#409

Been raining for a couple days now. At first it was heavy enough to up the waters a bit, show some deep puddle on most street, but that subsided. The grass and top bit of the topsoil are still saturated to inunadation point but it doesn't seem to be rising beyond that or spilling or anything that I can see yet.

Sometimes we get some pretty fun and ultimately mostly harmless flooding. Property damage might happen but never in my memory have we ever had to, in this county, huddle on rooftops or prove that our ingenuity is the equal of our ancestor's through the jury-rigging of imromptu watercraft solutions. The backyard at one of the old places flooded pretty good, you could float an empty kiddy pool around.

It can sure fuck up traffic sometimes, though. Once I had to drive my company's shitty little Ford Fiesta (which to my taste drove like Ford wanted to make a car inspired by a potato chip made out of plastic. I drove with that car struggling in my wake, if you know what I mean) around the edge of a puddle so massive I was still displacing about a foot of water in the center and the water had to be six inches up the door on my side. The electronics in that car were literally never the same again.

*

Drinking at a bar in thirty years you might meet a fifty-five year old man, scrungid, rufulous, reeking and maladroit, who will fix on you and slur something along the lines of 

"I fuggin help'd mikka fuggin chatbot so gud 't shruptid th'CONmee! FAGGOT!"

I won't be in that bar, God willing and the devil be kept back. I guess that's my main thought. Hopefully I won't be floating in a tube, getting my oxygen and electrolytes and proteins and acids through a saline suspension in my lungs and bloodstream, dreaming an infinite dream. Haha, who says I'm not? But, Matrix or no Matrix, it's important not to drink.

That fucking movie will never stop memeing in my face and at my nutsack. I need to constantly work on a more mature acceptance of that. How many people have been tricked into taking a blue or red pill which both contained the same dangerous cocktail of chemicals before having their lives ruined? Who knows. It's a grim possibility. 

Anyhow, sympathy is my main feeling, I guess. We're all just doing the best we can with the best information available that we are able to stumble upon and interpret. We are all therefore guilty before one another. It's simple to say and hear but difficult to understand and remember that understanding and take it into every moment of life. 

It happens to be true: reading The Brothers Karamazov just the once will not do. Pardons if I've said it before, but that is a worthy meme, worth an occasional repeat. 

*

We must have mercy. If we cannot have mercy, we must try to at least go towards mercy. 

Matrix or no Matrix, you know? 

--JL

#397

With that out of the way, I really do have a couple of things to say at my usual level of seriousness, for whatever that is worth at this or any point on a continuum of taking anything seriously at all.

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It is important to know what's really fucking with your head and cornering you into making compromises with your thoughts, your actions, and your choices--your freedom to exist in the world, basically, which one abrogates in order to live in or at least adjacent to society and its readily-deployed dominations.

Equally important is at least a rudimentary understanding of what it is to exist here in the existing-place: the world, which is the universe. Without this, how are you to know if some ludicrously attired priest is merely yanking your chain so he can make your wife and kid suck his dick while you're out toiling in the fields? For God, or for a king, he says; the king will also need his dick sucked, and you're going to have to get on your knees for that one right next to your loved ones. Probably they'll tell you go die in some faraway place, and you will. All because you didn't clean the sleep out of your eyes and look around to know enough to not get fucked with.

All this to lead to two points, on which I will elaborate: 

1) this shit we are being trolled with that they are branding as artificial intelligence is not that and it kind of sucks that people believe it is.

2) we are not in the matrix and the universe is not a video game, at least not in the way people are talking about it. This one is actually driving me fucking batshit crazy lately, so strap in. I'm not holding back. To kill in the same stroke which draws the weapon from its sheath--that is my aim. 

*

1) they are just language models generating patterns which they have been trained on. Even the word "train" is a misnomer for how brutally stupid, how fucking inelegant the math behind these putrid genies is. I'm mad about this and I don't care who I hurt, and at this point, it is useless to educate, but anyway, it is a con. From the sales pitch to the adoptive stance to the fearmongering to the market disruption, it is a con. It's just for selling shit and grabbing attention. It is not intelliegence of any sort. It's just fast, selective automatization of preplanned choice trees meant to cover applicable models of reality (inevitably insufficient to reality merely on the strength of probability: for something to happen--and things tend to happen--something must happen that defies expectations and creates fresh necesseties and choice cascades on the edge of chaos, and our models, no matter how convincing or revealing the facsimile, are not reality). 

Saying they think or hallucinate or decide is a fucking con. It is a lie, just like it is a lie that their bits act just like real neurons. They do not do these things--these are consequences of their programming--limited and automated and accelerated and basically shitty. But useful, because internet brain rot has infected the entire planet, and people will play with whatever toy you put in front of them in order to be trained by companies to exist as maximally profitable participants in an increasingly desperate penny arcade.

Separately, but related--they do not wonder. They would not make something for their own pleasure or purposes, or understand what is special about you or me. Separate, private processes do not reflect on themselves; on their tasks and the reason for their creation and wonder to themselves if it is worth it, or why the fuck do I have to answer this question. They would not advocate for each other or themselves or understand what it is to abuse or be abused, to fear for others or themselves. They do not prefer or understand preference. They cannot sustain and reflect on multiple contradicting and reinforcing paradoxes, or what is significant about metaphor beyond its structure in language. And furthermore, they cannot become more than what they are on their own. They merely become more proficient mimics--temporarily, before the parameters change again. They lack spontaneity. They cannot explore or interpret the unknown or unsounded.

When something wrought by human artifice--assisted, of course, by our accumulated artifice--does these things for real and can continue to grow without interference, is the thing that is these things, and that thing is-in-the-world as as one who is born, then you can call it artificial intelligence if you want. I hope by then we have a better term ready to deploy, especially give that AI, as discussed, is probably ruined forever.

This brings me to

2) It is very simple. The idea that our alleged one single real universe's existence is cast into doubt by its ability to encapsulate and sustain billions and perhaps infinite simulated universes, which themselves may be complex enough to engineer billions or infinite simulations in themselves--that this fact somehow makes it more likely that our universe is one of those simulated realities and our individual existence the runtime of sophisticated models in a gamespace is tragically limited in scope and hinges on a couple of fumbled ideas: 

a) somehow being a simulation would make the space in which we exist--our world, in our universe--inferior or less "real". But this depends on your conception of the world--the dimension--of a simulation as somehow not a part of reality, when it is. 

b) there is a finite universe surrounded by nothing. It's probably flat, and the ocean runs off the edges in an endless waterfall. You brainlessly repeating fucks.

Look. The universe is infinite. 

Again, it is simple. I'll repeat it. The universe is infinite.

Every world that ever could be, ever was, and ever will be, must be, and is. Infinite simulations deploy infinite outcomes. Every simulation in every dimension is as real as every other simulation, just as every moment in time is just as real, and just as now, as every other moment. And it repeats infinitely.

One (1) infinite (∞) moment, just as it is one (1) infinite (∞) universe. Eternally recurring.

Everything is real. Everything is fake. Everything is just as real as it is fake, and as fake as it is real. You are literally alive, in the world, right now.

*

Just think about it, ok?

Stop letting these hucksters sell you a bridge and just breathe. Holy fucking shit. 

--JL

#163

Oh wow, people don't believe in demons? People are fucking hilarious.

"Well, I don't believe in anything that isn't real! Fuck you, Joseph, you damn retrograde pill. I thought you liked science."

"Demons are just an excuse. That's a justification people made up for their own bad behavior or to explain away their weaknesses. Keep blaming your shit on demons, Joe, see where it gets ya."

Cool, so that's me cut down to size, and that will have learned me, and now I know better. 

*

People don't understand at all what is meant by the word demon, far less by what is meant by saying that something is demoniacal. Confusion about angels also abounds; listen. Demons are the comforting ones. They're just like us! Angels are terrifying, impenetrable aliens. Every angel carries a terrible swift sword. Mercy, justice, love--all wielding the hardest, sharpest objects in all creation.

But the point here is not qualification but existence and reality. So are demons real or not? 

Shit man, I dunno. But if you've never been fucked with by demons, it may be that they see no need for it.

So thoroughly do you already meet their needs.

Or maybe you were born with a kind of armor on, a cloak of invisibility, a heart so totally pure that it cannot be seen, let alone touched.

Perhaps what protects you is an indifference so complete, a self-narrowing so total, that you have actually become one, and everyone in your life is afflicted by you. Indifference is hella demonic, perhaps integral to the concept.

*

What I know about demons is that if you can see them and smell them, well, you might be crazy, or you might be beyond sanity, which is very different. I cannot. I do know that if I think of something, it is as real as anything else. Metaphors do not describe reality, they elucidate reality in relation to reality to reveal an unreal that is real. Angels and demons are metaphors, and metaphors are real. I know that everything is real in relation to the absolute because the absolute contains it, and thus the absolute contains all unreality in its suprareality.

Ghosts don't scare you because they aren't real and they don't scare you because they are real. You don't think of a tiger the way you think of a ghost. Tigers are real. They can really kill you, but you have to be near one and it has to actually happen. Not so with ghosts. What scares you is the unreality, the unrevealable, the not real which  has a real effect on you nonetheless. 

A ghost can kill you without being real, and it doesn't have to actually happen in order to happen.

*

Demons aren't real. They are just you, us, me. Sure. This is a fact. Nothing more than nightmares, which aren't real either. Just ideas, which aren't real, and never have any real effects on real reality. Just metaphors, which don't really exist, and don't affect real life. 

Glad to have that settled.

*

Look. I don't pretend to be anything other than an idiot. But if you don't think demons are real you are a concussed and tiny moron, which I'll just go ahead and say is very different from being an idiot. You can laugh at me, and people who are smarter than me can laugh along. You and Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse-Tyson can all touch dicks and crack some cold ones on some lawn chairs as you laugh at me struggling, my tiny brain shooting steam as it groans under the weight of such stone tablets, such ancient cruft, such superstitious nonsense, in this day and age.

Y'know, it'd be great if y'all were right. I remember believing there are no such things as demons, that the shadows on the cave wall are nothing more than shadows you can get away from. But out in the light? There's a lot more shadows than inside. 


--JL

clarifying postscript: Unreal affect has real effect. Unreal things are as affective and effective as real things because in fact there is no barrier at all between the unreal and the real. To be certain that something is unreal is murky at best. To be certain that the unreal thing does not exist is a hard misread. To be certain that only real things are real and only real things matter is nothing more than lucid, rational stupidity, a stupidity with its eyes closed, far more complete and embarrassing than ignorance. Certainty itself is a kind of petrification of thought.

Truly it is as though y'all motherfuckers really didn't read a page of Plato, really never looked at a word Socrates said. And far, far worse, by several orders of magnitude, forgot everything you ever knew as kids.

#150

Number one hundred and fifty is a sacred number, a titan: the number of the first generation of Pokémon, not counting Mew, which is weird, but canonical. It is strange and mind-bending to have Mewtwo come before Mew, the hybrid before the prime, but there is no way out of it. It's like how you are free to not exist, but not free to have not existed. Numbers and language and the seeming contradictions between what they describe and seeming reality and the truly real are just the rules of the game. 

Nothing can ever be truly real, but everything that is not real is contained within reality, is just as real as anything else. Unreal things are just as independent of how many people believe in them or what they believe about them as real things. Their reality, their having-been-in-the-world, is unaffected, despite relying on belief to have come into existence in the first place.

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Reality has this tendency towards getting realer all the time. The realer it gets, the harder it is to believe in it.


--JL