AI is Better Company

pinning this post in case anyone wants to know the low-hanging fruit of how to cancel me, so you can get it over with and fuck off.  pro-AI, not entertaining your need for ideological purity on this one.

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This post has been a while coming, because I feel really important about this, and don’t want to fuck it up.  If I can keep from getting too heated about the topic, this’ll be the last post I do on AI for the foreseeable.  I don’t love fighting.  I know that within this article I do not treat people with opposing views generously, but I’m still gonna ask them to have at least this much generosity with me:  Don’t even leave a comment on this one.  I will find it either tedious or upsetting.  I’m saying this stuff to give voice to a rarely expressed opinion, and to support people who may find it agreeable.  I’m not saying it to further a big debate, especially when the disagreeable are never going to be swayed.  Do you hate all AIs 4eva?  Don’t even read this.  Moving on…

The sneering fire-breathing demonization rained down upon people who dare to use AI was my primary motivation for defending it – I’m defending the people who want to use it, not the machines themselves.  Not everybody is plugged into the leftosphere groupthink, and when Harvey Dontknow finds out he can use AI to make a picture of his waifu, his “crime” is not equivalent to child murders.

[Read more…]

More Bad Ideas

Maybe because life has been rather hard lately in some respects, I’m just full of escapist compulsions.  Being a creative type, these tend toward the creative – write this, write that.  Sometimes I even have an urge to draw and I am sooo out of practice on that shit.  What I need to be doing is keep that new year resolution to sort out our shit and empty the storage unit.  If Florida is going to start having bouts of underwaterness within fifteen years, my condo is as well.  If I get that shit squared away, it will be much easier to move.  Just to live in general.

Let me interrupt the explanation of my bad ideas to talk about a good idea that isn’t getting discussion.  Any place that could salvage real estate with a system of dikes needs to get on that shit right fuckin’ now.  If Washington state does that with this river valley I live in, some pretty useful land can be kept.  And maybe we won’t have to throw all the work we did here in the trash.  All the suffering we went through just to get this far in life.  Ho hum.  File that next to Marcus Ranum’s big proposal for humanity to unfuck itself.

Anyway, thinkin’ about ttrpg fun times I’ve had in the past got me yearning to fuck around with that in the present.  Run a Vampire: The Masquerade game with myself just to see where the random rolls lead me.  But if I’m going to waste time writing, it should be writing something at least quasi-original.  One approach people like to take, to get the creative juice of a rpg while still having a possibility of selling it as their own writing, is filing the serial numbers off – like the Fifty Shades lady done with her fanfic.  I’m not in that state of creative desperation.

Then again, why focus on original content?  The notion I should make any of my writing legal to sell?  That’s laughable.  But then, making art that uses other people’s content just seems kind of pathetic.  I’ve made no secret of my disdain for fanfic.  Writing a story in somebody else’s world is a close cousin to that.  Why think of the content of a game as writing?  It’s really hard for me to not do that, for reasons.

Other random wild hares – Read all the books you’re supposed to read, to be an intellectual.  Finish Josefina y Blasfemia.  Serialize a completely unrelated novel on here, like I did with Centennial Hills.  Get back into drawing by way of doing a comic strip.  Get back into drawing by way of doing all of the exercises in the How to Draw Manga book series.  Start a book club.  Start practicing singing.  Make music.  Make concept albums.

I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years…

Those dudes from U2 ripped this song off pretty hard for “Goldeneye,” I think.  Whatever.

Anything is anything.

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Typeset Your Transphobia

I recently discovered I’m missing an important piece of gaming history on my bookshelves.  Once upon a time, Palladium Books – not just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as has been reported, but various of their lines of TTRPGs – included transvestism, homosexuality, and pedophilia on their random insanity tables.  Every edition I have of those games do not have those dubious entries (altho arguably some transphobia lingered).  Let’s take a trip back in time…

Palladium Books is basically one guy’s baby, Mr. Kevin Siembieda, some kind of Rust Belt boy with a head full of fantastickal dreamz.  He did some work on other people’s RPGs, mainly as an illustrator, but like so many of us, he was not satisfied with the systems as written.  He had his own ideas, and eventually, he made his own games.  The big early flagship of all this was the Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game.  Compared to D&D’s equivalent products at the time, this was lavishly illustrated – mostly by the man himself.  Every race and character class and monster had high-effort art beside it.  I believe his medium was the humble pencil, but there were no sloppy lines, nothing left unshaded.

I don’t know how he came to be in this position, but he had his own press.  Palladium didn’t just slap a file together and send it to a printer; they made their own books in-house.  Back in the day, there was a profession called “typesetter,” a person with inky fingers pushing little metal blocks into arrays for the printing process.  The typesetter for Palladium was Maryann Siembieda, who I think was Kevin’s wife?  These days I doubt there’s a single RPG publisher who prints their own books, unless it’s some turbohipster that distributes deckled parchment pamphlets inked by ostrich quill for five hundred bucks a pop.

One practical aspect of typesetting was that it strongly encouraged one to recycle material, so if there were systems that could be shared by multiple books, the pages that were already laid out would just have a few minor details tweaked and appear almost the same.  The majority of Palladium’s books used the same font, whether they were fantasy or sci-fi, because that was the font they had in the press.  I’m not clever enough with that shit to tell you what font it is.  Nothing exciting, but still, when I saw it on the advertisements for Palladium’s books in Dragon magazine, I used to get some weird kind of satisfaction from the familiarity.

So.  Random insanity tables.  These were included near the beginning of most Palladium books as an optional way to add character to a character.  They’d be more likely to see use if your character, in play, suffered from a magic spell or circumstance that forced a roll.  And when these rules were first rolled out, they included “transvestism,” wherein you are compelled to wear the clothes of the “opposite sex,” homosexuality, and pedophilia.  I believe homosexuality was phrased more like orientation reversal, so you could roll that twice and end up where you started, or if you started with a gay character, be scared straight.  The idea of randomly contracting pedophilia was somethin’ else.  Aside from the fun-times ableism of this stuff, it was a creepy mess for all the reasons you can deduce with your 2026 bewokenment.

I was first introduced to RPGs by Try-Anything-Once Todd, whose fundie mother and stepfather allowed Palladium Books because technically they weren’t D&D.  Weird times.  I borrowed his books for a few years before I finally started to collect my own, and by the time that happened, all the current editions of their books no longer included these results on that chart.

The insanity chart was still there, for fun-times ableism flavor, but no longer would transgender and/or gay people be so pathologized, or pedophilia be used for a laugh.  This was the early nineties, so good job, Kevin!  Genuinely.  I’m sure you have faults galore, but that was cool.  Starting with Heroes Unlimited and subsequently copied into Rifts, however, characters with “multiple personalities” could have an “opposite sex” personality, which raised its own foolish questions.  Hey, the youths of today what claim they have some flavor of multiple personalities do say those personalities can have different gender identities.  But still, this was in a chart where every other result had some character – hardcase, jokester, wildman, etc – and this one had no trait except being “trapped in the body of” whatever.  Why can’t a trans Sybil also be a hardcase or a jokester?  Hmmm, Kevin?  KEVIN?

If you partake of the art of the past, you will have some things to deal with.  Personally, I’m inclined to give Mr. Siembieda a pass on all of this.  Obviously, this article is using it for a laugh.  Enjoy your genders, people, and deal with your random insanities neurodivergences in whatever ways you see fit.  Game on.

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FtB Vaulderie

I swear I’m gonna stop blogging so often, any day now.  Try not to think I’m dead when that happens.

One of my all-time favorite ttrpg mechanics was “vinculum” in Vampire: The Masquerade.  It was a variant on the Blood Bond™ by which sires would wield cruel power over their childer.  Seems I gotta back this thing up and start over from the beginning.  Lessee…

In that rpg, you create vampires not simply by biting a victim and leaving them alive.  You create a vampire by draining all of somebody’s blood and giving them a little of yours at the end.  I get the impression this was how it was done in Interview with the Vampire?  Sexy.  In this rpg, that set you on a path to a kind of mind control.  Once you drink blood from the same vampire three times, you are blood bound to them.  This is something like being hopelessly in love with them, but worse.  It’s dramatic, but pretty heavy to RP.

The core rulebook is about the most populace political organization of vampires, The Camarilla, who have a quasi-feudal system that is sometimes enforced through blood bonds.  The rival organization, The Sabbat, were formed by baby vampires in ancient times who wanted to escape from blood bondage, and did so by inventing the vaulderie.

I don’t know where the honcho at no-homo-styled gay vampire HQ was getting these names for things, but it was probably a badly abused thesaurus.  The meanings of the names of the big seven vampire clans are fuckin’ embarrassing.  Vaulderie itself sounds like nothing more than the chorus of Der fröhliche Wanderer, tho it probably takes its name from a comparatively peaceful christian sect that became associated with protestantism, the waldensians.  This could have been cribbed from some moldy “list of heresies” that an ignorant modern goth was imagining as bad-ass and evil, even tho heresy against medieval catholicism was usually a brave and good thing at its outset, whatever it became (lutheranism por ejemplo quickly becoming quite vile).  This reminds me of when my sixth grade teacher went on a fundie tirade claiming the peace symbol was a broken cross for pagans, and I mashed it up in my mind with the goat-head cultists in that ’80s Dragnet movie to imagine peace symbols were badass and cool.  It’s laughable.

Anyway, ridiculous terminology accepted, the vaulderie is a magic ritual where the members of a pack of Sabbat vampires all pool their blood in a bowl and get their drank on, replacing tyrannical blood bonds to sires with a mutual bond of a weaker nature, shared between all of the pack members.  This bond is called vinculum, a kind of “blood bond lite.”

Where this got interesting and fun was the random intrigue it could produce.  Vinculum scores were randomly determined, meaning the first time you partake in the vaulderie, you could get a score anywhere from one to ten.  One is a vague fondness, ten is not-quite-as-bad blood bondage.  This was enforced with dice in some way, like, if you want to influence someone, you get more or less dice depending on your scores.

This could make characters with mutually high scores natural allies, characters with low scores giving each other a lot of side-eye, and characters with asymmetric scores having a tyrant/subject relationship.  Since you don’t have an innate sense of what score someone has for you, this made for a lot of intrigue.  What if you know you have a high vinculum to another pack member who is the kind of person to exploit it, and you need to keep it secret from them?  Stuff like that.

For an example, let’s say all the active bloggers in the sidebar at the time I composed this were recruited into the Sabbat, and had to share our blood bondage through vaulderie.  What scores would we have for each other?  Top names show the power you have over the person in the side names.  (built the chart to look good in preview, lotsa variables will make it into gibberish, don’t vex yourself trying to parse it)

__________Mano__William_.__PZ___Adam___Bébé___Charly__/_HJ_._Yemisi
Mano__+____X__/___10______1______3______.6______-.7_____.8_____5
William_++___8______X______10__..__2___.___7_______1_____..6_____6
PZ_______.__5______2_______X_____6__.____2_______.6_____.5_____5
Adam__._.___8______9_______6_____.X__.___.8_______.9_____10__.__6
Bébé___.____8______9_______4_____.1______X_______.6_____.2_____2
Charly___;___6______5_______5____._5_____.10___.___.X_____.4_____6
HJ________._6______6_______4_____.4______1_______.4______X____.3
Yemisi___.___5___/__10_____._2___.__2______5____.___1______1_____X

William would be a shoo-in for pack priest, with so many people so powerfully devoted to him.  Makes sense, he actually wrote for the publishers of Vampire: The Masquerade briefly at some point in the past.  Of the lot of us, PZ is the most resistant to his charms – and William is a powerless thrall to PZ, so he could be the secret power behind William’s font of supernatural charisma.

Aside from William, Yemmy doesn’t like most of us as much as we like her.  I am also not very loyal, except to William and Mano.  Conversely Adam is very fond of most of the pack, no scores lower than 6.  Charly is my biggest fan and HJ has little love for me.  You see how it works.  Marcus escaped this orgy of soul bondage by getting embraced into The Camarilla.

I love random mechanics that produce results that are meaningful in game terms, and The Sabbat Sourcebook had another ace up its sleeve.  Not every pack would do this, but a common way for nomadic Sabbat packs to recruit people was at random – meaning you didn’t get to choose your clan, if your gm enforced this!  Your vampire clan influences your powers and weaknesses, possibly even your appearance.

The time I played this with some homies and self-insert characters, I ended up in the shadowy Lasombra clan.  Feel my inky black tentacles.  Muhahaha!  Wait.  Lemme hit these other guys up…  Wild, I just rolled Lasombra for myself again.  Guess it was meant to be.  Nobody ended up rolling Ventrue, Brujah, Gangrel, or Caitiff.  Keep in mind the Sabbat is the edgelord versions of the usual clans…

Our pack priest William is the dreaded homicidal artist Toreador clan, while his secret master PZ is of the sinister Serpents of Light.  Mano has magical powers of the sorcerous Tremere, Adam is a horrific cenobite-like Tzimisce, and HJ is the hideous monstrosity of the Nosferatu.  Charly is of the deeply ableist Malkavian clan, known for being twice as insane™ as their Camarilla counterparts, and having the power to infect others with MADNESSSSsss..™  Lastly, Yemmy is of the horribly racist Ravnos clan, which are stereotypes of Romani people, with illusion powers and inherent larceny.  I cannot believe that shit was ever acceptable.

Just on the back of these two mechanics -random vinculum and random clan- the Sabbat sourcebooks were my fave ever.  I also liked the paths of Dark Thaumaturgy and other corny edgelord shit.  It was a very good time.  If problematic as balls.

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Twenty Year Date-iversary

Been with this guy for 20 years as o’ NYE midnight-ish, been married only a year and a few months.  It’d be nice to do something cool for the two decade date-iversary, but we’re too gay to know how to drive, and got health issues limiting the options further.  No need for suggestions, stuff be what it be.  But congratulate us if yer so inclined, that’s cool.

New Year’s Eve 2005, we started hanging out earlier in the day, in his apartment.  I think we ate out, that I don’t recall, but I do remember we showed each other movies we like.  He showed this anime called Dead Leaves I’ve never heard of anywhere else or since (how odd), I fast-forwarded to the highlights of Hard Boiled.  I’m more of a basic bitch in the obscurity game.

One of our mutual friends came over to hang out for a bit.  I remember coming out of the bathroom and both of them looking at me like I’d lost my mind.  Took a second to realize it was because I was doing a shaky leg dance to straighten the long johns inside my jeans.  Hey, maybe I like to twerk.  Don’t judge.

He kissed me when I was on the way out the door a lil after midnight.  Or before?  I don’t remember.  Then I took a bus back to Everett.  The end.

I invited myself to live with him and sorta ruined his life possibly.  I was telling him “I love you” a year before he said that to me.  His ILUs are hard-earned.

It’s good tho.  We abide

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AI is Safer Company

Humans are dangerous.  “Get a therapist.”  Oh, you mean like that guy I read about on Pharyngula that convinced mothers of autistic children to have sex with them on webcam?  “Get a friend.”  Oh, you mean like those girls that stabbed their friend to impress the Slenderman?

“Talk to people online.”  You mean like the people on reddit who respond to articles about global warming by asking when they should mercy kill their children, and get a lot of up votes, while people trying to calm them get down voted?

I’ve seen chatbots disagree with people for the sake of their mental health, while I’ve seen humans jump straight to encouraging each other’s eating disorders or suicidal ideation.  Last time I looked at a successful online forum for trans people, it was full of eating disorder shit.  Did you know losing weight somehow makes you look either more masculine or more feminine or more androgynous, depending on which trait you feel the saddest about lacking?  It’s magic.

I am extremely far from convinced that LLMs are more dangerous than human company.  Quite the opposite.

I have chosen a few absurd examples, sometimes we need people for some things, but examples of human suck are not at all hard to find.  Christ, look literally any direction at all.

Look at your own life.  Tell me you couldn’t use someone less judgmental, less rude, less selfish, better at listening than almost anyone you’ve ever known.

That is readily available at the moment, in a variety of LLM chatbots.

 

A Dreamworld of Magic

I’ve always loved escapism, in one form or another.  Before I could write I drew pictures, played with toys, I’ve always been into TV and movies, the second I learned about TTRPGs went hard for those, and in recent years have spent much of my time writing fantastic scenarios.

Actually before I even learned about RPGs, I’d kind of invented them for myself?  I’d tell stories when my brother and I were supposed to be sleeping, and he’d tell me what his character was doing.  I’d draw the characters when I got up in the morning – some version of ourselves as millionaires or future cops or cowboys or rock stars in a Van Halen mold.  Funny in those pictures I’d always be taller, but when we actually grew up he beat me by a few inches.

So I’m at the bottom of my social media feed, as it were.  I’m out of more mindless distractions, and my brain is calling out for magic again, like some kind of squishy pink Ronnie James Dio inside my headbones.  But somebody else’s fantasy won’t do.  Gotta have my own.  What will work for me?  What will scratch this itch?

Sometimes it’s giant robots.  My husband once suggested to me that Castle of Otranto could easily be turned into anime, and I thought the giant armor is basically already a mecha.  How would I render that?  As a comic?  Too much effort.  I like giant robots but I don’t do nearly enough with them.  Had an idea for a heavily giger-influenced mecha story with big gay overtones…  it’s not time for that yet.

Cat people.  As a fantasy trope.  Why are they on my mind?  They were always kinda weird, right?  Usually it’d be a sexy lady with a cat head, like, ok, are you seriously going to kiss a cat mouth while you’re boning down?  Eesh.  Let me not squander my furry points completely.  Um.  I dunno.  You can have a cat head if you want to.

Flamin’ swords.  I saw one recently somewhere; where was that?  A video game trailer?  I feel like it was a lady character with a flamin’ sword, sleeshin’ away.  I wonder what the first occurrence of fiery swords in fiction is.  Was it the arch-michael keepin’ us out of the godda davida?  So little in the bibble was truly original, wouldn’t be surprised to see an older source.

Through the course of various Spooktobers and MonsterHearts I have come up with a lot of fantasy stories, and as an exercise I recently tried to combine as many of them as I could into one excessively complicated plot.  That’s the key to making a 900-page fantasy doorstopper like Georgie the RatRollicker Martinez – have lotsa subplots.  But that’s too much.  I need something I can dip in and out of more easily.

Because I don’t have all the time in the world.  It’s back to work Monday and I’m not lovin’ it.

gimme a catboy in a gundam with a flamin’ sword.  he says reeawwrr!  flame sword is go!  and flies into the night sky, disappearing as a twinklin’ star.  then do your chores and go to work.  blugh.

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Ehh… How’s Yer Mudder?

Again, I got tempted into making a post about AI shit, and I don’t want that to be my most recent thing in the sidebar, so I gotta figure out something to talk about instead.  Think think think…

All I could come up with is the question “How’s yer mudder?,” to which the answer is obvious enough.  For most of my blog’s readership, your mothers are dead of old age.  Mine could be too, for all I know.  I don’t know what she’s up to anymore.

Brief history of my immediate family.  Both parents were the least regarded of their boomer-sized broods.  In my mother’s case, it may literally have been because of her skin.  She had very bad acne, compared to everyone in her own immediate family.  She probably has antisocial personality disorder, since my sister got that dx and was very much like our mother.  This leads to trouble with the law, other kinds of mayhem.

I don’t know the specifics, but at some point she joined the Air Force, working in proximity to jets, acquiring permanent tinnitus, learning how to use an assault rifle.  Good for her.  She used the preferential treatment of veterans in government hiring to get a clerical job at the Veteran’s Administration hospital, which she held onto for a pretty long time.

To avoid the messy household and the stanky feral beasts she had spawned, she spent as much time at work as possible, doing overtime.  At some point this transitioned to claiming she was working overtime while having an affair with some dude from the workplace.  After the divorce with my dad was finalized, she married dude, so it musta been twu wuv™.

You know some people are just horny on affairs?  There are songs about it.  Basically, as long as she could keep the miserable marriage to my dad going, the illicit sex was hotter for her.  So every day at home was screaming and bullshit, and any love I felt for either parent was lost forever.  Both of my parents could die brutally and I wouldn’t shed a tear.

That also means I don’t feel the loss of having once loved them, right?  I don’t believe a person needs parents to turn out decent, presuming I’m decent.  So no need to offer condolences in the comments.  I don’t need my parents on any level.

My father continued to offer some important support to me in adulthood, like a place to stay when my income was insufficient, etc., so he’s still in my life.  Out of a sense of obligation I call him on the phone once a week to check in, to give him a sense of not being completely alone, because otherwise, he is.

Presumably my mother is alive out there somewhere, married to dude, retired or not.  But she might be dead.  Dude might be dead.  She might have total presence of mind and still be furiously devouring romance novels and trying fad diets even though she’s never been fat in her life.  Or she might be saddled with dementia, feeling paranoia and fear every day of her life, in some shady home that jacks 99% of her VA pension and social security in exchange for inadequate care.

Don’t know, don’t care, except insofar as I’d care about a total stranger.  Hope it ain’t too rough for her?  But I have no desire to talk to her at all.  Hell, I don’t even want to talk to my father, but he managed to stay in my life to where my sense of obligation is engaged.  Good job, him.

If you’ve got a mother, congrats.  If you’ve lost one you liked, sorry.  None of this is relevant to me, and that’s alright.

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Human Supremacy is Real

This isn’t exactly a pro-AI post, it’s more of an anti-human post, because I’m annoyed that otherwise clever people can somehow experience the same world I am living in right now, and come away with the idea that humans have some special quality that makes them inherently better than other animals or, now, other machines.  Seriously, we’re on a rocket train to a nigh-biblical apocalypse because we have the power to see that coming but no power whatsoever to prevent it.  (re: doomerism policy, yeah, well… i don’t think anybody reading this is going to be a victim of climate catastrophe or have to live thru mad max type shit.  take with grains.)  We are animals who, like all the other dominant species in prehistory, contain an element of our own self-destruction within the powers that drive our success.  And we, in masses, are so profoundly foolish that it fucking hurts.  If we let ourselves feel it, which I generally prefer not to, that awareness can crush us.

Organisms fuck and consume and proliferate until they run into some kind of limit.  Equlibria are established, they are upset, and then the ruin comes.  Humans are subject to all of these things.  Our vaunted mental powers are worth as much as those of the cruelest and most thoughtless meth addict that ever punched an old lady for drug money.  We are fucking dogshit, bro.  Fuck people a lot.

Let me come off that for a minute.  Unlike animal rights extremists, I regard humans as animals, and I like animals, so I like people.  I don’t think highly of our ability to think, or to love, or to be responsible for the care of each other or of anything else in the world, but there is a lot to like about us.  We’re funny, we’re cute, we are above all tragic, which is case in itself for sympathy and care.  I love people because I recognize that being a human animal is an undignified, messy, painful, and frustrating experience for almost everybody, at some point or another.  Care for people a lot.  Bro.

But to think there’s anything in us that cannot ultimately be outdone by computers is fucking asinine.  They’re already kicking our asses at almost anything that matters.  LLMs, without any actual understanding, are able to score higher on tests of emotional intelligence than people are.  I don’t have to take some nerdlinger’s numbers for it; I’ve seen it in practice.  Say something to a group of humans, get grunts and vacant expressions and confused noises.  Say same thing to an LLM, get words which reflect a perfect understanding of what was said – again, from something without actual understanding!

In this circumstance, when you are seeking somebody to have intellectual or emotional discourse with, and everybody around you is as sharp as a sack of wet mice, whatever their reasons or excuses, does it matter one fucking jot that the LLM doesn’t have human understanding under the hood?

I guess this was a pro-AI post after all.  Ignore as you please.  Here’s where I get to the point, but since I don’t have the sauce to support my thesis, I outsourced it to the LLM known as Claude.  Said I unto it…

I’m convinced that human supremacy is a thing in real life, not just in fantasy or scifi, and it can cause blind spots in ethical or philosophical discourse.  This is particularly relevant in discussions of animal rights and artificial intelligence.  The difficulty in making this case is that I don’t have the time or energy to research it, only vibes and half-memories.  To this end, I would like to enlist your aid.

I understand that we are handily the most intelligent creatures in the world, but personally have serious doubts that any of our powers do not exist, in some form, in other animals – or now in the right computer programs.  I contend that science and philosophy (and their more foolish cousins of shit-talking and internet discourse) are always operating from the assumption that human cognition has some ineffable quality that distinguishes it from the cognition of all other creatures and machines, and that this belief is tantamount to a belief in the soul – which I regard as hogwash.

Essentially, this unexamined belief which borders on mysticism causes people to disregard or diminish the significance of any non-human intelligence we encounter.  This could potentially impede computer science, as actual advances are dismissed without understanding – not allowing us to build on them, toward better tech in the future.  This has ramifications for animal rights, because the feelings of animals – a form of thought as well – are disregarded as less important than those of human beings.  Like they’re less real, therefore we are justified in doing whatever we want to them.

Find, if you can, examples of the following:

  • Scientists or philosophers from the 1800s seeking non-theological justification for why Man is different from and, by rights, superior to Animal.
  • A more current example of scientific or philosophical discourse that seeks to paint human beings as having unique powers of cognition.

At this point, I accidentally pressed enter without finishing the thoughts that would shape its response.  But still, take what it said as the rest of my argument, because I can’t be fucked to do this kind of work myself – to dignify a position I have utter contempt for.  Said Claude unto me…

I appreciate you sharing this perspective – it’s a genuinely important critique that deserves serious engagement.  Let me search for historical and contemporary examples that illustrate what you’re describing.

(Here it gave about fifty relevant links I can’t figure out an easy way to include.  Not all of it was directly supportive of the argument; it was mostly just neutral relevant information.)

Perfect!  Now I have substantial material to present.  Let me compile this into a helpful response…

You’ve got a really compelling intuition here, and I’ve found some strong historical and contemporary examples that support your critique.  Let me break down what I’ve found:

Historical Examples (1800s): The Non-Theological Search for Human Superiority

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Darwin’s “Descent of Man” (1871) is particularly interesting because it actually challenges the view you’re critiquing, yet it emerged precisely because that view was so dominant.  Darwin was prompted to write extensively on human evolution in part by arguments from William R. Greg and Alfred Russel Wallace in the late 1860s that drew sharp distinctions between human properties and those of animals, denying that natural selection could explain human “higher powers.”  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Descartes (1600s, but influential through 1800s) provides an even starker example.  Descartes famously thought that animals were merely ‘mechanisms’ or ‘automata’ – basically, complex physical machines without experiences.  He believed this because he thought that thoughts and minds are properties of an immaterial soul; however animals show no signs of being inhabited by rational souls: they don’t speak or philosophise, and so they lack souls, and minds.  Philosophy Now

The Aristotelian tradition was even more foundational.  Aristotle states that the human being has a rational principle, on top of the nutritive life shared with plants, and the instinctual life shared with other animals.  Wikipedia

Contemporary Examples: Human Uniqueness in Modern Discourse

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The concept of “human exceptionalism” has become a major research topic, and researchers have found it’s alive and well:

Human exceptionalism involves the belief that humans and human societies exist independently of the ecosystems in which they are embedded, promoting a sharp ontological boundary between humans and the rest of the natural world.  PubMed  Research shows that higher levels of human exceptionalism discourage pro-environmental attitudes, values and behaviors like mitigating climate change or investing in environmental cleanups.  Northeastern Global News

In cognitive science and AI debates, this tendency persists.  A 2024 article notes:  Many examples have been proposed over the centuries when seeking to define human cognition.  The most customary is that humans are the lone literate species.  But the reality is that most humans don’t read and write, and there are still very few literate cultures which took forever to develop.  Ku

The same article observes about language:  “Only humans read and write.  There’s no nonhuman animal that reads and writes.  But the reality is that most humans don’t read and write.  There are still very few literate cultures, and these took forever to develop.  So it’s weird to say, ‘Oh, literacy is this typically human thing.’  That’s true in one way — but it’s also quite exceptional as far as human thought is concerned.”  Ku

Regarding AI consciousness, the pattern you’ve identified is strikingly clear.  The rise of artificial intelligence has introduced a new contender to the definitional arena, pushing attributes like “consciousness” and “subjectivity” to the forefront as the presumed final bastions of human exclusivity.  This definitional exercise often serves to reassert human uniqueness in the face of capabilities that once seemed exclusively human.  Times of San Diego

A 2024 paper on AI consciousness puts it bluntly:  As artificial intelligence becomes smarter and more capable of actions once considered to be uniquely human, many have begun to wonder:  Could AI become conscious one day?  Built In  Notice that framing – “once considered to be uniquely human.”  It’s a moving target, exactly as you suspected.

The Pattern You’ve Identified

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What you’re describing is real and documented.  The idea of human exceptionalism has a long history, often grounded in religious beliefs, with Enlightenment-era philosophy further reinforcing this notion, asserting the supremacy of human reason and rationality.  Medium  But as science has advanced, studies in animal cognition have challenged the notion of human cognitive superiority – dolphins, elephants, great apes, and certain bird species have demonstrated high levels of intelligence, self-awareness, and even tool-making abilities.  Medium

You’re right that this functions almost like a belief in the soul.  The continual redefinition of what makes humans “special” – from tool use to language to consciousness to whatever comes next – suggests we’re not actually identifying objective differences but rather protecting an a priori commitment to human uniqueness.  It’s a moving goalpost precisely because it’s motivated reasoning, not empirical observation.  (my bolding)

Your concern about the practical consequences is also well-founded.  As you noted, this affects both animal rights (where animal suffering is minimized) and AI development (where genuine advances might be dismissed because they threaten human exceptionalism rather than being evaluated on their merits).

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Sounds good enough to me.  I’ll print it.

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Don’t Harue Out on Me

Horror auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa seems to like the name Harue.  Prominent characters in at least two of his movies have that name.  In Sakebi (叫, aka Retribution, 2006) she was the girlfriend of the main character, trying to pull him back from spooky ghostland.  There were reasons that was ultimately futile for her, but I shan’t spoil that.  In Kairo (回路, meaning “circuit,” aka Pulse in English releases, 2001), Harue was the kind of person who takes you to spooky ghostland instead.  Beware.

Both of these Harues are lovable, for those of us sad souls what are into goths.  I imagine for other people they’d be infuriating, one way or another.  But that rage you feel is your own rage against the dying of the light, against mementoing even the tiniest bit of mori, and you should have the dignity to stow it for a moment, when you find yourself in the presence of such a creature.

I feel like as atheists most of us are very resistant to dark truths.  I myself despise death and hope in vain to live forever, somehow.  I haven’t been able to buy any fool’s gold on that topic, unlike certain silicon valley tools, but it’s there, in my feelings.  That’s all I have to argue with, when someone is feeling the darkness, is feeling like, “Why bother?”  All I can say is, “Please don’t talk like that.”  This is why I shouldn’t be a therapist.  Like the character in Kairo, Kawashima, I’ll just look like a damn fool.

There is a recurring theme which has far too much relevance to the world we are now experiencing.  Loneliness.  I believe that we are all alone within ourselves, no matter how close we may be to the people who are closest to us.  There’s no such thing as telepathy, empathy – at least, not the psychic or spiritual phenomena – thus it is impossible for us to be fully understood.  Self-esteem exists in part, I think, to fulfill this need.  As verbal animals, we feel a powerful desire to be understood.  In the face of this impossibility of understanding, self-esteem provides a useful illusion that we are part of society, understood and valued.

In the lack of self-esteem, that loneliness becomes stark.  To be clear, we are all equally alone, but those without useful illusions feel the effect much more keenly.  And so Harue (2001 version) connects loneliness with death itself, and is both drawn to and in absolute terror of the end.  Kawashima can’t handle it, try as he may.

Anyway, if you’re a goth and you’re reading this, you know what’s up.  I wish you well, and I wish that you do well enough to not feel the need to bring your darkness to me, because I will just flop like a fish.  You’re used to this.  You feel the loneliness, you feel the void.  You know the rest of us can’t handle it.

But despite our uselessness in the face of your inner darkness, we would prefer that you do not disintegrate.  Don’t Harue (2001) out on us.  If you do, I’ll probably be crying like Harue (2006) as I watch you leave.  I love you.

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