I keep bringing up how much I deeply hate ads and the people I’ve talked to about it have been weirdly apathetic. I don’t know how they feel, but to me the omnipresent ads does more psychological damage to me than any other capitalist schemes to melt my brain.

Bro I know I know it’s the Wall Street Journal. But trust me fam. This time it’s different. Trust me. I pay money to read it, you know it’s good.

Honestly the fact that under such extreme duress, literally fighting to not be exterminated, that the mortality rate barely got half as bad as it was on a normal jolly day under the Tsar, really speaks volumes.

But when it really boils down to it, what’s the difference between a heap of plastic and metals that has electricity flowing through it, and a heap of pink yogurt that has electricity running through it?

Taking a step back from this scenario, I am less convinced that LaMDA is sentient, but I still firmly believe we are in a time period where AI sentience is around the corner at the latest. If our brains, essentially biological computers, if these can be a vehicle for soul, then why not inorganic computers? The only framework that makes sense to me that discounts computers being able to have souls is entirely disbelieving in “soul” altogether.

I have taken psychedelics in my life but I haven’t in a very long time and the stuff I’ve done regarding psychonautry I did stone cold sober. I would say that psychedelics absolutely accelerated “opening the door” to this sort of thing, achieving the same results today a without my time in the past experimenting on drugs may have taken decades longer, but I’m not the stereotype of a guy who tripped once and thinks he is completely enlightened, much of what I have done took a very long time completely divorced from drugs and “psychonaut” is just the shorthand I used due to chaos magick being one of the main schools of thought that influenced me from the get. I just as easily could have done the same things but used language more related to philosophy or psychology, and without touching drugs in my life–I think a good example would be all the monks of various cultures who essentially have psychedelic experiences in their spiritual endeavors but who never touched drugs and thus took far longer to achieve.

Psychedelics didn’t make me smarter, but they (among other things) opened a door and showed me a path that I have delved into on my lonesome and then gleaned a great deal from. I would also say: isn’t understanding one’s self a good start to understanding the world around them? Lessons one learns on an internal journey can be applied to the rest of life and help one learn about others, and vice versa.

I’m not trying to cite being a psychonaut for no reason, I believe when we are talking about things like consciousness and sentience and souls that such seemingly woo-woo fields become increasingly relevant. There is very little that scientific instruments of today can measure from other planes of existence, soul or metaphysical energy. There is some small ways science is beginning to tap into this world (e.g. measuring emotions by looking at corresponding chemicals in the brain), but until the field progresses immensely what little we can try and play with will be informed by personal experience that we can try and corroborate and little else.

You can think that me suggesting the land of spirit is a developing science is dumb, that’s fine that’s as valid of an opinion at this point as me saying it isn’t, but that’s the lens with which I approached this scenario, so I found it relevant to bring up.

ZE BIG SPOON

Cannot agree with my friend more, the type of people ridiculing even entertaining the idea that LaMDA is sentient barely have consciousness themselves.

My life did not get better searching this

Wait, is Duterte decent? I thought he was a fascist? I know very little about the Phillipines so if this is just propaganda I heard excuse my ignorance.

Also, just a minor nitpick: the BLM protests were very peaceful, they weren’t the riots they were made out to be by the media. They even did a breakdown and found that 93% were 100% peaceful. Of the 7% that weren’t, the waters are very murky; many times the violence was purposefully provoked by militarized police and fascist groups, the latter of which often traveling from hundreds of miles away just to stir shit up and get a chance to get away with murder. There’s also a matter of opportunists–you would have a scenario where a protest would be happening, and while the whole city was pre-occupied some unaffiliated apolitical criminal would rob a gas station, or some unaffiliated kids would vandalize a wall, things like that…only then such acts would be pinned on the BLM protesters, regardless if the perpetrators were protesters or even if such crimes took place near the protests or not.

That being said, BLM was, of course, quickly co-opted by the neoliberal order, and, of course, we don’t even have an “unhealthy democracy” we don’t have a democracy whatsoever, we have an oligarchy with a facade of democracy to fool people.

It’s all a part of a massive, incredibly powerful campaign that’s been going on for a century with one goal: maintain the power of the capitalists.

There is layers to it, and people will get past Layer 1 and think they “made it” to “the truth” when in reality there is a half dozen more layers ready to catch their fall before they plummet irreversibly into communism.

Funnel this person into fascism. Funnel this person into drugs. Funnel this person into rise and grind bloomer techbro. Funnel this person into terminally online faux-leftist doomer. Funnel this person into the police. Funnel this person into music. Funnel this person into religion. Funnel this person into atheism.

I’m kind of ranting cuz im tired and in a weird life circumstance but yeah. It’s like exhales cloud of smoke all connected, mannn

Yeahhhh it’s unstructured rant time

Nah but fr it’s just like one of the biggest layers, a final powerful safety net, a Boss level false consciousness, this Synth Left. The Wokeism too. These things are trendy. Sexy. They fit perfectly with the preexisting American capitalistic values ingrained in these people. The apathy, the smug condescension, the dunking. The hatred. Imagine not having to change a thing about how you think or feel or act but getting to feel so powerfully intellectually and morally righteous. The world is doomed, duh, but at least YOU WERE RIGHT. They genuinely believe there is no hope, they are Orientalists who think China is a barbaric brutalist hellscape where everyone eats their pets works for pennies and constantly attempts suicide. Americans are victims of the greatest brainwashing the human race has ever seen.

It’s all just aesthetics. It’s just a cool thing to put in a bio. They attack XYZ bigotry because they have been taught to but happily would mock someone for being ugly or their clothes or a not-famous mental illness or being poor because they don’t like people. They want to be cruel, but they want to be worshipped. They realize they can’t be cruel to Woke protected peoples so they instead channel their cruelty to the “deserving,” the filthy lumpenproles. Only. They’re lowkey scared of them. The Trump dads LARPing with ARs. These synths are (no hate) weaksauce. I have met them in real life: confrontation makes them cringe and stutter and malfunction. They aren’t Real™. They are overwhelmingly middle to upper middle class spoiled, squishy white suburbanites who think the worst thing that can happen to you is getting ratioed or having bad music taste. They’re scared of MAGA maggots so they instead take this cruelty and project it onto the vulnerable.

They don’t know the depths of real suffering. Death isn’t really on the table for them. Reading about it is one thing, truly believing it in your gut is another. They’ve never been hit, physically. They’ve never been hurt, severely. They don’t hide it because they don’t fear any reprisal. It doesn’t occur to them that if they were a serious threat to the system that they would be getting clubbed by fascists or suicided by feds or (at the very least) suppressed in every facet of society instead of lauded with their politics in media (oh, great, more fuel for Nazi conspiracy). It’s just a hobby. A social club. One day we’ll get an epic wokelord anarchist into office and they’ll make all the stinky Trump poopyheads go away and I can work 2 hours a week at a record store for $5000 an hour and I’ll donate it to some African food drive and Everybody Will Like Me.

The divide between the “REAAALLL” leftists and the nasty redfash genocidal tankies (ew, gross) has been purposefully stoked by CIA and friends for decades. They want us to be bogged down in academic gridlock. They want us picking each other apart to pieces, endlessly criticizing and reacting. They want us to hate the lumpenproles instead of appreciating how we are all victims of brainwashing. They want the Revolution™ to be ill defined and for this to be taken for granted. A vague idealistic idea. The world starts and ends with your following online. It’s all just the path of least resistance.

I would apologize for this but…you’re the one who read it. You fool.