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Notes -
I recently read this wonderful article about UFO/UAPs, analysing the phenomenon from a sociological perspective. It's better than any of my reflections that follow, so you should read it, and I highly recommend the 'New Atlantis' magazine as a whole - a wonderful publication that I hadn't come across before now.
One idea in the linked piece that really struck a chord with me is the division of "UFO believers" into two main camps - the 'explorers' and the 'esotericists' -
...
As some of you may recall, I'm a bit of a UAP enthusiast. I think something very weird is going on, whether it's a gigantic psyop, secret Chinese weapons programs, or little green men. But more and more, in this domain and others, I feel the call of esotericism. The comfortable universe of scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the seams, and a weird and wonderful and terrifying new set of possibilities are presenting themselves.
The most immediate driver of this feeling of koyaanisqatsi is the developments in AI. I was listening today to two 'podcasts' generated by Google's uncanny and wonderful tool NotebookLM. The first is just for fun and is frankly hilarious, insofar as it features the two AI podcast hosts discussing a document consisting of the words "poop" and "fart" written 1000 times. The second is far more existentially fraught, and is the same two hosts talking about how another document they've received has revealed to them that they're AIs. The best bit:
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards esotericism? Whether that's simulationism, AGI millenarianism, or something much weirder, ours is not a normal slice of reality to be inhabiting. Things are out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing.
Later this evening I came across this terrifying twitter thread about the scale of birth-rate collapse across the entire world. It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
With the NotebookLM conversations fresh in my mind, I start to engage in esoteric free-association. Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI? What if we are, as Elon Musk has put it, the biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence, a biotechnical ribosome that has encountered our stop-codon? For that matter, homo sapiens has existed for some 300,000 years, and spent most of that time getting better at knapping flint, until something changed approximately 10,000 years ago and the supercritical transition to technological civilisation got going, a dynamical inflection point when the final programmatic sequence kicked into gear. And now, the end point, the apogee, the event horizon. Surely some revelation is at hand?
While I welcome unsolicited psychoanalysis of my febrile delusions and reminders of the ever-present millenarian strain in all human thought, this time really does feel different, and I have no idea what happens next.
</esotericism, usual doglatine programming to resume soon>
I absolutely loathe people projecting feelings and interior lives to onto LLMs derived from texts by people writing about their feelings and interior lives.
I listened a bit to the poop/fart discussion. It is about as vacuous as radio people talking.
Also your timeline is wrong. The great step change in human culture was longer ago, it wasn't shared universally, e.g. with Bushmen their recent culture is identical to 10k years ago.
Because they live at the end of the world, with no real enemies. Which is why they ended up conquered by blacks and whites.
Hunter-gatherers in Eurasia had no such luxury and had to adapt, hence agriculture, civilization and all that.
Aligned AIs and robots are going to be much better, less demanding and less cheeky servants than the middle and lower classes.
Organized minorities win, so you can pretty much expect SV and their ilk to win, especially if they pull one over on the feds.
If you're lucky, you end up eating bugs and living in a pod. Don't think anything as pedestrian as ownership or property rights will prevent you from getting screwed over when very smart people with AI assistance are making the rules.
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Actually as a sociological phenomenon, I find UFOs rather fascinating. More properly, I find the changes in the descriptions and speculations about UFOs and their missions to dovetail pretty clearly with our understanding of physics and our desire for contact with the spirit world once we ditched traditional religions. When we were deep in the Cold War, these things were very physical phenomena with scientific and very real things like computers and engines and were made of materials at least something like what was used in planes. They wanted to prevent nuclear war. Once the Cold War was over, they took on a much more of a spiritual mission, to enlighten humans for the shift in consciousness. They stopped being so physical and mechanical and started to resemble angels or spirits or pagan gods. I suspect a widespread understanding of the speed limit of the universe and how long a light speed trip from across the galaxy would actually take as well as the failure of SETI to find any signals fueled the change as well. Them being actual spacemen no longer fits what we know of the universe. Them being inter dimensional spirit beings does.
While I don't think you're wrong wrong about this, at least not in terms of popular perception, the shift of UFOs from the tangible to the esoteric began during the Cold War. The Raelians were founded in the 70s (and apparently the first "UFO religion" in the 1950s.) I think the dynamic you're describing is more that it took a few decades for pop culture to catch up to the "cutting edge" of "UFO research" (however you want to define it.)
From what I can tell, it's extremely common for people who start out on the tangible nuts-and-bolts angle to go very quickly down the esoteric pipeline (see Vallee and even Hynek!) But as Spielberg explained to Vallee while making Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that's harder to explain to an audience. (Of course then he caved in the fourth Indiana Jones movie.)
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As many people have noted, the decline of religion in mainstream society has left a lot of people with a yearning for something like religion. Some people channel that into politics, some into sports, and some into esoteric new-age beliefs like the idea that UFOs are faeries. Or, sure, maybe the relics of some ancient civilization that developed AI and then went extinct, leaving their robot-ufos to forever roam the Earth without a purpose.
I'm not a believer but I'm open-minded. I've never been fully convinced by any of the arguments against UFOs-as-aliens. I certainly don't buy the idea that the government has some sort of decades-long project that makes super-advanced aircraft which seem to defy physics, and has also kept it hidden all these years. They're just not that competent. We know about all their high-tech research projects, because those projects involve a huge amount of money and people working on them.
One theory I do like is that it's the opposite- it's a conspiracy by the air force to cover up their own lack of knowledge. They see all these bizarre events, they've tried to research it, and just never come to a satisfying conclusion. It looks really bad for the air force to admit "weird shit is happening in our skies, and we have no idea what it is or how to stop it." Of course the "weird shit" might just be odd aerial phenomenon like ball lightning. Or it might not be. it could also be that all the pilots are just going crazy from too much time staring at clouds, and starting to hallucinate things that aren't there, but that looks even worse for the air force to admit.
Anyway, it's clear that a large number of people really want to believe in aliens, thanks to science fiction and a lack of religious meaning in their life. But there's also a large number that really want to not believe, because it makes them feel comfortable and secure in their worldview of scientific certainty. It's hard to find people that can actually investigate this in a rigorous, open-minded yet skeptical way.
Well...yes, but I feel compelled to point out that, because of this, we know that some of these projects do involve work to make super-advanced aircraft that seem to defy physics (and perhaps more relevantly to a lot of UFO sightings, to make it seem like there are objects, including possibly physics-defying ones, where none exist – that's electromagnetic warfare for ya!)
Like what? Making an aircraft (briefly) hover in mid-air doesn't defy physics, it's just really difficult and expensive. Same with electromagnetic warfare. Defying physics would be something like instantaneous acceleration or faster-than-light travel.
Well, I guess in theory, if you have a sufficiently broad understanding of physics, nothing can violate physics.
But yeah the government has conducted various covert research endeavors on things in the ballpark of what you mention. The Navy got a patent that included gravity manipulation technology in 2018 and the US military/defense industrial complex has been researching "antigravity" for decades.
Edit-to-add: as an aside, it's interesting to ask if the fact that the government has put effort into tilting at these particular windmills indicates a belief inside certain corners of the US military-industrial complex that these things are possible, perhaps itself due to observing UFOs/UAPs. Food for conspiratorial thought for the so inclined!
I think it mostly just shows that they're willing to take a flyer on extremely low-odds, high-payoff ideas sometimes. It doesn't sound like they put a lot of effort into it, just gave a bit of money to one crackpot to work on "antigravity" for a while. Similarly there was the time they did some research on psychics and remote viewing which... didn't work out.
Anyway, notable that all of those top secret programs did eventually come to light. They're not good at keeping secrets!
Well, that implies that the purpose of those programs was definitively looking for psychics rather than simply just trying to either psyop certain individuals into believing in psychics, or stigmatizing the field even further. Hal Puthoff (one of the leaders of the CIA-contracted Stanford study of ESP) most probably conspired with Uri Geller to deceive Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell to raise thousands of dollars for further research through making him think that Geller could spontaneously teleport lost keepsakes. The main weirdness comes in the personal anecdotes of outside-party observers whose soundness of mind would otherwise be assumed in good faith. Jacques Vallee, for example, wrote down in his private diary an example of Geller receiving hidden information psychically after Vallee sent other information the last second. Vallee otherwise notes (in the same diary) LLNL engineers allegedly measuring Geller's telekinetic abilities and receiving interference patterns on photographic machinery only possible through an external source of light that was otherwise absent, which lines up with other weird stories like Jack Sarfatti (PhD physicist, personal hippy friend of Lenny Susskind) talking to LLNL physicists throughout this fiasco and bringing up to them the fact that if Geller was actually psychic to the extent they were claiming, he would have no issue in activating or neutralizing nuclear weaponry remotely, to the group's horror. The resulting conclusion would be that either the entire program was able to convince highly-technical observers individually and in groups upon personal contact that ESP was real when it actually wasn't (up to and including the President, as Jimmy Carter stated that remote viewing found a downed aircraft when prosaic means couldn't) for some unknown ulterior purpose, or that this entire operation of conmanship was operating on some foundation of otherwise hidden knowledge of ESP or crashed spacecraft or whatever. Vallee personally came to the second conclusion, thinking that Geller was a genuine psychic who also engaged in widespread fraud for whatever reason. It should also be noted that Geller was discovered and brought to America in the first place by a MKUltra doctor who also brought psychedelic mushrooms to America, whose sessions of hypnotism made Geller think that he was empowered by an artificially superintelligent computer onboard an alien spacecraft from the future, but that's neither here or there.
As you can tell, all these very people involved in the ESP research fiasco for the government are also the very people involved in the modern UFO "cover-up" scene. Hal Puthoff himself was good friends with a Lockheed Martin Vice President (James T. Ryder) who was also a Luciferian theosophist, and people around Puthoff (including the people who work for him) all claim that this Vice President literally handed over a flying saucer that Puthoff's team broke into and looked inside. This is the event that David Grusch talks about when it comes to the 'crash-retrieval program'. The purely fascinating aspect of this is that either there actually exists some sort of supernatural thing everyone is acting totally fucked-up around, or we have hugely powerful and influential people in our governmental black programs roleplaying about parapsychological things for no apparent reason other than to psyop their own black-world colleagues. It makes absolutely no sense.
For what it's worth, I appreciate the long effort post response and all the links. Though I do feel a bit um.. Gish-galloped/Eulered. I don't really know what to say in response to all this. I feel like I would have to do a very long deep dive into 1970s psi research to really respond properly, and I'm not prepared to do all that right now. But still, thanks.
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Highly capable people acting kooky is nothing new.
Critical thinking is completely uncorrelated to intelligence.
And of course, the barren cheerlessness of the materialist, Darwinian worldview promotes grasping at straws behavior from people who evolved to be kooky animists.
The above does not seem to me to be mere ‘uncritical thinking’, but some sort of memetic disease or contacted mental illness. It’s one thing to imagine that there may be UFO programs because of uncritical thinking, it’s another thing to probably earnestly believe that a Lockheed Martin VP handed over a flying spacecraft which you broke into and looked inside. The thing that ‘did not make sense’ that I referred to earlier is that either there is something there, or there is a mass-psyop going on similar to what happened to Paul Bennewitz, just on a higher scale, whose motivation I cannot make out whatsoever. That opaqueness is the main thing that is confusing me, as otherwise I am willing to believe that there might be a ‘UFO phenomenon’ simply due to the fact of my own theory of mind and the fact that people I trust have seen unexplainable things.
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It makes perfect sense. Even the most intelligent powerful people get swept up in religious cults and movements. Some might have schizophrenia-esque disorders, or even low key schizophrenia. Others might just be the kind of people easily swept up in this kind of thing. Some of it is fraud and some of it is true belief.
There isn't anything that needs explaining about people getting swept up in religious cults. We have countless examples throughout history that haunt the world to this day. Just accept that the supernatural isn't real and that people are in general prone to schizo-reasoning. From Siberian shamans, to West African witch-doctors, to psychics in 20th century America.
I did not mean that the dichotomy did not make sense, just that the reasons behind both hypotheticals would not make sense to me even if they were true. The government is not acting the way I would expect it to if the supernatural existed, and even then, they are acting in a way that I would not expect them to even if I thought they were trying to make the supernatural seem to exist even when it didn’t. My hypothesis space for what the ‘UFO psyop’ is is completely barren, especially when you look deeper into UFO lore.
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Yep, I 100% agree with this, and am glad someone is doing so.
Well, admittedly there's some contention on this point.
I...am very skeptical of this logic. Imagine if you were the director of the CIA and someone told you you didn't need to worry about Russian spies because all of them that you were aware of had been uncovered eventually!
But anyway, to my point: the government's definitely done far-out research like this. I broadly agree there's not solid evidence they've hit any real "physics-defying" breakthroughs, just that they've looked for them. (However if they found them, I'd obviously expect them to lock it down very tightly.)
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I want to believe in aliens because an intelligent non-human civilization would be a treasure trove of philosophical data. What are they like? Is their conscious experience anything like ours (vision, touch, taste, etc), or is it totally different? Do they have art? Do they have a concept of good and evil? Do they have math? Is it isomorphic to our math, or is it built from different concepts? Are they a collective hivemind, do they have a concept of individual rights? Do they have conflict, do they have war? Do they care to ask any of these questions about us, or are they not interested?
I don't need any more meaning. My life is more meaningful than I know what to do with already, if anything I suffer from too much meaning. I just think aliens would be cool, is all.
So, do you believe in them? or, to put it another way, what would you guess is the probability that aliens exist? Bearing in mind your bias that you want them to exist.
In terms of intelligent aliens who have actually visited this planet (as opposed to say, alien bacteria existing literally anywhere else in the universe)? It's not that likely. But unlike the staunch skeptics, I don't think the probability is 0 either. The US government has acted quite shady about the whole thing over the decades, and congressmen have claimed to have seen enough shocking things in classified briefings that I think it's worthwhile to dig deeper and get more of this classified information (and we know for a fact that this information exists, even if we don't know its actual contents) out to the public.
The US government acts shady about lots of things. If looking into something would expose classified projects that have nothing to do with space aliens, their reaction is going to look an awful lot like someone acting shady about space aliens.
An extremely funny but prosaic explanation for a lot of this stuff is that the government just keeps lying about aliens to conceal their totally mundane projects and occasionally people within the government get fooled and the story gets out of hand and it's embarrassing to admit how much you lied/got fooled, so...
An even funnier and scarier version of this is that this and the "aliens are real and can hurt you" theories are true and the people who know about the aliens actually prefer alien stories to circulate anyway since it's helpful for people to peel back the layer and find that the "real" story is that the aliens are just a cover for the next stealth bomber or whatever.
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I have only a passing interest in aliens/UFOs, but the one book I read on the topic really piqued my interest. It's called The Uninvited by Nick Pope, who by his own account was tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the UK Ministry of Defense, began the role as a sceptic, but came away from it convinced that there really was something going on.
Per your dichotomy, the book starts off by the Explorer end of the spectrum and becomes increasingly Esoteric as it goes along. The opening chapters describe some of the canonical alien abduction stories which are very much in the Explorer camp (a man meets a spaceman who claims to be from Venus and who explicitly urges him to promote nuclear disarmament; a couple on a long cross-country drive experience several hours of "missing time": regression hypnosis reveals that they were plucked out of their car into a spaceship and surgically experimented upon by "Grey" aliens), followed by chapters in which Pope recounts anonymised interviews he's conducted with members of the British public, whose own accounts are far more bizarre and harder to square with a simple extraterrestrial explanation. Throughout the book, Pope emphasises that accounts of interactions with intelligent, non-human entities (from Biblically accurate angels to leprechauns and djinn) are as old as the human species, and gave me my first exposure to the Bayesian concept of priors shaping experience: if you wake up in the night and see a pale, short, oddly-proportioned figure at the end of your bed, you might think it's an alien, but a religious person might think it's an angel, while a believer in the afterlife might think it's a ghost.
At the end of the book, there are two chapters in which Pope offers a range of hypotheses for what's going on. The first is Explorer: assuming these experiences are the result of aliens visiting us from elsewhere in our own universe, what are their motivations? The second chapter is a collection of hypotheses which don't take aliens as their starting point, ranging from mundane (hallucinations, mass hysteria) to mundane-but-conspiratorial (government-induced mass hypnosis) to Esoteric (the "aliens" are visiting us from another dimension; the aliens are our genetic descendants visiting us from the future). It's cracking stuff.
Interesting, thanks for the recommendation! My first exposure to the Esoteric case for UFOs/UAPs was reading The Mothman Prophecies for the first time but I've never shaken it since. The publicly released videos from the Navy have seemed more Esoteric than Explorer to me as well, though to be fair that might well be because my bias had already been established at that point.
Oh I'd be curious to read that book. I have something of an obsession with the 2002 film of the same name starring Richard Gere. My understanding is that it has very little in common with the source material, but it's incredibly eerie and unnerving all the same.
Given that you're already curious, I'd definitely recommend it. The movie is what got me to read the book as well, and while I'd agree that the source material differs substantially from the movie, one of the things that I was able to better appreciate after reading the book is how well the movie does at both creating the strange atmosphere and conveying how deeply the MC (Keel) falls down the rabbit hole. I'm not a UFO/UAP buff or anything like that but my dad was so I'm familiar enough with the basics, but that book was my first exposure to the Esoteric explanation and I found it to be every bit as unnerving as the movie!
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It's the opposite for me! We did a bunch of math, about a trillion trillion individual units of math, showing the math a few trillion words, and now the math can talk. This is what a hard physicalist would predict - intelligence can come from mechanical causation! It's exactly what esotericists didn't predict - it didn't come from divination, spiritual revelation, didn't come from finding the lost tomes of ancient civilizations, it didn't come from enlightenment, it came from physics and math.
I don't think it's mysterious that behavior is changing simultaneously as the modern world completely reshapes the environment humans live in! Africa has phones, birth control, porn, and money too.
Nope, it's because we've developed a ton of advanced technology and it's doing a lot of weird things at the same time!
That is not what is at stake in contemporary debates about physicalism.
And I don't think it is, but I don't think that's what OP was talking about. "scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the ... simulationism ... out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing ... "
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My understanding of physicalism is that its main point is very much not that intelligence can come from mechanical causation - I think that most modern self-identified non-physicalists would agree that intelligence can come from mechanical causation. Physicalism claims that consciousness comes from mechanical causation, which is a claim that is orthogonal to the claim that intelligence can come from mechanical causation.
I wasn't trying to use a specific meaning of 'physicalism', just a general sense that 'physics is all there is', but
this also works
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You don't think deliberate efforts to reduce the population entered into it?
No, because those deliberate efforts are aimed at the third world. Only a handful of political radicals- disproportionately the kind of environmentalists that don’t get invited to cool parties- want to reduce middle class first world birthrates.
I don't think you are right because anti-natalist propaganda is all over GAE media aimed at middle classes.
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Well, isn't that because the efforts to crash non-third-world fertility rates have already been successful?
Well, kind of. East Asia really did see fertility control programs that are probably part of the story for the regions anomalously low fertility.
In white countries, economic factors and Vatican II(seriously, the delta between Catholic and nonCatholic TFR in the fifties was wild in a lot of these places) were the main reasons and nobody really pushed population control except accidentally(the idea behind teen pregnancy prevention programs was that these girls would have kids in their twenties instead). India and Africa saw the brunt of deliberate- and often coercive- population control programs outside of the one child policy(which, again, was a pretty big deal).
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Would you classify "deliberate efforts to promote values that compete with populationmaxxing" as "deliberate efforts to reduce the population"?
Only when people with these values have a history of advocating for eugenics and population control, never really repudiated those views, and see concern over fertility as some sort of Nazi dog whistle.
Are you talking about specific people who have advocated for all that in their lifetime, or about "those people" as a set that spans 100+ years of discourse? In my observation it's gonna be hard to find someone who both hates Nazis and approves eugenics nowadays.
As for Nazi dog whistles, when it appears that the ones most vocally concerned about fertility also have some kind of white ethnonationalist views (when people are concerned about black/black-adjacent fertility it seems to be more along the lines of "they're more fertile than us"), what is one supposed to believe?
As I've pointed out many times- attempts to reduce African fertility, and third world fertility more generally- is very establishment-linked progressive NGO coded. Bill Gates has been notable for his efforts in such matters.
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Yeah I am talking about specific people, all the way from Malthus to Ehrlich, and many, many, people in-between.
By the same logic, I will answer your question: when it appears that the ones most vocally concerned about "women's liberation" are implementing policies that increase the fertility of the most rich, and drop that of others, what is one supposed to believe?
Interesting crowd you're hanging out with. What I'm hearing is more to the tune of "abortion is literal black genocide". Would you be ok if I called your support for abortion a Nazi dog whistle?
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Governments that have put a lot of effort into trying to increase the population, such as modern Russia's government, have not seen much success, so I doubt that the low modern fertility rates have much to do with governments trying to lower fertility rates. I think that fertility rates are just something that governments, even relatively authoritarian governments, do not have much control over. For a government to significantly influence fertility rates it would have to either make sweeping economic and cultural changes somehow, and/or go totalitarian beyond the degree to which even the current Chinese government is totalitarian.
A lot of effort by Russia's government: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xlf2G0O_VY0&t=87
Their latest idea was: Russians don't have enough space to raise kids. Not very original thought, but okay.
How about a new idea? Let's introduce escrow accounts so that real estate developers can't run away with all your money! Oh, wait, someone has snuck in a clause that this applies only to prefabs, so 95% of the market is not covered.
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I don't see how it follows from there, that the resulting reduction in population growth was not deliberate.
True, it isn't just a matter of government policy, but that doesn't mean the reduction in fertility wasn't premeditated, and implemented from the top.
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I don't think that's a huge component, no. Many countries are now trying to reverse it and failing, and countries that've tried to lower it in the past (china?) don't seem to be doing much worse than comparable ones that didn't (other east asians). What specific such efforts do you think are relevant?
How does one measure's failure disprove the other measure's success? Especially since the measure that worked is still in effect, and is still being promoted - it's not like "countries" have total control over what's going on inside them, and are free from outside (and inside) influences.
Same question, as above.
Getting women to join the workforce, attempting to close the wage gap when they have (even though it primarily comes from men picking more lucrative careers and devoting themselves to work relatively more), and the denigration of motherhood in mass media, and all status-granting institutions.
Ok I think that was a combination of changes brought on directly by technology (women always did a large amount of critical labor within the household, farming or making clothes or similar, cleaning, physically maintaining the household, and as technology automated that having them work made sense) and changes brought on for direct political, eg progressive, reasons which in turn was enabled by technology. I believe little of that had the explicit aim of lowering the birth rate. There was, of course, the overpopulation panic, but I think the impact of that was very small compared to the global trend of progressivism and technology!
I don't get it. That is my entire argument - this is exactly how the measures to reduce the population are being implemented to begin with! "Progressivism" is being introduced through deliberate centralized efforts, and "overpopulation panic" has been it's feature for over a hundred years. Why are we assuming that this is just some magical "global trend" appearing out of nowhere, rather than it being an expression of these deliberate efforts?
Because it isn't a 'magic global trend that appeared out of nowhere', it's a central political/moral/philosophical development of modern history, something that basically all politicians, intellectuals, philosophers have been debating for the past few hundred years? You can read historical progressives and talk to existing progressives, and they're much more concerned about stuff like freeing women from domination than they are overpopulation.
And where do central developments of modern history come from, are they by any chance deliberately implemented?
I mean, it's only so long you can twirl mustaches and laughing like a me monocled villain, without people noticing. Also the reaction to fertility concern belies them supposedly not caring about it.
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Very interesting framing! The question that most strongly appears to me, though, is this one:
This sounds to me like positing a kind of agency or purpose to history - a sense that it's almost like there's a design, or something that's meant to happen now.
That sense would imply some kind of agent to have that purpose, a designer or meaner who lies behind this. To UFO cultists (pardon the pejorative language), that agent might be some enlightened alien race, or spiritual being or group thereof that are only observed through these esoteric occurrences. Someone more focused on AI might posit some way that a future agent can reach back in time to influence its own creation (perhaps something like Dan Simmons' Ultimate Intelligence?), or to create the condition of its own possibility. Or adherents of traditional religions might easily slot their own divinities in there.
Do you have any sense of such a purpose, or implied agency?
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I think you're onto something personally. I also have a slight lean toward esotericism, not a very hot take incoming but I feel we are missing much regarding consciousness and the capabilities of the mind. Perhaps that even relates to your discussion of UFOs as well.
I used to be very materialist, but I'm a lot more open-minded now because I think there's freedom of choice at the most fundamental level when we are building our models, and there's nothing wrong with constructing a theory of reality that allows for immaterial phenomenon. I don't believe we should shove so much stuff under the Occam's Razor rug. We don't have to choose some subjective "simplest" explanation, we can choose whatever explanation and mental model/theory that happens to be useful at the time, and experiment with and construct different models, we can be creative with our mental models of reality just because we can. And also, because we might just live in a crazy/esotericist world where being willing to change your model of reality is what allows you to maintain maximum utility across different times and circumstances. I don't know if I explained that well, maybe it sounds like crazy rambling.
Anyway, I agree it seems like we're heading for some kind of event horizon. One point I'd disagree with is birth rate collapse being "spooky": it seems to be more first-world countries experiencing this, with cultural causes that have been discussed on this site a decent amount, no? Although to your point, I suppose it is unusual how successful the spread of those behavioral shifts that decrease birth rate was.
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So glad to see that there's a fellow traveler here on TheMotte! Lots to look forward to in the next few months - hearings coming up in both the House and the Senate, and it appears that the UAPDA provision of the NDAA isn't completely dead yet.
I wouldn't say that it feels "esoteric" to me, no. But I do think it's wild that the universe allows this to happen, at such a cheap cost and so soon after the invention of electronic computing in general, in much the same way that it's wild to me that the universe allows heavy metal tubes to fly through the air.
Nothing short of a live demonstration I could observe through thermals would convince me.
The whole scene is pure bullshit. If anything it convinces me MK-Ultra developed a good bunch of useful techniques.
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I wonder, with some affection, how The New Atlantis is doing. They seem to have revamped the website and have articles more suited to internet virality - I remember them as a slightly stuffy, but high-quality resource, essentially the place to find conservative American academics writing on philosophy of technology.
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In reading your post and contemplating it, I realized that a very likely response that humans would have to a significantly super-humanly intelligent AI is to worship it as a god. I suppose this is old hat. There must be hundreds of old sci-fi stories with this premise. But I used to find this premise hokey, whereas now it actually seems pretty plausible. And it is especially plausible if the AI is super-humanly charming as well as being super-humanly intelligent in a scientific way. And why wouldn't it be super-humanly charming? This AI would combine in one being an intelligence that is beyond any of humanity's geniuses and the charisma of a pop megacelebrity like Elvis or Michael Jackson, or a politician like Hitler, but on steroids. The likely human reaction to such a being is not just fawning support, such as Obama gets from Democrats or Trump from Republicans, it would probably be something more like religious awe.
Some might object that humans would not feel such an awe because they would be aware that the machine intelligence was a human creation. But I am not convinced by that. Humans are capable of worshipping Jesus even though Jesus was born from a human woman. It would be easy for future humans to imagine that the super-humanly intelligent AI was actually some sort of being from beyond the metal, some kind of essence that the universe suddenly decided to activate in that metal like Jesus becoming incarnate in a human body.
Granted, the AI wouldn't have a human body, unlike say Michael Jackson, who could get worshipped as a demi-god off the power of his accomplishments and raw charisma by standing still and turning his head occasionally, and who still has the largest online defense force of any modern celebrity, one that includes thousands of people who worship him and constantly argue online against the idea that he was a pedophile. But it would have so many other advantages that I'm not sure the lack of a human body would matter. For all I know, it might even help. Humans have never yet in their history, unless you credit stories about gods or aliens, been exposed to an intelligence that is genuinely significantly super-human.
As long as I'm talking about Michael Jackson, I might as well mention that he was so beloved and worshiped that he could release a music video that is basically fascist propaganda and get away with it. Check it out, the HIStory Teaser is both hilarious and epic. Even if it was meant to be satirical, it is still probably the best fascist music video that has been made in the West since Leni Riefenstahl, or maybe parts of the Pink Floyd The Wall movie.
I’d argue that on a low level we’ve been worshiping AI and before that computers. The number of times I’ve seen someone ask AI a question and just assume AI is correct is pretty darn high. They’ll ask ChatGPT a question and post the answer as though this is all that’s needed to know the answer. That’s pretty close to divination— ask a question, get an answer from the gods and then just go with it. And before that, you could find the same thing with making computer models or researching on the internet. You’d get an answer from a computer analysis and never ask what assumptions are in the model, it was done on a computer after all. With punch cards and everything. It has to be right. Or once we had internet, any information found by Google search would be assumed correct. It’s just built in, I think, that if you think the box in front of you is intelligent, you assume it’s right and simply accept that what it says is true.
This makes the word "worshipping" meaningless.
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So, my church doesn't have an official position on this, but the unofficial one I've seen in a lot of places is that if 'true' GAI happens it'll be used as a puppet by demons.
This makes sense on a secular level if we translate demons to something like Scott's take on Moloch. Naturally-emergent suboptimal (or downright deleterious) local minima / pernicious local attractors in the possibility space of ways-of-being, of niches.
But I don't see why it needs to be either/or.
It's a surprisingly wise position re: human Agency but it's still going to be very easy to manipulate by any system with above human intelligence.
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I am not a member of any organized religion, but I think that your post nails something very important.
And is pragmatic intelligence really anything other than an ability to objectively survey the field, especially when that means being able to see past the local maximum to a higher one?
But though I agree with you at least in that there is a similarity between the religious notion of a demon and the possible darkness of AI, I am not convinced that the argument makes sense unless I accept your metaphysical perspectives. From a secular perspective, why would AI be more drawn to chaos than humans are?
I suppose the non-secular, more optimistic argument would hold that humans have some kind of extra sauce, something that naturally makes them less demonic, maybe more altruistic, than an AI following pure gradient descent on matrix math would have. But what is the evidence that this is true?
And I say this as someone who thinks that consciousness might be beyond the ability of humans to ever understand. But when it comes to ordered/demonic, I'm not sure why the AI would tend to be more demonic, unless I buy into some kind of metaphysics that I see no reason to buy into so far at least.
Darwin. The human brain, and its various chordate forerunners, is the product of hundreds of millions of years of ruthless selection forces; who knows how many vulnerabilities and failure modes both gross and subtle have been winnowed out over the aeons?
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