Horiz

Doofish clowns disbelieve black holes exist but fail to realize that they are already trapped on a black hole de facto: the planet Earth itself is a gravitational prison. The event horizon for an unaided human is only as high as you can jump.

And just like a black hole, there is no obvious edge.

You’re stuck. Deal with it.

Lex Luthor Lite

About the below, the worst part of this denial isn’t just the gaslighting of younger people it requires. Though that’s certainly bad enough. It’s the way people have to lie to themselves to keep the illusion going. Pretending nothing’s changed and that everything is just peachy means ignoring mountains of data, turning a blind eye to how insanely unaffordable everything’s gotten, and acting like rising inequality is just some kind of baseless complaint promulgated by the poors. At that point in your journey to become the Lex Luthor of your subdivision, you’re not just casually dismissing other people’s struggles, you’re nuking your own ability to see clearly or take any kind of responsibility for the mess we’re all in.

And that’s pretty freakin’ evil.

Lurch

Feminism lost its way when it became primarily about keeping “undesirable” men away from PMC women. And then it embraced Islam as feminist.

Combine with that a heaping serving of “Feminism for me but not for thee” and it was done. Now feminism lies in ruins with nothing to replace it — which to be fair is true of most of the zombie 20th Century ideologies we still cling to. There is nothing yet clearly on the way to supplant any of them and it appears there will not be for some time.

LLMinate

For once I agree with Yglesias. And yes, I read the whole paper.

This is a big nothing. The highest-quality LLMs are now smarter than most humans. But so what? Progress is not made by the lumpen masses and neither it will be by LLMs who are near that level of mundanity. The gap between someone like Bill Atkinson or Nancy Cartwright and some regular clown is nearly as vast as the gulf between a slime mold and Goofus Tardbiscuit III (i.e., most people).

All most people have — probably 99.999% of humanity — is the illusion of thinking, the same as LLMs. The thoughtuful few are those who make any progress, who lift the rest of everyone up out of the muck.

LLMs are still in the muck. I don’t know their future but that’s where they are now. And so is nearly every human.

Miraculum

We live daily surrounded by and ensconced in miracles. Now our quest is not to extend these marvels into the future but to destroy them in the present. In our apathy, the future has become unimaginable and the declaration of the impossibility of further wonders taken for shrewd insight and obvious truth — despite all history and evidence pointing to its risibility.

The left is no less guilty of this than the right. As I’ve said before, we needed new minds and did not achieve them. Now we will pay the price.

Amber

Shit, homie, that’s going to happen to non-incarcerated people too. AI companions will “solve” the loneliness epidemic.

I hate the future.

By the way, the only way AI companions could make a difference to the loneliness issue is if they were like Iris in Companion. And then they’d just be people (with all the rights and responsibilities that entails), so no real solution there.

I saw some dippy clown the other day “proving” there was no loneliness epidemic with her little science spreadsheets. And it was so cute! But of course she’s wrong. Your little science spreadsheets show you almost nothing of use here.

No Nous Is Bad News

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.

Cognotive

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.

RQM

Relational Quantum Mechanics.

Ugh, this Rovellian nonsense. RQM is almost as bad as superdeterminism.

RQM cannot be correct because the superpositional state of quantum systems is an observable fact that has real-world testable and tested consequences. Simple as that.

RQM is not saying much. And what it is mostly saying is covered by already-existing QM theories. And as to the rest, what it’s claiming is purely wrong. To put it bluntly and to reiterate the above, RQM is either obvious or wrong. The parts that are obvious already exist elsewhere. And that parts that are wrong are all Rovelli’s.

It’s a theory that has no purpose and is directly contradicted by the way the universe actually works.

Experimental Mind

That’s a great observation. It leads one to wonder why we became so fearful. And why we collectively decided that all relationships are only about power. I’ve heard people posit it was due to increased precarity, but that doesn’t ring true to me. That’s a pat answer that only touches the surface.

There’s no single explanation of course, but I believe this retrogression has more to do with smartphones, social media and the exaggerated performativity they inject into the sociocultural landscape than it does with the socioeconomic concerns. Essentially, by compressing us back into de facto small communities again with Instagram, Facebook and those other evils, we’ve been forced to resume the mores and norms of a medieval village. That is, a now-virtualized non-locality where everyone knows or can easily discover your business and pass judgment upon you, sometimes with devastating consequences.

We are not cognitively set up to handle this compression of all of us into one tiny yet vast mental conurbation, so we adapt in various ways — most of which are actually maladaptive to any end goal of human happiness or eudaimonia. The solution isn’t to retreat to a past that would no longer be composable with now-novel minds never seen in human history but to tame the beasts of tech and moral overreach to make our tools serve us rather than have us further bent to their whims and limitations.

At least, we should do this. We probably will not and instead will stumble along until something breaks. But change will occur either way. That, at least, is certain.