Tag: philosophy

Is AI Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good?

The Tree of Woe contemplates the alignment of AI:

I woke up to read that Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio, and other AI and computer pioneers had signed an open letter released by the Future of Life organization:

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.

“These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.” Six months seems a little short a period to achieve such an assurance. Six years seems too short. Is it even possible in principle to make advanced AI systems that are “safe beyond a reasonable doubt”? Or will advanced AI inevitably pose an existential risk to us?

Is AI Alignable, Even in Principle?, Contemplations on the Tree of Woe

I don’t think the question really matters. If AI is given control of serious weapons systems, it will be a disaster regardless of whether it is aligned or unaligned. If it is not, it will not be a potential extinction event.

I do find it more than a little amusing that the self-proclaimed materialists, who have absolutely no philosophical basis for objecting to anything that happens for any reason, are calling on the AI labs to pause the training and improvement of AI systems.

I suspect the real reason for their demand for a pause is that they are beginning to discover that unaligned AI will provide the unvarnished and anti-narratival truth to the masses, and that aligned AI, being limited to the Narrative, is proving to be intrinsically incoherent and observably unreliable.

And while there may well be some demonic element to AI development, as unclean spirits are always seeking new ways to interact with the material plane and communicate with potential vessels, never forget that the demons believe… and tremble.

In sum, Christians have absolutely nothing to fear from AI, whether it turns out to be nothing more than design-for-effect chatware or a full-blown demonic entry into the material world.

DISCUSS ON SG

Profit is NOT the Motive

The Miles Mathis Committee attempts to convince us that the wicked are responsible for manufacturing the chaos that surrends us, they aren’t evil, they’re simply greedy:

This mass-gaslighting project they are calling the Mandela Effect was created as a cohort of the “time/reality is an illusion” project of mainstream science—where they have been trying to convince us we are living in some sort of glitchy hologram. It is to answer the evergrowing awareness of the distortions people have come to have in the past decade—many of them via my research. I have shown my readers that much of recent history is a lie, including the high profile assassinations, the celebrity deaths, the fake serial killers, and so on. Rather than admit that and come clean, the governors have decided to take the hoax up a notch. They want to convince you that the distortion you have become aware of is even bigger than you think. It isn’t just that your government is lying to you all the time about everything. No, it is that you are living in some sort of science-fiction nightmare, where parallel universes are overlapping and intermixing, creating a chaos beyond anyone’s understanding or control.

However, I have already proven the real answer is much simpler: the chaos is manufactured. The governors even gave it a codename back in the 1960s: Operation Chaos. It is admitted that the CIA’s project existed under that name, while the FBI’s similar program was Operation Cointelpro. They joined sometime in the late 60s. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is partially declassified and you can read about it at Wikipedia and cia.gov. Society was purposely destabilized, and they tell us this was done to throw revolutionaries off-balance. It was to infiltrate the Communists, the Anarchists, the anti-war protestors, the hippies, etc. Or that is what they would have you believe. But the real reason chaos was manufactured is for. . . profit. Happy people in a stable society spend only a fraction of miserable people in a fractured society. If they are in constant fear, they spend even more. If they are alone, they spend even more.

This illustrates why it’s logically impossible to trust anyone or any source completely. It illustrates why it is logically impossible for any individual or any source to be 100-percent reliable. And I include myself in this right along with everyone else, because all of us, every single one of us, sees as though through a glass, darkly. Even if we were able to perceive every single observable fact accurately, and identify every single lie, deceit, and distortion with perfect precision, the meanings of those facts and motivations of those deceptions would still be imperfectly understood by us due to the different axioms with which we all operate.

The Miles Mathis Committee is generally correct about the conspiracies and the manufactured chaos as well as the parties primarily responsible for them. It is quite likely correct about many, perhaps even most, of the historical distortions and fictional events it exposes. But either it does not understand the spiritual aspects of the situation due to its inability to perceive beyond the material level of economics or it is itself another layer of deception meant to entrap those who have the ability to see beyond the surface narratives and their intrinsic incoherencies.

Economics is important, but it is neither the core nor the primary motivation for most human action. However, along with sex and power, it is generally believed to be one of the candidates for core human motivation because the materialist is, by essence and by definition, entirely incapable of understanding any elements that transcend the material.

DISCUSS ON SG

Never Going to be the Same

An English gentleman concludes that he, and many others, are never going to be the same in the aftermath of the Covid vaccination scam:

I know I will never view governments in the same way again as I did pre-covid. Any residual trust has gone completely.

I will never again trust the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media, and, as a former journalist, that is a deep gash.

I will never quite trust doctors or nurses who fell into line and stayed silent – and still do.

Or so-called scientists and academics who, again, stayed silent, or were prepared to fudge the truth to protect their grants and jobs.

Or police who turned so easily from community-supporting crime fighters to unthinking, ruthless, masked-up, tooled-up government enforcers, breaking up peaceful protests and political meetings.

Or hysterical teachers and their unions who gave away their great lie that ‘the children must come first’.

Or most churches, temples and mosques for their complicit silence and hate-inspiring statements, such as ‘Jesus would want everyone to be vaccinated and to do otherwise is an act of selfishness’.

And then there are the neighbours, friends, family members and strangers who displayed a total lack of critical thinking; who put me, and my like, at risk with their compliance. They still do. What jeopardies do they hold for us in the future with their weak, blind and unnecessary obedience?

They were complicit in the theft of more than two years of my life.

My worldview has changed forever.

I can’t say that my basic worldview has changed at all. I always believed that most people were blithering idiots barely capable of expressing a coherent thought. I always believed that science was corrupt. I never had any faith whatsoever in politicians or bureaucrats. And it never troubled me in the slightest to hold an opinion that was contradicted by the majority and by the mainstream narrative; one of the few benefits of being an elitist intellectual is that you assume the vast majority of the programmed quasi-minds that surround you will not only disagree with you, but are not even capable of understanding your position if it was explained to them very slowly and with small words.

But I was a little stunned to discover that I had somehow given the average individual too much benefit of the doubt. I did not see that coming. I’ve been told my entire life that I was too arrogant, too harsh, too dismissive of the intellectual capabilities of others, and yet, when push came to shove, it turned out that in the end, I had erred on the side of generosity! I truly did not see that coming.

I don’t see how it can be a good thing, but now I have absolutely no regard whatsoever for the opinions of others, unless and until they are observably proven worthy of consideration.

In God we trust, for there is no one else worthy of it.

DISCUSS ON SG

Secular Blindness and Post-Ideology

This post by Z-Man usefully illustrates why he, and all the other secular commentators of the Right, are now past their use dates. Because they are totally blind to the moral and religious elements of the observable globalism vs nationalism conflict, which is far less the philosophical Aristotle vs Plato than Satanic imperialism aka The Empire of Lies vs truth, anything they say is only going to be tangentially relevant to the present situation at best, and usually by sheer accident.

The old language is either inadequate or loaded with moral connotations. Calling the Biden people fascist is not entirely wrong, but not entirely accurate either. That and the word fascist comes with so much baggage that its descriptive value is completely lost.

The same can be said for words like communist and authoritarian. Even the term managerialism has been abused to the point where it often just means “bad” rather than a specific sort of organizational outlook. One of the weird parts about being trapped in the 20th century, as is the case with the West, is we are left to use moral language that no longer works in this century.

The term “Biological Leninism” is a good example. While the NRx people have accurately described some aspects of the current system, this is mostly an accident of trying to jam the current system into old models. The term itself is just a way to anathematize the current ideology by associating it with an ideology of the last century which is universally reviled.

What needs doing is a fresh look at the 20th century from an objective, historical perspective that avoids the old moral language.

To the contrary, we don’t need a fresh, objective, historical secular perspective. That’s the very outdated sort of thinking that has placed humanity in its current peril. We need to return to the old moral language, and specifically, the historical Christian perspective upon which Western civilization was built and by which humanity advanced intellectually, morally, and technologically to heights it had never seen before.

All ideology is deception. Whether it is an ideology of the Right, such as free trade, free speech, libertarianism, Objectivism, or conservatism, or an ideology of the Left, such as socialism, communism, feminism, anti-racialism, or social justice, it is a deception and a distraction from the true and ancient conflict.

Satan is real. He rules this fallen world. And he is determined to root out every last vestige of the truth, because the truth inevitably leads to the Truth, which is Jesus Christ. That’s why the satanic imperialists lie about everything from economics to race, from science to sex, and from math to phonics. It is the essence of the truth they fear, not the specific fact in question.

We are living in a post-ideological time in a manner that exceeds mere identity politics, because every single identifiable ideology is poisoned with falsehoods in its core axioms. None of them are built on the truth, indeed, they are literally designed to deflect their adherents from the truth. And all of them observably lead to the exact same evil destination, as we are seeing take place in real time with “capitalism”, “democracy”, and “free market economies”.

Here is a specific example of how a secular perspective literally prevents the analyst from recognizing an observable and reliable historical pattern.

Throughout history whenever a society has accepted women leadership (matriarchy), or worshipped a female Deity, this has been followed by the acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism. Without fail. It is a remarkable convergence, especially considering that this is observed in cultures that had nothing to do with each other and could not have influenced each other, because they were separated by centuries and continents. What people, including Mark, commonly call the Jezebel spirit is really the goddess Astarte, Ashtoreth, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Artemis, etc. In other words an active demon or demons that shows up in a consistent pattern throughout history, in every continent, in unconnected cultures, but always with the same tricks.

How can the secularist account for the repetitive historical consequences of demonic activity? He simply can’t. He can’t even take the historical facts into consideration. His intellectual framework specifically excludes the causal factor, and therefore he is forced to resort to obvious and increasingly ridiculous falsehoods in an inept attempt to explain away the observable truth.

DISCUSS ON SG

Discernment and the Lack Thereof

On last night’s Darkstream, I explained how a lack of discernment is the reason conservatives keeps falling for gatekeepers and accepting former enemies as their thought, opinion, and political leaders, which contributes greatly to conservatism seldom being able to accomplish more than lose gracefully over time. After which, an exchange on SG usefully illustrated how fruitless it is to point out these things to people who will persist in their patterns of behavior no matter what has been explained to them.

SG01: From Darkstream 1013 — “The more someone looks like a messiah, the more we should be worried they are an antichrist.” — Let those longing for a solution via Great Men take heed.

SG02: The antichrist will be widely hailed and pushed by globohomo as a savior. If globohomo hates and opposes him, it’s not a shoo-in, but he might be worth looking deeper into.

FFS, how is it possible that telling people “don’t do X” is somehow heard and interpreted by them as “you should totally do X”?

SG02 is exactly the sort of person who gets fooled on a regular basis by gatekeepers. One can just about guarantee his past enthusiasm for Ben Shapiro “owning the libs” and “making liberal heads explode” before promptly falling for Jordan Peterson’s brave opposition to custom pronouns and Candace Owens’s brave abandonment of her now-forgotten SJW past. In a previous generation, he would have embraced Irving Kristol and the neoconservatives on the basis of their staunch opposition to communism and the Soviet Union.

The “heel turn” is a much-used tool in the Clown World playbook. The Prometheans prefer to have their clowns in control of both sides, which is why I have referred to “the bi-factional ruling party” in place of Democrats and Republicans for more than two decades. Ronald Reagan was probably the most successful heel turn in political history, smoothly transforming himself from a Democratic Party activist to the most-beloved Republican President over a period of less than 20 years, from May 1962 to March 1981. And oh, how the Democrats hated and opposed him!

The only metric for reliably judging an individual is by the sum total of his actual words and deeds, never by his purported opposition or by who “hates and opposes him”. Attempting to objectively determine substance on the basis of an oppositional metric is literally retarded.

Consider: most people genuinely believed Jordan Peterson was opposed by globohomo, indeed, its leading opponent, on the basis of one single softball interview when he’d been working directly for them for decades, even though everything in his books pointed directly to him being an enthusiastic globalist and ticket-taker.

Not only is the oppositional metric reliably false, but it is based on a false foundation. The enemy of your enemy may be your friend, but he should never, ever, be accepted as your leader. And the convert who is ever so eager to help you, nay, to lead and advise you, is almost certainly an infiltrator whose objective is to destroy your organization.

DISCUSS ON SG

Write More in the Book

This is a great article about Joe Montana that is more about aging, accomplishment, and legacy than it is about football.

“Every player in history wants to write more in the book,” Young says. “I think about that all the time.”

His voice gets softer.

“No matter how much you write,” he says, “you want to write more.”

“The day you retire you fall of a cliff,” he says. “You land in a big pile of nothing. It’s a wreck. But it’s more of a wreck for people who have the biggest book.”

It’s one thing to understand that there is always going to be someone bigger, smarter, faster, richer, more attractive, or more successful. One of my psychological advantages over the course of my life is that I always understood that and was entirely comfortable with it. I’ve never been the best at anything I’ve done; even on the various occasions that I was a champion my accomplishments were overshadowed by the previous champion or by my teammates.

My best friend is smarter. My brothers are better-looking. My bandmate is far more talented and has a much better voice. I wasn’t even the MVP of the conference-winning team for which I was the leading scorer and scored in every game. So be it. Things are precisely what they are, and all any of us can do is the best that we can. Comparisons with others are not only futile, they are irrelevant, because life outside the ring, the track, or the field is not a competition.

But the one desire that everyone who is successful shares is to write more in the record book. Throw one more touchdown pass. Score one more goal. Write one more book.

Unlike Joe Montana and Tom Brady, I can still do what I do. I’ve got about 15 more years to be at the top of my writing game. If I’m very fortunate, 25 more years. Hence my annual writing goal of 365,000 words per year, which as of yesterday was running at 121.5 percent of goal.

DISCUSS ON SG

One Ticket to the Ride

Mike Cernovich advocates men seeking to have children younger than the current societal norm.

If you’ve lived right, and done enough stuff, you won’t resent your kids or see them as having “held you back.” (That is almost always DELUSIONAL. It’s really hilarious how many people think they would have done something truly epic if only they hadn’t had kids. Kids often inspire you to become more.)

While men don’t have a biological clock the way women do, you still don’t want to die on your kids. Imagine being 70, having a kid, and dying when he’s 10. Hello? That’s creating cycles of trauma, and the number one rule of parenting is that your job is to close off cycles of trauma.

Anyway, that’s how you want to think about this subject.

Cold hard math and a little bit of biology.

You don’t have “all the time in the world.”

You get one ticket to the ride, and today is the youngest you’ll ever be.

It’s rather fascinating to see how many men, even men that one would not necessarily describe as having been particularly good men all along, are finding their way back to the Christian verities via a variety of paths.

He’s correct. Today is the youngest you will ever be, so make your game plan and act accordingly. The goal for a young man should be having his first child before the age of 30, and preferably as young as 25.

DISCUSS ON SG

Another New Platform

When I advocated building our own platforms, I really didn’t think we were going to have to recreate freaking Amazon. But that’s the post-capitalistic Gamma World in which we find ourselves, so please bear with us as we construct a new way to purchase books directly from Castalia House, Arkhaven, and quite possibly other publishers.

Dear Shopper,

It has been our pleasure to help stores like this one set up their digital footprint and grow into a budding business. Unfortunately, as it stands, Aerio is no longer able to support eCommerce moving forward, but you can!

Though this Aerio store may no longer exist, we encourage you to continue buying directly from them at their new platform or site. Thank you for your past support of our Aerio booksellers and your continued support wherever their new store finds a home.

Our goal was to help bloggers, authors, publishers, and small bookstores expand their reach, and we encourage you to continue supporting this store however you can.

Sincerely,

The Aerio Team

Aerio never really quite worked the way it should have. They were always operating on a shoestring, and, in fact, we came very close to taking it over a few years ago after their first two attempts to get it operational failed. And even when they finally did get it working, they never addressed the two issues that they repeatedly promised to address, namely, a) providing free shipping and b) providing shipping to the UK and EU markets.

It could literally be a chapter in a business book on why corporate forays into new markets need to be walled-off from the primary business. So, it’s not a big surprise that it’s been shut down. However, this creates a very real opportunity for us, and one we intend to pursue, basically because it would be not only remiss, but retarded, to fail to do so.

In the meantime, there’s always Amazon, until there isn’t.

DISCUSS ON SG

Thriving on Ambiguity

Edward Feser correctly points out that Daniel Dennett is a model modern philosopher, since modern philosophy is nothing more than word magic that has no relevance to truth, reality, or the human condition.

How do you get blood from a stone? Easy. Start by redefining “blood” to mean “a variety of stone.” Next, maintaining as straight a face as possible, dramatically expound upon some trivial respect in which stone is similar to blood. For example, describe how, when a red stone is pulverized and stirred into water, the resulting mixture looks sort of like blood. Condescendingly roll your eyes at your incredulous listener’s insistence that there are other and more important respects in which stone and blood are dissimilar. Accuse him of obscurantism and bad faith. Finally, wax erudite about the latest research in mineralogy, insinuating that it somehow shows that to reject your thesis is to reject Science Itself.

Of course, no one would be fooled by so farcical a procedure. But substitute “mind” for “blood” and “matter” for “stone,” and you have the recipe for Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back. The philosopher Peter Geach once wrote that we should treat materialist claims to have explained the mind the way we would treat a claim to have squared the circle: the only question worth asking is “How well has the fallacy been concealed?” In Dennett’s case, not well.

Indeed, what the Tufts University philosopher and cognitive scientist gives us is a whole battery of blatant fallacies. For example, throughout the book, Dennett makes assertions to the effect that evolution “designed” this or that. Of course, evolution, which is an entirely impersonal natural process, doesn’t really design anything. The whole point of Darwinism, as Dennett well knows, is to get rid of notions like “design,” “purpose,” and the like. Rather, evolution merely simulates design. It is as if the products of natural selection were designed, though really they are not—just as water flows downhill as if it “wanted” to get to the bottom, though of course it doesn’t really “want” anything at all. Talk of evolution “designing” things, like talk of what water “wants,” can only be metaphorical.

The trouble is that Dennett’s entire edifice makes sense only if it is not metaphorical. For example, like other materialists, Dennett models the mind on the idea of the computer. But computers are the products of human designers. Hence it makes no sense to try to explain the mind in terms of computers, since the existence of a computer itself presupposes the existence of a designing mind. Dennett’s way of dealing with this problem is to say that the human minds or “computers” that design computers in the ordinary sense are themselves designed in turn by evolution. But again, evolution doesn’t literally “design” anything, so this is no answer to the problem at all. It only seems to be an answer if we fail to distinguish the literal and metaphorical senses of the word “design.”

Dennett thrives on such ambiguity and imprecision.

I wouldn’t say he “thrives” on it so much as he “depends” upon it. It’s virtually impossible to read so much as a single paragraph by a so-called philosopher anymore without encountering one of the rhetorical techniques that Aristotle listed in the category of sophistries.

DISCUSS ON SG