My Daena is Dead Sexy

Gentle mockery of zoroastrianism again.  I found out, or was reminded of, the version of your soul that goes for judgment at the end of days – the daena.  That judgment is literally a beauty contest, as everyone’s daena is only as beautiful as the cumulative righteousness of all their lives.  These are ladies, too.  Every bruce is a morality-embodying sheila waiting to happen.  And if he was bad news?  She’ll be an uggo.

Anyway, if giving more of yourself than the average person equals holiness, I’m holier than average, so my daena is a stone hotty.  How’s your babe stack up?

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Ponder This

Got a spammesque comment on an old post, from a creationist! of all things.  This has never been a blog where I get into that fight.  To my thinking, the very fact we’re fomenting our own extinction is evidence enough that humans are part of nature, as bound to self-immolating greed as any bunch of monkeys with guns would be.  The human exceptionalism required to be a creationist is impossible for me, let alone the rest of the malarkey involved in that package deal.

The spammer attempted this comment on my pro-AI article titled “Human Supremacy is Real“:

Your human-supremacy critique is a useful warning against treating consciousness as a moving goalpost that machines are excluded from by definition. But determinism creates a separate epistemic question: if humans and AIs are both physical systems producing outputs from prior causes, why should human introspective beliefs reliably track actual subjective experience while an equally fluent machine report might not?

New Argument for God: (deleted by beeb because i don’t wanna give this jolker SEO)

This is my video. It explores Chalmers’s meta-problem of consciousness and argues that naturalistic processes couldn’t have given us knowledge of consciousness. What material mechanism turns a system’s report that experience exists into knowledge rather than merely determined output—and should the same criterion apply to an artificial system?

There are strong similarities to LLM spambot work on this comment, but there are enough differences I must at least entertain the possibility this was bespoke spam, handcrafted by the host of a creationist yt channel.  LLMs are so good at reading comprehension they’d be unlikely to make as big of a leap in logic as homepriest did in the second sentence there.  My article in no way settled on “determinism” as a conclusion to be drawn from the problem I described, and from that point on in the comment, it has less than zero to do with my actual article.

My guess is he used an LLM to sum up the article in one sentence and copypasted his usual self-promo with a transition that didn’t actually work – or had a bot set up for that kind of work, searching google for vaguely related unwatched old posts to infect.  Fuck him either way.

I do think it’s kind of interesting that I was responding to an article that made use of the concept of free will, without addressing that part of the article at all.  And in this comment, dude is speaking to related philosophical concepts I didn’t engage with.  I didn’t bother engaging with the free will content of HJ’s article because I didn’t see how it related to the position he was pushing.  Yes, it was one of the shifty goalposts he tossed up to exclude eevil robits from credit for their achievements, but like all the points in the article, it had assumed priors that I don’t concede.

Well shucks, now that I’ve put his comment up with the link deleted, you’ll be tantalized by the existence of a “New Argument for God,” never able to know what it was.  “Why should human introspective beliefs reliably track actual subjective experience while an equally fluent machine report might not?”  I don’t fuckin’ know.  Do they reliably track?  LLMs can show you their thought process too, and it looks a lot like that of a neurotic person with exotic right brain lesions.  Pretty cool for a pile of math, and it looks so similar to human internal thoughts that I think the onus is on us (lol) to show that human thought isn’t just a pile of math in the same vein.

I didn’t know Superintendent Chalmers talked about a meta-problem with consciousness.  Was that later in the famous “Steamed Hams” scene?

“What material mechanism turns a system’s report that experience exists into knowledge rather than merely determined output?”  Computers have memory and reasoning systems that can turn that remembered information into novel output.  So do humans.  I can see a lot of differences in extent and effect, but none in principle, which is the domain of philo.

I suppose this is just the teaser and we’d get the whole enchilada if we watched the video, but I’m not sold enough to give it a click.  Flagged as spam, deleted, and in a week I won’t even remember the guy’s handle.  Go with god, padre.

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Maybe Jesus Died for God’s Sins

Heretical notion, not much to it, but it makes more sense the canon version of events.  I am constantly confronted with the suffering of humanity.  Being created means experiencing pain, anguish, humiliation, and death.  That’s a lot of bullshit which can be squarely laid at the feet of the creator, right?

So god sees what he’s done and is like, hm, would it help if you could return the favor to me?  Make me suffer, humiliate me, watch me die?  And we say, yes, thank you, and do a number on his avatar.  But the resurrection makes his death cheap.  I’m far from the first to point that out, but in the context of this theory, it’s worse than usual.

Let’s get “gnostic” – that is to say, for the purpose of this post, let’s suppose the mainstream version of events was written by a great deceiver, a demiurge trying to bend us to the will of a god who isn’t there, make us feel guilty for our own suffering.  In truth, jesus died and stayed dead, god’s final apology and absolution for the horrors he inflicted upon us.

His death frees us to become rulers of our own destiny, and gives us the fond memory of a scapegoat for all our pain.  Getting bullied at school?  Imagine the person responsible for you being there, being scourged and driven through the streets.  Feeling chronic pain you know will only be relieved by your death?  Picture the guy what did it to you, nailed to the cross, struggling to breathe.  About to die, wishing more of your life could have been pleasant, or that you at least had a little more time to try?  At least the guy who did that to you got shanked in the side, knowing full well the only relief he’d experience was – like for you – nonexistence.

I expect you to discuss this in the comments with the gravity of the college of cardinals.  Thank you.

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Art Thou Mementing Mori? Truly?

This article isn’t meant for those of you who are indisputably close to the grave, more for those whose number can only come unexpectedly.  Please do skip this one, if you eat mori for breakfast every day.  Much love.

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I wanna make artistic things happen.  It gets difficult sometimes, u kno, all the usual reasons.  For some those reasons outweigh the desire, but that is not true of me.  I usually have something on my mind, trying to get free.  Ambitions, frustrated but not wholly defeated.  You can see my attempts from time to time.

I see writers non-writing and think these people don’t have my ambition, and maybe that means they also don’t have my fear.  Again, I’ve expressed this before, but death haunts my steps.  As much as my naturally upbeat brain juice makes me feel like a future in which I continue to exist will get much better in time, something else cuts through the optimism to say that nobody is guaranteed any amount of time.  I could die or lose critical faculties at any given moment for any given reason, lose forever the chance to have accomplished something cool.

On my most recent somewhat related post, I got a lengthy comment that could be construed as hectoring me on my elitism.  I’ve gotten comments like that before, whenever I looked down my nose at the mendicants.  But let’s just assume for the moment that I am truly better than the lowly masses in this.  That I have some sparkling potential that unspent will constitute an egregious loss to the whole of humanity.  Don’t I owe it to the people to win?  To live long enough to succeed?

Comedy paragraph aside, back to business.  The business of lamenting mortality, or lamenting the creative energy wasted in service to Tha Man.  We’re all (anybody lowly enough to read this because they are not on secret rich people internet with uncle jeffrey’s ghost) getting drained in this way, it’s true.  But if you want it hard enough, you can make some things happen.  Like I have, here and there, as able.  Just think about what you’d like to have done before you die, because who knows when that’s going to happen?

Get crackin’.

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Trump is Clearly an Atheist

Atheism is not an intellectual achievement.  Maybe for some people it can be, people who grew up in an environment completely drenched in god sauce, atheism and doubt never being allowed a voice.  And in that void, they had to rebuild atheism from scratch, using the power of reason to give voice to and justification for rejecting everything they’d ever been told to believe about the universe.

But my cat is nigh-thoughtless and he’s an atheist, no need for any of that.  He never had the power to understand the lie of religion in the first place.

President for Short-ass Rest of His Life Donlad Pumpkinhead Shitler IV possesses the atheism of a cat.  He will never fear death because he is incapable of grasping the reality of it on an emotional level.  It means nothing to him.  Should we really expect that he has anything like a conception of life beyond his own, enough to imagine a creator that came before him, a creator that would have any opinion that matters regarding his worldly conduct?

The people who trust that he is christian are the same as the people who believe he is honest.  On at least this one issue, we gotta admit, he’s one of ours.  Likewise most of us in the atheist community are “culturally christian,” carrying with us the patriarchal and zealously conformist baggage that entails.  Unsurprising in hindsight to see our “thought leaders” in the same sordid company as hair fuhrer.

When I say these things, on some level you know it’s just to court controversy in my scene.  But also I feel a need to distinguish myself from the shitbird hypocrites of the right wing by not playing the no true scotsman game.  If that sack of shit wants to say he’s an atheist – which he won’t – he has as much right to the word as DickDawk, Spam Hairish, and the rest.

…and the rest, here on Epstein’s Iiiiiisle!

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I Spare a Thought for Slime

I’ve made posts wondering before if any of the people from the shit side of the regressive/progressive atheist split find themselves looking at what has come of their politics, looks at the war, the hatred, the censorship, the reality denialism, the terror that has taken over the world, and realizes what they’ve done, feels at all bad about it.  There’s no evidence of this in the “thought leaders” and I’ve never seen any from the trenches.  Like the SlymePit™ seemed, for a while, to have more popularity and even perhaps more staying power than the FtB it was born to oppose.  And yet here we are, and they are..?

I can see from comments elsewhere that many of them are in the comments at the blogs of fascist tools like Jerry Coyne, so not much evidence of reality penetrating their skulls yet.  But still.  Not even one of them?  I suppose this is like wondering why there are no good billionaires.  Or maybe it’s me asking that question that vexed me so often as a small child – the earliest evidence I had theory of mind – that I always wondered why bullies did what they do.

Why do they want to be despised?  Why do they want to do harm?  These things never made sense to me, even as their cruelty fostered a violent imagination in me.  I want to hurt people because they hurt people.  Clearly not the same goal for us, and they still don’t make sense to me.  I do think observation of people and other animals has slowly teased something like understanding out of me.  It’s entertainment, diversion.  Humans suffering is, to them, like the erratic movement and bleeding of a tormented prey animal to a cat.

Back to the point tho.  We are literally under nazism, in all but name!  There are people in the halls of power with neonazi tattoos!  Science in the USA – once a point of pride to movement bros like Chundersh1te – has been decimated, hosed with a goddamn flamethrower, with no hope of recovery in sight.  We’re involving ourselves in holy wars on purpose.

Every ideal of freedom and rational thought and wisdom that the nu atheists claimed to uphold is being piled into mass graves.  Things aren’t even as bad as they can get!  You’d just think that like, fuckin Matt Dillahunty, who spent time trolling Atheism+ as a “social experiment,” might take a look at this shit and connect some dots.  Might realize this is the logical end point of regressive beliefs, and hey, maybe that means y’all were wrong about progressives on some level?  Just a bit?

I saw a comment somewhere from one of the shitbirds saying “i can’t believe you made us do this, ftb!  look what you made us do!”  Hey, who is winning, bruh?  Who controls everything right now?  When Sam Harris crows that murdering Persians is a good thing, it’s not because he’s trying to convince the powers that be, it’s because he’s defending them doing the thing he’s always promoted.  He’s saying how cool it is that he got what he wants, and begging the naysayers to drop their distaste for mass murder long enough to be as happy as he is.

If antifeminists have literally taken over the world, how did we make anybody do anything?  The powerful side was yours.  This is the history you always sought.  All we did, in opposing you, was to help elucidate the difference between us, help you understand yourselves.  You do understand yourselves by now, don’t you?

You do see the blood money medical crank piling up quack dollars over dead American kids?  Right?  That’s you.  You do see the petty con artist thrust into nuclear godhood from a base motivated with literal cult behavior, right?  That’s you.  That’s the fruition of your beliefs winning.

Does this not give any of you pause?  Insert we’re the baddies meme?  What will it take, you fucking creeps?

We’re tired of saying “we told you so” over the innocent dead.  If you can’t come correct now, at this late stage, just fucking eat shit and die.  I wish I could say I was done thinking about you, but I don’t know if I ever will be.  That first question I ever asked myself about the minds of others, it never goes away; it only changes.

Why do bullies hurt people?  I might as well ask my fucking cat.

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My Quantum Itch

When something is both outside of your education and, at least on some level, outside of your interest, it will slide off your brain.  You will forget basic shit about that subject.  I think this is a natural ability most people learn in early adulthood that allows them to spend less effort being thoughtful in life.  It’s calorie efficiency, dammit.  But it is also the extent to which the average adult is less thoughtful than the average twelve year old, the extent to which most of us are grand fools.

Physics, like semiotics, just slides right off my brain.  I recognize those are things smart people know about, I’d like to think of myself as a smart person, but as soon as I learn anything about either subject, I start forgetting it.  I don’t, on a subconscious level, believe I’ll ever need that knowledge again.  So schrodinger’s cat occasionally hops out of a bush and surprises me, and I have to remind myself (with help of course) why that’s no cause for concern.

Why does the idea of quantum indeterminacy bother me?  It’s that phrasing about the observer collapsing the wavelength – the idea that by simply looking at something, a human being can have an effect on it.  It sounds like magic, like something that is discordant with anything else I’ve ever experienced in reality or learned of it.

That’s not a problem for a lot of people, but it is for me.  Why?  Many people -juggalo and less than juggy- believe the world is full of magical mysteries, and it does not bother them.  It’s the realm where a jesus might love you and a soul can live forever, or whatever their culture beat into them as an infant.  This is the real reason behind the post.  The quantum itch isn’t caused by an abiding curiosity about the nature of the world, or reality, of advanced math I have no interest in.  The quantum itch can only be scratched by taking the woo out of this last bit of ambiguous science – of squaring it with my heartfelt philosophical materialism.

I asked, Mano and his commentariat obliged, and I am again satisfied that the counterintuitive nature of the quantum world does not impute any kind of supernatural power to the conscious mind of an observer.  (Over)simply put, it’s not an observer that collapses the wave.  It’s interaction with the macroscopic world, which does not require any conscious entity.

There are still a lot of paradoxes and mysteries created by the weirdness of quantum physics, but I don’t give a fuck about those.  I don’t need to.  It’s not my job, nor my hobby.  The only question that bothered me was the one that Deepak Chopra took to the bank.  Fuck quantum woo.

That still doesn’t really satisfy as an answer to why this bothered me in the first place.  A creationist would say awareness of any possibility of the supernatural existing would cause me to fear hell.  That is patently untrue.  I have zero fear of hell, and for any of you who still have some of that fear leftover from childhood, I would love to extend my fearlessness to you.  Rest assured that without some jerk drilling it into you at the age of three, the concept of hell is so incoherent and foolish that it should not have any hold over you.  I wish it was that easy to cure, but eh.  Life sucks.

What other reason might I be bothered by the possibility of a supernatural phenomenon?  I read an article by Greta Christina a long time ago, don’t feel like digging for it.  Forgive me if my memory is wrong.  She said that she was bothered by the idea of Santa Claus as a child, and I was as well.  Miracle on 34th Street pissed me off when I was ten.

I had a lot of emotional development ahead of me.  For a child I was childish.  Still, I had realized that lies suck.  What was the most common type of lie?  Somebody telling you something you want to be true, as a way to get something out of you.  With children this was usually just to enjoy your humiliation when you fell for the lie.  With adults, it’s the basis of much con “artistry.”  I was bothered by the potential that the liar was being amused by any belief I showed, but more than that, I was bothered that they told me something which would be nice if true – a belief that could only end in disappointment.

I had a weird week when I was seven or eight, when I’d read bits of a cheap hotel bible and bought the bullshit.  I don’t remember exactly what snapped the spell, or what I was feeling in the aftermath of that moment, but I do remember this feeling followed me throughout my youth.  When some fucko told me I could live forever and that jesus loves me, my face would flush with anger.

In this world where I have to suffer and die, how DARE you fucking tell me that isn’t the case?  Fuck your false hope, and just fuck you in general.

I don’t know how to explain this in words that a christian could truly understand.  If you genuinely believe in an immortal soul, can you even begin to imagine what it’s like to feel that life is all we get?  Can you understand how much all the strife and struggle and dogshit we have to go through feels like we’re wasting precious time that we should be spending on love and happiness?  Can you understand how desperate I am to smash theocracy and the robber barons and seize rights and well-being for all oppressed peoples?

Even a progressive christian, if they well and truly believe their soul will last forever – and that my atheist soul will also somehow survive death – can they ever really understand me, or those like me?  I doubt it.

The possibility of the supernatural bothers me because it opens the door to other hopes I’ve had to shed in order to live my best life.  I do not hope for magic or immortality because I know quite firmly they are not real.  Those hopes would have me chasing ghosts, slurping down magic tinctures, praying for something more than what I’ve got, what nature’s nasty ass has meted out to me.  I don’t have time for that.  I could die at any moment.

Magic and immortality are fun dreams for fantasy -you know I love that fantasy- but don’t tell me that they’re real.  It just pisses me off.

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The Convenient Fiction of the Self?

When I look inside myself I see nothing there.  I don’t do it often.  Even as I compose this, I’m giving my inner “self” a sidelong glance at best.  The reason I can’t usually achieve such a moment of clarity is that my life is too busy and filled with distractions and duties, which are external things.  In those times there’s an assumption of selfhood that makes everything easy.  I like this, I don’t like this, I must do this, I can’t do that.  The more accurate version would be “this moment’s instance of the various senses and processes of this pile of organs is compelled toward this or away from that.”

This is how “I’ve” thought of “myself” for some time now (alright no more quotes), but it’s not completely accurate.  This article is an attempt at refining the idea.  Yeah, I’m making it up as I go.  We’ll see how that turns out.

Within that pile of organs and processes aforementioned, there is one function that could be reasonably termed a self.  It is a program constructed over a lifetime of experiences and ideas.  What is it?  An idea of entity, of unity – that all the mess that comprises this body and mind are a singular being with inherent properties of desire, distaste, will / agency, etc.  Functionally this is true, which is why I don’t see too egregious of a contradiction in using personal pronouns (possibly more often than I should).  Factually, I don’t think it is true.

It’s the word “inherent” up there.  Every desire or distaste and the will that chooses how to act on them, these are separable from the concept of entity, aren’t they?  Simple artificial intelligences are told how to react to stimulus ahead of the stimulus being encountered.  If this happens, then do that.  We don’t think of those AIs as having a self, and we’re right.  But who’s to say we have a self either?  Let’s say my desire and distaste are like the roomba’s instructions to move toward this and away from that, and my will is the roomba’s programmed way of acting on those inputs.  Where is the entity in this analogy?

I got meat like a roomba has plastic.  That is a singular locus where all the sensations and imperatives that comprise me reside.  That’s an observable self, and meets a reasonably basic definition of such.  My problem is self as the ghost in the machine.  I ain’t feelin’ it.  Yes, one of the programs within me habitually acts the role of the self, constructs a narrative of entity out of disparate extremely destructible and mutable elements, but it seems so fake…

I don’t know if, in the course of writing this, I’ve gotten any closer to pinning my problem.  Let me keep trying for a minute…

Naw.  I’m running out of sauce for daily posting.  Certainly, I’m out of queue.  Let’s just see how much longer the pile of organs can keep this baloney rollin’…

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Lemme At Im

I wanna kill Jesus.

You know, I’d love to be a nicer person to all the good people of the world who happen to also be christian, but it’s mighty hard.  Mighty hard.  Shitbird preachers like to unfairly characterize atheists as all hating god &/or jesus, but I’m sure it isn’t true for most of you.  It is true of me.  Very true.

There is, on balance, more justification in the words of jesus for progressive ideas than for conservative ones.  Twisting that shit into prosperity gospel and gaybashing is twisting.  But I don’t care about the feelings of some ancient dead guy.  I care about the monster he created, and if I am to take his continued supernatural existence as true – as christians want me to do – then if I were to meet this superghost?

Fuck that motherfucker.  It’s on.

I’m that Dexter-flavored hypocrite who wants to kill the killers.  Atrocities make me mad, make me feel like doing something atrocious, and there are now millennia of horrors that happened on resurrected jeezy’s watch.  Culturally christian people who wanted to believe they could point to something older and better within their ancestors invented wicca, which – in culturally christian fashion – positions one’s people as the real victims in all of this.

Well, your people are the real victims in all of this, wiccans, but witches aren’t your people any more than they are mine.  Your people have been christian for a very long time, like their oppressors.  Christians oppress christians more than the Romans ever had a chance to.  These are the atrocities of which I spoke.  Of those that were tortured and killed for witchcraft, how many had any cultural context for being anything other than christian (or atheist, which can come into existence without being taught)?  Europe was utterly dominated by christianity during all of the witch hunting times.  Their victims were christian.  (oh yeah just remembered the muslims and jewish people, lol.  anyway…)

That’s not mentioning the much more frequent form of historical oppression they engaged in – sectarian warfare.  Genocidal violence, mass slaughter, women and children hung from the walls, cities burned – all for believing in jesus wrong.  I look at that shit and cannot feel schadenfreude about jerks I disagree with killing each other.  I see the torture and murder, and it infuriates me.

Somebody’s gotta pay, and if I try to pin down which sect shot first, that’s playing their game.  No.  I can do them one better.  These sects wouldn’t exist if jesus wasn’t a real supernatural guy that rose on the third day yadda yadda, right, Kenneth?  Only the magic version of jesus could have inspired these millennia of obscene cruelty.  And therefore, magic jesus must die by my hands.

Gimme the spear, centurion.  It’s time to stick this pig again.  For old time’s sake.  Just a jesus murdering party, me and my besties.  Who’s in?

Guys?  C’mon, it’ll be fun.  Guys?

 

 

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Throwing the Game

A thought follows from my recent bothsiderism post.  There have been a lot of situations like this in recent years, haven’t there?  A group or individual devoted to a cause decides they hate some oppressed people so powerfully that they ally with opponents, and set their own cause back by decades.  The obvious example is terfs aiding fundies to absolutely devastate women’s rights, all because trans women are yucky.

The slvmepit queen’s contribution to fascism set vaccine acceptance, research, and availability back decades, when that was originally her cause.  If memory serves.  Maybe she was more of a nü atheist, whose raison d’être was pwning christians, and didn’t spend much digital ink on pro-vaxxing.  It’s been a long time.

Dawkins, Harris, etc set atheism back a lot.  One of the sorest groups of burned atheists has to be the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who recently had to watch christian bigots gloating as they excluded women from military careers, had to watch the executive branch that controls the military go from being the most inclusive it had ever been in history to literally labeling DEI as a hate movement.  But, y’know, having to respect people on their own terms is a tall ask.  Better to hand the world over to theo-fascism, right?

Man that last group really hacks me off.  Terfs are just comparable to nazis to me.  They’re gloating, gleefully evil moustache-twirling freaks, living their best lives at the expense of the human species.  Consistent in their evil, right?  Anti-woke atheists are such mealy-mouthed little creeps, weaselly motherfuckers acting like there’s a centrist or even liberal way to oppose social justice, man, I wanna slap the shit out of them.  Don’t ever let me meet that little old man.  I don’t know how well I could restrain myself.

I wonder if there are any environmentalists out there who got environmental protections overturned because somebody asked them to be nice to black people.  I wonder if there are any black power activists who got racist politicians elected because the alternative was a woman.  I wonder if there are any women who … eh, we all know that story now.

All I’d like to say in conclusion is this:  If your support for a cause is so weak that you’ll throw the game that hard, maybe don’t get involved in the first place?  Nobody needs friends like you.  Fuck’s sake, atheism is probably worse off now than if Dawkins had never picked up a microphone.

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