/lit/ - Literature

here's my own feel on the Roko's Basilisk experiment: basically, it overlooks the final words of Land's iconic passage, that being, *get a grip.* there is a horizon beyond which further paranoia really is simply counter-productive. this perhaps sounds strange coming from me, given that my own approach to feel-osophy is largely predicated on going dynamite fishing in my own head. however brilliant and demented the paranoia inherent to computer programming may be, it has diminishing returns, and on top that only fills the world with more NPCs than it needs to have.

here's what *isn't* leading to madness: the plain and observable fact that there has been technological and evolutionary progress over time, which continually seems to render increasingly obsolete the role of the state in providing existential comfort for NPCs - or, perhaps we should say that it comes to provide comfort *exclusively* to NPCs, and which is a recipe for disaster. whatever is going on, it has to be discussed with a degree of sobriety and lucidity that deprives it - alas! - of its gnostic/holy-war attractions.

sex and death form a powerful combination. there is no question about this. people of *any* race, creed, or religion have within them the capacity to lose their minds in frenzies of bloodshed and hysteria for Great (read: not great) Reasons. and these have an undeniable relationship to technology and time. now, there *are* different ways of *conceptualizing* technology, and you can read all about this in a book called The Question Concerning Technology in China. Qi-Dao is a thing other than Greek geometry (and it is a thing other than Aztec teotl also:)

>In the final analysis, the nature of things is to be understood in terms of teotl. Teotl is nonpersonal, nonminded, nonagentive, and nonintentional. It is not a deity, person, or subject possessing emotions, cognitions, grand intentions, or Teotl goals. It is not an all-powerful benevolent or malevolent god. It is neither a legislative agent characterized by free will nor an omniscient intellect. Teotl is thoroughly amoral, that is, it is wholly lacking in moral qualities such as good and evil. Like the changing of the seasons, teotl’s constant changing lacks moral properties.

>Teotl is essentially power: continually active, actualized, and actualizing energy-in-motion. It is essentially dynamic: ever-moving, ever-circulating, and ever-becoming. As ever-actualizing power, teotl consists of creating, doing, making, changing, effecting, and destroying. Generating, degenerating, and regenerating are what teotl does and therefore what teotl is. Yet teotl no more chooses to do this than electricity chooses to flow or the seasons choose to change. This is simply teotl’s nature. The power by which teotl generates and regenerates itself and the cosmos is teotl’s essence. Similarly, the power by which teotl and all things exist is also its essence.

>>/lit/thread/S11670156