My latest post on the possible impact of AI on the peak and decline of industrial civilisation. Also check out my chat on Geopolitics and Empire where we talked about this and a range of other issues. https://open.substack.com/pub/zeroinputagriculture/p/intelligent-artifice?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

All is learning. Every person is a product of the process of learning. All that is known to them must be through the process of learning. From their sense of self, to intelligibility, to relationality. Every choice made by someone is is direct consequence of what they have learned in life in regards to those just mentioned aspects. Learning is not good by its very nature, for what is learned is not truth but knowledge. Knowledge of what is good, true, and beautiful - and alignment to it - is what makes learning good. As all is learning, all can go wherever the patterns emerge. As patterns are just heuristics, rather than absolute truth, they can give rise to all that is theoretically possible, as opposed to the really real. By becoming aware that All is learning, one installs a psycho-technology of self-transcendence - if one aligns that learning to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful then they shall become Enlightened, rather than simply Awakened - a distinction i propose. Because all is learning, if one learns to see a glimpse of Right alignment, they are likely to self-correct towards it.

Hate disappears when one knows that all act accordingly to what they have learned, and one is not responsible for what one has learned, because they have no control over the initial acts of learning - childhood. Likewise they have no control over external factors that may or may not ever prompt them into becoming aware of how different their way of being and relating can become. If one is never made aware of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful - how can we blame them for aligning to anything else they have learned instead? We all become who we are due to factors entirely out of our control. If we make ourselves, it is because we have learned that we can in some way, a LEARNING that was outside of ones control. We really have no control over what we learn, we can only interfere with our ability to learn and maintain certain patterns, thus allowing them to drop out - though still being learned behaviors.

People do not think very much when they talk about free will. How should it work, if you were to invent it, you should ask them. They will give a silly answer. They say - it gives you the ability to decide between multiple options. I say, that is absurd. If I consciously make a decision one way, it is because anything i have learned up to that point has culminated in an action potential of the individual. All that encompasses the self's state (consciously and unconsciously), is taken to produce some action at any particular moment in time. Of external forces acting on me, many will be out of my possibility to avoid. Inward forces can have more 'control' but it always fails. The vice always comes back, so it is learned, so then the vice always DOES come back. Control is given up by learning that they have no control. Learned helplessness. Where was the free will in putting the vice aside? Shall we say it was free some of the time but not others? Or that it was still always free and people simply switch from good to bad because they want to? Those who make that argument forget about learning and that the individual is STUCK.

People get stuck in loops. We see this constantly. They make the SAME mistakes over and over, never learning to alter course - or if they do learn, it is detrimental to their cause. They learn themselves into depression - a death spiral. They come to see a depressive realism, knowing meaninglessness as the ground of being. They have learned that life has no meaning, and that they have no control - the two ideas play into each other as storms in a vortex, sucking everything down with it to the bottom. This behavior was LEARNED by forces outside of their control. No one swallows the pill of spiritual death if they KNEW about what the pill of spiritual life could afford. That decision to not self-sabotage is learned by experience of a good (really real) phenomenon. Point me to free will and I will show you what was learned, and thus known, resulting in some particular action resulting from the integration of many differentiated parts. I will show you that self is found in both the parts and in the integral. That every part is a result of some learned process, springing from the conditions of the world and the patterns of ineligibility thus spawned from/into them. The integration itself being learned from the parts. Ego develops because language develops. New patterns emerge in language, of thoughts, and it can be learned that those thoughts are of their own being - reflections back into self (in particular thought identifying with though) rather than appearances in awareness.

They did not learn incorrectly to attribute thoughts to self, only that they learned - or perhaps later on when society complexified - that the thoughts being thought were out of their control, and instead the thoughts were in control. This is dualism put simply. Two different forms of control. Self is imprisoned by mind.. Some lack awareness of self and instead ARE mind (non-optimal way of being I argue). Dualism is resolved by finding that self is mind. mind is always in control. Mind acts by learning. The best act of learning is through experience.

Self-transcendence is installing a feedback loop of insight learning. By gaining insight we add a rung to our ladder, in which we step up. As we are higher up, we can differentiate from where we were previously and integrate it into a new perspective. This new perspective is taken to be the new way of being, which affords new ways of seeing self and the world. Thee affordances naturally generate insight, adding yet another rung to the ladder. This goes on until one reaches the top of the wall and can see over it. Only it is cloudy (completely white) and they can see no-thing. Some stay up here and gaze down below occasionally if required to, but they live in the heavens. They become useless down below, on the ground.

Others, by virtue of having learned to be a different type of person, sit on the wall and pick up their ladder slowly, rung by rung, and place it on the other side of the wall. Then they climb down, leaving the heavens behind. At the bottom they see the same thing as on the other side of the wall. Nothing has changed, except that is not true. Someone has learned a good deal. They know the heavens, they know their humanity. They are not the same person as when they started. They know this deeply, and the thought spews many different angles to be viewed at. By now understanding Heraclitus well, they see what lies on the other side of the wall as different by virtue of having a new perspective. The world opens up. The conditions and constraints of the world are not seen as limitations but as possibility, for they give rise to both.The vertical and horizontal dimensions of being are in proper tonas. One flows between self and no-self in the horizontal, holding both as true at the same time. This affords a middle way of being. Self becomes no bother and the reflections of thoughts cease to be cast.

Self is known not by the LLM that is our thoughts, though its propositional knowing does itself change, but by the nature of our being. I see no reason to cast out self for self is but a convergence of many disparate parts, brought into unison. With no or little resistance, learning is optimized and a never-ending journey to Know Thyself begins. Because self is affirmed, we can learn from it, striving for perfection, and achieving excellence. Perfection is not available to us, but we can always learn to Know it better, and thus align more towards it. I take perfection as being perfectly aligned to the Good, the True, the Beautiful. We as humans face finite transcendence due to all being learning. For learning only reveals patterns in the world, not the truth. We can never know the true thing, only its appearances as they unfold.

The One, The Way, The Way of the One. They cannot be known, for all that can be known is but a pattern of their manifestation. They closest we can get to them it to be them, which we always are, for we are always flowing out of them - however - some see the patterns, and as so are able to flow with less resistance to the current, and in a self-aligning manner so as to become the best version of themselves. Best here being a matter of transjective determination, of feedback loops that try to get at what Best is in a optimal manner, always changing their perspective since all perspective afford new interpretations which afford new perspectives..

If I were asked about what I identify with - I would give two answers. One as Self, expressed in words, the other as Being, expressed as a quiet knowing of what is being expressed in words. At no point are reflections cast back inward from thoughts, even if they chain, and at no point is no-self found for if you can't see it, you have simply just stopped looking, for you have learned to view it as a detriment rather than as a supremely good way of staying connected towards the complexity of reality and in being able to relate to people who have never seen over the wall. I do not find myself better than anyone else for having done so (and frankly more of a peering), only more lucky, and compelled to put forward what I have learned in my good luck, so as to possibly set someone else in the path towards Right relation to self and to the world. For that is all anyone really wants from awakening, despite what they have learned to think of it - if you could show them Right relation, they would find themselves in Right alignment.

This is a bit of a followup to this post in which I spoke about talking to parts of myself while journaling: https://www.reddit.com/r/ranprieur/comments/17ttb8k/i_had_a_similar_experience_to_a_trip_report/

Since that post (in which I was speaking to an inner child) I've discovered or spoken to other 'parts' of myself that react differently and 'want' different things - an adolescent, a critic, a very very angry spiteful part that appears on my bad days and seems to hate me... even my day to day conscious self seems to be yet another 'part', playing the role of wrangling the team together, making sure the ship moves in the right direction.

Well it turns out there is already a branch of therapy that is predicated on this theory of multiple selves, and its called Internal Family Systems (IFS).

https://ifs-institute.com/

The whole premise is that we have inner conflicts and they're literally multiple selves inside of us hashing it out, and a way of dealing with that is to consciously converse and befriend these parts and find out their purpose and why they were formed in the first place.

Kind of cool seeing that this thing that I randomly came across inside of myself is already a fully fleshed out theory in psychology. When I found it, my first reaction was 'of course', haha. Of course someone's already figured this out.

For "consciousness" Ran chose to use an image of a color pattern. So I'm thinking, that looks like what people call a "psychedelic" color pattern, like what would be used for a "psychedelic" fabric pattern or "psychedelic" art poster, bright colors, fractal-like symmetries or mandala like patterns. I haven't experienced anything like that, except by looking at such fabrics or images. Then is the choice of that pattern a sort of metaphor, intending a chain of association from the conventional descriptor "psychedelic" of that sort of image, to the idea that "psychedelic" was supposed to mean mind-revealing, to the idea that consciousness is the contents of mind to be revealed by that?

I'm worried about asking that question, because it seems maybe so tedious. Ran writes to keep it short and interesting. Spelling it out, the things meant and implied, can get tedious and boring, which may make a person spelling it out look stupid or annoying.

I thought anyway it would be a better use of time, for myself and whoever reads this because of interest in the title, to ask about it and actually communicate about it, better than just watching some random clickbait titled video about psychedelic imagery, that probably wouldn't get to the point I'm interested in.

Have you, whoever reads this, experienced such "psychedelic" images, other than as art images on screen or in physical objects? Have you only experienced those images under the influence of a drug that has "psychedelic" effects? Did the image seem to reveal anything about consciousness? Did the image just seem to be an odd effect of a drug? Did it seem to be an odd effect of your visual processing, rather than anything very close to your consciousness itself?

Just launched The Long Forum- a monthly post on my writing substack that links all the best long form content from the internet over the last month. This is the best alternative to all the shallow algorithm driven crap on offer. Dig in deep and nourish your mind. https://open.substack.com/pub/haldanebdoyle/p/the-long-forum-march-2024?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

In response to Ran bringing up the Fallout games, I'd like to share two funny links commenting on the franchise. Although they are about 3 and NV respectively, not 4 which is Ran's main focus.

• "Jalyss Dislikes Bethesda". There's a also a sequel of sorts about Skyrim.

• "Rad Squirrel". A plotline from a webcomic. (The in-game character is drawn as a furry since the girl has shape-shifting abilities centred on squirrels in the "reality" of that comic.)

https://www.businessinsider.com/recessions-mortality-degrowth-economy-gdp-unemployment-environment-pollution-2024-3

Ran writes (2024-02-23)

Nobody would ever consciously choose to avoid feeling good, so they must be doing it subconciously, and it must be hard not to.

I'd disagree with this.

I think you are talking from a perspective that could be likened to a generalized extroversion, where instead of being focused on other human minds, craves interaction with the world in general. People with this perspective fear that they would fall into depression if they were unable to find happy thoughts in the world, and incorrectly assume that most actually-depressed people fit that mold.

For those more introverted in the same sense, sometimes thoughts relating to the outside world can be painful even if they "should" be positive. Parts of the mind work harder when maintaining a positive attitude, and those parts may be crying for a rest.

One famous story about being extremely uncomfortable on a meta level with happiness on a shallow level, is the "Happy Happy Joy Joy!" Ren & Stimpy episode.

Another analogy is that often an animal can appear to be starving, yet show no interest in "easy" food, and there are several possible explanations other than "it's crazy". Maybe its teeth hurt. Maybe it is constipated. Maybe something even worse is going wrong with its intestines. Or the animal could be a human with type 1 diabetes, insight into their condition, and no insulin.