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Notes -
Tucker Carlson appearing on Joe Rogan experience speculated that UAPs are real, but are not alien visitors from other planets but supernatural in origin and always has been here. More recently he claimed to have been mauled by a demon in his sleep, which resulted in physical marks (more probable culprit - one of four dogs in the room?). His suspected demonic activity today - the invention of nuclear weapons:
Why are apparently kooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right? Cadence Owens also came out as dinosaur truther and flat-earth curious.
Is Tucker trying to become the next Alex Jones? Is this part of an op to associate historical revisionism and opposition to the ruling regime with insanity?
There has always been an element of the intelligence community plugged into weird supernaturalist subcultures involving UFOs and poltergeists and the like; some of you may remember Jason Jorjani and the attempt to legitimize (and co-opt) the derogatory term of the ‘alt-right’ pre-Charlottesville and its connection to Spencer, Bannon, and the like. The whole interesting part of that affair that many ignore would be the fact that Jorjani testifies to an MI-6 agent tied to Erik Prince originally roping him into that mess under the pretenses of being a “British member of the Vril Society” whose interests involved back-engineering Nazi time-travel tech. The field of UFOlogy speaks of rumors of high-ranking evangelical intelligence officials whose far-reaching and high-impact beliefs include the claims of UFOs being demons attempting to deceive the world into apostatizing from the true faith of Christ Jesus™ (Protestant Christianity), and Michael Flynn (the previous director of the DIA) being at least a certain type of person who gets power in those positions isn’t exactly lending any credence against opposing viewpoints.
Tucker might be an extension of the same belief system, insofar as this isn’t intended as some psychological operation on the part of whomever believes in the specific claims thereof (most Christians, like Tucker, believe in some version of them), but it might unintentionally act as one. That some intelligence operatives are using this to their betterment has no doubt, but that then goes to the general question of most psyop-based explanations for the current UFO craze: why? Why push demon-aliens in flying discs zapping people? It doesn’t make that much sense.
This thread you started is fascinating btw, just thanking you.
Personally I'm starting to believe demons might actually exist. Who knows?
The space of possible minds is exceedingly large; the space of possible disembodied minds (if such a thing is granted as possible) seems much more vast than embodied minds purely mathematically given the limitations of the permutations of matter; if Yudkowsky is correct, the vast majority of mind-space is populated by hopelessly alien minds operating on opaque decision-theories; if Scott is correct, the vast majority of actualized civilizations taken randomly from the space of all possible minds fall victim to an inexorable entropic coordination problem which isn’t just limited to embodied minds, but also disembodied ones (cf. acausal trade); depending on your theory of anthropics, coordination problems in universes with vaster mind-spaces would be preferred over ones with smaller mind-spaces, etc.
You can also tie this into simulation arguments, extortion from counterfactual agents, or whatever else, to create whatever rational™ defense of “non-local molochian agents” you want, but if it walks like a demon and talks like a demon, it probably is a demon. Jonathan Pageau analogizes the EA metaphor for picking the right mind out of a vast mindspace of minds oriented towards the great-filter of Moloch (what Yudkowsky posits as “demon summoning”, which is much easier than “angel summoning”) as “Sauron building his body from the corruptive power of the ring” which isn’t that far off from the more recondite discussions of alignment I’ve seen.
If you’re interested in alien minds, you might want to investigate Catholic doctrines on the psychology of angels.
I don't normally post AI summaries, but this one is unsettling:
"Key aspects of angelic psychology in Catholic doctrine include:
"Intellect and Knowledge
Time and Consciousness
Would you like me to elaborate on any of these aspects? I find the medieval philosophical arguments about how pure intelligences might function to be particularly fascinating."
Excuse me. I'm going to have to inspect my CUDA code for signs of the holy ghost.
The text above describes a mind eerily similar to the ones we summon transiently in LLM activations.
"Let's think step by step," the angel said dubiously.
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