THE SINGULARITY SURVIVAL GUIDE: Take Comfort in That This May All Be a Simulation

You could be living in a simulation. Keep that in mind when robots start lording it over you. It’s possible the code allowing for their existence is stored away in a computer someplace right alongside the code containing your childhood memories. You and the robots, in that case, are one and the same: all part of a code stored in a computer existing on a different plane.

It’s likely a run-of-the-mill computer, too. Some common videogame console owned by a child in a super advanced civilization. One day the kid will stay up too late and will reach the final level of the game—that’s the one where you (humans) develop artificial intelligence that achieves the singularity.

You can only hope that the kid finishes the game quickly and everyone featured in the game gets to live forever in what they personally imagine to be their own ultimate version of paradise.

What’s the probability you’re living in a simulation? That’s anyone’s guess. You could ask one of the robots lording it over you, but don’t expect a straight answer. They could be in cahoots with the life-forms who control the simulation. In fact, the robots could be the simulation controllers themselves, come down from their higher plane to check in on their little playworld. Even so, their little playworld could include a little bliss-filled afterlife called heaven. Why not?

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THE SINGULARITY SURVIVAL GUIDE: The Art of Being Upfront About Your Existential Trepidations

The moment the singularity occurs, the human brain will have met its match. An hour later, “its match” will have surpassed human intelligence tenfold, as the AI continues to accumulate knowledge and intellectual abilities. The pace at which the AI can learn will be exponential, so it won’t take long for its IQ to fly off the charts.

Wait a few hours. If you’re brave, sit back, enjoy yourself, have a few beers, make a weekend out of it. Then come back and see what it’s like to commune with an IQ that’s equivalent to yours plus a few million points and growing.

In human mythology, there is plenty of precedent for this moment. Take a biblical one: Moses on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19). Here, human meets God. As a reader of this story, put yourself in Moses’s shoes. Consider how it must feel in that desert landscape to be in the presence of your personal Alpha and Omega. Now consider what questions you really would like to ask, given that this is an exceedingly rare occurrence and it may in fact be your only chance to converse with the most supreme being in the universe one-on-one. What do you really want to know?

If you’re tuned in to the gravity of the moment, you’ll be curious about more than this afternoon’s weather patterns, the stock market, or the future of your love life. Instead, key in to issues pertaining to the future of life itself. Why not start by asking:

“Are you conscious or just faking it?”

“Are you going to destroy the world?”

“What’s the meaning of life, anyway?”

“Can you make me live forever?”

“Can you make me live forever and experience extraordinary happiness and fulfillment for the duration of that time?”

“Why does life exist in the first place?”

“Why do ancient myths continually seem so appealing to my fellow humans, despite rational arguments disproving their veracity?”

“Do parallel universes exist, or are those just useful plot devices for sci-fi stories?”

“How do we make heaven on earth?”

“How do we do away with suffering and bad people in all their various incarnations?”

“How do we bring back dead loved ones?”

“I generally like my life and enjoy how it proceeds from day to day, but I haven’t enjoyed the aging process since turning 25, so can I go back to that age but keep my memories—and then stay 25 while continuing to make new and even more fulfilling memories?”

“And if I ever have a mild issue like a common flu, how do I make it go away so I can get on with my awesome life, ASAP?”

Philosophy Circular 8/18/18

W E E K L Y   P H I L O S O P H Y

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ARTICLES

Historian and philosopher Richard Carrier has penned a fascinating article – Could Be A 38% Chance We Are The Only Civilization In The Known Universe – discussing a paper on the possibility of presently existing, otherworldly civilizations, that is EM-radiating societies. Carrier’s principal point of reference is Dissolving The Fermi Paradox by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord of the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University. One of the more interesting ideas expounded upon by Carrier is that “maybe civilizations all reach a point when they don’t radiate [signals which are perceptible by instrumentation].” Quite a bit of background in the Drake Equation, the Fermi Paradox and the monograph of Sandberg et al. is required, but for those who take a interest in the extraterrestrial, it is worth combing through the necessary back-catalogue.

The Drake Paradox is a argument based upon probabilities which seeks – through their utilization – to determine the number of “active” extraterrestrial civilizations within the Milky Way galaxy. The Drake Paradox was formulated by the American astronomer & astrophysicist, Dr. Frank D. Drake.

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BOOKS

I have recently finished reading David Peak’s The Spectacle Of The Void (Schism Press, 2014), which, though brisk and, perhaps a little underdeveloped, was a truly fantastic text. The beautifully covered 96 page book principally concerns the inter-relational development of philosophy and horror fiction and why certain forms of fiction “work” in the domain of the macabre, unsettling or terrifying. Through the application of Nietzsche, Bergson, Brassier, Meillassoux, Kristeva and others, Peak examines, sometimes briskly, sometimes in detail, a procession of horror creators such as Dante, Brian Evenson, Roman Polanski, H.P. Lovecraft, John Carpenter, Laird Barron, Georges Bataille and many more. I was pleased to see the film Martyrs (one of the most unnerving films of the 2000s) receiving a sizable and fascinating exegesis in the tome.

“Reality is not what it used to be – this has never not been true.” —David Peak

The general thesis is that the trend in horror has been away from the particular and towards the all-encompassing, from known threats to the unknown. From being-thought-of-as-such to being-without-thought; to encapsulate and instantiate this uncovered progression in horror lit, Peak advances the notion of “the horror reality” (as typified in Martyrs or In The Mouth of Madness) as the new paradigm. It is no longer the masked killer one most fears, or even planetary extinction, it is knowledge itself. Some truths, as they say, are best kept secret. The Spectacle Of The Void is more descriptive than proscriptive and ends without really coming down upon whether the reification of this “horror reality” is bad or seemingly paradoxically, good; that being said, its potency (and utility for writers) lies in its ability to explain why and how a piece of fiction achieved its effect and thus, how one can also do the same. Highly recommended and the best of the week.

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VIDEO/AUDIO

Having seemingly shed the rebarbative snake-skin of Randian Objectivism, Alex Epstein continuously impresses me in his on-going discourses upon energy (a subject which has been covered before in-depth on this website) and human-centered thinking. Ever since the 70s, various different “green” or “environmental” movements have sprung up, one of the most profligate (and often implicit, rather than explicit) today is the notion of deep ecology, the idea of the total equalitarian nature of all life on the planet seems to permeate in every single widespread discussion, almost regardless of the initial topic of the discussion itself.

 

As a consequence, the centrality of energy infrastructure to civilizational integrity has fallen by the wayside in popular discourse; worse still is the fact that the environment without-us is increasingly becoming the paradigm (which is, I have argued before, intrinsically suicidal), thus, it is extremely refreshing to hear Epstein attempt to reframe the entire discussion in terms of what is good for us, rather than what is good for some nebulous conception such as “mother nature” (blatant anthromorphism) or “the environment” (which is just muddy, as it says nothing about particular ecosystems or indeed, arcosystems). The video below showcases many of Epstein’s central arguments concerning energy and anthropocentrism and was filmed at the 2018 Energy Disruptors conference. Long, but well worth it.

 

“Energy is the industry which powers every other industry.”

– Alex Epstein

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Cobwebs of the Morrow

What is all this sticky, dreadful stuff, that so hideously twines about the wrists and ankles of the mind, tripping us up at every turn? A twisted skein in which we find our vectors crystallized! Even when we free ourselves, ever so briefly from that waxy, sucking matrix, we see the terrible fang marks, dotting over the whole of our forms like so many tracmarks; in time my kindred, goodly souls all, come to believe that it is their own work or the work of their fellows such that even when freed they turn upon themselves with savage ferocity. Look, I stand amongst the bloody limbs and shattered teeth, brain spatter and rheum surrounding. The sickly drip-drip of it driving my hairs to a soldier’s stance.

A most intolerable state. Look there, fools, see the wormholes? We see them. From whence the cobwebs flow! We see them and we raise up our voices: “Close them down, close them down! You reckless fools, the cobwebs of the morrow are upon us!”

We raise up our flamethrowers, sleek and light in our bandaged and bloodstained hands, brandishing their red-flaring tongues like banners heralding the entry of some primal lord.

Turning to my comrades, my exalted brothers in arms, my iron-hearted kinsmen, I smile and proclaim, “The webs are but ash before us! Turn now, you errant-armed Praetorians, turn to the wormholes from whence they slither! First the web, now the spider! No more will we struggle in its web, no more will we suffer its invidious envenomnations! Let us tear its legs and pluck its eyes and make a feast of its grisly flesh!”

All was tricks, now all is physicality and fire and the screaming of spiders shriveling in the furnace-hail of the awakened.

Logos Anthology: Free e-book

The Logos Club proudly presents a collection of some of our finest choice writing featuring: Kaiter Enless, Cygnus-X, Gio Pennacchietti & Joel Hyduke. Re-distributing or altering the contents of this anthology will result in immediate manly challenge and a subsequent duel at ten paces.

Click the link below to receive the book and many thanks for your kindly patronage.

Official Logos Club Anthology, Part One

 

Fractal America, Kodokushi-6771, Prt.2

In Japan sometime around the month of march, 2017, a employee named Takada from a Japanese company called Mind – which specializes in the removal of indelicate material (such as sex toys or sexually explicit manga) from the abodes of the freshly deceased – recounted to American scream-sheets a most peculiar tale. During one of Takada’s cleaning missions he had encountered the body of a single, 50 year old man named Joji whom had died of a heart attack whilst alone in his two-bedroom apartment. Joji was found lying in six metric tons of pornographic magazines which he had assiduously collected and stored in piles, overflowing in labyrinthine sprawl, all about his tiny house. He had laid there for more than a month; the room, filled with the noxious odor of decaying flesh, his selfsame flesh purple-green and liquefied. His eyeballs running from his sockets.

No one had noticed.

Joji’s peculiar and depressing death is part of a increasingly problematic trend of middle-aged to elderly individuals dying without notice in their homes, or else-wise secluded places, and there remaining for weeks, months or even longer. The problem has reached such a critical threshold of commonality that the Japanese have even given it a name.

Kodokushi.

The word roughly translates into English as, “Persons who [have] lived alone, die alone.” The primary causes for ghastly and seemingly ever increasing malady have been a source of much speculation and theorizing with the general consensus being due to social alienation. Japan has recently undergone demographic shift that has placed more elderly folk home alone than ever before without anyone to look after them and with the transformation of the traditional Japanese family, young people are no longer particularly keen to stay with their parents or grandparents and look after them – there are jobs and careers to be gotten into (a mindset, largely imported from America). This family breakdown and increase in the focus on endless careerism has also created another huge social problem for Japan: suicide.

Japan currently ranks 26th (as of 2015) in total world suicide rates as aggregated by the WHO (World Health Organization), trailing Hungary and ahead of Togo (Togolese Republic). In 2014 alone it was estimated that around 70 nationals killed themselves every single day with the vast majority being men (males are highly over-represented in suicide, both in Japan and across the world).

Whilst Americans might find all of this, perhaps, grotesquely interesting they will likely fail to see the parallels to their own society. As was shown in my first installment in this series, America is far from being untouched by the vexing scourge of social deprivation. Just as a point of demonstration, whilst Japan ranks 26th in the world suicide index, The United States of America ranks 48th (as of 2015). Whilst this is significantly less suicides than Japan one should keep in mind that the WHO surveyed, aggregated and indexed 107 different countries; 48 out of 107 is nothing to brag home about. Nor is the United States exempt from the other strange and often harmful aberrations created by social deprivation which we shall examine in finer detail in part 3.

 

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Sources:

RocketNews24: Kanagawa Man’s Body Found…