The Myth of Progress

[semper occultus]

Bertrand Russel's The Scientific Outlook from 1931 had a reasonable stab at predicting a 21st century of agriculture being closed down to free up lebensraum for transhumanist pod people chowing down on lab meat

[guruilla]

Via Plutonia:

It's real. "Meat Made From Air"

WEF endorsed

https://www.airprotein.com/

Air meat 1.jpg

Air meat 2.jpg

Berkeley-based startup Air Protein makes a meat alternative using NASA-inspired technology to transform carbon dioxide into protein.

Bay Area-based Air Protein makes “meat” from thin air using space-age science
Air Protein’s recent $32 million Series A funding round secures its spot in the growing field of meatless meat and heralds the next wave of alternative protein technology — fermentation.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/02/21/ ... e-science/

[stickdog99]

[Harvey]

And what if sodomy IS a sin, urrmm, not a possibility anyone considered lately, I guess, being too busy pussy-shaving and butt-fucking their girlfriends, probably...

Wonderfully phrased. Begining to feel like the RI I remember. Some excellent points made.

...and the Serpent was only the first recorded case of “Hey, have I got a great idea for you!” It's been downhill ever since.

Slight tangent. I can't help wonder if the serpent hasn't been misrepresented somewhat by millennia of bad press. viewtopic.php?f=34&t=41786&p=705516#p705516

[guruilla]

Ah my sins have been disinterred, having been conventionally buried, I thought, at the end of the previous page. Surprised, and amused, that of the many points I made, the most contentious one was one of only two survivors!

the other one,

I can't help wonder if the serpent hasn't been misrepresented somewhat by millennia of bad press.

Ah come Harv, that's old paradigm stuff! I had my "Gnostic heresy" period, as Aeolus Kephas, as well as a couple of decades advocating Satan. I have put on the shoe and gone to that ball, and at best it's a bunch of psychedelic burn-outs and occult zombies, at worst...

dancevampires.jpg

30 years later, it seems to me that Gnosticism has been unveiled as the religion of the elites (not counting Satanism, which is only an inversion of religion). Not that it doesn't have some good data-points, but the whole "God/the Garden isn't good enough, let's create a better future/make this world a better place" that kick-started the March of Time - it's the Snake, as well as Saturn, that eats its own?





I forgot to highlight this:

I used to be hellbent on fixing things, I am now happy to settle for merely understanding them.

And those who don't understand the bloody-obvious (timeless) wisdom of this, have clearly understood nada.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Glad to see the commentary develop as it has. I say this as a relative layman on a number of the topics/talking points raised in the last ~page or so, but I appreciate simply absorbing and digesting these words.

[semper occultus]

Evolutionary Hymn - C.S. Lewis

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future’s endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there’s always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we’re going,
We can never go astray.

To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn
Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,
Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,
Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,
Towards that unknown god we yearn.

Ask not if it’s god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.

Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature’s simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly,
'Goodness = what comes next.'
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.

On then! Value means survival–
Value. If our progeny
Spreads and spawns and licks each rival,
That will prove its deity
(Far from pleasant, by our present,
Standards, though it may well be).

[DrEvil]

While I disagree with the contents of that poem it is still excellent, but if it wasn't for evolution we'd still be trying to figure out photo-receptors down by some hydrothermal vent. Acknowledging the existence of evolution doesn't mean you value change over everything else, but I would argue the vast majority of this place (there's dozens of us!) are actually in favor of change, even radical change, specifically in the current system that rules us and the values it champions.

[Joe Hillshoist]

I shouldn’t be surprised by the sort of reactions on this thread, such that easily equate Christian faith with far right-ism and “racism” ~ a word that should always be in quotes these days, if it is to have any meaning; along with “homophobia” and countless other levers of control that the Myth of Progress has employed to turbo-boost itself into the persecutory drive of enforced tolerance (for all but the intolerance of deplorables). And what if sodomy IS a sin, urrmm, not a possibility anyone considered lately, I guess, being too busy pussy-shaving and butt-fucking their girlfriends, probably...

And what if it is?

Surely any god that makes sodomy is a sin is a fuckwit. Its not really any of their business what consenting adults do (with each other) in their private lives is it?

Especially when that god promotes a religion that first come up with the idea of work* making you free.

Surely "messy. smelly, a bit gross and potentially causing infection" is not the same thing as "sin". And some Christians claim oral sex is also a form of sodomy. Seriously ... how isn't that an even more insidious control mechanism that rejecting discrimination against people cos they are different?

* IE work for people who own all the factories for slave wages.

[Grizzly]

Remember, these devices “might” pick up your conversation for your own protection.

https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/comments/y41cto/remember_to_disable_the_hospital_spy_before/

[DrEvil]

I would change that to "unless the Amazon Echo is unplugged and set on fire". Just to be sure.

Edit: and of course, after muting it, everyone in the room talks openly with 24/7 surveillance and profiling devices in their pockets.

[Harvey]

While it's all as impressively vague as an obligatory paragraph of exposition from your last SF novel "To start, the researchers connected the neurons to a computer in such a way where the neurons received feedback on whether their in-game paddle was hitting the ball" this is probably only a fraction of it.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/967077

Watch brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time

Neurons playing Pong

Human and mouse neurons in a dish learned to play the video game Pong, researchers report October 12 in the journal Neuron. The experiments are evidence that even brain cells in a dish can exhibit inherent intelligence, modifying their behavior over time.

“From worms to flies to humans, neurons are the starting block for generalized intelligence,” says first author Brett Kagan (@ANeuroExplorer), chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. “So, the question was, can we interact with neurons in a way to harness that inherent intelligence?”

To start, the researchers connected the neurons to a computer in such a way where the neurons received feedback on whether their in-game paddle was hitting the ball. They monitored the neuron’s activity and responses to this feedback using electric probes that recorded “spikes” on a grid.

The spikes got stronger the more a neuron moved its paddle and hit the ball. When neurons missed, their playstyle was critiqued by a software program created by Cortical Labs. This demonstrated that the neurons could adapt activity to a changing environment, in a goal-oriented way, in real time.

“We chose Pong due to its simplicity and familiarity, but, also, it was one of the first games used in machine learning, so we wanted to recognize that,” says Kagan, who worked with collaborators from 10 other institutions on the project.

“An unpredictable stimulus was applied to the cells, and the system as a whole would reorganize its activity to better play the game and to minimize having a random response,” he says. “You can also think that just playing the game, hitting the ball and getting predictable stimulation, is inherently creating more predictable environments.”

The theory behind this learning is rooted in the free-energy principle. Simply put, the brain adapts to its environment by changing either its world view or its actions to better fit the world around it.

Pong wasn’t the only game the research team tested. “You know when the Google Chrome browser crashes and you get that dinosaur that you can make jump over obstacles (Project Bolan). We’ve done that and we’ve seen some nice preliminary results, but we still have more work to do building new environments for custom purposes,” says Kagan.

Future directions of this work have potential in disease modeling, drug discoveries, and expanding the current understanding of how the brain works and how intelligence arises.

“This is the start of a new frontier in understanding intelligence,” Kagan says. “It touches on the fundamental aspects of not only what it means to be human but what it means to be alive and intelligent at all, to process information and be sentient in an ever changing, dynamic world.”

[DrEvil]

this is probably only a fraction of it.

You can say that again. The Eurekalert piece left out the title of the paper - "In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world".

I guess "We created a sentient Pong slave! Look at it go!" was too incendiary.

It does mention the free energy principle, but not that the guy who came up with it, Karl J. Friston, is a co-author on the paper. The math is so far beyond me it's not even funny, but the basic idea (which I am probably mangling beyond recognition) is fascinating. It essentially boils down to: systems try to minimize surprise. We model our surroundings and try to predict what will happen, and if our predictions fail we reassess our model or change our surroundings to fit our predictions (in other words, politics are hardwired into reality. Damn it!).

Can't wait to see what happens when a more advanced experiment (maybe with robot arms. Robot arms are cool) fails to predict an outcome and decides to change its surroundings to fit.

Peter Watts has his usual uplifting take on the whole thing:
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10307


A completely different tangent: I'm pretty (a little) sure that entropy plays a part in the above. Minimizing energy spent is usually beneficial, and having to spend time and energy organizing things to fit our predictions or reorganize our internal models spends energy and goes against entropy.

All life really goes against entropy. It's a high-energy state that will naturally decay into a low-energy state if left alone.

Throw in pan-psychism and the implications are a little unnerving. If the universe is sentient/conscious and we're just tiny parts of it, what else follows that basic layout? Our bodies and the cells inside them. In our case, specifically the type of cells that throw their weight around, gobbling up everything around them to spread, also known as cancer. What does our bodies do about that? Immune system GO! Our immune system wipes out cancers all the time and they never amount to anything. How would that apply on the scale of the universe? What if the universe has an immune system, we just haven't become enough of a nuisance to trigger it yet (spreading to another solar system might do the trick)? What if the reason we haven't found anyone else is because the Great Filter is the universe's immune system kicking in whenever someone gets too European?

Anyway, sorry about the detour. The idea "what if life itself is evil" just popped into my head a couple of weeks ago and has been sloshing around in there since, so I just wanted to lay it out and hopefully have someone explain why it has to be wrong.

[Harvey]

Logically, there is only one way in which life itself may be considered evil, since evil is a human conception: to see the whole world yet perceive nothing more than one's own distorted reflection.

[DrEvil]

Yeah, I should have clarified. Not intrinsically evil, that was just my starting point before I came up with all the other nonsense, but bad/evil in the same sense we view cancer or a virus: not good for the host, in this case the universe.

Actually, come to think of it, my starting point wasn't even "what if life is evil", but "what if the pan-psychic universe is evil?" (again, not Satan-evil, just not friendly to us). We tend to assume that if there is some greater being/mind/sentience/consciousness it has to be good and wise and all that stuff. I can't think of a good reason why that should be the default. Why isn't it selfish and indifferent to others and mostly concerned with itself, same as most other life we know of? I know for a fact I'm not going to lose any sleep over a virus or bacteria in my body dying, I might even actively work towards getting rid of it. Why should the universe be any different?

Then again, maybe life is the whole point. I've seen some research looking at whether life is a random accident or an intrinsic emergent property of our universe, and the researchers landed on the latter. Pure speculation of course, since we only have a sample size of one, but intriguing nonetheless. If life is inevitable the place should be teeming with it.