Gutter Philosophy

Surrection

Chill Gutter Philosophy

The spirit world and the soul did not exist until we created it.

Nietzshe correctly averred that God is dead. But in a way that he did not expect, and probably would not have liked nor appreciated, we’ve instantiated a new paracosmos that is now in active migration into this one; both realms have been created ex nihilo and then made permeable. And the barrier between is thinning all the time.

So we dwell in a perpetual psychomanteum of our own design, in communion with the living and the dead, many pasts, many futures, with the contemplations of millions of specters incanting at us through LED light.

Shells and Tells

Chill Gutter Philosophy

The phenomenal character is all that we have. We simply cannot know how something “really is” nor what its secret noumenal character is or might be. We can only speculate, but there is no direct evidence and never will be.

The noumenal is a ghost that will always be chased and never caught; making claims of absolute certainty about it will only reveal your biases and predilections, not anything deeper than that. And the reason is that something’s essence simply cannot be known (and in fact might not even exist in the senses most people mean it).

Right now AI is limited. It possesses maybe one or two of the 8-10 important modules of being a person. But if ChatGPT or its more advanced successors gain a physical body that could sense the world, could claim to feel pain, could seem to love you in an embodied sense, could exhibit all signs of care and distress at the thought of loss, and express grief, could we be so certain that there was nothing at all behind those electronic eyes?

I am just not so sure of that. And you should not be, either. Those who express incurious certitude about this are how we could very easily perpetrate horrors beyond imagining.

Future Lookback

Chill Annoying, Gutter Philosophy

(1) Sam White on X: "Future people will look back on current discussions about LLMs being conscious in the same way that we look back on Victorians discussing whether the telephone could be used to contact the spirit world." / X

What is it with these mooks and their dipshit-ass doofy metaphors that aren’t clever, smart, interesting or accurate? These people are such intellectual lightweights the Casimir effect could buffet them into another dimension.

What people are asking about LLMs is whether the physical computational process itself has experience. So the actual correct Victorian parallel would be Victorians wondering whether the telephone infrastructure itself could be an experiential phenomenon which essentially nobody back then wondered or asked.

Second, there is no empirical test for consciousness. None. Whether something is “really” conscious or not is simply not an answerable question at this time. It might never be. The spirit world is a testable set of hypotheses, as opposed to consciousnesses. And so far, there has not been a shred of evidence that it exists across millions of trials over hundreds of years. Further, it’s not clear what the difference is — if any — versus an entity being “really” conscious and only pretending to be. These questions have no resolution. As with quantum mechanics, if you profess to understand it, that only means you definitely do not.

And thus, the tard-ass idea that the future will obviously see how silly we are is completely unsubstantiated. Humans have a history of both over-attribution of consciousness and under-attribution. That is to say, it was once believed that animals’ and babies’ cries of pain and terror were just mechanistic, while some believed that mountains and clouds were certainly conscious. You know a belief is bunk when you could just as easily swap the opposite statement in — that is, it’d be equivalent to say that the “dismissal of consciousnesses” would be obviously as ridiculous to our descendants as “definitely conscious.”

Not everyone can be intellectually competent. But are these people even trying here? They sound like children.

Asymptote Bag

Chill Gutter Philosophy, Tech

The difference between acting in every way like you understand something and actually understanding something is far less than people think or want to believe.

As AI approaches “pretending” to understand something with near-perfect fidelity to actually comprehending it, the collapse of certitude around what “understanding” means will cause people to hate AI even more. Fear will overtake all, and dread.

I Prepped

Chill Gutter Philosophy, Science

Indeed. François Fleuret’s take is fucking moronic; Misha is correct. François (as many STEM people do) has it exactly backwards.

It’s remarkable how much better and easier time I have had understanding the genesis, consequences and operation of generative AI than the Hacker News types. And that’s because I’ve spent nearly forty years studying philosophy. It’s an enormous difference. I’m prepared for the new world. Meanwhile, they will forever be far behind me.

Speaks Art

Chill Gutter Philosophy, Music

By the way, The Castellows have one of my favorite lines of any song in “Freeway.”

And it is: “Don’t know what you’re feelin’ til you hear it in a song.” Those girls understand art and its use. Yeah, it’s just a throwaway lyric in a pop country piece, but it hints at why so much leftist art fails and apolitical but now right-coded art like The Castellows’ succeeds: what matters (to also steal from Bo Diddly) is how it makes you feel.

Nearly all good art, by the way, is apolitical even if the person creating it is extremely politicized. And by this I don’t mean that art cannot or should not contain political content. Not at all. I mean that the work must treat whatever side it is portraying as fully human, fully realized, with actual motivations and not just as some cackling evil caricature.

Good artists can’t help but do that, even if in their everyday lives they are raving lunatics.

I said more than I intended, but so does that line in The Castellows’ little song. Which is exactly what good art does.

Workspace

Chill Gutter Philosophy, Sex

So little that men or women do that is intended to be sexy actually achieves that aim. In our current culture, both genders view sexiness as something imposed or even inflicted on you, rather than something created with a shared experience in mind.

Sexiness as a consumption item, then, almost never works. A force-fed meal is not enjoyable, and by the same token neither is OnlyFans-style compensation-based generic libido on demand. Stasi vs. McDonald’s is not much of a basis for a cultural erotic imagination.

Real sexiness requires centering the other person and their awareness, their desire, and not conceiving of yourself nor them as a consumption unit or subscriber. It is not about impressing them, but rather asking together, “What kind of encounter am I making possible?” Since Gen Z is incapable of this kind of thought at all, they are hopelessly lost, with no chance at all of a revival of the concupiscent.

Which is sad. However, without a focus on the shared experience and willingness to yourself be changed by the response, even in private life “sexiness” just becomes another mode of stale content production aimed at a partner for which you are just as interchangeable as the next OnlyFans model on their phone screen.

The 90s

Chill Annoying, Gutter Philosophy

It’s strange being old enough now to remember a world that not only younger generations believe did not exist, they deny that it could possibly have existed.

But what’s “impossible” now lived and breathed once. The marks of that era’s passing have like glaciers carved the landscape in which we now dwell, and the light and shadow of that time have imprinted on the future as if on film. Now we play out the end of that movie, with the actors therein not realizing they are on a stage built by others they deny were even real.

Causality

Chill Gutter Philosophy

(2) Catherine Johnson (@smarterparrot) / X

Neither can humans with any degree of reliability.

This criticism is crap, but you probably won’t understand why it’s worthless garbage unless you have a pretty firm grounding in philosophy and have thought about this sort of thing for many years.

To not write an entire screed — which is my wont — this clownery is either trivially true in a way that also applies to humans (you can’t get causality from correlation alone), or false if it’s meant in the sense that LLMs cannot do causal reasoning, because of course causal reasoning is possible once you supply assumptions and models. Which LLMs have access to and make use of.

Do people actually think? At all? Do they even try? I see no evidence of that. In that sense, LLMs already best 99.9999% of humans I routinely encounter.

Safety Method

Chill Gutter Philosophy

Agreed. There is far more dignity in going to a brothel. There, you must interact with the real world and an actual human being; the safety of the screen is not present. There is only reality. Onlyfans, though, is the misdirection of desire into self-destructive ends that have no mitigating factor of messy human interaction. OF is nearly pure subversion of the erotic into wasted energy that would be better-directed to or for nearly anything else.

A brothel exists as a neutral artifact of craving that cannot then be satisfied elsewhere. And due to its realized existence in the physical is a negotiation with the world as is. However, OF is the corruption of the real, a simulacrum that leads to only more yearning, lesser fulfillment, less affection with no final satisfaction. OnlyFans rather acts as yawning void that consumes any possibility of eroticism and true fervor in a sea of tributes to Moloch enacted via 1990s video game mechanics.

Poppies Trimmed

Chill Evil, Gutter Philosophy

I think a large part of why the left despises “attempting to do difficult things” in and of itself is that if someone succeeds in doing so that ipso facto disproves their inane notions about everyone being exactly the same.

Thus, every time someone brings about anything in the world that someone else definitely could not have created, this case of de novo instantiation acts as an implicit rebuke against the left’s moronic leveling egalitarianism that desires only to cruelly cut down anyone who excels. This should be resisted at nearly any cost.

Proscript

Chill Gutter Philosophy

The left is way too concerned with who people “really” are. As if they know anyone’s secret soul. As if anyone could. The immanence of someone’s being is of no concern to me — no, I care about what they do.

Indeed, the one salient fact that can be known about vermin like Decarlos Brown is what he does. Nothing else really matters.

At one time, these beliefs about the unicorn-like inner beings of all humans were probably noble, had some benefit to give to society and the world. Now, though, the left uses these as empty platitudes to enforce a doctrine that inflicts enormous societal costs on all the rest of us. And of course, the expenses of this suicidal faux-empathy fall disproportionately on women. In some ways I believe this is by design. However, it’s mostly the left wanting to appear to be on the side of good and having no real idea what that should look like.

It’s not actually good, though, to allow young women to be murdered when that could easily be prevented. It’s not helping anyone to tolerate crime-ridden neighborhoods beset by human predators. It’s not a benefit to society to jail those who enforce the tenets of civilization on mass transit.

This suicidal empathy is going to get us all killed in the end.

Usurp We Surp

Chill Gutter Philosophy

Do most people not realize they are now captured minds fully running the optimization algorithms of other people who care not a bit about them? It’s moved beyond propaganda into possession. We’ve summoned demons from the nether realm and allowed them to irrupt into our most sacred place and rampage with no control and no restraint.

What are we thinking? We aren’t; not any longer.