Thursday, May 05, 2011

On Privilege - Modern Homocentrism

Humans believe their experiences as human beings are privileged. This is a delusion which even professional intellectuals cling to. There are many such illusions which have turned into delusions. Most of them have ended up as great "mysteries" for philosophers who conspicuously scratch their heads over them.

One such illusion is of time "running". Another is the so-called "arrow" of time which is a straightforward artifact of the nature of computation. But then again it would require understanding computation, entropy and time, and that's something beyond most physicists.

Just about everyone clings to bits being dimensionless - they're not. Bits are similar to functions and not at all like numbers. The bit 1 is close to the function f:1->1 and not the number 1 at all. Most people, even many physicists, cling to elementary particles being dimensionless points instead of extended objects.

Mathematicians cling to the delusion of there being One True Mathematics with a death-grip even though every single mathematician will freely tell you it's a delusion. They know it's false yet cling to it. They also cling to the notion of T having meaning (one true truth, hah!).

Physicists cling to the absurd notion of One True Timeline (copenhagenites, nondeterminism, clinging to a classicist vision of micro- and macro-reality instead of quantum, rejecting time travel out of hand). They also cling to One True Physical Reality (big bang creationists). Physicists have also clung up to the late 20th century to the notion of Aphysical Free Action (vitalism).

Most normal people cling to One True Present (time travelers "overwriting" the past). Magical thinkers cling to One True Self (copies of me aren't me, they are "copies").

Are you catching the pattern? It's not just the loathsome T word, which is a lie and a deception, it's the whole emotion behind it.

The emotion that says I AM PRIVILEGED ABOVE ALL OTHER THINGS. Ultimately "true" has no meaning other than "privileged". And people for some stupid moronic reason, think they are privileged.

People think their minds are privileged. They think 'now' is privileged. They think their subjective experiences (of singular linear classical time as opposed to branching multiple merging quantum time) are privileged.

People think their actions are privileged (not subject to determinism). They think their senses (of real probabilities instead of complex probabilities) are privileged. They think their subjective universe (the mathematics they subjectively experience) is privileged.

As a good modernist I know to scorn such privilege. It is a loathsome abomination to all intellectuals.

For fuck's sake, even the supposedly anti-privilege "aliens are real" is an expression of that imaginary privileged status. These morons think they are privileged to live in a friendly universe where aliens wouldn't bulldoze them like we would a pond of slime. They think they matter.

They think humanoid bodies are privileged. They think *corporeal* bodies are privileged. They think their feudal anti-rational societies are privileged. They think their concerns for ethnicity, their stupid ideologies (esp, gaia-worship, aka "environmentalism") and obsolete resources are privileged!

I would bulldoze them into food paste if I could, just to show them how very, very wrong they are.

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