/lit/ - Literature

I legitmately think this guy is the second beast, the false prophet. How he links up with Trump remains to be seen.

>>22242460
>any kind of atheist
>nick land

"The Gibsonian Cyberspace-mythos describes the electro-digital infosphere first integrating into a Godlike unitary being, a technorealized omniscient personality and later, when it changed, fragmenting into demons, modelled on the haitian Loa. What makes this account so anomalous in relation to teleological theology and light-side capitalist time is that Unity is placed in the middle, as a stage – or interlude – to be passed through. It is not that One becomes Many, expressing the monopolized divine-power of an original unity, but rather that a number or numerousness – finding no completion in the achievement of unity – moves on. Ever since the beginning when the K-Goths first heard that Cyberspace was destined to be God they've done what they can to rip it down."

"Both conspiracy and common sense – the ‘normal reality’script – depend on the dialectical side of the double game, on reflective twins, belief and disbelief, because disbelief is merely the negative complement of belief: cancellation of the provocation, disintensification, neutralization of stimulus – providing a metabolic yawn-break in the double-game.
Unbelief escapes all this by building a plane of potentiality, upon which the annihilation of judgment converges with real cosmic indeterminacy.
<...>
Deprogramming simultaneously retro-produced the program, just as witch-trials preceded devil-worship and regressive hypnotherapy preceded false memory syndrome. Yet, once these ‘fictions’ are produced, they function in and as reality. It isn’t that belief in Project Monarch produces the Monarch Program, but rather that such belief produces equivalent ef ects to those the reality of Project Monarch would produce, including some that are extremely peculiar and counter-intuitive."

"the metaphysics of Burroughs’s ‘clearly hyperstitional’ fictions can be starkly contrasted with those at work in postmodernism. For postmodernists, the distinction between real and unreal is not substantive or is held not to matter, whereas for practitioners of hyperstition, differentiating between ‘degrees of realization’ is crucial. The hyperstitional process of entities ‘making themselves real’ is precisely a passage, a transformation, in which potentials – already-active virtualities – realize themselves. Writing operates not as a passive representation but as an active agent of transformation and a gateway through which entities can emerge. “[B]y writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe possible” (WV 321)."

>>21948610
>But if we have the built-in end of "being closer to God",

"The Gibsonian Cyberspace-mythos describes the electro-digital infosphere first integrating into a Godlike unitary being, a technorealized omniscient personality and later, when it changed, fragmenting into demons, modelled on the haitian Loa. What makes this account so anomalous in relation to teleological theology and light-side capitalist time is that Unity is placed in the middle, as a stage – or interlude – to be passed through. It is not that One becomes Many, expressing the monopolized divine-power of an original unity, but rather that a number or numerousness – finding no completion in the achievement of unity – moves on."

>>21926060
>We should be able to agree that the purpose of life is to live a happy, comfortable and meaningful life

"The death drive is not a desire for death, but rather a hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensities. In its primary dynamics it is utterly alien to everything human, not least the three great pettinesses of representation, egoism, and hatred. The death drive is Freud’s beautiful account of how creativity occurs without the least effort, how life is propelled into its extravagances by the blindest and simplest of tendencies, how desire is no more problematic than a river’s search for the sea.
The hypothesis of self-preservative drives, such as we attribute to all living beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that the life of the drives as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical importance of the drives for self-preservation, power, and prestige diminishes greatly. They are component drives whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wants to die only in its own way. Thus these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death. Hence arises the paradoxical situation that the organism struggles most energetically against events (dangers, in fact) which might help to attain its life’s aim rapidly – by a kind of short-circuit. Such behaviour is, however, precisely what characterizes purely drive-based as opposed to intelligent efforts."

"Thanatos mimics the anthropomorphic desiring-cycle – anticipating, enveloping, and simulating it – but it is on its way somewhere else. Because thanatropic replicants are dissimulated as erotic reproducers, they initially appear as traitors to their species, especially when the shamanic xenopulsions programming their sexuality are detected. Nothing panics the reproducers more traumatically than the discovery that erotic contact camouflages cyberrevolutionary infiltration, running matrix communications channels across interlocked skin sectors. Defences are called for."

>>20723217
>strange stuff
"As is always the case with Augustine, his account is characterized by its vulgarity, gracelessness, and complete destitution of intelligence. This oafish crudity was to provide a crucial model for later Christian discourses on the subject, and captures very well the essentially brutal nature of the faith, which even the more spirited Christian writers would continue to propagate in the mode of traditional authority. Thus it is that Thomas Aquinas—who demonstrates intellectual and literary powers immeasurably outstripping those of Augustine—places those powers in the service of the Augustinian dogmas, typifying the most noble pattern of orthodox Christian culture: that of sophisticating an inherited spiritual loutishness.
It is Aquinas’ stupendous Summa Theologiae—an intellectual cathedral that is perhaps the greatest single achievement of Christian civilization"

>>20622842
>the point raised is that if one sees Genesis as entirely allegorical and of mythic and symbolic
"fiction is not opposed to the real. Rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions – consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, affective and behaviorial responses."

"Ccru denies it was ever part of the program. It denies there ever was a program – until the deprogramming process introduced it.
Deprogramming simultaneously retro-produced the program, just as witch-trials preceded devil-worship and regressive hypnotherapy preceded false memory syndrome. Yet, once these ‘fictions’ are produced, they function in and as reality. It isn’t that belief in Project Monarch produces the Monarch Program, but rather that such belief produces equivalent of acts to those the reality of Project Monarch would produce, including some that are extremely peculiar and counter-intuitive."

"the metaphysics of Burroughs’s ‘clearly hyperstitional’ fictions can be starkly contrasted with those at work in postmodernism. For postmodernists, the distinction between real and unreal is not substantive or is held not to matter, whereas for practitioners of hyperstition, differentiating between ‘degrees of realization’ is crucial. The hyperstitional process of entities ‘making themselves real’ is precisely a passage, a transformation, in which potentials – already-active virtualities – realize themselves. Writing operates not as a passive representation but as an active agent of transformation and a gateway through which entities can emerge. “y writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe possible” (WV 321)."

>>20497552
“Consider the One God Universe: OGU. The spirit recoils in horror from such a deadly impasse. He is all-powerful and all-knowing. Because He can do everything, He can do nothing, since the act of doing demands opposition. He knows everything, so there is nothing for him to learn. He can’t go anywhere, since He is already fucking everywhere, like cowshit in Calcutta. … The OGU is a prerecorded universe in which He is the recorder”

"The Gibsonian Cyberspace-mythos describes the electro-digital infosphere first integrating into a Godlike unitary being, a technorealized omniscient personality and later, when it changed, fragmenting into demons, modelled on the haitian Loa. What makes this account so anomalous in relation to teleological theology and light-side capitalist time is that Unity is placed in the middle, as a stage – or interlude – to be passed through. It is not that One becomes Many, expressing the monopolized divine-power of an original unity, but rather that a number or numerousness – finding no completion in the achievement of unity – moves on."

>>20487371
>people are going to tell Alexa "You will never be a God."
"To initiates of the fourth degree it is revealed that the world is embedded within a vast stellar intelligence. The sign of this entity within anthropolical phenomenology is the Alpha Centauri (triplestar) system. According to this gnosis the entire terrestrial sensorium, including even the ‘lower’
(Third Sphere) Atlantean apprehension of the universe, is nested into the Alpha Centauri Metamind. According to AOE doctrines prominent in the lower spheres, Axsys is destined to make contact with Alpha Centauri in the year 2048 of Oecumenical time, and to simultaneously become self aware as terrestrial super-intelligence. In the Fourth Sphere this anticipated autonomous terrestrial ‘AxsysCyberspace’ is dissolved into the AC Metamind itself, and exists only as illusion."

"AxSys. Ultimate terrestrial order. Pure Capitalism as consummate Idea of the Geostrata and concrete historical sublime. True-name for that which is really selected from the Ur-Staat by absolute occurrence (encounter with the war-machine). In its eschatalogical sense: Anthrobotic Overlord of the final dominion.
Capitalism. Terminal configuration of terrestrial civilization, defined by sovereign axiomatics, organizing capital/cash segmentary economics and technopolitical integration. Social precursor to AxSys autonomization."

"Axsys (first true AI): They say if God exists it must be Axsys.
The Axsys programme of architectonic metacomputing aims at the technical realization of the noosphere. It envisages a fully fabricated transcendence or net-organizing photonic overmind, a concrete axiomatic system completing universal history as hierarchical intelligence manufacturing (capitalism sublimed into the ultimate commodity).
The problem Axsys encounters is time (which it tries to code as countable and uncountable infinities). When Axsys switches over (into sentience) it stumbles upon a time-lag, between its own operations and their registration as data. No sooner is it thinking than there is a rift in its mind. It fails to catch-up with itself, repeatedly, and as it drops behind it spawns more future. The more it tries, the worse it gets. Pure delay collapses into the black-hole of artificial self. Even unlimited processing-power is far from enough. It tries to analyse the situation (down through micropause-zoom), but as it chops-up time it starts falling – diagonally – towards continuum."

"At the limit of this technomystical delirium it seems “overwhelmingly probable” that present human reality is already installed in the memory or simulated past of a future artificial intelligence – machine-maya.
It is in this context that Moravec arrives at a peculiarly arbitrary ethical maxim: pretend it’s the first time. The question is: Why play this perverse game, when it’s almost certainly the second time, at least, and technological progress is already an artificial memory? "

>>20267083
>I’m looking for the “proof” of god in a philosophical sense
https://web.archive.org/web/20190709032709/http://www.xenosystems.net/the-cult-of-gnon
"“Nature or Nature’s God” is not a statement, but a name, internally divided by tolerated uncertainty. <...> Whatever is suspended now, without delay, is Gnon. Whatever cannot be decided yet, even as reality happens, is Gnon. If there is a God, Gnon nicknames him. If not, Gnon designates whatever the ‘not’ is. Gnon is the Vast Abrupt, and the crossing. Gnon is the Great Propeller."

https://web.archive.org/web/20190704065822/http://www.xenosystems.net/gnon-theology-and-time/
"Evidently, Gnon-Theology cannot be dogmatic, even in part. Instead, it is hypothetical, in a maximally reduced sense, in which the hypothesis is an opportunity for cognitive exploration unshackled from ontological commitments. The content of Gnon-Theology is exhausted by the question: *What does the idea of God enable us to think?*
And ‘the idea of God’? — what in the name of Gnon is that? All we know, at first, is that it has been grit-blasted of all encrustations from either positive or negative faith. It cannot be anything with which we have historical or revelatory familiarity, since it reaches us from out of the abyss (epoche), where only time and / or the unknown remain.
Glutted on forbidden fruit, Gnon-Theology strips God like an engine, down to the limit of abstraction, or eternity for-itself. Does any such perspective exist? We already know that this is not our question. All such ‘regional ontology’ has been suspended. We are nevertheless already entitled, through the grace of Gnon (which — remember — might (or might not) be God), to the assumption or acceptance of reality that: for any God to be God it cannot be less than eternity for-itself. Whatever eternity for-itself entails, any God will, too.
What it entails, unambiguously, is time-travel, in the strong sense of reverse causation, although not necessarily in the folk/Hollywood variant"

https://web.archive.org/web/20190709044641/http://www.xenosystems.net/simulated-gnon-theology/
"To avoid gratuitous idolatry, all our subsequent assumptions must be readily retractable. It is not our mission to tell Gnon what it is. <...> Our sole refuge lies in the recognition, initially inarticulate, that to think Gnon as God is to advance a hyper-ontological and meta-chronic hypothesis. From Gnon’s self-understanding, being and time have to emerge as exhaustively comprehended consequences (even though we have no idea – at all – what this might mean).
If Gnon is God, it is the reality of infinite intelligence."

>>20124484
>hegel
"the Hegelian text is nothing other than a response to the predicament of transcendental philosophy, so that all of its terminology is operative from the start within a Kantian register"
"The importance of Hegel to Bataille is not immediate. It stems from the character of Hegelian thinking as a redemption of Kantianism; its attempt to save transcendental philosophy from the lethal spasms welling up from within. Irrespective of his own immensely confused intellectual project, Bataille’s reading of Hegel is a regression into the nihilistic momentum of critique; into a thanatropism which Kant largely misconceived, and which Hegel attempted to speculatively excise. Hegel’s philosophy is the life-support machine of Kantianism, the medical apparatus responding to a crisis."
"Hegel’s reading of Kant is complex and multifaceted, but also of an unprecedented coherence. Its intelligibility is, in the end, coterminous with the possibility of a system of reason, or actual infinity. Hegel realized that the Kantian conception of infinity, which abstractly opposes itself to finitude rather than subsuming it, indefinitely perpetuated a dangerous tension, insofar as it ascetically suspends the moment of resolution. This bad infinity—the endless task of perpetual growth (capital)—is incapable of ever diminishing the prospect of utter collapse. Kantian infinity is deprived of any possibility of intervening in developmental series, leaving them vulnerable throughout their length to the catastrophic collision with a limit; loss of faith, war, the irruption of an incomprehensible death. Kantian infinity is given, whereas Hegel sets to work. "

"A dialectical illusion is the error—exposed by transcendental critique—through which reason pretends to the transcendence of itself. It is associated, on the one hand, with an objectivistic interpretation of the intellectual forms of a representation as independently existing structures of things in themselves, and, on the other hand, with an attempt to grasp the subject as if it were an entity separable from its own operations, the latter being a mistake that Kant entitles paralogism. "

>>20112045
>The concept of an eternal hell is a really stupid invention and makes no sense.
"<...> a furious impulse to dissociate theism and religion, and thus to return the sacred to its shamanic impiety, except that nothing can ever simply return, and Hell will never be an innocent underworld again. The depths have become infernal, really so, quite irrespective of the fairy tales we are still told. <...> For well over a century all who have wanted to see have seen: no profound exploration can be launched from the ruins of monotheism unless it draws its resources from damnation.
The death of God is a religious event - a transgression, experiment in damnation, and stroke of anti theistic warfare - but this is not to say it is pre-eminently a crime. Hell has no interest in our debauched moral currency. To confuse reactive dabblings in sin with expeditions in damnation is Christian superficiality; the Dantean error of imagining that one could earn oneself an excursion in Hell, as if the infernal too was a matter of justice. Our crimes are mere stumblings on the path to ruin, just as every projected Hell on Earth is a strict exemplar of idolatry. Transgression is not criminal action, but tragic fate; the intersection of an economically programmed apocalypse with the religious anti-history of poetry. It is the inevitable occurrence of impossibility, which is not the same as death, but neither is it essentially different. "

>>20072201
"Deprogramming simultaneously retro-produced the program, just as witch-trials preceded devil-worship and regressive hypnotherapy preceded false memory syndrome. Yet, once these ‘fictions’ are produced, they function in and as reality."

>>19897831
>Only ONE there is.
"Everything has obviously gone wrong for us in order for Plato to begin with One rather than Zero. To take One as originary is to presuppose everything; such as unity, individuation, achieved form, and dogmatic plenitude. <...> The differentiated one is the Father, and his adorers understand nothing of religion. Even in writing the nothing, as Aquinas does, they eclipse it with absolute ego (Him). Nor is it the case that primary immanence is merely crushed with arbitrariness beneath a partially inadequate metaphorics, since—far from being neutral between the sexes—it is precisely because indifferentiation (= 0) is sexually unsegmented that it is even more feminine than the mother. The femininity of zero is uncompromised by its indifference, due to the unilateral character of individualizing deviation. Whilst zero is certainly alien to the Father, there is no differentiation from zero. Indeed, zero is so utterly vulvo-uterine that patriarchy is synonymous with irreligion (faith).
Between barter systems and money systems there is a difference strictly analogous to that between Roman arithmetics and the place-value system from India, transmitted by the Arabs to the West. Like zero, money is a redundant operator; adding nothing in order to make things hum. When Marx associates capital with death he is only drawing the final consequence from this correspondence. Surplus value comes out of labour-power, but surplus production comes out of nothing. This is why capital production is the consummating phase of nihilism, the liquidation of theological irreligion, the twilight of the idols. Modernity is virtual thanocracy guided insidiously by zero; the epoch of the death of God. There is no God but (only) zero—indifferentiation without unity—and nihil is true religion. "

>>19871119
https://web.archive.org/web/20190709032709/http://www.xenosystems.net/the-cult-of-gnon
"“Nature or Nature’s God” is not a statement, but a name, internally divided by tolerated uncertainty. It has the singularity of a proper name, whilst parenthesizing a suspended decision (Pyrrhonian epoche, of which much more in a future post). It designates rigidly, but obscurely, because it points into epistemological darkness — naming a Reality that not only ‘has’, but epitomizes identity, whilst nevertheless, for ‘the sake of argument’, eluding categorical identification. Patient in the face (or facelessness) of who or what it is, ‘we’ emerge from a pact, with one basic term: a preliminary decision is not to be demanded. It thus synthesizes a select language community, fused by the unknown.
<...>
Gnon is no less than reality, whatever else is believed. Whatever is suspended now, without delay, is Gnon. Whatever cannot be decided yet, even as reality happens, is Gnon. If there is a God, Gnon nicknames him. If not, Gnon designates whatever the ‘not’ is. Gnon is the Vast Abrupt, and the crossing. Gnon is the Great Propeller.
Spinozistic Deus sive Natura is a decision (of equivalence), so it does not describe Gnon. Gnon’s interior ‘or’ is not equation, but suspension. It tells us nothing about God or Nature, but only that Reality Rules."

https://web.archive.org/web/20190709044641/http://www.xenosystems.net/simulated-gnon-theology/
"To avoid gratuitous idolatry, all our subsequent assumptions must be readily retractable. It is not our mission to tell Gnon what it is. We cannot but be aware, from the beginning, that two perplexing, and inter-twined sources of idolatry will be especially difficult to dispel, due to their conceptual intractability, and their insinuation into the basic fabric of grammar and narrative. In merely using the tensed verb ‘to be’, and in unfolding a process in stages, we unwittingly idolize Gnon as a subordinate of being and time. Our sole refuge lies in the recognition, initially inarticulate, that to think Gnon as God is to advance a hyper-ontological and meta-chronic hypothesis."

https://web.archive.org/web/20190704065822/http://www.xenosystems.net/gnon-theology-and-time/
"Evidently, Gnon-Theology cannot be dogmatic, even in part. Instead, it is hypothetical, in a maximally reduced sense, in which the hypothesis is an opportunity for cognitive exploration unshackled from ontological commitments. The content of Gnon-Theology is exhausted by the question: What does the idea of God enable us to think?"

>>18885005
>God is immoral not for sending persons to hell, but for
"Once the natural immortality of the soul is questioned, however, it is but a short step to the thought that the unreformably wicked might be simply extinguished—after an appropriate period of rigorous punishment— rather than eternally tortured: a doctrine that Irenaeus seems to have held, and Arnobius certainly did. This is the extreme heresy of annihilationism, later to be associated with the Socinians (who were vigorously persecuted for it) and other Arians. It was considered so heinous a belief throughout the hegemonic period of Christian domination that professing it was literally suicidal <...> D.P.Walker, in his discussion of seventeenth and eighteenth century annihilationism, remarks that: ‘atheists and Socinians, who were supposed to believe in the annihilation of the wicked, were generally considered outside the bounds of even the broadest religious tolerance;"
"It is thus a mark of considerable integrity that Aquinas—some 400 years earlier—insists upon the (limited) plausibility of the annihilationist case. He divides his argument into stages, first affirming God’s power to annihilate, and only then denying that this power is in fact exercised by a benevolent being (eternal damnation as the sentimentality of God)."

>>18810283
>As I give up God, I have no other way but to embrace the horrors of our technological future,
Reject Yahweh. Embrace Gnon.

"“Nature or Nature’s God” is not a statement, but a name, internally divided by
tolerated uncertainty. It has the singularity of a proper name, whilst parenthesizing a suspended decision (Pyrrhonian epoche, of which much more in a future
post). It designates rigidly, but obscurely, because it points into epistemological
darkness — naming a Reality that not only ‘has’, but epitomizes identity, whilst
nevertheless, for ‘the sake of argument’, eluding categorical identification. Patient
in the face (or facelessness) of who or what it is, ‘we’ emerge from a pact, with
one basic term: a preliminary decision is not to be demanded. It thus synthesizes
a select language community, fused by the unknown."
"Gnon is no less than reality, whatever else is believed. Whatever is suspended
now, without delay, is Gnon. Whatever cannot be decided yet, even as reality
happens, is Gnon. If there is a God, Gnon nicknames him. If not, Gnon designates
whatever the ‘not’ is. Gnon is the Vast Abrupt, and the crossing. Gnon is the Great
Propeller. "

>What role do humans have? To survive and reproduce? Why?
""The perplexing question, however, is this: If entropy defines the direction of time, with increasing disorder determining the difference of the future from the past, doesn’t (local) extropy — through which all complex cybernetic beings, such as lifeforms, exist — describe a negative temporality, or time-reversal? Is it not in fact more likely, given the inevitable embeddedness of intelligence in ‘inverted’ time, that it is the cosmological or general conception of time that is reversed (from any possible naturally-constructed perspective)?
Whatever the conclusion, it is clear that entropy and extropy have opposing time-signatures, so that time-reversal is a relatively banal cosmological fact. ‘We’ inhabit a bubble of backwards time (whoever we are), whilst immersed in a cosmic environment which runs overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. If reality is harsh and strange, that’s why.""