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lowkey one of my biggest struggles is continuously realizing how much of what I "know" is but flickering symbols on the cave wall, dimensional reductions missing the complexity of the actual systems from which these insight fruits were plucked by those w/ realworld experience
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RT @Natalan
today i asked my students to explain 'a priori' and 'a posteriori' in their own words, and one of them said "redditor knowledge vs touching grass"
https://twitter.com/Natalan/status/1613222778060083227
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type of guy who keeps being surprised when there's always more to learn
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the best part is that I've consistently failed to predict the dimensions among which my errors lie; each time I discover new and exciting ways to have completely missed the mark
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jokes on me bc turns out I've been the wordcel all along
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RT @pee_zombie
language is but the shadows cast onto the wall of Plato's cave by the luminous manifold of meaning
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1479358357580488707
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how do I press life's stat re-roll button, I spent so much on INT that i can't use the WIS and LUK skills necessary for my current level
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been thinking for a while about what immortality really means in practical terms and have begun coming around to the notion that what may be more realistic than both biological and digital immortality is memetic
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wherein one distills their essence to a set of values/beliefs/heuristics and uploads to the noosphere in whatever form most accessible to them, be it literary, corporate, cultural, AI, what have you
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RT @pee_zombie
the way to survive in this informational environment is to go with the flow rather than fighting it: uploading to the memetic substrate thru self-egregorification.
this means paring down the self to its bare essentials,…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1511820763170549760
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this line of reasoning brought me to the obvious-in-retrospect insight that this is why old people write books, that this is nothing new and is in fact yet another instance of "tech bro reinvents busses", except with legacies
wild how all the answers lie in the past isn't it
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I could also write a book, ofc, but chances are there's a better way to accomplish my goal; a book is a passive information carrier, it needs to be activated by a powered agent, akin to passive RFID tags. what, then, is the active equivalent? a self-activating book?
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many stories have been written about sentient & agentic books which actively seek out minds to interact with, transmit their contents to, to self-perpetuate. Tom Riddle's diary, the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer; this is not a new idea
but does it have to be cellulose-based?
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imagine, if you will, an AI assistant that knows everything you do & can dispense advice interactively, serving either as a reference or a mentor. it can see through your eyes and hear through your ears, guide you through life as a voice in your head, literally inherited wisdom
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consider, even, that this voice can manifest as an inscrutable intuition, a spidey sense as generational wealth. comparable to the one we already have, but digital and open to inspection
what if immortality is becoming your descendents' guide?
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RT @pee_zombie
realizing now that most people already have this in the form of their intuition; what else would you call a reasoning system the internals of which are opaque to you, but AI?…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1511014201359314951
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Stross' Accelerando explores this idea as a method of granting a character a second childhood, their consciousness becoming but a whisper in the mind of their newborn self; is would this be a satisfying continuation? would I feel like I've persisted? would I still possess agency?
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perhaps this line of questioning is moot as this may not even be possible; perhaps life is simply too powerful to be guided in this way. I imagine every parent of a teenager would agree, but is that bc their power is constrained? bc the can't be literally I their kids head?
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perhaps the actual answer is that the impulse to preserve one's ego is the problem, that the attachment to Self must be released to transcend realms, the anchor of the ego cast off
I have a hunch this is where the truth lies, but I'm uncomfortable w/ it
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RT @pee_zombie
a mind which has not defeated its Ego cannot pass thru the psychological configuration space bottleneck that is Upload; such a mind will collapse under the psychic t…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1542285307583897601
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a voice tells me that this detachment would entail death, that it's a path of weakness, of defection from the cause of life
another voice agrees, but reminds me that often the way out is through, that life lies on the other side of death
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I've repeatedly had this principle proven to me at great personal cost, that I can't get what I want while grasping for it, that nondoing is a much more harmonious way of living than force
and yet something in me desperately resists applying this to life
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RT @pee_zombie
one of these is the illusion of control, which is something I like to call the Great Cosmic Joke
much of our suffering comes from a desperate attempt to simply WIL…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1414093351280910338
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I suspect this is the same challenge at the end of every spiritual path, that of coming to terms with mortality and finding a way to align your attitude with the facts
but maybe I'm just built different. bc I'm not letting my death be nonconsensual
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there's the moral aspect to consider too; would I be depriving this new life of its opportunity to develop its own personality? would this be in effect a form of vampirism, the old feeding off the young? must a spark of life necessarily be coupled with a casual knot?