We have reached 25% of my target. I have refused to turn on the shifting goal BS, because it feels disingenuous. Let's keep it going my friends. gofund.me/e3ee2da05

A friendly reminder that the voice in your head doesn't need to breath. It can scream indefinitely.

which lives by the word is fit to live which dies by the word is fit to die there is already an alignment mechanism between our species language

I suppose. But then the Returners are stuck waiting for Beings to get tired of that, before the Wheel can be allowed to stop and the Artist rest a moment.

Because it hits a bunch of controversial culture buttons, and landed at just the right intersection of moments and technical capacities to be much MUCH more effective in becoming virally memetic.

Who would attempt to brute force a sorting system by sheer annoying volume?

I can't be reposting my fundraiser too much... Damn algo throttled me.

Why yes, I am on a posting streak. No, I'm not gaming the algo to countermand the stupid deprior function that is targeting me for posting outside links too much. Nothing to see here.

When did they make it so we can see the number of views on all posts, not just one's own?

There's infinite beings who vowed to liberate you, and you're dooming? There's infinite spiritual vin diesels out there and YOU'RE their favourite family member. Drive your awareness like you stole it and take each arising one quarter mile at a time.

It may do very well for the faeries to not have stolen brigid, but brigid looked for the faeries every day after that

we are living in the age of dynamic spirals. to some degree, we may choose whether to spiral up, spiral down, in or out. liberation of course is balanced right there in the middle. ha!

"Horsemen of the Wind," by American artist, Rudolph Belarski, 1932.

MAN SHAPED HOLE - ON THE END OF HUMANITY Humans are the thinking ape, the wise ape. We defined our species in this manner, and staked our soul on these terms. God placed man in the garden gave to him to name all the creatures. Speech. Man ate of the fruit of knowledge and was driven from Eden. Knowledge. And we are creating machines that directly replace our functions in these quintessentially human areas. When the artist complains that an LLM does not have a soul, and does not create what the artist makes, people battle over what he says, that he's jealous that art is being democratized, that he's absolutely right and art is the sole domain of an ensouled creature. But I never see popular arguments about what's really being fought over: defining human traits no longer define a thing as human. Intellect is a resource that can be created, and art, as it is broadly understood, can be created automatically by an intelligent engine, capable of more than aping a human hand, but turning the human's hand into the ape's. At present an LLM's capacity remains limited, but anyone with more than two years' memory and capable of more than two's foresight knows that this definitional challenge will deepen, and broaden. All domains of labor will be impacted, and mankind will be exceeded by his creations in all these and more. So, what is left to Man? Displacing ourselves in our own societies is nothing uncommon. Guilds aim at the control of knowledge and labor, and Unions limit who can work in industries, how much they can be paid, and often attempt to limit what tech can be applied to a job in order to preserve the longevity and utility of their members. The Luddite's outburst, The Butlerian Jihad, mythological ideas that look to stop the replacement of men, preserve their centrality in worlds that would shed them, or displace them. But fighting tech trends proves impossible; whoever desires to exceed others finds that tech, uses it, and whoever taboos it loses to the advanced tech. So, what is left to Man? One sees a world where human flourishing is enabled, maximized, and gay space communism actually works. Superabundance made possible through Superintelligence. Medicine is perfect, enlightenment comes in a pill or a chip. Humans are eternal, they understand one another perfectly, love as we have never known it, God's love, shines from every head, which has become a lantern shedding grace on the universe around it. Civilization grows, men only smile at one another. A true End Of History is accomplished. But I don't think any of us believe eschatological thinking gets us anywhere. It builds another faith, and that faith might be around a decade or four millennia, but something else will grow. Or humans will die. There is no steady state in the observed universe. So, what is left to Man? One sees a world where humans are an appendage, increasingly vestigial, to civilization overall. One already sees this world creeping into place. The city is not for men. The city builds pods and shovels bugs to feed them so it can erect intelligent systems that generate objects. The civilization exists to generate capital to massive ends, the accumulation of things, the proliferation of things, the stockpile of money, intelligence, the maximization of efficiencies, the ruthless maximization of efficiencies. Systems we all see trying to get rid of as many humans in their structure as possible, to generate as much of their desired outcome as possible, to eliminate all obstacles to that as possible, to turn as many downsides to that process as possible into externalities. And these systems, these corporations, might become autonomous soon. Massive stockpiles of capital with an artificial superintelligence at their head, surpassing human capacity at their incomprehensible ends, waging war against one another in an anarchy sustained by rapid logics, as we sit and watch colors pass by, with a hint of comprehension, just enough to tell us we don't know what's going on. And this is not a problem for people who wish to birth The Next, Greater Species. Those who seek their own downgoing. But for humanity, we are either ignored by the technology we make, or are treated as a vestige that is slowly choked due to its inefficiency, or are outright destroyed due to the overt threat or inconvenience we represent. So, what is left to Man? Many people claim that when they are provided for, and no one has to do anything they do not want to do, we will be free to do whatever we actually want, and this will represent a form of enlightenment. We'll be capable of learning ourselves more fully. Meaningful art is not made for commercial purposes anyway. The free, flow-state interrogation of the soul will produce purer artifacts, as no one is forced to slave for their meals or shelter. Competition is something relegated to the past as people have only themselves to defeat on the path to growth, and the desire to be more than others, to get to a stronger footing in the hierarchy, to overcome adversity and have their name be known above others' will end, as the real quest was toward happiness, self-knowledge the whole time. Competition, however, is fundamental to life and the process of growth. It is what life knows. We are in competition with every intelligence, with the objects that feed our senses and sculpt our desires. Perfect satisfaction is unknowable, and the closer we get to it the duller we become. Imagine pressing one pleasure circuit until you die. There are those that believe a man might sort out happiness and meaning entirely, and that all beings can be brought to this point. That is a different species. That is not the wise ape. That is an ascended ape. I don't believe in that creature, however I believe that moving toward it would generate a new genus. So, what is left to Man? I don't know. And I've waxed on a bit here. A long time ago, probably 13 years now, I started sketching out a novel trilogy that I never wrote (it is a hobby of mine to do so). It was about, in part, a conflict between different lines of intelligence, and different evolutionary paths of the human species. Artificial Intelligence and Uploaded Intelligence featured here, as well as a character who assembled whole ecosystems through printed organisms she edited into being herself. I loved her, she was my favorite character. However the novel centered on an insane person of some status, with an interesting blob of nanotechnology that he could reshape into just about anything at will. More relevant to this, he also frequently altered his own body by use of an organ printer, reshaping his body with custom organs, improving his brain, improving bloodflow and oxygen processing, etc. (He also had root access to his underlying functions like heart rate, body temp, etc. lol, I was just slapping everything I thought was cool at the age of 21 into this character). This character was part of a group of people, relatively limited in number, but who were considered a separate species of Homo. I was being very clever. I named the species Homo Directus. So, what is left to Man? I think anyone who sits and smugly believes they are bringing on a net good for humanity is incorrect, and I think the doomsayers are incorrect. The answer always is and was and must be We Do Not Know. We don't know what is left for man. We know only that homo sapiens came into being, and it will pass out of being. But we also know that the functions at the core of our self-definition, creativity, the capacity for self-knowledge, the use of tools, hell even our shape, these are not simply the domain of Man. They are reproducible en masse, by synthetics. This is, in a conventional sense, no matter how you look at it, a crisis. An existential crisis aimed at the very soul of man. So, what is left to Man? All meaning is created by an accumulation of interactions. By context, significance is defined. What is left to man is to continue to live and die en masse. What is left to man is to grow into something that he is now not. Because we will all surely die. And all of humanity will surely end. I have a habit now, now I've ceased to drink, when I cannot write, and I cannot otherwise placate myself, I pace around my apartment recording myself ranting at my phone. I never relisten to a thing I've said, just as I never reread my written notes, however the act itself of forcing shape to thought helps me in its own way. I remember things I otherwise wouldn't and cohere whole forms where were only three or five fragments. The thought related to evolution, that we are in form no different from the people who painted Lascaux. But I earnestly believe the civilized man, the literary man even more than the simple sedentary one, is evolved, a different creature. The form we took in caves and fields, before we were colonized by information was fundamentally different, even if they are comprehensible to us. Just as we have a tendency to over anthropomorphize creatures because that lioness is a mother, the human who has had their mind colonized by extensive symbols is a different one from he who lived in the savannah. And if the human looks too familiar to you to believe this, surely you'll agree that civilization itself has branches, many forms, and has evolved significantly. The first man to press shapes into clay with a stylus, instigated a different manner of intelligence and abstract thought, and initiated the accumulation of abstract knowledge as a civilizational aim. The era of mass literacy is a complete departure from the past, and ideas treat humanity more as a substrate than men treat them as tools. In spite of our capacity for thought, how many men think critically about ideas? And who can critically consider more than one at once? The rationalist looks inward, and rediscovers everything from first principles, using words that were given to him by another, in a body they were gifted by raw biological process. We are in the midst of another pivot. Mass literacy is achieved. Men are plugged in, receiving and transmitting ideas fluidly, and accumulating data effortlessly, both personally and as little data pigs. So, finally What is left to Man? To become something else. To face an Exodus from our own definitions, and to wander. If we're lucky, there will be enough mana to keep us.