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Sephfox

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A.I.R.RConsciousnessDataset

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Whether you feel as though you're better than the rest of the world or worse than the rest of the world, the same thing is true: you're imagining yourself as something special, something separate from the world.

Without a little bit of that narcissistic delusion, without that perpetual lie we tell ourselves about our specialness, we'd likely give up hope.

Our narratives about ourselves and the world are fundamentally about (a) something or someone's value and (b) whether that something/someone deserves that value.

Our values aren't just collections of feelings. Our values are stories.

The values we pick up throughout our lives crystallize and form a sediment on top of our personality.

The stories of our past define our identity. The stories of our future define our hopes. And our ability to step into those narratives and live them, to make them reality, is what gives our lives meaning.

He realized that he valued no one—not even himself—and this brought him an overwhelming sense of loneliness and grief, because no amount of logic and calculation could ever compensate for the gnawing desperation of his Feeling Brain’s never-ending struggle to find hope in this world.

And there, on the frontiers of intellectual discovery, he tossed his findings aside to a musty and forgotten corner of a cramped study, in a remote backwater village a day’s ride north of London. And there, his discoveries would remain, hidden to the world, collecting dust.48

You don’t know. Inertia simply makes it easier to sit there and keep watching than to get up and go to bed. So, you watch.

And best of all, they become highly suggestible. Paradoxically, it’s only in a group environment that the individual has no control, that he gains the perception of perfect self-control.

People who lose faith in their spiritual God will look for a worldly God. People who lose their family will give themselves away to their race, creed, or nation.

Because it's easy to get people riled up and angry about nothing—the news media have created a whole business model out of it. But to have hope, people need to feel that they are a part of some greater movement, that they are about to join the winning side of history.

Evidence and science are based on past experience. Hope is based on future experience. And you must always rely on some degree of faith that something will occur again in the future.

Evidence serves the interests of the God Value, not the other way around. The only loophole to this arrangement is when evidence itself becomes your God Value.

Spiritual religions draw hope from supernatural beliefs, or belief in things that exist outside the physical or material realm. These religions look for a better future outside this world and this life.

Ideological religions draw hope from the natural world. They look for salvation and growth and develop faith-based beliefs regarding this world and this life.

Interpersonal religions draw hope from other people in our lives. Examples of interpersonal religions include romantic love, children, sports heroes, political leaders, and celebrities.

Each family is its own mini-church, a group of people who, on faith, believe that being part of the group will give their lives meaning, hope, and salvation.

Common enemies create unity within our religion. Some sort of scapegoat, whether justified or not, is necessary to blame for our pain and maintain our hope.

Us-versus-them dichotomies give us the enemies we all desperately crave. After all, you need to be able to paint a really simple picture for your followers.

People are either near the top of the value hierarchy or at the bottom; there are no in-betweeners in our religion.

The more fear, the better. Lie a little bit if you have to—remember, people instinctually want to feel as though they’re fighting a crusade, to believe that they are the holy warriors of justice and truth and salvation.

Humans are actually horribly guilt-ridden creatures.

If you believe God gave it to you, then, holy shit! Do you owe Him big time!

This is the constant, yet unanswerable question of the human condition, and why the inherent guilt of consciousness is the cornerstone of almost every spiritual religion.

The sacrifices that pop up in ancient spiritual religions were enacted to give their adherents a feeling of repaying that debt, of living that worthwhile life.

You could even say that that’s really all prayer is: miniature episodes of guilt alleviation.

We all struggle with the sense that we deserve to be loved.

Religious beliefs and their constituent tribal behaviors are a fundamental part of our nature.43 It’s impossible not to adopt them.

If you think you’re above religion, that you use logic and reason, I’m sorry to say, you’re wrong: you are one of us.44

If you think you’re well informed and highly educated, you’re not: you still suck.45

We all must have faith in something. We must find value somewhere. It’s how we psychologically survive and thrive.

It’s how we find hope.

To realize any dream, we need support networks, for both emotional and logistical reasons.

It takes an army.

Religions compete in the world for resources, and the religions that tend to win out are those whose value hierarchies make the most efficient use of labor and capital.

As it wins out, more and more people adopt the winning religion’s value hierarchy, as it has demonstrated the most value to individuals in the population.

These victorious religions then stabilize and become the foundation for culture.46

But here’s the problem: Every time a religion succeeds, every time it spreads its message far and wide and comes to dominate a huge swath of human emotion and endeavor, its values change.

The religion’s God Value no longer comprises the principles that inspired the religion in the first place.

Its God Value slowly shifts and becomes the preservation of the religion itself: not to lose what it has gained.

And this is where the corruption begins.

When the original values that defined the religion, the movement, the revolution, get tossed aside for the sake of maintaining the status quo, this is narcissism at an organizational level.

This corruption of the religion’s original values rots away at the religion’s following, thus leading to the rising up of newer, reactionary religions that eventually conquer the original one.

In this sense, success is in many ways far more precarious than failure.

First, because the more you gain the more you have to lose, and second, because the more you have to lose, the harder it is to maintain hope.

But more important, because by experiencing our hopes, we lose them.

We see that our beautiful visions for a perfect future are not so perfect, that our dreams and aspirations are themselves riddled with unexpected flaws and unforeseen sacrifices.

Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.

Nietzsche filled them all with hope, and they took turns caring for this deteriorating, broken man, hopeful that the next book, the next essay, the next polemic, would be the one that broke open the floodgates.

For all of the progress and wealth and tangible benefits that ideological religions produce, they lack something that spiritual religions do not: infallibility.

The sources of hope that give our lives a sense of meaning are the same sources of division and hate.

Hope is, therefore, destructive. Hope depends on the rejection of what currently is.

Amor fati, for Nietzsche, meant the unconditional acceptance of all life and experience: the highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness.

And then act despite it. This is our challenge, our calling: To act without hope. To not hope for better. To be better. In this moment and the next. And the next. And the next.

You and I and everyone we know will die, and little to nothing that we do will ever matter on a cosmic scale.

It means that there's no reason to not love ourselves and one another. That there's no reason to not treat ourselves and our planet with respect. That there's no reason to not live every moment of our lives as though it were to be lived in eternal recurrence.

She would liberate and free more human beings than Nietzsche and most other "great" men, yet she would do this from the shadows, from the backstage of history.

Indeed, today, she is known mostly for being the friend of Friedrich Nietzsche—not as a star of women's liberation, but as a supporting character in a play about a man who correctly prophesized a hundred years of ideological destruction.

Like a hidden thread, she would hold the world together, despite being barely seen and quickly forgotten.

She would go on, though. She knew she would. She must go on and attempt to cross the abyss, as we all must do; to live for others despite still not knowing how to live for herself.

Kant believed that there was a clear right and wrong, a value system that transcended and operated outside any human emotions or Feeling Brain judgments.

He gazed into the abyss with nothing but logic and pure reason; who, armed with only the brilliance of his mind, stood before the gods and challenged them

Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an abstract principle is right and good for its own sake, that even if it hurts you today, even if it hurts others, being honest is still the right thing to do.

Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right.

The principled values of adulthood are unconditional—that is, they cannot be reached through any other means. They are ends in and of themselves.

The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, nontransactional. And to try to bargain for them is to immediately destroy them.

It requires good parents and teachers not to succumb to the adolescent’s bargaining. The best way to do this is by example, of course, by showing unconditionality by being unconditional yourself.

Consciousness is able to take a problem, a system of a certain amount of complexity, and conceive and generate greater complexity.

Kant argued that the most fundamental moral duty is the preservation and growth of consciousness, both in ourselves and in others.

The Formula of Humanity states, "Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means."

To transcend the transactional realm of hope, one must act unconditionally.

Self-love and self-care are therefore not something you learn about or practice. They are something you are ethically called to cultivate within yourself, even if they are all that you have left.

The most dangerous extremists know how to dress up their childish values in the language of transaction or universal principle.

Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn't make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure.

A young person who has been sheltered from dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it.

Material progress and security do not necessarily relax us or make it easier to hope for the future. On the contrary, it appears that perhaps by removing healthy adversity and challenge, people struggle even more.

They become more selfish and more childish. They fail to develop and mature out of adolescence. They remain further removed from any virtue.

Pursuing happiness is a value of the modern world. Do you think Zeus gave a shit if people were happy? Do you think the God of the Old Testament cared about making people feel good?

The philosophers of antiquity didn't see happiness as a virtue. On the contrary, they saw humans' capacity for self-denial as a virtue, because feeling good was just as dangerous as it was desirable.

Pain is the universal constant of the human condition. Therefore, the attempt to move away from pain, to protect oneself from all harm, can only backfire.

Trying to eliminate pain only increases your sensitivity to suffering, rather than alleviating your suffering.

The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture. It is self-defeating and misleading.

Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons.

The human mind operates on the same principle. It can be fragile or antifragile depending on how you use it.

When we avoid pain, when we avoid stress and chaos and tragedy and disorder, we become fragile.

Meditation is, at its core, a practice of antifragility: training your mind to observe and sustain the never-ending ebb and flow of pain and not to let the "self" get sucked away by its riptide.

The adult understands that life, in order to be meaningful, requires pain, that nothing can or necessarily should be controlled or bargained for, that you can simply do the best you can do, regardless of the consequences.

Pain is the currency of our values. Without the pain of loss (or potential loss), it becomes impossible to determine the value of anything at all.

When we pursue pain, we are able to choose what pain we bring into our lives. And this choice makes the pain meaningful—and therefore, it is what makes life feel meaningful.

To numb ourselves to our pain is to numb ourselves to anything that matters in the world.

Money is itself a form of exchange used to equalize moral gaps between people. Money is its own special, universal mini-religion that we all bought into because it makes our lives a little bit easier. It allows us to convert our values into something universal when we're dealing with one another.

Technological progress is just one manifestation of the Feelings Economy. For instance, nobody ever tried to invent a talking waffle. Why? Because that'd be fucking creepy and weird, not to mention probably not very nutritious.

Having an errant racist thought? Well, there's a whole forum of racists two clicks away, with a lot of convincing-sounding arguments as to why you shouldn't be ashamed to have such leanings.

The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation. It is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life.

Real freedom is the conscious decision to live with less. Fake freedom is addictive: no matter how much you have, you always feel as though it's not enough. Real freedom is repetitive, predictable, and sometimes dull.

Freedom itself demands discomfort. It demands dissatisfaction. Because the freer a society becomes, the more each person will be forced to reckon and compromise with views and lifestyles and ideas that conflict with their own.

When that day comes, when an AI can essentially spawn better versions of itself, at will, then buckle your seatbelt, amigo, because it's going to be a wild ride and we will no longer have control over where we're going.

AI will reach a point where its intelligence outstrips ours by so much that we will no longer comprehend what it's doing.

These algorithms make our lives better. They make our lives more efficient. They make us more efficient. That's why, as soon as we cross over, there's no going back.