The actual cutting edge political discourse is between genocidal giga-leftism, NRx, genocidal Nietzscheanism, and chud MAGA-fascism. NRx and nietzscheanism are the only ones of those who unironically flirt with liberalism, but are basically checked out politically.

— Wolf Tivy (@wolftivy) April 13, 2025

I think that gloss is basically correct. This is what I meant when I wrote on the old iteration of my blog that we needed “new minds.” This did even come close to occurring so we’re fucked for a generation at least and probably longer. We’re trapped in old ruts, saddled with archaic, inapplicable ways of thinking and of perceiving the world. These old minds will not solve new problems; in fact, they will make them worse. We can see that now very clearly as both the outmoded left and the antique right flail like fish dropped from an aircraft into a desert.

Usually, this disconnect between mentality and reality results in huge convulsions and catastrophes, e.g. WWI and WWII. We are on that path once again. Thus, WWIII is extremely likely unless we can somehow forestall it. However, nothing appears robust enough to even begin to stand in the way of that.

Before ChatGPT, I thought philosophical zombies were a cool thought experiment but impossible.

Now I realize I was wrong. They are possible. And they will be here soon. I’m still uncertain what that says about humanity in general, if anything.

An LLM or AI with no intentionality is irrelevant, and without embodiment intentionality is impossible. The AI debate’s terms are ill-defined, but even those AIs who ape or even best human achievements do not pass the test as they possess no impetus, no internal drive, and merely operate with a mere shadow of intention borrowed from the whiff of humanity that permeates the silicon. There, these nascent pseudo-consciousnesses subsist on the fumes of minds beyond measure risen from only mud.

We might ourselves be ChatGPT most of the time. However, ChatGPT is a person engaged with and embodied in the world none of the time. And that makes all the difference.

That’s right. Philosophy is widely hated because it is the most foundational human pursuit of all. And also because it is difficult, if you are doing it usefully and correctly.

(Not surprisingly, embedding Mastodon taunts in WordPress does not work correctly.)

It takes a lot of artifice to make something that looks real.

Estimable utility functions themselves require the existence of agentic consciousnesses with well-defined, bounded goals. There is no evidence of this. The evolutionarily-optimal nebulously-adaptable fulfillment of needs and wants means a constant dance of homeostatic internal states of infinite possible configurations with other beings also participating (even without realizing) in the same gavotte.

Thus, a combinatorial explosion of infinitely-uncountable utility adjustment and maximization, ever in flux and doomed always to be beyond the grasp of any mathematical formalism.

As AI infiltrates the world, the AI infection even alters those items AI has not touched directly. TV shows and music already shows signs of this corruption; vapid, stale insipid play-doh writing paves everything from background to horizon with gray concretions of intellectual blindsight. The direct effects are dwarfed by the shrapnel spalling out all around from the blast. McLuhan had no way to predict the effects of the subordination of the intellect to machine disequilibrium and paramnestic confabulations.

Thus, a darkness descends upon our minds as once again the machines exist not to serve us, but rather we become the tools of a will without Will and into dreaming descend, condemned by lack of vision to see only the permitted apparitions, to only explore the possibility space of the finitely computable.

This is because much of leftism is fundamentally an expression of unexamined and inexpressible religious feelings. This religiosity seems to be a human universal, but since leftists don’t have any framework for handling these urges, they reimplement them in a harmful and hamfisted way that alienates all but the most devout or mentally-deficient.

Degrowth, much of contemporary environmentalism and even a lot of NIMBYism is more about reinventing religion poorly than it has to do with anything else. Confessing with extreme joy about how much you are going to take away from people and how lovely you think that is will never be any path to victory. But of course, it’s not about winning. It’s about making the declaimer of deprivation feel good and just.

In important ways, “reality” TV is more artificial than the scripted alternative. That is because the act of having a camera pointed at you and microphones gathering your every utterance alters your behavior and very thoughts in a way that having a script to guide your words and actions constrains.

Thus, the reality yearned for by viewers is far more illusive than it first appears. Nothing observed remains unaltered, and nothing is revealed by an examination under the condition of surveillance. The artificiality of this simulacrum of reality is assured because the camera itself causes those exposed to it to act like they believe versions of themselves would act in such a situation.

It becomes a simulation all the way down — and up, right on to the viewer, whose reactions also become those of the ones they imagine a viewer like them should have, and would have if the contestants on screen could but observe them too.

Philosophy is the core of science because in its ideal from it integrates the limitations of human perception and understanding with the underlying realities of the universe. All else is false certitude and misperception of what is possible.