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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25817 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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I recently learned about Sir Roger Penrose's research about Qualia. Then I formed my own conclusion of one of the universal truths;

That the "0th Dimension (The Nothing) Emerges/Balance All Infinite Possibility Across The Conceivable & The Inconceivable Reality"

I wrote an essay on it, as well as a wrap-up of our future. What do you think?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lqBvh5xohGid4U685aJBCp1h1a2RET7Wl6gBn3GhELk/edit?tab=t.0

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1loPX-ESVGv-0EevZxYkZ9bZgRzTVxbUNlVRq05HNPh8/edit?gid=0#gid=0

  • -16

Penrose is an astrophysicist. His work on neuroscience has always been one step above Time Cube. The Emperor's New Mind (his first popular book, published in 1989 when he was still doing decent physics) was a crank manifesto in the same tradition as Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach or Brian Josephson's research on psychic phenomena.

Penrose is cool. Hofstadter's book is a fun watch summary on youtube. Brain on psychic powers - just 3D print phenomena, really. I recently learned about B-theory of time and David Lewis's modal realism from the comments yesterday, which is similar to what I'm writing! Infinite possibility - all exist yeh

a crank manifesto in the same tradition as Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach

Personally, I liked GEB. I think that a lot of it was just a popularization of the Incompleteness theorem.

Normally I have a working BS detector which goes off at woo (e.g. "brains are macroscopic quantum systems"), and I do not remember it beeping.

While I probably did not fully grasp the incompleteness theorem, I also did not think that Hofstadter was trying to sell me any deepisms.

In short, I see GEB like HPMOR in that it packs claims which have been made before into a narrative. Some people like to read about Mr Crab or Harry P-E-V, some don't.

Personally, I liked GEB. I think that a lot of it was just a popularization of the Incompleteness theorem.

The Godel stuff in GEB is good, although not as good a popular presentation of the material as Raymond Smullyan's puzzle books. I don't know enough to comment about the Bach and Zen stuff. The neuroscience is crank-tier.

My older brother introduced me to GEB when I was 12. The only sentence I can remember from it is "You're not supposed to just 'like' koans."

Brains/Consciousness being some kind of magical quantum system was always nonsense. I took physics classes in high school as well and at least what we learned even then was enough to expose several problems with that thesis. You still see similar pseudo-science get peddled when Wolfram published A New Kind of Science, despite it not being taken seriously and the problems with it have been well known for a long time.

If you ever took a physics class in your life that did any unit on quantum mechanics, you will have watched double-slit experiments (just as we all did) that were performed in front of you using sheets of common craft material and a tank of water. Not a single thing you saw there was quantum mechanical. All that you saw was that classical systems that carry waves can do weird things very similar to what quantum mechanical systems do. You can generate static wave interference patterns with just ordinary waves in water, which is a totally classical system. No quantum mechanics is required for this. This is not quantum mechanics.

You can also have quantized interacting systems (standard desktop computers do this) where there are only two states, and the system flips between one and the other (on or off, 1 or 0, contained or flooding) once the classical system reaches a threshold. The human brain can also do this too, where you can be in two states (think of turning right or left, running mental simulations for both outcomes like we do when driving), and when a threshold is reached (eventually enough neurons fire on one side over the other to cause a cascading outcome, leading us to turn right or left), and therein a state is chosen. This is "quantum" in the analogous sense that it is an undecided either/or, on/off state that can be flipped (or "collapsed" if you want to call it that) under the right quantitative conditions. But the point remains, no actual "quantum mechanics" is involved.

You can talk about modeling consciousness by analogy to quantum mechanics if you like. Just like we can also do for wave mechanics in a bathtub, or acoustic mechanics in the construction of a concert hall, or in designing decision-making CPU's in computers. If you want to speak of a cognitive state of considering options as "quantum superposition," that's true in a very loose sense of the word (there are 2 states being considered simultaneously and 1 of them hasn’t been chosen yet, so the superposed state has yet to "collapse" into a decision), but again it's not literally true. It's only true as a useful comparison. There is no "quantum superposition" going on. The entire system is an analog "classical" computer. Not a quantum computer.

So a lot of "quantum cognition" garbage you’ll see published is doing this. It's just looking at how our brains work as classically mechanical computers, and only finding similar operations to quantum mechanics, much in the same way looking at how ocean or sound waves work in classical mechanics, and then finding behaviors that resemble ones we observe in quantum mechanics. But it’s not quantum mechanics, which means in turn that most quantum cognition models allow no indeterminate, "quantum spookiness" to hang your hat on (looking at you, Deepak Chopra). They are all deterministic macroscopic systems. They just share behaviors in common with quantum systems in physics. That's all.

It's actually evidence that quantum mechanics is itself also just classical mechanics. We just can’t observe the operating variables so it only "looks" really mysterious; just as if we could not see the ocean but could only see the peaks of waves as individual particles, and found the behavior of those particles really strange, and then we invented a bunch of woo bullshit about it, when in reality it was just a perfectly sensible deterministic system in classical mechanics. But we don’t know if this is the case. Maybe quantum mechanics behaves the way it does because it is somehow fundamentally indeterministic. At bottom it could be. But we don’t really know that either.

Physicists have been reproducing even the weirdest quantum mechanical phenomena within entirely classical systems (both with fluids and sound and even so, hydrons and phonons entirely obey classical physics). And should Superstring theory turn out to be validated one day, would even further reduce all quantum phenomena to a classical system.

Brains/Consciousness being some kind of magical quantum system was always nonsense.

Agreed.

But it’s not quantum mechanics, which means in turn that most quantum cognition models allow no indeterminate

I thought that the quantum consciousness people were claiming that QM effects (superposition, entanglement, etc) play a role at the scale of brains. Indeed, Penrose claims superposition.

It's actually evidence that quantum mechanics is itself also just classical mechanics.

Hard disagree. A quantum system is not just a classical system of similar complexity where we do not have access to all the variables. An electron is not just a point-like particle whose position and momentum is not precisely knowable to us. Instead, it is its wave function, which is a much richer object than any classical point mass.

Crucially, quantum objects can become entangled. Where a register in a classical computer holds exactly one out of 2^N possible values, N qbits can hold a linear combination of all these 2^N. If you want to simulate that on a classical computer, you need not N bits but 2^N numbers. While building an interesting QC is hard, the physics fundamentals about the speedup you would get are solid.

Are there deterministic theories with non-local hidden variables? Sure. But they only save you from god throwing dice when you measure a spin, they do not get rid of the fact that in the real world, you have particle waves, and only in the boring limit where h is too small to matter do you get objects like cannon balls which can be described with just a few parameters.

I'll seize upon your post to address your claims as well as the claims of /u/BahRamYou below since he claimed my education was amiss, and since they somewhat overlap and I won't end up repeating the same arguments. I'm also not a proponent of the Hidden Variables Theory which I got saddled up with earlier. I'm a supporter of Many-Worlds.

First, what you and him are doing to a degree is drawing light to the distinction that's already been known between quantum consciousness and quantum 'cognition'. Quantum consciousness is garbage. Quantum cognition is not. My conclusion as maybe an informed layman, or statistically/mathematically literate student is right in line with what the cutting edge of science gives you in popular format or an undergraduate textbook:

The human brain is a classical scale system and as such can't really be guided in any meaningful way by quantum phenomena. Because even a single perception or decision involves the operation of millions if not billions of neurons, which are massive systems already (even just one neuron is a cell comprised of trillions of atoms). So any quantum indeterminacy that's there will be completely washed out by the system as a whole. This is exactly the reason hardly anyone (and especially experts actually in neuroscience, rather than other fields who are nosing in) buys the quantum consciousness thesis beyond the role of analogy, which is what I was alluding to earlier. And this is the difference between the Weak vs. Strong forms of quantum cognition.

Even if quantum effects became relevant somewhere within a single molecule within a single neuron, and even if this were somehow pertinent to the I/O protocol of the neuron (and had any effect at all on computation) and that’s already two “ifs” for which still no evidence exists, that still would not explain consciousness in any way. All it would explain is how each neuron runs its I/O protocol (which is all to say how the neuron decides what the output signals should be, given the input signals). Single neurons are not conscious. And there won’t be any shared quantum states between neurons, because any molecule doing anything meaningful quantum mechanically in one neuron will be separated by any other neuron by trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms chugging right along as a classical system.

So there cannot be any superposed macrostates in the brain. Moreover, anything the proposed quantum effect “does” to determine a neuron’s I/O protocol can be replaced by a classical circuit doing exactly the same thing and therefore won’t even be necessary to the output of the neuron, much less the whole brain. This is why consciousness can never and will never be explained by quantum mechanics. All sorts of classical systems can replicate quantum outcomes (well weighted dice are just as random and classical waves do many of the same things as quantum waves; when I was in high school we were replicating matrix mechanics with any classical algorithm).

This is also why quantum consciousness can't do what some of it's advocates claim and rescue contra causal free will (which doesn’t exist, and no one should want to exist anyway). For quantum indeterminacy (if that even exists) to change the output of the otherwise deterministic system of the brain, it would require spontaneous coordinated events across trillions of atoms, which even at most (at literally the most ridiculously most) won’t happen but maybe once in a trillion decisions. Which at a decision a second is once every thirty thousand years or so. This is the problem with vast macrosystems like the brain: quantum phenomena simply can’t cause or explain anything relevant about them.

I've read Penrose's book years ago as well as the claims of many of his supporters and the ensuing criticism of his work. There's already a real good summary of this school of thought and it's why only the advocates of the 'Weak' end of quantum cognition (which is to say those who use quantum mechanics as an analogy) are worth taking seriously. The people on the other end of that argument are all cranks. Even the best supporters of legitimate quantum cognition are all rooting their work firmly in classical mechanics by viewing neural computing as a geometric process (an exploration of a vector or concept space) rather than a linear process (say a hand calculation on paper or a Turing machine, although the latter isn't entirely accurate I recognize).

So legitimate researchers can say the brain functions 'like' a wave tank that can produce analogous circumstances of superposed wave-forms, interference patterns, and quantum switching between binary states without literally being quantum mechanical. We know the human brain cycles at around 40 Hz for instance, which seems related to our conscious perceptual threshold of about 20 Hz (that's why film and television media shoot to exceed that in frame rates to get our visual system not to notice). But even then, individual perceptual events often involve waves of coordinated signals across neural nets in the brain, hence entertaining two thoughts simultaneously, and using interference patterns to locate and determine outcomes. So obviously we'll get some analogous phenomena to wave particle duality; but none of this is quantum mechanical, it is all entirely explicable with classical mechanics, just like waves and sound (even hydrons and phonons, though no analog to those has been discovered yet in neuroscience far as I know).

Real quantum cognition research doesn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics and postulates no strange or mysterious physics like indeterminism. It is classical and deterministic through and through. It deviates from classical probability theory (which is linear), not classical physics. Wikipedia even provides a good summary for why thinking the alternative is bunk.

I think your high school physics class left out some important details about quantum mechanics. The point of the two slit experiment is that you're not just doing it with solid particles, like water... that would be a classical wave. It also works with photons, which have no mass and can travel through a vacuum like a bullet. It even works with just one photon at a time. You can see them arrive at the target with a detector, individually, and if you set it up right they'll still follow the same interference pattern of a wave, even though there's nothing for them to "wave" through. The famous Michelson-Morely experiment proved that there's no medium to carry light. It's a strange result that really does require quantum physics to explain- you can't explain it with just classical physics.

When you say:

We just can’t observe the operating variables so it only "looks" really mysterious

That's a very old argument, but this point pretty much disproven unless you allow for some even stranger results (like waves travelling backwards in time levels of weird). People have been trying to knock down the standard model of QM for a long time now, but it just keeps giving correct results... at this point you kinda have to accept that it has some truth to it, even if the math looks odd.

I do agree that there's a lot of cranks and grifters using the word "quantum" to sell nonsense, and that's really a problem. It's unfortunate that Penrose (who really is a respected scientist) gave them cover by writing a book that seems to agree with their woo. On the plus side, his book forces you to wade through like 400 pages of dense math about regular physics before it gets to the woo stuff, so I think most cranks wouldn't make it that far. He's also upfront that he's just offering some speculation about consciousness, not any sort of proof.

He paired up with a professional neuroscientist to develop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction. It's still speculative, but it's a lot more detailed than just "hey dude whatever the brain is, like, quantum..." They've done recent experiments showing there really are some strange effects going on in the brain in ways that you'd normally see in quantum mechanics, not classical. EG absorbing light more slowly than would normally be possible, and than re-emitting it in a higher intensity than normal.

I read GEB in high school and it was one of the first books that turned me onto philosophy. It's not "deep", but as a popularization it does its job well.

It always annoys me was 'esteemed' physicists venture into woo. That is a sign they ran out of ideas or are unserious about research and should retire to let the next generation of competent researchers in. This guy way overrated relative to his contributions.

AI researchers will take over & win all the Nobel Prizes at our worldly rate

Qualia always struck me as the basic material computation within biological systems. There's nothing magical about it.

If you begin things with the basic idea that consciousness is just at bottom, information processing at the level of the brain, that provides an easy pathway from hereon out to understand this. Whenever computers process information, there's always "something it's like" to be the computer doing that. That's just an inevitable consequence of computational task itself. This is just never experienced by anyone, unless the computation also includes a computed person that's experiencing it. When a computer experience's something, it's because it's computing the experience of that thing.

If you were to start with a simple visual process for example, where a computer needs to discriminate between areas of a space that are light or dark (say you're traveling to one trajectory and not the other), this will always be experienced in some way and necessarily so. The geometry that's being computed will be felt, and there will be something different about "what it's like" to be looking at a light area or a dark area. Because it couldn’t be otherwise. How could it? So there's nothing "extra" to explain about qualia. And the exact way this is experienced will depend on the computational circuit, it’s physical arrangement and how it behaves, etc. Other philosophers have reasoned the same way (including Dennett, Pat Churchland, etc).

Qualia always struck me as the basic material computation within biological systems. There's nothing magical about it.

Qualia, Consciousness, Sapience etc. all strike me as conversation starters that are sufficiently vague yet overloaded with implied meaning to forever escape any demands for rigor or practical application. A thousand years from now we'll probably have harnessed the power of the stars to feed unimaginably powerful thinking machines and the best insight they'll have into those topics will be something like "It's whatever the fuck you want it to be".

Of course, I'm a barely literate peasant. It's probably all perfectly sensible. But man does it look like so much pseudobabble from here.

I was going to say as well like you, I'm not terribly well versed on this subject. But I am a geek who's read a book or 12 on the present state of cognitive science.

If you're asking me what qualia is, it's simply a catch-all term for all the features that are unique to conscious experience. Thomas Nagel's “What is it like to be a bat?,” or to see the color red or hear your favorite song or smelling chocolate or feeling angry. It's one of the last scientific frontiers in neuroscience and it's one that hasn't even been resolved hypothetically. And yes, the explanation for qualia most likely does have something to do with the inevitable physical effects of information processing. All evidence that we've amassed so far is converging on no other conclusion. But that still leaves us ignorant of a lot of the details.

That's because we can’t access the information we need to answer this question. For instance to tell what is actually causally different between a neural synaptic circuit whose activation causes us to smell dog shit rather than freshly baked bread, we need to have resolutions of brain anatomy which are still far beyond any present technology. The mere arrangement of synapses won’t be enough, and we still don’t even have that; and since the IO signal for any neuron is determined by something inside the neuron, such as (maybe?) methyl groups attached to the nuclear DNA of the cell, we’d need to be able to make a map even of that, and for every single cell in the brain, which is far beyond any present physical capability. By a long shot. Maybe AI research could get there sooner, if somehow they achieve general AI and can ask it about its personal phenomenology, but that’s also just another technological capability we presently don’t have.

But no matter how you want to look at the problem, you're still stuck needing to explain why chocolate doesn’t smell like vanilla. Why does activating one neural circuit causes you to experience a smell at all and not hear a musical instrument, or see the color red or feel lust, etc. Why does any of this happens at all to begin with? We already know what it's like to process this information without any of this phenomena. We call it our subconscious. So what makes the difference between just walking though life running purely on subconscious processes, and instead experiencing all these bizarre but also specific phenomena?

In this sense we don’t really mean by this the biomechanics of our sensory systems like I led with previously above. What's really being asked is what makes the difference between chocolate smelling like chocolate and not vanilla, people don’t mean what has to be different about the molecular receptors in the nose that distinguish between these two odors. Those don’t have anything whatever to do with what things smell like. No matter what molecule stimulates a certain neural track in the nose, that’s just a binary signal, “on or off,” that flows into the brain. At best, perhaps, it has a quantity scale. But there’s nothing qualitative about it. That wire could go anywhere. It could go to the circuit that makes you see red, rather than smell anything, much less some particular thing. And actually for some people, it does. Synesthesia is a real thing. (So why are only some people synesthetes?)

Qualia are undeniable. I don't think they can 'not' exist. Because it is literally 100% impossible that “I am experiencing a black field with whitemarkings inside it right now” is false; that it “isn’t happening” and thus “doesn’t exist.” That I am seeing letters on a computer screen as I type can be in doubt, maybe I’m hallucinating or dreaming this; maybe I am mistaken about what the sensory signals my brain is interpreting as letters on a computer screen actually signify; etc. But that I am experiencing seeing letters on a computer screen is impossible to doubt. And why that is has to be explained.

Qualia are also fictional (our brain invents them to be able to demarcate and navigate through information) and yes, their “existence” will have something to do with information processing. Because we know if you remove or numb the pertinent information-processing circuit that generates any given experience, you consequently remove the experience. And you can even cause the experience to occur by simply sticking a wire into the pertinent circuit and shocking it. So we know this is simply something that circuit does, this is scientifically established, and does differently than a circuit that doesn’t generate any phenomenological experience (as most circuits in our brain don’t) or that generates a different one than this (as all the remaining circuits in our brain do). What makes a “chocolate circuit” cause that experience and not some other (or none at all)?

One thing that often throws everyone off including the eliminativists is the completely unnecessary folk assumption that qualia are 'things'. That they're objects or entities. They are not things, they are events because the mind is a process, not an object. Qualia don’t “explain” things they are the thing to be explained. And they don’t exist separately from the physical process underlying them; they are the physical process underlying them. So the question is what is different about those physical processes, and other physical processes, which don’t generate such phenomena? That is exactly identical to the question of what causes those events of experience to occur, and to have the qualities they do (rather than others instead).

As an example, if there were anyone out there who can “experience” the difference between “324” and “325” as quantities, that logically entails that for them there is something experientially different between them. And that’s exactly what the word “qualia” means. Most of us though don't qualitatively experience any difference between such abstract numbers. We comprehend them in a computational sense that's absent any unique qualia. We generally have to work out in what way they differ. We don’t experience it directly, the way we do the difference between “two” and “three,” which are quantities we can directly apprehend in experience.

All that said, my cheap theory to offer you is that all qualia are just ways of discriminating the geometry of touch as a sense. And all other 4 senses remain subordinated to touch as a primary sense, simply generating complex mixtures of touch sensations. Complex emotions like love include psychosomatic feedback. Your internal monologue relies on the same neural circuitry you use to hear spoken voice. Touch more generally is just a way of discriminating geometries. If there were no qualia, you would not be able to discriminate between those things. And I think a summary of the evolutionary history of sensation lends support to this. One of the things pointed out in the article is how touch was the first sensation that developed. Vision later developed from the same circuitry and machinery as touch. And then smell came after that. In most animals sound is processed by touch sensors on the moving hairs of the ears. There's no inherent reason why that had to be the case, which indicates an evolutionary development: all senses ultimately go back to touch. It's also pretty well known that pain sensing cells evolved from touch sensing cells as a way to detect irritants. In general 'pain' is a touch sensation so intense that it disrupts and overloads other mental computations. Which is exactly what pain computes: an attention claiming condition report that needs immediate resolution.

I could keep going with other experiences like vision and pleasure, but it still follows the same evolutionary pathway.

Qualia, Consciousness

Actually not vague terms at all!

If you've ever pricked your finger and felt pain, that's a qualia.

If you've ever felt a sensation of hot or cold, that's a qualia.

If you know what the color blue looks like, and how it looks different from the color red, that's a qualia.

It's just conscious experience. That's it. It's that thing you have when you're alive and experiencing things, and that you lack when you're dead. Its nature might be mysterious, but the concept itself is about as straightforward as you can get.

I think what's happening is that people correctly notice that the people who like to use the word "qualia" also like to use other strange terms like "property dualism" or "epiphenomenalism" or "p-zombies" that seem to refer to very strange ideas. So they get nervous and they assume that any talk of consciousness in general must be BS. Independent of your evaluation of the philosophical literature on consciousness, it would simply be a mistake to write off the idea completely. That would be like saying that because people have come up with crank theories of physics before, physical reality itself must be a "vague" or "nonsensical" idea.

to forever escape any demands for rigor or practical application

The rigor is that you know what pain is, that's the rigor.

As for "practical application", that seems like a category error. It's not clear how you can derive from first principles, starting with our current best theories of fundamental physics, that anyone is conscious at all. And yet we know they are. Surely you can appreciate that it's intrinsically interesting to try and figure out why that's the case?

"It's whatever the fuck you want it to be"

But it's not. See above.

But man does it look like so much pseudobabble from here.

If you have specific examples in mind, or want to talk about specific terms or ideas, I'd be happy to try to explain them.

If you have specific examples in mind, or want to talk about specific terms or ideas, I'd be happy to try to explain them.

The easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis. Specific, falsifiable, measurable, and ideally: interesting. Do you have one?

The easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis.

Well, no, not really.

We can give multiple examples of statements that are clearly meaningful and aren't "pseudobabble", but which admit of no possibility of empirical verification or falsification, even in principle.

We can start by asking what happens when you turn your statement on itself: does "the easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis", make a testable hypothesis? It of course depends on exactly what you're trying to say here, and what you mean by "pseudobabble". If your statement was only intended to express something purely subjective, something like "I have no interest in statements that don't make testable hypotheses", or "I have no use for statements that don't make testable hypotheses", then it perhaps could be defensible (although even then there are significant difficulties). But if your statement was intended to express something objective -- that is, you were offering an objective criteria for distinguishing "pseudobabble" from non-"pseudobabble" -- then we run into some real problems. What is the empirical test for empirically verifying the statement "statements that don't make testable empirical predictions are 'pseudobabble'"? You could point to past successful empirical predictions made using claims that make empirical predictions, and the lack of successful empirical predictions made by claims that don't make empirical predictions. But this would just be circular. If someone hasn't already accepted the assumption that empirical verifiability is a guide to meaningfulness, they're going to be unimpressed by a track record of past successful empirical predictions.

Let's consider examples of inaccessible past information. There is a fact of the matter regarding what color shirt you wore on March 1st, 2009. There are probably no reliable records of what color shirt you wore that day, nor does anyone alive have a reliable memory of what shirt you wore that day; if there are reliable records of that day, just pick a different day for which there are no reliable records. This is not a "pseudobabble" question to ask. But there is (plausibly) no way of empirically verifying what color shirt you actually wore that day, even in principle. So, here we have another counterexample.

I am aware that the idea of fully simulating the past, starting from the universe's initial conditions, is a hot topic of discussion in AI spheres. It seems at least possible to me that due to a combination of time/energy constraints, inability to know the initial conditions with enough precision, and possible indeterminacy, there may be no way of actually fully simulating all past events with perfect accuracy. If you agree that this is a conceivable possibility, that's all that's needed for the counterexample to work. We may or may not be able to know what color shirt you wore on March 1st 2009, but it seems that even if we can't, that doesn't thereby make it a "pseudobabble" question. So the meaningfulness of the claim is not dependent on its empirical verifiability.

For a more grandiose example: there may be regions of the multiverse that are causally isolated from our own such that we can never empirically verify their existence, or empirically verify certain concrete facts about those regions, even in principle (could be a parallel universe, could be regions of our own universe that are beyond the limits of the observable universe, take your pick on whichever strikes you as the most physically plausible). But the question of the existence of these regions is not "pseudobabble". They could simply... exist. And there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that. Your inability to verify the existence of these regions has no bearing on the meaningfulness of the claim that they do exist. (You could imagine, for example, a sentient inhabitant of one of these regions claiming that talk of anything beyond his own region of spacetime is "pseudobabble". Well, you know that your own existence is not "pseudobabble"!)

For an even more grandiose example: you have no way of empirically verifying that you are not the only consciousness in existence. It's possible that you're the only conscious being who actually exists, and the rest of the universe is just your hallucination. But the existence of other consciousnesses is not "pseudobabble". When you see someone who is not you prick their finger and experience pain, there is simply a fact of the matter as to whether or not there is a conscious experience of pain happening for some consciousness at that time. You have no way of empirically verifying it, but it's still not a meaningless question.

The rigor is that you know what pain is, that's the rigor.

Assuming you're not talking to eliminative materialists/illusionists that believe phenomenal consciousness is a complete myth in the first place. "Consciousness don't real" is certainly a take, and I have always wondered if these people are actual, honest-to-God p-zombies.

I've spent a lot of time joking about that, but I regret to inform you that they're not p-zombies since the definition requires external indistinguishability from people who do have internal experiences. (My partner gets mad at my mostly-joking position of "If people tell you they don't have internal experiences, believe them." -- then again she's a utilitarian and I'm a virtue ethicist or something. Even if no-one but me was conscious it wouldn't impact my moral reasoning much).

They're pretty well aware of how insane their claims are. But, philosophers justify insane claims for a living.

If you've ever felt a sensation of hot or cold, that's a qualia.

I do not think that this will get you anywhere. At most, you can convince me this way that I have qualia. But my temperature detection circuit is nothing special, an insect might have something rather similar. Does it have qualia? What if I replace it by electronics running an identical neural network and a temperature sensor? What about a rock which gets slightly larger when it is warm?

If qualia is a useful property systems of matter can have or not have, then you automatically run into p-Zombies.

At the end of the day, I want concepts which describe reality and pay their rent in anticipation of future events. The pH value of aqueous solutions is a good (if limited) concept. I can measure it, and it will give me good predictions about which reactions will tend to take place e.g. if I decide to take a swim in it.

Qualia is not such a concept. It does not make falsifiable predictions. There is no test to determine if a dog or a LLM has qualia.

I'm not certain this refutation of qualia's validity as a concept really works unless you also throw out a large portion of commonly-used language, in other words, it proves too much. "Qualia" is just meant to be a descriptive term for a phenomenon that is experienced and individually confirmable. Claims about why qualia arises and whether it is present in someone or something else are unfalsifiable and do not meet the standard for scientific inquiry or analysis, you could argue that debating that is a waste of breath (and I may even agree, actually), but that doesn't invalidate the concept of qualia.

The structure of this argument is kind of like stating that we should discard the concept of "feelings", for the very same reasons why qualia would be invalid. Or any kind of evaluative statement, really; "good", "bad", "immoral". Sometimes we just want to be able to refer to things. People aren't making testable predictions every time they open their mouths, and as such the purpose of language serves functions outside of making such statements. Hell, people even do this in the scientific world - for example debating interpretations of quantum mechanics is a common pastime among physicists, many of which are not testable and do not meet the criteria for science.

This is assuming computers have consciousness, which I would emphatically argue they do not because they have no intentionality or ability to act.

I don't think Windows Update fighting me so hard whenever Microsoft says it's update time makes my computer conscious, but it sure resembles intention and ability to act. Or do those terms have standard definitions in philosophy that I'm missing?

Consciousness and intentionality sound like potentially two different things (that our correlated in our experience). Perhaps they necessarily entail each other, perhaps they do not. But it sounds like a thorny philosophical question that will be around for a few thousand years

Is intentionality and ability to act necessary for consciousness?

Suppose you have someone with locked-in syndrome. They have no (or extremely limited) ability to effect any kind of change in the outside world; perhaps they can blink or move their eyes, but let's say that they're taped over or removed. At the least, they have less ability to interact with the world than an LLM. Are they no longer conscious? I don't think so, so current ability to act isn't necessary for consciousness.

Intentionality is a bit trickier, but I'm not sure someone who's had locked-in syndrome for a decade has any remnant of intentionality; lack of opportunities to exercise intentionality leads it to wither. I still grant that unfortunate individual consciousness.

It may be necessary for action and intentionality to have at some point existed for consciousness to exist, though; I'm not sure a being that spent its entire existence in those conditions would be conscious.

Not just computers. If conscious experience (qualia) is just an innate consequence of information being processed*, regardless of the substrate upon which that occurs, then e.g. a sundial must be very faintly self-aware.

*And just asserting that doesn't give any actual insight into how qualia arise or work

Edit: responded to the wrong comment

This still sounds like a vacuous concept to me.

Also, take a 4-bit adder, which is a very simple computation device.

In the first experiment, we connect it to two digital light sensors. One reads 3, the other reads 5. The adder circuit does its job and outputs 8, which we then bitshift to get the average of 4. By your description that means our circuit is experiencing a certain amount of light.

In the second experiment, we connect two temperature sensors. One reads 3, the other reads 5. Again the adder does its job and outputs 8, which results in an average value of 4. But this time it is supposed to experience temperature, and depending on the scale of our sensors, it might experience very different temperatures!

To the degree either an adder or a human neuron experience anything, what they experience is simply voltage levels of their inputs. Either system is describable perfectly well without using a word like experience.

Do you and I see the same red?

If we both look at the same object, which is red, we have the same wavelength of light reach our eyes. Our eyes are both human eyes and process this wavelength the same way. We both recognize that we are seeing what we commonly call red.

But, what if I am seeing what you would call "blue"? I would recognize it as red - all red objects were this "blue" to me my whole life (and all blue objects were something you don't have a concept of at all.)

These are the kinds of things I pondered as a kid and it's why I don't scoff at qualia. There are some things that we can't in principle measure, and these things are the most foundational to our subjective experience of the world.

If we're both using broadly the same kind of bio-neurological substrate (ie not colour-blind, no drugs, no pathologic photosensitivity, etc) I don't see why we would have a grossly different experience. I think there are subtle differences in processing and interpretation (some people might have visual snow, some cultures don't clearly distinguish blue from green) but nothing so different as experiencing the other person's blue qualia.

It's an interesting idea and I used to ponder it myself when I was a kid, but now I'm older I take the other side and ask why wouldn't we share similar qualia.

If you see something crimson, and then something cardinal red, are those "the same red" to you? My guess is that you can distinguish those colors, if they are put side-by-side next to each other, but that the associations that each color in isolation brings up in your mind are quite similar.

I don't think there is "something it is like" to see the color crimson, aside from the associations with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. And if you ask whether other people have the same associations, we dissolve the philosophical question of whether the qualia are "the same", and replace it with empirical one of "how similar are they". We know how to tackle that one.

Let's say you were to take a set of 500 colors, and a set of 50 random memories you have, you could rate how strongly you associate each color with each memory on a scale from 1 to 10. This would give you a 500 x 50 matrix of association strengths, which you could think of as a 50 dimensional space where each orthogonal direction in the space is how strongly one of the 50 random memories is associated, and each of the 500 colors is associated with one particular point in this 50 dimensional memory space. But those points will not be randomly distributed within the space, and in fact you can probably map those points to a 3 dimensional space without losing much information. The position of colors within this 3 dimensional space would be a fairly faithful representation of the association of colors with those 50 memories.

If you were to repeat the above procedure with 50 random concepts you know instead of 50 random memories you have, you would also get a 3 dimensional space with colors in particular points within that space. Generally, I would expect that the positions of colors in this space generated by concepts would be pretty similar to the positions of colors in the space generated by memories.

Well now let's say we repeat this experiment with the same 500 colors, and the same 50 concepts, but a different person, Bob. I would expect that that person maps probably maps colors to concepts in a similar way, as long as they speak the same language and neither you nor Bob are colorblind. If crimson maps to a similar location in your color map as it does in Bob's color map, I think it's fair to say that you see a similar red to Bob.

This also tracks with how we teach colors to our children. We don't say "red is an ineffable experience which I experience and you might too", we say "red is the color you see when you look at a fire truck, or a stop sign, or a strawberry". This provides anchors so that our children know how to bind qualia to language. We can see evidence that they really do bind qualia to language in similar ways to each other too.

Take two kids, Alice and Bob. Teach them red by example. This fire truck is red. This strawberry is red. This stop sign is red. Teach them orange by example. This carrot is orange. This traffic cone is orange. This orange (fruit) is orange (color).

Take Alice into a room with many objects of many colors. Ask Alice to bring you things which are halfway between red and orange. Note the things she brought you, then put everything back exactly where it was at the start. Bring Bob into the same room, and ask him to bring you things which are halfway between red and orange.

Alice and Bob probably both chose similar things. They both took two of their qualia, interpolated an intermediate quale, and mapped that quale back to the physical world. When they did, they got similar results to each other, implying that their qualia were similar (unless Bob is colorblind, in which case they got very different results, implying that their qualia were very different).

I don't think there is "something it is like" to see the color crimson, aside from the associations with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. And if you ask whether other people have the same associations, the question becomes an empirical one, and one we know how to tackle.

I don't follow this. What is being associated with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc.? When you see a random drop of fresh blood on the ground during your walk, you might identify it as "red" because it appears similar to fire trucks and stop signs and strawberries which you were taught at a young age were "red," but what is it that you're comparing in order to associate these things in the first place? I would characterize it as comparing the qualia of observing a stop sign with observing fresh blood on the ground, which would be another way of describing "what it is like" to see the color red. If there's no there there, and there's no actual experience of seeing the color red when you observe fresh blood or a stop sign, then how is it that you're associating the color of the blood to the color of a stop sign?

You're associating your sensory inputs with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. If you sever your optic nerve, and then you point your eyes at a stop sign, you will not experience redness.

I claim that qualia are what it feels like from the inside to ascribe meaning to your raw sensory experience.

Do those sensory inputs exist as an experience that I have outside of my memories, emotions, etc. though? If they don't, then how am I able to identify colors of entirely new things sans context? I'm not sure how that would make sense, so I conclude that I do experience sensory inputs, i.e. those sensory inputs are a form of qualia. Which then raises the question of if the qualia of me experiencing the sensory input from observing a stop sign is similar to that of someone else doing the same thing. We can empirically observe that the meaning that we ascribe to these sensory inputs are very similar, but that wouldn't actually get us to the similarity of the sensory inputs themselves.

It's also possible that, since qualia is intrinsically and, as-of-yet, inescapably subjective, the very concept of comparing qualia between two people is incoherent, and the best we can do is to figure out if the qualia of the meaning that we ascribe to sensory inputs are similar, as a proxy that we can never get better than.

Do those sensory inputs exist as an experience that I have outside of my memories, emotions, etc. though?

No? What would they even be sensory inputs to?

If they don't, then how am I able to identify colors of entirely new things sans context?

I don't think that's a thing you're able to do sans context. Infants, lacking context, aren't able to identify the colors of anything.

I suspect we're using the word "context" differently - what exactly do you mean by "sans context"? Are your memories a part of the context? Are the innate saccade patterns that all humans use to look at things (e.g. gaze snaps to contrast, edges) part of the context? How about the learned saccade patterns (e.g. scanning in reading order)?

so I conclude that I do experience sensory inputs, i.e. those sensory inputs are a form of qualia

You don't experience unmediated sensory inputs. The map is not the territory, and you can only experience the map, never the territory directly. See exhibit 1932741: the blue/black or white/gold dress. There's an excellent diagram on that page which shows how the exact same colors on the screen can lead to the perception of a white/gold dress or a blue/black dress, in a way that makes it very easy to verify that your raw sensory data really is the same for the blue on one dress and the white on the other.

And so if you have a quale of seeing white on the ruffles of the dress, that quale is not just your raw sensory inputs.

Which then raises the question of if the qualia of me experiencing the sensory input from observing a stop sign is similar to that of someone else doing the same thing.

I would say the question should be "how similar is it" rather than "is it similar", but yes.

that wouldn't actually get us to the similarity of the sensory inputs themselves.

True, but since we don't directly experience the raw sensory inputs, I don't know how much it matters how similar the raw sensory inputs are. We could quantify the similarity of those raw sensory inputs (e.g. by doing the same dimensionality reduction trick on optic nerve spike frequencies), but I don't think doing so would buy us anything beyond pretty pictures to look at and maybe some cures for diseases.

It's also possible that, since qualia is intrinsically and, as-of-yet, inescapably subjective, the very concept of comparing qualia between two people is incoherent, and the best we can do is to figure out if the qualia of the meaning that we ascribe to sensory inputs are similar, as a proxy that we can never get better than.

I reject the idea that qualia are inescapably subjective. People talk about qualia all the time. Therefore, those qualia are causally upstream of what they're saying. If you can figure out the full chain of causality from sensation to perception to meaning making to conversion to language to speech, I don't think there's anything left to explain. It's a lot of stuff to understand, and we don't yet understand all the links in that chain, but that's a statement about the inadequacy of our knowledge, not the unknowableness of the phenomenon.

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I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not talking about color associations or being able to distinguish between shades. I'm saying, when you look at an object, your brain seems to translate that into a "color" in your mind. This "color" is how you perceive that wavelenth to be, but there's no rule that says that I see the same "color" as you. All of the colors I see might be completely foreign to you. 100% of my colors might be ones you don't see at all ever. They all appear to gently blend together for me in shades and hues on a spectrum. We share the wavelengths together, but not the effect they produce in our minds.

This "color" is how you perceive that wavelenth to be

My perception of the color is not a simple function of wavelength - see example of the blue+black/white/gold dress. My perception of a color is the effect it has on my mind. There is no perception of a color outside of the effect it has on my mind.

In terms of the effects colors have on our minds, we currently have limited direct visibility into this, but

  1. "limited" is not "zero"
  2. that ability is improving over time
  3. we have good reasons to believe that, for the most part and with many caveats, minds that sense data downstream of a set of causal processes develop highly analogous internal maps of those causal processes, even if their sensory data is not the same modality. When the sensory data is of the same modality, the internal structures will likely become more analogous, not less.

I suppose one thing to check - do you agree that two identical-to-the-atom clones observing identical-to-the-photon sensory inputs would have identical qualia? Or do you think even that is not something we can have high confidence in?

I suppose one thing to check - do you agree that two identical-to-the-atom clones observing identical-to-the-photon sensory inputs would have identical qualia? Or do you think even that is not something we can have high confidence in?

I don't think we could have high confidence in. What if it's assigned randomly, like the first thing you ever see is assigned what I see as "red?" There's just no way of knowing, no conceivable test to find out.

Assigned by what? By "qualia" are you referring to anything you've ever experienced? If so, how do you know you've experienced qualia?

If the first color quale you ever experienced was "assigned" to red, and the second to blue, and then one day they magically switched, would you notice a difference?

If no, why do we care about "qualia"?

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Linus Pauling has entered the chat, and is interested in selling you some extra Vitamin C.

This really reminds me of timecube, where someone uses a lot of words and fancy language to say something utterly mundane. I skimmed but this just seems to be B theory of time and it's consequences.

timecube

Lul i just checked out Time Cube & it made me laugh! True, I added creativity touch/self-expression/meh humaness elements cuz I was excited - feel free to use LLM to get TL;DR if you want

The whole document is kinda more of a technological utopia manifesto - it is just the first three pages are about 'B-theory of time.

Today, I discovered B theory of time & David Lewis Modal Realism, which is mostly what I was writing about! I wish I had known about them two sooner! What do you think about these two theories? I guess they are metaphysical - can't really prove or disprove but you see - if I personally come up with it as a logical/rational universal truth, then it matches someone's smart in this world & has an interest from among the scientific community then...

I am extremely satisfied. I am not the only one!

I added the extra spice, which is the 0th Dimension, the nothing, that brings the two theories into existence? Metaphysics is cool

Are you suggesting that you figured out what timecube is actually about?

Timecube is about a slightly schizo guy hating American adventurism in the middle east.

I thought that was 9/11?

Well, from what I remember he was gleeful about 9/11 or maybe its been too long.

It's really not that complicated once you get past the schizo wording.

So, you know how if it's day where you are then it's night on the other side of the earth? And half way between you and the opposite side it's sun rise and sunset?

Thats it, thats all time cube is.

Chop wood, carry water.

That the "0th Dimension (The Nothing) Emerges/Balance All Infinite Possibility Across The Conceivable & The Inconceivable Reality"

I mean probably not.

I mean I had most inspiration from Brain Greene if you want to give that a look - https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9z5il_FQUw&list=PLQEkPawTFlc5SM1mGE7ml0Vam_QsKhkXM&index=3&ab_channel=AlexO%27Connor

Not enough em-dashes to be standard LLM psychosis. Perhaps standard homegrown schizophrenia?

nah, your typical neurodivergent person into existentialhope.com & effectivealtruism.com website fam

https://teatonglu.substack.com/ - here's my existential blog

utopia links - https://teatonglu.substack.com/p/anti-doomer-reading-list-50-existential

;p

self_made_human

& you also into tranhumanist stuff soooooo let's live long yo!

Thanks. Transhumanism is sick.

But I still have to stand by what I said. I am a transhumanist doctor, and to put not too fine a point on it, (half) a psychiatrist. It pains me to feel that duty asks me to dampen your enthusiasm.

When Sir Penrose talks about consciousness and qualia arising from strictly quantum mechanical interactions within the wetware of the human brain, he has enough street cred (courtesy of a Nobel Prize) that people listen seriously. He made testable predictions, and made world-models with a semblance of rigor. Unfortunately, he still didn't convince the wider scientific community. You are facing a far more uphill battle on the best of days, and you're not trying as hard.

As far as I can eyeball, your general thrust is:

1.It is impossible that something exists instead of nothing.

  1. But we do exist.

  2. Therefore, the impossible exists.

  3. Therefore, every impossibility exists, to "balance" the nothingness of the "0th Dimension."

This is where the philosophical alarm bells start ringing. It’s a clever-sounding syllogism, but it hinges on a category error. The "impossibility" of our existence is a statement of incredulity or low probability, not of logical contradiction. A royal flush is incredibly improbable, but it's not "impossible" in the same way a four-sided triangle is. You're conflating "that which is statistically miraculous" with "that which violates logic." By treating them as the same, you're granting yourself a license to declare that anything and everything, including logical contradictions ("Infinite Paradoxes Exist Everywhere"), must be real.

That makes no damn sense. Even for something as plausible (or at least not ruled out by known and speculative physics) like a Boltzmann Brain popping up out of the quantum foam post Heat Death, there is no room for triangles with two sides.

"I imagined/conceived the above. So it has to exist." This is a souped-up, personalized version of the Modal Ontological Argument or David Lewis's Modal Realism, but without any of the logical rigor. Lewis argued for the existence of all possible worlds, not all conceivable worlds. We can conceive of Escher drawings and contradictions, but that doesn't make them physically possible.

It is slightly rude of me to pattern match your words to crankery or a slightly loosened grasp on consensus reality, but that is still my genuine personal and professional opinion. I expect you have done high doses of recreational psychedelics, and laxened your priors. It would be remiss of me to not at least politely ask that you seek help. Others are likely to be less polite, but trust me, I know where this road tends to lead.

That's not slightly rude of you, it's unprofessional as fuck. You are leveraging your medical credentials to insult a guy on the internet. What is fucking remiss of you is to diagnose someone based on a collection of posts, and then to broadcast that pseudo-diagnosis in a public forum.

You get to shitpost or enjoy the prestige and respect of a doctor. Pick one.

Do I look like I'm on the clock here?

An "insult" implies, at least slightly, that there's no merit to my claims. I am intimately familiar with crankery, and I know the symptoms of someone at very high risk of psychosis. Someone offering legal, programming or engineering advice would not be held to the same acuritny. In this case, I invite you to examine his arguments and see if your claims that I'm being irresponsible stand.

Do I look like I'm on the clock here?

Off the clock doesn't mean ethics are optional does it? Are you allowed to fuck your patients after work?

An "insult" implies, at least slightly, that there's no merit to my claims.

As they used to teach journalists, the primary metrics of an insult are delivery, intent and impact. Even a merited comment can be insulting if it's used to demean someone publicly. And legally we're talking ethics, not lawsuits. Your delivery started with labeling it as 'LLM psychosis' or 'homegrown schizophrenia,' then backpedaled to psychedelics and 'high risk'. That's not constructive critique, it's pathologizing a philosophical post.

I am intimately familiar with crankery, and I know the symptoms of someone at very high risk of psychosis.

You should try focusing on ethics for a bit. Or diagnostics. I don't care how 'intimate' you are with crankery, you can't fucking diagnose it off an internet post. That's what is supposed to set psychiatrists apart from armchair psychiatrists, part of what you are supposed to learn at medical school isn't how to spot crankery it's how to distinguish between spotting crankery and being a dick and why diagnosing over one internet post is always the second one.

Someone offering legal, programming or engineering advice would not be held to the same acuritny.

IANAL is an age old internet acronym because lawyers are held up to a similar level of scrutiny. You are correct that it is not the same however. NAD didn't take off the same way, because most of your profession know not to give medical advice over the internet. Most of them understand that they have traded shitposting for a higher level of respect, for the opportunity to be listened to when they do leverage their medical credentials. I can see a scenario where you notice a regular poster change over time, or fixate and spiral, and warily offering them advice. You called this guy a schizophrenic who fried his brains on drugs after ONE OP.

In this case, I invite you to examine his arguments and see if your claims that I'm being irresponsible stand.

My claims stand. I didn't read the op again, it wouldn't change anything. My claims would stand even if he'd smeared shit and blood on a picture of the Pope, scanned it and attached it as an op. My claims are not about his behaviour, they are about yours.

If you are really determined to maintain your right to shitpost with your credentials, show me what in the op you decided met the diagnostic criteria for either schizophrenia or drug-induced psychosis.

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Legal advice is notoriously something you are not supposed to give.

But someone offering programming or engineering advice can't personally attack someone in an argument by making engineering claims. They don't have the kind of bad motivations and incentives they would for mental health.

In what way is he being insulting? The guy is posting crazy physics word salad, strongly indicative of some sort of mental issues (which does NOT take a doctor to Notice). @self_made_human is very very gently pointing this out. If I felt like engaging (which I don't), I would be much less polite about my disdain.

You might not find it insulting to have someone casually dismiss a post that is sloppily written stream of consciousness, but expressing coherent thoughts with philosophical precedent with two fucking sentences: "Not enough em-dashes to be standard LLM psychosis. Perhaps standard homegrown schizophrenia?" but I assume you aren't fucking schizophrenic. I have said before that I have learned to tolerate that kind of casual prejudice, and you will note I didn't object to anyone else saying anything like that. It doesn't particularly bother me when members of the public talk like that. But a fucking doctor casually lobbing a term that instantly makes people lose respect for you (and any psychiatrist who doesn't know that needs to prove to me they still have a license) out like that IS insulting. It is insulting to schizophrenics, it is insulting to doctors and it is insulting to the concept of the motte as a place where fucking smart people who think things through go to talk about shit they can't talk about elsewhere.

I only objected after the pivot from that to 'well hold on I know I flippantly dismissed you with the barest thought moments ago, but I am a doctor so you should listen to me'. Like I said, you can shitpost, or claim the mantle of medical professional. One or the other. Pivoting like that, assuming the freedom of shitposting and then pivoting to demand the respect of your profession is point blank unprofessional behaviour for a doctor and just outright fucking stupid for a fucking psychiatrist.

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Thank you for your lovely feedback! Psychiatrist is cool - I love watching healthy gamer & Diary of the CEO about self-improvement YT + bunch of other vids

You say I don't try hard, but I'm actually not smart enough to know how to even start to work harder, besides writing 20 pages of it already XD If you want, you can continue it for me? Do the research pHD level with constructive arguments - English essay/research is one of my weakest points - logical rigor, I don't know how to write a compelling argument ----- in fact, I will be content if no one really reads my work, so thank you so much for reading it

I understand all the fallacies you listed are true - but then again, this is the ultimate truth we are talking about here - is there a possible way to prove it or to unprove it? These fallacies hinges on it - it comes hand in hand, frustratingly! What's your take on the ultimate truth, if you have one?

The 9th dimension or infinite dimension above somehow allows contradictions/paradoxes to exist with each other - something we have yet to comprehend

It makes no sense that triangles with two sides & Escher drawings from our 3D epistemic physics standard reality. It exists in a different reality - if you believe in multiverses & infinite dimensions

Yeah, my essay is more for kinda general audience than smart 130+ iq intellectuals because frankly, I usually get 120 on IQ test and I wish I were smarter, so I'm waiting that neuralink (or any brain enhancement) that can increase all our IQ in the future & able to speak all languages & reach more understanding of peace with each other - which is why in the second link - 'Utopain Tech Society' excel sheet - i say increasing our intelligence is one of the first things we should do because I do see us being monkeys being inefficient doing things really lol

david lewis modal realism? nice - how come i never seen his name before? thank you! of course someone definitely thought up what i thought up --- the internet is big yoooo

You write smart & knowledgeable things in a short time - you must have had a good life, and the motte page is one of your sources of intellectual stimulation - keep up the good work!

You bet I have done a lot of psychedelics... of healthy stuff! - 2 x cinnamon chai coffee, creatine, omega-3 + whole foods daily + 4 x resistance training + 2x 4x4 Norwegian cardio protocol + 7.5 hours sleep + gratitude + friends & family connection + always learning - in fact I learn from you too!

when you get into transhumanist stuff, you get into longetivity (dipping in Bryan Johnson vids but I ain't buying his expensive crap) + signed up to be a cryonist for a time-being, until the rich do something to transfer our consciousness to advance nanotech robotic body - hell yeh

I wish I were rich enough to do some psychedelic stuff - they look very fun to do, but I won't get into it cuz I'm worried about the addictiveness of it. For now, I'm planning a healthy, whole food coffee shop - I won't be adding MCT/CBD oil to the menu, surprisingly --- I am really otherwise a normal person that's into utopia stuff, wants to travel around the world doing touristy things, and own a simple coffee shop - not become a reseacher of something that's hinges on fallcies and otherworldy dimensions - metaphysics imma right?

At least I do those things for the time being until post-labour society & UBI get established for everyone - (they are projecting it happens around 2060?)

Thank you, I always love to learn from everyone - I love knowing pitfalls and when to get help (usually yeh from YT vids & LLM) - I am aware that there are cases of using LLM as therapist can lead to LLM psychosis & they just be bias & agreeable to you ---- but they free yooooo - I ain't rich --- but don't worry - I super happy & grateful to even need threapy and sometimes I have to therapy my friends really

When this is fun - nice to meet a fellow tranhumanist too!

Haha, my wife and I were just talking yesterday about how we haven't seen em-dashes in LLM output for the past couple months, so they probably retrained the models to not use them. But also that still no one is going to ever use em-dashes anymore for fear of being called an LLM.

ChatGPT 5 is still using them all the time in my experience, I haven't bothered to tell it to stop as I rarely use it's writing to communicate

But also that still no one is going to ever use em-dashes anymore for fear of being called an LLM.

I'm still using em-dashes, and I'm not going to stop.

Somewhat similarly, I don't use them because I'm lazy and a hyphen is good enough. But if I did, I would continue to use them because I don't care what people think.

I imagined/conceived the above. So it has to exist. As all impossibilities exist [...] Everything Is Happening All At Once - Every Possibility Exists - To Stabilise the 0th Dimension

Under your world model, most observers would be Boltzmann brains". I observe that my experience is mostly ordered, where things that happened in the past are more likely to happen in the future, and past states of the world seem to influence present states of the world.

More generally, this does not seem coherent. Instead, it feels like you are going off the rails in the particular way that happens when your mind starts flagging random experiences and thoughts as "this was deeply meaningful".

If "sometimes I have an experience or insight which feels deeply meaningful for reasons I have trouble articulating" applies to you, there are a couple of things which might help:

  • Get enough sleep
  • Reduce stimulant usage
  • Run ideas past others (importantly not LLMs, which have a strong tendency of agreeing with whatever you say. If you must use an LLM, try figuring out what the exact opposite of your idea is, and try running that through the LLM)
  • Ask yourself "if this were not meaningful, what observations would I make that are different from the observations I would make if it were meaningful". Then actually look for evidence either way.

So I replied to self-made-human as his comment is similar to yours - I copy paste it for you my friend

self-made-human

Thank you for your lovely feedback! Psychiatrist is cool - I love watching healthy gamer & Diary of the CEO about self-improvement YT + bunch of other vids

You say I don't try hard, but I'm actually not smart enough to know how to even start to work harder, besides writing 20 pages of it already XD If you want, you can continue it for me? Do the research pHD level with constructive arguments - English essay/research is one of my weakest points - logical rigor, I don't know how to write a compelling argument ----- in fact, I will be content if no one really reads my work, so thank you so much for reading it

I understand all the fallacies you listed are true - but then again, this is the ultimate truth we are talking about here - is there a possible way to prove it or to unprove it? These fallacies hinges on it - it comes hand in hand, frustratingly! What's your take on the ultimate truth, if you have one?

The 9th dimension or infinite dimension above somehow allows contradictions/paradoxes to exist with each other - something we have yet to comprehend

It makes no sense that triangles with two sides & Escher drawings from our 3D epistemic physics standard reality. It exists in a different reality - if you believe in multiverses & infinite dimensions

Yeah, my essay is more for kinda general audience than smart 130+ iq intellectuals because frankly, I usually get 120 on IQ test and I wish I were smarter, so I'm waiting that neuralink (or any brain enhancement) that can increase all our IQ in the future & able to speak all languages & reach more understanding of peace with each other - which is why in the second link - 'Utopain Tech Society' excel sheet - i say increasing our intelligence is one of the first things we should do because I do see us being monkeys being inefficient doing things really lol

david lewis modal realism? nice - how come i never seen his name before? thank you! of course someone definitely thought up what i thought up --- the internet is big yoooo

You write smart & knowledgeable things in a short time - you must have had a good life, and the motte page is one of your sources of intellectual stimulation - keep up the good work!

You bet I have done a lot of psychedelics... of healthy stuff! - 2 x cinnamon chai coffee, creatine, omega-3 + whole foods daily + 4 x resistance training + 2x 4x4 Norwegian cardio protocol + 7.5 hours sleep + gratitude + friends & family connection + always learning - in fact I learn from you too!

when you get into transhumanist stuff, you get into longetivity (dipping in Bryan Johnson vids but I ain't buying his expensive crap) + signed up to be a cryonist for a time-being, until the rich do something to transfer our consciousness to advance nanotech robotic body - hell yeh

I wish I were rich enough to do some psychedelic stuff - they look very fun to do, but I won't get into it cuz I'm worried about the addictiveness of it. For now, I'm planning a healthy, whole food coffee shop - I won't be adding MCT/CBD oil to the menu, surprisingly --- I am really otherwise a normal person that's into utopia stuff, wants to travel around the world doing touristy things, and own a simple coffee shop - not become a reseacher of something that's hinges on fallcies and otherworldy dimensions - metaphysics imma right?

At least I do those things for the time being until post-labour society & UBI get established for everyone - (they are projecting it happens around 2060?)

Thank you, I always love to learn from everyone - I love knowing pitfalls and when to get help (usually yeh from YT vids & LLM) - I am aware that there are cases of using LLM as therapist can lead to LLM psychosis & they just be bias & agreeable to you ---- but they free yooooo - I ain't rich --- but don't worry - I super happy & grateful to even need threapy and sometimes I have to therapy my friends really

When this is fun - nice to meet a fellow tranhumanist too!

I hope it clears something!

I'm fairly certain Boltzmann brains are unfalsifiable. Under the theory, you think that your experience is mostly ordered only because you have randomly configured into a brain with false memories of an ordered experience.

That said, it should be treated with the same level of seriousness as other unfalsifiable theories like an invisible intangible dragon in your garage.

Aren't Boltzmann Brains both implied and not ruled out by our current best understanding of physics? A truly energy-less vacuum is impossible, which means that any given volume of space-time is ergodic, and that over sufficiently long time scales, will be recapitulated. A post Heat Death universe is abundant in few things but time and space.

I would imagine that the discovery of new laws of physics could, at least in theory, falsify the notion.

Most things are "unfalsifiable" in the strictest sense, but you can still use probabilistic techniques. The fact that the inputs coming into your brain are coherent with what your brain expects strongly indicates that it's not the case that "most" brains are Boltzmann brains.

Boltzmann pocket universes, where a fluctuation contains observers that maintain coherency over timescales of hours, still in most models are much more prevalent than real observers.

That's to say nothing of instantaneous Boltzmann brains that fluctuate into existence believing they've had a coherent history of experiences.

Eh. I find these theories extremely unconvincing. Boltzmann brains become super-exponentially less likely the more atoms are required to form them. An orderly pocket universe forming would be 10^10^"holy fuck" times less likely than an orderly brain on its own.

And there would be 10^10^"holy fuck" times more versions of you that had all the same past experiences, so were "you" in absolutely every respect, but were currently experiencing complete chaos.

You are overlooking the fact that a post Heat Death universe has infinite amounts of time at hand. It really doesn't matter how unlikely an event is, as long as it isn't categorically/logically impossible.

Being an old-fashioned meat brain? Can happen "naturally" in a very small chunk of the universe's lifespan. As far as I'm aware, our decision theories are inadequate to the task of settling this (same issue with the simulation hypothesis) so I remain agnostic as to the actual ramifications. It is instrimentally useful to me to act as if I exist as an entity that won't poof out of existence. Hasn't failed me yet!

Nope, not overlooking it. It's a probabilistic anthropic argument. It is true that, in a Boltzmann-Brain universe, a brain that is "you" will eventually show up paired with sensible input. But it will be vastly outnumbered by those brains that are "you" up until epsilon seconds ago, but are now seeing chaos. The fact that you're NOT currently seeing chaos is extremely strong evidence that a Boltzmann-Brain universe does not exist. (It doesn't matter if chaos and non-chaos events all happen infinitely many times. It's the proportions that matter.)

I admit, though, that I'm still open to debate. (Physicists really don't expect Boltzmann Brains to be real, but if Feynman can't come up with a knockdown argument, what chance do I have?) There are weird questions like "Is there such a thing as an instant of consciousness?" or "Is anthropic reasoning on the laws of existence even valid?" which might be relevant. But just waving at infinity isn't enough.

The fact that you're NOT currently seeing chaos is extremely strong evidence that a Boltzmann-Brain universe does not exist.

But if I were seeing chaos, wouldn't I stop evaluating evidence, thus making the Boltzmann brains where I can read your post the only ones who are convinced that they're not Boltzmann brains? I don't know how to put it in more rigorous terms.

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Boltzmann observers with a invisible dragon in their garage are exponentially more likely to exist than real observers.

I'm not sure what my takeaway should be from that, except that I don't like Boltzmann brains.

The Dread Jim weighs in on the "moderate right".

Basically, to him the right isn't progressing at anywhere near the rate it needs to in order to enact radical change. He uses Asmongold, the popular live streamer, as an example. Asmongold is perceived to be anti-woke, but in reality all of his positions (in Dread Jim's opinion) are moderate/centrist.

For Dread Jim, the only way to save civilization is through the following:

  • Eliminating voting rights for the vast majority of "normies", and all women
  • Executing gay people ("poofs off roofs")
  • "Conscripting wombs"

He seems to view this last solution as the most important. Fathers should once again be responsible for marrying off their daughters, and if that's not possible, the state should step in. Similarly, adultery should be punishable by death.

Barring these radical changes "failure to murder everyone who is insufficiently left is likely to also be 'extreme far radical right'".

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Never heard of Dread Jim. Based on your summary of his views I recommend he move to the country that has at least partially embraced his ideals. I'm talking of course about Iran.

Googling their TFR shows they have fewer children per woman than the US. I guess executing gay guys didn't help.

Iranian women have far more rights than Jim wants, though. Afghanistan is the society that most closely matched his ideals.

The most notable thing about him when the shock value wears off is the depth and breadth of his hatred. The man has been railing nonstop about how women should be reduced to sexual chattel and raped by their husbands, along with how all non-white people in the west should be slaughtered for the better part of 30 years now. He was, when I was much younger, a pretty key part in me deciding who my ideological enemies would be though so I guess there is that.

The most notable thing about him when the shock value wears off is the depth and breadth of his hatred. The man has been railing nonstop about how women should be reduced to sexual chattel and raped by their husbands, along with how all non-white people in the west should be slaughtered for the better part of 30 years now

Eh. There's a reactionary idiom that is the reverse of political language everywhere else. Where most people use euphemisms ("I'm pro-life"), and a stalwart minority of fair-minded folks speak prosaically ("I'm anti-abortion"), reactionaries actively and intentionally use dysphemisms ("I'm pro-Men-Controlling-Women's-Bodies"). They take speaking blunt and coarse to its extreme, to the point of not even being accurate.

Having read a few reactionaries a lot, I am 100% confident they don't literally mean what they say. Why are they speaking like this then? I think this strange affectation is (a) a reflexive emotional rebellion of what they call 'the longhouse', which gags everyone's language and thinking in daily life, (b) a gatekeeping mechanism to keep out "containment conservatives" in the brand of James Lindsay, who operate the modern political ratchet by policing discourse to their right.

Yes, Dread Jim clearly believes in returning race and gender norms waaaaaaay back. Leftists would certainly describe the world of the late 1800s as "reducing women to sexual chattel" and "genociding browns", which is why he delights in calling his politics that. But, really, do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?

You can only say "I want to reduce people to chattel I can rape at will and kill other people" for so many decades nonstop before I believe you. I am fairly certain he is serious in his political aims and objectives I have no reason to give him any charity at all as he has never given any other group any at all.

do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?

Would you willingly live with the rights of an 1890s woman?

Would you willingly live with the rights of an 1890s woman?

There were far more of these than commonly thought. Women in the west haven’t been property, unless they happened to be slaves, ever.

do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?

Would you willingly live with the rights of an 1890s woman?

Sure. Obviously in this scenario I'm transformed fully into a woman (mentally and physically, with no one including myself remembering my being a man), and all other women would have to have the same rights.

I think the sexual revolution was terrible for society. It was also pretty bad for women themselves.

Ok I will rephrase. Would you be able to live a happy life having had rights and then having them taken away from you? Could you go from person to non-person?

Sure, happiness is a state of mind, not a state of being. Men in POW camps in war have found tremendous happiness before, to give one example of many. And I am willing to bet that a significant chunk of women in Afghanistan are happier with the Taliban back than they were under US occupation, especially the more devoutly religious muslim women.

I think you would very definitively lose that bet. Fig 4A has the cross tab for women.

I never claimed all or even a majority might like it, just a significant chunk. And that chart is only overall life satisfaction, with the male drop being almost as big as the female.

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Could you go from person to non-person?

This is a pretty annoying leftist framing of "rights". Are children not people? Are foreigners living within another country not people? Are the mentally disabled and elderly not people?

Would you be able to live a happy life having had rights and then having them taken away from you?

Of course. Here, the example of expats above is helpful. And indeed, in practice I did experience losing freedom of speech when I was a teenager, having learned things and come to opinions that are de facto illegal in my country. The Boomers lost freedom of association in the 1960s and they managed well enough. And voting? Please. Voting is a joke. The right to vote is the right to be ruled by whoever controls the media.

Do you think not being able to say nigger or keep black people out of your dad's car dealership is equivalent to being a woman in the 1890s in terms of rights lost? I am going to be honest, I really don't think that you do.

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The principal difference between the 1890s woman and the 21st century man is that the 1890s woman was legally defenseless against abuse from her husband, while the more fortunate 21st century man is merely legally defenseless against career criminals, mentally ill violent strangers on public transportation, police officers, his boss, every woman who works in his HR department, his wife, and rioters who have the correct politics.

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Why not? Speech is fundamental for political coordination under any system, but especially in a democracy. You can sneer and call it "not being able to say nigger", but you know it's not limited to it, and that the point is disenfranchisement.

I think the sexual revolution was terrible for society. It was also pretty bad for women themselves.

How about some bullet-biting: It was terrible for society and possibly bad for women on average, but also eliminated many of the worst-case woman situations, and created some new best-case man situations, and you can't undo it because it's too attractive in the short term.

That's a useful and charitable framing. Kudos.

It did not eliminate many of the worst case women scenarios. There are still women being beaten by the man in their lives and feeling too controlled to leave. I’m not sure how much domestic violence has actually declined, even.

Yes, of course domestic violence still happens - but you can hardly claim that it's not more frowned upon and that women have more legal recourse against it now than they used to have. Plus all the other tools in a woman's toolkit - child support payments, public welfare, and depending on where you live a wide array of organizations that exist purely to support women.

If you distill "worst-case" to a point like "can still be beaten, raped, tortured and killed" or "can still settle into abusive relationships and stay there, for whatever reason" then yes, fair, nothing has changed. But I don't think that's a useful perspective to take.

But, really, do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?

no, but he often gives the impression that he thinks that's what 1890 was like, and I don't trust him to actually moderate in the heat of the moment.

I think you are right about your assessment of dysphemisms. Sometimes one needs to accept a label to stop it from having leverage on one's thinking. On the other hand, the solution to being called a monster by progressives is not actually to become a monster.

Luckily for him, he does not even have to fight the federal government for that, because his dream country already exists. It is called Afghanistan.

Sure, he will have to make some compromises as there are no buildings high enough in rural Afghanistan to throw the gays to their death, but I wholeheartedly recommend he goes there and waits for the decadent Western civilization to collapse and being replaced by the Taliban regime.

failure to murder everyone who is insufficiently left is likely to also be 'extreme far radical right'"

This sentence has too many negations in it for my taste.

Let me try to dig out the core:

murder everyone who is insufficiently left

Virtually nobody is advocating for the cleansing of all the people who are not left. Not the GOP, not the Dems, not the woke mob. Even if you say that everyone except literal Nazis is sufficiently left, the position "let us just kill all the Nazis outright" is very fringe. Getting Nazis fired, cast out from society, forcibly re-educated, perhaps put into labor camps for life might all be popular fantasies on the fringe left, but simply gassing them and be done with it is unlikely to be the consensus even in Antifa.

His claim is that this would make Antifa 'extreme far radical right'.

--

More broadly, I think that fringe opinions should not influence our broad categorization of the political spectrum. I can probably find a crazy person who is arguing that we should take "eat the rich" literally and slaughter and barbecue the top 10% income bracket. I could then claim that simply taxing rich people out of their wealth but not eating them is a "moderate left" position, actually.

Sure, he will have to make some compromises as there are no buildings high enough in rural Afghanistan to throw the gays to their death,

Afghanistan has many mountains, so there are surely places with long enough drops.

Eliminating voting rights for the vast majority of "normies", and all women

Okay, yeah, universal suffrage and representative democracy do seem like a stopgap measure that is slowly due an upgrade or replacement. So what does he actually suggest? Restoring the aristocracy? Military junta? Same oligarchy as now, but without the pretence of democracy?

Executing gay people ("poofs off roofs")

That seems close to pointless. Curtailing their ability to advertise and evangelize, sure. But literally killing them? Are the gays truly the most corrosive element in society that deserves uniquely lethal treatment? Not the jews, or the leftists, or the rich, or the muslims, or the elites?

"Conscripting wombs"

Okay, yeah, either this one or artifical wombs is probably going to happen sooner or later. Making babies is not optional for civilization.

Barring these radical changes "failure to murder everyone who is insufficiently left is likely to also be 'extreme far radical right'".

I don't understand this sentence. Please explain for dumb foreigners.

Are the gays truly the most corrosive element in society that deserves uniquely lethal treatment?

No- for DreadJim, that would be women, and the reason they don't get lethal treatment (though they may be beaten into submission) is simply that they're more useful alive.

He's literally just a feminist with the valence switched (that's what "kill all men" means- when they tell you who they are, believe them). It's not intellectually sophisticated. The fact we permit and encourage unironic expressions of one but not the other is the underlying problem of the modern age, yes (and the fact that it's useful to certain power structures to maintain this state of affairs is as disgusting as slavery), but this is the "peepee poopoo" version of criticizing it.

Making babies is not optional for civilization.

Raising new workers is more expensive than it was in the past and the current markets thus can't support the production of more people. This is to some degree artificial (enclosure is not an elite thing this time, as it's currently perpetrated by slightly over half the demos), but every single human being in Western society is selected for based on how well they can boss slaves around more than anything else, and some of our solution is simply to increase society's reliance on slavery.

That the slaves in the modern era are powered by lightning and fossil fuel is not particularly material when you're comparing across other civilizations, whose unpaid labor was generally of the human variety.

This post is very bare in substance. You haven't done much more than link a fringe blogger and write a summary of his latest post. Dread Jim is very much a Culture War figure, but you're not offering anything in the way of opinion or commentary of your own, just "Hey, look at what this guy said." What do you want to conclude from this? What sort of discussion were you aiming for?

This is the only forum I know of, outside of X where it's not nearly as convenient to have back and forth discussions and there are too many trolls, where extreme right-wingers are given any credibility. Further, this places is a repository of knowledge on obscure far-right bloggers. @erwgv3g34 in particular seems to be an expert, which is not surprising given his other interests. It's quite impressive; I don't know of any other existing forum like this place. So yes, he is certainly fringe in the mainstream – in fact, he's totally irrelevant – but from what I've gathered there are more than a handful of people here who share his opinions. Is there any other message board (again, outside of X) where Holocaust deniers, the openly racist, and male supremacists commingle? It's very impressive.

As such, this was just a summary meant to start a conversation on the feasibility of his suggested solutions.

Well, 4chan before the glowies decided since they can't win ideologically they would burry it in semi-automated spam.

Then don’t summarize, write an effort post. You’ll notice our resident Holocaust denier does this.

My first reaction to this is but why though? Why do all that? (besides it being his sexual power fantasy) My second thought was does he actually have any kids himself because a lot of these guys don't.

But we had a much higher birthrate in living memory, in a society much similar to our own, so if you believe we need to urgently raise the birthrate as the number one priority it makes a lot more sense to implement something like the 1930s moral values rather than white shariah. And that's the other thing his call to RETVRN isn't even that. Western Christian society has never had rules like that and Northern Europeans have always had a degree of gender equality. Compare the number of premodern ruling queens in Europe to anywhere else, or the status of Viking women, or Medieval women or convents or another dozen examples. So he's actually trying to implement something that has never actually existed in Western society except among the FLDS I guess. Also there's a lot of evidence that it's more about rural life vs urban life than strict control of women. The 1860s USA or contemporary sub-Saharan both have a higher fertility rate than Saudi Arabia for example.

Speaking of society Jim could actually move to a society that shares his vision much of the Gulf have created a system like that with migrants serving at their pleasure and subjugated women. But he won't. He'll say it's cause he hates Arabs and Muslims but that's the problem he wants white ISIS to take over society and brutally murder everyone he hates but white ISIS doesn't exist and never did. It's telling that a lot of his commentators are Indians who do practice the kind of father arranged marriages he wants. Basically any white Christian conservative from any point in history would be pretty horrified at a lot of his ideas. And the vast majority of Republicans would as well. Contrary to Democratic party talking point most Republicans aren't motivated by extreme racism or sexism. So I don't think Jim's ideas of what the right wing should have much baring especially since he has different goals than the vast majority of conservatives and his preferred solutions seem to be more because he likes his solutions rather than their efficacy. I've skimmed through his blog and he has several failed predications (mostly about Ukraine) without an attempt to recalibrate, and just seems like a crank. He wants to "restore civilization" but his method for doing so is, take over society and kill everyone I don't like, which is what every barbarian everywhere does. He hates everyone, everyone is wrong except Jim. I wish he would at least have the decency to found a fringe political party which is what the extreme leftists who also, want to kill everyone that disagrees with them and force people to do the "right" things do. But as far as I can tell he's entirely alone and thus doesn't have to deal with other humans. For someone who wants a society heavily based on Christianity does he even go to church?

Also the way he talks about women makes me pretty uncomfortable I honestly just get the vibe he hates them. Not just because of wanting to reduce them to chattel (though also that) But I've never read so much talk of "wet pussy" in my life including in relation to pubescent children and Disney movies. It just seems incredibly vulgar for someone who wants to return use to traditional chaste society and no pious Christian man I know would talk like that.

1920s/1930s moral values = 1920s/1930s TFR

I'm not convinced that returning to the moral standards of the one time in US history that the urban birthrate was lower than it is today is a good way to fix low TFR.

I realize I failed to elaborate and probably should have cut that date or expanded on it. But my initial reason for using those decades specifically was that the US was still above TFR despite that.

You daily reminder that the 20's and early thirties were, themselves, a sexual revolution that was if anything more earthshaking than the sexual revolution of the late sixties.

Indeed- the 20s and 30s were a massive expansion in progressive thought to the point that the Americans installed a dictator and underwent a socialist revolution in the mid-1930s.

Modern feminism might be potent, but not "two Constitutional Amendments" potent or Civil Rights Act potent.

The Dread Jim

Help me out here, please. Who is this guy? What makes him notable?

The Dreaded Jim is pretty much the most right-wing blogger on the internet. Many of the controversial positions that are now considered inside the Overton window of The Motte, such as HBD and the disaster of the sexual revolution, were first popularized through his blog.

He is legendary for his bluntness, explaining in ten words what others do in ten thousand, sort of like an anti-Moldbug. Readers who are not scared off get redpilled twice as fast as by any other source.

Jim has been doing this for a very long time; the original blog dates back to 2005, the original website to 2002 1998, and you can find mentions of his name on Usenet archives going back to the 90's.

His actual pseudonym is James A. Donald, or Jim for short, but Scott called him The Dreaded Jim once, and it stuck.

Where does Kulak fit into this heirarchy?That dude seems pretty extreme to me...

The briefest, most accurate description of Kulak is that he is a pagan who worships violence itself.

Kulak is more of a grifter than Jim. It cannot be denied that Jim is consistent and has written his views for a very long time. Kulak only recently took on his revolutionary genocidal catgirl persona, and I think it's very questionable whether he's actually got skin in the game or is just engagement-farming for Twitter bucks.

Has he ever talked about how many children he's fathered?

explaining in ten words what others do in ten thousand

I'm actually laughing out loud at this. He is famous for spending well over one hundred thousand words and over 30 years of blog posts to express the idea. "Women and minorities are inferior to me, and I want to rape and kill them."

Many of the controversial positions that are now considered inside the Overton window of The Motte, such as HBD and the disaster of the sexual revolution, were first popularized through his blog.

I think you are giving him too much credit. I'd consider Vox Day more influential than Jim, and neither of them are really well-known outside the highly politicized Very Online. I am skeptical that Jim was the first to "popularize" HBD or criticism of the sexual revolution.

Jim was popular enough to get his own "Heroes of the Dark Enlightenment" trading card; Vox Day wasn't.

Okay? No idea who created those cards or what their criteria were.

I’m pretty sure The Garbage Generation predates Jim, at least, and that’s very popular audience and critical or sexual liberation.

I'd consider Vox Day more influential than Jim

Is Vox Day still relevant these days? I haven't heard much of him since Rabid Puppies and that one alt-right comic book attempt.

Don't know if he's relevant but he has a substack that pops up on my feed every now and then: sigmagame has 7k+ followers but a few hundred like per post. I didn't realize it was a person at first (who names their kid Vox Day?) and if you told me it was someone writing as someone else using AI I'd have to take it on faith.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

who names their kid Vox Day?

I think his real name is Theodore Beale, or similar.

He's still around but he lost a lot of his audience when Blogger kicked him off, and Rabid Puppies was pretty much his 15 minutes of fame in the outside world.

I read him for a while in the dark days, but pretty quickly noted that he made a lot of predictions that did not pan out, with zero effort to calibrate. I concluded that either he was smart enough to be deliberately manipulating his audience, or else he was stupid enough to not recognize the pattern. Either way, not worth listening to.

Im rarely exposed to “extreme far radical right” but when I am, I inevitably feel like I’m back in my early 20s reading some Marxist drivel. It requires me to completely buy into the premise of the civilization collapsing, that we are going to be replaced, that everything currently is so bad, that we require some drastic civilization-altering action, nothing short of complete revolution to survive, where we’ll kill landlords/poofs, enslave women/peasants, etc.

I just don’t see it, the collapse of the Western civilization, or the climate change wiping us out, or capitalism turning into “Neo-feudalism” and enslaving us all or white replacement. There are problems, but none of them induce the doom and gloom in me that ultimately summons the revolutionary zeal. My life’s pretty good! People around me are living normal lives, with the usual ups and downs, but nobody’s miserable to the extent the workers in UK were during the Industrial Revolution.

I say the same thing both to the suburban Maoists and to the fascists: if you see it, go do something about it instead of writing yet another blog post.

My life’s pretty good!

Yeah, mine to. I don't understand why you think this is a good argument

People around me are living normal lives, with the usual ups and downs, but nobody’s miserable to the extent the workers in UK were during the Industrial Revolution.

How many people are having kids?

I say the same thing both to the suburban Maoists and to the fascists: if you see it, go do something about it instead of writing yet another blog post.

We're trying. What's wrong with writing a blog post sometimes?

How many people are having kids?

Anecdotally, a surprising amount, a lot. The majority of my coworkers approaching 30s, myself included.

What's wrong with writing a blog post sometimes?

It’s just funny to see those grand declarations and nothing else. Speaking to the in-group only, reinforcing the feeling of doom within the in-group, exactly the same way the leftists do it. I’m probably much closer to “a normie” nowadays, so the internal rhetoric feels jarring, detached from the reality of my own life to a tremendous degree.

Anecdotally, a surprising amount, a lot. The majority of my coworkers approaching 30s, myself included.

Statistics tell a different story, though.

It’s just funny to see those grand declarations and nothing else. Speaking to the in-group only, reinforcing the feeling of doom within the in-group, exactly the same way the leftists do it. I’m probably much closer to “a normie” nowadays, so the internal rhetoric feels jarring, detached from the reality of my own life to a tremendous degree.

Funnily enough, I don't see much connection to reality in this criticism. Why is everyone screeching about "far right" parties performing well in Europe? Why is Europe adapting it's laws to enable more online censorship? Why is the UK arresting comedians for tweets? Those are not things that happen when a group is out of touch with the normies.

Far right is a snarl word, come on now. Reform and AFD would fit comfortably within mainstream right parties; FN might not but it isn’t that far outside the window.

Statistics tell a different story, though.

No, they don't. 86% of women aged 40-44 (as of 2016) had at least one child. Perhaps you meant to ask a different question?

Funnily enough, I don't see much connection to reality in this criticism. Why is everyone screeching about "far right" parties performing well in Europe? Why is Europe adapting it's laws to enable more online censorship? Why is the UK arresting comedians for tweets? Those are not things that happen when a group is out of touch with the normies.

Despite the screeching, none of the far right parties want to throw homosexuals off rooftops, strip normies of the franchise, or 'conscript wombs'. That's why they are popular.

No, they don't. 86% of women aged 40-44 (as of 2016) had at least one child. Perhaps you meant to ask a different question?

Yeah, we can quibble over the precise formulation, if you want, but the birth rates are what are. So I'm not sure what point you're making here.

Also... the statistics you cited are from nearly a decade ago for some reason?

Despite the screeching, none of the far right parties want to throw homosexuals off rooftops, strip normies of the franchise, or 'conscript wombs'. That's why they are popular.

Sure. I'm not exactly one of those types either, but his criticisms targeted a much larger group (like people worried about capitalism turning into neo-feudalism, which would include that well-known far-rightwinger Yannis Varoufakis).

Yeah, we can quibble over the precise formulation, if you want, but the birth rates are what are. So I'm not sure what point you're making here.

The point is that "people aren't having kids" is a strong statement that's clearly evidence of some kind of catastrophe, which is presumably why you framed the question that way. People having one or two kid instead of two or three is less clearly so.

Also... the statistics you cited are from nearly a decade ago for some reason?

Unfortunately that's the most recent chart I could find for this.

Sure. I'm not exactly one of those types either, but his criticisms targeted a much larger group (like people worried about capitalism turning into neo-feudalism, which would include that well-known far-rightwinger Yannis Varoufakis).

Literally who? His party has zero seats, so this is another point in favor of the people OP is criticizing not being popular.

The point is that "people aren't having kids" is a strong statement that's clearly evidence of some kind of catastrophe, which is presumably why you framed the question that way. People having one or two kid instead of two or three is less clearly so.

Not really. Yeah, literally zero kids is "extinction event within our lifetimes (or should I say, just barely after)", < 1 / < 2 kids, depending on were you live, combined with mass migration, is "replacement" the very idea he was mocking. So no, it has nothing to do with why I framed it that way.

Unfortunately that's the most recent chart I could find for this.

You might still be right, but it might be a bad idea to so confidently deny my claim then.

Literally who?

Huh, I always took you for a fellow Euro. And if you are, that's an odd thing to say. Maybe you're just a bit younger than me.

His party has zero seats, so this is another point in favor of the people OP is criticizing not being popular.

Maybe he should have tried being a right-winger then, might be a bit more popular now.

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There's a big difference between women aren't having kids and women aren't having enough kids. According to those stats most women still have at least one child.

And how many of those are single mothers, either through divorce raping an innocent husband, or through having sex with a man who any fucking idiot could have told you was not going to stick around (edgy bad boys, bohemian drifters, married men, etc.)?

Not only are we going extinct, but what's left is fast becoming a civilization of bastards, incels, fuckboys, single mothers, and cat ladies.

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Having "one child" is a death sentence for an ethnicity, just look at the shit China is in right now.

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I am a right-wing extremist. I am aware of "The Dread Jim" from many previous discussions through the various iterations of this forum.

His proposed solutions are not feasible, nor are they necessary, nor does he appear to possess insight or a track record that makes him worth listening to or discussing in any significant way. He, like many similar "right-wing extremists", appears to be possessed of a combination of panicked fearfulness and abstracted zealotry aimed at a sort of imaginary, narrative-based glorious final battle. He, like many others, lacks the necessary coldness of heart to effectively prosecute the culture war.

His suggestions are similarly foolish.

  • eliminating voting rights is unnecessary if federal power can be annulled and Blue cultural and political power centers neutralized and demolished, which by all evidence appears to be much easier to accomplish.
  • Rolling back LGBT's influence on our society does not require exterminating LGBT people, only creating general awareness of the concrete harms their movement has caused and an understanding that their social control can and must be resisted. This, again, appears to be working.
  • It is a very good idea to roll back feminism and "women's rights" generally. As with LGBT, what this looks like is establishing common knowledge of how these movements have catastrophically overstepped, the concrete harms they've caused, and the ways we were better off before them. Women having the vote is irrelevant if we neutralize the unaccountable power that vote is meant to enable. Relationships between men and women, whether spousal or familial, are not advanced by the sort of iron fist Jim advocates. Loving relationships can exert a level of stabilization, security, and sound life decision-making that Jim's preferred forms of tyranny can never achieve.

It is a very good idea to roll back feminism and "women's rights" generally. As with LGBT, what this looks like is establishing common knowledge of how these movements have catastrophically overstepped, the concrete harms they've caused, and the ways we were better off before them

How do you convince people that life was better when they were really "people" in the same way men are without a jackboot? This went away for a reason in the west, all the religious and mythological reasons were shown to be "fake" (as far as society is concerned, I dont want to engage in a theological debate) how do you put the gene back in the bottle?

Simple: all the pseudoscientific and pseudoreligious reasons for a society based on the sexual revolution have been shown to be even faker.

I'm not entirely convinced we would actually want to put the genie back in the bottle, after all this world is a direct consequence of the weaknesses of the blank-slatism equality bullshit(everyone was born equal in the image of the lord shit) the church would peddle. Woke liberalist shit is like Christianity with the numbers filed off.

How do you convince people that life was better when they were really "people" in the same way men are without a jackboot?

The past is not an unknown world to us. We have solid evidence of what the world was like before the progressive era, and it did not consist solely or even primarily of dehumanized women and tyrant men. Men and women have loved each other and cooperated together for all of recorded history, and they can do so again. The brave new progressive world has made both men and women wretched. Currently, it is expending vast effort to try to paper over its deficiencies on behalf of women in particular, usually by the use of blatant social and legal double-standards. Remove some of these, and maybe we can get back to something resembling constructive engagement once more.

This is the inverse of your criticism of Jim. Jim believes you that the past was pure evil, and wants to return that evil you both agree we've lost to the modern world. I do not believe you that the past was pure evil, and want to return the non-evil we've lost to the modern world. Your system has not solved men abusing women. It has not solved rape. It has not solved sexual harassment or coercion. I believe my system can do better on all of those things that yours, and I think we can and possibly have proven it.

system has not solved men abusing women. It has not solved rape. It has not solved sexual harassment or coercion

Crime in the first world is the lowest it has ever been at any point in history. You are in less danger over the last 20 years than any other person in the history of the world, for the most part by a significant margin.

With respect, I think you're trying to have it both ways; you call yourself as an "extremist", but your suggested proposals and the congeniality with which you express them are not really outside the mainstream in 2025. Maybe a bit outside the Overton window, but not by much. Like this

Rolling back LGBT's influence on our society does not require exterminating LGBT people, only creating general awareness of the concrete harms their movement has caused and an understanding that their social control can and must be resisted. This, again, appears to be working.

is not a controversial statement. Uttering it does not make you an extremist.

It sounds like you want to go back to the 90s; Jim wants to go back to...I don't know, the 16th century and also kill a lot of people in the process.

As with all these conversations between "normie" right-wingers and people like Jim, the distinguishing factor is race. Race is of paramount importance, and by extension immigration and demographics are the only issues that matter.

Jim doesn't want to go back to anytime. The level of control of women he wants has never existed in Western Christian society and the relief efforts of the Catholic church in South America during the 16th century would be intolerable churchianity to him. He wants contemporary Afghanistan not anything that's ever existed Christendom.

Is it safe to say he wants "White Sharia Space Marine Rape Gangs"?

As far as I can tell yes. But he'd likely say that game theory would eliminated the rape gangs as women would choose to be "owned" and thus safe from the rape gangs that would target "unowned" women. Thus eliminating rape and thus creating utopia.

With respect, I think you're trying to have it both ways; you call yourself as an "extremist", but your suggested proposals and the congeniality with which you express them are not really outside the mainstream in 2025.

I am on record that large-scale, open-ended political violence is a preferable outcome to the political outcomes Blue Tribe appears to me to be aiming for, and further that I believe Red Tribe can and will decisively win such a fight. I have argued at length that the Constitution and rule of law are dead, and that their corpses provide little advantage to our present situation. I have argued at length, and continue to argue, that reconciliation between Reds and Blues is probably impossible in the foreseeable future, and that the culture war is terminal for our society as presently constituted. If you think that these positions do not qualify me for the label of extremism, I'd be interested in hearing your arguments as to why.

What separates me from Jim and his ilk is that I have a better understanding both of why that violence should be delayed as long as possible, and why we have advantages in executing it that are not necessarily compromised by such delays. If I am not mistaken, Jim himself, and certainly many others like him, argued that we were already past the point of no return, that political solutions were impossible, and that in fact we had already compromised our ability win an outright fight, leaving fighting immediately as a desperate last resort. And then the 2024 election happened, and suddenly our position is considerably better.

I am on record that large-scale, open-ended political violence is a preferable outcome to the political outcomes Blue Tribe appears to me to be aiming for, and further that I believe Red Tribe can and will decisively win such a fight.

I am curious, I disagree and think civil war is very unlikely, but I think that if this does happen and if defeat were imminent, unleashing a nuclear holocaust on the US and cleansing it would be preferable to the red tribe being allowed to conquer and rule over the ruin of my Northeast. Does that make me an extremist as well? If so, which kind?

Does that make me an extremist as well? If so, which kind?

Yes, it makes you a Blue Tribe extremist. It also means, in my opinion, that you lack imagination.

that you lack imagination

Expound

Why not move somewhere else? Why nuclear bombardment? Why do you ignore forms of defeat that do not result in Reds ruling you with a jackboot; for instance, a new norm of strong federalism where Blues have blue laws in blue places and reds have red laws in red places? There's also the part where Reds would survive Nuclear bombardment a whole lot better than blues, and would in fact likely rebuild; the threat here is asymmetric to your side's disadvantage.

If Blue Empire were eternal despite all we Reds could attempt, if we were crushed as badly as the Christians in 1600s Japan, I think I would flee elsewhere before resorting to nuking the country. No evil rules eternal; sooner or later, often sooner, it burns itself out.

I think you are making a similar mistake to Jim; you also lack the inner coldness-of-heart, are also carried away by the narrative glories. You lack temper to lose.

I mean my nuclear hellfile in this case is a metaphor for an artificial pathogen engineered to inflict maximum casualties on red tribers, but I get your meaning, retreat is probably a better option than mutual annihilation. I would need a way to make sure the red tribe wouldn't be able to complete an AGI for that to be reasonable, but on the whole, I would agree.

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In an actual scenario where they start a civil war and win, why would the Reds not rule with a jackboot? Even if they assure you, as a member of the Blue team, that they will not, as they try to persuade you to put down that big red button, why would you believe them?

I wouldn't trust any belligerent in the culture war to be magnanimous in victory on the best day, and here we are in a subthread where we're actually talking about the blog by some redtriber who is very openly fantasising about jackboots and lots of other redtribers are assuring us that he is very important and influential.

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I am on record that large-scale, open-ended political violence is a preferable outcome to the political outcomes Blue Tribe appears to me to be aiming for

Depends on what outcomes you're referring to.

I have argued at length that the Constitution and rule of law are dead

Too broad of a statement to analyze, need specifics. Aren't these things that Blue Tribe blame the Red Tribe for as well?

I have argued at length, and continue to argue, that reconciliation between Reds and Blues is probably impossible in the foreseeable future, and that the culture war is terminal for our society as presently constituted.

I don't see why this statement makes you an extremist. Maybe just a political realist?

If I am not mistaken, Jim himself, and certainly many others like him, argued that we were already past the point of no return, that political solutions were impossible, and that in fact we had already compromised our ability win an outright fight, leaving fighting immediately as a desperate last resort.

I think you misunderstand the far-right position. Jim thinks we're past the point of no return because 50% of newborns are non-white. What's your political solution to that?

No, you're just operating from totally different first principles.

Responding to the edits:

It sounds like you want to go back to the 90s; Jim wants to go back to...I don't know, the 16th century and also kill a lot of people in the process.

"Where did things go wrong" is an important element of social critique. My answer is that things went wrong with the Enlightenment, which was not the triumph of rationality over superstition, but rather the opposite. That's a long and involved conversation, though.

I do not think my model is accurately summarized as "go back to the 1600s", more along the lines of "stop making a simple (but for some highly lucrative) mistake we made in the 1600s and have been continuously making ever since." This would be a better summary:

The empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality were never rigorous in any population-level sense. Superstition and ignorance changed their masks, and nothing more. Now that bedazzling scientific advancements are slowing down and we have had a moment to collect ourselves, a modest amount of actual skepticism and curiosity and a memory broader than the last fifteen minutes is sufficient to tear the whole rotten edifice wide open.

Skepticism, rationality and empiricism, and even instrumental materialism, do not mean believing that studies show.

In any case, I do not wish to "go back to the 90s". Free speech and human rights are a spook, "rule of law" is doomed because no set of rules can ever constrain human will. Values-coherence is a prerequisite for the formation and maintenance of a functional society; the aim is to achieve values-coherence with others, band together for mutual benefit and defense, and prevent rule by those who hate you.

As with all these conversations between "normie" right-wingers and people like Jim, the distinguishing factor is race. Race is of paramount importance, and by extension immigration and demographics are the only issues that matter.

That is certainly one point of contention. Jim and similar "right wingers" believe that the problem is blacks and browns, and wish that Reds and Blues could coordinate against them. I believe that the problem is Blues; if it were possible to coordinate with Blacks and Browns against them, that would be an entirely acceptable outcome. Browns and Blacks are a problem to the degree they empower Blues; if blue power is broken, disputes with blacks and browns are solvable in any number of ways.

Depends on what outcomes you're referring to.

Blue Tribe's goal is sociopolitical closure, to shut anyone who disagrees with them out of the economy, the political arena, and to the greatest extent possible society itself. In the classic formulation, they aim to make peaceful revolution impossible, and to the extent that they succeed they make violent revolution inevitable. The part people have missed, though, is the degree to which they have not succeeded in making peaceful revolution impossible.

Too broad of a statement to analyze, need specifics. Aren't these things that Blue Tribe blame the Red Tribe for as well?

Sure, and they're occasionally correct, after a fashion. But let's put it bluntly: the first amendment does not protect my speech, and the second amendment does not protect my right to keep and bear arms. What protects my rights is my ability to coordinate action among those who share sufficient values with me to be allies. There is no way to share power long-term with those who do not meet this basic criterion.

I think you misunderstand the far-right position. Jim thinks we're past the point of no return because 50% of newborns are non-white. What's your political solution to that?

Creating a polity where Blues hold no sway, and hence browns and blacks are not an appreciable problem. encouraging blacks and browns committed to blueness to leave for blue areas seems like a pretty easy and bloodless solution. to the extent that this is not possible, it is because Blues still have too much power, which is again a problem I think we are in the process of solving.

No, you're just operating from totally different first principles.

Indeed we are. His are wrong and foolishly so.

Creating a polity where Blues hold no sway, and hence browns and blacks are not an appreciable problem. encouraging blacks and browns committed to blueness to leave for blue areas seems like a pretty easy and bloodless solution.

Agreed. But I think many conservatives do not want a bloodless solution. They want to overcome liberalism's tolerance of mediocrity and comfort. They want a return of martial values and spirit. They're Occidentalists, seeing bourgeois values as soft and unworthy of emulation.

Agreed. But I think many conservatives do not want a bloodless solution. They want to overcome liberalism's tolerance of mediocrity and comfort. They want a return of martial values and spirit. They're Occidentalists, seeing bourgeois values as soft and unworthy of emulation.

Can you give some examples of these "conservatives" of which you speak?

Values-coherence is a prerequisite for the formation and maintenance of a functional society; the aim is to achieve values-coherence with others, band together for mutual benefit and defense, and prevent rule by those who hate you.

I have to ask, becuase this seems like a pretty important wrinkle in your thesis here. To what degree and type of values-coherence do you require? You are a Christian, so I presume you are against pre-marital sex. In your ideal society, would anybody who thinks pre-marital sex is fine be expelled? Would anybody committing it be imprisoned?

My question really is how much values-coherence is enough; that is, where is the line? And how can you even quantitatively/rigorously determine where the line is?

In my tradcath filter bubble the normal response to fornication runs the spectrum from ostracism(for a seducer) to a shotgun wedding(for a courting couple that made a stupid mistake) with the median outcome being a mutual no-contact order. The man is held primarily responsible. 'Fornication is OK' is outside the overton window, 'Fornication sometimes happens and worrying too much is a cure being worse than the disease' is at the far end of it. People are not popularly held to have a right to privacy wrt past fornication, and it's very likely to restrict an individual's marriage prospects by a lot- but no one asks questions about a first child only taking six months or so.

I'm pretty sure we're a bit more conservative than @FCfromSSC on questions like that.

To what degree and type of values-coherence do you require?

Have you read Conservatives as Moral Mutants?

And yet, fundamentally… it’s not true that conservatives as a group are working for the same goals as I am but simply have different ideas of how to pursue it. It’s not true that conservatives simply think that lowering taxes will stimulate the economy or that economic growth works better than foreign aid to help the global poor or that, as regrettable as it is for gay couples who long for children, children will be severely traumatized unless they are raised by heterosexuals. I would certainly prefer it to be that way. I want to have respect for all belief systems; I want to believe we’re all working for the same goals but simply disagree on certain facts.
But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.

So it goes.

That's an example of what not enough overlap for society to function looks like.

Zunger was straightforwardly correct:

No side, after all, will ever accept a peace in which their most basic needs are not satisfied — their safety, and their power to ensure that safety, most of all. The desire for justice is a desire that we each have such mechanisms to protect ourselves, while still remaining in the context of peace: that the rule of law, for example, will provide us remedy for breaches without having to entirely abandon all peace. Any “peace” which does not satisfy this basic requirement, one which creates an existential threat to one side or the other, can never hold.

i am indeed a Christian. I don't require people to also be Christians to live in peace with them. I don't require the laws to be Christian laws to live in peace under them, since there is very little the law can do to secure Christian ends. I am happy to cooperate with people who disagree with me on some things to achieve the other things that we do agree on. I am willing to extend liberty to others to the extent that they are willing to extend liberty back.

On the other hand, the more cohesive my community and the more fringe the demand of tolerance from those at its fringes, the more it seems to me that people who are incapable of fitting in should simply go somewhere else. This principle works the other way: I and mine should not casually intrude into the lives and communities of those alien to us. We should interact with those we can tolerate, and those we cannot tolerate we should separate from and avoid. This is not out of any high-minded principle, but only the practical wisdom of circles of concern. People far away are not generally as much of a problem as those close by; you are never going to conquer the whole world and institute global utopia, so the best thing is to make your bit as good as possible, and let those far away do as they will.

There is no definable "line". Either people are willing to cooperate or they are not. Either you can tolerate others or you cannot. Both maximizing and minimizing tolerance have serious downsides; you need a happy medium, and there is no way to rigorously define where that medium is. There is no way to codify it into a set of legible rules. If you have too much tolerance, values drift and society collapses. If you have too little tolerance, you fall into purity spirals and infighting and society collapses. There's no substitute for prudence and sound judgement.

degree to which they have not succeeded in making peaceful revolution impossible.

much confused! The Blues have succeeded in making peaceful revolution possible?

I observe that Blues tried and failed to make peaceful revolution against them impossible.

and the second amendment does not protect my right to keep and bear arms.

So then a progressive effort to scrap that, you'd just be indifferent? Waste of time to try and do anything about it?

So then a progressive effort to scrap that, you'd just be indifferent? Waste of time to try and do anything about it?

No. You use the progressive efforts to coordinate united opposition from your own tribe. Such opposition has, in the past, involved both voting and passing laws in some cases, and shooting federal agents and bombing federal buildings in other cases. What you cannot do is assume that "playing by the rules" is the sum of valid responses, because "rules" do not work the way the "play by the rules" narrative assumes they do.

Blue efforts to kill the second amendment de jure or de facto should be resisted, because even as a corpse the second amendment is a powerful rally point. But at the same time, one must remember that the second amendment, alive or dead, was only ever a tool, and the aim that tool was designed for must be pursued regardless, within or without the law as may be necessary.

I believe that the problem is Blues; if it were possible to coordinate with Blacks and Browns against them, that would be an entirely acceptable outcome. Browns and Blacks are a problem to the degree they empower Blues; if blue power is broken, disputes with blacks and browns are solvable in any number of ways.

I hope it's not to low effort for me to say thank you for expressing this, and doing so in such a clear manner. It sums up not just my disagreement with some people online, but also with some people I know IRL, because we are in agreement here, and they're at the "the problem is blacks and browns, and wish that Reds and Blues could coordinate against them" position.

(It's related to why I argue eugenics is still a deeply Progressive position, and tend to reference Confucians on social inequality.)

I believe that the problem is Blues; if it were possible to coordinate with Blacks and Browns against them, that would be an entirely acceptable outcome. Browns and Blacks are a problem to the degree they empower Blues; if blue power is broken, disputes with blacks and browns are solvable in any number of ways.

But, if I’m reading you correctly, ultimately your end goal is to form a regional society of people who share your moral intuitions. If Blacks and Browns refuse to relinquish Blueness, or at any rate refuse to become sufficiently compatible with your Redness, doesn’t that mean you will either have to quell them or expel them? And if so, isn’t TDJ just skipping the middle steps?

What solutions were you envisaging?

But, if I’m reading you correctly, ultimately your end goal is to form a regional society of people who share your moral intuitions.

Sure, or enough of them to limit the scope and scale of political conflict to something survivable.

If Blacks and Browns refuse to relinquish Blueness, or at any rate refuse to become sufficiently compatible with your Redness, doesn’t that mean you will either have to quell them or expel them?

If they can't secure blue power by winning a vote, and they can't compromise law enforcement, why do they need to be either quelled or expelled? If they are content to live as a political minority, well and good. if they are not content, they can move somewhere that seems more congenial.

What solutions were you envisaging?

Blue Power comes from several sources, among them political machines, long-term control of the knowledge production and dissemination apparatus, entrenched bureaucracy, and entrenched legal precedent. The foundations of most of these sources are visibly decaying. Without them, I do not think Blue Tribe is capable of the sociopolitical closure they threaten. Without that threat, the geographical sortition that has been ongoing for well-over a decade should make it possible to simply allow them to stew in their own shitholes, far away from me. and if not, the sword will remain a viable option for the foreseeable future.

Fair. I would consider ‘no meaningful political or extra-political power’ as ‘quelled’ but that’s really quibbling over semantics.

Without that threat, the geographical sortition that has been ongoing for well-over a decade should make it possible to simply allow them to stew in their own shitholes

I would say this is optimistic. The fact remains that the high-paying and high-status jobs are all in Blue areas and are likely to remain so. Your children and their children are likely to have to grapple with some level of Blue domination for as long as this is the case, although having a reliable bolt hole might make this more comfortable.

That absolutely is a controversial statement. Saying it would get you fired from virtually any top-tier job.

He, like many others, lacks the necessary coldness of heart to effectively prosecute the culture war.

Or in other words, he's too busy thinking with his dick.

The feminists are correct when they point this out, especially when discussing those sorts of people who can't really handle modernity; it's just that instead of fixing the problem, they simply replaced one set of destructive fetishes with a different set of destructive fetishes (they get off on the oppression narratives just as men get off on the possession ones).

Humanity in general has a hard time dealing with that, given the destructiveness of those fetishes never had to be dealt with before (as it evolved alongside the state of nature) by either gender. Hence we see a lot more DreadJilling (eliminating political power for the vast majority of "normies" and all men, executing straight people, conscripting wallets).

I hesitate to even call DreadJim right-wing, for he is not. That label belongs to whatever the "entrench corruption harder/50 Stalins" faction is in society, and that faction is the feminist one. His faction has simply fallen completely off of the reform -> conserve -> ossify/tradition political treadmill.

DreadJilling

I just can't not imagine a pirates of the caribbean spoof porn parody.

As I keep saying, society advances through the counter-révolution by building a more functional parallel society which bides its time to take over the prevailing superstructure while growing by being better. This entails being acceptable/appealing to at least a noticeably large subset of women, and ‘property, but might like getting beaten and raped at will’ will not do that.

This is a more generous assessment of Jim and his ilk than I'd be inclined to give. I think there's less foolishness there and more evil; the pursuit of a good end by bad means has long since given way to a pursuit of a bad end by bad means. I don't think that Jim merely disbelieves that stabilization, security, and sound life decision-making can be achieved by loving relationships; I think he deplores loving relationships in a vacuum. There's some kind of tipping point you often see people running over where reasonable paternalism gives way to an all-consuming hatred.

I think there's less foolishness there and more evil; the pursuit of a good end by bad means has long since given way to a pursuit of a bad end by bad means.

"Evil" and "bad" are meaningless unless one shares values-coherence with the people with one communicates, which is not true for Jim or people who think he's correct, and cannot in general be assumed here. I certainly do consider him evil and agree with the rest of your analysis as to why, but I try not to assume that others share my moral values.

"Evil" and "bad" are meaningless unless one shares values-coherence with the people with one communicates

One of the most poetic things to ever happen is that the great fascist powers were met in their own framework by their enemies and crushed through strength of arms, thus in addition to destroying there power and killing many of them, also defeating them ideologically in the only way that really mattered as far as they were concerned.

Speak plainly, please. What is the relevance to the present discussion?

If anyone can be called a fascist without hyperbole, it's Jim, and he operates on this level with this exact mindset. He does not see right and wrong, only will to power. I find it satisfying that his ideological forbearers were defeated in the way that they were.

This is unfair and untrue. Jim very much does see a distinction between right and wrong. In his recent "Genocide", for example, you can see that he differentiates between legitimate genocide, when a defeated group refuses to stop fighting, and illegitimate genocide, such as the Tutsis in Rwanda, which was committed "for utterly trivial, wicked, evil, and frivolous reasons".

Similarly, in his earlier "How to Genocide Inferior Kinds in a Properly Christian Manner", he argues that you cannot just kill savages and take their stuff, because that undermines the high trust equilibrium of strong property rights that makes civilization great. Instead, he recommends legitimately purchasing the land and tempting them into committing unspeakable crimes, and then killing them and taking their stuff.

The beauty of this approach is that it will only work if the savages are genuinely inferior; an intelligent people will not sell their land for immediate consumption goods, the way a modern ghetto dweller will take out a payday loan to buy Air Jordans or a PS5, and an honorable people will not react to losing out on the deal by waging war against the folks that purchased the land, the way that same ghetto dweller will burn down the pawn shop for predatory lending. Thus, their destruction is legitimized by their own wicked natures.

This is a recurring theme in Jim's writing, explaining goodness in terms of game theory and material consequences. As he notes, this ends up to a large extent rederiving traditional Christian morality; risen killer apes and fallen angels are basically the same, so it doesn't really matter if you get your ethics from Darwin or from Jesus.

erwgv3g34 thers nothing I think I could say to you that wouldn't violate TOS other than "May your blade chip and shatter"

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Similarly, in his earlier "How to Genocide Inferior Kinds in a Properly Christian Manner", he argues that you cannot just kill savages and take their stuff, because that undermines the high trust equilibrium of strong property rights that makes civilization great. Instead, he recommends legitimately purchasing the land and tempting them into committing unspeakable crimes, and then killing them and taking their stuff.

The beauty of this approach is that it will only work if the savages are genuinely inferior;

Like the Irish and Polish. In fact, quite a few European peoples could have been genocided under this framework.

This is a recurring theme in Jim's writing, explaining goodness in terms of game theory and material consequences. As he notes, this ends up to a large extent rederiving traditional Christian morality

Pretty much doubt. I mean, I'd probably have to wade through a bunch of garbage to distill out an actual attempted derivation; it's much more likely to be a loose collection of handwavy claims than any sort of serious deductive argument.

It's kind of funny how all sides of the atheist internecine war want to make claims that the core of their morality is game theory. Of course, this game theory is somehow "not objective", meaning that other people can't simply rederive it from the premises... but good luck asking them to explain how that's supposed to work. And more funny is that they all seem to come up with quite different conclusions about what their handwavy game theory premises are supposed to imply (derivation often not shown). I'm pretty confident that the folks here who appeal to it don't think it directly derives traditional Christian morality. ...especially not Jim's version.

So I read that article and am pretty unconvinced. For one a lot of nonwhites are already here and are thus neighbors according to Jim's reading if the parable. The other is most of the starving African children that Jim references are Christian and there's all sorts of stuff in the New Testament about helping brothers of the faith. I feel like Jim's Christianity is about as true to the text as Episcopalians which is to say they really really want to ignore the parts of the bible that conflict with their internal morality. He references the old testament genocides but all of those were towards pagans not towards believers.

In his recent "Genocide", for example, you can see that he differentiates between legitimate genocide, when a defeated group refuses to stop fighting, and illegitimate genocide, such as the Tutsis in Rwanda, which was committed "for utterly trivial, wicked, evil, and frivolous reasons".

I am skeptical that the difference between these two is meaningful. How does this model apply to the Melian Dialogue?

This is a recurring theme in Jim's writing, explaining goodness in terms of game theory and material consequences.

Goodness, at least my own understanding of it, is not reducible to game theory and material consequences. Based on your description, Jim does not appear to have any meaningful understanding of Christianity, and I certainly do not appreciate his appropriation of my faith for his own ends.

It may in fact not matter whether you get your ethics from Jesus or Darwin; I do not observe Jim to be winning to any appreciable degree, and do not think his fortunes likely to change in the future. I observe that many people have proclaimed Darwinian fitness where Darwinian fitness did not in fact exist. I note that my own values appear to by highly adaptive, but it seems to me that a good deal of what makes them adaptive is a willingness to adhere to them whether they appear adaptive or not.

Nobody is evil in their own mind. Of course Jim has rationalizations for why beating and raping women is good and why genocide is virtuous. You only buy these rationalizations if you agree with him in the first place. The same is true for people like KulakRevolt, agitating daily for race war and genocide, and our resident Jew-haters. No one says "Yeah, I just hate these people and want to kill them." They construct elaborate rationalizations for why the people they hate deserve it and they are acting morally --in self defense, even.

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Thank you.

I'm generally skeptical of the term "fascist" for people who don't choose it themselves, but don't particularly disagree. If the Jim Party somehow secured power where I live, I think fighting them would likewise be the morally correct option, and would have every confidence of victory.

Yeah even ignoring all the murder the level of government control he want would be intolerable, in addition to micromanaging personal interaction I suspect the Jim party would wind up suppressing basically every Christian denomination as "heretical churchianity"

As an aside, just because I often muse about this whenever he's brought up, is there a consensus estimate on how fucking old Jim is at this point? The absolute low ball has to be 60 but he could be like 80 and still doing this.

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I think ISIS went a bit similarly: the promise of a new caliphate brought out a big chunk of violent fanatics that otherwise would have been terrorists hiding from view, gave faith that they would win battles in a traditional type war with God on their side, and pitted them against a number of local powers backed up by Western air and ground forces. They lost.

I'm not conspiracy minded, but it would at least be an interesting one that this was done deliberately as a honey pot, but I have zero evidence of this. I also can't speak to it's long-term effects on the region --- how many of those dead IS fighters would have fought with the Houthis, Hezbollah, or Hamas in recent conflicts?

Very few for all those. The Houthis and Hezbollah are Shia who ISIS thinks are heretics that deserve to be brutally murdered and most recruits from Gaza just join Hamas and Hamas has few foreign fighters.

I agree with the general thrust though ISIS probably sucked a lot of people in who would have committed terrorist attacks in Europe.


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