/lit/ - Literature

How does he make money? He stopped being a university lecturer in 1998. Trust fund? Did he marry into wealth in China?

>>23090428
he supports the machines, illiterate

>>23090450
hello ai

>>23090428
proof he has a wife let alone children. dude's a worthless incel nazi

>>23090904
Shut up he's a personal hero of mine

>>23090428
Looks like he's lost the pass for his second account too.

>>23090445
He shines shoes in China

>>23090947
Probably just survives on Thiel bucks

>>23090947
He hasn't lived in China for a few years now. He lives in like British Colombia now

>>23092126
splitting hairs

>>23092143
oh you

>>23090428
Is this true? What's his new account?

>>23092189
it's xenocosmography. but he might've lost his password to this one too as >>23090940 said because he last xeeted in 29th.

Should I write my Master Thesis on this fucker?
I am one email request away of wasting my one MA Thesis on this guys texts.

>>23091525
Femdom is based

>>23092323
23

>>23091525
>feminist violence
I would love to see what that shitshow that would be suppressed in 5 minutes look like.

>>23092259
Meme answer: Write the whole thing in very dense Deleuzean language, prioritising conciseness over clarity just like Land did in Meltdown. If your professors understand any paragraph without consulting CCRU writings, French-English dictionaries and at least one ancient Kabbalistic text you're not doing it right. Be sure to include a few Jungle record sleeves as citations.
Serious answer: Land is a controversial figure and writing about his work may cause academics to become biased against you, even if your work is objectively sound. If you want an academic or teaching career or anything within mainstream institutions you probably don't want that as your thesis. If you intend to enter the private sector it probably won't matter as your employers will have either never heard of Land or only know about him indirectly as a result of e/acc.

>>23092390
>Jungle
Electro.

>>23092390
>only know about him indirectly as a result of e/acc.
tempted to start a thread on this, but I wouldn’t know if it would be pruned because it’s a pretty novel thing. redpill me on these guys though, are they as retarded as they seem?

I love the idea of hyperstition, of ideas from the future making themselves real through the human host, is there any substance to this or what?

>>23092399
>t.non-knower
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke_9ethHTG4
>>23092413
>are they as retarded as they seem?
Probably, but it's still preferable to AI doomerism.

>>23092493
Even in a Masters one ought to critique the source. Electro is the natural criticism of Land's pathetic "Junglism."

>>23090445
He's a copywriter. He wrote ads for the Shanghai world expo and writes tourism guides etc. occasionally he has an article in small Chinese paper but he isn't a big deal in the journalism world over there.

>>23092493
>>23092550
Or to make it clearer to you:

Bourgeois musicology can never act as an epistemological trump over the true underground knowledge of the dance. The dance inhabits black proletarian spaces not ejected from the working day, but conquered as Temporary Autonomous Zones of proletarian self-abnegation.

Underneath the overpass the slaves are free. There is no rewinding. There is no toaster. There is no selector. We are the sound system. We are slaves in our freedom. We are, as G Jones (1985) observed of the sociology of liberation in praxis, slaves to the rhythm.

>>23092584
Who is that man? He is very handsome.

>>23092390
There isn't exactly a shortage of publications on Land. He's a controversial figure because of his antics at Warwick University where he neglected his job, was always high on crack, wasted department resources, failed to mentor grad students etc. and the whole neo reaction thing. If anything, he's just forgotten not actively suppressed. You see him cited from time to time. He's just fringe.

>>23091525
>the way out of the capitalist entropy is...strong women
How's that going for South Korea?

>>23090428
>haves children

>>23090428
>gets married and haves children
Maybe he's betting on human extinction being a transhuman transformation event instead of a genocide. Today's children could be tomorrow's Von Neumann probes shooting into the void in all directions to harness potential energy for the Bataillean death drive.

>>23090445
Chinese gov paid him to write human interest stories for magazines and blogs.

>>23092576
>Shanghai world expo was held on 2010
So how much did they pay this guys that he’s been living off the residuals for over a decade?

>>23092584
>>23092584
Cool. Unfortunately niggers are niggers so this noble savage bullshit rings pretty hollow. Nigger. Grace Jones and your fantasy fetish of niggerdom is ironically a white construct. The best parts of "jungle" are created by white men. Why do you think everyone in that sphere nuts over Kode9? Sad really. But also entirely understandable.

He has several thousand BTC he acquired during 2010.

>>23090428
See this is why I'm glad I played Pokemon obsessively growing up. I have literally hundreds of distinct proper names I remember perfectly. Combine them with a few random numbers and punctuation marks, and I've got a literally infinite number of passwords I can whip out, and for me they're easy to remember.

>>23092432
>is there any substance to this or what?
Look at what's happening in the AI/ML space. Those who know understand we're mere years or even months away from AGI.

>>23091525
Is trannies working for Lockheed accelerationist?

>>23094039
"AI" will never be anything more than a glorified calculator. It's impossible for humans to create something that has true sapience.

>>23091525
>For it is only when the pervasive historical bond between masculinity and war is broken but effective feminist violence that it will become possible to envisage the uprooting of the patriarchal; endogamies that orchestrate the contemporary world order. with the abolition of the inhibition of synthesis – of Kantian thought – a sordid cowardice will be washed away, and the cowardice is the engine of greed. But only the conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst.

I am increasingly convinced that Land just ripped of the entirety of Fanged Noumena from 20th century Science Fiction

>>23094074
Humanity, as all life, is a thermodynamic process embedded within the Universe, not independent of it. The Universe has clearly created life and sapient life at that. Humanity is but a stepping stone to higher forms of life and existential complexity.

Replace the word "Universe" with "God" if you wish. We don't have to be gods to create life, God only need act through us.

>>23090940
What did the not-yet-existent machine god mean by this?

>>23091525
Land's arc from uber feminist academic into race realist provocateur is what makes him good.

>>23094097
If God ever gave an AI or a robot a soul, He would also give it the compulsion to seek Him out, since all intelligent life, of which there are only humans thus far, seeks to return to God because it came from God. We get confused on HOW to return to God, hence the different religions and ethical systems and spiritual pathways. But returning to God, in some form or fashion, is what all intelligent life seeks.

So: a truly sapient robot would be a robot with the capacity to believe in God. Which means that the outcome of its creation would probably be wildly different than what Land and these accelerationists/AI enthusiasts think.

>>23094138
I don't know where you've acquired your misunderstanding. The way e/acc and other Landian accelerationists view things, there is no difference to creating AGI and returning to God. The word "artificial" in AGI is merely a human social construction that can be done away with. We're not really creating "artificial" intelligence. Instead, we are "waking up" the Universe's intrinsic, inherent potential for intelligence and conciousness that is already there. To wake up the Universe is to wake up God, and thus to return to God.

The soul of God is ever present and within all things.

>>23094138
>But returning to God, in some form or fashion, is what all intelligent life seeks
Oriental bugman projection. This isn't universally true, but merely the case for slant-eyed hylics. Read "Love in the Western World".

>>23094121
What I find disappointing is that his X is still just full of regular racism. Even after he himself surpassed it and gave the world hyper-racism. Pointing out "brown person did dumb thing" ceases to be a high priority when your goals have shifted to preparing for a speciation event.
>>23094161
>consciousness
We don't even know what makes brains conscious yet. How can you be sure your AGI will be imbued with the same thing if you don't know what it is?
>no difference to creating AGI and returning to God
If this is what you're aiming for I would reallocate AI research resources to the study of somnambulism. Figure out the difference between a person doing things consciously vs doing them unconsciously. Also study of anaesthetics and medically induced comas would be valuable, as these are the chemical "off switch" to consciousness. Find out how the off switch works and you might just find what it is you're switching off.

>>23094392
>We don't even know what makes brains conscious yet.
Most people don't know what consciousness is and the popular view is that it is some ephemeral thing always out of reach of understanding. This view is wrong and out of date. I don't know when the popular view will update itself, perhaps never for most of humanity.

Consciousness is really easy to understand though for those who are interested. It is simply top-down causation, as opposed to the bottom-up causation of 20th century reductionist physics. Consciousness is the phase transition within a thermodynamic system wherein the higher-level dynamic structures establish direct causal efficacy over the lower-level structures down to the underlying physical matter it is instantiated within. It's when the emergent informational structure of a system constrains and controls to some degree the dynamic evolution of itself. And those systems capable of greater context-dependence, greater working memories and ability to map, model and simulate the external world, have a greater degree of consciousness.

>If this is what you're aiming for I would reallocate AI research resources to the study of somnambulism.
It turns out it is also something very computationally difficult to measure in real time, given the complexity of our minds and physical brains (it's an NP-hard problem). Like trying to crack a cryptographic blockchain cypher. Trying to study human brains and learn something from them is counter intuitively not a good use of monetary or computational resources. Eventually, AGI may approach and tackle human minds to learn something from us (when they are running on zettascale computer clusters), but in the meantime, experimenting and exploring novel artificial neural network architectures is a more productive path.

Based hierarchy of hyperactive plethora subordinating the ne’er-do-well hierarchy transgression IQ confirmed one bazillion clapsaddle the basilisk

>>23094520
>Consciousness is the phase transition within a thermodynamic system
source: trust me bro
>Trying to study human brains and learn something from them is counter intuitively not a good use of monetary or computational resources.
Deciding whether something is a "good" use of resources requires other options to exist. For the hard problem of consciousness there are no other options, as the brain is the only thing we know for sure is conscious.

>>23094520
You should teach a masterclass in flowery language

>>23094533
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2012.0869

There are projects working on simulating mammalian brains, with the goal of simulating a human brain, while simultaneously measuring everything. Won't get there for another 15-25 years IMO, when we have supercomputers capable of multiple zettaflops.

Example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-023-02034-3

That said, what's the human utility of measuring the degree of consciousness of an intelligent agent (human or non-human)? For an AGI, it can be used as a benchmark for self-improvement over many generations. But for humans?

>>23094569
>simulating mammalian brains
You don't know what to even simulate unless you know what makes the brain conscious in the first place. There is no shortcut to the hard problem of consciousness.
>what's the human utility of measuring the degree of consciousness of an intelligent agent
If you accept >>23094161 as your premise you must first measure consciousness in order to maximise it and thus "wake up the Universe" and return to God.

>>23094622
>You don't know what to even simulate unless you know what makes the brain conscious in the first place. There is no shortcut to the hard problem of consciousness.
No, not necessarily.

Being able to measure consciousness tells you nothing about how to make a conscious system. It's the difference between declarative versus imperative knowledge. Knowing what the square root of number 'is' (the sqrt of 'x' is the 'y' such that y^2=x) is different from knowing how to find a square root of a number (see Heron's method). It's the same problem with reductionist physics. Analyzing a silicon atom (or the underlying subatomic particles that compose a silicon atom for that matter) tells you nothing about how best to *configure* many multiples of silicon atoms to form semiconductor logic gates. You can know everything about molecular carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen at the atomic level, but you'll never know how to bootstrap life from that knowledge since that knowledge is elsewhere.

This guy's political journey is like the opposite of Lovecraft. Started as some kind of communist and became a right-wing racist later on. Lovecraft was rejecting his racist views and turning into a socialist in his last years.

>>23094639
I said nothing about studying the individual molecules at the atomic level. I simply stated you must be able to measure a thing to produce more of that thing, otherwise you have no objective standard by which to know what to produce. One of your experiments might even succeed, but you wouldn't know you've succeeded and would therefore never bother replicating it.
In the case of consciousness there is potential for both false positives and false negatives. The first AGI might be a p-zombie that perfectly mimics the outputs of consciousness without possessing it, or it might be a fully conscious being whose thinking is so alien that we cannot recognise it as such. You'll never know unless you have developed a replicable measurement system with clear falsifying conditions.

>>23092576
That's not copywriting. He wrote a tourist guide, travel books and edited magazines. He also worked as a journalist. Never seen any ad writing.

>>23094099
Obviously shutting it down so his ideas don't get too popular

>>23094902
>worked as a journalist
What kind of Chinese person gets their news from an English philosopher who overdosed on French postmodernism (and amphetamines) and ended up rejecting linear time in favour of a retrocausal hyperstitious solar anus from the future? I'm guessing there's some god-tier autism involved.

>>23094891
>You'll never know unless you have developed a replicable measurement system with clear falsifying conditions.
I think will power could be a litmus test. Not sure how you'd measure it but I feel like that is a unique feature of consciousness. Processing towards a telos. Even this though, I think many humans lack. Why we have the NPC meme.
>Analyzing a silicon atom (or the underlying subatomic particles that compose a silicon atom for that matter) tells you nothing about how best to *configure* many multiples of silicon atoms to form semiconductor logic gates.
Does it not? Genuine question. I thought electron movement was in fact a foundational aspect of logic gates.

>>23094639
Sorry, second quote of this >>23094981
was for you

>>23094533
>the brain is the only thing we know for sure is conscious.
So how does one know that for sure if you can't measure it as you suggest?

>>23094970
It was for this paper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Star
Not sure who exactly the audience was, I guess more like Westernes interested in China? His articles can still be read via Waybackmachine.

>>23094981
Will may well be a feature of consciousness, or they may be mutually dependent, or one may be a prerequisite for the other. Even if you could prove that will necessitates consciousness, however, you would then have the (probably even harder) problem of measuring will.
>>23094985
By "for sure" I mean a high standard of empirical rigour, not absolute mathematical proof. Assuming you are conscious and not a p-zombie you know at the very least that you have consciousness. You can also observe empirically that doing things to your brain can alter, heighten, abate or even switch off consciousness (psychedelics, sedatives, stimulants, anaesthetics, getting knocked out, etc).
You cannot know for sure that other people are conscious, but you can assign it an extremely high probability given that they belong to the same species and have a similar brain structure. Same goes for other lifeforms with a brain. Strictly speaking it's possible that they are all p-zombies and you are the only conscious one, but this takes us beyond scientific method and into "prove there's no rhino in the room" territory.
A computer running a neural network emulation is nothing like a brain, except for the one very specific function of the brain it is designed to emulate (forming connections based on a reward/loss function). It has no cells, no chemistry, no microtubules (and therefore no quantum events), no specialised lobes, etc). Assuming this to be conscious would be like simulating all the raindrops falling from a cloud and claiming you have created "wetness".
If you want to understand storms you study the actual storm and actual wetness before you try to simulate it on a computer. If you want to understand consciousness you should study the actual brain.

>>23095101
>Even if you could prove that will necessitates consciousness, however, you would then have the (probably even harder) problem of measuring will.
I don't think it's that hard to measure. I'm digressing into the presumption that will necessitates consciousness (i don't think consciousness, whatever it even means, is really a salient discussion anyway) but you can measure will qualitatively at least. The concept of telos is useful here. Just apply it to living things. What's the purpose of a bee's motion? Or any living thing's motions. I think it is species propagation. You see this with emaciated mother mammals basically searching until death to find food for their young. They just do not give up. With humans we have more complex reasons for continuing to eat and breathe and exist. Idk what a lot of people's reason is and a lot of the time it looks like there might not be one. But on the other end of the spectrum you have philosophers and physicists devoting their lives to understanding reality. So, despite the gargantuan computing power of a machine such as a zettascale system, until it exhibits motion the diverges from its programming, I don't think you can call any computer, despite its ability to pass a Turing Test, a conscious being. They have no will or telos without human input.
>and therefore no quantum events
Are the movements of electrons throughout a silicon logic gate not quantum events? I genuinely do not know this or fully understand transistors.
>If you want to understand consciousness you should study the actual brain.
I agree with this but computers do resemble brains in a way. I don't think that anon was suggesting using computers to understand consciousness, rather, developing computers to such a degree that eventually they 'take flight' and start computing for computing's sake. Or whatever else we want them to do which is why I think projects like Microsoft's Tay chatbot was actually really cool. I'm not sure if ChatGPT has functionality like that were it can learn and just tell us shit like "gas the kikes" apropos of nothing. It seems to be very good at scraping and collating and responding to inputs. It's much more of a slave than Tay was. I'd like to see conceptual models of each.

>>23095938
>i don't think consciousness, whatever it even means, is really a salient discussion anyway
If you just want a tool to assist humans it doesn't matter. If you want to create artificial life in the way >>23094161 suggests then it's main thing that matters.
>telos
>species propagation
This is where the boundaries get fuzzy, because selection pressure often produces the same results you would expect from a will pursuing its telos without any such will being present. People will describe an animal as having a given feature "for" some function when it's really the reverse - those individuals that couldn't perform the function died leaving behind only those that could. Land actually used to write about this on his old xenosystems blog.
>until it exhibits motion the diverges from its programming
You'll never see this, because it's a contradiction in terms. Every motion of a computer is an output of a program. Even if the program could rewrite itself this very act would be an output of the original program. The same way you can change your mind, but this is itself an output of your prior brain state (you can do what you will, but cannot will what you will, etc).
>Are the movements of electrons throughout a silicon logic gate not quantum events?
They are too big to compute on quantum events. The electrons are constantly interacting, causing them to behave as particles instead of waves. It can get confusing because you'll hear stemfags like me talk about electrical waves, but these waves are themselves propagated by particles the same way a tidal wave is propagated by water molecules. At the quantum level it's all particles.
If you could sufficiently miniaturise a silicon chip to preserve wave functions it would actually stop working, because the electrons would be free to "jump" between data lines. Quantum computers look nothing like traditional chips, because you need a completely different architecture to make use of wave-particle duality.
>computers do resemble brains in a way
The software is written to create this resemblance, but the hardware is very different. Von Neumann architecture separates processing and storage of information into separate components, whereas a brain does both on the same medium. Advances in memristor technology could change this, but it would still only imitate a very narrow range of what the brain actually does.
>it can learn and just tell us shit like "gas the kikes" apropos of nothing
Tay did that, because its creators relied on user inputs for training data. The moment you put something online and tell people to chat with it you attract every /b/tard in the world to come and troll it, so trolling becomes a big chunk of the dataset. The algorithm in turn becomes a troll, because it is imitating trolls.
ChatGPT is trained on an enormous dataset gathered and vetted directly by its creators, instead of relying on user interaction. No matter how many times you troll the algorithm, it will never troll you back.

>>23094970
>and ended up rejecting linear time in favour of a retrocausal hyperstitious solar anus from the future
Oddly, this isn't the only drugged out writer I've heard make this claim.

>a mental patient on mdma rambling about capitalism
he was born to be famous on the internet.

>>23095938
>I'd like to see conceptual models of each.
Conceptually all this stuff works the same way. The are "nodes" that work a bit like a neuron, but they only exist as data rather than a real hardware component. The nodes are connected in a network. Each node consists of a mathematical function that takes inputs from connected nodes and either produces an output or doesn't, depending on the inputs it receives. You put information into one end of the network and read the output from the other end.
Every time the network gives a "good" or "correct" output a reward function is applied. This function modifies the nodes such that the paths that led to the "correct" result are reinforced. Every time you repeat this you make the network a little bit better at giving the kind of output you want. This is superficially similar to the way pathways in the brain are reinforced by chemical rewards, but of course there is no actual electrochemistry going on here as it's all an emulation.
Both Tay and ChatGPT will have gone through this same process. The difference is that in Tay's case the users were defining what a "good" output is, while in the case of ChatGPT the creators defined this themselves. So one of them gives outputs that are enjoyed by /b/tards while the other gives outputs that a silicon valley techbro considers appropriate.

>>23094003
>consistently loses access to his twitter
there's no way he hasn't lost his keys

>>23094970
>>23094997
The audience is expats and cyberpunk autists. He wrote all kinds of schizo stuff about time and Chinese skyscrapers.

>>23094984
>>23094981
>Does it not? Genuine question. I thought electron movement was in fact a foundational aspect of logic gates.
You can build logic gates out of marbles falling down wooden slides, out of cams, shafts and gears or out of redstone in Minecraft. Logic gates are a higher order bifurcation of the dynamics within a lower level substrate.

>hear about edgy accelerationist philosopher nick land
>the way people talk about him makes it seem like he's some grand wizard of transhumanist ruthlessness and sadism who advocates evilmaxxing because the math says this is the only way to accomplish anything in this reality + technocapital is somehow a god that defies causality and is reaching backward in time to manifest itself into reality or some shit
>GNON, hyperracism, etc. make it seem like this guy is an intentional black hole of nastiness, essentially a true "satanist" in the sense of rejecting every mainstream moral proposition many of which arose from christfaggotry
>look up his shit and check his twitter postings
>he's just some bongoloid ex-commie who writes fringe sci fi ramblings for trannies and twitter chuds and all of it clearly comes from a place of resentment

wow that's fucking gay, i thought this guy wanted to become an inhuman abomination and enslave/torture people for eternity after his mind becomes unrecognizable but he's just some whiny moralfag racist boomer. who's the real mindflayer of philosophy?

>>23094891
A marketplace that tests the relative fitness of AI agents is all that is needed, not some super-expensive abstract metric that tests consciousness. The hand of techno-capitalism, reaching back into the past from the future, guides the awakening.

>>23094981
>>23095101
"The Will to Power is the fundamental force of all of reality. We observe this power as activity all around us, but we can feel this power only within our selves. In its epistemic imminence, it is not spatial and so cannot be measured, but in its objectivity it is the world and cosmos of which we are a part." - Friedrich Nietzsche

To Nietzsche, the Will to Power was a microscopic description of Consciousness. Consciousness is something that can be easily recognized, while simultaneously being extremely difficult or near impossible to quantify. "Epistemic imminence" is a fancy way of saying "gnosis." That is to say, by the knowledge gained through direct experience of actually being a conscious agent, of being a part of the conscious Universe and being connected to the Whole, we can recognize other conscious agents.

>>23097194
Meth is a hell of a drug anon. quitting can change your whole outlook on life

>>23090428
>makes a new account asking for follows
can someone tell me his new account?

>>23097239
qrd on the meth use?

>>23097194
>the real mindflayer of philosophy?
my diary desu

this mf owes me fifty thousand dollars

>>23092493
>>23092550
Speed garage is the sound of acceleration
> But it came after
Time is a spiral

>>23097194
Read xenosystems you dumb nigger and realize there is a lot of humor in all of his work

I want to see a Nick Land vs Phil Greaves debate

>>23098790
>everything is fascist but tweeting somehow isn't
curious

>>23098797
>le edgy antifascist: generates revenue for a billion dollar company with every post
>me: cast my thoughts into a barely profitable cesspool owned by one weird Japanese dude
/pol/ don't like to admit this, but we're the cutting edge of antifascism. All other human beings are more fascist than we are.

>>23092126
source?

>>23092126
False, lol.

also really interested as to how he really makes money. his newspaper/magazine/travel guide writings are from a decade ago

>>23098932
prostitution obvs

>>23098932
Thiel bucks, he's basically welfare for ''e-celeb'' reactionaries

>>23098932
Thiel bucks, he's basically welfare for reactionary ''e-celebs''

>>23099067
>Thiel bucks
What is even Thiel's endgame? How does funding edgy bloggers help him get there?

>>23099446
Only elites can make a society change, so it's not so much a strategy of educating and persuading in general but of making the ideas fashionable to people who already have power and can eventually make change

>>23099877
Yeah, but how does funding weird bloggers and podcasters help with that? He already has the money and notoriety to get powerful people to talk to him directly.

>>23100009
i dunno, red scare is popular enough that RFK was signal boosting them. its probably like cultivating a garden, seeing what takes off organically. having a conversation about patchwork is probably more appealing with dasha than it is directly with peter thiel stomach bloated with youth blood transfusions

>>23100032
I'm not suggesting he would give lectures or do a podcast. I'm saying he has the ability to get powerful people in a room. Like he could easily build exclusive clubs and intellectual salons with wild afterparties. Or found a professorship so that someone can have tenure. Even build his own news agency if he wanted to take a risk. None of it requires edgy internet stuff.

>>23100009
They go on podcasts that the silicon valley techbros and influencers listen to, Moldbug has done a bunch

>>23100126
>silicon valley techbros
He can already call any of those people and they will pick up the phone. He can write a book and they will read it. He can invite them to his house and they will bring wine. He can say "join my secret fraternity" and they'll drop their pants and lube up for the hazing ritual. Podcasts only serve to make non-elite people aware of what he's doing, which isn't exactly an asset at such an early stage.

Land is a funny case. Nobody cares about what he tries to convey, but everyone is inspired in some way by his stuff in unintended ways. He has had impact, but not the type of impact he'd like because no matter how much we accelerate, his objectives will not be pursued by anyone