Monday, December 24, 2012

Perfect Example Of Solar Zealots' Hype

In Gizmag,

It's hard to envisage that sort of system working effectively until you tweak the temperature variables and scale the whole thing up. Put this tower in a hot desert area, where the daytime surface temperature sits at around 40 degrees Celsius (104 F), and add in the greenhouse effect and you've got a temperature under your collector somewhere around 80-90 degrees (176-194 F).

Ahh, so THAT's why solar towers aren't built anywhere. Kind of a big disadvantage. And puts the scorcher on those stupid plans to have green greenhouses underneath. For free! Yeah right. Well, I always hated that stupid Desertec crap.

The amazing thing is that this paragraph above is exactly 1 paragraph and 1 photo distant from the following marketroid hype:

Because you want large tracts of hot, dry land for best results, you can build it on more or less useless land in the desert;

Far from consumers. Since when has this been an advantage?

It emits absolutely no pollution - the only emission is warm air at the top of the tower. In fact, because you're creating a greenhouse underneath, it actually turns out to be remarkably good for growing vegetation under there.

Yes that's right, they say that 80-90 degrees celsius is "remarkably good for growing vegetation under there". That's the Worshipers of the Sun God Ra for you, incapable of common sense or of comprehending 'logical contradiction'.

Oh that's right, apparently I made a mistake in assuming these would be EARTH vegetables underneath those solar towers. No, all along it was supposed to be Vulcan vegetables. I feel so stupid now.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Good Heroes Are Impossible

The whole notion of a "hero" is someone who sacrifices themselves for the herd. Someone who due to courage (suicidally low self-esteem and mindless idiocy) volunteers when the herd needs someone to die. So the whole notion of a hero is utterly despicable! And as Good people do not go along with despicable acts, we have a problem with the whole notion of a Good Hero.

No good person can ever be a hero. Because to be good means to conceive of Good and that's not something that is done easily or lightly. So, no good person can possibly be an idiot. Yet it is a fact that you, all of you, aren't worth the life of a single Good person. Not at one thousand to one, not at one million to one, and not at a billion to one.

Genuinely Good people are precious and their lives are valuable on a par with the continued existence of humanity. So you see, you're just not fucking worth it. And the FACT that you demand people sacrifice themselves for you all. The fact you use admiration and other despicable psychologically manipulative tools to control mindless herd members into suiciding for you ... only makes you less worth saving.

And as we established, a Good person will understand this because they're not an idiot. So we see that the notion of a Hero being a Good person (or vice versa) is utterly ludicrous. Batman is a Hero, therefore he cannot possibly be Good. And he happens to be Evil. Meanwhile, Hal Jordan ceased to be a hero precisely because he was Good.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Character Alignment

In AD&D there is a central concept known as character alignment which is astonishingly and staggeringly fruitful when applied to real life. It's a 2 dimensional scale. Lawful vs Chaotic and Good vs Evil.

The tools who created AD&D were Lawful Neutral retards who didn't have the slightest grasp of what Chaotic Good meant. Proof: they wrote that chaotic good characters respect good authorities. Give me a break! Could they be more ridiculous?!

Well, those retards may not have had any clue what Lawful vs Chaos meant. And they had even LESS of a clue what Good vs Evil meant since they (and everyone else) constantly tries to redefine Good as Lawful. As obedience to the herd.

But the truth is that Good means having an INDEPENDENT conception of Goodness. It does not mean that you define morality == ultimate good. How could it since morality (the well-being of the group matters) is something only the herd conceives of as good.

Neither does being of Good alignment mean you define empathy == ultimate good. And I speak authoritatively as someone who DOES define empathy == ultimate good. It is sufficient that a person define empathy as an ordinary good.

What does it mean then to have a conception of good? Well there are technical requirements and the definition is itself highly technical. And it's because of that highly technical nature that you the NPCs are ill-equipped to understand Goodness. So why bother talking about it?

With these preliminaries out of the way, it's possible to create an accurate grid of character alignment.

Lawful Neutral Chaotic
Good angels angels angels
Neutral tools cattle activists
Evil monsters narcissists psychopaths

monsters = mercenaries, dictators, batman, ruthless and without conscience

tools = academics and bureaucrats

ANGELS

Now, I'm sure you all, being NPCs (cattle or tools or activists), are greatly puzzled by the mention of Angels. Isn't Lawful Good where stereotypical Heroes and Paladins are slotted? Well, BULLSHIT!

Heroes by definition don't have any independent conception of Good as they're willing to sacrifice their lives for something as worthless as "society" which I call cattle. I seriously doubt that Paladins are any better. No, it makes far more sense to understand Heroes and Paladins as staggeringly corrupt and hypocritical compared to genuine Angels. In other words, they are Lawful Neutrals with Lawful Good tendencies.

What are Angels then? They're beings of pure goodness, who can never deliberately commit the slightest unnecessary evil act without being haunted by their actions forever. But don't imagine for a single moment that they define Good and Evil the way YOU scum define it. After all, there is a reason the Archangel Michael is depicted as carrying a big fucking sword, and it isn't because he's afraid of meeting demons everywhere he goes.

Now, I use the word "Angel" because it means, by definition, beings who are made out of pure goodness. And not because I want to pander to the psychotic religious freaks in the world. Angels exist, Gods do not! Or if they do, only evil gods exist. Being an Angel means being Good and being Good means being an Angel. It does NOT mean being obedient to nor worshipful of a god. AD&D got Angels totally wrong. But then, it also got gods totally wrong as every Angel possesses a Portfolio, something only gods possess in AD&D. Exhalted got Angels totally wrong too. Angels are not physically perfect beings (wings optional), they are psychologically perfect beings.

Furthermore, don't imagine that Angels in real life are the obedient emotionally castrated eunuchs of much of the psychotic hallucinations (religious "revelations" and "visions") of cattle. Angels are fully capable of hatred, fury and WRATH. Angels are not your friends. Angels are scary beings whom you, the NPCs, can rightly view as much scarier than monsters. And prostrating yourself or kowtowing isn't going to help. It is NEVER going to help but will only serve to draw attention to you. You know what might just help you? Running.

Batman Is Evil

Batman is evil. He isn't a rogue, he isn't a vigilante, he isn't a loose cannon. Far, far from it. He is Lawful Evil.

How many people have expressed contempt that superheroes with staggering mental, technological or supernatural powers waste their time "fighting crime" instead of helping humanity?

That isn't a coincidence. They fight crime because it's inoffensive. They fight crime because it's what the herd wants them to do. They fight crime because it's Lawful.

In other words, all those "superheroes" in comics are of Lawful alignment. But strict obedience to higher authority says NOTHING about whether a person is good or evil.

Once the two dimensions of character alignment are sharply and violently separated, it's possible to arrive at certain conclusions which would appear strange at first sight.

The typical scientist or bureaucrat is Lawful Neutral. The typical two-legged cattle is True Neutral. The typical protestor is Chaotic Neutral, caring absolutely nothing for good or evil. So far nothing terribly surprising, just insulting.

Then we have Hal Jordan in Emerald Twilight who tried to eradicate the Green Lantern Corps. Why?

Well, before his motivations were retconned, he had come to the realization that there WASN'T any justice in the universe and that the Corps may have stood for Order (Lawful) but it didn't stand for Justice (Good) therefore it had to be removed.

Hal Jordan was a Neutral Good character who joined up with a Lawful organization when it seemed Good and ruthlessly crushed them when he determined they had lied to him and that they were not so good. That they were despicably Lawful Neutral.

It's important to note that Hal Jordan's motivation was to resurrect his city because an evil had been done to IT. Not because an evil had been done to HIM. And that's the key fact we need to be able to judge Batman.

Batman is evil because his only motivation is HIMSELF. He fights crime because Gotham is a Chaotic Neutral City and because the criminals he fights are Chaotic Evil. Gotham's criminals are as antithetical to Batman as Neutral Evil is to Neutral Good.

The important point is that Batman's crime-fighting adventures have fuck-all to do with whether he is Good or Evil. Because they ONLY have any weight on whether Batman is Lawful (he is) or Chaotic (he hates that).

Now, Batman COULD HAVE BEEN Lawful Good or Lawful Neutral, but he isn't. He's a billionaire and you don't see him doing any good with his money. You see him being a playboy and selfish.

Batman's motivation for crime fighting was that his parents were murdered. Because an evil thing was done TO HIM. Not to others, but to himself. Selfish selfish!

And Christopher Nolan knows that Batman is evil because in the movie Batman Begins, Batman saves his sweetheart at the cost of millions in property damage.

Now, if Batman is the ultimate Lawful character, if his biggest motivation is Law, then how could he possibly commit millions of dollars of property damage for PERSONAL GAIN? Only if personal gain was as big a motivation could that make sense. But what that means is oh yeah, Batman Is Evil!!

And the only superhero to have ever been Neutral Good was swiftly balderized and his actions reinterpreted as a "fall".

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Words Everybody Should Understand Which You Won't Find In A Dictionary

because dictionary writers are too fucking retarded to grasp them.

  • polite = obedient to arbitrary social rules supposedly meant to promote niceness (in other words, someone too stupid to be nice on their own initiative)
  • nice = helping others satisfy their desires in the immediate and instantaneous terms (in other words, someone too stupid to think long term)
  • kind = helping others satisfy their desires in the long term (requires empathy)
  • Morality = the rules of internal interaction which further the group's collective well-being (in other words, something cattle believe to be intrinsically good and which they are stupid enough to confuse with goodness itself). Or more simply, anti-Societal Catastrophe.
  • Ethics = the rules of EXTERNAL interaction which further the group's collective well-being (ethics and morality both get more imperative as the targets of the rules get more inclusive. so as the group size grows for morality and as it SHRINKS for ethics)
  • Justice = Morality + Ethics + Necessity + Convention. Or more simply, anti-Catastrophe.
  • Fairness = social equality of opportunity.
  • Honour = obedience to the values you were raised by (in other words, absolutely nothing to do with morality or ethics or goodness or even lawfulness)
  • Courage = obedient reckless endangerment of one's own life at the say so of others, a form of passive suicide due to low self-esteem
  • Ferocity = a specific emotion felt when consciously defending something at enormous cost to yourself, because it's worth it
  • Bravery = courage + ferocity, said of doomed people who accept their fates
  • Good = intrinsically valuable.
  • Evil = intrinsically negatively valuable.
  • Right = furthering a good.
  • Wrong = furthering an evil.
  • Lawful = obedient to higher authority. (higher authorities invariably consider lawful = good, and promote this view by praising all forms of obedience. even suicide, see courage. also honour, politeness.)
  • Innocent = not disobedient to higher authority. (not Chaotic in AD&D terms)
  • consideration = immediate, instantaneous empathy
  • projection = persistently assuming that others have one's mental traits
  • reversal = persistently assuming that one has others' mental traits (eg, this will hurt me more than it will hurt you)
  • empathy = comprehension of others' values and emotions (see attunement, sympathy)
  • consciousness (psychological) = comprehension of one's self, physical and mental
  • consciousness (philosophical / phenomenological) = the subjective experience of physical existence. Responsible for suppressing self-fatal actions, NOT for initiating any actions nor decisions nor thoughts.
  • attunement = sharing the emotions, values and thoughts of others
  • commiseration = feeling a negative emotion because another person is feeling a negative emotion
  • 'no such word in English' = feeling a positive emotion because another person is feeling a positive emotion (though compersion comes close)
  • schadenfreude = feeling a positive emotion because another person is feeling a negative emotion
  • sympathy = a specific kind of emotion, a less intense version of pity (in other words, has FUCK ALL to do with empathy, has everything to do with degrading others)
  • pity = the specific emotion you feel when you believe someone is hopelessly incompetent
  • charity = the self-righteous superiority that comes from helping others
  • misery = a specific kind of highly intense negative emotion
  • happiness = a specific kind of weak positive emotion (in other words, NOT a category of emotions anymore than NYC = USA)
  • love = a high value (which idiots believe is an emotion somehow)
  • passion = a still higher value
  • willpower = appreciation of the discrepancy between one's own desires and others' desires; emotional discipline and empowerment feed into willpower but are not willpower
  • extroverted = a person who values attunement
  • introvert = not an extrovert (in other words, the default state!)
  • analytic = possessing the capacity for instantaneous instinctive passive logic (less than half the population, related to Comprehension)
  • synthetic = possessing the capacity for subconscious instinctive passive creativity (the only kind of creativity that matters, less than one tenth of the population, related to Understanding)
  • judgement = analysis + synthesis (less than 5% of the population)
  • free-thinker = a person capable and willing to exercise their own Judgement
  • creative genius = the elite of free-thinkers
  • religious = a form of retardation
  • religion = a form of morality intermediate between universal human rights and tribal morality (the group is intermediate in size between everyone and the tribe)
  • tribalism = the most depraved and degraded form of morality (in other words, held only by the most retarded people)
  • clannish = deMause childrearing mode 4, so retarded as to not even qualify as a form of morality
  • individual morality = a contradiction in terms
  • suppressing = not feeling or acknowledging an emotion consciously (technical details omitted)
  • neurotic = possessing overlearned (knee-jerk) emotional reactions
  • psychotic = believing the hallucinations one experiences are real
  • narcissistic = incapable of empathy
  • psychopathic = incapable of empathy or planning
  • sane = empathetic + rational
  • Fascism = totalitarian authoritarianism (eg, USA Republican, French Front National)
  • Conservatism = social inertia
  • right-Liberalism aka Liberalism = factional democracy
  • Social democracy = groupthink
  • Communism = consensus democracy (with retards)
  • Anarchism = statistically random democracy
  • Environmentalism = human extinction advocates
  • right-libertarian = slavery advocates (usually autistic)
  • ideology = high strength of conviction = delusional thinking about the nature of reality by those too weak-willed to have principles
  • idealism = high principles = fervent beliefs about how things OUGHT to be ... but aren't.
  • vision = high willpower?
  • freethinker = capable of independent Judgement, intellectual analytic-synthetic
  • reasonable = incapable of independent thought or judgement, cattle, part of the hive-mind. Weak in willpower and mind.

  • manipulation = to undermine someone's agency by causing them to unwittingly violate their own values, whether in appearance or in fact. bonus points if they never figure it out.

Saturday, December 01, 2012

Advice to a Student of History

No doubt you've already read some of Ancient Engineers [at powells], History of Childhood, Political Consequences of Child Abuse, Origin of Consciousness, Athens: Government by Jury and Referendum, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama, Environmentalism 400 BC, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, How To Get Rich by Jared Diamond.

Or how the Boyar Russians managed to run a nation with complex trade relations with absolutely no money using sheer politics, how Egypt's welfare might be tied to the supplanting of its negative interest currency by the Romans, Mikhail Bakunin's predictions of red and black dictatorships arising which were borne out. And for fun, the fiction of Sylvia Volk. Whichever ones you've read, I highly recommend the others.

You will not have read about any of Deng Xiaoping, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Hugo Chavez Frias; Nestor Ivanovych Makhno, Douglas Engelbart; Sakichi Toyoda, Ricardo Semler. As you have no reason to suspect they are related. Their relation is that each of them tried (and often succeeded) in lifting an entire country up one step on the ladder of Tribal Feudal Industrial Networked society. That is, they tried singlehandedly to alter the history of an entire country in a permanent, irreversible and fundamental way.

No doubt you know that history is not a science as it offers no theories, only narrative. (Anthropology meanwhile is an anti-science.) Well, psychohistory is a science. And some of Jared Diamond's stuff almost qualifies. Economics, sociology, psychology and politics are sciences too, if dismal ones. You will not be able to guess that all of these sciences have as their foundation micro-psychology, in the same way as chemistry and astronomy are both founded on physics. Without micro-psychology, the driving force for progress in psychohistory theory seems random and doesn't really make sense.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Why Interest Rates Are Artificial And Should Be Abolished

I've never seen an explanation of where interest rates actually come from, or why they should be abolished, before. These things are always just assumed, the latter with stamp scrip, and the former with "time preference of money" which is irrational and I don't share at all. Here it's clearly stated why interest rates are artificial and evil. They are a natural product of human atavistic greed over a totally artificial product, one that is completely out of touch with everything in physical reality. With the sole exception of land, which is something humans don't create. The paragraph in that page serves as a complete and thorough denunciation of the entire field of economics. If economists are so evil and corrupt that they won't denounce interest rates, let alone work to eradicate them, then what possible value can they have as academics? Lynch the lying fuckers, all of them.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Realistic Starships Are Tubes

Out in space, there are two requirements that determine the physical shape of a starship.

The first is heat management, by which I mean dumping heat to keep a starship from overheating. Any kind of drive, even an external drive, will produce a vast amount of heat. And unfortunately, vacuum is an excellent insulator. Also, the temperature of space in Earth orbit is 394 Kelvin (120 Celsius) when exposed to the sun so that line about "space" being cold is just lying crap.

Parenthetically, it's amazing how much lying crap one has to dig through in order to find that number, 394 Kelvin. Cryptic imbeciles who think they're elite engineers do a song and dance because they believe ordinary people are incapable of grasping that it will be cooler than 394 K in the shade. Give me a fucking break.

The second requirement is shielding from radiation and micrometeorites. Isaac Kuo came up with an ingenious way of shielding a starship using only known and existing technology. The idea is to exploit the high velocity of a starship to annihilate everything in its way instead of letting the high velocity work against the starship.

You do this by continuously misting water in front of the starship so the droplets disintegrate everything in their way. After objects are disintegrated down to elementary particles, and conveniently ionized, it's a simple matter to almost instantly sweep them out of the way using an electromagnetic field. Particle accelerators do that all the time.

A 1 milliliter droplet of water going at 99% of light speed hits with the force of 31 tonnes of TNT. One tonne of water going at 99% of light speed hits with the force of 31 megatonnes of TNT. The most powerful nuclear bomb ever made had a yield of only 50 megatons (45 megatonnes).

Now, everyone knows the shape of electromagnetic fields, and most people can figure out from looking at a diagram of an electromagnet that the center of the electromagnet is unshielded. There are no field lines going through the exact center of any kind of magnet or electromagnet. They all cancel out there, so it's unprotected.

So if we want to maximize the amount of shielded volume in our starship, we're going to pick some kind of torus. Right away that looks very different from pretty much every depiction of starships in science fiction. But that's not all.

You can increase the volume of the starship without increasing its cross-section in its direction of travel (ie, what has to be shielded) by elongating it. And by some marvelous coincidence, when the starship is inside a solar system and in danger of getting crispy fried by its sun, that small cross-section also helps, as all you need to do is orient the starship towards the sun.

Incidentally, elongating the starship is also the answer to radiator fins. If you need radiator fins at all, then the best place to put them is down the long axis of the starship, probably in the middle. You put them anywhere else and they're likely to get ripped off. Also, radiator fins that don't catch sunlight are a really good idea.

It's unfortunate that you need strong structural supports to keep the front and back sections of the starships together with the radiator fins in between. Those structural supports have mass and so increase the size of the drive necessary to push the starship. But I can see no way of avoiding this ... unless the misting system is very lightweight. Which it very well might be.

Well, there you have the best possible shape for a starship. It looks like a tube. And if you don't need it to turn at all, better yet if you want to avoid it turning at all costs, then you just spin it. The gyroscopic forces will keep it steady. This also happens to generate gravity, not that computers and AI will ever care about gravity except as a bad thing to avoid at all costs.

And if you're thinking of Babylon 5 or other pathetic space operas where starships spin to generate gravity, you can get that right out of your mind. As a result of the spinning, any such starship is incapable of turning without tearing itself apart. Which is the same reason flywheels can't be used to store energy in automobiles.

No, if a starship ever spins, it's because it's expected to never, ever need to turn for any reason. So it's a good thing interstellar war is flatly impossible, isn't it? What with every space civilization deploying giant space mirrors to fry any incoming enemy vessels, and light up cities at night and during winter.

Starships can never wage war on each other or on any planets like they do in science fiction. Starships can't move like they do in science fiction. And starships can't even look like they do in science fiction. You see, science fiction is pretty much totally fucking useless. It's a wonder that people consider it to expand the mind.

I think the only worthwhile science fiction on television was probably Star Trek and Alien Nation. And that's because both explored the boundaries of humanity rather than get mired in the muck and the past.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Good and Evil exist

Of course, if something exists then it must be possible to formally and rigorously define it. And it turns out that it is possible to define good in such a manner. Examining the definition you then discover a number of theorems.

1. good and evil are relative to people with universal values, only values that can be made universal can ever be good for the obvious reason that if good contradicts itself then there is a problem with that notion of good.

Social power and status cannot ever be intrinsically good because it's not possible for literally everyone to simultaneously hold either of them.

Note that for something to be a moral value, it has to be path independent as well as universal. For 'good' only universality is required. It has to be good in all situations, always, without exception. For morality much more is required as the meaning of 'logically consistent' is stricter, for obvious but technical reasons.

2. society as a whole has a concept of good (empathy) and evil (psychopathy) due to the fact that any society that values psychopathy immediately self-destructs and so doesn't contribute its values to the sum over all possible societies.

3. the subset of society called cattle also have a concept of good (harmony, moral flexibility) and evil (principles, conflict). The violent contradiction of that concept of good against every other concept of good is why the value of cattle's concept of good is equal to only a single non-cattle's concept of good. And I'm being generous.

4. when you cancel out all conflicting universal values, there is still something left. No matter what your values or what your principles, psychopathy is always in violent contradiction to them. Which is why psychopaths are always evil.

As if by coincidence, psychopaths are one of the few people who are incapable of conceiving of good or evil. And in fact, I can't think of any other kind of people who are so incapable. Therefore, the only people for whom psychopaths aren't intrinsically evil are other psychopaths and probably ONLY other psychopaths.

Anyone and everyone who can't conceive of good and evil is intrinsically evil, to everyone except other people who can't conceive of good and evil. Only universally evil people fail to acknowledge the existence of evil. For everyone else, people who do acknowledge the existence of good and evil, you have to specify what they're evil in relation to.

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Bravery Is Evil

It amazes me that people think bravery is a good thing, but then again most of the general population are mindless cattle. Bravery is not FEROCITY. Bravery is evil, ferocity is good.

Bravery means you're an idiot incapable of accepting the danger you're in despite knowing it intellectually. Alternatively, it means you devalue your own life and survival, thinking it of no account compared to others'. Bravery is a spontaneous act taken without consideration.

Ferocity means that you cherish your life. That you fully appreciate the COST of what you're doing. Ferocity means that you're not going to RISK running upon something that could crush you, you consciously WILL FACE IT and pay the cost of doing so. Because it's worth it, to you.

Protection

Ferocity is only ever done to protect a person, a place, or a principle. Because you WILL pay the cost of challenging a greater power than yourself, what you're protecting needs to be worth the pieces of yourself you'll leave behind in trade.

Bravery is routinely done by sociopaths in order to "look cool" and be admired. Ferocity never can be because fleeting admiration can never be a fair reward for, say, public humiliation. Or the pity that results from not having hands or feet.

Human beings don't consciously and deliberately trade away either body parts or pieces of their egos in exchange for something as intrinsically worthless as social approval. Not when this social approval comes paired with reduced social status as society throws you away like a used kleenex.

Supermen

Bravery is the stuff of heroes, of bland idiots looked up to in wonder that anyone could be so fucking stupid. Bravery is for "heroes of the cattle". Bravery is societal. Bravery gets awards and recognition.

Ferocity is the stuff of supermen, looked upon in astonishment and not a little fear that such people can even exist. Ferocity is for lone wolves who'll do whatever it takes to do what matters to them. Ferocity is individual.

Bravery is for people who laugh in the face of death because they're too fucking stupid to understand it. Ferocity is for those who respect death as an overwhelming force, and will fight on using sheer willpower.

Bravery is driven by self-belief, the delusion that one can do anything, no matter how retarded and foolish. Ferocity is driven by sense of responsibility, the fact that one HAS to do something, no matter how low the odds of coming out unscathed.

Supermen yes, but not Nietzschean supermen. Rather the opposite.

Societal Disapproval

Bravery should be scorned, hated and despised by every thinking person (a small fraction of the population admittedly) as encouraging martyrdom. Just as I've always despised martyrdom for totally violating personhood.

Ferocity IS scorned, hated and despised by all would-be leaders of the cattle (and the cattle themselves) as a force that naturally opposes them. It is scorned as "unreasonable", hated as "incomprehensible", and despised as "uncivilized".

Just as people become fierce, the cattle around them tell them to "chill" and "cool it" and "relax" because they're "scary".

Summary

You know when nurses laud dying or dead children saying they were "very brave"? What they mean by that is the children heedlessly marched to their own deaths. And I continue to fail to understand what's good, what is in any way positive or noble or worthy, about being a victim and a mindless animal led to the slaughter. Except of course that mindlessness makes people a more easily led and manipulated TOOL.

Bravery is for tools.

Raw hatred has more going for it than bravery.

Bravery is evil.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

The Purpose of the Subconscious, or All About Consciousness Research

Philosophers being idiots argue about whether the "purpose" of the subconscious is representational like Freud said or "productive" like Deleuze claims. But this is idiotic because the subconscious has no "purpose" to consciousness. The subconscious is the foundation upon which consciousness is built on! It is an artifact of an imperfect neural network. That is all.

If anything, it's consciousness' purpose that has to be examined. But its purpose is clear:

  • inhibition of subconscious actions
  • modeling of self-actions
  • modeling of other-actions
  • and learning from those models for the purpose of inhibition

In fact, in order to model self-actions you need a concept of self, which is the very definition of psychological consciousness!

You see, everything that you can do consciously, you can both do and you can learn to do it all subconsciously. Mimicking others is easiest of all. The only thing you can't do subconsciously is NOT do something.

Subconsciously, the only possible thing you can do is upgrade an interfering behaviour. Like telling a young kid to let go of the bat instead of swinging it at their sibling. Which is exactly what you should do because the subconscious doesn't understand negation.

(A great example of interference is when a sergeant yells ATTENTION to his subordinates when he finds them misbehaving.)

Now consciousness isn't as limited as subconsciousness, you can actually model a specific behaviour and NOT do it. That's what consciousness is for: to predict one's death and stop us doing things that would cause us to die!

(So what's the "purpose" of the subconscious in light of that? Easy enough, it's to do stuff to further one's life. That is, everything else!)

Gorillas Aren't Conscious

Incidentally, predicting one's own death isn't an exaggeration or a simplification. Disgust is the emotion people feel when they encounter something associated with their own mortality. Not just biological hazards (urine isn't) but anything that reminds people that they will someday die.

We know this because gorillas don't feel disgust even as they eat their own vomit and their own feces. It's said that gorillas have a concept of self and (some) of the future. Gorillas definitely pass the mirror test. But evidently, gorillas don't have any concept that THEY WILL DIE in the future.

And this is the explanation of why gorillas don't qualify as conscious the way humans do. Something nobody, none of the pathetic supposed experts in the fields of biology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, or cognitive science could explain but that I can.

Just like I was the first human being to explain and define what life is, and what intelligence is (living representation). And for the record, it's not because I'm a creative genius but because those academic fields attract fucking idiots incapable of fucking logic!

Cognitive Scientists Are Incompetent

As proof of the utter incompetence of cognitive scientists, look no further than the imbecility spouted about so-called "mirror neurons" which have FUCK ALL to do with empathy or with mirroring others! So-called mirror neurons are obviously implementing proprioception.

So-called mirror neurons have nothing to do with anybody else. All they do is fuse visual data with kinesthetic data in order to forge a map of your own body. They're what makes your brain know that you have two arms, two legs, and that they bend and move in particular ways. Nothing else.

So-called mirror neurons activate when you see others' bodies for the same reason nearly all of the neurons for squares activate on seeing pentagons. They're incredibly similar things! A 2D triangle is more similar to a 3D dodecahedron than either are to a banana.

Other primates' bodies are incredibly similar to your body. Two arms, two legs, hips, two knees that bend only backwards, shoulders with ball and socket joints, elbows, wrists, hands, one head, one nose with two nostrils, one tongue, two ears and two eyes. Is it really a wonder that parts of your brain register others' bodies as the same kind of thing as your own body?

Could they just be lying to hype up their findings the way physicists lie about the Higgs particle's relation to mass? No and for two reasons. The cog sci and neurosci crowd are debating mirror neurons' relation to empathy internally, not stating it as fact to outsiders for news copy. Secondly because at least the Higgs confers 1% of the mass of matter, whereas confusion of self and other is the definition of non-empathy.

Confusing their own wants & needs with your wants & needs is what fucked up people do and is called projection. Going the other way is called reversal (reverse projection). Both projection and reverse projection are the exact opposite of empathy. They are obstacles to empathy, not weak forms of empathy.

The notion that proprioception neurons have anything to do with empathy. Or that empathy has anything to do with proprioception is fucking ridiculous. It's a sign of how mentally incompetent and blatantly incapable of logic, creativity, and fucking common sense these imbecilic twits that work in cog sci and neruosci are.

And the PROOF of it is the fact that empathy (after you've ceased confusing it with attunement to others' emotions) is nothing more than consciousness of others. Consciousness means possessing an accurate concept of self. Empathy means possessing accurate concepts for others.

And the proof of THAT is the fact that psychopaths (who by definition don't have empathy) also "happen" to not have any self-identity (a long-term concept of their self). This is actually the reason why they find it so easy to lie and why they're incapable of feeling guilt. Lies and misbehaviours can't taint them since there is no them to taint in the first place.

Empathy like consciousness is the direct product of general cognitive abilities. The more cognition you're capable of, the more consciousness and the more empathy you're capable of. Since cognitive scientists are feeble-minded imbeciles, it's obvious they don't have much consciousness nor much empathy. Not having these things, it's obvious why they don't know them.

Believing to have discovered particular neurons that implement consciousness or empathy (which are the product of the whole entire brain) is as deranged as believing to have discovered the particular copper wires that implement TCP/IP. It's not even the same kind of thing.

This is just scratching the surface of cognitive scientists' staggering mental incompetence. The notion that facial expressions are human emotions is particularly imbecilic. And it just keeps on going.

Consciousness Of Primates

So anyways, since it's obvious different beings have more or less complete concepts of themselves, this leads us to making levels of consciousness. Which are

  1. an incomplete model of a physical self inside of the mind -- where gorillas are
  2. a complete model of one's entire physical life from birth to death inside of the mind -- where nearly all of the human population is doomed to stay
  3. a model of a psychological self inside of the mind -- where I'm at and where I can lift up to half of the human population
  4. a complete OOSA model of a psychological self inside of the mind -- where I'm confident I can reach
  5. being able to use that model in real time -- where any decent AI should be able to reach
  6. a reflective model of a psychological self inside of the mind -- where any AI I design would start at

Introspection meaning read-only access to one's entire mind. Reflection meaning read-write access to one's entire mind. And not just the crude back-propagation which the human brain is capable of.

The experience of 'letting go' of a concern or obsession is an example of negative back-propagation. It's the reason why drugs that boost negative back-propagation can treat OCD (inability to let go).

Since the human brain is a crude neural net, crude back-propagation is as good as it gets. This neural net wasn't designed to work with consciousness at all. Any decent AI architecture will do much better just because its designers know consciousness exists.

Better Than You

Getting back on topic, there is clearly a vast difference between human beings and gorillas. Even the primitive tribals who lack consciousness have a, severely warped, concept of their entire physical life. A concept which gorillas do not have.

And just as clearly there is a vast difference between myself and the rest of humanity. As vast a difference as there is between yourselves and gorillas. Which is why I do not consider myself a human being in any meaningful sense of the term. I am not one of you.

By the time I'm in a position to lift up less than half of the general population (excluding biologists, anthropologists, psychologists and philosophers in that order) a rung higher on the scale, I will myself be a rung higher still.

The scale of consciousness explains why I feel like I'm an entirely different and higher species from humanity. Especially psychologists, anthropologists and greenpeace activists. Whereas the scale of psychological maturity says I'm merely as far above adults as adults are above juveniles.

And after all isn't that the purpose of consciousness? To prove once and for all that I'm better than you.

Psychologically Dead

Oh wait, the point of consciousness is to inhibit self-actions that can lead to your physical death. Like joining a man holding an AK47. And the point of higher consciousness is to inhibit self-actions that can lead to your psychological death. Like joining the rat race (believing social status matters) or getting coopted by a corporation (believing a job defines you).

Come to think of it, that explains why so few human beings possess minds. Without higher consciousness, the very first authority figure (whether it be parents, teachers or bosses) who tried to convert others into clones of themselves succeeded. This success left them without a mind and thus helpless hosts to the ideas of others. Once their minds are unformed, the random tides of others' continual conversion attempts suppresses the formation of an individual mind.

It gets better. Because converting others and suppressing their minds is itself an idea which will lodge in these mindless husks so that the victims become victimizers in turn. They become parents or teachers or bosses and attempt with all their might to "mould" impressionable young minds (destroy their individuality) and "sway public opinion" (rip apart others' psyches). Exactly as in the otherwise ridiculous scenario of the cult pseudo-science called "memetics".

The only people who escape this cycle of mental depradation are those who erect shields against it. Less than half the population is capable of shielding their minds. Of these, maybe a tenth to a fifth are capable of erecting shields by themselves. And of these, only a tiny fraction are left alone long enough for shields to fully form. And only a vanishing fraction are guided in the formation of their shields so that a task which should take weeks or months takes years and decades instead.

Without shields, most people are just drones in the hive-mind. At best, they're NPCs doing their preprogrammed tasks until the comparatively fewer Player Characters come along. At worst, they're prey to the wolves among the herd. And it doesn't matter whether they're rich or poor, low status or high status. Because monetary wealth and social status are only ideas propagated by the herd to control its members. They do not and cannot intrinsically matter.

The best part of course is that cattle believe they possess minds because their random aggregations of constantly fluctuating tastes seem to differ from others' such random aggregations at any particular point in time. This is disproved by the desperation with which they seek out the "support" of "like-minded" people. Their "individuality" cannot withstand concerted opposition. Even supposed weirdos like the members of 4chan felt the need to congregate together.

So ... the vast majority of humanity are mindless cattle who've committed psychological suicide in much the same way a deer would be said to commit suicide if it walked right up to and nuzzled a hunter. This is hardly new or original but at least the mechanism by which their minds died, or rather the mechanism by which a small minority's minds resist dying, has been elucidated. The obvious next step then is to immunize the minority's minds from psychological death.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

21st Century Research "Ambitions"

I saw this article about Future and Emerging Technologies on next big future and I wondered at the 4 out of 6 projects that Brian Wang, that racist mindless cheerleader, was NOT hyping.

  • FuturICT - The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator and Crisis-Relief System: Unleashing the Power of Information for a Sustainable Future

Anti-human crap. Simulation and hand-holding for elitists with a view towards getting them to better understand technology & demographics blah blah blah so they can better oppress people. And of course the ever present exploitation of "climate change" as an excuse to impoverish people. This is NOT collective intelligence.

  • Graphene - Graphene Science and technology for ICT and beyond
  • Guardian Angels - Guardian Angels for a Smarter Planet

Anti-human crap. Oppressing people by infantilizing them with respect to the natural environment. Totally useless if optional since people won't stand for infantilization.

"emotional applications" what the fuck is that supposed to mean?

  • HBP - The Human Brain Project
  • ITFoM - IT Future of Medicine: a revolution in healthcare

Supposedly machine diagnosis yet sold in such a fishy kitchen sink & head in the clouds way that it sounds unrealistic at best. It actually sounds like a big sink for lots of money, to make biotech researchers feel useful, like ITER does for physicists. It doesn't sound like it will ever be useful. The danger for humanity here is that it makes real progress on machine diagnosis seem unrealistic, just like Star Trek made communism sound unfeasibly far away. "Well, we squandered millions of euros in R&D money and we achieved squat. What hope do YOU have?"

  • RoboCom - Robot Companions for Citizens

I have no words. These retards are actually trying to create Cylon slaves. And yes, I mean conscious beings as a slave labour force.

Conclusion

You know that things have gotten dire when the US military under DARPA has a much better track record of funding pro-human technologies than civilian researchers. I want to ask if researchers have always been so crushingly idiotic or if it's a recent phenomenon.

Poverty of imagination and poverty of ambition doesn't quite cut it, these worms are pathetic and evil. Yet more confirmation for my hatred of academia. The best of these projects (the ones Brian Wang hypes) are probably worse than the worst of my projects. But I know what's at fault. It's the bureaucratization of academia.

At least DARPA is still capable, every now and again, of saying "fuck it" because they kill people and they're proud of it, because they're in it for themselves. DARPA doesn't answer to anti-human political paymasters because it serves the needs of the military, and the military is simply assumed to be entirely anti-human.

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Gangster Rap is 3000 years old

The Ancient Greek bards were rappers. The Iliad and the Odyssey were rap songs ... about rape and slaughter. The epic poems like the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the Norse poetic Eddas were equally barbaric reinventions of the Ancient tradition.

Rap is all about beat rather than melody. The ancient Greek epics were chanted. Non-existent melody, so-so rhymes, but very strong beat and rhythm. Also, it may be difficult to believe but as non-melodic and violent as rap is, ancient epics were worse.

This is the first time I've noticed it. I'm used to thinking of the ancient epics as really shitty murderous stories. Because that's the known-wrong belief in the literature departments which all consider the Iliad to be something written for purposes of territorial appropriation.

Well, they weren't. They were really shitty trance-inducing murderous rap songs. It kinda strips all the allure off of the Iliad, assuming it has any, when you put it in proper context. Not something alien and primitive, but very familiar and primitive. Or just primitive.

Academic types have a real blind spot to this because they can't be seen, or even THINK, that they're wasting their time studying something low class. Even when they compare the Iliad TO rap, they minimize the resemblance, saying it's "freestyle like jazz and rap". Jazz? WTF?!

It's why performers say stupid shit like "rap Iliad" instead of "original Iliad". If anything, their performances are weak and not nearly hardcore enough because the Iliad was more rap than rap. It was more violent and less melodic than all but the most extreme gangster rap.

Oh and the Iliad is not a poem except in the loosest sense. And Homer was never a poet anymore than he was a writer or a singer (he was a scribe). We don't call rap songs 'poems', we call them rap. And the Iliad? The Iliad is not "like" rap. The Iliad IS rap!

Sunday, June 03, 2012

General-Purpose Self-Improvement

It's often said that the human brain is a computing machine, and this is blatantly true. It's less often said that the human mind is an operating system or programming language. And when it is said, it's assumed to be some kind of metaphor. It isn't a metaphor, it is exactingly true. (Consciousness though has no exact analogue.)

There are two general-purpose psychological self-improvement techniques. And strangely enough, they correspond to two paradigms for programming languages in computing. The two paradigms that admit not only thinking, but thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking, and ... to infinity. Computing is about thinking precisely. OO and Functional are about improving your thinking by thinking about thinking.

I think I'm on the right track that this kind of correspondence exists. And I think I'm on the right track that the Core Values paradigm I invented is the one that 'happens' to correspond to the computing paradigm I like (OO). And I think I'm on the right track that the common features between my paradigm and the computing paradigm I like ... are also the same things that make this computing paradigm understandable and natural for the overwhelming majority of programmers.

The OTHER technique is to pretend to be the kind of person you would like to be. And the guy whom I learned this technique from (the writer of Self 2.0) considered it too dangerous to use past a certain point. Myself, I consider it anathema.

Thursday, April 05, 2012

Enviros Caused The Financial Collapse

One regulatory perspective is that environmentalism has played a much greater role than people think. It induced a deep skepticism about anything involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world. The response to environmentalism was to prohibit scientists from experimenting with stuff and only allow them to do so with bits. So computer science and finance were legal, and what they have in common is that they involve the manipulation of bits rather than stuff. They both did well in those forty years, but all the other engineering disciplines were stymied. Electric engineering, civil engineering, aeronautical, nuclear, petroleum—these were all held back, and attracted fewer talented students at university as the years went on. When people wonder why all the rocket scientists went to work on Wall Street, well, they were no longer able to build rockets. It’s some combination of an ossified, Weberian bureaucracy and the increasingly hostile regulation of technology.

I just read this passage in an interesting article which you have to take with a grain of salt cause the guy's a dumbass right-libertarian who talks about blind spots but is remarkably blind himself.

BUT this part seems true, especially about scientists and engineers being brutally prohibited from playing with nuclear bombs. Think about what could have been done!

Nuclear cannons to launch huge amounts of supplies into orbit cheaply. A nuclear Orion starship. Nuclear bombs as demolition charges for mining / quarrying / canal digging.

Think about it: what kind of a dirty bastard would play on the stock market if they had even a slim chance of playing with LIVE NUKES! It's not even a contest, there is just no fucking way!

So it's clear, the enviros did wreck the world! They wrecked it by causing the financial collapse. And they caused THAT by causing the financialization of the world in the first place. Enviros hate industrial economies with a passion and they quite gleefully destroyed the First World's industrial economies "by accident".

Now if only the criminal justice system could see to it that causing widespread poverty (and thus mass death) was a crime so that it was okay to kill environmentalists in self-defense. But that will never happen because judges are middle upper class and they interpret laws (which being contradictory can be used to logically conclude anything) in a typically middle upper class way.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

On The Nature of Humanity - Peacemaker, Not Killer

Newsflash: humans are the most brutal, sadistic creatures to ever crawl out of the muck. We only got to this point in history by being ruthless murders with instinctual homicidal tendencies. Our history is defined not by our good deeds, but by the wars we've fought, the people we've tortured, and the civilizations we've raped and pillaged.

These child-soldiers are not warped beyond what is human, they are human. They experience life and death in a manner our comfortable, homogenized-milk-drinking minds wouldn't be able to comprehend....it is we "civilized" humans who are warped beyond what is "human."

Humans vs Homo Sapiens

Actually no, this is a holdover from our biological past. The same as for other killer species, notably wolves and chimpanzees. This is what it means to be homo sapien NOT human. There is a massive difference between homo sapiens and humans. Language, thought, consciousness. Non-human homo sapiens are exemplified by feral children, stone aged cultures, and a few incredibly primitive tribes in the Amazon.

Trying to lay it all on our being human is as stupid as trying to credit our having genitals or two eyes to being human. Utterly fucking ridiculous. Or alternatively, the same as trying to say that information, knowledge, decision-making and thinking (things that software can do) are what it means to be a Being. Utterly fucking ridiculous.

This is what you get with magical tihnking morons who are incapable of thinking in terms of logic and syllogism, but instead think in terms of excerption, association and correlation. Humans have toes? Then toes must be what it means to be human!

Moderns vs Primitives

Furthermore, Europe hasn't had a war in 50 years. Neither has China. Technically, China hasn't had an (external) war in a lot more than 50 years. And in the 18th or 19th century there was a great century of peace for Europe. Peace is definitely possible for moderns. Even if primitives are in a near constant state of war.

The first thing you learn in The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is that consciousness is inhibitory. Paying attention while doing something doesn't prime the action, it inhibits it. That's why when you learn typing and make typos then you try to very carefully do correct actions ... that's counterproductive. Anyways, consciousness is inhibitory .... and it is fully capable of inhibiting the subconscious impulse for aggression, murder and death. At least, for those nations that actually have higher consciousness.

Primitives without consciousness don't even make any excuses for war. They just go to war because they feel like it. Because they're in a "killing mood". Conscious beings need an excuse so that slows down the pace of warfare. The more conscious people are, the better the excuses have to be, which again slows down the pace of warfare. In primitive tribes, half the population dies of homicide / suicide. In World War 2, even with ridiculously effective weapons, less than a fifth of the population of Europe died.

Higher Mode Childrearing

It isn't an accident, it isn't happenstance, that the way we moderns raise children "correctly" just "happens" to reduce aggression, irrationality and warfare. We do not fucking like those things. They are not productive. And we want and plan to eradicate these things from our psychological makeup.

We go to extreme lengths to care for babies and raise children with ridiculous amounts of attention and care for no other purpose than eradicating irrationality and neurosis and psychosis and aggression in general. Of which warfare is the most quintessential example.

We moderns raise children so they will have the widest possible emotional flexibility and adaptability. And so they will have principles. All things which severely inhibit warfare. Because it "just happens" that nations which don't go to war prosper better than those who do.

You see, moderns want their children to prosper, rather than to "follow in their footsteps" or "obey their elders". And since war is adverse to prosperity, it follows by inescapable logic that moderns want their children to not go to war. Something that wasn't true even 50 years ago, but nevertheless is the culmination of a consistent trend over the millenia.

Affordance Of Consciousness

Furthermore, the observer effect (inhibition of the effects of abuse by recognizing it as abuse) which together with two genders produces a ratchet in childrearing modes (the child of two parents will effectively be raised in the higher of the modes the parent was raised in) ... is a product of consciousness. Consciousness which is the essence of what being human means. Therefore, being human means that we naturally FALL straight towards peace. We're just taking a long time falling because the nature of homo sapiens is incredibly brutal.

Parents deliberately and consciously inhibit irrationality to the same level that they've achieved themselves. And it is the nature of consciousness to inhibit irrationality. Hammers are uniquely suited to hammering nails and that is what we deliberately use them for. Consciousness is uniquely suited to inhibiting irrationality (including warfare) and that is what we deliberately use it for.

Summary

So on a trivial and superficial level, that stupid stupid comment seems correct and profound. But when you examine it and tear it apart, it is the exact opposite of the truth. It is the biological nature of homo sapiens to be a brutal killer species. It is the psychological nature of humans to deliberately go counter to their biological nature in order to be peacemakers. Between them, it is psychology that triumphs.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Hypocritical Lying Asshole Brian Wang

Check out this article for a startlingly blatant depiction of hypocrisy and racism. The gist of the article is that China's cities are far smaller than advertised. And in fact, far far smaller than Brian Wang has always boasted they were. Yes boasted since according to him, China having the biggest cities and the biggest contiguous urbanized area were GREAT things. A judgement which would be entirely true if only China's cities were that big or at all contiguous. But now that empirical reality has turned out to trump Brian Wang's racist pro-China hype, suddenly having big cities is a BAD thing. Suddenly, megacities are "ungovernable messes". China = good, India = bad. Four legs = good, two legs = bad.

It's like that all over the place. In the words of this racist asshole, China is consistently just as good as any other industrialized country. And will in fact be BETTER Real Soon Now! When in truth that claim is very far from empirical reality. And China would still be only a developing country at best if it weren't for Japan. That story was also recently on NBF but of course it was spun as "look how much the USA sucks" (something which sounds plausible because it happens to be true for entirely separate reasons) instead of "look how inferior China really is if you take away Japan".

China may or may not achieve the transition to high tech. China certainly amounts to more now than it did 10 or 20 or 30, let alone 40 years ago. And China is so ludicrously over-hyped it's not funny.