Anubis is the Greek name of the god of death, mummification, embalming, the afterlife, cemeteries, tombs, and the Underworld, in ancient Egyptian religion, usually depicted as a man with a jackal head.

the demon Humbaba (Huwawa), who was a monster featured and slaughtered in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This example of his features was used in the interpretation of omens. The convolutions of the mask represent the intestines of a sheep examined for divination.

Humbaba/Huwawa - ProQuest

Writing on a terracotta plaque in the British Museum (cat. no. 127), Sidney Smith interpreted its inscription as an explanatory caption that identifies the grotesque face on its other side as that of Humbaba. The text reads:

If the coils of the colon resemble the head of Huwawa, [this is] an omen of Sargon who ruled the land. If [the omen is] for a poor man, the house of the interested party will expand. [Written by] the hand of Warad-Marduk, diviner (bārû), son of Kubburum, diviner.

The sinuous lines that make up the face on the front of this plaque clearly recall the convolutions of the small intestine. When taken together with the text inscribed on the back, it is irresistible to link this distinctive appearance with the persona of Humbaba

Ugallu, the "Big Weather-Beast", was a wolf-headed storm-demon and has the feet of a bird who is featured on protective amulets and apotropaic yellow clay or tamarisk figurines of the first millennium BC but had its origins in the early second millennium.

He was one of the class of ud-demons (day-demons), personifying moments of divine intervention in human life.

Pazuzu the demon is by nature destructive to human endeavors, but its destructive energy can be redirected with the right magical occult rituals. Pazuzu might even be redirected to fight other evils, making it "Evil-against-Evil".

"Intended to ward off evil"

original Arabic name for the Necronomicon, a fictional tome of forbidden knowledge first mentioned in the short story The Hound written by H. P. Lovecraft.

"hard to see, but worm-shaped"

In short, 4 wings means that this demon of the winds can fly really fast and spread disease really fast.

Perhaps another way to think about it is to imagine the demon as a giant insect, since insects have 4 wings.

Flight feathers (Pennae volatus)[1] are the long, stiff, asymmetrically shaped, but symmetrically paired pennaceous feathers on the wings or tail of a bird; those on the wings are called remiges (/ˈrɛmɪdʒiːz/), singular remex (/ˈriːmɛks/), while those on the tail are called rectrices (/rɛkˈtraɪsiːs/), singular rectrix.

"high disseminator": (Epidemiology) A person who is a carrier of a highly virulent and easily transmissible pathogen. For example, Typhoid Mary.

here, it's also a pun, as "disseminator" has as its word-root "semen".

Pazuzu is a fictional character who is the main antagonist in The Exorcist horror novels and film series, created by William Peter Blatty. Blatty derived the character from Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, where the historic Pazuzu was considered the king of the demons of the wind, and the son of the god Hanbi.

In The Exorcist, Pazuzu appears as a demon who possesses Regan MacNeil. Pazuzu is often depicted as a combination of animal and human parts with his right hand pointing upwards and his left hand downwards. He has the body of a man, the head of a lion or dog, eagle-like taloned feet, two pairs of wings, a scorpion's tail, and a serpentine penis.

Gematria is the numerological practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase according to an alphanumerical cipher. A single word can yield several values depending on the cipher which is used.

axis of evil: Iran, North Korea, and Iraq

The phrase "axis of evil" was first used by U.S. President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, less than five months after the 9/11 attacks, and often repeated throughout his presidency, to describe foreign governments that, during his administration, allegedly sponsored terrorism and sought weapons of mass destruction.

The Axis of Evil-against-Evil: no idea, but the original book says:

Economically compacted as the Axis of Evil; an experimental project on occultural weaponry and strategic weapons which finally led to the total annihilation of the Assyrian civilization as well as its neighbor empires.

xero: "dry"

xero-informatic: "to read dry winds and desertification as if it's a message, sent from something intelligent"

Pazuzu is an Assyrian/Babylonian demonic god of devastating dry winds. He was most popular in the first millenium BCE Mesopotamia.

He was a demon of the underworld (where all demons were thought to reside) in control of the west and south-west winds which brought famine during the dry season and, in the rainy season, tearing storms and locusts. As he was the force behind the destructive winds and their threat, he was also considered the best defense against them. Similar in this way to the Egyptian god Set, prayers to Pazuzu were intended to divert his natural inclination...

"The ton" was Britain's high society during the late Regency and the reign of George IV, and later. The word means, in this context, "manners" or "style" and is pronounced as in French ([tɔ̃]). The full phrase is le bon ton meaning etiquette, "good manners" or "good form" – characteristics held as ideal by the British beau monde.

traducer: one who slanders another by making malicious and false statements.

Here, Mr Constance is exposed as the "Marquis of Avonshire", who faked his own death and took up the name of Constance and is hiding here.

Somehow, Mr Wilde knew it.

Anarchism was popular in the 19th century. Two temporary successes included the Paris Commune (1871, France) and the Spanish Civil War (1936--1939).

By the 1880s, Indian reservations were interfering with western expansion, and many Americans felt that the only solution to the “Indian Problem” was assimilation of Native Americans into Euro-American society. The Government set a dramatic new policy under the Dawes Act dissolving tribal ownership of reservations into individual allotments for Native American ownership.

Most likely Norfolk of Virginia of USA, not Norfolk of UK.

In reality, rivalries between US and Germany was settled by the 1899 Tripartite Convention in which Germany and the United States partitioned the Samoan Islands into two: the eastern island group became a territory of the United States (Tutuila in 1900 and officially Manuʻa in 1904) and is today known as American Samoa; the western islands, by far the greater landmass, became known as German Samoa.

“Let's not make fun of fools; their madness lasts longer than ours. . . That's the whole difference.”

A drawing room is a room in a castle where visitors may be entertained, and a historical term for what would now usually be called a living room

The Château de Voltaire is located in Ferney-Voltaire (Ain) in France, close to the border with Switzerland and the city of Geneva. It was Voltaire’s home between 1761 and 1778. It was listed as a historical monument in 1958 and acquired by the French State in 1999.

Lake Geneva

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.

Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717 -- 1797), Member of Parliament.

Now remembered for his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which is generally considered the first gothic novel.

Blake wrote many terrifying, Biblical poems. One scholar describes his overarching theme as:

"nothing outside man [is] worthy of respect. Nature is miserably cruel, wasteful, purposeless, chaotic, and half dead. It has no intelligence, no kindness, no love and no innocence".

Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, originally as Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763).

The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom is a novel by Tobias Smollett first published in 1753.

The central character is a villainous dandy who cheats, swindles and philanders his way across Europe and England with little concern for the law or the welfare of others.

The novel's elements of terror and the supernatural have caused some historians of English literature to describe it as anticipating the themes of the Gothic novel.

James VI and I (James Charles Stuart; 19 June 1566 – 27 March 1625) was King of Scotland as James VI from 24 July 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the Scottish and English crowns on 24 March 1603 until his death in 1625.

James's visit to Denmark, a country familiar with witch-hunts, sparked an interest in the study of witchcraft, which he considered a branch of theology. He attended the North Berwick witch trials, the first major persecution of witches in Scotland under the Witchcraft Act 1563. Several people were convicted of using witchcraft to send storms against James's ship, most notably Agnes Sampson. James became concerned with the threat posed by witches and wrote Daemonologie in 1597, a tract inspired by his personal involvement that opposed the practice of witchcraft and that provided background material for Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth. James personally supervised the torture of women accused of being witches. After 1599, his views became more sceptical.

John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often seen as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage.

Curiously, Lovecraft here dismisses the Greek and Roman horror legends, even if there were plenty. Presumably it was out of his personal judgment that those legends were too didactic, too rationalistic, not supernatural enough.

Sabine Baring-Gould (1834--1924) was an Anglican priest, hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist, folk song collector and eclectic scholar.

Probably referring to the Witch-cult hypothesis

The witch-cult hypothesis is a discredited theory that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress a pre-Christian, pagan religion that had survived the Christianisation of Europe. According to its proponents, the witch cult revolved around the worship of a Horned God of fertility, the underworld, the hunt and the hunted, whose Christian persecutors called the Devil, and whose followers participated in nocturnal rites at the witches' Sabbath.

Lovecraft is probably referencing some early 20th century anthropological hypotheses. Perhaps The Golden Bough?

It's hard to understand nowadays.

Because "the bad is stronger than the good", the supernatural is usually associated with horror.

The mental concept of "supernatural" evolved from the long ignorance of ancient humans.

Most of the times, we are stuck with boring daily lives, but sometimes, we are sensitive to supernatural horror, and no amount of rational mental defense can keep us from feeling it.

This sensitivity is probably biological and ancient, which is why there has always been a significant minority of humans who feel it from time to time.

Fear of the unknown is ancient and persistent. This is what allows supernatural horror to be dignified and profound and respectable.

Materialists criticize it because it's "supernatural". Idealists criticize it because it doesn't have a practical moral, not didactic.

Still, for people who are sensitive enough, they will appreciate it.

The reporter thought it was a whisky factory explosion, but it was actually caused by the alien monster summoned.

Lovecraft wrote in a letter

Vaguely, "Arkham" corresponds to Salem (though Salem has no college), while "Kingsport" corresponds to Marblehead. (SL III.432)

The Charles River (sometimes called the River Charles or simply the Charles) is an 80-mile-long ( km) river in eastern Massachusetts. It flows northeast from Hopkinton to Boston along a highly meandering route, that doubles back on itself several times and travels through 23 cities and towns before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. The native Massachusett tribe named it Quinobequin, meaning "meandering".

see The Silver Key

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt those liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.

Described in "The Other Gods".

They look like rats, with little tentacles extending out of their lips (like a star-nosed mole).

Zoogs are a race of sentient forest-dwelling creatures that inhabit the Dreamlands of Earth. They are mortal enemies of cats, as they prey upon kittens and are preyed upon in return by adult cats.

an outer God which once appeared as a "tall, swarthy man" who resembles an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.

Not very powerful, but quite infamous among humans, because he meddles with human affairs a lot.

the ruler of the Outer Gods, and may be seen as a symbol for primordial chaos

Richard Upton Pickman is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft for his short story "Pickman's Model". He was a renowned Boston painter and photographer notorious for his graphic works.

John Dee - Wikipedia

English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, teacher, occultist, and alchemist. He was the court astronomer for, and advisor to, Elizabeth I, and spent much of his time on alchemy, divination and Hermetic philosophy. As an antiquarian, he had one of the largest libraries in England at the time. As a political advisor, he advocated for the founding of English colonies in the New World to form a "British Empire", a term he is credited with coining.

Probably the town of Salem, famous for its witch trials.

Danish physician, natural historian and antiquary

Ole Worm - Wikipedia

In reality, he was alive 1588 – 1654, so he could not have written something in 1228.

Lovecraft made this one up

mythical city

Iram of the Pillars - Wikipedia

real human

Ibn Khallikan - Wikipedia

real city

Sanaa - Wikipedia

This stupidly pedantic footnote merely points out that sometimes using the right word is very important and satisfying, for it suggests the right metaphor.

Starting sentence of Seneca's Moral letters to Lucilius/Letter 81, paragraph 9

There is a marvellously accurate phraseology applied to certain subjects,[5] a long-established terminology which indicates certain acts by means of symbols that are most efficient and that serve to outline men's duties. We are, as you know, wont to speak thus: "A. has made a return for the favour bestowed by B." Making a return means handing over of your own accord that which you owe. We do not say, "He has paid back the favour"; for "pay back" is used of a man upon whom a demand for payment is made, of those who pay against their will, of those who pay under any circumstances whatsoever, and of those who pay through a third party. We do not say, "He has 'restored' the benefit," or 'settled' it; we have never been satisfied with a word which applies properly to a debt of money.

Good philosophy, such as "Everything is water." satisfies the following criteria:

• It is not limited to the subjective. It talks about something out there that doesn't depend on humans or the personal feelings. It attempts to be natural and true.
• It is interesting, and can induce interesting thoughts even if it is wrong.
• It might be metaphorical, but taken seriously. It might end up being just poetic, but before that, it is treated seriously like a physical theory.
• It is fundamental, first principles. It is the "physics" in "All science is either physics or stamp collecting.".

Good philosophy is allowed to jump to conclusions on the weakest evidences, guided by intuitions and contemplations, in contrast to empirical science. It is like Paul Dirac's method in theoretical physics:

If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one's equation, ... one is on a sure line of progress.

R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a pre-Greek origin and a connection with the root of the word sophos (σοφός, "wise"). German mythographer Otto Gruppe thought that the name derived from sisys (σίσυς, "a goat's skin"), in reference to a rain-charm in which goats' skins were used.

Nobody takes philosophy seriously anymore, not as serious as the Greeks did. This is bad. We should take philosophy seriously. To do that, we need a healthy culture (like the Greeks' culture), because only a healthy culture can give rise to good philosophy.

A lot of the Greek philosophy books are lost, but that's okay. We already have more than enough to show that the Greeks justify philosophy.

I bet $100 against you, resolved by 2200.

Not anymore. Now theoretical physicists talk about quantum loops and strings and such.

There is something treacherous about a skull, that most intimate companion, so indifferently adapted to an inorganic regime, so untouched by the disappearance of flesh. It is the natural emblem of piracy, criminality, and cold betrayal. Perhaps everybody occasionally imagines their skull become a paperweight, or (less modestly) a museum exhibit in some distant time. Such thoughts are a little more cynical than those which capture it shortly after interment; a chamber of heaving maggots and filth. One only glimpses its calcic imperviousness by imaginatively stripping it of our rot, ageing it tastefully, polishing it. In the end one comes to feel that it merely tolerates its momentary participation in us, numbly awaiting the cessation of our tedious biological clamour.

Credo quia absurdum is a Latin phrase that means "I believe because it is absurd", originally misattributed to Tertullian in his De Carne Christi. It is believed to be a paraphrasing of Tertullian's "prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est" which means "It is completely credible because it is unsuitable", or "certum est, quia impossibile" which means "It is certain because it is impossible".

IRL minecraft

A Chinese legend tells that Genghis Khan once contemplated slaughtering all of China so that it can be wild again and be a better horse grazing ground.

Jebe

In 1201, during the Battle of the Thirteen Sides, an arrow wounded Genghis Khan in the neck. His loyal subordinate, Jelme, cared for him. After winning the battle, he asked the defeated to reveal who shot his horse in the neck. This was an euphemism for his own injury in an attempt to conceal his injury or possibly to prevent false confessions. Jirqo'adai voluntarily confessed, and further added that it was Genghis Khan's choice to kill him, but if Jirqo'adai was allowed to live, he would serve Genghis Khan loyally.[6] Genghis Khan valued demonstrated skills by men and their loyalty.[7] He thus pardoned and praised Jirqo'adai in this account. He then gave Jirqo'adai a new name, Jebe, which means both "arrow" and "weapon" in Mongolian.[8]

Compare with Korea, with the easiest writing system in the world, but still the same extreme authoritarianism, and a somewhat higher highschool suicide rate (due to Korean gaokao stress).

Chinese adage: 上有政策，下有对策

"The above has policies; the below has strategic responses."

This is a close analog to some of the microbes that live with as little power as possible. They do it by being very very slow and zombie like.

The methanogens, the most stringy kind, uses just 15 zeptowatts per cell, which is just 10 times larger than the theoretical limit of 1 zeptowatt.

‘Zombie’ Microbes Redefine Life’s Energy Limits | Quanta Magazine

members of the team who in 2015 tried to estimate the lowest amount of power needed for life, based on the premise that even deeply dormant cells must repair random damage to their essential molecules to survive. They found that for individual cells, this power minimum hovers around a zeptowatt, or 10−21 watts.

this underground biome has almost no cell division: Some individual cells down there might be 100 million years old. It also means that in all that time, those cells might not have evolved or changed much at all. It’s a biosphere characterized by stasis.

Widespread energy limitation to life in global subseafloor sediments

aestivation!

Homer, Odyssey, Book 11, line 90.

In Book 11, Odysseus visited the underworld where every dead goes (in Greek mythology at that time, there's no heaven or hell, only the underworld). In this book, it is shown that the dead souls have a mute and boring lifeless existence. Achilles tells Odysseus that he'd rather be a living slave than the dead king of underworld.

Cliffnotes says

Tiresias observes that one of the gods, the earth shaker (Poseidon), is angry with Odysseus for blinding his son (Polyphemus, the Cyclops) and will cause Odysseus and his men many problems. However, Tiresias reports, the Greeks can get home alive if they use proper judgment and control. Above all, they must not harm the cattle of Helios, the Sungod, no matter the temptation. If they do, Odysseus' men will die. Echoing the curse of the Cyclops (9.590-95), Tiresias warns that Odysseus himself might eventually arrive home, but he will be "a broken man — all shipmates lost" (11.130) and find his household in disarray. Furthermore, the prophet instructs Odysseus that he must eventually pursue yet another quest, carrying his oar inland until he meets a race of men who know so little about the sea that they think the oar is "a fan to winnow grain" (11.146). At that place, Odysseus is to make certain sacrifices to Poseidon. If he follows these and other instructions, Odysseus can live out his life and die in peace. (The journey inland, however, takes place after the events told of in The Odyssey.)

I'll just quote one paragraph starting at line 90:

“Then there came up the spirit of the Theban Teiresias, bearing his golden staff in his hand, and he knew me and spoke to me: `Son of Laertes, sprung from Zeus, Odysseus of many devices, what now, hapless man? Why hast thou left the light of the sun and come hither to behold the dead and a region where is no joy? Nay, give place from the pit and draw back thy sharp sword, that I may drink of the blood and tell thee sooth.’

We might approximately determine when the people, to whom the ashes belonged, died.

A reference to Job 3:13-15

For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest, With kings and counsellers of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver:

A Kurtz-gradient is, essentially, a reference to the kind of intensive journey "to the end of the river" undertaken by Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now and its source material, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

That is, going back to the roots, back to a past that's more primitive, cruel, uncivilized, but also more alive.

Greek for "complete burning". A rare and expensive ritual used by ancient Hebrew people, where they burn a livestock completely for God, who would smell its "pleasing aroma".

Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism – Robin Mackay

a presentation at the conference Virtual Futures in 1996: Rather than reading a paper, in this collaboration with artist collective Orphan Drift, under the name of ‘DogHead SurGeri,’and complete with jungle soundtrack, Land lay behind the stage, flat on the floor (a ‘snake-becoming’ forming the first stage of bodily destratification), croaking enigmatic invocations intercut with sections from Artaud’s asylum poems. In this delirious vocal telegraphy, meaning seemed to disintegrate into sheer phonetic matter, melting into the cut-up beats and acting directly on the subconscious. As Land began to speak in his strange, choked-off voice (perhaps that ‘absurdly high pitched ... tone ... ancient demonists described as ‘silvery,’ which he later reports being taunted by),3 the disconcerted audience begin to giggle; the demon voice wavered slightly until Land’s sense of mission overcame his momentary self-consciousness; and as the ‘performance’ continued the audience fell silent, eyeing each other uncertainly as if they had walked into a funeral by mistake. Embarrassment was regarded by Land as just one of the rudimentary inhibitions that had to be broken down in order to explore the unknown – in contrast to the forces of academic domestication, which normalised by fostering a sense of inadequacy and shame before the Masters, before the edifice of what is yet to be learnt.

A fictional professor in Ballard’s nover The Drowned World

The further down the Central Nervous System you move, from the hindbrain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae...is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and the air-breathing amphibians with their respiratory rib-cages, the very junction where we stand now on the shores of this lagoon, between the Paleozoic and the Triassic Eras. (§3:44)

both powered by radioactivity

Sun's is fusional. Earth's is fissional.

According to geotrauma theory, clear and articulate speech, and lawful civilization ("Logos") in general, is a way for earth to repress its Hadean Eon trauma. Sounds that are not clear or articulate threaten to destroy this repression, which is why they are so disconcerting and almost dangerous to civilization.

Worst section in the whole essay in my opinion. A clusterfuck of meaningless and boring numerology.

Perhaps a good depiction of psychosis. Since the author, Nick Land, used a lot of meth, it is a reasonable hypothesis.

A fictional game invented by the CCRU. It seems to be about numerology, kind of like real life poker games, and Rithmomachy.

From the CCRU glossary:

Cthelll: Earth's iron ocean, comprising one third of terrestrial mass, approximately three thousand km below the surface. Intensive megamolecule.

Cthelllectronics: Auto-engineering pragmatics of anorganic terrestrial intelligence, emergent from the ionic swirls of Cthelll, it intersects with the electromagnetic fields of the technostrata. According to the K-Goths, when the web switches to Cthelllectronics it calves-off into the Crypt.

1920 essay by Sigmund Freud that marks a major turning point in his theoretical approach. Previously, Freud attributed most human behavior to the sexual instinct. With this essay, Freud went "beyond" the simple pleasure principle, developing his drive theory with the addition of the death drive (Todestrieb).

The most relevant quote from the essay is

Such external excitations as are strong enough to break through the barrier against stimuli we call traumatic. In my opinion the concept of trauma involves such a relationship to an otherwise efficacious barrier. An occurrence such as an external trauma will undoubtedly provoke a very extensive disturbance in the workings of the energy of the organism, and will set in motion every kind of protective measure. But the pleasure-principle is to begin with put out of action here. The flooding of the psychic apparatus with large masses of stimuli can no longer be prevented: on the contrary, another task presents itself—to bring the stimulus under control, to bind in the psyche the stimulus mass that has broken its way in, so as to bring about a discharge of it.

Humans have a lot of illnesses due to their bipedalism, such as back pains.

The eye sockets on human skulls point perpendicular to the line of spine, unlike all quadrupedal vertebrates.

Aquatic ape hypothesis - Wikipedia

The hypothesis was initially proposed by the marine biologist Alister Hardy in 1960, who argued that a branch of apes was forced by competition over terrestrial habitats to hunt for food such as shellfish on the sea shore and sea bed, leading to adaptations that explained distinctive characteristics of modern humans such as functional hairlessness and bipedalism.

Elaine Morgan's 1990 book on the hypothesis, Scars of Evolution, popularized it.

Most modern paleontologists and anthropologists consider it disproven.

Freud's psychoanalysis states that adult psychology is based on child and infant experiences. Thus, he would sometimes start his therapy with "tell me about your mother".

Barker pushes one step further, and asked, "What are child and infant experiences based on?". He concluded that it's based on the rise of mammals (the class of animals distinguished by the trait of milk-suckling), since we are mammals. The rise of mammals is based on the traumatic K/T geological event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Earth's inner core is solid iron, its outer core is liquid iron mixed with other components, and its mantle is dense rock.

Barker proposes that the earth's iron core is a kind of liquid memory (like a computer hard drive, but... not hard). The patterns of heat flow in the iron core stores the painful memories of Hadean Eon. These memories are expressed on the surface of earth by geological processes.

A Brief History of Geotrauma (Robin Mackay 2011) summarizes geotrauma theory thus:

... psychic experience becoming an encrypted geological report, the repercussion of a primal Hadean trauma in the material unconscious of Planet Earth. Further developing Professor Challenger’s model of ‘generalised stratification’, Barker ultra-radicalises Nietzschean genealogy into a materialist cryptoscience.

‘Geotraumatics’ draws on everything from geology and microbial evolution to human biology and vocalisation, reinterpreting Earth-history as a series of nested traumas of which human subjectivity is the symptom.

In other words, Barker proposed that the true meaning of our thoughts can only be understood by genealogical analysis (as Nietzsche did for morality). And since we are creatures descended from geological chemicals of the Hadean Eon, our thoughts must be understood by understanding the earth during the Hadean Eon.

"generalised stratification" roughly means: the biosphere is just another layer of the geological strata of earth; the psycho-sphere too. Our thoughts are actually geological formations, like valleys and rivers.

And these geological formations are in pain, much like a plateau is the result of tensions in the lithosphere, and earthquakes are massive outpourings of such tensions.

Our thoughts are just another symptom of the pains of earth.

According to Sigmund Freud,regression is an unconscious defense mechanism, which causes the temporary or long-term reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of development (instead of handling unacceptable impulses in a more adult manner).

From the essay's Section 4 (emphasis mine)

Let us imagine living organisms in their simplest possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of irritable matter; its surface, inasmuch as it faces out towards the external world, is thus differentiated by its very position, and serves as the vesicle's receptor organ. Embryology qua recapitulation of evolution really does show, moreover, that the central nervous system develops from the ectoderm; and the grey cerebral cortex remains a derivative of the primordial outer surface, and may well have inherited some of its essential attributes. It is therefore easily conceivable that by dint of constant bombardment of the vesicle's outer surface by external stimuli, the substance of the cell becomes permanently altered down to a certain depth, with the result that excitation occurs differently in this surface layer from the way it occurs in the deeper layers. A cortex would thus form that ultimately becomes so tempered by the effect of the stimuli that it becomes perfectly adapted to their reception and becomes incapable of further modification.

... its outermost surface abandons the structure proper to living things, becomes to all intents and purposes inorganic, and in consequence operates as a special covering or membrane impeding the stimuli... The outer layer becomes necrotic – but by doing so it protects all the deeper-lying ones from suffering a similar fate, at any rate so long as the stimuli do not bombard it with such force that they break through the protective barrier. For the living organism, the process protecting it against stimuli is almost more important than the process whereby it receives stimuli; the protective barrier is equipped with its own store of energy, and must above all seek to defend the particular transformations of energy at work within it against the assimilative and hence destructive influence of the enormously powerful energies at work outside it. The process of receiving stimuli chiefly serves the purpose of determining the direction and nature of the external stimuli, and for that it must clearly be sufficient to take small specimens from the external world, to sample it in tiny quantities. In highly developed organisms the stimulus-receiving cortical layer of the erstwhile vesicle has long since retreated into the inner depths of the body, but parts of it have remained on the surface immediately beneath the general protective barrier. These are the sense organs, which essentially are equipped to register the effects of specific stimuli, but also include special devices to provide additional protection against excessively high levels of stimulation, and to exclude unsuitable types of stimulus. It is characteristic of them that they process only very small quantities of the external stimulus; they merely take samples of the external world. One can perhaps compare them to feelers that reach out tentatively towards the external world and then repeatedly draw back...

Another fictional character created by CCRU.

The only document attributed her is Stillwell-Vysparov Letters – Miskatonic Virtual University Press.

If you are trying to break a code, you should have the right assumptions about the source of the code, otherwise you will look for the pattern you wanted to find, and either fail to find it, or find an illusion of it (as in pareidolia).

Freud's theory was much more than Oedipus Complex, but that's what he's most famous of, and that's what most people think of when they think of Freud.

When Barker first figured out how to measure those hard-to-measure things ("disorganized multiplicities"), he thought he figured it out himself. Later, he understood that there is no himself. He was merely a "virtual tic-density", a "geotraumatic tension".

A "tic-density" is a spacetime region where there are lots of tics happening. Animals are tic-density regions. The vacuum is the opposite of tic-density regions.

A human is a "virtual tic-density", because it is just a name given to a temporary tic-density region, that will exist for only a few decades, with matter flowing in and out every hour. Basically, the intuitive understanding of the self is an illusion.

A "geotraumatic tension" is an analogy from structural engineering. A tension point in a slab of steel is a point of high stress. Barker stated that humans are psychological tension points of the alive-and-thinking earth's psychology.

"Pertaining to signs or signifiers"

Barker suggests that the assumption of the intentional stance is wrong. Communication doesn't require intention. It only requires information, which only requires the design stance.

It is possible to speak without thoughts, without intention, without meaning. And in order to find speech from non-human places, it is necessary to accept this kind of meaningless speech as speech.

"search for extraterrestrial intelligences"

A tic is a sudden, repetitive, nonrhythmic motor movement or vocalization involving discrete muscle groups.

Here, a "tic-system" is a system of motor impulses that simply do things without thinking about them. A system of motor reflexes. It is what humans and all other animals are, according to some philosophers like Nietzsche.

The study of how non-organic matter communicate.

For example, trying to decode the "speech" of earthquake waves.

MVU = Miskatonic Virtual University

Miskatonic University is a fictional university located in Arkham, a fictional town in Essex County, Massachusetts. It is named after the Miskatonic River. After first appearing in H. P. Lovecraft's 1922 story "Herbert West–Reanimator", the school appeared in numerous Cthulhu Mythos stories by Lovecraft and other writers.

In physics, Principles of Least Action are formulations of physical laws that have a distinct "teleological form". It is often informally stated as "Nature takes the path of least action between the beginning and the end."

Kleptoplasty is the behavior of taking chloroplasts from a food source and incorporating them into the consumer's cells. The root word klepto- comes from the Greek word for thief.Organisms capable of kleptoplasty typically eat algae or aquatic plants and "steal" the undigested chloroplasts.

"To induce to commit an unlawful or evil act."

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 clay hypothesis suggests how biologically inert matter helped the evolution of early life forms: clay minerals form naturally from silicates in solution. Clay crystals, as other crystals, preserve their external formal arrangement as they grow, snap, and grow further. Clay crystal masses of a particular external form may happen to affect their environment in ways that affect their chances of further replication. For example, a "stickier" clay crystal is more likely to silt a stream bed, creating an environment conducive to further sedimentation. It is conceivable that such effects could extend to the creation of flat areas likely to be exposed to air, dry, and turn to wind-borne dust, which could fall randomly in other streams. Thus—by simple, inorganic, physical processes—a selection environment might exist for the reproduction of clay crystals of the "stickier" shape.

There follows a process of natural selection for clay crystals that trap certain forms of molecules to their surfaces that may enhance their replication potential. Complex proto-organic molecules can be catalysed by the surface properties of silicates. When complex molecules perform a "genetic takeover" from their clay "vehicle", they become an independent locus of replication – an evolutionary moment that might be understood as the first exaptation.

"nemo" is Latin for ne hemō (“no man”)

"Nemo-Phenomenology" is exactly what it says: "what it feels like to be no man".

isolated and relatively small dark nebulae, containing dense cosmic dust and gas from which star formation may take place. Bok globules are found within H II regions, and typically have a mass of about 2 to 50 solar masses contained within a region about a light year or so across.

From Barker's interview

Spinal-Catastrophism. For humans there is the particular crisis of bipedal erect posture to be processed. I was increasingly aware that all my real problems were modalities of back-pain, or phylogenetic spinal injury, which took me back to the calamitous consequences of the precambrian explosion, roughly five hundred million years ago. The ensuing period is incrementally body-mapped by metazoan organization. Obviously there are discrete quasi-coherent neuromotor tic-flux patterns, whose incrementally rigidified stages are swimming, crawling, and (bipedal) walking. Elaine Morgan persuasively traces the origin of protohuman bipedalism to certain deleterious plate-tectonic shifts. The model is bioseismic. Crustal convulsions and animal body-plan are rigorously interconnected, and the entire Aquatic Ape Theory constitutes an exemplary geotraumatic analysis. Erect posture and perpendicularization of the skull is a frozen calamity, associated with a long list of pathological consequences, amongst which should be included most of the human psychoneuroses. Numerous trends in contemporary culture attest to an attempted recovery of the icthyophidian- or flexomotile-spine: horizontal and impulsive rather than vertical and stress-bearing.

In short, the bipedal walking habits and the spinal anatomy of humans is causing a lot of back pain and other health problems. These are actually the symptoms of earth's traumas.

Musaeum Clausum (Latin for Sealed Museum), also known as Bibliotheca abscondita (Secret Library in Latin), is a tract written by Sir Thomas Browne which was first published posthumously in 1684. The tract contains short sentence descriptions of supposed, rumoured or lost books, pictures, and objects. The subtitle describes the tract as an inventory of remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living. Its date is unknown: however, an event from the year 1673 is cited.

Like his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Musaeum Clausum is a catalogue of doubts and queries, only this time, in a style which anticipates the 20th-century Argentinian short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges, who once declared: "To write vast books is a laborious nonsense; much better is to offer a summary as if those books actually existed."

Look up "observer selection effect", or the "anthropic bias".

Look up "The Great Silence" or "The Great Filter".

A shadow biosphere is a hypothetical microbial biosphere of Earth that would use radically different biochemical and molecular processes from that of currently known life.

Normally, the shadow biosphere is understood as secret microbes that happily eat rock chemicals and geothermal energy, several km deep in the crust. Weird, but not very weird.

Here, Barker proposes a very weird kind of shadow biosphere, one that is based on "necroevolution".

Necroevolution is a concept proposed by Stanislaw Lem in the novel The Invincible. It describes a hypothetical situation where machinic life forms evolve that outcompete normal life forms. This victorious, "invincible" machinic life form is so weird and un-lively that the people who witnessed it felt that it couldn't be truly called alive. They called it "necroevolution".

A modern incarnation of "necroevolution" is the Grey Goo scenario.

Perhaps Barker is proposing that, somewhere in earth's crust, the strains and inorganic chemical complexes are necroevolving, and they constitute a shadow biosphere.

Heterochrony is a concept in evo-devo:

In evolutionary developmental biology, heterochrony is any genetically controlled difference in the timing, rate, or duration of a developmental process in an organism compared to its ancestors or other organisms. This leads to changes in the size, shape, characteristics and even presence of certain organs and features.

Here, the organic life and the inorganic non-life are considered as just developmental stages of matter. "Life is just a phase every corpse goes through."

The Ossificans is interpreted as heterochrony. The piece of matter is so impatient to reach the rocks phase that it starts turning muscles into bones while it is still in the living phase.

Thus "Thanatos Praecox" ("Premature Death").

Plutonics is the psychoanalysis of the buried trauma of earth. (Pluto is the Greek/Roman god of the underworld)

From Barker Speaks

Deleuze and Guattari ask: Who does the Earth think it is? It's a matter of consistency. Start with the scientific story, which goes like this: 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 (kinetic to thermic energy). 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.

a disease where the victim's muscles slowly turn into bones. The victim, even if cared for, would eventually die from being unable to move the lungs to breathe.

"Premature death".

It is a parody phrase of "dementia praecox" ("premature madness"), which is the 19th century name for schizophrenia.

This is the only document that actually exists. It is another piece of philoso-fiction, written by members of the CCRU.

Read it here

"genomic recidivism" roughly means that our genome used to be "criminal", and might become criminal again.

The article proposes that our genome bears the imprint of its origin in the Hadean Eon, when earth was "hadean" (hellish). It could suddenly revert to its Hadean nature and create hell here and now.

"Save yourself from hell".

Ashen light is a hypothesised subtle glow that has been claimed to be seen on the night side of the planet Venus. The phenomenon has not been scientifically confirmed, but has been suggested to be associated with lightning, which there is some evidence for on Venus.

It is believed to either be a visual illusion, or a thunderstorm-like weather phenomenon on Venus.

Further reading: Mystery of the Ashen Light of Venus (2021)

This is an example of "philoso-fiction", presenting modern mad French philosophy in the style of a fictional researcher in a world somewhat like Lovecraft's universe.

It blends horror, occult, secret, and modern mad French philosophy together. It is somewhat similar to the SCP project.

"World Spirit", something Hegel (a father of modern French philosophy) talked about a lot.

Work is secretly meaningless; distractions are obviously meaningless. Distractions serve to make work seem meaningful by contrast.

In this way, work depends on distraction. If there is no distraction, work would be seen as obviously meaningless and then people would revolt.

The hippocampus is the main structure involved in the generation of the 4- to 12-Hz theta (θ) rhythm, which is one of the most regular EEG oscillation that can be recorded from the mammalian brain.

The theta mode appears during states of active, alert behavior (especially locomotion), and also during REM (dreaming) sleep.

The LIA mode appears during slow-wave (non-dreaming) sleep, and also during states of waking immobility such as resting or eating.

Latin "vernus" means "of spring".

Induction of the flowering process of the plant by exposure to the long periods of cold winter or such conditions. Once this process takes place, plants develop the capability of flowering.

The "Unconscious" is just an intentional stance upon the biochemical machine that is the brain. Intentionality, beliefs, desires... these are merely convenient fictions for talking about the Unconscious.

Similarly for the Conscious.

In the story of the bicameral mind (Julian Jaynes), the voices of gods stopped speaking about 5000 years ago. Well, what happens if the voices of consciousness also stop speaking?

"family plot" means a graveyard place where a family can be buried in.

Bakker suggests that all the intuitive concepts about consciousness and unconscious -- things like desires, cravings, beliefs, qualias, emotions, moods -- will all be buried by neuroscience, indiscriminately.

The postmodernists like to say they have given up the Cartesian subject, but they kind of haven't. They admit that the Cartesian subject is not in one piece, but made of many pieces, like... intentionality, qualia, etc.

They dress this up with French words like "differance", but that's not radical or scientific enough. They should really deconstruct these concepts -- like intentionality -- too, guided by neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

He should have rushed B, not D...

Husserl made some phenomenological methods, kind of like scientific methods.

a patently contradictory conceit that only a humanist could believe...

Vade mecum is Latin for go with me (it derives from the Latin verb vadere, meaning "to go.") In English, "vade mecum" has been used (since at least 1629) of manuals or guidebooks sufficiently compact to be carried in a deep pocket.

It's called "vision as inverse graphics" among computer vision scientists.

This is a typical move for writers of radical claims: to make the bitter pill seem acceptable by somehow tying it to something emotionally nice.

It is nothing more than post-hoc rationalization, like all "and the moral of the story is...".

Indeed, I can mount an ad hominem attack against this claim: how could we know that these atrocities are atrocities? By way of skeptic thinking, all I need to do to make them no longer atrocities is to get myself into a life-world, a context, where such atrocities are not, according to communal epistemic practices (say, the local Nazi club)...

This is a rather dramatic kind of non-monotonic logic.

1. Dissent � The uncertainty demonstrated by the differences of opinions among philosophers and people in general.
2. Progress ad infinitum � All proof rests on matters themselves in need of proof, and so on to infinity.
3. Relation � All things are changed as their relations become changed, or, as we look upon them from different points of view.
4. Assumption � The truth asserted is based on an unsupported assumption.
5. Circularity � The truth asserted involves a circularity of proofs.

Pyrrohnians are in a sense parasitic: they don't create new premises or argument structures. They simply expose the inherent contradictions in others' philosophies.

The Skeptic strategy:

1. Take usual philosophy as starting point.
2. Derive "knowledge is impossible."
3. Wait to be challenged as "self-refuting".
4. Wait for the challenger to realize that, actually, it is usual philosophy that is self-refuting.

Nietzsche

Each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic.

Even truthfulness is but one means to knowledge, a ladder--but not the ladder.

Tractatus 6.54

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.

Wittgenstein

peritrope: if you claim to refute all knowledge, then you know that you have refuted all knowledge, which is a contradiction.

apraxia: you can't stay alive unless you act as if you have knowledge.

Peritrope (Greek: περιτροπή) is Socrates' argument against Protagoras ' view of relative truth, as presented in Plato's book known as Theaetetus (169-171e).

It means "a turning back on one" and likened to the image of a snake devouring its own tail. Socrates' peritrope described Protagoras' view as a theory that no longer requires criticism because it already devours itself. Sextus Empiricus is thought to have given the name in a comment on Protagoras' view in Against the Logicians.

One practical problem with externalism is that it makes it difficult to program an agent such that it can know what it knows.

Namely, because the agent can't find justification inside itself (justification is external), the agent cannot (unless it asks for help) separate its unjustified beliefs (definitely not knowledge) from its justified beliefs (not yet knowledge, but pretty close) from its pile of blind beliefs.

And who is the agent going to ask for help from? Other agents? But all agents would have the same problem if knowledge is external in our world.

In such a world, agents can know lots of things, but they cannot know what they know. Since humans (claim to) know plenty of what they know, human philosophers find the externalism theory of knowledge a bad fit to what they observe.

This allows justified true belief:

Belief: the person believes in it (blindly).

True: the world makes it true.

Justified: the world makes it justified (here is where externalism differs from the others).

Eric: I will define phenomenal consciousness by examples and folk psychology!

Phenomenal consciousness is the most folk psychologically obvious thing or feature that the positive examples possess and that the negative examples lack. I do think that there is one very obvious feature that ties together sensory experiences, imagery experiences, emotional experiences, dream experiences, and conscious thoughts and desires. They’re all conscious experiences. None of the other stuff is experienced (lipid absorption, the tactile smoothness of your desk, etc.).

Bakker: Which part of our brains is making the "obvious" verdict? Not folk psychology, but folk philosophy!

Typically, recognition of experience-qua-experience is thought to be an intellectual achievement of some kind, a first step toward the ‘philosophical’ or ‘reflective’ or ‘contemplative’ attitude. Shouldn’t we say, rather, that phenomenal consciousness is the most obvious thing or feature these examples share upon reflection, which is to say, philosophically?

Eric: Also, any theory of phenomenal consciousness must explain why it is obvious, but we are struck with wonder and confusion when we stop to think about it.

If the reduction of phenomenal consciousness to something physical or functional or “easy” is possible, it should take some work. It should not be obviously so, just on the surface of the definition. We should be able to wonder how consciousness could possibly arise from functional mechanisms and matter in motion. Call this the wonderfulness condition.

Bakker: Yeah, I understand that. It's just like St Augustine with time

“What, then, is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”

And I can explain both the same way! The reason is that we know how to use time, but not how to theorize abstractly concerning time. Similarly, we know how to use phenomenal consciousness, but not how to theorize abstractly about it.

Why?

Evolution! We die if we don't know how to use time, but nothing bad would happen if we can't theorize time. Similarly for phenomenal consciousness.

Why would we die if we don't know how to use phenomenal consciousness? Bakker doesn't explain, though presumably it is important for something (otherwise evolution would not have produced it).

Why is there such a difference between using and theorizing? That brings us to two families of cognitive processes.

Family 1: source sensitive. Such a process is evolved to deal with causal mechanisms (basically, doing science, asking "how", although in an unschooled, primitive way). Because it deals with causal mechanisms, and everything has a previous cause, the process always has "open slots" where more information can be sent in for processing.

This family is more versatile and it is responsible for the dramatic scientific progress.

Family 2: source insensitive. A member of this family would have "fixed input format" as an analogy. It would not request for information on "and what happened before that?" or "and what is inside this black box function?".

This family is inflexible, and it is responsible for the endless philosophical debates.

In fact, they are blind to these further information, and blind to their blindness. The result is that subjectively, when thinking using such source-insensitive cognition processes, the feeling is a sense of sufficiency: there's nothing lacking. No puzzling fact that requires expanding. No "and what happened before that?"

Phenomenal consciousness seems to be made of family 2 processes. That's why it feels so complete even if it is so information-poor.

A great metaphor here. A luggage is a box (concept) that contains a lot of clothes (instances). If the luggage is "too big" ("inflated", meaning either "metaphysically inflated" -- it adds spooky real things to the world, like ghosts and qualias and world souls -- or "epistemologically inflated" -- it adds spooky ways to gain knowledge, such as direct and accurate introspection, which is already experimentally disproved), then you can't bring it on the plane (to your philosophy). But you might try to bring all the clothes without using a luggage by simply listing all the examples without giving an abstract concept that allows you to derive the examples.

See also The Ptolemaic Restoration: Object Oriented Whatevery and Kant’s Copernican Revolution | Three Pound Brain

Socrates invites us to think of the mind as an aviary full of birds of all sorts. The owner possesses them, in the sense that he has the ability to enter the aviary and catch them, but does not have them, unless he literally has them in his hands. The birds are pieces of knowledge, to hand them over to someone else is to teach, to stock the aviary is to learn, to catch a particular bird is to remember a thing once learned and thus potentially known. The possibility of false judgment emerges when one enters the aviary in order to catch, say, a pigeon but instead catches, say, a ring-dove.

Philosophical Investigations

A darker version of Sellar's "game of giving and asking for reasons".

Hint of the introspective illusion: we don't introspect directly, but we merely apply Theory of Mind on ourselves.

Bakker makes a giant list of concepts that are both low-dimensional information processes in the brain, and discontinuous from nature (and thus impossible to explain by natural science).

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.

"There is nothing outside the text." is like visual anosognosia. Not only can't they see things that aren't text, they can't see that they are blind.

One example from Jacques Derrida (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Our most common axiom in ethical or political thought is that to be just or unjust and to exercise justice, one must be free and responsible for one’s actions and decisions. Here Derrida in effect is asking: what is freedom. On the one hand, freedom consists in following a rule; but in the case of justice, we would say that a judgment that simply followed the law was only right, not just. For a decision to be just, not only must a judge follow a rule but also he or she must “re-institute” it, in a new judgment. Thus a decision aiming at justice (a free decision) is both regulated and unregulated. The law must be conserved and also destroyed or suspended... justice is impossible.

In short: if you follow rules, you are an amoral machine. If you don't follow the rules, you are an amoral anarchist. You're damned either way.

Philosophers noticed the first-person effects of LWOS, and tried to derive philosophies out of them. They failed, because they didn't have the neuroscience to actually understand the first-person effects of LWOS through third-person, neuroscientific theory.

the prototype of all conceived times... the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible

William James, The principles of psychology.

"Free will" is an illusion caused by the fact that the "darkness that came before" a conscious idea remains unconscious. Since we don't notice the darkness that came before, we presume the ideas pop up "freely" (that is, unbound by causality).

It took such a long time for people to discover that they are not in one piece, because it is profoundly unintuitive. Intuitively, I am in one piece, because the information that can reveal the fractionate nature of me is never raised to the level of consciousness (except perhaps in some psychopathologies).

In the same vein, there is the "Bayesing Qualia" paper, which posits that qualias are an explanation conjured up in the brain to explain certain features of its inference mechanism.

Bayesing qualia: Consciousness as inference, not raw datum A Clark, K Friston, S Wilkinson - Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2019

"The illusion of sufficiency".

In Caution Flag | Three Pound Brain, there is a very dramatic example of illusion sufficiency:

Consider the following one sentence story about Johnny:

S1: Johnny went to the corner store, grabbed some milk, then came home to watch Bill Maher.

This is innocuous enough in isolation, until you begin packing in some modifiers:

S2: Johnny went to the corner store, stepped over the blood running into the aisle, grabbed some milk, then came home to smoke a joint and watch that idiot Bill Maher.

Pack in some more:

S3: Rather than take his medication, Johnny went to the corner store, shot the guy at the till in the face, stepped over the blood running into the aisle, grabbed some milk, then came home to smoke a joint and watch that liberal scumbag idiot Bill Maher with his neighbour’s corpse.

Oof. That Johnny’s fucking crazy, man.

It's an extended analogy: if we see two things and don't notice some difference in need of explaining, we assume they are the same by default, and don't even think about whether they are really the same.

Similarly, if introspection neglects enough information, it would lead to a lot of unnoticed identifications.

For another example, people didn't notice difference between the position of earth today and yesterday, so they assumed the earth remains in the same position by default, even though they could have noticed that if the earth goes around the sun, it would give the same observations.

Cognition Obscura | Three Pound Brain

Bakker elsewhere remarks that philosophy is an academic subject where people seriously talk about literally supernatural beings like "intentionality" and "norms", and yet it purports to be prior to science.

Kind of like using Ted Bundy’s testimony to convict Mother Theresa.

See A Eulogy for the Unconscious (1895 – 2012) | Three Pound Brain

And his master narrative could very well be true: that the Unconscious finds its historical origins beyond the horizon of the outer, objective world, then gradually migrates to its present locus beyond the horizon of our inner, subjective world.

The Unconscious, in other words, is of a piece with gods and underworlds, a way of comprehending What We Are Not in terms of What We Are. It’s literally what happens when we rebuild Mount Olympus into our skull. This explains why it’s such a curious double gesture, why, in the course of disempowering us, it allows us to own our abjection. My skull, after all, remains my skull, and if What We Are Not resides inside my skull, then ‘I own it.’ We bitch about our Unconscious to be sure, but we cluck and joke about it as well, the same way we do when our children are obstinate or wilful. ‘A Freudian Slip’ is almost always an occasion for smiles, if not laughter.

In fact, before 18th century, science was mostly theoretical. Technology, obtained by tinkering and trials, with no theoretical guidance, went along without science.

This demonstrates the depths of humanity's theoretical incompetence:

• Philosophy, the most theoretical subject, has made almost no progress and resolved no problems.
• Science, a rigorous and methodical theoretical project, did not substantially progress until starting around 16th century, and even then it took another 2 centuries for it to start guiding technology.
• Technology, the most practical subject, has made plenty of progress way before science has started making steady progress.

The term derives from the name of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician who discovered in 1847 that childbed fever mortality rates fell ten-fold when doctors disinfected their hands with a chlorine solution before moving from one patient to another, or, most particularly, after an autopsy. (At one of the two maternity wards at the university hospital where Semmelweis worked, physicians performed autopsies on every deceased patient.) Semmelweis's procedure saved many lives by stopping the ongoing contamination of patients (mostly pregnant women) with what he termed "cadaverous particles", twenty years before germ theory was discovered.

The popular understanding of Nietzsche has domesticated him into a tepid motivational speaker about "Being the best you can be."

The humanities people tend to do the same (except in words way harder to understand).

Bakker's signature move: dissolving a philosophical position/problem by an analysis of how human brains work quite well by heuristics (in daily life, but not in philosophy) despite lack of information (Blind Brain Theory). How this heuristic creates illusions that trap philosophers into stupid positions, like continental philosophy.

Very much like a born-again Christian trying to convert a lost soul.

See The One-Eyed King: Consciousness, Reification, and the Naturalization of Heidegger | Three Pound Brain for explanation.

Two jargons invented by Heidegger. Roughly, it means "humans are thrown (geworfen) into the world without explanation, as a brute fact."

Priam (father of Hector) lamenting the death of Hector.

You, you were their greatest glory while you lived— now death and fate have seized you, dragged you down [into the House of Death]!"

Book 22 of the Iliad.

The big threat to humanities is not reductionism (which isn't necessarily what science says), but the death of intentionality (which is a necessary outcome of science as it's done since centuries ago).

The real problem is not whether humanities can explain its subject matter (certain human activities), but rather whether its subject matter would still exist in a few decades.

And how should we account for cultural history, psychology, and philosophy? Perhaps... with SCIENCE?

Don't quote Godel as a cheap rejection of scientism. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem can be avoided in practice by using weaker systems of arithmetics sufficient for physics.

It is a category mistake in the first-person view, but not in the third-person view.

In the first-person view, "Beethoven is better than Spears" is an aesthetic fact, not a natural fact. In the third-person view, "the author thinks "Beethoven is better than Spears"" is a natural fact.

We do have preliminary results. See for example experiments by Pascal Boyer testing which ideas are easier to transmit.

Cognitive templates for religious concepts: Cross‐cultural evidence for recall of counter‐intuitive representations P Boyer, C Ramble - Cognitive Science, 2001

Be careful. This line of thought quite readily get you into rejecting Newtonian mechanics as vacuous, since we don't know how to quantify inertia except by further details of how to measure it, the details themselves involving assumptions on inertia.

Or it might lead you to denounce "dark matter" or "miscellaneous causes not yet quantified".

But philosophy needs science as a background condition for what they do even more.

Radioactive dating solved many problems in history by precisely dating the time of an artifact.

Charles A. Whitney, in the article "The Skies of Vincent Van Gogh," provides scientific evidence of astronomy as a means to explain the origins of Starry Night and other van Gogh night sky paintings.

Ineliminable Inscrutability Scrutinized and Eliminated

Brandom rejects two possible theories of normativity (rule-following).

Regularism:

If a given performance conforms to some pre-existing pattern of performances, then we call that performance correct or competent. If it doesn’t so conform, then we call it incorrect or incompetent

Brandom's objection: Regularists can't distinguish between what happens and what ought to happen. We don't say "gravity ought to work", so a Regularist must somehow explain why the Law of Gravity is not normative, while the Law of US is a normative.

Everything in nature ‘follows’ the ‘rules of nature,’ the regularities isolated by the natural sciences. So what does the normativity that distinguishes human rule-following consist in?

Regulism: rules are certain declarative sentences like "No smoking.", and rule-following is behavior that is described by the rules.

Brandom's objection: rules can't be made entirely explicit. There must always some unsaid rule to avoid an infinite regress, like "the rule about following rules" and "the rule about the rule about following rules" etc.

Wittgenstein said this about how the infinite regress is cut off by unspoken rules that are followed in practice.

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.”

Thus, there is a necessary implicitness, or "blindness", in rule-following behavior. At some level, we simply follow rules without understanding.

But then, a challenge! How is "implicit norm" even possible?

How can a performance be nothing but a ‘blind’ reaction to a situation, not an attempt to act on interpretation?

Unconscious rule-following is automatic, therefore not normative, much like a sneeze, or falling in gravity is not normative.

Or is it? Perhaps we are forced to conclude that fundamentally, norms are based on mechanical, thoughtless behaviors. In this way, we can naturalize norms in a norm-less theory (such as neuroscience).

Brandom refused this, and insists that we must then admit "nonconscious norms". He even proposes a kind of non-natural metaphysics, where non-natural normativity is baked into the metaphysics.

But Bakker has a better idea: explain norms in a norm-less scientific theory

The history of the social sciences is a history of emancipation from the intellectual propensity to intentionalize social phenomenon—this was very much part of the process that Weber called the disenchantment of the world. Brandom proposes to re-enchant the world by re-instating the belief in normative powers, which is to say, powers in some sense outside of and distinct from the forces known to science.

Bakker's Blind Brain Theory

Now Bakker begins his own philosophy, using Blind Brain Theory.

Note how important is implicit/blindness in Wittgenstein's and Brandom's explanations of how norms work. But they never paused to consider it deeper than a simple "Such implicitness means implicit normativity exists." They then went on to consider normativity without studying further just what are implicit, and how they are implicit.

This is a grave error. To explain normativity, we must study what are implicit and how they are implicit in the brain when people think normative thoughts and do normative actions. We must study the neglect structure of the brain, and that brings us to Blind Brain Theory.

According to BBT, all cognition is heuristic and depends critically on the environment to play nice (that is, remain stable). Heuristic algorithms can skip many steps and come out right, as long as the environment rarely challenges it with difficult examples that exposes the error of the heuristic.

Normative cognition is also heuristic -- what features of the human environment does it depend on?

Wittgenstein again

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 "bedrock" is the stable normative behaviors of other humans I live with. In other words, Regularism is actually the right approach to explaining normativity.

Brandom was wrong to reject Regularism, but to see why he was wrong, we must do some psycho-philosophy. We must understand why the human animal is psychologically prone to reject Regularism (just like how it is psychologically prone to think souls exist). It is, again, because of BBT.

We think "This rule is normative." when some normativity-detection cognitive module is triggered. If the module keeps quiet, and we have the distinct feeling of "Wait, that's not normative...", no matter how much information processing the other modules do. And it just so happens that thinking about causes and statistical correlations cannot trigger this module.

There are roughly two types of explanations: causal/natural and normative/supernatural. Causal/natural explanations are those step-by-step explanations that intrinsically allows you to break it down further ("how does this step work?"), push it forwards and backwards in time ("and what happened before/after?"). Normative/supernatural explanations are those brute assertions about what to do and not to do ("This is simply what I do."), accompanied with an anosognosia, a blindness to the blindness, a feeling that the assertions are sufficient with no further explanations possible ("What do you mean I must explain why it is what I do? I have explained myself sufficiently. There is nothing left to explain!")

Since Regularism involves solving normative cognition using the resources of natural cognition, it simply follows that it fails to engage resources specific to normative cognition.

Bakker is in no danger of self-contradiction, because the problem "how does normative cognition work?" is perfectly possible to be the kind of problem that causal cognition can solve. Sure, causal cognition can't solve all problems, but it can solve some... like "how to build a plane?" and "how the brain works?" Science works, and that shows the power of causal cognition. In contrast, nothing sophisticated like science has been built upon normative cognition. This shows that causal cognition can solve normative cognition, while normative cognition can't.

What doesn’t follow is that normative cognition thus lies outside the problem ecology of natural cognition, let alone inside the problem ecology of normative cognition.

In short, Brandom failed because he tried to solve normativity with normative cognition. Bakker may succeed, because he is trying to solve normativity with causal cognition. The feeling that "normativity can't be solved causally" misguided Brandom, and it is just an illusion generated by the fractured nature of cognition, described above.

normative cognition seems unlikely to theoretically solve normative cognition in any satisfying manner. The very theoretical problems that plague Normativism—supernaturalism, underdetermination, and practical inapplicability—are the very problems we should expect if normative cognition were not in fact among the problems that normative cognition can solve.

Here is Bakker's explanation of normative cognition, and how it leads to Brandom's mistake:

normative cognition belongs to social cognition more generally, and that... has evolved to solve astronomically complicated biomechanical problems involving the prediction, understanding, and manipulation of other organisms absent detailed biomechanical information. Adapted to solve in the absence of this information, it stands to reason that the provision of that information, facts regarding biomechanical regularities, will render it ineffective...

... intentional cognition has evolved to overcome neglect, to solve problems in the absence of causal information. This is why philosophical reflection convinces us we somehow stand outside the causal order via choice or reason or what have you. We quite simply confuse an incapacity, our inability to intuit our biomechanicity, with a special capacity, our ability to somehow transcend or outrun the natural order.

Blind Agents

This section reviews Making-it-Explicit (Brandom, 1998), which was a serious attempt to explain how we explain. Brandom tried to reconcile the tension between mechanical implicit with the philosophical implicit.

He argued that, though we can't find intentionality in the physical and biological laws of nature, we can find it in the conversations people make in a society. Intentionality is a myth that becomes real when enough people vocalize that myth when they talk to each other.

Kinda like money, really. Pieces of paper or lumps of gold become exchangeable for goods when enough people take them as exchangeable for goods.

To make his argument, Brandom reviewed the history of explaining how we explain.

Kant

Kant argued that there are rules that are necessary for anyone to explain anything. For example, when we explain to someone about why the sky is blue, we assume that they are "rational", is going to "take us seriously", will interpret the words we say the same way we interpret them, etc. All these necessary rules are moral rules, which makes them immune to scientific understanding. Kant calls these moral rules "practical reason" to distinguish them from scientific understanding of the world ("pure reason").

In this way, Kant separated a few objects (God, immortal soul, free will) from scientific understanding, and that allowed him to simply assert that they must be true because we need those concepts to do things.

Bakker would criticize this as Kant trying to do behavioral psychology by purely thinking inside his own little head. Kant's approach is doomed because introspection is an unreliable hack meant to work only for talking with people in daily life, and we can't even understand what actually goes on inside our own heads without science.

Kant: "We need God, immortality of the soul, and free will in order to do things."

Bakker: "Well, time to check that claim with behavioral psychology. I bet Kant's wrong!"

Frege

Frege argued that normative explanations are incompatible with causal explanations. If I explain why I helped you using behavioral neuroscience, I would have made a "modal mistake", since the right explanation must be normative rather than descriptive.

Explication is an intrinsically normative activity. Making causal constraints explicit at most describes what systems will do, never prescribes what they should do.

Since how we explain is constrained by normative things (as Kant argued), and normative things cannot be explained with descriptive statements (as Frege argued), any explanation for how we explain must be made of normative things.

Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein argued that the implicit assumption behind every explanation is in the other people who hear the explanation. You can't be understood unless other people follow some shared rules. Telling others to follow a rule of understanding like "law of noncontradiction" only works if the other people agrees to that rule and agrees with you about how to use that rule.

"Don't contradict with that statement you made before."

"Why not? And did I really make a contradiction?"

while rules can codify the pragmatic normative significance of claims, they do so only against a background of practices permitting the distinguishing of correct from incorrect applications of those rules

Thus, an explanation of how people explaining must explain why people follow rules. This explanation "why you should follow rules" is itself a normative rule and requires normative explanation.

"You can't say that! It's against rule X."

"What's the problem?"

"It's against the rule-rule to go against rule X!"

"What's the problem?"

"It's against the rule-rule-rule to go against rule-rule!"

Overview

Kant proposes that we are blind to the "things in themselves", such as God, immortal souls, and free will. This blindness allows us to imagine those things as much as we like since science can't say we're wrong about them.

Wittgenstein proposes that we, as a society of people talking to each other, are blind to the rules that support conversations with other people.

With those philosophers, Bakker agrees that our severe blindness is what gives rise to the properties of consciousness, but insists that consciousness can be fully described by science, explaining away all normative statements in the process.

"Reason is not causal. The state of my thought now is not determined by anything before. Reason is invisible, inaudible, not measurable, completely insensible. Reason has no causality. Reason has no physics. Reason is... indeed, completely supernatural and unphysical."

Kant proposed that we can't help but think about things in space and time, and can't help but do things for right and wrong. These two kinds of "can't help but" are the same kind: they are both caused by our biological constraints.

In John 9, Jesus meets a man born blind. To show that He is indeed the “light of the world” (John 9:5), Jesus heals the man. “He spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. ‘Go,’ he told him, ‘wash in the Pool of Siloam’ (this word means ‘Sent’). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing”

Liberal democracy is distinguished from all previous prevalent political systems (monarchy, dictatorship, Roman republic...) in that it attempts to stay as agnostic as possible about "What is the good life for a person?"

Liberal democracy basically says, "You do you. Don't hurt others. Otherwise do whatever you want, or not. We don't care. We are not allowed to care. It would be intrusive of us! We are not going to tell you what's the meaning of life, or what is good, or what is valuable."

Even the First French Republic had a state religion (although they called it "Cult of Reason"). Modern republics don't even have a state religion anymore.

The Enlightenment is the start of rational reflective criticism: people started to ask "Why do we do what we do?" and found many of their traditions stupid, unreasonable, unbelievable. They can't hold on to these traditions anymore.

The traditions used to hold people together and make them agree on "what's the good life?" Now it can't.

Humans confabulate all kinds of rationalizations to their urges, but their urges are basically the same, since they are all human animals descended from a common evolutionary history.

For example, religions have wildly different theologies (rationalization), but basically the same sanctioned behaviors (moral urges).

This has similarities with Alexander Goldenweiser's analysis of primitive art:

involution is described as an in- herent tendency in "primitive" art towards complexity, elaboration, and repetitiousness- the "earmarks of involution".

However, modern art involutes away from repetitiousness.

Summary:

Metaphysical philosophers who want to figure out how we know (epistemology) and what we are (ontology) are like astronomers who want to figure out what the universe is like.

Dogmatic philosophers were like medieval astronomers who learn about the heavens strictly by reading old books.

Kant and other continental philosophers were like astronomers with visual anosognosia.

Bryant is like a visual anosognosiac who smashes telescopes and cyborg eyes.

What they need is SCIENCE.

They are both stuck. Kant and continental philosophers are stuck with "correlationalism", while the others (such as the OOO) are stuck with "anticorrelationalism". One starts with the subject, the other starts with the object.

They are both wrong because the subject-object dichotomy is wrong. It is just a cartoon, a heuristic, a result of how the brain works. See Blind Brain Theory.

Bakker invented the term "out-of-play illusion" here.

He means the illusion that "If there is no conscious information about how something can differ over time, then that thing is automatically considered to be static, timeless, motionless, etc."

Dogmatic philosophy: start with metaphysical dogmas. Can't find theoretical knowledge.

Kant: dogmatic philosophy is wrong.

• How to explain their failure?
• The knower can't be a passive receiver. The knower must make some "conceptual activity".
• <del>But where is the knower doing the conceptual activity?</del> [Kant couldn't have asked the question because of the illusion of sufficiency. The question never even occurred to him.]
• The conceptual activity is clearly not material, therefore I call it "transcendental".

Russell: The "transcendental realm"? Sounds immovable to me! How could it move? The transcendental realm isn't even spatial!

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions [metaphysics] that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.

Weird disorders like "pain asymbolia" would not be weird if we have some intuitive understanding about how our minds are made. Our intuitive understanding of our own mind says that the mind is whole and free, and such odd behaviors like pain asymbolia and tumor-induced-psychopathy are quite literally unimaginable by our intuitive theory of mind.

If our introspection gives us some "flags" that notify us that our understanding of our own minds is incomplete, then we would be less puzzled. The utter puzzlement comes from the simultaneous conviction that our intuitive Theory of Mind is sufficient and the odd disorders demonstrating that our intuitive ToM cannot be sufficient.

The cognitive illusion of sufficiency meets the material reality of insufficiency.

I'm unable to find any prominent researcher advocating this position, but perhaps:

Does memory encoding exist? (Tulving, 2001)

Socrates invites us to think of the mind as an aviary full of birds of all sorts. The owner possesses them, in the sense that he has the ability to enter the aviary and catch them, but does not have them, unless he literally has them in his hands. The birds are pieces of knowledge, to hand them over to someone else is to teach, to stock the aviary is to learn, to catch a particular bird is to remember a thing once learned and thus potentially known. The possibility of false judgment emerges when one enters the aviary in order to catch, say, a pigeon but instead catches, say, a ring-dove.

Kant's philosophy seemed necessarily true because Kant had philosophical anosognosia. He was blind to the alternative ways to interpret the feelings. He was also blind to this blindness.

Kant's philosophy is based on a rational analysis of the feelings, like sight and sound. After intense introspection, Kant believed that all feelings inherently has dimensions of space and time, therefore space and time are constructed by his subjective self, even if the objects don't have space or time.

Kant was the first critical philosopher, and that meant that when he did his work, he felt like he was doing the one true critical philosophy.

As the years went on, more critical philosophies appeared, and now we can't take any philosophy as seriously as Kant took his own philosophy.

The question is then, why does a philosophy, an interpretation, and similar things, feel sufficient, until someone produces some alternative interpretation and wake up from our trance of sufficiency? Why do ideas sound so great in our own mouths until someone raises questions about it?

Bakker's theory may be compared with that of Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017)

Humans have intuitive physics: things tend to fall to the ground and stay put, unless you kick it. Motion is absolute (contradicting Newtonian physics), and some things are moving (like the sun), others aren't (like the earth).

Humans also have intuitive meta-physics: the subject is passively a receiver of true information about the outside world.

Both of these should be explainable by neuroscience.

Kant wanted to study reason, just like how scientists of his time studied the stars and the heat engines. Kant, unfortunately, had no neuroscience instruments, so he was forced to rely mainly on introspection and philosophy -- not science.

So his study of reason was unscientific, which is why it failed.