great framing, neatly addresses the false paradox that's always annoyed me: "would I still be me if I was born to different parents"; ofc not! it's an ill-posed question. the "you" hyperobject is generated from the ensemble of possible futures, requiring a common origin
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RT @ClickingSeason
Genetics aren’t luck. You didn’t get lucky, you received a gift carefully crafted and prepared for you by your ancestors.
https://twitter.com/ClickingSeason/status/1447152413736148996
w/o a set of worldlines casually bottlenecked by a single coherent region of space (your body), what meaning can there be to the question? it is an outgrowth of a dualistic mindset, requiring something like a soul to be possible, a reification of the self
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RT @pee_zombie
ultimately, the only cosmological distinction which matters is Cartesian Dualism. either you believe there is "something special" about humans (a soul, some psychic…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1377726118824964098
the self hyperobject plays the same narrative role as a soul, being a coordination point for your various selves; it is a soul rebased to work in a materialist metaphysics, having the same ontological status as any other convenient abstraction; not "real"
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RT @pee_zombie
posit the existence of a higher self outside of linear time, to which there's little diff. btwn ur past & future; when you do smth so that you don't "regret it late…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1398346559109091329
this self-concept is useful in explaining why we can seem to act against our own self-interest for long periods of time, while being aware that it's not "what we want"; what is doing the wanting here, exactly? clearly your instantaneous self wants it!
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RT @pee_zombie
akrasia is a hell of a failure mode, a self-made pit of suffering w/ no one else to blame but your lack of agency in your own life; I've fallen prey to it more often th…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1438690646173290498
this state of temporary divergence from our higher selves' goals can last for weeks, months, in bad cases even years; but at some point it ends. we wake up, become aware of the pattern, and are able to wrest control of our lives from the daily driver
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RT @pee_zombie
when the system is a hyperobject, this entails a sort of agentic recursion; the overlay system emerges from the substrate's collective behavior, but to protect itself in…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1396932850096689159
in these moments we channel our self-egregore, becoming avatars of a higher power than our mundane selves; we attain glimpses of a higher plane. we see our lives from a higher dimension, looking down from above, understanding how the parts fit together.
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RT @pee_zombie
sometimes I feel like I'm not really conscious for weeks straight, just going thru life, doin my thing, not reevaluating top level goals, continuing on the same cours…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1379600906128343041
the key is, however, that this higher self, this god we worship, has no real existence outside an abstraction of the dynamics of our corporeal form; it is but a clever structure of ideas, a narrative tool we use to explain our lives in retrospect. we generate this god by existing
in the (excellent) comic Gunnerkrigg Court, we see the trickster god Coyote claim precisely this; that he has no existence outside of the imaginings of humans, that he is an egregore generated from our collective memes; and yet, causality is attributed to his actions.
man's drive to explain the world around him, to seek patterns, simplification, & causality, to create & share these ideas w/ each other, generates entities more powerful than any individual; this is how an egregore acquires agency, a narrative given life
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RT @pee_zombie
this is how an egregore is born, emerging from many minds holding the same polarizing belief; this meme directs their actions, & these many small vectors, now aligne…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1354227317392990218
a main paradox of the story is that Coyote has existed since the beginning of time, before men, and yet was created by them; in this way, Coyote is a retrocausal hyperobject
we theorize about our selves in the same way; however, real life isn't a story
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RT @pee_zombie
this framing posits God as a retrocausal hyperobject existing outside of time, an avatar for the abstraction of the Just Universe itself; God does not hear prayers in…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1407044800168304644
it may feel tempting to posit the existence of an eternal soul existing prior to your mortal life, entering your body upon birth (or the moment of conception, depending)
while this perspective has psychological utility, we must remember that it is but a convenient fiction
dualism is an incoherent metaphysics, taking the Godelian tradeoff of completeness over consistency, claiming to handle both objectivity & subjectivity, but w/o providing a unification mechanism. this cognitive schism then permeates all theories generated from this grounding.
I say incoherent here not as an insult but a statement of fact; Godel tells us that if you choose completeness, you must give up consistency, & something which is inconsistent can't be coherent. neither is the more correct approach as it depends on goals.
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RT @pee_zombie
the interesting bit is that this isn't wrong; PM follows directly from Gödelian incompleteness
his theorem states that a given logical system can't be both complet…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1389730159503228930
classical dualism is high modernist, positing a totalizing monotheistic God & a universe entirely defined by His will; contemporary dualism is instead postmodern. the single God has collapsed into many minor ones, myriad ideological vanishing points.
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RT @pee_zombie
the interesting bit is that this isn't wrong; PM follows directly from Gödelian incompleteness
his theorem states that a given logical system can't be both complete & …
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1389730159503228930
these hodgepodge attempts at cobbling together a functioning dualism in the postmodern informational environment are admirable in their efforts, but ultimately, as with all dualist theories, doomed to fail, as dualism inevitably collapses under its own contradictions
such is the case with the dualistic notion of the self; while unchallenged it might survive, when faced with the difficulties of modern life and the need to be reconciled with contemporary intellectual modes, the notion of a refined soul outside one's physical self collapses.
the Buddhists had the right idea; the self is an illusion, but a useful one. we must be able to hold these contradictory ideas simultaneously at different levels of our mind; that there exists some platonic object called "I", and that it has no metaphysical counterpart.
thru this tension we can hold our psyches upright; a sort of psychological tensegrity, the contradictions generating our internal supports through their opposition. it is not an easy balance to strike, nor is everyone capable; but if you manage, you reap psychospiritual benefits.
many compose their worldviews from multiple perspectives, a curious non-totalizing dualism. for example consider those which reference the Christian god, but also astrology and neopaganism with comparable levels of sincerity; is this not a rather postmodern worldview?