🏴‍☠️ I live to ride the ocean
The mighty world around
To take a little plunder
And to hear the cannon sound 🦜

Not to be confused with epistemology, which also poses a grave risk to the MAGA cult.

I call it geeking out which is usually instead about anime plots or TTRPG characters and worlds. And it’s a habit of us neurospicy folk that often scares those who aren’t.

My whole point was that while Trump’s memo was meant to enable Christian proselytizers, there is a whole demographic of thinkers (mad, free or otherwise) who will also be enabled, so this may well be a Chesterton’s Fence issue, especially if those thinkers are the office clerks who are super good at data crunching and making sure the LAN doesn’t fall apart.

That argument wouldn’t persuade someone who is willing to rely on faith, because they have given up reason for loyalty, much the way MAGAs assert the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; it’s a statement of fidis (faith, or fidelity; loyalty) rather than an assertion of truth.

But for those of us trying to understand what is, the silent void is evidence of a silent void in a world where events are not only detectable but also have effects that can be detected through side channel attacks. It’s how the science we depend on to fight plagues and land airplanes and determine evolutionary links is not based merely on a handful of observations but an abundance of data that consistently points towards our mathematical models.

But again, the reason I posted it here (as opposed to athiest communities or philosophical communities) is I know its an oversized pill. Even those who live their lives as naturalists don’t want to acknowledge the gravity of what that means. And I’ve thought about it more than all the proselytizing evangelists I’ve encountered have thought about their belief, combined. I doubt Ned Flanders is going to have much luck with me (or those like me who love thinking about these things) at the water cooler.

And to be fair, my exploration and coming to terms with insignificance was a rough climb down into the abyss and back out again and maybe about a third up the other side. The common problem in Miskatonic University of professors going mad from revelations of forbidden truths is one I’ve experience myself. (Studying the German Reich and the Holocaust in the aughts when the US started feeling fashy did not help matters). We humans want to be special. We want to be God’s chosen. We want to be more than social hominids polluting ourselves to death with industrial exhaust. We want to, at least, be colonizing space and one of the elite species that escaped their terrestrial prison. And we’re not.

Camus’ absurdism is about coming to terms with the reality of death, of a meaningless chaotic world that (considering his time and experience in the Résistance) might not actually be worth experiencing, as a lot of it sucks and is suffering.

Religion, as Camus called it philosophical suicide but others call it a leap of faith is the most common response to the realization that we live our lives to no divine purpose. Most choose to veer away and pretend that reality is different. And that is the nature of faith.

Put simply, there are no embarrassments to materialism, and this is even the consensus of religious scholars.

In the post about the new convert your colleagues to your faith in the breakroom memo by the Trump regime, I offered an example of what my spiritual workmates might encounter if they raised the topic of Jesus, several paragraphs about the cosmic horror of reality.

The main thrust is that all spirit, whether another subatomic factor, or a manifold like gravity, is transparent to to the standard model of particle physics. It’s also transparent to relativity, but we expect that.

And that includes human souls, ghosts, afterlife.

My point was I’ve thought about and researched existential philosophy at length, possibly to suggest I’m ASD (disclosure: I’m diagnosed), and my evangelical rivals may as well be walking into the Total Perspective Vortex.

To be fair we’ve seen dozens of CEOs and boards of directors get prematurely thrilled about the idea of replacing high-paid jobs with AI (or at least with AI and some lower paying jobs to curate the good slop from the eldritch horrors and hallucinations).

This guy is being semi-self-aware at least, and they all need to be reminded the economy despairs for good jobs

Also, I bet a nickel if we looked at his clerical staff we can find bullshit jobs there to keep clerks running around so he feels important while he walks through the office. Take those guys and let them work at home as part of the LLM team. I bet they’d appreciate doing real work (and skipping the commute).

Right now it takes specialists with a solid LORA game to make generative AI produce functional results. If we acknowledged this, then we’d either integrate AI as a new tool for doing stuff or we’d ditch it and keep our artists and experts. (And, with newfound appreciation for them, give them a raise?)

Also I still stand by the notion that well-treated, well-paid workers are productive workers. It was recently affirmed by a farm expert noting that prison inmates are outperformed by low-paid undocumented laborers who are outperformed (in turn) by well paid workers (documented or otherwise.)

We could make capitalism work if our bourgeoisie wasn’t so busy trying to be aristocrats and hyper-bigots.

Or we could nationalize AI development like China in a step towards post scarcity, but that would likely require violent revolution.

White rich people don’t get arrested if it can be avoided.

Nonwhite rich people (including Jewish folk) do get arrested and even convicted. If they’re well liked they get their sentence commuted due to a technicality.

I didn’t say the soul pulls energy from the person, but there has to be interaction between material and spirit (I don’t need spirit to be its own manifold in this model so I didn’t presume it)

If the soul doesn’t interact with the material then there’s no connection between the two and theyre not associated.

So we should be able to detect that interaction. It should have enough of a footprint that were able to notice something even if only side channel effects (which is how we discovered radiation and the heating properties of microwaves).

And we haven’t.

As I said, it doesn’t rule out spirit, but like many apologetic arguments, it takes a lot of weird presumptions to assert that spirit does exist, does interact with material, yet cannot be detected with the scientific means we have in the twenty first century. It can happen but then it requires stark changes in the models of mechanics we have (such as possibly the simulated-universe hypothesis). In this case our scopes are good enough to see the proverbial teapot. 🫖

But I appreciate that it’s difficult to comprehend what the issues are, and why this is a failing not merely of Christianity but any narrative that involves spirit or afterlife. It rules out most models of ghost and fairy phenomena as well.

And don’t worry. If you don’t get it today, we’ll have many (hypothetical, thankfully) days together in the break room so that I can assure you do.

To date there is zero evidence for interaction between material nature and the spirit. And not for want of looking, as scientists and clergymen alike have been searching for centuries now, anomalous exceptions are extremely rare. Even the standard model of particle physics is transparent to any spiritual factor.

So why should we look at it? Because the human mind, to perceive and process sensory stimulus into situation awareness, to remember, to read and speak and understand facial expression, to compute, and to engage in reason — for all these capacities — it requires power.

While LLM generative systems power demand is calling for the re-commissioning of nuclear power plants, the human brain eats up (according to anatomists) about 20% of our caloric intake, when we are awake, at rest. Less when we’re at full run, more when we’re computing the integral of the acceleration of rocket thrust as fuel is spent, or landing an airliner by yoke.

But it means, if we have a soul, and that soul remembers its sins, can reason why such behaviors were sinful; if that soul can feel the fires of Hell, this processing takes energy, and an energy source. That means interaction between the physical and spirit, which means there should be something to detect. There should even be side channels.

No evidence of energy exchange, no side channel heat or sound, it strongly (not absolutely) implies there’s no spirit to detect. Or if there is, it might be so delicate that interference from natural phenomena (lightning strikes and CME emps come to mind) would shatter it.

The exception is the simulated-universe hypothesis: If the universe is a simulation in a computer program (or Azathoth’s dream; Ia! 🦑🌊🌌) then all our recorded observations are of simulated events, and souls can simply be simulated. But some of us object to the notion we’re an object in a program or a figment in a dream.

If there’s no detectable energy powering our souls, then they could be in the core of the sun and not feel a thing, nor have an eff to give. No regrets, no memories, no pain, no misery.

Most likely, by far, we are thinking meat.

Heck I who am awake today can be a different iteration than me, who was awake yesterday. The separation of time when cerebral cortex activity is shut down for maintenance (non REM sleep) may indicate separate beings, like an AGI powered down and rebooted, with its past memories front-loaded. We’re the same for day-to-day quotidian purposes, but our breaks in continuity raise philosophical questions.

And all this is before we get into the incomprehensible vastness of our galaxy, in which earth is barely a mote, or the universe featuring immense strings of galaxies, in which our Milky Way is a dot.

And all this is before we discuss the multiple great filters that are imminent before us, and as a species we are ill prepared to navigate. When we go extinct in the next century or too, it will be part of the Holicene dying, and none of our gods, myths and cultures will survive. All of our operas and symphonies, all of our paintings and sculpture, all of our cinematic thrillers and cozy mysteries and Ghibli animations and fine cuisine will evaporate into geographical layers, and the universe won’t even notice.

All this is to say, I’ve thought about this and confronted my personal insignificance. I’ve come to terms with mortality and the end of society and species. I get why people cling to notions that we are something special, even though all indications from nature imply we are not.

I say, bring it.

I remember a point right after gay was a generic derisive (e.g. That’s so gay! = That sucks! ) for a short while I’m gay for meant I like this so much I’d be willing to do sexual favors to get it (e.g. I’m gay for mineral water right now )

Similarly when we talk about architecture porn we mean stuff that would excite people really into architecture. In some places, we still see it. ( Gun porn, food porn, grammar porn, etc.)

It’d be awesome if we generalized sluttiness the same way.

A 1990s meme has been updated for 2020s audiences!

Fine, adding a useful link to my comment above.

I was diagnosed with ASD around when I was fifty. Five-Oh. I’m still wending the administrative labyrinth to get appropriate support.

As for ADHD, I only really noticed my executive dysfunction when playing Subnautica and Satisfactory, both of which feature periods where there are big lists of tasks I can engage in right now towards large goals, and my brain would freeze up.

Folks and teachers and peers noticed I was a bit odd since I was six.

This is, if true and accurate, delightful news! And has improved an otherwise troublesome day.

The new Christian nationalist orders are not so patient. Even Charles X of France rolled back rights too speedily, sparking public outcry resulting in Parisian haircuts. (a bit off the top 🪟🔪)

SCOTUS used to be sneakier, carving out sections of fourth- and fifth-amendment protections, but since Dobbs the Federalist Society Six have tossed subtlety and reason to the wind and now adjudicate away rights based on vibe and conservative rhetoric grievance.

Hopefully the US and UK both will recognize why the French public was swift to act when manarchists took shears to the Napoleonic Code.

Every society has its pathway there. TERFs are one of the last milestones.

GB has really wanted to go fascist autocratic since Germany looked over in the 1920s and saw a like minded kin.

When the regime ignores petitions by the public for the redress of grievances, you petition harder.

Demonstrations, Public Disobedience, Mischief, Sabotage, Terrorism.

Censorship always expands and encroaches on things important to the public. Obscenity and indecency protections eventually turn into queer erasure. Security concerns are always followed by carve-outs of civil rights.

Hit hard early.

I’m reminded of an incident in the aughts or early 2010s in which an intra-office correspondence from a right-wing think tank escaped into the public. One of the correspondents expressed distaste over disabled and welfare recipients having access to refrigerators.

As the history of Great Britain has shown us, it will always be tempting to trim the privileges of the poor and disabled, to punish them for their shortfalls in exploiting the capitalist system. In the meantime, the hardest workers, such as USMC front line riflemen and wait staff in diners scattered across the states, the hardest, cruelest work does not make one rich. As a note, the most costly crime in the United States is wage theft, and time theft is a myth dispelled by the ubiquity of bullshit jobs. We’re being robbed by our own bosses who always want more of what they already have in excess of what they can use.

Really, we should intervene with billionaires the way we do drunkards and addicts.

And yet we also praise and worship private equity investors, who do nothing short of create sinkholes in our economy, but only after stripping companies down to their skeletons and leaving them with immense debt to go bankrupt. Mitch Romney managed such a firm before his political career, and he was the Republican candidate for President of the United States before the GOP was repurposed as Trump’s instant army.

The merit or lack thereof that a given person shows doesn’t come out of a vacuum. We shouldn’t be relying on fate and kind bosses (or bad parenting and bad bosses and being the wrong color and the wrong religion etc.) to decide who gets to enjoy what luxury, yet some riflemen escape combat to end up disproportionately homeless, while grifters and financial hacks rent municipal areas for their wedding.

Ideally, we’d all eat the same, and be motivated to make sure the most squalid and most vile of eaters still dine with extravagance, knowing the least of us dines as well as we do, since it’s not anyone’s fault they were born frail, or with avolition, or with blindness or with a foul temperament they cannot overcome without the capital, the financial acumen and the sheer ruthlessness to make it in the late-stage capital world.

But I’d settle for a narrow wealth bandwidth, where the poorest of us has a thousandth, maybe of the richest of us.

We don’t even get that. So fuck capitalism, and death to monarchists.

This was something I was thinking should be memified / rendered into an infographic.

Meritocracies tend to have blind-spots regarding certain folks:

• People who do useful stuff not recognized by the merit assessment system, and allotted no reward or compensation; also merits under-valued and underpaid (e.g. parenting, teaching)
• People who subvert the system, often playing to the measures of merit rather than the spirit (e.g. private equity schemes, MLMs, cults, lobbyists, trillion-dollar far-right hate-based propaganda machines)
• People who have characteristics favored by the assessment system that aren’t really meritous (white, male, related to wealthy families), and people who are devalued for characteristics that don’t affect their merits (nonwhites, women, queer, poor, fat, unattractive, strange cultures and religions, outside the mainstream ideology)
• The personhood of those people who genuinely have little or no merit at this time (disabled folk), some of whom have served (enlisted veterans suffering from TBI or PTSD, or were just blackballed by a superior officer with a grudge) or have the potential to serve (children of the wrong color, children who are below average in physical prowess, children with unusual learning styles, weird children, poor children)

Probably not a complete list. Early draft.

This wording bothers me, since it would be much better if I forgave myself during the many prior weeks I’ve lived, in which case I’d be much healthier now. But I’m in my late fifties so now and this week seems generally a bit late for first times.

An attempted fix: May this be the week you forgive yourself for surviving the only way you knew how.