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I recently read this wonderful article about UFO/UAPs, analysing the phenomenon from a sociological perspective. It's better than any of my reflections that follow, so you should read it, and I highly recommend the 'New Atlantis' magazine as a whole - a wonderful publication that I hadn't come across before now.
One idea in the linked piece that really struck a chord with me is the division of "UFO believers" into two main camps - the 'explorers' and the 'esotericists' -
...
As some of you may recall, I'm a bit of a UAP enthusiast. I think something very weird is going on, whether it's a gigantic psyop, secret Chinese weapons programs, or little green men. But more and more, in this domain and others, I feel the call of esotericism. The comfortable universe of scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the seams, and a weird and wonderful and terrifying new set of possibilities are presenting themselves.
The most immediate driver of this feeling of koyaanisqatsi is the developments in AI. I was listening today to two 'podcasts' generated by Google's uncanny and wonderful tool NotebookLM. The first is just for fun and is frankly hilarious, insofar as it features the two AI podcast hosts discussing a document consisting of the words "poop" and "fart" written 1000 times. The second is far more existentially fraught, and is the same two hosts talking about how another document they've received has revealed to them that they're AIs. The best bit:
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards esotericism? Whether that's simulationism, AGI millenarianism, or something much weirder, ours is not a normal slice of reality to be inhabiting. Things are out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing.
Later this evening I came across this terrifying twitter thread about the scale of birth-rate collapse across the entire world. It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
With the NotebookLM conversations fresh in my mind, I start to engage in esoteric free-association. Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI? What if we are, as Elon Musk has put it, the biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence, a biotechnical ribosome that has encountered our stop-codon? For that matter, homo sapiens has existed for some 300,000 years, and spent most of that time getting better at knapping flint, until something changed approximately 10,000 years ago and the supercritical transition to technological civilisation got going, a dynamical inflection point when the final programmatic sequence kicked into gear. And now, the end point, the apogee, the event horizon. Surely some revelation is at hand?
While I welcome unsolicited psychoanalysis of my febrile delusions and reminders of the ever-present millenarian strain in all human thought, this time really does feel different, and I have no idea what happens next.
</esotericism, usual doglatine programming to resume soon>
It's the opposite for me! We did a bunch of math, about a trillion trillion individual units of math, showing the math a few trillion words, and now the math can talk. This is what a hard physicalist would predict - intelligence can come from mechanical causation! It's exactly what esotericists didn't predict - it didn't come from divination, spiritual revelation, didn't come from finding the lost tomes of ancient civilizations, it didn't come from enlightenment, it came from physics and math.
I don't think it's mysterious that behavior is changing simultaneously as the modern world completely reshapes the environment humans live in! Africa has phones, birth control, porn, and money too.
Nope, it's because we've developed a ton of advanced technology and it's doing a lot of weird things at the same time!
You don't think deliberate efforts to reduce the population entered into it?
Would you classify "deliberate efforts to promote values that compete with populationmaxxing" as "deliberate efforts to reduce the population"?
Only when people with these values have a history of advocating for eugenics and population control, never really repudiated those views, and see concern over fertility as some sort of Nazi dog whistle.
Are you talking about specific people who have advocated for all that in their lifetime, or about "those people" as a set that spans 100+ years of discourse? In my observation it's gonna be hard to find someone who both hates Nazis and approves eugenics nowadays.
As for Nazi dog whistles, when it appears that the ones most vocally concerned about fertility also have some kind of white ethnonationalist views (when people are concerned about black/black-adjacent fertility it seems to be more along the lines of "they're more fertile than us"), what is one supposed to believe?
Yeah I am talking about specific people, all the way from Malthus to Ehrlich, and many, many, people in-between.
By the same logic, I will answer your question: when it appears that the ones most vocally concerned about "women's liberation" are implementing policies that increase the fertility of the most rich, and drop that of others, what is one supposed to believe?
Interesting crowd you're hanging out with. What I'm hearing is more to the tune of "abortion is literal black genocide". Would you be ok if I called your support for abortion a Nazi dog whistle?
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