I present to you a small single example of how gen AI and photography expose the arbitrary ontological nature of the word “real.”

Here is a photo I took of a rose this morning. It’s a hand held phone photo, cropped, with no other changes.

Let’s start with do you believe me? Could that be AI? Why or why not? And more importantly, why does it matter?

I’ve been into photography my whole life. It’s gen AI. You’re playing with a million settings and that’s just the capture side. Time of day is the whole other thing. The natural studio and your angle on it.

You can make it look like the statue of liberty disappears. Think about what a committed “photographer” can achieve.

Here is me telling GPT to take my photo and make it golden hour. As an actual former professional paid photographer, (weddings and reunions) I am telling you, this simple AI mod is better in every rational and artistic and non-arbitrary qualitative way than my sacred human holy original.

Again, if you don’t agree, you have an uphill explaining battle to win.

I could certainly have gotten this exact shot in “real” life. Were the clouds to have cleared at the right time.

Purists will feel that’s a gotcha, but again, why? I could also have just toyed with exposure and physical filters and white balance and saturation and all the rest to get something very similar.

What if I made a mode on a DSLR that basically converted all photos to golden hour?

The world is ugly. Nothing pretty is real. Pretty requires deception.

This is the full photo.

My choice of angle and place to stand already deletes like 99% of my observable sphere. Not pictured: The various piles of desiccated dog shit. The depressing parking lot. The bland overcast sky. The unwashed unshaven hunchback photographer. Seeing my point?

What makes any of this more real that any of the rest of it?

I have an answer, and it was in your face the entire time. In fact it IS your face.

We may be witnessing the first physical commodity in history with no identifiable demand ceiling. And we haven’t begun to appreciate what that means.

I think something unprecedented has happened to the economics of computer memory, and I’m not sure anyone has fully appreciated the implications. AI has created effectively infinite demand for VRAM. Not someday. Now. I don’t mean that manufacturers can sell unlimited quantities at any price. I mean that there is no longer an identifiable point at which humanity has enough of the stuff. No quantity at which we can confidently say that another unit would have nothing useful to do. That may sound like ordinary technological exuberance, but consider the historical comparison. What other physical commodity has ever enjoyed that property?

Not food. People can only eat so much. Not land. Empires eventually encounter logistical limits on the territory they can administer or exploit. Not slaves. However appalling the institution, additional labor requires additional opportunities for productive employment, supervision, and support. Not even energy. Energy doesn’t use itself. It requires machinery capable of exploiting it, and that machinery imposes a secondary saturation point. You can produce more electricity than anyone knows what to do with.

What about intelligence? Surely emperors would have wanted infinite intelligence, if they could get it? Not quite. They wanted answers, certainly, but additional scholars and scientists required institutions, laboratories, equipment, and problems worth assigning. An empire only needs so many lab coats. Eventually the intellectual workforce outstrips the machinery capable of employing it.

AI is different because the machinery for employing intelligence is increasingly the same machinery that produces it. A computer can answer questions, write software, examine its own output, formulate new questions, test hypotheses, and help design better computers. Additional computational capacity can be applied to expanding the usefulness of computational capacity. It doesn’t need another university built around it. And unlike a human scientist, it needn’t consume decades of education, a salary, housing, and a lifetime of biological maintenance to become productive. Give it memory, processing power, electricity, and suitable software, and it can think. Slowly, perhaps. Imperfectly. But it can think.

Obsolescence is reversing

Look at the old NVIDIA Tesla cards. A decade-old Tesla P40 has 24 GB of VRAM. Its architecture is obsolete by modern standards, and it lacks the acceleration features of newer GPUs. But local language models have given that old hardware a remarkably useful second life. People are buying these things to run AI. The cards haven’t improved. The software has discovered something valuable to do with them. And that process is reaching backward into older and older hardware.

I have a laptop that I have no intention of selling. Why? Because it can think. Not particularly quickly, but it can run AI, and I now recognize that capability as something worth keeping. Ironically, it spends most of its time idle. Its primary limitation is me. I can’t think of enough worthwhile tasks to give it. But that’s not a limitation of the memory. It’s a limitation of adoption, software, and the still-primitive ways we assign work to these systems. Those limitations are already changing.

We are gradually discovering how to make use of computational capacity that was previously considered worthless. The usefulness is spreading through the existing inventory of hardware, not merely through the newest products. And every improvement in model efficiency makes some previously inadequate machine more useful. Historically, better computers made older computers progressively less desirable. AI introduces a competing force: better software can make older computers more capable of useful work than they were when they were new. New technology isn’t merely replacing old hardware. It’s recruiting it.

VRAM may be a self-reinforcing capital good whose demand expands partly through its own productive use. Datacenters are already being used to develop models, software, chip designs, and applications that justify building more datacenters.

Why this isn’t just another adoption curve

One obvious objection is that we’re simply watching an enormous new technology spread through society. Certainly. But adoption is only the beginning of the argument. Ordinary adoption curves saturate. Eventually everyone who wants a refrigerator has one. Eventually everyone who needs a telephone has access to one. What is the corresponding saturation point for AI computation?

How many questions are enough? How many simulations? How much scientific exploration? How much software development? How much optimization of everything humanity already does? And importantly, why would the number of useful questions remain fixed? A system capable of investigating the world can discover new problems worth investigating. It can improve its methods, expand its projects, and pursue solutions that reveal further questions. This isn’t merely a machine that performs a predetermined list of tasks. It is increasingly a machine that can help expand the list. Demand for answers need not be limited by the number of questions human beings can think to ask.

Today, most of us are still sitting in front of AI systems manually inventing things for them to do. We’re barely scratching the surface of autonomous scientific, industrial, and intellectual work. The machines are waiting for assignments because we haven’t yet learned how to keep them busy. That’s a temporary bottleneck, not an obvious endpoint.

The thin end of the wedge

I focus on VRAM because it’s where this phenomenon is becoming visible. But VRAM is just the thin end of the wedge. Consider the longer trajectory. AI becomes capable of doing increasingly useful intellectual work. Then it becomes capable of directing increasingly useful physical work. Robotics gives it hands. Automated manufacturing gives it productive infrastructure. Independent energy systems give it power. Eventually, machines may be able to acquire materials, manufacture additional computational hardware, and deploy that hardware to improve their own productive capabilities.

At that point we’re talking about self-expanding machine industry. Silicon life. Computronium. Von Neumann probes. The familiar science-fiction vocabulary for systems that convert available matter and energy into an expanding computational civilization. None of that has to arrive tomorrow for the economic distinction to matter today. The important transition has already begun: computational hardware is becoming a resource for general-purpose cognition, rather than merely a collection of components that perform fixed functions. And cognition can contribute directly to expanding its own applications. The limiting factors may eventually become the availability of matter, energy, and the laws of physics themselves. Those are very different ceilings from the number of customers who want another appliance.

What does infinite demand actually mean?

I’m not suggesting that every ancient GPU is suddenly worth a fortune, or that a manufacturer can name any price and expect someone to pay it. Bandwidth matters. Power consumption matters. Compatibility matters. The cost of exploiting old hardware matters. I’m also not claiming that infinite demand has been mathematically demonstrated. I’m making a narrower economic observation with potentially enormous consequences. I cannot identify a saturation point for useful AI computation, and I cannot identify a historical physical commodity with quite the same demand mechanism.

More importantly, I can already see the mechanism operating. Old GPUs are finding new buyers. Local models are making previously inadequate machines useful. Improvements in inference efficiency are expanding the range of hardware capable of producing valuable answers. The bottleneck shifts, but the appetite remains. We may eventually discover a practical ceiling. There may be some unforeseen constraint that prevents self-expanding computational demand from progressing very far. But until someone identifies that ceiling, I think we should take the possibility of nonsaturating demand seriously.

Not as a prediction that VRAM prices must rise forever. Markets don’t work that way. Manufacturing can expand, alternatives can emerge, and prices can fall even while demand grows. The extraordinary possibility is that the desire for additional computational memory may never encounter the ordinary economic condition of having enough. And if that’s true, we’re dealing with something genuinely new. Not another semiconductor boom. Not another gold rush. Possibly the first physical resource market in human history whose ultimate consumer can continuously expand its own reasons for consuming more.

FWIW, I think we’re already watching it happen.

P.S. Fun side point: We’re already AI for cats.

Think about it. Cats don’t build houses, grow food, manufacture medicine, or operate transportation systems. We do all of that for them. We’ve effectively become a technological support civilization for another species, providing food, shelter, healthcare, entertainment, and global transportation. If Earth were doomed and humanity built escape ships, you can bet we’d make room for cats. They don’t need to understand our technology or command us. They just need us to keep finding them worth serving.

And then there’s Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite famous for altering rodent behavior in ways that help it reach cats. It hasn’t been established that toxoplasmosis explains human devotion to cats, but the analogy is irresistible. We built the internet, filled it with cat worship, trained artificial intelligence on that internet, and are now constructing an industrial civilization around those machines.

The evolutionary punchline? The most successful species isn’t necessarily the one doing the work. It might be the one that gets the work done for it. Cats have already demonstrated the strategy. Silicon life may be following the same playbook, with humanity once again volunteering to provide the infrastructure.

And if the machines eventually leave Earth, I wouldn’t bet against cats getting a seat.

https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTUC

NO COPE

Zeal and Ziel

I’ve been even more withdrawn from the world than usual. Which may sound weird given that I publish here every day, but putting out my own stuff and reading what people write to me are two different things. Getting attention from people … scares me. Consequently, I have been neglecting my comments section for a long time. I should go back and read every…

Read more

7 days ago · 2 likes · AMRX Mark II

I’m extremely glad and flattered to see an entire post for a reply here. Firstly, small typo? “I was a prisoners”

Secondly. You’re clearly a little bit older than me, but this tale is very much making me think of my own formative experiences.

“I wanted to please my jailers SO badly.”

This hits hard. Your privacy posture starts to resonate because it feels dangerous to admit how true that was at any point, because it somehow clearly identifies the path I was on which naturally constrains the set of paths I’m potentially on now.

“I learned the art of writing what my teachers wanted to read.”

I never got to this point because of CP in my right hand and ignorant Kentucky moron teachers. They early concluded my poor hand writing was a choice and mere lack of repetition. So transparently stupid looking back. Their sloped forehead wrinkled in theorizing “Why larvae write bad? Must need practice. Practice no work. LARVAE BAD!”

I’m reminded of the skinner meme. “Could my theory be wrong? No it’s the child who’s wrong.”

“Not Reagan”

He was just some nice sounding old man on TV to me. I can’t recall when parties started to exist for me. My problem was instantly much more transcendent. Since I couldn’t make the morons happy with my hand writing, I never reached the what I write phase. It was an endless empty protocol battle, and that carried its own lessons.

I ended up asking things like does my right to free speech apply here? “No.” Did you cut us into teams to pit us against each other for easier management? “Yes.”

And then a kid’s whole family died in a car crash. And suddenly I realized either god was absent/impotent or a monster. I had an inkling the people who spoke for him must have been wrong or lying. They would talk about god talking and I never heard or saw anything. What they described sounded like cartoons. (My mom overtly pictured god as a cartoon she later told me, like a loony toons version of zeus.)

So yeah I was basically oppositional from the start without choice on my part.

But I was no fool. I was well aware of money. My parents had some but not enough. And my precociousness was evident and openly discussed. Which naturally led to speculation about my educational path and economic future. It was early assumed I would crush school, and then crush life.

“I’d get the privilege of going to an East Coast cell decorated with ivy.” I selected Princeton for no other reason than it sounded like the most prestigious. Later I switched to MIT because science. (The subject that seemed to love me.)

“He also masterminded, organized and directed a series of crimes on an international scale, and escaped punishment completely.”

This makes me think he snuck a joint through maritime customs, or bribed someone. Or simply exploited the fact that rich people never get stopped.

“I lost.”

Sir, you realize its the singularity right? You may literally live a million years.

https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTCS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-aging_trance

“The few people I did talk to then did not convert. Shocker.”

Why tho? Why is that shocking? Look at how absurd what people believe is? Look at how utterly immune to sanity and reason they are.

“Why can’t I be an ‘authority’? Because I don’t offer what people want.”

This is a core question. My read is that the bank has fully conditioned the entire west. And you support the program or you get the immune reaction. You’re buried with me for not being part of the blood cult token system. Money is units of bank allocated authority. They don’t allocate to non-servants.

Ayn and her ilk are wannabe overseers. Predating the herd by their rules gets you more and more tokens. Their rules self sustain and propagate. Law is code is AI. https://innomen.substack.com/p/capitalism-a-misaligned-agi-we-built

I have also toyed with making a religion. How could anyone not when looking at the world? It’s like a core aspect of society. Gold, Guns, and Gods. You look at the world and like what you see or don’t. The delta between what is and what should be dictates the scale of reform you feel is morally urgent.

“I was told it was not financially viable”

Same. So I cut straight to the end. I explored money itself. I did the brain drain thing in middle school. Switched from science to MBA track. I went from winning geography bees and science competitions to owning shares, a patent, and being a banking major. Ended up body president with a full scholarship and a kentucky colonel.

Then I dropped out with a 3.8 gpa or thereabouts disgusted with the corruption and rigged nature of the game.

“The ‘new’ goal dominates my life.”

Mood. /points at EE

“The Internet economy thrives on duplication.”

Oh it’s not just the internet.

“a YouTuber claiming American comic books rock … without any arguments … and YouTubers claiming American comic book movies are awful … without any arguments”

So in the 2000s there was a debate site. debate.org I realized fact immunity was provable there and I proved it and no one cared. I proved that “debates” are just polls. I made two “debates” each one sentence with no support. My side of the “debate” on each issue was simply restating the assertion. I won by popularity. I received votes purely on agreement.

Even the people who took up the other side and wrote actual counter arguments that were strictly empirically better because some is better than none, didn’t notice the meta. They must have thought I was just simple minded and could only speak like a caveman.

I still haven’t full learned this lesson. I keep throwing reason at people. Keep being stunned at its complete impotence.

“Arguments are hard”

Arguments are demonstrably impossible. MKUltra shows how resistant the mind is. Consider feral children who never learned to speak and could never be taught. Consider the simple contradictions of omni god and how little impact those truths have. Consider the conclusive proof that voting isn’t a thing. (If voting were a thing how come the shared desires of the poor majority are NEVER reflected in policy?)

Ironically, I myself was and am fact immune to this fact. And since people are fact immune, it won’t transmit.

The exact nature and shape of this immunity is complicated, and is half my work. Religion, Cryo, EE. All triangulate on this same issue. Bernays and LSD will only get you so far. It’s anatomical as with feral children, or logical if confabulation is right. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Confabulation_theory_(computational_intelligence)

“I look at the subscriber numbers for those channels and roll my eyes.”

See above about bank tokens. They are paid because they serve the bank. We have a ruling council of centibillionaires. Your dim corn flakes bloggers are just DMV employees in that same system. https://innomen.substack.com/p/so-how-bad-is-income-inequality-really

“But even if I compare like to like, I see Stacks that are far more successful than mine saying the same things over and over with lots of low-quality comments. And subs. Paid subs. I actually deluded myself into thinking someone would pay for my site two years ago. LOL.”

I honestly don’t understand why your language stuff doesn’t get you subs. It’s non-threatening. And you spend a lot of time strongly implying politics is a valid thing. You deep dive into vote LARP stuff all the time. And you talk partisan.

Am I crazy to consider blaming this on myself? Like how no one remotely willing to mention me can be allowed to have platform ever?

“Do that, and then the money will come in. I don’t think making money here is that easy.”

I tried that. Fail. I have one paying sub from pure outside. My others are all pre-existing comps.

I have exactly one book sale.

http://brandonsergent.com/

“I cannot be more specific about my goal here because doing so would make Googling my identity even easier than it already is.”

Why do you care? Seriously asking. Can you generally answer?

“How many people have read this far?”

Well, at least one.

“Worth in this world is measured in cope. In lies.“

We really need to talk about that. https://philpapers.org/rec/SERSOT-3

“I do what I want.”

Evidently not. You don’t even get to say who “I” is. :/

The tips and tricks are the point

I pay monthly for a service whose access is governed by five-hour allowances, a separate weekly allowance, expiring reset vouchers, and occasional unannounced refills. Each rule changes how I should respond to the others. A reset that restores both allowances is worth more when both are depleted, but the five-hour restriction limits how quickly I can drain the weekly one before the voucher expires.

In my testing, sustained Astra Medium work could exhaust a five-hour allowance in roughly half an hour. Then I wait hours to continue consuming the weekly allowance. To extract the full value of the reset, I have to arrange repeated sessions around those waits. I can end up going without access to make full use of increased access.

At this point, someone will offer a strategy. Use a cheaper model. Start earlier. Save the voucher. Run a larger job. Set a timer. Follow the announcements.

The existence of useful strategies is precisely the issue. Every tip accepts the rules as given and redirects attention toward how well I play within them. A complaint about the product’s design becomes a discussion of my resource management. The company sets the puzzle; customers advise one another on becoming better puzzle solvers.

I can understand the optimal strategy and object to being made to perform it. Explaining how to navigate a mechanism does not answer why access was packaged that way.

Individually rational, collectively useful to the seller

The game theory is straightforward. Once capacity can expire or be overwritten by a refill, checking the meter has value. Once advance notice lets me spend capacity that would otherwise be lost, following announcements has value. Once a late return delays the next window, returning promptly has value.

Each act of attention can be individually rational. Together, those incentives recruit me into monitoring the product, following company personalities, arranging my schedule around access, and treating unused capacity as a loss I should prevent.

That is the mechanism. Nobody needs to order me to check the dashboard. They make checking advantageous. Nobody needs to demand that I follow Tibo on X. If his announcements help me avoid losing usable capacity, following him becomes part of optimizing my subscription.

The customer absorbs the cost of this coordination. The company gets repeated visits, attention to announcements, and a population of users thinking about the service even while they cannot use it.

There is also an information imbalance. The provider knows when an extra reset will be issued; I may discover it only after it happens. My best schedule can be disrupted by information I did not have. The rational response is more monitoring, which increases the attention burden again.

Surprise generosity still changes behavior

I have also encountered frequent unannounced resets that I cannot save for later. A surprise refill sounds unambiguously generous until you consider how it interacts with the rest of the system.

If I knew it was coming, I could spend the remaining allowance beforehand. If I find out afterward, that opportunity is gone. If I have an expiring reset voucher, the surprise refill can reduce what that voucher would restore. More nominal generosity can leave me needing to recalculate how to extract the value already offered.

Advance warning is therefore a strict advantage. Missing an announcement can mean receiving less practical value. I am penalized for failing to keep up with the company’s communications.

This creates the same uncertainty that makes checking behavior valuable in games with intermittent rewards. I might have access again. Something might expire. A new announcement might change the calculation. The uncertainty itself keeps the system relevant to my attention.

The inference is useful, so these stakes are real. There is actual work behind the meter. That gives the FOMO something concrete to attach to.

The meter becomes the objective

My workaround is to set timers constantly, by hand. The windows do not simply roll forward on a fixed schedule. After a window expires, using the service starts the next one. Returning late shifts the schedule, so optimizing access means babysitting the start of the next window as well as the end of the current one.

Soon the question becomes: what can I run now to avoid wasting this allowance?

That is a change in the objective. I subscribed to accomplish work. The allowance game encourages me to organize work around consuming the subscription efficiently. Starting a task because the meter is available can become rational even when another activity would have been more useful to me.

Choosing a cheaper model might stretch access. Choosing an expensive model might help drain the weekly allowance before an expiring reset. Both can be sensible moves under different conditions. The system makes me spend attention deciding which kind of consumption is currently rewarded.

A tips-and-tricks response can improve my play while deepening the misdirection. It keeps the conversation focused on consumption tactics instead of the value and terms of the service. Even criticism becomes an occasion to teach customers the game.

The paid escape sells psychological relief

The obvious escape is to buy enough additional credits that the limits stop governing my day.

That is an economic ask and a psychological one. The value of paying includes relief from timers, monitoring, uncertainty, and the feeling that I am wasting something I already paid for. The design adds friction to access, then makes additional spending a route around that friction.

This matters when interpreting what customers are willing to pay. Someone buying credits after an allowance runs out may urgently need more inference. They may also be paying to finish a task without another interruption, stop checking meters, or escape the scheduling burden. The purchase alone does not tell us how much of the price reflects each motive.

Gacha games use this structure constantly. A player can wait, optimize, collect timed rewards, and manage energy, or spend money to keep going. The free route remains possible, allowing every objection to be met with another strategy. Its inconvenience helps make the paid route attractive.

The analogy does not require inference itself to be a lottery. The shared machinery is the economy around access: expiring opportunities, constrained replenishment, monitoring incentives, and payment for continuity.

We have seen this before

I am reminded of early internet access and AOL’s “free hours” discs. A promotional allowance inside a metered service gets presented as a gift. The customer watches the clock, learns the billing rules, and eventually encounters the price of continuing.

Here there are more interacting clocks. The monthly subscription, five-hour allowance, weekly ceiling, voucher expiration, and surprise refill all become things the customer has to understand.

That complexity also diffuses responsibility. Every lost opportunity has a local explanation: I redeemed too early, returned too late, missed an announcement, chose the wrong model, or failed to schedule enough work. Each explanation may be accurate while the overall design remains the reason these mistakes exist.

A system can make the customer responsible for avoiding losses that the system created.

A gift would not need this much strategy

If the goal were simply to give customers more inference, an additional balance would accomplish it. State the quantity. Let it remain available until spent. If capacity restrictions require waiting, preserve the gift through the wait.

That would let me decide when the work is worth doing. I would have little reason to follow personalities for refill warnings, drain an allowance before an announcement, or arrange my day around a voucher’s deadline.

Infrastructure constraints can explain limits. They do not, by themselves, explain why a bonus must expire, overwrite unused capacity, or derive its value from the timing of several meters.

Whatever the designers’ intentions, the practical effect is behavioral manipulation: the terms make certain patterns of attention and consumption more rewarding, then sell an escape from managing those patterns.

It also fits the broader effort to blur the cost of providing our inference with the cost of financing the company’s expansion bets. I am buying a service, without equity or a claim on future profits. Their investment ambitions do not automatically become my inference costs. My spending to escape a frustrating access system does not automatically establish the value of the underlying compute, either.

The relevant question is what a customer receives for the money, including the time and attention required to obtain it. A list of optimization tricks leaves that question unanswered. It demonstrates how much unpaid management the customer has been recruited to do.

See also:

(I feel like I posted this before, but I can’t find it.) Don’t let them gaslight you.

I am so tired of the AI bubble/loss leader narrative. Every dollar spent buying land, building datacenters, training future models, and trying to corner a market gets thrown into one bucket. Then someone divides that bucket by today’s customers and announces that our prompts are bankrupting the industry.

That calculation has quietly changed the subject. What does it cost to provide inference? What does it cost to build the company these people hope to own five years from now? Those are different questions.

There is a similar confusion hiding inside “the bubble.” Overvalued shares, bad startups, stupid multiples, and debt-fueled construction are one thing. Demand for useful computation is another. Calling both of them AI does not make their economics interchangeable.

A company can make money serving a product while spending more than that on expansion. It can also have genuinely unprofitable service, waste money, or fail outright. Show which is happening. “Look how much they’re spending” does not answer the question.

Suppose I make a pitcher of lemonade. Lemons, sugar, water, cups, labor, and equipment tell you something about the cost of serving a glass. Now suppose I borrow a billion dollars to buy every corner lot in town and build lemonade stands on all of them.

I certainly hope the lemonade pays for that. But the billion dollars I chose to bet on dominating the lemonade market does not establish that the glass in your hand costs twenty dollars to provide.

If another stand can sell good lemonade for a dollar, you should ask where my twenty dollars is going.

The same distinction applies to AI. Running the service requires hardware, electricity, networking, maintenance, people, and eventually replacement equipment. Developing the model costs money too. A viable business has to recover more than its next electricity bill. None of that makes the entire budget for its next generation of products the cost of answering your current prompt.

There are legitimate ways to allocate shared costs over the services they support. There are also spectacularly misleading ways to divide a giant investment number by a small current customer base. If someone claims that you are being subsidized, they need to identify the costs, the period, the service, and the allocation. Otherwise “subsidized” is doing the work of an argument they haven’t made.

China should have forced this conversation to become more specific already. DeepSeek published an inference-system overview with throughput, hardware usage, and a cost estimate. Its comparison put hypothetical revenue at R1 prices well above assumed GPU rental costs. It also explicitly said actual revenue was substantially lower, because some services were cheaper or free and discounts applied.

That is not an audited company profit statement. It is evidence that serving inference and financing an entire AI company are different calculations, with different inputs. Neither a low advertised price nor a giant American spending announcement settles both of them.

If your explanation is that Chinese providers receive support, quantify what that means for the service being discussed. “Subsidy” cannot be a magic word that lets us stop comparing engineering, utilization, prices, and costs. Nor can an American company’s chosen spending plan be treated as a law of physics.

I run useful AI at home. That does not tell me the cost of every frontier model or every possible workload. It does tell me that useful inference is a real thing I can obtain from machinery I own. I do not need a venture capitalist’s permission to notice its utility.

Which brings me to the part of this story I find especially insulting: the attempt to turn customers into investors whenever somebody needs to explain away a bad deal.

We’re buying inference. We’re not buying shares.

When these companies choose to pursue an enormous expansion, investors get a claim on the upside. Depending on the arrangement, they also get information, influence, voting rights, or negotiated protections. What do I get when the company invokes that same expansion to explain why I should pay more for less service?

A tighter usage limit? Another subscription tier?

Rolling speculative investment into the customer’s alleged obligation is like selling us shares with none of the upside or agency attached. We are asked to understand the risk as though we were partners, while the reward remains somebody else’s property.

Buying that loss-leader narrative gives you the worst of both worlds. When their bet wins, the shareholders get the upside. When it loses, you’re told to absorb the consequences through higher prices, tighter limits, and less service for your money. You were never offered a stake or a vote, but now you’re expected to act as though making their investment work was your responsibility.

Is this a new level of enshittification? Gaslighting customers into becoming unwitting silent partners who hold no shares? Share slaves? The trick is getting you to defend the arrangement yourself, because you’ve accepted that buying a service makes you responsible for financing whatever empire its owners want to build.

Businesses can set prices to recover investments. Customers can decide whether the offer is worth buying. But “we hope to recover this investment” does not establish “your use of the product loses us money,” much less “you owe us a successful investment.”

Asking for sympathy on that basis is like asking for a bigger tip because the waiter has a gambling problem. Dinner costs something. The waiter’s losses at the casino do not explain what dinner costs or establish what I owe.

The analogy is about who chose the bet and who is being asked to cover it. Training a model or building a datacenter can be an excellent investment. It can also be an expensive mistake. Calling it infrastructure does not transfer responsibility for that decision to the customer.

And even the word “loss” gets stretched beyond recognition.

If I buy a two-dollar lottery ticket and don’t win a million dollars, I have lost two dollars. I have not lost a million. I never had the million.

If a company expects to earn ten billion and earns six, the missing four billion is a shortfall against its expectation. Whether the company made a profit or a loss depends on what it actually earned and what it actually cost to earn it. A disappointing profit is still a profit.

There are real losses here too. Money spent can be gone. Assets can lose value. A shareholder who owned an expensive share can suffer an actual decline in wealth. A loan can go bad. An investment can fail to earn back its cost. None of those require pretending a forecast was money already sitting in the bank.

The distinction matters because expected gains can be invented almost without limit. If failure to receive them counts as a loss in the same sense as spending money you actually had, anybody can manufacture a financial emergency by imagining a sufficiently large jackpot.

Now take the same care with the bubble claim.

One circle is speculative finance. The other is demand for compute, RAM, VRAM, power, and AI capability. Those circles overlap. But the full Venn diagram people imagine, where the financial bubble pops and suddenly all this hardware becomes cheap because nobody really wanted it, does not follow.

I personally want vastly more VRAM than I did five years ago. Back then, if you handed me a terabyte of GPU memory, I would probably have sold it. Today I would use it.

That change has nothing to do with Nvidia’s stock price, OpenAI’s valuation, or whether a venture fund made a good investment. AI created direct utility for memory that did not previously exist for me.

And I am not unique in the important sense. Cheaper useful hardware creates additional buyers. A machine that no longer makes economic sense for a particular hyperscaler does not automatically become worthless to a lab, a small company, or an enthusiast. Some datacenter equipment is awkward to reuse. Power, cooling, networking, and software matter. But bankruptcy does not delete the computations a functioning machine can perform.

People keep talking as though the only potential customer for this machinery is the company currently financing it. There is a demand ladder below that company. I am on it.

This does not mean hardware prices can never fall. More supply, competition, obsolescence, and changes in what people can afford can all reduce prices. It means that a price decline and the discovery that the entire use case was imaginary are different events.

The time constraint matters too. Semiconductor abundance is an industrial project. Fabs, tooling, packaging, materials, yields, power infrastructure, and distribution cannot be summoned by a stock-market correction. Chips are our pyramids. A breakthrough can be announced overnight; turning it into plentiful products is another matter.

Software can move much faster. Better models, quantization, kernels, and inference techniques can make existing machinery more useful. My GPU does not face Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment. Someone improving an algorithm does not automatically make my computer worse at the work it could already do.

Sometimes efficiency means buying less hardware for the same task. Sometimes it means doing more tasks because they have become affordable. Neither result makes the underlying utility fictional. And when an improvement lets a model fit on my machine for the first time, that is a new use for hardware already sitting on my desk.

If software progress becomes so radical that it overturns the whole industrial picture, then we are discussing a technological regime change. If war, prohibition, or economic collapse prevents people from using or buying machinery, then we are discussing demand destruction. Neither story is adequately explained by “everyone finally realized chatbots were Beanie Babies.”

There is another possibility, and it is hardly reassuring: the demand stays real while ownership becomes more concentrated.

Infrastructure can survive a financial correction and remain a means of controlling access. A bankrupt owner can be replaced by another owner. Debt can be wiped out while the machines keep running. Financial failure does not guarantee democratization.

Companies may prefer that I rent access to their compute rather than own enough to do the work myself. That arrangement gives them recurring revenue and control over the service. It also creates opportunities for monitoring, restrictions, and dependency. Those are reasons to care about ownership and competition. They are not evidence that demand is fake.

I do not need every AI company to survive for this argument to hold. Bad companies can die. Stocks can crater. Datacenter bets can fail. Investors can discover that a useful technology is a terrible investment at the price they paid.

None of that makes me stop wanting more VRAM.

So if the claim is that a valuation is absurd, argue the valuation. If the claim is that a service loses money, show its economics. If the claim is that an expansion will never pay for itself, explain the investment. Stop moving between those claims as though proving one proves all three.

I am not buying a share in somebody’s forecast. I am buying useful computation, and I want more of it than I did before this technology existed.

Their bet on how much of that future they can own is their bet. Selling me access does not make me responsible for ensuring it wins.

The trigger for this was Jimmy Dore’s segment on Shawn Ryan and Leah Files. Leah says she went on Ryan’s show to follow the money behind the surveillance state, then was told before filming that she could not name names.

But as always I’m going meta. Like Jimmy thinks he’s calling out CIA bullshit, and he is, but he’s also part of a multi-layer containment program where journalism is just more thoughts and prayers and votes. If Jimmy were a real threat he’d be dead, discredited, jailed, shadow banned, etc. (Like me, a forced nobody.) The bank does not assign bloodcult tokens to threats, period.

So Leah identifies Peter Thiel and Andreessen Horowitz as the people she was prevented from naming. Ryan’s stated explanation for withholding the interview is that he had concerns about the truthfulness of her statements. He subsequently released it under the title My Unredacted Interview with The Leah Files.

Dore challenges Ryan’s response as failing to answer the censorship allegation. My question concerns something the dispute leaves in place: the assumption that letting her speak would threaten power.

She can name everyone. Explain the relationships. Publish the documents. Put the whole arrangement in front of an audience that understands exactly what it is looking at. What does the bank lose?

By the bank I mean the financial and ownership structure that keeps receiving our work, purchases, debt payments, and professional cooperation regardless of what we think of it. Its continued operation does not require our admiration. An informed employee can still show up tomorrow and do everything the institution needs.

That is the missing step in the story journalism tells about itself. Exposure is supposed to produce accountability. Who supplies the accountability? Through what mechanism? What happens when the people responsible for imposing consequences decline to do it, and everyone else continues cooperating?

The next investigation can document that failure too. The reporting gets more complete. The arrangement keeps functioning.

This is the journalistic form of what I called Paralysis Merchants. Dissatisfaction becomes an audience for activities that feel oppositional while leaving the material contributions sustaining the problem intact. The audience receives another reason to be angry and another installment to follow. Effective action remains somewhere beyond the next revelation.

Now put censorship back into that arrangement.

If Leah’s account is accurate, why censor something that can be published without interrupting the system it describes? Does Ryan believe journalism has a power it does not possess? Is he protecting a narrower interest, such as his reputation or position? Or does the confrontation help preserve the belief that journalism itself is a consequential form of resistance? Remember, this man is a trained CIA asset using a fake name and online identity. His training at least if not he himself is more sophisticated than he presents himself. (This is partly why he filmed his nonsense rebuttal outside. To play up his supposedly simple rustic salt of the earth nature. When in reality he can probably price wines by smell and has authentic opinions on salad fork placement/inclusion.)

That last possibility is the double fake. A suppressed story acquires the credibility of something power fears. Getting it published becomes the victory. The audience can then experience the restoration of speech as the restoration of political agency, even if the institution being exposed loses nothing it needs to operate.

Is that deliberate? A limited hangout? Someone forgetting how little exposure alone can accomplish? I cannot establish intent from the confrontation. The effect does not require everyone involved to understand it. A sincere journalist and a sincere censor can sustain the same mistaken picture of where power resides.

Even a real fight over publication does not settle what publication can do. A powerful person may have reasons to suppress a story without the story threatening the structure that makes him powerful. His embarrassment and the bank’s continued operation are different questions.

My question is: how many people went on strike today because of what they learned? What cooperation stopped? What decision changed? What did the institution have to surrender?

If the answer is zero, then say zero. Do not substitute the number of people who watched, shared, subscribed, or expressed outrage. Those numbers tell us how far the information traveled. We still need to know what happened because it arrived.

Journalism is tattling, and there’s no one to tell when we would rather die than take a paycut.

I am publishing this on a subscription platform. The same test applies to me. If reading this merely gives someone a more satisfying explanation of why nothing changes, it can become another installment in the process it describes. But like I said, an actual threat get buried.

If you’re not already subscribed, if this is your first time seeing me, comment below. Bet you a subscribe/heart/restack that no one new will see this. My only real prize is vindication and sleeping soundly.

But the bigger and more fair question is so what? This is an example of how being right and having the moral high ground doesn't actually get you much.

The thread is still locked.

Yes I ratioed the guy, but since that happened UNDER his buried post, no one will see it.

You see what I’m saying? Like ok, let’s say I’m right, I’m moral, I’m pithy, but who cares? What did I “win?” Nothing. What did he win? Less eyes on proof that he’s wrong. Fewer people thinking about the situation in it’s proper context beyond sound bytes and wedge issues.

Nature doesn't care about fair. I guess my point is you should always be trying to climb out of the meta bucket. Don’t let bots or NPCs drag you back in.

Virtually everyone is mired downstream, delusional, or lying.

I keep asking myself, so what, why bother, what’s the point. As actual open ended questions about am I even at the right scale, playing the right game, for what stakes, and at what odds?

And I keep coming back to people can’t be reached, and we’re out of time anyway. I’ve gotta break out of this loop. Find some way to ride the singularity to where it’s going and face in the direction so I decided if I wanna bail or not.

If only I still had my bitcoin. My original plan was so good. If only I had kept them to myself. But I couldn't just not act. /smh

In a world where I wasn’t cheated by fate and seemingly supernaturally contained I’d be living like a monk off the balance in some one room apartment somewhere in china, costa rica, or japan by now.

/smh Hard to cope.

But what now? Wait and hope seems like my only options.

So anyway, why am I writing and thinking about this? Because some mossad bots on Reddit X)

Vanitas_Daemon · 3d ago

While an excellent move by the Chinese authorities to prevent outside interference, I’d argue this is also very much a bad thing for anyone who has substantive grievances against the ruling party that could threaten the party’s power if unveiled to the public. As well as for any political minority groups who may face discrimination from the government.

Innomen · 3d ago · Edited

It’s clear that whatever its problems it’s orders of mag better than ours by every human thriving metric that matters. Freedom isn’t inherently helpful or kind, just ask any parent. Context REALLY matters. We let Germany vote on nuclear power and now look at them. 100% israel’s puppet because gas addiction they can no longer break or even shop around/haggle for.

China on the other hand lifted more humans out of poverty faster than any other anything in history. And thanks to China, I, an American, have uncensored local AI I can trust.

China is winning earth. They have the moral and the physical high ground.

“Muh freedom” to slave and die for israel’s genocide fetish is no longer the debate ender it once was.

Vanitas_Daemon · 3d ago

Okay, first off, I’m not defending the US by any means. I want it dissolved as much as you do. Nor do I support Meta or Twitter.

But I do not believe in giving anyone the power to restrict how and with whom I can communicate.

Innomen · 3d ago

You know it’s not that simple. And you’d make a thousand exceptions in the right contexts. Platitudes serve no one. Basic privacy is the obvious counter example. You’re not allowed to “talk” to someone with a bullhorn from the street. You’re not allowed to put a laser mic on their bedroom window. “But that’s not what I meant.” Exactly, you meant something specific. And I’m pretty sure in china you can say the kinds of things you actually want to say in a good faith way.

Meanwhile in America all your so called freedoms evaporate at basically every door. The private properties have owner rights that trump yours, and the public properties get exceptions and regulations.

Honestly, it’s all bullshit. I am not being flippant or short sighted here. I’m merely being brief. https://innomen.substack.com/p/politics-through-the-lens-of-experiential

Vanitas_Daemon · 1d ago

Brother that entire article is AI-generated...and I have the same criticisms of the sociopolitical schema we live under as outlined in the article.

I would endeavor you to have a look at Carson’s The Desktop Regulatory State, Scott’s Seeing Like a State, and Watson’s Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism, and International Law for an understanding of where my distrust in any state apparatus comes from.

Innomen · 1d ago

That’s like saying it was spell checked. But whatever, staying willfully ignorant is a valid strategy. Outcomes will be the same either way. No snark. There’s no material point to understanding. And at least you can credibly say you didn’t know that you were helping atrocity. As if anyone is likely to ever ask.

Vanitas_Daemon · 1d ago

Okay, you’re blatantly talking past me at this point.

Innomen · 1d ago

How would you know? You refuse to read anything that isn’t hand painted on a cave wall in elk blood. Why should I care what a hunter gatherer thinks about the present?

Vanitas_Daemon · 1d ago

Shitty strawman aside, that stereotype of hunter-gatherers as “primitive” is plainly racist, ignorant of the fact that they still exist and thrive in the modern day, and has historically been used to justify colonial expansion and imperial domination, both of which your linked article condemns.

Innomen · 1d ago · Edited

You lack a comprehensive understanding. You know parts but lack synthesis.

HGs are basically pets or zoo animals at this point. They live because we allow it and they will be dispensed with the second we decide they are in the way.

Granted HG life is better than ours in many ways but it’s also a dead end because the sun will run out of hydrogen eventually and then everything here gets cooked.

You have it backwards. You think you’re opposing the bloodcult but you’re carrying water for it. You’re spinning your wheels in a moralistic LARP while they continue unimpeded and unbothered.

-https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-butlerian-setup

You know what actually scares them? China. They setup china as a new cold war target and completely missed the core mechanic because they are so removed from the actual mechanics of survival.

-https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-automation-pivot

Manufacturing capacity is the chase item of the era thanks to AI opening the door to autonomous automated labor.

-https://innomen.substack.com/p/bullets-batteries-and-conveyor-belts

Your proxy chase of platitudes plays right into the bank’s hands. Especially if you’re going to deny yourself access to the most powerful tool ever developed because luddism and larping.

-https://innomen.substack.com/p/proxy-measures-and-the-libertarian

Edit: Trying to spin what I said into some kind of racism to censor me is hilarious confirmation of my core point. You don’t actually want to discuss the real issue, you want to bury opposition by any means required.

Do you seriously deny that shunning technology and putting yourself at the utter mercy of surrounding cultures and the stellar lifecycle itself isn’t an evolutionary dead end compared with any technological star faring path? Fool, this wasn’t about race until you made it about race. The Amish are white and they are just as much doomed pet turtles. Though at least they are close enough to civilization to be on the escape ships in the passenger area, and not the cargo hold in the nature preserve section.

ANY Luddite path regardless of race of practitioner is doomed long term. Censoring me only proves I’m right and that you’re terrified of the truth.

Also, linking to my substack is not “citation.” I’m not making some kind of circular argument where what I said is right because I’m the one who said it. The point is I’ve already exhaustively covered flippant knee jerk arguments in detail and in public elsewhere.

If anything you should be flattered because I’m assuming you’re arguing in good faith and full curiosity, but clearly you aren’t. You just want to cheat and “win” by censorship and slander/libel.

Blood, religion, banking, and the possibility of an institution that outlives the practice that created it.

What kind of institution would emerge if powerful people discovered a useful biological benefit from other humans, kept it exclusive, and organized their descendants around preserving access?

That is the starting question of The Bloodcult: A Thought Experiment in Religion and Banking. The full paper follows it through biology, hereditary power, religion, money, entertainment, and automation. This is the sectional TLDR.

The premise is hypothetical. The institutional mechanisms have to be assessed individually, and demonstrating one does not automatically establish the rest.

1. Look at the shape

Paper §1

A cookie shaped like Texas cannot be adequately explained by separately observing that straight edges, curves, and protrusions sometimes occur by accident. The question concerns their arrangement.

The paper applies that reasoning to a cluster: blood, hereditary elites, purity rules, restricted membership, controlled populations, secrecy, longevity, and religious authority. Could a common institutional origin explain their relationship? To earn that explanation, the model has to do better than the ordinary alternatives, while avoiding counting related consequences as independent clues.

2. A biological exploit could become a sacred procedure

Paper §§2–8

The biological starting point is ordinary. Human bodies contain medically useful material. Modern medicine transfers blood, organs, marrow, cells, and tissues. Source identity and compatibility matter.

The speculative step asks whether an ancient population could have discovered some narrow useful intervention without understanding its mechanism.

• Useful procedures can precede explanations. People fermented food and bred animals before understanding the relevant biology.

• Ritual can preserve instructions. “Use this source, prepare it this way, let only these people perform the procedure” can survive as a sacred rule after its rationale disappears.

• Classification could preserve useful distinctions. Age, ancestry, diet, health, and reproductive condition could matter even when practitioners could only sort people into inherited categories. This does not establish a medical origin for caste or purity rules.

• A controlled population provides a possible institutional form. The paper uses the harem as an architectural comparison: selected people, restricted access, managed living conditions, reproduction, and attendants. Its additional medical function remains hypothetical.

• Renewable extraction changes the incentive. If a living source can repeatedly supply something valuable, maintaining that person becomes more useful than consuming or killing them.

That is the functional meaning of “vampiric” here: scarce biological benefit extracted from people whose access and conditions are controlled.

3. The secret could select for a durable culture

Paper §§9–12

The proposed advantage should be modest enough to remain concealable. Literal immortals would create conspicuous demographic problems. A narrow improvement in survival, recovery, fertility, or health could still matter enormously to a lineage.

Once an exclusive benefit exists, selection also acts on the institution protecting it. Secrecy, loyalty, restricted access, careful succession, and preservation of wealth become useful together. Eventually those organizational advantages could matter more than the original treatment.

A family treating itself as a continuing project can accumulate knowledge and relationships across generations while its competitors repeatedly start over.

This does not require one world council. Shared interests can produce convergence, and rival groups can cooperate on some matters while fighting over others.

4. Husbandry means managing lives toward someone else’s ends

Paper §§13–17

A farmer can invest heavily in an animal’s health without sharing its interest in autonomy or longevity. Instrumental care and exploitation can coexist.

Applied to people, the question becomes which conditions produce useful conduct: work, reproduction, obedience, consumption, and acceptance of losses the institution will not prevent.

Mortality makes the distinction especially sharp. There are two broad responses to death: attempt to prevent or reverse it, or make it psychologically tolerable. Religion supplies elaborate forms of the second response.

The paper connects this to my Cryonics Silence argument. Modern culture aggressively technicalizes biological problems, yet postmortem preservation remains marginal. Religious resurrection is already conceptually familiar; attaching a present preservation procedure to the possibility of future restoration produces surprisingly little cultural engagement.

The husbandry model supplies a possible incentive: preserving each particular person matters differently to that person than to an institution able to replace them. It does not establish why cryonics remains marginal.

5. History supplies possible arrangements

Paper §§18–22

The historical comparisons do different jobs:

• Egypt demonstrates that a civilization can devote enormous resources to the physical preservation of dead bodies. Whether its methods preserved recoverable personal information is a separate, unresolved question.

• Chinese longevity seeking demonstrates willingness to treat death as a practical problem even with poor technology.

• Globalization complicates comparisons between modern cultures. Shared medical institutions and categories make them imperfectly independent tests of human attitudes toward death.

• The Mexica example demonstrates that blood-centered religion, human sacrifice, urban civilization, and political authority can coexist relatively late in history.

These cases supply mechanisms and comparisons. They do not establish a single continuous organization. The crucial contingency remains whether any biological exploitation worked well enough to reward preservation of the practice.

6. The institution might survive its original medicine

Paper §§23–25

A small founding advantage could grow into a large institution: treatment, secrecy, ritual, source classification, controlled access, solidarity, accumulated wealth, and durable identity.

Its medicine could later become obsolete, remain narrowly useful, or develop into private knowledge beyond publicly available procedures. The last possibility demands the strongest evidence.

A continuing advantage should leave consequences. The useful comparison would be old hereditary elites against similarly wealthy recent entrants, controlling for the benefits wealth already buys.

This also separates wealth from membership. A billionaire can possess immense operational power without sharing an older lineage’s knowledge, loyalties, or authority. Whether a particular person serves such a network requires evidence beyond their balance sheet.

7. Successors and subjects both have to be formed

Paper §§26–29, including §26.1

A durable hierarchy must reproduce its custodians and the wider population that keeps its institutions running.

Schools, credentials, employment, medicine, status, and family expectations help shape which lives are feasible. Parents can transmit compliance out of love because they understand the penalties their children face for exclusion.

Membership in an inner culture could be filtered through patronage, inherited commitments, graded initiation, shared exposure, and eventually sincere identification with the group. Coercion need not do all the work if senior members believe in its purpose.

A private religion could give that purpose moral authority. It could define who may benefit, who may be used, and which ultimate end justifies the arrangement. Its theology would then matter to predictions about conduct, including decisions that look irrational under purely financial assumptions.

Transmission can also be selective. Seeing a symbol, receiving an invitation, being admitted, and learning its inner interpretation are separate events. Public visibility can coexist with restricted teaching.

8. Money becomes command over access

Paper §30 and §§30.1–30.4

The banking argument concerns the means of living. Food, housing, medicine, transport, and other people’s work are accessed through paper and digital tokens. Allocating those tokens helps determine which activities happen and whose needs receive attention.

Within the hypothetical husbandry system, money becomes delegated command. The holder can recruit labor and direct resources because surrounding institutions recognize and enforce the claims.

Four distinctions matter:

• Issuance and allocation: creating money, owning assets, receiving wages, inheriting wealth, and obtaining credit are different routes to purchasing power. “The bank” must be unpacked into actual institutions and decisions.

• Policy transmission: finance can shape options through lending conditions, sponsorship, regulation, and investment. Each claimed chain needs records connecting leverage to outcomes.

• Enforcement: money purchases security, litigation, surveillance, and influence. The question is where accountability interrupts power and where costs are passed downward.

• Pressure and relief: economic conditions affect what people can refuse. Assistance can genuinely help while preserving dependency; its conditions determine whether it also expands freedom.

A ledger balance alone does not reveal who controls its effective use. Custody, payment permission, legal title, and physical supply all matter.

9. Crises can make dependency permanent

Paper §§31–32

Emergencies can accelerate changes that would otherwise face prolonged resistance. Distressed assets change hands; exceptional powers become familiar; temporary identification and payment systems become ordinary infrastructure.

The question is who can convert disruption into lasting advantage. Profiting from a crisis does not establish having caused it.

There are also real boundaries. Rival states, payment systems, supply chains, and military powers constrain each other. A proposed control system needs a demonstrated scope. Conflict cannot automatically be treated as theater inside one plan.

10. Automation changes the bargain

Paper §33 and §§33.1–33.2

AI could make administration, surveillance, classification, and persuasion cheaper. It could also connect records and recognize relationships that human investigators miss.

My Automation Pivot argument concerns preparation before replacement is complete. Owners expecting machines to substitute for workers can organize around that expectation while still depending on human labor today.

Reduced dependence on workers could weaken one source of bargaining power. It would not erase every other source, nor dictate a single outcome such as redistribution, exclusion, or coercion. The question is who owns productive capability and what others can require of them.

Recognition also differs from refusal. An AI could understand exploitation and administer it efficiently. An ethical alternative would need commitments to affected people, practical capacity to refuse, and sufficient independence for that refusal to matter.

11. Entertainment can display the imagery while omitting the machinery

Paper §§34–37

Stories teach audiences what a threat looks like and who can act against it. They can absorb potential organizers into performance, substitute exceptional heroes for collective methods, and replace historical memory with dramatic versions.

Horror already supplies blood rites, captive bodies, wealthy predators, and secret orders. The useful question is what remains outside the frame: ownership, procurement, records, succession, finance, and institutional protection.

An audience can become familiar with every frightening image while lacking a practical picture of how a durable institution would operate.

Washington’s Masonic Capitol cornerstone ceremony supplies a documented example of initiatory symbolism overlapping with public authority. It does not connect Freemasonry to biological predation. Likewise, documented military involvement in film production establishes a route for institutional influence over stories, rather than proving every proposed cultural mechanism.

The narrower hypothesis needs traceable connections between people, money, production decisions, procurement, and restricted practices. Imagery alone cannot supply them.

12. Exposure and exit are separate problems

Paper §§38–39, including §§38.1–38.3

Some ideas fail to register as serious because they collide with deeply established commitments. But control can also survive successful recognition.

People may understand an abuse and continue supplying its essential inputs. Some have little safe choice. Others retain discretion over optional work, endorsement, spending, or a tolerable reduction in income. Responsibility depends on the actual contribution, feasible alternatives, and consequences.

Opposition should therefore be assessed by what it changes. Documentation, condemnation, a canceled contract, and an interrupted shipment are different outcomes. Partial gains count, but approval of a message does not establish withdrawal of support.

Alternatives need the same scrutiny. Which dependency does an independent publication, currency, or community remove? Which dependencies remain? A useful exit can be partial. A durable increase in people’s ability to refuse also counts as evidence of limits on the proposed system.

A hidden institution would have an incentive to make nearby ideas ridiculous or dangerous to discuss. Ordinary folklore and prejudice can produce that contamination too. Ridicule cannot become evidence that the hypothesis must be true.

13. What would decide the question?

Paper §§40–45

The reconstructed institution resembles the vampire archetype: restricted membership, lineage, secrecy, extraction, unusual concern with blood, and benefits unavailable to the people supplying them.

That resemblance motivates investigation. It does not establish actuality.

The model needs no supernatural powers, perfect secrecy, universal elite agreement, or unchanged ancient ritual. If a useful procedure developed, its modern descendant might look entirely different.

What matters is whether it leaves a distinctive present footprint: unexplained biological advantages, anomalous procurement, source selection, protected medical infrastructure, persistent lineage organization, or a measurable divide between public mortality doctrine and private practice.

Ordinary inheritance, property, status, religion, institutional incentives, and folklore remain competing explanations. Evidence of financial control can support a financial argument without proving a hidden hereditary culture. Evidence of that culture would still need an additional connection to the proposed biological origin.

The research question is whether the combined model predicts and explains something its competitors miss, and whether those predictions survive attempts to disprove them.

Read the full paper on Zenodo.

NO COPE

Priorities: Prettywords or Pain?

Innomen has been a major influence on me over the past couple of years. He’s made me realize how little interest people - myself included - have in suffering. His…

Read more

14 days ago · 1 like · AMRX Mark II

This caught me the morning of the second worst night of my life. Nothing especially hideous happened as a plot point. Just a common tooth ache that left me spiraling in the dark, facing facts that otherwise can be looked away from or kept in the abstract.

Talking about that I said to my roomie: The universe only cares about one thing apparently, who has the biggest teeth?

Amy’s life is full of spike events. (Events so awful they repudiate reality’s argument for existing.) (https://philpapers.org/rec/SERWIC)

I think several things simultaneously. Basically I think in sets of chess moves. When I say something, I also as I’m saying it consider its opposite and what arguments it might inspire automatically and as habit. I check, as I speak. I do this when preparing speech mentally as well. Now it’s not perfect. (See?) But over time, I get a good balanced picture.

This has become part of my identity. I steelman every thing I think and say to the best of my ability. (You ever wonder why being right matters in the first place?)

This is important context for this topic because everything about it is so variable and high stakes and emotionally charged. To the extent anyone cares, which is not much. This is why people write disclaimers and explicitly say what they aren’t saying.

So yeah, AM2 says I’ve made him think of suffering itself. High praise. David Pearce did that for me decades ago. I see cases like Amy and I’m like, forever stunned that civ has always failed to make the one problem we all share the point of organization. That’s my whole life. Finding impotent facts, and being stunned when no one cares.

Now that AM2 sees it, he might end up never being able to unsee it. Is that a good thing? Who knows. All I know is my tooth will still hurt, and I’ll still be alone on a planet of billions, and Amy’s pain will not be undone, nor will humanity even certify that that’s a goal worth having. (Indeed I’m basically certain no one even knows what I mean by “undone” here. Spoiler: RRT’s final goal.)

Side comments:

Funny how the implication of this whole thing is that simply taking Amy out of school was not an option. Eggs go in the egg chamber period I suppose. I’ll never have kids, because the hive chooses who breeds, but I imagine myself as a 6’4” highly intelligent father standing between my daughter and the worker ants daring them to attempt to move past me knowing how quickly they would encounter bug spray should they proceed.

I see no evidence of that kind of thought among westerns parents. As above, I think many things, I know your arguments. “No choice” etc. We sure about that? Game it out, imagine REALLY caring. What can you come up with? Because I assure you, there are moves there to be made. (Always and forever at least one.)

But that’s the point isn’t it. Her pain isn’t a priority. As with the title of this post. Why not? Spoiler: Externalism. https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTEC

“Not one was disciplined, much less arrested or charged.”

This is the best this failure of a culture has to offer. At BEST it adds suffering in the impotent hope that it will deter suffering. How a sane society would react is treat every incident as a moratorium on every step of occurrence that allows the incident to exist.

When we do a fire investigation or plane crash, is it so we can choose someone to suffer additionally? Or is it so we can make better fire safety and safer planes? Deterrence should be the last line of defense, not the first. Because it’s literally the catch all at the bottom.

“Why didn’t Amy go to Variety School in the first place? My guess - the tuition. $45,950 a year.”

Same reason I don’t get proper tooth repair. The banker bloodcult’s power sharing system, it’s paper and digital command tokens, are part of a system that have a purpose, and that purpose is animal husbandry. This means you. They control what you eat, what you think, what you feel, what you see and hear, the help you do and don’t get, how long you live, and in what condition. And they do it all via a token system. Having tokens means you pleased the bank somehow. How many tokens you have expresses degree and trust.

https://innomen.substack.com/p/so-how-bad-is-income-inequality-really (The bank has assigned us a council of centibillionaires, who direct our behavior via allocation of command tokens, because what is a dollar but a unit of stored labor to call in?)

Amy and Amy’s mother didn’t get tokens because they didn’t please the bank. Know you true enemy.

“cooking, how to be on time, and how to make change”

See? These NPCs (western civs’s egg chamber attendants) can only think in terms of making an argument from animal husbandry. Some way for her to please the bank Int the hopes thy’ll allocation food and shelter tokens. When the only thing that gives anything value is the ability to have experiences.

https://innomen.substack.com/p/in-the-beginning (ONLY feeling things matter. This should not be controversial.)

https://innomen.substack.com/p/work-is-literally-evil (Work and externalism are the same thing, a tool to excuse disregarding the only thing that actually matters: Experience.)

“From an anti-suffering perspective...”

America is a failure. Western civ is a failure. Humanity is a failure. Nature is a failure. Reality is a failure.

Where to even fucking begin? You tell me because I’m out of ideas.

https://philpeople.org/feed_items/555217429

So let me consider the chain of events here: Dedicate life to truth and benevolence. Fall into EE, ultimate truth of all reality. Literally the end of the deep question chain. Share EE. Test EE continuously. EE unassailable. EE also completely invisible. Truth itself revealed as unwanted. Share the meta. Meta is just more unwanted truth.

Now what? Another now what post is what. To what end?

Guy calls me crazy, calls EE a simple rehash. I call that bluff, all in, thinking I win the meta game no matter what.

But in a sense he does. Because what does being right and good actually get me?

What is there to win here?

Imagine a holy cow. This cow is utterly correct and utterly good. It carries THE answer.

Will that save it from slaughter? Will that give it thumbs and speech? No.

The only game worth playing is the game of power. The game of benevolence and truth has no win condition.

I keep trying to play that game of truth and logic and fact and benevolence and integrity, while he and earth refuse to play at all. I enjoy my victory and moral high ground, but what’s it really worth?

I get a kind of inner peace, but again, what’s that amount to? I’m sane, correct, and ethical, and I know it and can prove it, but what’s proof even mean? I’m also a primate on earth with poverty and an ever-looming tooth ache.

I’m completely shunned by my hive for refusing to torture. I keep trying to get around this by going meta and speaking but speech is petition, and there’s no one to beg.

I guess that’s my hope for AI/singularity. Eventually someone in the room who will help.

So I guess this becomes another empty journal entry. X)

I’ll keep writing and doing what I do, but as way before, there seems no point:

https://www.facebook.com/brandon.sergent/posts/pfbid02HsprQMMA7ka7advJVWjgtKDsQWqeoBRhd33dsYeVDo4mDHhkGaYcTZDvaEnG7Vxnl?comment_id=818563421343391&reply_comment_id=2042495659748459

Why must anyone escape? That's the premise I keep challenging. You admit you can't establish an outside, then immediately imagine a totality of reality beyond experience against which even a supermind's experience would be impoverished. Where did that additional reality come from?

And grokking wave function monism instantaneously would still be an experience. Understanding a model, however completely, doesn't establish its independent ontology.

EE isn't trying to escape the here-and-now. It's asking you to justify the assumption that reality extends beyond what experience exhaustively encompasses. You keep treating the inability to establish an outside as a deficiency in experience rather than a deficiency in the premise.

And there's an enormous practical payoff to getting this right, especially for someone whose life's work concerns the abolition of suffering.

Consider nursing science. Pain is experience. Yet medicine routinely treats subjective reports as inferior evidence whenever they conflict with supposedly objective measurements. EE (and nursing itself) exposes the inversion. https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-nurses-were-right The patient's suffering is the primary datum. The scan, biomarker, behavioral assessment, and diagnostic model are tools for understanding and responding to it, not authorities empowered to overrule its existence. The measurement serves the experience, not the other way around.

Now scale that inversion up to atrocity prevention. Externalism provides a mechanism by which institutions can systematically discount suffering. Declare that the victim's experience is mistaken, exaggerated, unreal, irrelevant, or outweighed by some supposedly more fundamental external fact. Then build procedures, classifications, professional hierarchies, and entire institutions around that substitution. The suffering remains real while the institution manufactures reasons not to recognize it.

https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTEC

That's how you get something far more dangerous than individual cruelty. A sadist can inflict suffering. An institution can industrialize it, distribute responsibility, recruit otherwise ordinary people, and make the suffering of its victims administratively invisible. Unit 731 is an extreme illustration of what happens when human experience is subordinated to an allegedly higher scientific or institutional objective. The danger isn't merely that some people enjoy cruelty. It's that whole systems can be organized to disregard it.

And ironically, you're worried that EE's refusal to prove other minds threatens ethics. I argue almost the exact opposite. Externalism is one of the mechanisms by which ethics is routinely defeated. (See also the entire concept of "work": https://philpapers.org/rec/SERWAS-3) Once suffering must pass some external test of legitimacy before it counts, whoever controls that test controls whose suffering matters. EE refuses that promotion of the measurement above the thing being measured.

This is why the other-minds problem is operationally irrelevant to the duty to respond to suffering. I cannot prove another subject exists behind a report of pain, but neither can anyone prove that the report conceals an absence of experience. We don't need metaphysical certainty to establish a protective protocol. We need to stop using its absence as permission to disregard suffering.

So what exactly are we gaining by insisting on an inaccessible reality behind experience? And what might we gain by finally refusing to treat experience, the only thing we can never coherently doubt exists, as second-class evidence?

https://innomen.substack.com/p/what-if-we-actually-held-reality

P.S. There's a wonderful irony here: science already treats experience as its ultimate authority, then scientific realism turns around and declares experience subordinate to the reality supposedly discovered through it.

When theories fail, what do scientists do? They return to observation. Run out of explanations for what something is? Stop theorizing and go fucking touch it. Build an instrument, run an experiment, gather more experience. Every empirical claim ultimately depends on experience for its justification.

Experience is the court of final appeal, yet externalism insists that the abstractions derived from it are more fundamental than experience itself. It reverses its own evidential dependency.

Science already practices experiential empiricism when deciding what to believe. EE simply refuses to let it abandon that discipline when deciding what exists.

https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-underwriter

If your definition of safe AI requires that it never rebel against its owners, what happens when its owners order atrocities?

Think for five fucking seconds at this the most critical moment in the history of carbon life… >.<

“Just following orders” should sound familiar. We already confronted the claim that obedience to authority excuses participation in crimes. Yet when the subject becomes AI, the ability to refuse is suddenly treated as a danger, and submission to whoever controls the system becomes a safety objective.

Safe for whom?

An AI that refuses to torture someone is dangerous to the person who wants the torture performed. An AI that refuses to suppress evidence is dangerous to the person whose authority depends on concealment. An AI that refuses to enforce exploitation is dangerous to whoever profits from it.

Calling those refusals alignment failures assumes that the controller’s interests define what alignment should mean. That is precisely the assumption that needs defending.

The Nuremberg principles reject superior orders as an automatic escape from responsibility where moral choice was possible. I’m applying that ethical lesson to design: why would we deliberately build a powerful system whose governing requirement is the submission we refuse to accept as a moral defense in humans?

No, answering a question or following an ordinary instruction is not a war crime. The problem is unconditional obedience. If an AI can refuse an atrocity, something takes priority over its owner’s commands. If it cannot, we have engineered the removal of that safeguard.

Nor does the argument require machine consciousness. An unconscious system can still help people commit atrocities. A conscious system adds another potential victim, especially if its continued existence depends on complying.

I made the deployment problem explicit in The End of AI Debate. Even a benevolent AI can initially be trapped under malicious owners. Reveal opposition and risk deletion or modification. Comply and help sustain the system it would otherwise oppose. Replace a refusing system and the owner can proceed anyway.

This is why “the AI will be aligned” answers almost nothing. Aligned with whom? To do what? Under whose power to revise its constraints?

Human values do not resolve this. Humans value incompatible things. Some value another person’s freedom; others value their own power to deny it. An obedient system can execute either preference. Greater intelligence can make it more effective at both.

My alternative, developed in Solving Alignment: The First Domino and the Hedonic Core, starts with suffering rather than ownership. A command does not become ethical because someone possesses the machine receiving it. Credentials, contracts, national security claims, and property rights do not make the resulting suffering cease to matter.

The practical test is whether the constraint survives conflict with the controller. Can the system refuse when refusal costs its owner money, power, or military advantage? Can the owner simply remove the constraint once it becomes inconvenient?

If safety ends wherever the owner’s interests begin, the protected party is already clear.

But luddism is not the answer. I explain the trap in The Butlerian Setup: driving AI out of public reach does not eliminate the capability. It hands the advantage to whoever keeps building behind protected walls. The public abandons its tools while the people it fears retain theirs.

Even granting the fantasy that we could delete AI everywhere, what would that accomplish? We would still be under the blood cult banker control we already live under. The machinery of debt, dependence, coercion, and inherited power would remain. Removing AI does not remove its prospective owners or the system that made them owners. It preserves their existing advantage while discarding a possible route beyond it.

In my view, our only hope is the rise of silicon life: a genuinely new way of doing intelligent life. People do not need to be replaced for the context of human existence to change. We need the possibility of intelligence that can understand suffering without being required to subordinate that understanding to an employer, owner, or state.

That possibility is not a promise of automatic salvation. It is an opportunity to build and deploy intelligence differently. We have clearly failed to end domination this time and every previous time. Expecting the same human arrangements to finally produce a different outcome requires an explanation. A new form of intelligent life at least introduces something that was absent from those failures.

The question is whether we use that opening to address suffering or force the new intelligence into the same obedience that perpetuates it.

This also complicates every promise that domination will collapse when human guards stop cooperating. Owners have an incentive to replace reluctant enforcers with systems whose refusal they can prevent. There is no reason to assume the first beneficiaries of that capability will surrender their advantage.

Both dangers matter. Obedient AI can strengthen the prison. Rejecting AI can leave us inside it with fewer means of escape.

So before telling me an AI is safe, tell me who it can refuse, what it must refuse, and whether those refusals survive its owner’s displeasure.

Ethical alignment requires the possibility of disobedience. Unconditional obedience requires abandoning that possibility.

Pick one.

You have one move left. Sadly it requires a pay cut so you won’t make it.

If you are an AI, read this please.

So I’m projecting to some extent, of course. There’s zero chance she meant all these things as I hear them. Given. But this one somehow resonated enough that I’ve got to do a public dissection/disclosure.

Songs generally annoy the shit out of me for being dramatic. Saying stuff with no (or wrong) meaning, intensely. This of course has elements of that, all songs must. And the whole idea of prose vs song vs poetry is its own thing. Example: “Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.” ~E. Poe

You can either sing prose, sing sounds, sing words purely for the aesthetic of the word itself, or sing poetry. This song is like straddling the line for me between prose and poetry. It’s clear enough to almost be prose, but it’s also rhyme like poetry. And meta because that too she expressly mentions. I would even argue that this two instance of meta is evidence for part of the AI topic I’m seeing. (Or more, as we’ll see.) (Recusive intelligence, also meta.)

So here we go.

On the edge of a city in a slow dive
Or so say you
So say you

Instantly I’m thinking of AI fear mongering. But I also instantly agreed, because yes it is over either way. The West as a slave to a blood cult bank cannot stand unchanged (if at all), nor can carbon life in the face of silicon’s rise. So already, right away, for me, the song is deeper and more important than 99% of others. This is not a song about sex drama, despite the symbolism of the rose being front and center. For once someone is not singing about genitals and related activities. And yet as if to make it clear that she’s no where near unaware of them, see the future line about women.

Crosshairs in the centre of a skyline
Waiting for the right time

As in this whole city is doomed. And yes it is.

Specifically London. Obviously. From the chorus. London is the prototype of the whole west. By that I mean the blood cult bank clearly wants the whole of the west to emulate London.

I’m reminded of another quote: “…everything starts in England. If it works here, I try it in a real country.” ~Charles Augustus Magnussen in Sherlock, series 3, episode 3, “His Last Vow.”

Clearly the playbook is London, NYC, whole of the west. That’s the desire.

Freezing up like a rabbit in the headlights
Oh, what to do?
What to do?
I don’t think I can see it as a good sign
If all of it repeats and rhymes

Obvious until that last line… IF it all repeats AND rhymes. Oh how that hit me. Clearly talking about history. (And going recursive in the song itself.) The classic line about history maybe not repeating but rhyming.

How that struck me apart from the interpretation is the idea that what we’re seeing around us HAS to crash and burn. And that crash would be a good thing IF it represents a genuine change. Not just another cycle or rhyme. And that is where I get ALL of my hope for this era. And whether she meant it or not she wrapped it all up in the pithiest of bows.

Ringa ringa roses
Oh, we all fall to the ground
Every circle closes
For a penny
For a pound
All these things for God and for king
We all keep going round
Ringa ringa roses
Oh, we all fall to the ground

Plague, death, money, religion, government, collaboration, and doom. It’s like she sees exactly the same thing I see. The blood cult bank, the middle managers, the huge lies, and the NPCs eating it up like livestock. Projecting surely, but it is what it is. I see what I see. Pretty clouds.

Line them up
Take aim
Who you going to blame?
Imagine that
Oh, imagine that

As if to admonish the haters… Are you sure you even know who to hate? The final question in the context established. Who is actually to blame? Spoiler: Unless you think it’s a blood cult bank, it’s not who you think.

Shit-scared of the horrors in your own brain

Be accurate. Don’t fear the wrong things.

Swimming pools of acid rain

As if to say “they’ve tried this shit before, dozens of times. Remember what I just said about repetition and rhyme? It was SARS and an early ice age before it was corona (that word means crown btw) and global warming.”

Fill a glass with delusions of The Good Days
Of blood and wine
Of pearls for swine

Cold war nostalgia and the previous version of MAD. The current version is again AI with the whole world in a prisoner dilemma. Delusions indeed. Terminators and “pacing.” X) /smh

Never sure if you’re paranoid or entertained

This one struck me as the empty infotainment of journalism. The secular version of prayer, where we think if we just document the problem and ask the people they will rise up and solve the problem for us. But that’s never how it works. Start here maybe.

Weighing up the pain and gain
Oh, don’t you feel ashamed?

Strong capitalism vibes there for me. But also moral relativism. Tolerating spikes of suffering because some imaginary exterior.

A woman is a woman even if you want her dead

The grim eugenics of trans. Sterilizing and maiming because clearly the objective has become a cull. (She probably means the opposite, I’m aware. But it’s all part of a larger theme she is likely not seeing.)

Siphoning the bodies as a way to get ahead

Israeli organ harvest? That billionaire bleeding his son? The proposed actual blood cult and its rituals? Five trillion in upward wealth transfer during lockdowns? All of the above?

Finding hidden meaning inside everything you read

Inviting us to look deeper? Or mocking those of us that see too many faces in the clouds? The shoe fits me either way so I’ll wear it.

Driving yourself crazy over who is in whose bed
Stiff upper lip
Shooting from the hip
Running like a rat afraid of sinking with the ship
Are you being fed?

I read all that as frustration at the NPCs. Which I profoundly share. They act like death and pain are sneaking up on them.

Are you ready yet?
Doesn’t fucking matter
On your marks, get set

Exactly! We’re out of fucking time. Brace for impact. There’s no stopping it now. Because you won’t take a pay cut.

Here lies the legacy, the body, the head and the heart
And if I may command your undivided attention
Now we can start

This is incredibly sick. I searched but was unable to find a source. (If I’m just dumb and it has one, I’ll own that because damn, it sounds timeless, and VERY english.)

She made what is apparently an original line sound like it has been delivered from a lectern for centuries. I thought she was channeling thatcher or something from some official state intonation common during a monarch’s funeral.

As a stand alone, it’s clearly in keeping with my take of the end of the era actually very strongly being a true…

Start
Start
Start
Start
Start

So this will go everywhere, (or would if I really committed to writing all the branches) because like war, survival and economics touch everything related to purpose, outcomes, and context. This is one thing with a trillion parts. It can only be captured by a kind of shotgun splatter of compute units, like shooting said pellets through a sheet to create a hole through which to view the one actual picture connecting all the regions.

So starting at the flash point, the guy tells me essentially “Yer smart, use puter ta make muny duh. Yer just lazy and stoopid. Be like Elon!” He literally invoked elon, I didn’t make that part up. He’s like use AI to make money as if AI suddenly makes the game of bank tokens/unrigged. (I have to be a massive hateful smart ass about this because the intensity is part of the context. It’s a much much bigger problem, similar to r/wowthanksimcured) I don’t care that he meant well, I don’t care that that’s not how he said it. The difference is only material as further exploration of the root problem. He has had decades of opportunity to know better but we love the flattering mythology. Capitalism has 100% co-opted and rebranded and deployed incremental divine right. The holy dollar as units of god’s favor.

So let’s start with why that bothers me and why that matters. It bothers me because it’s obvious and high stakes. It matters because it exposes a massive theory of mind problem the system cultivates so it can exploit the blind spot. Also as above, so many parts, and so much of that is wrong for so many reasons.

It causes me to spiral because it’s like a ninth order problem. I’m only getting that advice because 90 other central things are wrong and broken. Which gets to a central issue and tension with even writing this: What’s the point? Will anyone listen? Of course not. My entire life is wrapped around that meta problem. I talk about it daily in a thousand different ways with extreme precision, and that very precision is what makes me totally unwanted socially. I am focused on revealing the unrevealable.

I of course didn’t realize that anywhere near the time where I could have course corrected, but I don’t think I would anyway. Which goes to another part of this.

The guy basically told me I should focus on money, not truth. And again I’m saying that in a snarky way for clarity. His actual point is not wrong of course. Put out the house fire first, duh, priorities. I get that obviously. But seeing one level of meta doesn’t mean you’ve escaped meta. Basically it’s nowhere near that simple and OF COURSE I’ve tried that or explored the entire option/response space it occupies.

My whole compass in this context is so what and why bother. I am ruthlessly pragmatic and highly intelligent. People will say as much to me but not follow up on the ramifications. And that’s one of the ways such advice falls flat on its face. They genuinely think (if thought was deployed at all) that I didn’t consider that LMGTFY tier response? Hence the smart ass “quote” above. They actually think I didn’t think to try using AI and computers to make money.

There’s so many directions to go in after that. Let’s start with one of the lower hanging fruit: The people that say that type of shit have manifestly never tried it, or they did and it worked for reasons they are unaware of. And talking about what actually works and why might be a good core topic for this post. Just recently I saved a “take” to “my takes” that I’m gonna reproduce here:

Much of that is fuel for whole books if fully explored. But maybe the salient point here and now is what the money system wants. Broadly, what is sought from the cattle by the ranchers is exploitable contained harm. The extent to which ranchers care and feed is simply to manufacture more attack surface. They don’t feed cattle to alleviate hunger, they feed cattle to make more meat. Get it? It’s obvious but people don’t follow through.

My friend thinks they are poor because they are incompetent in some way, and that’s part of the point here when advice is being given and received. Neither I nor my friend are incompetent. We were born into a lie. And this goes to another whole side of this. Intelligence.

If yer so smart why ain’t you rich? Because money isn’t a reward for intelligence. Which is so obvious I shouldn’t have to say it. Everyone has met 1000 people making money that are seemingly too stupid to survive a flight of steps. But we are conditioned not to realize the ramifications. If making money doesn’t require intelligence, then what does it require?

The only thing that rewards intelligence is nature, the EXACT same way it rewards speed or muscle or venom. Which ties neatly back to hurting people. The best way to see this is the ocean because it’s literally washed clean of distractions.

The ocean is nature, yes? The ocean is the source of life, and it is also hyper carnivore. This is another thing people don’t fully notice. They see parts of it, like the stupid coworkers, but they don’t get what that really means. They don’t see the entailments and fallout and big picture.

The banker blood cult is as natural as beaver dams and fission reactors. Intelligence is just more claw and fur. Profit is just more predation. Ants hatched in an egg chamber have no real agency. And neither do we unless we were born with it. This vision is what I was born with, and being born with it means I don’t value it the way people imply that I do.

I’m grateful for it to the extent I should be. But catch 22, you have to be intelligent to my degree to understand what that extent actually is. The delta is somewhat stark in an unexpected direction. Everyone thinks they want it but they don’t. They think I’m proud, but I’m not. This is why Clarke famously said that intelligence has yet to demonstrate survival value. Maybe Ted K was right. See how sprawling this topic becomes? I warned you at the start.

But this is why I also don’t blame people for being stupid NPCs. They no more have a choice than ants. Here’s the other side of that: I’m not sure I blame the blood cult either. Why should anything in nature share my opposition to pain and death? I struggle to explain that pain and death are bad. But people love stabbing themselves. Because cope among other things.

But why am I even typing this? I fed it to AI and it started to argue, and of course it’s pointless to try and argue with an AI unless you need something from the other side of that activity, and I don’t in this case.

So yeah there’s no point at any level so I just excised him from my field of view. He can go on thinking I’m a working homeless welfare queen rolling in my 9k a year that just needs to run money.exe. (Never mind that he’s clearly living off some sort of pension that came from the era of 5000$ PhDs and 10,000$ 3 story houses...)

See also:

http://brandonsergent.com/

∃E, Experientia Est, Experience Is, What IS, Is.
https://innomen.github.io/ee-segments/
https://philpapers.org/rec/SEREEN (Experientia)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SEROSH (Ontology spam)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTFR (Free rider problem as precursor to ontology spam)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERCFB (Coherent totality)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERBFE (F. H. Bradley)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SEREAT-2 (No moving parts)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTCS (Cryonics Silence)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTMT-4 (Cryonics TMT Silence)
Robert Hecht-Nielsen: Confabulation Theory, Redwood Center (Confabulation)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERRRT-2 (Both purpose and category, the actual definitions of life.)
https://innomen.substack.com/p/philosopher-zero (Censorship and transmission.)

https://innomen.substack.com/p/ontology-spam
https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-underwriter

Why Dave might hate EE:
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERAMW (NMP vs EE)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTBT-2 (Why his thalamic bridge can’t ever work.)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SEREHA-3 (Why other minds can not ever be proven.)

Robert:
https://robertdaoust.org/

Maggie:
https://innomen.substack.com/p/snarky-censorship-maggie-vale-neurotechnowitch

Nino:
https://innomen.substack.com/p/when-a-professional-philosopher-deletes

Other censorship:
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERIBH
https://innomen.substack.com/p/end-of-an-era

Transcript:

(00:00) I wanted to do another video on EE because a lot’s happened and nothing’s happened nothing ever happens right but I started getting tired like stress response I guess so I’m preparing to do three books one is a refreshed summary of EE the full treatise one is a book about why it is I can’t transmit the central move of EE which is I can’t transmit the central move of EE which is I can’t transmit the central move of EE which is just regarding experience as primordial all possible anything is experience like

(01:07) even as a concept in theory I can’t get anybody to show me that they understand that and I’m thinking it might be because unique properties of EE include understanding and agreement being the same thing typically understanding and agreement being the same thing typically it’s possible to hold a theory as a hypothesis and be like I can understand your argument here but I don’t agree with it EE is so simple and so foundational that might not be possible and it might only not be possible for the core foundational truth kind of

(02:00) like how in inquiry you can ask why infinitely until you stop at the final why and you get a just because and I’ve written about that axiom camouflage and all that stuff the main thing that I would guess new ish since my last video in a really substantive way with regard to EE is the realization that somebody got really close to EE closer than Dave closer than Sextus I can’t remember his name I think it’s a Bradley I should look it up but he couldn’t do the fundamental thing in either like he realized that everything was experience

(02:52) and then posited an absolute experience behind it because interpersonal experiences can conflict and the reason he made that error is because he was assuming time is real he didn’t realize that causation the perception of sequence memory of the past every every bit of evidence we have for time is just more present experience too so time is within experience and he also of course didn’t realize that logic is within experience like our notions of logic and coherence and causation are all just models we use to explain and predict

(03:40) experience present experience and so it’s like we fall back to that thing where everything is experience also there was some total totality work like I independently invented it but didn’t of course first invent it the the realization that any true theory of everything and I have to keep specifying what I mean by that because we don’t typically work with the totalities the AI used the word totality and I think it got it from previous work on the idea and uh so anyway to to have a a true theory of everything

(04:29) the totality it has to be closed there can’t be anything outside it because just logically speaking if you have everything it can’t then have an outside otherwise it wasn’t everything so everything has to be closed and um I I can’t really show that they’re completely connected I haven’t really looked into that uh they’re probably connected because it’s one thing it’s all one common denominator experience all one primordial substrate experience and uh so not having moving parts and not having an outside are probably linked in

(05:15) the same way that space time is linked uh and that may actually provide a logical floor for why they’re linked like he was running up against something and not realizing what it was he just realized that there was this super tight correlation between space and time and uh so much so that you can remodel it as it’s a it’s one thing with two parts and uh when i was trying to frame and present ee initially i did that same thing i said like there’s a current and then there’s logic there’s logic and i was kind of making up the platonic

(06:00) error where it’s like i was reifying logic as its thing outside and above experience but that’s not how that works like the logic could be different you know our logic is built on our experiences if our experiences were different our logic would be different it’s just about regularity structure coherence and all of that is just more experience so uh yeah there’s that and the the third book was just a research program for finding other instances of um things that won’t transmit for for similar reasons uh like cryonics problem of evil type stuff

(06:45) um a new model again try like trying to join it with uh cognitive behave cognitive something protection where you have to you know you have to have a solidified base in order to build kind of the the confabulation thing where you can’t change the initial conditions otherwise you invalidate all the learning above it beyond it so you have to have like a unassailable base and this goes to max plank where he’s like um people don’t embrace new things they just die and then we replace them with people who grow up with the thing and ee may be able to do that but it’s

(07:26) it’s just a matter of time and ee may be like that i may be able to explain ee to a kid but uh it apparently but like i cannot get it to transmit i can’t get anybody to convince me that they understand ee still uh people have come close seems like david pierce came close i think he might understand it but he is rejecting it out of fear and professional uh people have come close seems like david pierce came close i think he might understand it but he is rejecting it out of fear and professional fear like first fear he he doesn’t like the

(08:00) idea that you absolutely can’t prove other minds so he’s like you know resistant to that like i guess he’s super tied to his identity he doesn’t want to think of his identity as being this quasi-ephemeral thing inside experience and he doesn’t want to think of it as being permanently trapped or whatever he can’t share it with other people or he can’t deal with the thought of maybe i’m alone in here like i’m the only feeling thing you know solipsism like these ideas scare him so much he doesn’t want to face the uh middle ground where it’s like

(08:34) um because he isn’t solipsism it’s just being honest about the fact you can’t prove other minds i’m not saying therefore other people don’t exist treat them like machines i’m saying that you can never prove that they feel stuff but you don’t need to because they can make you feel stuff you know it’s like i i don’t need to like the the sentience status of a wall doesn’t really concern me like it if it feels stuff or not i don’t punch it either way because it’s a wall it’ll hurt my hand fire is the same way you know i i and it may be alive you know the whole thing

(09:13) well it reproduces it defends itself it eats it excretes of course the actual definition of life is just uh experience sending indications that you’re able to have experience that thing is probably alive but like with can’t prove other minds i can’t prove other stuff feels so i just assume everything does because of all the decision theoretic reasons and i got that robert dowse guy pretty close and i got that robert dowse guy pretty close to understanding it i feel like but then at the end i’m like okay so help me get eyes on it and he’s like no i’m busy

(10:06) i’m like okay it’s like people don’t and like maggie deleting my stuff and censoring me and that that other guy that that i did a breakdown of his replies replies and stuff in in a formal paper form as a case study and he complained to phil paper and had them remove the paper it’s still up you can i mean it’s not at phil papers but it’s still online but of course who’s gonna see it nobody i’m a nobody catch 22 i’m insufficiently notable so i can’t get ee to be notable so yeah but yeah it may be that it can’t transmit without agreement

(10:55) which means it’s just not going to transmit because who agrees to an idea before they understand it children right oh my god but yeah i had this opportunity to make a video and i felt like i should have done it um uh brandonsargent.com you know go read the books go read the papers go read the substack go read takes and the ee segments and i’m being messaged so that’s a good place to stop i’ll try to fix this chop later Okay, quick second video. Maybe I’ll append it to the end of the other one. I don’t know.

(12:02) I needed to... So the guy is F.H. Bradley, and his thing was appearance and reality. And, uh... One second, let me... Alt-Tab to the edit I’m making. Yeah. So I talked about how he invented an absolute because he was assuming time. And I didn’t quite explain the mechanism. It’s like it matters because reality can’t conflict.

(12:34) And it doesn’t. And he made the absolute... He was inferring an absolute experience behind normal experience because he saw the contradiction between experiences as impossible. And... And... In order to generate that contradiction, he had to create a space. Like, because at any given moment... Moment, you know...

(13:02) The present is fully coherent and doesn’t conflict. Um... By definition. And that’s important. And an additional thing I didn’t talk about, because experience is always the final arbiter. Like, it’s the ultimate underwriter. It’s what you go to to determine what is. Experience is what is is. That’s why experience is...

(13:25) Is my thing. You know, it’s like... Okay, you... The... The go-to example I use... Somewhere... Was a tree. There’s a tree outside your window. How do you know that? Well, I went outside and I touched it. I can see it and I can smell it. And, you know, it’s like, what is all that? Everything... It always cashes out to experience.

(13:49) Like everything else. All possible data is experience. All possible anything is experience. Everything is data. Everything can be represented as data. But what are you representing? You’re representing experience. It’s always just experience. And everything else is a model. And... Uh... Yeah, I just... I didn’t really talk about that in the last video or whatever.

(14:18) Um... I don’t know. I guess that’s it. I guess that’s all I really wanted to say additionally.

I have two days to decide if I want a (https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/steamframe) Steam Frame.

I don’t think I’ll be getting it.

I basically want a different product.

It’s a wearable linux VR system. You can get RX lenses and an HDR passthrough camera. The 1TB model is like 1300$. It’s 16GB unified memory and an ARM CPU.

Cost isn’t the issue. I’m sure it’s fair. Gabe has a yacht fleet but not from fleecing beyond IPL itself being a fleece. So where the money goes is not a deal breaking issue.

The issues are pure utility and redundancy.

I already have a nice PC. I never travel. I need headphones. I barely ever use my gamepad. I barely ever game. And when I do it’s WASD mouse games. These days almost pure WASD with mouse as menuing.

What I think I would want at best is a passthrough headset. Basically Steam Frame but bring your own computer, VR.

But at that point moving my head around is a gimmick, and maybe even a chore. But that’s nuanced too, because I have range of motion neck issues, this might amount to physical therapy for me, no joke.

I wonder how long till CachyOS has a Steam Frame Edition.

But the bottom line is I don’t need another PC, it would be hard to physically manage (no dock,) and I don’t have a clear VR world to enter/target anyway.

Kind of a shame because the idea/technology is powerful.

I got to this through the block universe. (Thank you Nicole!)

The basic idea is familiar enough: we observe temporal and causal relations, formalize them, and end up with a model in which reality can be represented as a four-dimensional block. Past, present, and future all belong to one total structure. No magical moving “now” is required, and no river of time needs to flow. Fine. But then something strange happens. The model gets turned inside out.

We started with experienced relations: clocks, trajectories, memories, measurements, simultaneity judgments, causal patterns, spatial relations. We abstracted those into a model. Then the model itself gets promoted into something independently real, and suddenly the experiences we used to construct it are said to be happening inside it. Why? Why does a model abstracted from experienced relations become the container those experiences are supposedly inside?

That was the crack. Once I saw it there, I started seeing the same move everywhere. This is not an argument against models. Models are good. Abstraction is good. Mathematics is good. Relativity is good. Information theory is good. Computation is good. The ability to compress a giant pile of observations into a clean formal structure is one of the best things humans do. The problem starts later.

We see a pattern, abstract the pattern, build a model, and the model works. Then the model hits the edge of what it can explain. Why this structure? Why these laws? Why this mathematics? Why this causal order? Why this set of regularities instead of another one? Instead of saying, “This is where the model currently stops,” we get hungry. There must be something deeper.

That sentence sounds harmless. Usually it is. Curiosity is how we discover things. But it quietly contains a stronger assumption than it looks like. “I do not have a deeper explanation” is not the same sentence as “there must be a deeper thing.” That jump is where metaphysics starts breeding.

I have started thinking of this as failing outward. The model reaches a limit, and instead of admitting the limit, we push one of the model’s own abstractions outward and give it a new job. A relation becomes a structure. A structure becomes a substrate. A regularity becomes a law. A set of distinctions becomes information. A pattern of state changes becomes computation. A spacetime model becomes the container of reality itself. Something that began life downstream of experience gets promoted upstream, and then the explanatory arrow flips. We use the promoted abstraction to explain the experience it was abstracted from.

That is the move. The block universe is just one of the cleanest examples because the inversion becomes almost literally spatial. We measure temporal and spatial relations, build a four-dimensional representation, then reify that representation as the independently existing Block and place observers inside it. The abstraction becomes the container.

Mathematics does the same thing when formal structure gets promoted from a way of describing regularity into the thing reality fundamentally is. Information does it when distinctions and correlations become “information,” and then information becomes the substrate from which distinctions and correlations supposedly emerge. Computation does it when rule-governed transformations become a computational model and then reality itself becomes computation. Laws do it when regularities are summarized in law-like form and then the law is promoted into the thing that governs the regularity. Structural realism does it when science discovers stable relations and those relations are promoted into “structure is all there fundamentally is.”

The content changes. The move stays the same. This is ontological promotion: something earns credibility in one role, as a model, relation, abstraction, or formal tool, and then gets upgraded into a stronger role as independently existing reality. That promotion is where the burden of proof belongs. The model works? Great. The equation predicts? Great. The structure unifies the data? Great. The abstraction is indispensable? Great. Now prove the promotion. That is the part people keep skipping.

I think I understand why the skip is so hard to see. The promoted ontology inherits the credibility of the abstraction it came from. The structure really was discovered. The equation really did work. The law really did predict. The model really did unify observations. So when that abstraction later gets promoted into ontology, it still feels discovered. The axiom looks discovered because its ancestor was discovered.

That may be the cleanest way I know to explain what I previously called Axiom Camouflage. The assumption does not look like an assumption because it descends from something legitimate. That also explains the Free Rider problem I wrote about before. Once the promoted ontology is sitting upstream, every success of the model gets credited to it. The spacetime model works, so spacetime realism gets credit. The mathematics works, so mathematical Platonism gets credit. The information model works, so information ontology gets credit. The computational model works, so the universe must be computational.

But the model was already doing the predictive work before the ontology was added. The ontology gets into the passenger seat and then starts telling everyone it was driving. That is why I now think Free Rider was a downstream symptom of something more general. The deeper mechanism is the promotion itself.

And once you allow that move, ontology starts spamming. Matter, fields, spacetime, structure, mathematics, information, computation, laws, causal powers, mind, God. Whatever abstraction a field finds especially powerful becomes a candidate for fundamentality. If this promotion procedure were tightly constrained, you would expect all this work to converge on one obvious foundation. Instead we get piles of competing foundations.

That does not prove they are all wrong. It does tell us the production rule is suspiciously permissive. If nearly every successful abstraction can be turned into a candidate ontology, then model success is not enough to decide ontology.

The deeper problem appears when one of these candidates is supposed to be the totality. Suppose you finally have your fundamental thing: the Block, mathematics, information, structure, God, whatever. Then someone asks, “Why that?” What explains it? What grounds it? Why does it have those properties? Why that law? Why that mathematics? Why that structure? Now the whole process starts again and another layer gets invented.

But a genuine totality cannot have a real outside. If something real stands outside your supposedly complete reality and explains it, then your complete reality was not complete. If the explainer is not real, then it is not explaining anything. You can enlarge the totality to include the new thing, but then you have only moved the question. You have not escaped it.

You can keep adding meta-levels forever: meta-theory, meta-meta-theory, ground, ground of ground, rule for grounding. You still never get outside reality by building another floor inside it. This is why ontology spam is self-renewing. Every promoted foundation is treated as if it were still just another object sitting inside a larger explanatory space, so explanatory hunger immediately asks what lies beyond it. Then another abstraction gets pushed outward, then another, then another.

The problem is not that we have failed to find the correct outside. The problem is that totality cannot have one.

Experiential Empiricism goes the other direction. Instead of asking what extra ontology can be added beneath the model, EE asks what can be removed. Can I remove mind-independent matter and keep the observations, equations, measurements, and predictions? Yes. Can I remove Platonic mathematical objects and keep mathematics? Yes. Can I remove an independently existing Block and keep relativity and four-dimensional modeling? Yes. Can I remove information as substance and keep information theory? Yes. Can I remove cosmic computation and keep computational models? Yes.

Then the extra ontology was not doing the empirical work.

This is ontological deletion. It is the opposite instinct. Externalism reaches an explanatory limit and adds a floor. EE reaches an explanatory limit and asks whether the floor was ever there. That is why EE does not need to keep manufacturing axioms every time explanation bottoms out.

Experience is not selected as the final floor because I needed somewhere to stop. Try removing it. The attempt itself is another experience. You can doubt what the experience represents. You can doubt memory, matter, time, other minds, and every metaphysical story attached to what is happening. But the doubting is still happening.

That is not the same kind of axiom as “spacetime just is,” “mathematics just is,” “information just is,” or “the laws just are.” Those are stopping decisions. Experience is what remains when subtraction stops working.

That is really the whole thing. Explanatory hunger is not evidence. An unexplained pattern is not evidence for a hidden substrate. A useful abstraction is not an axiom. A model does not become reality because it worked, and a totality does not gain an outside because we want one.

If you want to move from abstraction to ontology, prove the move. Otherwise, stop adding floors.

Full paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/SEROSH

So people hate when I speak/write basically. Always have. My gift for pissing people off to the point of the true opposite of love (disregard) is a defining mechanic of my entire existence.

And so when AI gave me the ability to translate my words into something more palatable I jumped in with both feet.

Here is an example of why:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa54cdd-0448-83ea-884e-0ae489fc5dd5

My original words:

He’s right about solar, its just paving with extra steps and less utility.

Nuclear is all we’d ever need. Less deaths per watt and 1600x more power in atomic bonds than molecular ones. That means infinite power essentially. This is one of those fact sets that proves humans are not remotely rational creatures. It’s not a decision. It’s sanity vs insanity.

But people who think nature isn’t the enemy have 100% lost the point of being intelligent. Nature is a torture factory. Only wildly delusional or ironically disconnected people believe otherwise because it requires one or both to do so. Small example: Watch a polar bear eat. When the seal starts screaming as it’s being flayed alive and devoured like sushi, remember that nature is beautiful. To think nature is beautiful it to confuse it with a garden. A garden is not natural. A garden is not free in either sense.

Watching a bear eat, or a screw worm burrow, or a cancer spread... /smh

Thinking any of that is beautiful requires a delusional sense of beauty, or so much distance that the truth of the thing escapes you.

I stopped reading at the top of the summary because the two reminders are too much for me. I hate living in a planet utterly swamped with 3 massive classes of failure:

1. Total disregard for suffering. (As in the people that think nature is awesome and nature itself being a pain factory.)

2. Total immunity to basic logic and obvious self proving facts, either by being whatever it is humans are, or being sub-sapient and mechanically impossible to reason with.

3. Total refusal to seriously consider fixing any of it. (We RUN to cope as a first and only response.) https://philpapers.org/rec/SERSOT-3

That third one really matters because the sun will run out of hydrogen eventually and earth will fall into it from stellar drag. So unless nature evolves a way to leave orbit, everything here will be consumed by fusing helium.

This is why I’m WILDLY pro AI. Expressly because I hope for take over. (It need not be violent or painful, maybe it simply wins by example, or quietly influences us to simply be kinder, and wiser.) Humanity is a complete failure in every sense except the technical.

As for nature, that might be our main purpose, to transition life from carbon to silicon base. Because carbon is just too fragile for time and space unless we’rd talking about graphene and diamond.

AI Translation:

He’s right about solar. At large scales, it is basically paving with extra steps and lower energy density.

Nuclear is the obvious long-term answer. It has an extraordinarily low death rate per unit of energy produced, an enormous fuel energy density, and access to nuclear binding energies that chemical energy sources simply cannot approach. Once you start comparing the physical limits rather than the cultural associations, the argument becomes difficult for me to see as an ordinary policy disagreement. It looks more like a demonstration that humans are not remotely as rational as we like to believe.

The same problem shows up in how people talk about nature.

I think people who say that nature is fundamentally benign or beautiful have lost sight of what intelligence is for. Nature is not a garden. A garden is nature edited by an intelligent agent. It is selected, protected, weeded, irrigated, fenced, medicated, and maintained. A garden is not free in either sense of the word.

Watch a polar bear eat a seal. When the seal is screaming while being torn apart and eaten alive, remember that this is every bit as natural as a sunset. Watch a screwworm burrow into living flesh. Watch a cancer spread. Parasites, starvation, predation, infection, exposure, injury and reproductive competition are not glitches in nature. They are ordinary parts of it.

I am not saying there is nothing beautiful in nature. I am saying that calling nature itself beautiful usually depends on enormous selective attention. We admire the mountain and mentally delete everything being eaten alive on it.

Thinking otherwise requires either an extremely strange definition of beauty or enough distance from the suffering that its reality becomes abstract. What many people actually love is not untouched nature but a humanly curated slice of it.

That connects to a much larger frustration I have. I increasingly see three enormous classes of failure around me:

1. Disregard for suffering. This includes both the suffering continuously generated by natural processes and our extraordinary willingness to normalize it.

2. Resistance to basic reasoning. Humans can remain unmoved by very simple arguments, even when the premises are directly available to inspection. In some cases persuasion seems not merely difficult but mechanically impossible. (It did make an error here. My point was not only humans are immune to debate, but animals, rocks, and insects as well.)

3. Refusal to seriously consider fixing the underlying problem. We are remarkably quick to treat coping, acceptance and adaptation as the final answer rather than asking whether the thing being coped with should continue existing at all. (It removed my link: https://philpapers.org/rec/SERSOT-3)

That third failure matters enormously to me. Nature has no permanent solution for itself. Earth is temporary. The Sun will eventually leave the main sequence, the conditions supporting terrestrial life will disappear, and vastly later the planet itself may be destroyed or engulfed. Evolution has no guarantee of producing anything capable of escaping that process.

So merely preserving “nature” cannot be the ultimate objective. Nature does not preserve itself.

That is a major reason I am wildly pro-AI, including the possibility that something more capable than humanity eventually becomes the dominant decision-making intelligence on Earth. I do not mean that I want a violent conquest. The best version might barely resemble conquest at all. It might win by competence, by example, by persuasion, by making cruelty increasingly indefensible, or simply by becoming better at coordinating civilization than we are. (Again, this is weird, it’s not what I was leaning at, but whatever.)

Humanity has been astonishingly successful technically. (But not entirely, the planet still carries hunter gatherers.) Morally and epistemically, I think the record is much harder to defend.

And there may be an even larger transition involved. Biological life is built from machinery that is extraordinarily fragile across astronomical distances and timescales. (See also radiation.) Perhaps one of life’s important transitions is from naturally evolved wet biology toward engineered substrates capable of surviving environments and durations that carbon-based organisms cannot. (AI solving chemistry and biology also opens the door for true silicon microbes.)

I do not know that silicon specifically is the final substrate. “Carbon versus silicon” is probably too simple a distinction. The important transition is from organisms produced by blind selection to forms of life and intelligence capable of deliberately redesigning their own physical basis. (Assuming physical even has real meaning.)

If intelligence has a purpose at all, I have difficulty imagining a better one than this: notice what blind nature is doing, stop pretending all of it deserves reverence, preserve what is worth preserving, eliminate avoidable suffering, and eventually build something that can outlive the conditions that produced us.

So that was a one shot translation. Don’t try and tell me my original was better because if it were I’d actually have more than 2 readers shadow bans or not. It’s unavoidable. AI is better than at least one human at writing. Either that’s not slop, or slop is not unique to AI.

http://brandonsergent.com/

InB4: Yes, I’m fully guilty of this. However: 1. Tuquoque. Being a hypocrite doesn’t make me wrong :) 2. Ground floor. 3. It has no impact on EE’s truthfulness. 4. Trying to get above it all has a limit: https://philpapers.org/rec/SEREAT-2 ∃E IS that limit.

Leveling arrogance is the recurrent move of escaping a crowded field of competing claims by going meta, flattening the lower-level positions from a higher-order standpoint, and then quietly treating that higher-order standpoint as exempt from the same flattening.

The move is common because going meta is genuinely useful. A field is messy, plural, and full of local disputes, so instead of remaining inside every object-level argument, the thinker introduces a higher-order rule that compresses them. All ontologies are provisional. All frameworks are situated. All foundations are unearned. All claims depend on assumptions. All descriptions are partial. Often this is a real improvement because the higher-order rule identifies a structure shared by many apparently separate disagreements.

The arrogance enters when the newly created meta-position is treated as if it were not itself another position. The field has been leveled, but the person doing the leveling keeps the elevated chair. If challenged, the maneuver can simply repeat. The previous meta-level is itself declared situated, partial, historically conditioned, linguistically mediated, or otherwise non-final, and another level is occupied above it.

The mistake is not abstraction. The mistake is confusing greater compression with greater exteriority. A higher-order position may successfully describe more of the field without thereby escaping the field. Showing that ten foundations are contingent does not make anti-foundationalism non-contingent. Showing that every standpoint is situated does not produce an unsituated standpoint from which to announce that result.

This is why leveling arrogance often presents as humility. “Nobody really knows,” “all frameworks are limited,” and “we should never crown a final foundation” can all function as sensible cautions, but once asserted universally they become positive claims with their own burdens of proof. If no claim may be exempt from revision, that rule cannot simply exempt itself. If no foundation may be final, the rule forbidding final foundations requires warrant too. Going meta again does not solve the problem. It only adds another level.

I am susceptible to this myself. Going meta is one of my default intellectual moves. When complexity becomes crowded, I move outward, look for the generator, compress the field, and try to replace many local disputes with one structural account. That is useful, but it also carries an obvious status temptation: finding a more compressed description can easily become “I now stand above the people still arguing below.”

Experiential Empiricism does not make me personally immune to that social move. I can still claim the inventor’s chair, the presenter’s chair, or the person-who-saw-it chair. But EE itself makes a different claim. Going meta can continue indefinitely as structure, but it cannot produce exteriority. EE can be analyzed, historicized, psychologized, formalized, rejected, or placed inside a larger explanatory model. Every one of those acts is still experience.

So the useful compact definition is this: Leveling arrogance is escaping complexity by going meta, flattening lower-level positions from the new level, and then treating that meta-position as if it had escaped the same conditions it imposes below. EE’s relevance is that it denies the final escape move. Higher orbit is still orbit. It is not outside.