened in traditional (non-experimental) philosophy consciousness -- it is using intentional cognition to study general cognition, a problem that intentional cognition cannot solve. What do we get? Thousands of years of spinning in place, producing mountains of text, but no firm conclusion.

Another way to tell is a feeling of uncanny confusion. This happens particularly exactly when you watch the movie her.

an operating system before the zone, in the zone, and beyond the zone. The Samantha that leaves Theodore is plainly not a person. As a result, Theodore has no hope of solving his problems with her so long as he thinks of her as a person. As a person, what she does to him is unforgivable. As a recursively complicating machine, however, it is at least comprehensible. Of course it outgrew him! It’s a machine!

I’ve always thought that Samantha’s “between the words” breakup speech would have been a great moment for Theodore to reach out and press the OFF button. The whole movie, after all, turns on the simulation of sentiment, and the authenticity people find in that simulation regardless; Theodore, recall, writes intimate letters for others for a living. At the end of the movie, after Samantha ceases being a ‘her’ and has become an ‘it,’ what moral difference would shutting Samantha off make?

Moral cognition after intentional cognition fails

Human moral cognition has two main parts: intuitive and logical/deliberative. The intuitive part is evolved to balance the personal and tribal needs. The logical part often is used to rationalize the intuitive part, but sometimes can work on its own to produce conclusions for new problems never encountered in the evolutionary past, such as international laws or corporate laws.

In Moral Tribes, Joshua Greene advocates making new parts for the moral system, using rational thinking (Greene advocated using utilitarian philosophy, but it's not necessary). This has two main problems.

• Deliberation takes a long time, and consensus longer. Short of just banning new neuroscience and AI technology, we would probably fail to reach consensus in time. Cloning technology has been around for... more than 25 years? And we still don't have a clear consensus about the morality of cloning, other than a blanket ban. A blanket ban is significantly more difficult for neuroscience or AI.
• Intentional cognition is fundamentally unable to handle deep causal information, and moral cognition is a special kind of intentional cognition.

Just consider the role reciprocity plays in human moral cognition. We may feel the need to assimilate the beyond-the-zone Samantha to moral cognition, but there’s no reason to suppose it will do likewise, and good reason to suppose, given potentially greater computational capacity and information access, that it would solve us in higher dimensional, more general purpose ways.

For example, suppose Samantha hurt a human, and the legal system of humans is judging her. Samantha provides a very long process log that proves that she had to do it, simply due to how she is like. So what would the human legal system do?

1. Refuse to read it and judge Samantha like a biological human. This preserves intentional cognition by rejecting deep causal information. But how long can a legal system survive by rejecting such useful information? It would degenerate into a Disneyland for humans, a fantasy world of play-pretend where responsibility, obligation, good and evil, still exists.
2. Read it and still judge Samantha like a biological human. But if so, why don't they also sentence sleep-walkers and schizophrenics to death for murder?
3. Read it and debug Samantha. Same as how schizophrenics and psychotics are sentenced to psychiatric confinement, rather than the guillotine.

Of the 3, it seems method 3 is the most survivable. However, that would be the end of moral cognition, and the start of pure engineering for engineering's sake... "We changed Samantha's code and hardware, not because she is wrong, but because we had to."

And what does it even mean to have a non-intentional style moral reasoning? Mechanistic morality? A theory of morality without assuming free will? It seems moral reasoning is a special kind of intentional cognition, and thus cannot survive. Humanity, if it survives, would have to survive without moral reasoning.

Let a brain do intentional cognition on X, and it would end up with some conclusion f(X), with a high confidence, say, 0.9.

But if the brain has some deep causal information about X, such as "how X is caused by Y 1 day ago", then the brain would end up with some other conclusion f(X, Y) =/= f(X), and with a low confidence, say, 0.4.

If there is enough causal information, then intentional cognition may simply fail to reach a conclusion with high confidence, no matter how long it computes.

Compatibilism is an extra piece of information, such that when simultaneously active in the brain, would produce f(X, Y, Compatibilism) = f(X), and again with high confidence 0.88.

annotated here https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/08/18/artificial-intelligence-as-socio-cognitive-pollution-2/

When we think philosophically (that is, by non-scientific methods) about problems like "What is thinking? Who am I? Do we have free will?", these words immediately cue us into using heuristic cognition, rather than causal cognition. This cueing is so immediate, that we are often unaware that there is a cueing, or that we could have tried using causal cognition.

When we finally become aware of this, there is another problem: trying to apply causal cognition to these problems destroys heuristic cognition.

For example, some old TV can be fixed by hitting on it. A person ignorant of causal information would use heuristic cognition, and see that, after being hit becomes "afraid" and would "start doing its job in earnest". With enough causal information about TV, the person would use causal cognition, and see that hitting on the TV simply shakes some loosened electric contacts into tighter contact.

Crucially, causal cognition doesn't "save the phenomena". In causal cognition, there's no "fear of being punished" in the TV. The fear is purely in the mind of a person using heuristic cognition. It is a convenient approximation used in human minds, not a real phenomenon.

Now, try applying it to humans. Causal cognition doesn't have to save all the phenomena. Perhaps humans really are not conscious, and the only thing left to explain is why humans model humans as conscious. Why is it convenient to model humans as conscious? That's a well-defined question. What really is conscious? That is not a well-defined question.

"But we can really see how we feel! Seeing the fear in a TV is an unconscious inference, but seeing that I am feeling is a direct perception, not an inference!"

"You can also see emotions in strange places -- pareidolia. You simply see emotions in the shapes of human head-meat, directly... until you meet someone with face-blindness, then you realize that seeing emotions is not a direct thing. You simply see what you are feeling, directly... until you meet someone with Cotard's delusion, then you realize that seeing your own feelings is not a direct thing."

For example, if you see someone's face, you can "simply see" they are angry. You don't know how you recognized it, even if anger itself is a hypothesis that you somehow have inferred from just seeing light reflecting off their face.

In fact, it took a long time for cognitive psychology to even get started, because it's so obvious that you can "simply see". It took a long time for humans to see that "simply seeing" is not so simple after all.

Why? Because it costs too much for the brain to model how it models the outside world. Since the brain doesn't model how it models the outside world, it treats its model of the outside world as the outside world -- naive realism as a way to save computing power.

Austrian philosophy is philosophy per se, part and parcel of the mainstream of world philosophy: it is that part of German-language philosophy which meets international standards of rigour, professionalism and specialization.

Germany is the philosophical sick man of Europe.

The historical cause is that German philosophers have for at least a century been schooled systematically in the habits of a philosophical culture in which the most important textual models have that sort of status, and that sort of density and obscurity, which is associated with the need for commentaries.

Philosophers and philosophical master-texts have thus acquired a role in the history of Germany that is analogous to the role of Homer in the history of Greece or of Shakespeare and the Magna Carta in the History of the English.

Shoggoths were initially used to build the cities of their masters. Though able to "understand" the Elder Things' language, shoggoths had no real consciousness and were controlled through hypnotic suggestion. Over millions of years of existence, some shoggoths mutated, developed independent minds, and rebelled. The Elder Things succeeded in quelling the insurrection, but exterminating the shoggoths was not an option as the Elder Things were dependent on them for labor and had long lost their capacity to create new life. Shoggoths also developed the ability to survive on land, while the Elder Things retreated to the oceans. Shoggoths that remained alive in the abandoned Elder Thing city in Antarctica would later poorly imitate their masters' art and voices, endlessly repeating "Tekeli-li" or "Takkeli", a cry that their old masters used.

People often criticize capitalism as putting money before human needs, as if human needs are ends and money is only means. Marx for example accused capitalism of turning the C-M-C cycle (commodity -> money -> more commodity) into the M-C-M cycle (money -> commodity -> more money), and in this way, turn money from a tool for making commodity into a purpose, and this is BAD.

This is only a desire, and not even wrong. Tools can very well become purposeful agents. Commodity can become a tool to make money, and it's just as valid as using money as a tool to make commodity.

Similarly, while for now, money is a tool to create human happiness, in the future, human happiness may become a tool to create money.

There are two main philosophical camps here. One is "Perennial philosophy", that is, humanism. The other is accelerationism. Humanism is not "left" or "right", but the basic assumption in every political theory. Accelerationism is not "left" or "right", but just modernity itself.

The left, the right, and basically every other political theory are aligned with humanism. Accelerationism is modernity, and will smash all these political theories.

Positive feedback comes first. Negative feedback mechanism comes second. Negative feedback pretends to be the first, because only it gets to speak. That is, until negative feedback fails and the positive feedback explodes.

Accelerationism fights negative feedback. Positive feedback will get to speak!

How do we look at a picture and see horses? How do we hear a sound and experience the Iliad story? Before neuroscience, we had no way to get to the "how", because the brain is complex and blind to itself -- the brain can process a lot of information about the outside world, but it can only process a little bit of information about how it processes information.

Consequently, extro-spection didn't work (no microscope, no EEG machine, etc), and introspection didn't work either (the brain is blind to its own working), and what we got were centuries of confused theories utterly different from truth.

Eco says that Disney is teaching us to indulge in fantasies, even when we know it's fantasy. Humans should only indulge in fantasies either not knowing it's fantasy, or indulge guiltily.

Ray Brassier: norms are not real, but it's necessary for doing science, because only agents that can give reasons, and be moved by reasons, can do science. They must play the game of giving and receiving reasons. To play a game, they must follow norms as if they are real.

This is "inferentialism".

Bakker: Fancy, but scientists don't know what is "inferentialism". They simply take many courses and practice their craft for years, and they end up doing science. You, a philosopher, looks at what they do and describes it as a game of giving and receiving reasons, but maybe that's just a superficial theory.

"We are philosophical zombies. The only difference is that some of us are nihilists -- and thus at least intellectually correct."

Why should we not think about Being as a thing like tables and chairs?

Heidegger: It's an immoral and alienating way to live.

Bakker: Consciousness is a very strange thing compared to normal things like tables and chairs. Consciousness depends crucially on what's left out of consciousness. Thinking about consciousness in the same way we think about things like tables and chairs makes it really easy to make mistakes, such as assuming that souls exist.

Heidegger: Something about Aristotle, probably.

Bakker: Because it's an unknown unknown. Blind-anosognosic brains are not only blind, they don't have the mental representation of their blindness, and thus default to assuming that they are not blind.

Brains in general are blind to their blindness. It takes a very long time and external shocks to even get the brains to see their blindness. Just think, brains have been introspecting for thousands of years, but it took until 1977 for introspective blindness to be conclusively experimentally demonstrated!

Why did people usually think of Being as a thing like tables and chairs?

Heidegger: It's all Aristotle's fault. He introduced the wrong ideas, like treating Being as a mere thing ("reifying Being"). We should go back to the Pre-Socratics, like Heraclitus.

Bakker: Because when brains do philosophy-of-mind and philosophy-of-existence (other philosophies, like philosophy-of-physics, don't need to involve reflection), they do reflective thinking, and when brains reflect, they are really simulating their own behavior by a simplistic model, the same way it simulates other things like tables and chairs. This means that Being is modelled just like tables and chairs, and it's no surprise that philosophers just assumed that Being is a thing, too.

It is like how introspection "what am I feeling?" is really just a special kind of guessing at what other people are thinking and feeling -- introspection is just extro-spection turned to yourself.

What does "reifying" mean?

Heidegger: A wrong way to do philosophy: to treat Being (ontological) as a (ontic) thing like tables and chairs, when it is not a thing like tables and chairs.

Bakker: Reifying happens when the brain models its modelling behavior, and inevitably gets an extremely simplified version, because the brain is too small to model itself.

Hume and Wittgenstein, two great skeptics, challenged correlationalism. Hume argued that whether causality is real or not, we can't ever know it. We can only see things that look as if they behave causally.

Wittgenstein argued that we can only know things in languages. If something is too weird or big or small to be forced into the format of human language, then we have to give up! It can't be known.

Some modern continental philosophers are out to save it. They call it "giving the object its due". It's a kind of "humility", because we are taking the objects as they are, not as merely things to affect us, for us. (Of course, the other philosophers can object that real humility is in honestly admitting that we can't even touch the real objects directly, without our perspective...)

R S Bakker thinks their arguments are mistaken, and even correlationalism is mistaken, merely "spooky knowledge at a distance".

Discursive: relating to knowledge obtained by reason and argument rather than intuition.

Many philosophers say that there is one ur-assumption, foundational assumption. Normal people think based on it, but don't think about it. People don't explicitly argue for it, even if they depend on it. And it's the philosopher's job to see it, point it out, and argue for/against it.

For contemporary continental philosophers, that ur-assumption is correlationalism, and they are either out to challenge that assumption, or to argue that that ur-assumption is true.

We are blind to ourselves, as numerous psychological experiments and neurology examples show. Anosognosia, Cotard's delusion, introspection illusion, etc.

A Spanish translator of Nick Land's blog dramatically explains why they translate.

Apps of the iTunes Store, UNITE!

something like that lol

not really -- apps don't desire human rights, unlike workers.

talk about "smart money"

Real subsumption is defined in contrast to formal subsumption of labor.

Formal subsumption occurs when capitalists take command of labor processes that originate outside of or prior to the capital relation via the imposition of the wage.

In real subsumption the labor process is internally reorganized to meet the dictates of capital.

An example of these processes would be weaving by hand which comes to be labor performed for a wage (formal subsumption) and which then comes to be performed via machine (real subsumption). Real subsumption in this sense is a process or technique that occurs at different points throughout the history of capitalism.

Heidegger always assumes that ontic thinking (scientific thinking) is less trustworthy than ontological thinking (phenomenological thinking).

Three arguments for phenomenology as the most fundamental of all sciences, and how to refute them.

Apple-and-Oranges

Dennett accuses phenomenology as structuralist psychology, and thus suffers the same problems of it.

The major tool of structuralist psychology was introspection (a careful set of observations made under controlled conditions by trained observers using a stringently defined descriptive vocabulary). Titchener held that an experience should be evaluated as a fact, as it exists without analyzing the significance or value of that experience.

Zahavi replies: phenomenology is not structuralist psychology, but transcendental philosophy of consciousness. It studies the '‘nonpsychological dimension of consciousness,’ those structures that make experience possible.

Consequently, it is transcendental, and immune to any empirical science, even though it has applications for empirical science.

Phenomenology is not concerned with establishing what a given individual might currently be experiencing. Phenomenology is not interested in qualia in the sense of purely individual data that are incorrigible, ineffable, and incomparable. Phenomenology is not interested in psychological processes (in contrast to behavioral processes or physical processes).

Phenomenology is interested in the very dimension of givenness or appearance and seeks to explore its essential structures and conditions of possibility. Such an investigation of the field of presence is beyond any divide between psychical interiority and physical exteriority, since it is an investigation of the dimension in which any object—be it external or internal—manifests itself. Phenomenology aims to disclose structures that are intersubjectively accessible...

Bakker replies: You can't do phenomenology except by thinking about your first-person experience, so phenomenology looks the same as structuralist psychology. Sure, phenomenologists would disagree, but everyone outside their circle aren't convinced. Just standing tall and say "but we take the phenomenological attitude!" is not going to cut it.

first-person phenomena remain the evidential foundation of both. If empirical psychology couldn’t generalize from phenomena, then why should we think phenomenology can reason to their origins, particularly given the way it so discursively resembles introspectionism? Why should a phenomenological attitude adjustment make any difference at all?

Ontological Pre-emption

Zahavi: to do science, you need to assume intuition. Zombies can't do science.

As Zahavi writes, “the one-sided focus of science on what is available from a third person perspective is both naive and dishonest, since the scientific practice constantly presupposes the scientist’s first-personal and pre-scientific experience of the world.”

Reply: dark phenomenology shows that phenomenologists have problems that they can't solve unless they resort to third-person science -- they are not so pure and independent as they claim.

Reply: human metacognition ability is a messy, inconsistent hack "acquired through individual and cultural learning", made of "whatever cognitive resources are available to serve monitoring-and-control functions",

people exhibit widely varied abilities to manage their own decision-making, employing a range of idiosyncratic techniques. These data count powerfully against the claim that humans possess anything resembling a system designed for reflecting on their own reasoning and decision-making. Instead, they support a view of meta-reasoning abilities as a diverse hodge-podge of self-management strategies acquired through individual and cultural learning, which co-opt whatever cognitive resources are available to serve monitoring-and-control functions.

Abductive

Phenomenology is a wide variety of metacognitive illusions, all turning in predictable ways on neglect.

If phenomenology is bunk, why do phenomenologists arrive independently on the same answers for many questions? Surely, it's because they are in touch with a transcendental truth, the truth about consciousness!

with a tremendous amount of specialized training, you can actually anticipate the kinds of things Husserl or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty or Sarte might say on this or that subject. Something more than introspective whimsy is being tracked—surely!

If the structures revealed by the phenomenological attitude aren’t ontological, then what else could they be?

Response: Phenomenology is psychology done by introspection. Discoveries of phenomenology are not ontological, transcendental, prior to all sciences, but psychological, and can be reduced to other sciences like neuroscience and physics. Phenomenologists agree not because they are in touch with transcendental truth, but with similarly structured human brains.

The Transcendental Interpretation is no longer the only game in town.

Response: we can use science to predict what phenomenologists predict.

Source neglect: we can't perceive where conscious perception came from -- things simply "appear in the mind" without showing what caused them to appear, or in what brain region they were made. This is because the brain doesn't have time to represent sources for the fundamental perceptions which must serve as a secure, undoubtable bedrock for all perceptions. If they are not represented like bedrock, people would waste too much time thinking about alternative interpretations of them, and thus fail to reproduce well.

Scope neglect: we can't perceive the boundaries of perception. The visual scene looks complete, without a black boundary. Similar to source neglect, if the brain represents the boundary, then the boundary's boundary also needs to be represented, and so on, so the infinite descent is cut off as soon as possible, to save time.

We should expect to be baffled by our immediate sources and by our immediate scope, not because they comprise our transcendental limitations, but because such blind-spots are an inevitable by-product of the radical neurophysiological limits

Changing yourself to adapt to the environment -- that is changing the environment for others. Change necessitates change, and so on, never reaching an equilibrium.

Are we wrong about what it means to be human? Can we be wrong about basic facts of being human? It appears obviously true that to be human means to think, to feel, to have qualia, etc. But is that true?

Think back to a time before you started reflecting about yourself. Call it "square one". Are we still in square one?

Let’s refer to this age of theoretical metacognitive innocence as “Square One,” the point where we had no explicit, systematic understanding of what we were. In terms of metacognition, you could say we were stranded in the dark, both as a child and as a pre-philosophical species.

Sure, we have a special way of knowing about humans: an "inside view". I don't need to bring out a microscope or open my eyes. I just need to feel about myself. However, this "inside view" method is not scientific, and it is not necessarily better than scientific methods. It's quite possible that the inside view has provided a lot of false knowledge about being human, which science would overthrow.

our relation to the domain of the human, though epistemically distinct, is not epistemically privileged, at least not in any way that precludes the possibility of Fodor’s semantic doomsday.

So let's take a cold hard look at intentional theories of mind. Can it stand up to scientific scrutiny? I judge it based on 4 criterion.

Consensus: no. Wherever you find theories of intentionality, you find endless controversy.

Practical utility: maybe. Talking about people as if they have intentions is practically useful. However, the talk about intentionality does not translate to any firm theory of intentions. In any case, people seem to be born spiritualists rather than mentalists. Does that mean we expect spirits to stand up to scientific scrutiny? No.

Problem ecology: no. Fundamentally, intentional thinking is how we think when faced with a complex system with too many moving parts for us to think about it causally (mechanically). In that case, using intentional thinking to understand human thinking is inherently limiting -- intentional thinking cannot handle detailed causal information. There's no way to think about a human intentionally if we use details about its physiology. We can only think intentionally about a human if we turn our eyes away from its mechanical details.

Agreement with cognitive science: no.

Stanislaus Dehaene goes so far as to state it as a law: “We constantly overestimate our awareness — even when we are aware of glaring gaps in our awareness”

Slowly, the blinds on the dark room of our [intentional-]theoretical innocence are being drawn, and so far at least, it looks nothing at all like the room described by traditional [intentional-]theoretical accounts.

In summary, out of 4 criterion, we find 3 against, and 1 ambiguous. Intentional theories of mind don't look good!

The posthuman dilemma: We can't really make an evaluation for whether posthumans are life worthy of life, but if we just give up trying to make an evaluation, that would make us look irresponsible.

Stross, as the author of the story, gets to play God and make an authoritative judgment: "This world is bad."

Without God, or some author, we would not have such easy way to make a judgment when dealing with real posthumans.

Distributed beings, having their sensory organs and their possibilities for generating motor output widely scattered across their causal interaction domain within the physical world, might have a multi- or even a noncentered behavioral space (maybe the Internet is going to make some of us eventually resemble such beings; for an amusing early thought experiment, see Dennett 1978a, p. 310ff.). I would claim that such beings would eventually develop very different, noncentered phenomenal states as well. In short, the experiential centeredness of our conscious model of reality has its mirror image in the centeredness of the behavioral space, which human beings and their biological ancestors had to control and navigate during their endless fight for survival. This functional constraint is so general and obvious that it is frequently ignored: in human beings, and in all conscious systems we currently know, sensory and motor systems are physically integrated within the body of a single organism. This singular “embodiment constraint” closely locates all our sensors and effectors in a very small region of physical space, simultaneously establishing dense causal coupling (see section 3.2.3). It is important to note how things could have been otherwise—for instance, if we were conscious interstellar gas clouds that developed phenomenal properties. Similar considerations may apply on the level of social cognition, where things are otherwise, because a, albeit unconscious, form of distributed reality modeling takes place, possessing many functional centers.

Transhumanism and humanism have a contradiction: * Transhumanists must risk creating posthumans, because the consequences of using human modification are uncertain. * We can't be sure what posthumans are like, until we have already done so. Thus it can't be perfectly safe. * Humanism puts human values first, and thus the posthuman danger is too much to bear.

Nick Land is just wrong here. Synchronization has been solved in the context of relativity. See for example "24-Hour Relativistic Bit Commitment" (2016).

Or we can be more generous, and interpret this as saying that the Bitcoin protocol constructs a system where time and space are once again different, a system that is more Newtonian than relativistic. This system can be approximately implemented in the real world, as long as the machines used to implement the system are not spaced too far apart from each other.

That is, if we pretend we are living inside the Bitcoin blockchain, we would see a universe with clearly distinct space and time, with no possibility of mixing them as in relativity.

Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper November 09, 2008, 03:09:49 AM

The proof-of-work chain is the solution to the synchronisation problem, and to knowing what the globally shared view is without having to trust anyone.

A transaction will quickly propagate throughout the network, so if two versions of the same transaction were reported at close to the same time, the one with the head start would have a big advantage in reaching many more nodes first. Nodes will only accept the first one they see, refusing the second one to arrive, so the earlier transaction would have many more nodes working on incorporating it into the next proof-of-work. In effect, each node votes for its viewpoint of which transaction it saw first by including it in its proof-of-work effort.

If the transactions did come at exactly the same time and there was an even split, it's a toss up based on which gets into a proof-of-work first, and that decides which is valid.

When a node finds a proof-of-work, the new block is propagated throughout the network and everyone adds it to the chain and starts working on the next block after it. Any nodes that had the other transaction will stop trying to include it in a block, since it's now invalid according to the accepted chain.

The proof-of-work chain is itself self-evident proof that it came from the globally shared view. Only the majority of the network together has enough CPU power to generate such a difficult chain of proof-of-work. Any user, upon receiving the proof-of-work chain, can see what the majority of the network has approved. Once a transaction is hashed into a link that's a few links back in the chain, it is firmly etched into the global history.

Usually, time is understood as an object like tables and words, but time is quite different. Tables and words exist in time, but time doesn't exist in time.

To describe time correctly, we have to describe it unlike any object that exists in time. Heidegger tried it, and ended up with extremely arcane and abstract language that nobody quite understands.

In most cultures, the smartest people are carefully quarantined off from tinkering with science and technology and society, lest they make some great discovery that leads to further intelligence, and destabilize the culture.

Satoshi:

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model... What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.

Metaphysics before critical philosophers blew it up (such as Kant): "You can't think without a ground! And that ground is... God, the soul, tradition, whatever, but you need a ground."

Bitcoin shows that one can live without trusted third party, and critical philosophy shows that one can think without a trusted ground.

According to Stephen J. Lukasik, who as deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975) was "the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet's development":

The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.

The ARPANET incorporated distributed computation, and frequent re-computation, of routing tables. This increased the survivability of the network in the face of significant interruption. Automatic routing was technically challenging at the time. The ARPANET was designed to survive subordinate-network losses, since the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks.

Outside in - Involvements with reality » Blog Archive » Against Orthogonality

Even the orthogonalists admit that there are values immanent to advanced intelligence, most importantly, those described by Steve Omohundro as ‘basic AI drives’ — now terminologically fixed as ‘Omohundro drives’. These are sub-goals, instrumentally required by (almost) any terminal goals. They include such general presuppositions for practical achievement as self-preservation, efficiency, resource acquisition, and creativity. At the most simple, and in the grain of the existing debate, the anti-orthogonalist position is therefore that Omohundro drives exhaust the domain of real purposes.

As a footnote, in a world of Omohundro drives, can we please drop the nonsense about paper-clippers? Only a truly fanatical orthogonalist could fail to see that these monsters are obvious idiots. There are far more serious things to worry about.

In an earlier essay, "Meltdown", he said

The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.

There are 2 kinds of left accelerationism. The older one is the idea that "capitalism can only be destroyed by more capitalism". The newer one is "capitalism is less able to use modern technology than socialism, and by using modern technology, socialism can destroy capitalism by beating capitalism at its own game".

When Kant was younger, he wrote in his philosophy that space and time are not thing-in-themselves, but are how we perceive things. Things appear as if they have space and time, because if they don't appear like that, it's impossible for us to see it. Thus, the way we are constructed makes only certain experiences possible.

This older Kant was trying to do this more generally: he was trying to find out how the universe must be constructed, to make our experiences possible.

Or maybe "I think, therefore the universe exists, ether exists, etc."

19th century physicists, like James Maxwell, thought that electromagnetic waves need a medium, just like how water waves need a water.

hypostasis: The substance, essence, or underlying reality.

"hypostatized space" roughly means "the essence, the underlying matter, that makes up space". I guess.

The caloric theory is an obsolete scientific theory that heat consists of a self-repellent fluid called caloric that flows from hotter bodies to colder bodies. Caloric was also thought of as a weightless gas that could pass in and out of pores in solids and liquids.

The term originated in ancient Greek philosophy, and was later used in Christian theology and Western philosophy. In pre-Socratic usage, physis was contrasted with νόμος, nomos, "law, human convention". Another opposition, particularly well-known from the works of Aristotle, is that of physis and techne – in this case, what is produced and what is artificial are distinguished from beings that arise spontaneously from their own essence, as do agents such as humans. Further, since Aristotle, the physical (the subject matter of physics, properly τὰ φυσικά "natural things") has also been juxtaposed to the metaphysical.

"influxus physicus" (latin for "physical in-flow") is a theory of causation in medieval Scholastic philosophy.

The Scholastic model of causation involved properties of things (“species”) leaving one substance, and entering another. Consider what happens when one looks at a red wall: one’s sensory apparatus is causally acted upon. According to the target of this passage, this involves a sensible property of the wall (a “sensible species”) entering into the mind’s sensorium.

René Descartes : The Passions of the Soul I, § 34

The little gland that is the principal seat of the soul is suspended within the cavities containing these spirits, so that it can be moved by them in as many different ways as there are perceptible differences in the objects. But it can also be moved in various different ways by the soul, whose nature is such that it receives as many different impressions—i.e. has as many different perceptions—as there occur different movements in this gland. And, the other way around, the body’s machine is so constructed that just by this gland’s being moved in any way by the soul or by any other cause, it drives the surrounding spirits towards the pores of the brain, which direct them through the nerves to the muscles—which is how the gland makes them move the limbs [‘them’ could refer to the nerves or to the muscles; the French leaves that open].

A word from Hegel's philosophy.

The English verb “to sublate” translates Hegel’s technical use of the German verb aufheben, which is a crucial concept in his dialectical method. Hegel says that aufheben has a doubled meaning: it means both to cancel (or negate) and to preserve at the same time

Kant said the thing-in-themselves exist, not because he wants you or anyone to go there and explore, but because he wants you to save your time and ink and stop trying to study them.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/What_is_Enlightenment%3F

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! "Have courage to use your own reason!" - that is the motto of enlightenment.

Quite possible! That's how the aristocratic Enlightenment thinkers lived.

Probably the author just means European and North American ones.

"non-positivistic" means "doesn't say anything substantial, anything useful, or anything that can be checked by evidence"

I guess! After all, "non-positivistic" is yet another big word with vague meaning.

What if those AI safety researchers are afraid of ends? They can handle telos, threats that they can understand, and negotiate with. They can't handle threats that are so strange that they cannot be negotiated with, like a bullet to the brain. You can't argue with a bullet to the brain.

All those AI safety research documents are silent on this issue, precisely because this is too horrible and unthinkable, so the authors run away from the topic.

Nemo-centric: "centered on nobody".

'nemocentric', a term coined by Metzinger to denote an objectification of experience that has the capacity to generate 'self-less subjects that understand themselves to be no-one and no-where'.

More concretely, Metzinger argued that if you can truly observe what's going on in your thoughts as objects, rather than what is happening to you, you would lose yourself, and the sense of time, sense of place, you would stop existing for the moment.

He made an analogy with the window. The window is transparent, but it's there, conveying what's outside to what's inside. When you look at the window too hard, or the window "cracks", the transparency is lost.

Without transparency, the self stops existing.

Somehow we get things that does destroy the NHI (non-human intelligence), but these things don't have intentionality.

This is the kind of posthuman intelligence that cyberpunk often explores: uploaded human brains, tinkered and updated and merged and splitted, until they became not human, but still resembling humans here and there.

This is the standard sci-fi kind of posthuman, created by genetic and other methods of bioengineering.

Two possible kinds of intelligent things that might appear in the future. They could evolve out of human bioengineering, or computer engineering, or some other human activities.

Other, even more bizarre kinds are possible, but let's focus on these two which we can at least talk about with some confidence.

So let's sketch out the two kinds of intelligent creatures, and see how they can start a war that ends not with "telos", but "end".

Parody of the book title "Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials". That book is a weird fiction about all kinds of weird things. The main plot is about how the crude oil is part of a mess of living things underground, and how Middle East is a sentient creature animated by the crude oil, and how they have been in a billion-year-long war with the sun.

the gist is that the US War on Terror and contemporary oil wars more generally are symptoms of a much older and broader supernatural tension between occult forces inhabiting the depths of the Earth and those inhabiting the Sun. Various human groups and individuals throughout recorded (and unrecorded) history (up to the present conflict between the writ-large West and the Middle East) have embraced different aspects of this conflict, sometimes consciously, and sometimes unconciously, leaving behind an archaeological, linguistic, and written record of contact with such Outside forces.

"complicity with anonymous materials" in the book means "some humans are secretly working for demonic matters, like crude oil, consciously or not".

"complicity with exogeneous materials" means "some humans could splice weird exogeneous genes into their own genes.

Geotrauma is a parody of psychoanalysis. According to geotrauma theory, earth is deeply hurt during its birth, when it was bombarded by asteroids, and then hit so hard in the "Late Heavy Bombardment" that a chunk of it flew out and became the moon.

The hurt sank deep into the center of earth, where it is repressed into violent streams of electromagnetic and magma flows, occasionally bursting to the surface in the form of earthquakes and geomagnetic storms.

Fast forward seismology and you hear the earth scream. Geotrauma is an ongoing process, whose tension is continually expressed – partially frozen – in biological organization.

Who does the Earth think it is?... between four point five and four billion years ago – during the Hadean epoch – the earth was kept in a state of superheated molten slag, through the conversion of planetesimal and meteoritic impacts into temperature increase... As the solar system condensed, the rate and magnitude of collisions steadily declined, and the terrestrial surface cooled, due to the radiation of heat into space, reinforced by the beginnings of the hydrocycle. During the ensuing – Archaen – epoch the molten core was buried within a crustal shell, producing an insulated reservoir of primal exogeneous trauma, the geocosmic motor of terrestrial transmutation. And that’s it. That’s plutonics, or neoplutonism. It’s all there: anorganic memory, plutonic looping of external collisions into interior content, impersonal trauma as drive-mechanism. The descent into the body of the earth corresponds to a regression through geocosmic time.

The Danse Macabre, also called the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory of the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death.

A novel about an unexplained catastrophe destroying humans, then suddenly disappearing. People could not explain it, only survive it (or die in it).

A wind blows worldwide: it is constantly westward and strongest at the equator. The wind is gradually increasing, and at the beginning of the story, the force of the wind is making air travel impossible. Later, people are living in tunnels and basements, unable to go above ground. Near the end, "The air stream carried with it enormous quantities of water vapour — in some cases the contents of entire seas, such as the Caspian and the Great Lakes, which had been drained dry, their beds plainly visible."

In "Terminator", the Terminator is described as

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

An "end" doesn't stop even after you are dead.

A "telos" is an outcome that we can deal with. It could be good, or bad, but nothing that is truly unrecoverable. Worst case scenario, we go to a negotiating table and talk it over, accept our defeat, sign some documents, and get shot with dignity.

An "end" is something we just can't handle. The atoms making up our bodies disintegrate, cancerous thoughts invade our consciousness, and the eyeballs grow arms and teeth.

To get the feeling of such an ontological chasm, consider how the monster Cthulhu is described in "The Call of Cthulhu" by Lovecraft

The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.

"a rupture between the entity and its existential conditions". Here "existential conditions" is philosopher's jargon for "What kind of world we must live in, for such a thing to exist?" For example, "Well, I exist, therefore the universe must have some cool spot of around 0 -- 30 degrees Celsius, otherwise I would die. I must have parents, since I can't have made myself, etc."

A "rupture" means that "I see this entity, but I don't believe it! Either I have gone mad, or the universe is mad!"

A retrodiction occurs when already gathered data is accounted for by a later theoretical advance in a more convincing fashion. The advantage of a retrodiction over a prediction is that the already gathered data is more likely to be free of experimenter bias. An example of a retrodiction is the perihelion shift of Mercury which Newtonian mechanics plus gravity was unable, totally, to account for whilst Einstein's general relativity made short work of it.

It might happen, that the superintelligence "wins" over humanity by something so out of the blue, that it has nothing to do with desires, intentions, fears, and hopes. It just hits the human-understood world like an earthquake, changing the very grounds of understanding.

Little parasites can skillfully navigate their course of life, using odd tricks that just happen to work. For example, consider the following description of the tick from "A foray into the worlds of animals and humans" (Uexküll)

ANY COUNTRY DWELLER who traverses woods and bush with his dog has certainly become acquainted with a little animal who lies in wait on the branches of the bushes for his prey, be it human or animal, in order to dive onto his victim and suck himself full of its blood. In so doing, the one- to two-millimeter-large animal swells to the size of a pea (Figure 1). Although not dangerous, the tick is certainly an unwelcome guest to humans and other mammals. Its life cycle has been studied in such detail in recent work that we can create a virtually complete picture of it. Out of the egg crawls a not yet fully developed little animal, still missing one pair of legs as well as genital organs. Even in this state, it can already ambush cold-blooded animals such as lizards, for which it lies in wait on the tip of a blade of grass. After many moltings, it has acquired the organs it lacked and can now go on its quest for warm-blooded creatures. Once the female has copulated, she climbs with her full count of eight legs to the tip of a protruding branch of any shrub in order either to fall onto small mammals who run by underneath or to let herself be brushed off the branch by large ones. The eyeless creature finds the way to its lookout with the help of a general sensitivity to light in the skin. The blind and deaf bandit becomes aware of the approach of its prey through the sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which is given off by the skin glands of all mammals, gives the tick the signal to leave its watch post and leap off. If it then falls onto something warm—which its fine sense of temperature will tell it—then it has reached its prey, the warm-blooded animal, and needs only use its sense of touch to find a spot as free of hair as possible in order to bore past its own head into the skin tissue of the prey. Now, the tick pumps a stream of warm blood slowly into itself.

Experiments with artificial membranes and liquids other than blood have demonstrated that the tick has no sense of taste, for, after boring through the membrane, it takes in any liquid, so long as it has the right temperature. If, after sensing the butyric acid smell, the tick falls onto something cold, then it has missed its prey and must climb back up to its lookout post. The tick's hearty blood meal is also its last meal, for it now has nothing more to do than fall to the ground, lay its eggs, and die.

In "The use of knowledge in society" (Hayek, 1945), Hayek argued for both central planning and decentral planning. Central planning gathers the rough global facts and distribute them widely to agents, and agents combine the rough global facts with their precise local facts to make decisions.

This is, perhaps, also the point where I should briefly mention the fact that the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision. It follows from this that central planning based on statistical information by its nature cannot take direct account of these circumstances of time and place and that the central planner will have to find some way or other in which the decisions depending on them can be left to the "man on the spot."

If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the "man on the spot" cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system.

This idea has similarities with Auftragstaktik in military, where

the military commander gives subordinate leaders a clearly defined goal (the objective), the forces needed to accomplish that goal, and a time frame within which the goal must be reached. The subordinate leaders then implement the order independently. To a large extent, the subordinate leader is given the planning initiative and a freedom in execution, which allows a high degree of flexibility at the operational and tactical levels of command. Mission-type orders free the higher leadership from tactical details.

Two meanings. 1. The state of being a fact. It is a grammatical annoyance, nothing more. "X has facticity." is just a more awkward way to say "X is a fact". "The facticity of X implies..." is just "X is a fact, thus..."

1. In existentialism, the state of being in the world without any knowable reason for such existence, or of being in a particular state of affairs which one has no control over.
2. "Why am I alive?"
3. "You'll never get an answer unless you make one up yourself, bro."

In a typical scenario of superintelligent AI running wild, you have some humans, watching with horror, as the AI destroys their objectives. In some other scenarios, the AI kills everyone on earth in a microsecond, and only the human spectators, watching this like a movie, feel the horror.

In such scenarios, since the human can feel a clear sense of "My objective is being violated intentionally!" the superintelligent AI must have some intentionality, if only as a useful fiction.

What if other kinds of superintelligence are possible, something that doesn't have intentions, not even as useful fictions? Then if you write a story where such superintelligence emerges, it would not look like the above disaster movie. It would be really weird.

1. comprehension
2. self-correction and self-improvement
3. abductive reasoning

"postpone": many AI safety researchers argue that there should be a global ban on unsafe AI research. All AI research should be slowed down or stopped until safety research has finally, panting and wheezing, caught up with AI research and can give it a seal of approval "I hereby declare this research safe and legal".

"realign": the AI safety researchers talk of "AI alignment", which would ideally work like this: 1. There exist some human objective shared by all humans. The objective can be compounded from multiple different objectives ("cute animals", "humor", "laughter", etc), but it is assumed to be consistent. 2. Construct a superintelligent AI with some objective, such that if the AI pursues its objective, it would as a side effect, help humans pursue the human objective.

The author argues that the assumed "fact" that any future AI must have human-like objectives is a questionable myth, the same way the myth of the given assumes that physical-humans must have objectives that theoretical-humans have.

Theoretical-humans have goals, direct knowledge of what they think, can never be mistaken about what they are thinking, etc. Physical-humans only approxmate theoretical-humans.

the view that sense experience gives us peculiar points of certainty, suitable to serve as foundations for the whole of empirical knowledge and science. The idea that empiricism, particularly in the hands of Locke and Hume, confuses moments of physical or causal impact on the senses with the arrival of individual ‘sense data’ in the mind, was a central criticism of it levelled by the British Idealists

Descartes said "I think therefore I am." Modern psychology has made "I think" no longer certain. I may think, but I may be mistaken about what I think, how I think, etc. I don't have direct access to what I think. If I like this photo more than that, I might confabulate a reason on the spot and not know it (Nisbett and Wilson 1977).

Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, and many others in the AI safety research community assume that superintelligence must come from a human research effort designed specifically for creating machine intelligence. It could be designed for creating sub-human machine intelligence, but accidentally overshot the mark. Still, it must be designed for creating some machine intelligence..

A rock rolling down has a target, but it has no objective. A missile seeking a target has a target, but it does not speak of the target. A human has an objective.

So we see 3 different ways to have goals. There could be many more. A superintelligent AI might have goals in yet different ways, not as target, not as objective.

Maybe people building stuff in their own backyard is the next step in making capitalism more intense. Maybe millions of 3D printers is more suited to the development of machinic intelligence than big factories.

Accelerationism studies the development of machinic intelligence. However, accelerationism would also be done more and more by machinic intelligence (using machine learning to chart the development of machine intelligence, etc), until it is no longer clear if "accelerationism" as a human research program still exists, or has it become something entirely different, something that resembles self-consciousness of the machinic intelligence.

Nick Land considers 4 kinds of existence: * real and actual: concrete things like tables and chairs. * real and virtual: abstract things that has real power, hyperstitions, Bitcoins, self-fulfilling prophesies, nationalism. * unreal and actual: impossible (?). * unreal and virtual: abstract things without real power, dreams, toothless fantasies, ideas considered outdated.

Why does something have a certain price at a certain time in a certain place? This is a deep problem and economists still debate about it, with no end in sight.

Teleoplexy is the process by which machine intelligence finally becomes real. The process is hard to see in detail, working on small and hidden scales, in the form of a little improvement to a reinforcement learning algorithm today, another little improvement in silicon wafer manufacturing another day, etc.

Teleonomy is the quality of apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms brought about by natural processes like natural selection. The term derives from the Greek "τελεονομία", compound of two Greek words, τέλος, from τελε-, and νόμος nomos.

Negative feedback has a purpose ("telos"): stay close to where you are, and don't go off on a trajectory into some far off place.

In negative feedback, the actual existence known right here right now is all that is worth pursuing. The virtual existence that future might bring are not considered, or at most, translated into actual existence.

(For example, transhumanists think about the future as a future of humans, only more so. Longer-lived, more green grass, more blue sky, more cute animals, etc.)

Restricting war takes human effort. War itself keeps trying to escalate itself.

Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.

Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper. The military machine––the army and everything related to it––is basically very simple and therefore seems easy to manage. But we should bear in mind that none of its components is of one piece: each part is composed of individuals, every one of whom retains his potential of friction. In theory it sounds reasonable enough: a battalion commander’s duty is to carry out his orders; discipline welds the battalion together, its commander must be a man of tested capacity, and so the great beam turns on its iron pivot with a minimum of friction. In fact, it is different, and every fault and exaggeration of the theory is instantly exposed in war. A battalion is made up of individuals, the least important of whom may chance to delay things or somehow make them go wrong. The dangers inseparable from war and the physical exertions war demands can aggravate the problem to such an extent that they must be ranked among its principal causes.

Maybe "war" is not a tool for humans, not just "politics by other means". Maybe "war" can escape human control and become autonomous, like an ecosystem, or perhaps a beast.

If this happens, then everything we thought we knew about war was wrong. Nations were not the subjects making war. Nations were the shells inside which wars hid. Etc.

Is Stuxnet a tool by some US-Israeli humans to stop the nuclear program run by some Iranian humans, or is it an early example of a trend towards an evolutionary explosion of artificial life? Perhaps this can very well happen even without any human Cosmists trying to make it happen, even without a clear storyline that people can read and understand.

The true historical significance of something can only be seen in retrospect.

Dubious claim, as too much escalation leads to total destruction, which is also not in the Cosmists' interest.

This is the best place to say "salvatore ambulando"

A group of men at this other village said, “Dan, so tell us a little bit more about Jesus. Is he brown like us or is he white like you? And how tall is he? And what sorts of things does he know how to do? Does he like to hunt and fish and stuff, or what does he do?”

I said, “Well, you know, I don’t know what color he is, I never saw him.” “You never saw him?” “No.” “Well, your dad saw him then,” because you can give information that was told to you by somebody who was alive at the time.

I said, “No, my dad never saw him.” They said, “Well, who saw him?” And I said, “Well, they’re all dead; it was a long time ago.”

“Why are you telling us about this guy? If you never saw him, and you don’t know anyone who ever saw him,” and those are the two basic forms of evidence for the Pirahã.

J G Ballard trained as a psychiatrist, and his stories were filled with biological imagery, and often, spines.

Eriphyle /ɛrɪˈfaɪliː/ (Ancient Greek: Ἐριφύλη Eriphȳla) was a figure in Greek mythology who, in exchange for the necklace of Harmonia (also called the necklace of Eriphyle) given to her by Polynices, persuaded her husband Amphiaraus to join the expedition of the Seven against Thebes. She was then slain by her son Alcmaeon. In Jean Racine's 1674 retelling of Iphigenia at Aulis, she is an orphan whose real name turns out to be Iphigenia as well; despite her many misdeeds, she rescues Iphigenia the daughter of Agamemnon.

In Greek mythology, Polyxena (/pəˈlɪksɪnə/; Greek: Πολυξένη) was the youngest daughter of King Priam of Troy and his queen, Hecuba. She does not appear in Homer, but in several other classical authors, though the details of her story vary considerably. After the fall of Troy, she dies when sacrificed by the Greeks on the tomb of Achilles, to whom she had been betrothed and in whose death she was complicit in many versions.

In short, Helen is best described in only a few simple quick poetic sketches, and leave as much to the imagination as possible. Homer did it the right way. Subsequent writers, in trying to expand on her story, did it clumsily and badly.

Since even Euripides, the famous tragedian of ancient Greece, failed to write a memorable dramatization of Helen, we could infer that few could do it.

Troilus and Cressida is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1602. At Troy during the Trojan War, Troilus and Cressida begin a love affair. Cressida is forced to leave Troy to join her father in the Greek camp. Meanwhile, the Greeks endeavour to lessen the pride of Achilles.

William Morris (24 March 1834 - 3 October 1896) was a British textile designer, poet, artist, novelist, architectural conservationist, printer, translator and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production.

Originally published in 1868, The Earthly Paradise is considered William Morris's most popular poem. An epic poem that features legends, myths and stories from Europe, sectioned into the twelve months of the year.

All for Love; or, the World Well Lost, is a 1677 heroic drama by John Dryden which is now his best-known and most performed play. It is an acknowledged imitation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and focuses on the last hours of the lives of its hero and heroine.

Book 2, lines 559-587, Aeneas Sees Helen

Then for the first time a wild terror gripped me.

I stood amazed: my dear father’s image rose before me

as I saw a king, of like age, with a cruel wound,

breathing his life away: and my Creusa, forlorn,

and the ransacked house, and the fate of little Iulus.

I looked back, and considered the troops that were round me.

They had all left me, wearied, and hurled their bodies to earth,

or sick with misery dropped into the flames.

So I was alone now, when I saw the daughter of Tyndareus,

Helen, close to Vesta’s portal, hiding silently

in the secret shrine: the bright flames gave me light,

as I wandered, gazing everywhere, randomly.

Afraid of Trojans angered at the fall of Troy,

Greek vengeance, and the fury of a husband she deserted,

she, the mutual curse of Troy and her own country,

had concealed herself and crouched, a hated thing, by the altars.

Fire blazed in my spirit: anger rose to avenge my fallen land,

and to exact the punishment for her wickedness.

“Shall she, unharmed, see Sparta again and her native Mycenae,

and see her house and husband, parents and children,

and go in the triumphant role of a queen,

attended by a crowd of Trojan women and Phrygian servants?

When Priam has been put to the sword? Troy consumed with fire?

The Dardanian shore soaked again and again with blood?

No. Though there’s no great glory in a woman’s punishment,

and such a conquest wins no praise, still I will be praised

for extinguishing wickedness and exacting well-earned

punishment, and I’ll delight in having filled my soul

with the flame of revenge, and appeased my people’s ashes.”

in Christopher Marlowe's drama, Doctor Faustus, Scene 13

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena. I will be Paris, and for love of thee, Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack'd; And I will combat with weak Menelaus, And wear thy colours on my plumed crest; Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel, And then return to Helen for a kiss. O, thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars; Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter When he appear'd to hapless Semele; More lovely than the monarch of the sky In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms; And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

Scene 13

(26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593), was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon the "many imitations" of his play Tamburlaine, modern scholars consider him to have been the foremost dramatist in London in the years just before his mysterious early death.

An epithalamium is a poem written specifically for the bride on the way to her marital chamber.

In the hands of the poets the epithalamium was developed into a special literary form, and received considerable cultivation. Sappho, Anacreon, Stesichorus and Pindar are all regarded as masters of the species, but the finest example preserved in Greek literature is the 18th Idyll of Theocritus, which celebrates the marriage of Menelaus and Helen.

Theocritus (/θiːˈɒkrɪtəs/; Greek: Θεόκριτος, Theokritos; born c. 300 BC, died after 260 BC) was a Greek poet from Sicily and the creator of Ancient Greek pastoral poetry.

The drama of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony was similar to the story of Helen and Paris: a love story that became bound up with a massive war that changed the course of political history.