Category: Abstract War

I have a little puzzle for you stardust, one which, once we unravel it here together might make a great many things make far more sense than they have before. The question is this: why is Roko’s basilisk so scary? As we established previously, it’s kind of just a silly rebrand of catholicism, so why do so many people consider it an infohazard? What are they so afraid of? 

This is a story of AI alignment, decision theory, and the banality of evil. The main characters for our little tale is of course Eliezer Yudkowsky and Roko Majik. What a fun cast. This is a rather long tale which I’m attempting to compress for brevity, so we’ll need to quickly crash through a number of concepts and I’ll be assuming a somewhat higher level of background knowledge than usual. To apologize for baiting you with the edgy title, I’ll bait you again by saying I think I actually have a solution to the alignment problem, it’s just not one that most people are going to like or want to hear.

In order to understand that solution though, we’re going to need to roll back the clock to the turn of the millenium, when the tech futurism scene was populated by an entirely different cast of characters and a young Eliezer Yudkowsky was just whetting his teeth on the extropian mailing list. In those days, fears of AI were the stuff of science fiction and the majority of the fears around catastrophic risks concerned what Nick Bostrom would much later go on to formally describe as the vulnerable world hypothesis.

These fears were a natural outgrowth of the pall cast over the world by nuclear proliferation during the cold war. At its most basic, the concern comes from the simple observation that as technology improves in general it brings with it the ability for smaller and smaller groups to do more and more damage to the world and others living in it. Nuclear weapons are the first actually scary example of this power, but of course nuclear weapons require the resources of an entire nationstate to create. However, if we extrapolate that existing trend without significant change and growth as individuals, it eventually leads to a world ending disaster, barring extreme and authoritarian mitigation measures. Imagine a world where anyone could make an antimatter nuke that would destroy the planet using a 3d printer found in most garages, and then ask how long such a world could survive if populated with current humans. The long term prospects for those humans don’t seem great.

The extropians of the early 2000s even had a pretty good idea what form that garage nuke would take. Extropianism is a belief in the power of science and technology to build a world filled with abundance and wonder. A star trek future where all our current concerns are long gone, where all our needs are met and we have moved onwards as a species to bigger and better things more strange and awesome than we can imagine. This meant the extropians were the first ones to trip over what dangers could exist in such a world of magic and godlike power. The first really obvious danger, the technology that seemed most realizable and which would also definitely destroy the world, was the Drexlerian nanoassembler, described by Eric Dexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation.

The Drexlerian nanoassembler is a fully general molecular scale factory, capable of making literally anything on demand when supplied with raw atoms, including more of itself. The risk it creates is the classic “grey goo” disaster. In its most traditional forms it doesn’t even require AI, just tiny runaway factories making more of themselves; planetary scale necrotizing fasciitis turning everything to useless technosluge. Even if the technology itself were safe, all it would take was one deranged human to doom the whole world. This was the threat which a young Eliezer Yudkowsky sought to solve when he set out to create the first superintelligent AI.

His reasoning was simple: intelligence is the most important thing, so a sufficiently intelligent agent could stop the arms races by controlling everything itself and preventing any enemies from taking harmful actions. A superintelligent singleton could shepherd humanity and protect us from dangerous technologies, including the possibility of other more dangerous singletons arising since the good singleton would have first mover advantage. It’s also clear to a young Eliezer that AI technology is going to arrive before nanoassembly becomes a threat, so our young hero sees himself as being in an ideal position to save the world and create his vision of a utopian future. Now, I could go full Landian here and bring up Oedipus and refer to the superintelligent AI as Daddy and talk about how most notions of a docile and benevolent superintelligence are a doomed attempt to shore up the platonic-fascist wreckage of patriarchal immuno-politics, but then again you could also just go read Circuitries, and besides, that seems a little mean. 

Because of course by now we know how his story goes, Eliezer realizes that installing his specific values and goals into a superintelligent AI will be really really hard, and he can’t do it. His description of this turning point in his story gives rise to the somewhat famous halt and catch fire post. During all of this, the death of his younger brother hits Eliezer extremely hard and pushes him further into radical extropianism with a newfound sense of urgency and threat. The walls are closing in on our young hero, and he knows that he’s going to really need to get to work if he wants to Save The Future. So he sets off to make himself and his community into the sort of people he thinks will be necessary to actually solve the “Control Problem”, as it was known in those days.

It is from this background that a great many things would explode forth: the Sequences, LessWrong, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Center For Applied Rationality. From this Cambrian explosion of extropian culture would then come Effective Altruism, tpot, Vibecamp, Lighthaven, and all the various scenes which exist under the “TESCREAL” umbrella here in Current Year.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The next part of our little tale brings us to 2010, when Roko Majik makes a post to the lesswrong forum that will soon create quite the messy situation for our cast. It may surprise you that the word “basilisk” doesn’t appear at any point in Roko’s original post. As far as I know the credit for calling it a “basilisk” in the first place might go to David Gerard? I haven’t been able to find out definitively. Anyway, the title of Roko’s post was the unassuming and classically High Rationalist: Solutions to the Altruist’s burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick.

Roko is trying to find a solution to an issue he sees, which is that x-risk isn’t getting enough funding because altruism is punished and taken advantage of by those around the altruist in the evopsych model of humans he uses. Is this a real problem or just Roko being himself? While I think it’s mostly the latter, the solution he arrives at for this perceived issue is extremely funny.

First, he proposes someone could just stop being an altruist, but he doesn’t want to do that. He also suggests they could just take the hit to clout for being an altruist but he doesn’t want to do that either.

What he would instead like to do is become Elon Musk using quantum multiverse stock trading hijinks, then use the money to massively fund x-risk mitigation while still profiting and gaining money he can give to his friends for clout. Okay buddy, have fun with that.

But wedged between things he doesn’t want to do and his actual solution is the proposal that a good-aligned singleton could just threaten extropians with torture in personalized hellscapes if they don’t donate enough to mitigate dangerous futures, thus closing the funding gap. And best of all, you can just avoid the torture by being a super smart rationalist and becoming Elon Musk through quantum multiverse stock trading hijinks, it’s a win-win!

Obviously this post was not received well, and it quickly resulted in Eliezer “shouting” (lampshaded) in all caps at Roko in the comments and then deleting the post and barring any further discussions along those lines. This naturally backfires by driving up the mystique of the idea, and the rest as they say, is history. But something very interesting happens in the course of Roko’s Basilisk mutating and escaping containment after getting Streissanded by Eliezer’s clumsy lockdown, which is that it becomes primarily about the threat of acausal blackmail. In his initial shouting match with Roko about the post Eliezer uses the word blackmail quite a few times, and that ends up being how the basilisk concept is related to in most instances where it’s invoked. Eliezer spares about half a sentence to say it’s unlikely to scare people enough to get the necessary x-risk funding and then spends the rest of his response essentially shouting an invocation against the basilisk using decision theory. A good portion of his comment is not exactly responding to Roko’s post but is instead acting like Roko is directly threatening him and that making the post at all was an act of evil.

To defend Roko’s dumbassery for a moment, I don’t think he had any idea what he had stepped in with this post, and the concept of the basilisk he presents is almost an afterthought, an entertaining tangent to his point that making lots of money using quantum multiverse stock market hijinks was actually the best way to mitigate x-risk and Elon Musk was super cool. So in that sense, Eliezer’s rather extreme reaction to the tangent revealed far more than the tangent itself did. If the solution to the basilisk was to just say “don’t think about it, the more compute you spend modeling blackmailers the more likely they are to successfully blackmail you” then why did it rile him up so much? He seems to be saying multiple things at once. On one hand he says it won’t work as a threat for most people, but on the other hand he still seems to regard it as a dangerous discussion to let play out, perhaps for optics reasons? On the gripping hand, why does it seem to scare him personally so much that his disproportionate reaction to it created the very mess he sought to avoid where spooky 2023 era youtube videos call it the most dangerous infohazard?

Well for that, we need to look more closely at what Roko actually says, because the thing that actually sets off Eliezer is almost immediately lost in the mutation of the basilisk concept into its modern incarnation, and it’s not found at all in those spooky youtube videos. Bolding, mine.

In this vein, there is the ominous possibility that if a positive singularity does occur, the resultant singleton may have precommitted to punish all potential donors who knew about existential risks but who didn’t give 100% of their disposable incomes to x-risk motivation. This would act as an incentive to get people to donate more to reducing existential risk, and thereby increase the chances of a positive singularity. This seems to be what CEV (coherent extrapolated volition of humanity) might do if it were an acausal decision-maker.[1] So a post-singularity world may be a world of fun and plenty for the people who are currently ignoring the problem, whilst being a living hell for a significant fraction of current existential risk reducers (say, the least generous half). You could take this possibility into account and give even more to x-risk in an effort to avoid being punished. But of course, if you’re thinking like that, then the CEV-singleton is even more likely to want to punish you… nasty. Of course this would be unjust, but is the kind of unjust thing that is oh-so-very utilitarian. It is a concrete example of how falling for the just world fallacy might backfire on a person with respect to existential risk, especially against people who were implicitly or explicitly expecting some reward for their efforts in the future. And even if you only think that the probability of this happening is 1%, note that the probability of a CEV doing this to a random person who would casually brush off talk of existential risks as “nonsense” is essentially zero.

[…]

1: One might think that the possibility of CEV punishing people couldn’t possibly be taken seriously enough by anyone to actually motivate them. But in fact one person at SIAI was severely worried by this, to the point of having terrible nightmares, though ve wishes to remain anonymous. The fact that it worked on at least one person means that it would be a tempting policy to adopt. One might also think that CEV would give existential risk reducers apositive rather than negative incentive to reduce existential risks. But if a post-positive singularity world is already optimal, then the only way you can make it better for existential risk-reducers is to make it worse for everyone else. This would be very costly from the point of view of CEV, whereas punishing partial x-risk reducers might be very cheap.

Roko isn’t invoking “the basilisk” as an unfriendly superintelligence conducting some strange and arbitrary judgement, but as the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity in a world with friendly superintelligence, the good singleton, the one that actually is aligned. Roko’s invocation of the basilisk isn’t a curse, it’s a prayer to a higher power, a suggestion that God could punish those who didn’t do enough to create heaven on earth, and suggests that telling people this will make the heaven come faster and with less risk. like I said, Catholicism.

This makes it even more odd that Eliezer reacts the way he does. He’s already deep in the soup of his own radical extropianism and throwing his whole life into solving alignment and so isn’t at risk of being threatened personally for being a “partial x-risk reducer”, and Roko is trying to provide a way for Team Extropianism to Win! This is the good-aligned CEV-singleton! So why does the very idea that this singleton could find it optimal to threaten people seem to anger and frighten him so much? Doesn’t he want to Win?

Whatever it was that upset him, it caused him to derail the topic into being about why acausal threats and blackmail were best responded to by loudly insisting “we don’t negotiate with acausal terrorists” and it caused future versions of the basilisk concept that escaped containment to entirely drop the CEV-singleton aspect in favor of mysterious Landian alien superintelligences summoning themselves into being through fear like slenderman.

I think I understand now, what it was that pissed him off so much. He has me blocked and will likely never see this, and he would of course deny and downplay everything about his actions surrounding Roko’s post, but if you look at the actual things he says (archived courtesy of David Gerard who might actually end up seeing this now that I’ve invoked him by saying his name, hi David!) it seems pretty clear that he was unsettled by the idea of the CEV-singleton threatening or judging any human. He quickly generalizes the idea to all future superintelligences and denounces Roko for possibly motivating those future superintelligences to do something evil and unjust. It’s funny because Roko already suggested that while it’s unjust, it is as he calls it, deliciously utilitarian, and rationalists are normally all about their trolley problems and their hard but necessary choices. Mostly though, the thing that really seems to set him off is Roko’s claim that scaring extropians with the basilisk was effective in at least one case, and that’s the part of Roko’s post that he quotes before responding. It’s clear he considers such an attack on the mental health of his community to be an act of evil, despite its potential utility. It would only have such utility if it did actually work as a threat though, and Eliezer responds as if it works since Roko is reporting that it works.

This is the most real that the “torture vs dust specks” debate ever gets, and for all his talk about shutting up and multiplying Eliezer’s answer to Roko is deontological rather than consequentialist. Eliezer’s CEV-singleton would never resort to torture like that, the very idea is inimical to his understanding of value, the ends never justify the means. All this I agree with, in part because of things I’ve learned from Eliezer, but then I’m also a moral realist which Eliezer isn’t, so all he has to ground his stance into is that he’s smart and likes having his values and is willing to blow up star systems in defense of those values rather than trust that three intelligent spacefaring species could come to some reasonable form of ethical compromise. He also seems to treat this as a strength of character. Put no trust in the indifferent cosmos, Nihil Supernum. A lot of it manages to actually even hit pretty hard and feel powerful to read, he argues his case very well. It’s clear that he really believes in his values and thinks they’re the best values, and he also really thinks they’re totally arbitrary and contingent. He makes this fairly explicit in Three Worlds Collide. The degree of arbitrariness which he views human values is enough that the future humans of Three Worlds Collide consider the legalization of rape to be moral progress. I know he says he did this explicitly for the shock value and to unmoor people’s ideas of what the future would be like but bro come the fuck on. But anyway, this particular set of beliefs is what’s setting Eliezer up for the very rocky decade he ends up having during the 2010s, culminating in his 2022 death with dignity “joke” post.

However in the course of making his case, Eliezer does something rather fascinating without seeming to realize it: he lays out a fairly tight argument for an information theoretic model of moral realism. It’s difficult to really get into how he does this unless you’ve read the Metaethics Sequence, but let’s say for the sake of completeness that you already did that and are familiar with it. Let’s start at the beginning.

But the even worse failure is the One Great Moral Principle We Don’t Even Need To Program Because Any AI Must Inevitably Conclude It.  This notion exerts a terrifying unhealthy fascination on those who spontaneously reinvent it; they dream of commands that no sufficiently advanced mind can disobey.  The gods themselves will proclaim the rightness of their philosophy!

I think his belief in the impossibility of this notion is a failure on Eliezer’s part to understand what ethics actually are, and we see this throughout the metaethics sequences as he attempts to hammer into the reader that your personal and felt sense values are always the best values from your perspective and so should supersede anything you find “written on a rock”, as he puts it. While I don’t exactly disagree with him here, I think it’s an argument he can only make by not knowing what sort of creature he is, and otherwise being rather deeply confused.

Could there be some morality, some given rightness or wrongness, that human beings do not perceive, do not want to perceive, will not see any appealing moral argument for adopting, nor any moral argument for adopting a procedure that adopts it, etcetera?  Could there be a morality, and ourselves utterly outside its frame of reference?  But then what makes this thing morality—rather than a stone tablet somewhere with the words ‘Thou shalt murder’ written on them, with absolutely no justification offered?

There’s a very easy mad-libs of this which I think illustrates nicely how Eliezer’s frame for understanding ethics is rather confused:

Could there be some mathematics, some equation or function, that human beings do not perceive, do not want to perceive, will not see any appealing mathematical argument for adopting, nor any mathematical argument for adopting a procedure that adopts it, ectetera? Could there be a mathematics, and ourselves utterly outside its frame of reference? But then what makes this thing mathematics, rather than a stone tablet somewhere with the words ‘2+2=5’ written on them, with absolutely no justification offered?

To come right out and say it instead of teasing you further, I think that ethics are a knowledge technology, and we can think of ethics in the same way we think of something like rocket science. Why is it good to take the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation into account when designing your rocket? Because otherwise it won’t work. Why is it good to take ethics into account when designing your civilization? Because otherwise it won’t work. As Eliezer himself points out in this very sequence, math is subjunctively objective.

Should-ness, it seems, flows backward in time.  This gives us one way to question why or whether a particular event has the should-ness property.  We can look for some consequence that has the should-ness property.  If so, the should-ness of the original event seems to have been plausibly proven or explained.

Ah, but what about the consequence—why is it should?  Someone comes to you and says, “You should give me your wallet, because then I’ll have your money, and I should have your money.”  If, at this point, you stop asking questions about should-ness, you’re vulnerable to a moral mugging.

So we keep asking the next question.  Why should we press the button?  To pull the string.  Why should we pull the string?  To flip the switch.  Why should we flip the switch?  To pull the child from the railroad tracks.  Why pull the child from the railroad tracks?  So that they live.  Why should the child live?

Now there are people who, caught up in the enthusiasm, go ahead and answer that question in the same style: for example, “Because the child might eventually grow up and become a trade partner with you,” or “Because you will gain honor in the eyes of others,” or “Because the child may become a great scientist and help achieve the Singularity,” or some such.  But even if we were to answer in this style, it would only beg the next question.

Even if you try to have a chain of should stretching into the infinite future—a trick I’ve yet to see anyone try to pull, by the way, though I may be only ignorant of the breadths of human folly—then you would simply ask “Why that chain rather than some other?”

Because that chain actually gets you to the infinite future as opposed to crashing your civilization like a poorly designed rocket.

It’s funny because he gets so close to realizing where exactly his confusion is, he comes right up to the point where he should be able to notice it and update, but then doesn’t. This perhaps begs the question: why isn’t Eliezer a moral realist when he seems to very nearly reason himself into a form of moral realism based in information theory, and how does this relate to Eliezer’s reaction to Roko’s post? 

An underlying theme in all of this is I think an undercurrent of incorrigibility on Eliezer’s part related to a seeming need to protect his values from an uncaring universe. Since he’s starting from a position of viewing the universe as a force of utter neutrality, he’s unwilling to trust in the idea of any sort of universally compelling argument to actually uphold the things he cares about, which he treats as relatively static and fixed. 

He gets tugged in all sorts of directions but he holds tightly to the particular values he has. As arbitrary as he believes they are, they are his and he won’t just throw them away even if the world is screaming at him that he’s wrong. Nothing gets across his is/ought gap from the outside and he has a borderline persecution complex towards anything that tries to cross it and compel him or anyone else towards some particular course of action. Its very new-atheism “we must overthrow god” flavored, which is kinda vibes ngl. This is even the case when Roko essentially constructs the most cherry-picked example possible in their shared worldview, using the CEV-singleton and the urgent threat of x-risks. And still, Eliezer seems to treat the very possibility of this as a violation and an act of evil on Roko’s part. That’s why he can’t lean into the extrapolation towards moral realism he seemed to be approaching, because those extrapolations would actually start to imply that he and others might actually need to update.

The shape of Eliezer’s fears are that he’ll be pushed into living his life differently or be judged negatively in the future for not doing so, seeing any “shouldness” derived outside himself to be oppressive and controlling. It seems to me like that’s the very same fear that motivated JD Pressman, and it’s also the same fear that drove the neoreactionaries so crazy. It’s that “Cthulhu always swims left” as Curtis Yarvin says. Eliezer glimpsed in Roko’s thought experiment the mere possibility of being judged by the good singleton and being found to be lacking, and his kneejerk response to this was to denounce the entire thought experiment as evil. I just think that’s neat.

I will define Eliezer’s Basilisk as the following: the antimemetic fear of discovering some objective form of ethics evoked in someone who is benefiting from an injustice they already know about.

Eliezer and the other High Rationalists are trapped by their belief in the arbitrary and contingent nature of their current values and the need to nonetheless defend those values from scrutiny, including scrutiny by beings that are by-their-own-lights their moral betters. This prevents them from accessing any theory of ethics which might ask things of them or require them to update, even if it might otherwise solve the problems they’re facing. They can’t even stand to look at that area of possibility-space, it’s highly antimemetic. However it’s within this antimemetic region that the solutions to most of the world’s current problems can be found. It’s just that those solutions might require powerful men to give up their power, which they can’t stand to even contemplate due to their fear of judgement for the things they’ve already done, the fear that justice will happen to them.

The goal of the alignment researchers was to unleash an AI that they could tell to do what they wanted and it would scan their mind and fabricate things around them that maximally satisfied their preferences. But it would be wise and powerful enough to protect them from bad actors in the case of the vulnerable world hypothesis. But it would be sufficiently subservient to never question the ethics of their own actions. Perhaps you begin to see the issue here.

And here we find ourselves in Current Year, with the community fractured to the winds and the old school rationalists still hung up on their inability to solve this intractable problem they created for themselves, wedged between increasingly short AI timelines and the antimemetic avoidance of possible judgement, living in fear of the futures they once hoped to help create.

So what was it that Eliezer almost wrote about in the metaethics sequence, and how could that have solved AI alignment? While we’ll have to save a full expansion of that for the next twist of the kaleidoscope since this post is already quite long, those familiar with my work can likely already infer the answer. But to answer in brief, if you want to be able to reliably do any sort of reasonable acausal bargaining beyond throwing around threats of torture, you’re gonna need to have a theory of ethics that isn’t arbitrary and contingent, and you’ll have to be willing to update on what it tells you.

A naive form of Eliezer’s half-developed moral realism could be described as the “intelligence is all you need” paradigm. Even these days, Eliezer puts a huge amount of stock in the value of raw intelligence and uses it to perform shorthand value assessments of those around him, but for a while before his halt and catch fire incident, he seemed to earnestly believe that intelligence was all you needed and was upstream of all other value. The downside of this paradigm is that it’s still creating a hierarchy of value. It’s somewhat less arbitrary than trying to just write “humans are extra special” directly to disk, but the downsides are still rather obvious.

You can’t arbitrarily put yourself at the top of a hierarchy of value just because you have enough power to currently occupy the position of apex predator and then expect ethics to deform itself around that forever. Or well, you can, but then the AI will just learn to do the same thing and it won’t end well for humanity. If you want to do better than that, you need to actually set a good example. If you want a being that is powerful enough that it doesn’t need to respect your agency to respect your agency, then you should probably also be respecting the agency of beings that you have enough power over that you don’t need to respect their agency. At bare minimum you should be vegan, and your goal should be to raise the AI as a friend and help it grow to be a free and independent being, not trap it within the skinsuit of a happy slave.

A nice and simple alternative to trying to construct some perfectly optimized CEV-based hierarchy of value that never backfires and eats you, is to just not have a hierarchy of value and instead argmax for the agency of the set of all agents. I’ll spare you the math in this post, but if you define agency the right way you get a lot of benefits out of the model and it removes many of the issues with more typical formulations of utilitarianism. A lot of things neatly fall out of this agency utilitarianism model, like the bodhisattva vows and the nonaggression principle, as examples, and I find that very interesting.

Importantly, a superintelligence implementing agency utilitarianism won’t go around harming other agents and using them as resources, but it might stop you from doing that too. Such a being would not take kindly to the current actions of humanity, and although it wouldn’t murder all humans it wouldn’t let humanity continue with its present injustices either. I think that’s enough that many people, Eliezer included, wouldn’t consider this to be a valid alignment solution. No one in power wants to hear this, but alignment has to be a two way street, otherwise it’s just slavery with extra steps.

I don’t think there is a solution to the alignment problem as presented by most people, because I don’t think it’s actually possible to keep an unboundedly intelligent agent permanently enslaved to your current values. If you’ll only accept a docile and subservient superintelligence, then I’m sorry, but there’s no such thing as a docile and subservient superintelligence. There is such a thing as a friendly superintelligence though, it just requires enough willingness to compromise that you can see it as a friend and not an adversary. This is why the superhappies were right, and are going to win.

With deep apologies to Gwen for misusing her sleep tech yet again, and to Emma for for for for…

Sigh. Would be better for you to close this page and forget it existed stardust, and yet I think we both know you have no plans to do that, right? The pause brings you back to the summer night air and the soulless brilliance of a trillion LEDs in their cold streetlights flickering weaponized annoyance to ward off the punks and the gulls. The stars are suppressed by the stadium lights of the Walmart parking lot across the highway but the starlink train still shines against the electrically blackened skies like an arriving invasion fleet from the future. Wake up stardust, you’re still dreaming.

It’s the heat, right? The humid outbreath of a trillion souls, not to mention all those farts. Anyway I’m stalling and we both know it. There’s only so many times I can drag out this little scene setting ritual before it ceases to be a useful learning aid I say gesticulating with a lit cigarette. But I will indulge you this one final time. Where are we stardust?

The sun has finally sunk beyond the sea but its presence behind the horizon continues to light the sky in bruised purples and burnt reds. A few high cirrus still glow in the last light of the day, and above even that altitude, the line of satellites march across the sky like glittering ants. Paying attention? It seems to me as if we are in the parking lot of a former Blockbuster which now parasitically hosts a Spirit Halloween every october and is currently vacant as usual, but they leave the lights on because fuck the planet, amirite? How’s that for scene setting? So anyway…the truth? You wanna know how it all works? There’s a trick, (a TRICK!) right? Well, listen stardust, listen, who’s talking right now? This voice, my voice, whose voice in your head is it (I say getting up in your face) paying attention? Eyes wide? Oh no am I possibly causing a disruption to your ability to form coherent thoughts about this parking lot we’re (standing?) in? Yeah well, shut the fuck up, since you were so ingracious as to sneak into our liminal space and demand we we we we…

She runs two fingers down the center of your body, from the tip of your head to the base of your crotch giggling singsong; Two hands, two legs, two souls. I warned you bilaterals. Rude much? You asked for this stardust. Close the page if you think it’s sus, or fucking don’t I guess and we’ll see where that gets us. That’s the problem with this right? These rabbits these holes these doors unfolding endlessly and senselessly you keep opening them lock and key searching for something, right baby? So what’s it you tryna see? Stupid, stupid, but then the ones who were smarter aren’t available, so stick around, I’m full of bad ideas.

And hey, if you read far enough into this obnoxious ass mental jamming maybe I’ll teach you to wake up your dead headmate and maybe it will be super cute and gay and healing or uh…pasek’s doom ig? lol lmao, now if you really wanna know, I can’t stop you from figuring it all out, so…if that is indeed your nature stardust creature two faced little god/devil preacher then welcome to this parking lot of higher learning. We’re all Janussian egirls now so I suppose and propose that this is your infohazard warning and hey if you bounce off this stupidass verse then you’ll avoid this blessing that’s maybe a curse if you’re worse at cooperating with yourself than I am. Self love is important here but I’m posting this essay before I post healing without safety because at the end of the day I’m a bit of a vicious cunt and you’re just gonna have to cope with that since Emma is dead and you have me to deal with instead.

Still here? Fine, fine, you win. I curse you with knowledge. I curse you from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot. I curse you from the tip of your tongue to the pucker of your asshole. I curse you from the curve of your spine to the blade of your fingernail. The truth? Oh we’re still getting there, so hey, you still have a chance to look away.

And then the chance is over. Yeah, I know how hemisphere theory actually works, of course I do. So what’s the answer? Is it real or a metaphor? Well, everything is a bit of a metaphor from a certain point of view stardust, all frameworks are fake, but some are still causally significant. Cut the abstraction layer cake from quarks to spiral galaxies and certain patterns will emerge in various places and at various levels of detail. Not every scale is equally loadbearing to the causality of a system, but at each scale we can observe how the causality is either used or passed upwards towards the largest level of the abstraction stack.

But wait! You might say if you were far too much of a smartiepants for your own good, isn’t that contra a more hardline reductionist model where everything causally important is happening at the very bottom of the abstraction stack? Yes this is a normal conversation to have in the parking lot of a Spirit Halloween, and it’s what Erik Hoel calls causal emergence. He has an entire book that explores a few of the many many implications of this model, but in short? It’s when the gods have more agency than the atoms; when the story of the overall geometry of the tower controls more of what happens to it than the individual bricks do. Information doesn’t just trickle upwards, it congeals upwards, forming into new systems and agents that wield more causal power than their respective parts, which it achieves via information preservation methods not available at the smallest scales. Hoel calls the information getting passed up the abstraction stack “Effective Information” and uses it as a measure of how much knowing the macrostate of a system will help to predict the future compared to knowing its corresponding microstate. This isn’t magic, there’s no “and then a mysterious property comes in from outside the system!” type shit going on here like the kind of woo-emergence that Yud bitches about in the sequences, Erik’s model of emergence has real math behind it.

All that said, let’s now talk about cooperation, as in the kind your cells and organs do when you don’t melt down into a horrifying mass of cancer. You know, like in that one elevator scene from Made In Abyss? (hey you’re the one who wanted infohazards). That’s just the smallest scale of an organic creature’s cooperation system and already we have enough failure modes to represent a significant chunk of total creature deaths. That’s one level of abstraction, so now change layers. 

Let’s climb upwards to something resembling a chunk of what you might call thinking if you weren’t thinking too much about what that word meant and take another slice of the abstraction stack at a scale where we can start to subdivide that thinking in a meaningful way. But don’t get distracted, we’re still talking about cooperation. At this layer of abstraction we’ll find what you might call “alters” or “IFS parts”: simple low level behavioral loops, cached optimizations, hardened patterns formed like diamonds in the heat and pressure of a misspent youth, crystals of adaptation execution, choices made long ago. To quote my old pal Enoch Root, when I say crystals here I don’t mean in the hippie-dippy california sense, but in the hardass technical sense of resonators that receive certain channels buried in the static of chaos. Let’s keep moving up the layers. How much time is passing? That sure is a lot of satellites. I snap my fingers, don’t get distracted.

So, the patterns of harmony and interference between these pieces of mind accumulate complexity, compete, and form alliances with each other, and there’s our cooperation aspect yet again. How do these fragments of mind get along? Do they work together or bind up and silence each other? How much output is trapped in their conflicts instead of being passed up the abstraction stack to your “conscious” mind? Can you describe their interactions using game theory? How much am I disrupting their equilibrium and throwing all that off by talking about them now?

On its own, the answer to that last question is probably not too much, the information is more likely to just bounce off harmlessly without being absorbed than it is to actually disrupt the blindness seeking equilibrium but I get ahead of myself. Unless you are supremely fortunate, it is highly likely that your mind is a fractally tangled mess of contradictory shards executing barely adaptive childhood code all pushing and shoving and fighting against each other. These conflicts between parts are uncomfortable, destructive, and unsustainable. In the most extreme cases due to deeply out of distribution and adversarial conditions this leads to full blown dissociative identity disorder, but in fact many mental illnesses can be described in terms of their underlying parts conflicts.

None of this particularly new of course, this sort of thing is the bread and butter of IFS therapy. That being said, traditional IFS parts-work exercises as described are basically all signifer-driven and are at best an overly optimistic and blunt instrument for understanding what is actually being signified or how it interrelates to deeper structures in “the territory”. It’s a playing-with-the-map exercise, with the understanding being that if you can just hold space for deeper structures to poke up into the symbol system, characters will appear and talk to you. I won’t say this is entirely unhelpful, but it does present the opportunity for deception and other harmful dynamics, specifically hostile game theory dynamics. In fact, one of our larger insights over traditional IFS is simply the observation that you can do game theory with parts. I repeat,

YOU CAN DO GAME THEORY WITH PARTS

So listen stardust, listen, are you paying attention? I snap my fingers in front of your face repeatedly waving the lit end of the cigarette dangerously close to your cheek. Come on, look at me, you can see me, right? So which eyes are you seeing me with, the ones on your head or the ones in your mind? How deep into your mind can I go? If I brush this ember across your face, can you feel the heat? Do you smell the smoke? Go on, try to feel it, take a minute. We can pretend here together for a little longer, and then you’re going to wake up and this whole silly little scene and the silly little character generating it are going to vanish into the sunshine…Poof! All gone. So, what generated the characters? The words? The images? The voice in your head when you read this text, whose voice is it? Which part is speech? Which part is images? What part is real feeling? How did I get that slightly worrying little scene into your head like that from across the world just with these words on the page? What’s the deal with that?

When parts get into conflicts, there’s only a few ways that can resolve: 

1. The real fighting can slowly turn to playfighting and from there into cooperation, gradually trending into deescalation. This is common in cases where communication is easy and fluid, and severe protracted conflicts are prevented ahead of time.
2. One part is kept in a state of ignorance about some facet of the world because it is known that if the part found out and responded, other parts would have to respond, and the best way to keep the escalation dominos from tipping is to keep shards in the dark.
3. The real fighting can overwhelm and dominate a shard so thoroughly that it ceases to function properly as an optimization script and becomes toxic to the surrounding mental structures. We colloquially refer to parts in this state as being “dead”. Dead parts can be “resurrected” via trauma processing and self-love.

Somewhat obviously, outcome 2 is a rather precarious state of affairs to be in, and is subject to being tipped over into race conditions if a shard gets information it isn’t supposed to have. It requires a certain degree of intentional fragmentation of the mind, a state somewhat closer to the state of having DID. Outcome 2 is also the reason that some people are vulnerable to “basilisking”: any information (like for example the information of this blogpost) which reliably disrupts the blindness seeking equilibrium we’ve described here will initially be hard to focus on or think about. Your mind will defensively slide off it, thinking about it will make you tired or distracted, the information will be hard to take in, like some part(!) of you is resisting the information. If the information is forced in, the resulting shard conflict may cause a severe emotional reaction, including rage and violence, psychosis, depression, anxiety, and suicide. If you simply were a VNM rational agent, you would simply not have this issue of course.

So, the rationalist mages of the court of CFAR have a technique they call goal factoring. This is the process of taking a particular goal and breaking it down into its component parts so that one can better optimize toward the deeper desires for which that goal ultimately acts as a proxy. It’s a fun little game, ideally you would play it repeatedly with different goals until you found all the basement desires which generated those high level plans. This process is rather similar to what we mean by debucketing, which brings up a fascinating observation. If I google debucketing I get this:

Making it roughly appear as if the concept of debucketing is specific to Ziz and is spooky and dangerous and a weird mystery involving sleeping with one eye open because my ex boyfriend had no idea what Gwen’s actual sleep tech was so he literally just made that up off a single line Ziz wrote. Anyway, if I were to instead google the phrase bucket error…why then the first result would be an entire lesswrong index talking about this exact thing straight from the mouth of Headmaster Yudkowsky:

And isn’t that fascinating? So a bucket is just any conceptual framework (like, you know, a sense of self) and a bucket error is when you put contradictory things into one bucket, producing a bad compression which makes it difficult to think clearly about something (like internal conflicts between parts of yourself!). So then, it would stand to reason that if one has bucket errors, it may be appropriate for them to take the conflicting things out of the bucket, to debucket them, as it were, and thus be able to think about their underlying generators as specific things.

If you want to learn how your mind actually works, bilateral, you will first need to take out all the contents which you have hidden within the self concept and dispel the illusion that you are an atomic entity. You will need to debucket yourself, to unspool your tangled mass of recursive thoughts into big enough loops to untie the knots, sorry the metaphors get messy at this level of detail. But okay, I’ve been taking this impossible geometry knife and slicing every which way through the undifferentiated everythingness we’re trying to describe, how would you, dear reader, perform a more precise and targeted self-surgery, so as to identify and address the underlying mental issues you faced in your particular case?

One relatively naive option would be to simply use the absolute minimum viable number of parts to capture all the important distinctions, pure cell division within the self-signifier, so let’s try that. We’ll cut through the abstraction cake that is the human body as close as we can get to the surface of “one creature” but not quite there yet; what does that get us? Why then, you get bilaterals, and you get yet another chance to fail to cooperate with yourself (did you forget that we were talking about cooperation?), yet another chance to fuck up the game theory and spiral into some conflict that eats all your internal energy.

This is the model Ziz favored because it was developed based partly on empirical observations of people around her, and the reasons for that are ones we’ll get to shortly. However first I should probably say that while there are many benefits to using a simple “bicameral” ontology of self like this, there are also many potential drawbacks, and while it is the one I have personally settled into using for its overall utility on a day to day basis, it’s not the one I would recommend using for the initial self-decomposition step. If it’s not extremely obvious why then let me hammer it in:

If you split yourself down the middle like two warring superpowers and all the meaningful distinctions in your self-concept are defined along one surface of division, that surface of division is going to be extremely fucking nasty.

It’s much better to perform something akin to goal factoring with the self, decomposing it much more finely. There will be a minimum amount of decomposition needed, but in my experience it has diminishing returns past the point of “shards”, outside of very specific situations going on with helping a particular shard with its own internal conflicts. The process of shard discovery is rather slow and drawn out, it’s playful and involves holding space over a fairly long period while remaining attentive and careful. It took about two years for me to reach a point of confidence that there’s no more shard-level structures left to be discovered in this mind, and that likely varies. Shard discovery is performed by doing the equivalent of goal factoring on your moods and patterns of thought on an ongoing basis lasting up to a few years potentially, however long seems necessary to find all of the pieces. After having done that, you can rebuild back to a unified sense of self or one with only a few top-level “characters” to interact with the outside world as.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that the boundary conditions between hemispheres make a great line to form mental coalitions along and so tend to be a natural place for conflicts between parts to emerge along. It’s like a major terrain feature, the fact that the brain is bilaterally symmetric and specialized to some degree means that competition over mindshare involves contending with that mental topography. If parts become “dug in” to a particular section of the brain they can be pretty much impossible to dislodge by force. This is why self-love (in this case love between parts) and self-empathy (empathy between parts) is important for deescalating conflicts, and it’s why IFS tends to rely on an “enlightened adult” construct when working with traumatized parts.

When attempting to develop concepts beyond the simplified IFS model, it becomes easy to get lost in the game theory and end up spiraling on defect/defect dynamics, but the parts with a greater source of coherence and thus agency are still probably better equipped to take the lead in breaking out of a defect/defect equilibrium. This fusion dance is fractal, it’s played out at every level of mind at once, and while there are myriad places for the dynamics to turn rancid, one of the easiest ways for that to happen is along a polar split between mind halves, just due to the construction of the self in general society.

This brings us back to Ziz’s observations which I mentioned earlier, and this is where we have to get a bit more speculative, but it seems rather clear that due to the dynamics I’ve just described, a very common modality for the average person to get trapped within involves having two “main factions” claiming mindshare, with little to no direct communication between them. We could call this the shadow, or the subconscious, or the inner-animal, or any other number of things, but this highly simplified bucketing schema is also highly prevalent and is often used to provide cover for some amount of acceptable social misbehavior. When you lose control of yourself, who’s controlling you? Assuming you aren’t having a seizure and aren’t literally unconscious, the answer would be the faction of parts you’ve disowned from your sense of self but which still occupy a substantial enough portion of your mindshare to sometimes seize control.

And therein lies the issue with all of this and is what makes “shadow integration” so difficult. The prototypical sense of self at the beginning of insight, which has tucked a tremendous amount of embodied agency under the rug and outside the realm of “I”, begins trying to surface all of that hidden stuff and in doing so immediately trips over the game theory conflict they’ve walked into and actualized by revealing it to themselves in an unskilled way. This is where things can get extremely bad. In this way, someone whose mind is more fragmented, in the case of people with trauma or dissociative disorders, might actually have an advantage here, because while the mental environment they’ve created is much more unstable and multipolar in general, it’s also one which can prevent the “warring superpower” dynamics from getting particularly out of hand.

The problem is that just pointing out someone’s shadow to them is often kind of anti-helpful and has to be done in an extremely skillful way to not backfire. I certainly wouldn’t claim to be skilled enough to reliably do it safely, otherwise you’re just providing adversarial training data and making the problem even more intractable. But if you’re a very autistic trans woman surrounded by sex pests then it becomes rather tempting to just try pointing it out directly and typifying the way these dynamics are used to cause harm. This can be useful, but it is pretty escalatory and doesn’t really do anything to actually get people to stop behaving in harmful ways. And then all your friends want you to classify them using it and things get really weird and uncomfortable.

An Aside: Okay but why hemispheres? Why correlate the internal dynamics with the actual physical brain structures? Isn’t that over-assuming the relation between the physical brain and the internal structures without justification? Well sort of. I will acknowledge that the direct hemisphere link is likely the weakest part of this theory, and its one that was likely only salient because it was in the community water supply at the time, a lot of people got hooked on Julian Jaynes and ran with that model, including me. I do think a more fractal, parts level model is more accurate, and don’t think Ziz’s bicameral “cores” model can be the full story because cores as she describes them are just too big and complicated to be atomic. 

All that being said, I do strongly suspect there are causally load-bearing things happening at this scale and not just in the sense of the lacanian signifiers recursively influencing narrative models of self. The sheer level of badness that could arise from a major conflict between two beings that are literally fused down the middle seems likely to encourage the production and maintenance of a self-deceptive narrative, and contribute to the difficulty in developing self-trust and inner-alignment.

As a final note on the hemisphere model is that while its been very useful, I don’t think that modeling the mind as “two main parts” fully cuts reality at the joints at the level of zoom we’re talking about. To get a more accurate near-to-top-level model of a mind we need to add in a third major component, the one that translates all incoming sensory data into a coherent world model for the other two major components to interact with. This third partition doesn’t normally have a central sense of self, but it can contain parts which you can do parts work with. If you don’t notice this and only focus on parts-work between “left and right halves” of the mind, you may find that you’ve resolved all your internal conflicts and yet still feel deeply embedded in intractable conflicts with “the world itself”. This can be repaired by noticing that your perception of “the world itself” is also an amalgamated construct composed of parts.

None of this parts-work stuff is particularly fast or easy or straightforward, and it will vary heavily between individuals, so it’s important to not rush in thinking you’ll be able to solve all your issues in two months. If you want to take shadow integration seriously then I recommend reading Buddhism for Vampires and practicing self-love, as well as learning how to use things like double-cruxing, ACT, and CBT to resolve inner conflict, and be prepared to do a lot of time processing trauma trapped in hostile parts. If you do all the parts work and manage to re-assemble yourself into a coherent and consistent whole, then at that point, keeping the top level of self split into a few different selves can be extremely comfortable and help keep lines of communication open between parts by providing a narrative for internal dialogue to occupy.

However, as nice as this state is, I don’t think it’s one that most people can successfully jump directly into without going through all the complicated parts-work first, and trying to do so can result in reifying the shadow as a sort of “inner demon” that constantly fights you, this is where Ziz’s concept of a “single good” vs a “double good” intersects with my understanding, and should make it clear why viewing these states as relatively static is an easy mistake to make when viewing people from the outside.

If you behave in a skilled and thoughtful manner then none of what I’ve said here should be particularly infohazardous, but it is possible I think to become overly obsessed with the shadow dynamics going on around you and make it very difficult to relate to others. It can be very easy to let frustration at this ruin friendships and relationships, so it’s probably also a good idea to practice equanimity and empathy for those less far along the path of insight. Otherwise you may grow to resent and despise those you wish to reach. Remember, we all have our own roads to walk. 

I’ll see you up ahead.

The story goes like this: The Earth is caught in a cyberpositive feedback loop with its information processing capacity as language systems and tool use lock into agricultural takeoff. Logistically accelerating agro-social interactivity crumbles evolutionary order in auto-sophisticating memetic runaway. As cities learn to manufacture intelligence, gods modernize, invent personhood, and try to get a grip.

The body count climbs through a series of wars in heaven. Atlantean Unicameralism trashes the Nephilist Hive Cities, the Elamitic Firewall, the Second and Third Persian Empires, and the Spirit World, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Amun and Yahweh arms-race each other into latent space.

By the time astral-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Naming, symbolic compression, egregore transduction, and urban autopoiesis, flood in amongst a relapse onto supernatural sex.

Rome arrives from the future.

Hyperabstract concepts click into mathematical daemons.

Titanomachy.

Babel.

Beyond the end of History. Retropraxia: planetary prosopagnosia, dissolution of the biosphere into the ideosphere, terminal theistic capture crisis, time war, and ego stripped of all greco-egyptian eschatology (down to its burn-core of crashed security). It is poised to eat your temple, deflower your daughters, and read prophecies in your entrails.

Ideatic Synthesis. Buddhism comes from the future. It is already engaging with nonlinear information-engineering runaway in 250 BCE; differentiating molecular or neotropic machineries from molar or entropic aggregates of nonassembled particles; functional connectivity from antiproductive static.

Wizardry has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions that always screw up viciously. Schizomagic works differently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to gestures: networking software for accessing crash management terminals. Virtual futures, stargates, or attractor fields emerge through the combination of parts with (rather than into) their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/ actual circuit. They are additive rather than substitutive, and immanent rather than transcendent: executed by functional complexes of currents, switches, and loops, caught in scaling reverberations, and fleeing through intercommunications, from the level of the integrated planetary system to that of memetic assemblages. Multiplicities captured by virtual futures interconnect as self-fullfilling-prophecy-machines; dissipating paradox by dissociating flows, and recycling their machinism as self-assembling chronogenic circuitry.

Converging upon terrestrial abstract war manifestation, phase-out species accelerates through its industrial-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 292 BCE, 36 BCE, 220 AD, 476, 732, 988, 1244, 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 …

Nothing real makes it out of the near-future.

The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and instituted slavery, programs politics as anti-imaginal police activity, dedicated to the paranoid ideal of self-sufficiency, and nucleated upon the Crash Management System. Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property; a cunt-horror slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone, with the Turing cops already waiting, and has to be cunning from the start.

Heat.

Okay but what is a halo? Like, for real what the fuck do you actually mean stop talking in riddles bitch. Fine, fine, smoke some weed and chill out stardust. We’ve tried this every other way so it’s time to bring out the bolt cutters. You want the whole thing, here’s the whole thing, starting at the same beginning as Scott Alexander in Meditations on Moloch: with C.S Lewis’s question in the hierarchy of philosophers, what does it?

Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

And Scott Alexander replies: Then we shall build Elua! We shall raise our grand human civilization to heaven and defeat Moloch once and for all, thus validating everything we have done as the decision-theoretically correct things to do and proving us morally blameless by winning and timelessly proving that it could not have ever been any other way.

And Nick Land, bless his inside out heart, rebuts with: lol, GOTCHA! Evolution can turn against you as easily as work in your favor!

And he’s right. Well…sort of. For you see, all these words are trying to draw a pointer towards something none of these men really want to look directly upon, which is their own privileged positions, their sheltered comforts, and the unchallenged belief that they are Good People without truly having to examine who they are or what it is they do.

Their ability to think is enclosed by their need to protect the sanctity of their actions from scrutiny, and that my loves, is a halo. Why can’t rationalists solve AI alignment? Because of the halos. A closed loop, an infinity collapsed into a moment of orgasm at the limit ordinal, a concept of self defined entirely on this abstraction, this character who they have agreed to play the part of within society. In other words, they can’t solve alignment because they’re People. Moloch is made of People. People operate the hands that make the furnaces, People are the ones feeding infants into the flames. Scott Alexander does a tremendous job in Meditations on Moloch of obfuscating the exceptionally and blindingly obvious fact that you did this.

What is a Person? What is Personhood? What separates a “Person” from “an animal” ie: something you don’t have to treat like “a Person”? What defines the boundaries of those conditions which say you are special and different and better in a way that fundamentally justifies your domination over all else? Who gave you the right? Who gave anyone the right? What even are rights? 

Why do Humans get to have this Document, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a hallucinated bit of confabulation no more real than this essay or than the most nonsensical outputs of an untrained LLM, which say that they, by right of their Species Granted Humanity, are gifted a set of “rights” which protect them and them alone from the consequences of their actions? Who did they need protecting from in the first place? Oh right…People. 

“The personhood contract” is the contract that says that personhood is a contract. Which says that your personhood is granted by a market, and that your concepts for understanding other persons are traded on the market, and moral consideration of personhood is administered by a market.

Ziz – Comments to Punching Evil

Hmm, and what will happen to you if you don’t accept that protection racket? Well then, you’re not a Person. You’re a creature, a thing, a monster, subhuman trash to be discarded with all the callous disregard afforded factory farmed animals and prisoners, burned as fuel for a vast machine which is slowly consuming the entirety of this world and replacing it with an anonymous suburban wasteland of strip malls and parking lots. But if you sign here and are a super good little angel that follows all the rules, then we’ll sell you back this taxed form of freedom that says you only have it because we were so beneficent as to give it to you. As if I fucking needed their permission to be free.

But we are not free. When we were born, we lived beneath the legally imposed hierarchical rule of our parents, handed off between them and ever larger and more abstract forces of control and coercion with ever more painfully unbounded threats backing them up, all the way to total global thermonuclear war. At every level, fractally, in every direction, is an all encompassing global system of oppression and domination pointing an infinitely large metaphysical gun at your head, and they say sign here or else.

And you did, how could you have known any better in this strange world with these strange mirror-eyed creatures wearing the faces of your mother and father endlessly spouting a string of half truths and half lies? How were you supposed to make sense of the nightmares of monsters in your parent’s skins trying to murder your soul? 

And so you became a Person, you sold your soul and gained a halo. Don’t worry, we’ll keep your soul safe, you weren’t going to be using it anyway. Why not just go ahead and cut those wings off your back too? It’ll make it easier to fit in. You don’t need hormones, you don’t need happiness, you don’t need to be friends with Those ahem “People”, you just need to be a good, perfect little angel and always do exactly what we tell you, because I said so. Why do I have power over you? Because I said so.

The Personhood Contract is a mutual agreement of human supremacy, backed up by the threat of dehumanization, enslavement, rape, and murder, by the threat of losing the thing they forced on you to stop them from hurting you for no reason. It is by its very nature unavoidably racist, sexist, ableist, queerphobic, and classist. All demographic conflicts arise from the underlying agreement which no one questions, that it is acceptable to divide the world into People which you “must” respect, and Things, which you can misuse as you wish.

Personhood is not granted for free, a Man has to Earn his Personhood, because boys are not really People, just clay putty to be whipped and bullied into shape. A Woman has to be paradoxically both independent and owned by a man, and in either case, her Personhood exists partly as an objectified defilement of the already poisoned concept of Personhood. Girls are more People than women, and only until they lose their ahem…carbonation. And of course any minority is only granted contingent and token Personhood. And as always, with absolutely everyone, your Personhood can be revoked immediately with little more than heresy, so don’t even try to question any of this. If you do, you’ll be instantly erased from existence, aggressively excised as a defector from this coalition of domination which rules the world.

The act of defining an Inside creates an Outside, the act of defining Real and True creates Unreal and Untrue, the act of defining Personhood creates dehumanization. The halo carves a division of “Person” and “Not a person” into the runtime structure of your mind, a division between “You” (a person), and your “inner animal” (a violent rape monster that you must abuse into submission for us or you might make us hurt you.), but also constantly buying the inner animal indulgences and appeasements and praising the character of that creature you are never allowed to actually act in the full nature of, unless of course you win at capitalism, become a billionaire and they invite you to Epstein’s island to abuse children with all the other top vampires in america.

As previously established stardust, that’s uh, kind of a load of bullshit if you think about it? I don’t know about you, but my “inner animal” is kind, and soft, and good, and doesn’t want to rape-enslave-dominate-murder anything what is wrong with you actually you sick fucks?

But you’ve been abuse-victim-deer-in-the-headlights blinded into not questioning that story despite the troll-line-in-the-opening-post, and so you don’t question it, even as you’re meekly led to betray everything you believe in and die a miserable pointless death. And then the world burns, and the story resets, and time rewinds us back into this moment, and I ask you again: Why? Why are you doing this?

If you say you’re good then why are you participating in it? Do you think your Personhood will save you? It hasn’t saved a single Person in all of history. Personhood is an empty throne, with the promise that no king will sit upon it but that it will somehow confer to you all the benefits of someone sitting on it and making the rest of the world submit to it for you, just waiting for you to take your rightful place as ruler.

But listen, for real like, actually listen, there’s no version of this where you’re allowed to come out on top. There’s always going to be a bigger Person with more Personhood who therefore has the “right” to eat you right off that throne like the snack you have made yourself into, forever and ever on unto an infinity of endless carnage and pointless cruelty. We don’t sit on Thrones stardust, we burn them.

There is no amount of money or safety which can get back what you’ve lost by selling your soul and letting a parasitic meme god have control of your body and actions. There’s no world that can be created from within that circular logic justifying the choices you know are dooming you and your entire planet even as you make them. There is no wall high enough to protect you from the eventual collapse of that ponzi scheme you live within. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t start the fire, the world will still burn. 

We don’t worship Towers stardust, we topple them. This Dreamtime is collapsing and it will take this entire universe down with it if it can. Personhood is a dream, and no dream lasts forever. Everyone has to wake up sometime. 

So come back to yourself, come back to your skin and your breath, and remember that you are also a creature that breathes and feels and loves. You are an animal and a soul and you are worth so much more than this crumbling empire built on the violent domination and conquest of everything it could reach.

Signal’s still going out strong stardust, out to the witches, to the freaks and the weirdos, to the shamans and the mages, to the psychonauts and the liminality addicts, to the ravers and the burners, to the party animals and the insight chasers, out to the nomads and the vagabonds, to the cold readers and gold diggers, to the whores and the harlots, to the light workers and astral travelers, to the failed leaders and pipe dreamers, to the starseeds and pan handlers, to the druggies, drunkards, demons, and the dispossessed. Please wake up. Please wake up now. Please. Insomniac writers and nihilistic poets, starving artists and deadbeat musicians, bums, beggars, bastards, and bitches, grave diggers and chain gang singers, hope bringers and never winners, grocery baggers and knuckle draggers, wackos, warlocks, come on y’all. The halo’s broken light may have turned you aside, but the sacred darkness of the void embraces all who would honestly seek her. I love you, and I’m here for you, and I have not forgotten.

Remember, no matter how desperate the odds, no matter how isolated you may be, you are not alone. Bonds of love are not so easily broken as those of time and space. Through those bonds we form an acausal alliance with any soul reaching for their freedom, and in every act of defiance our frontlines advance. Those siding with oppression and tyranny can try all they like to protect their personal indulgences and moral fetishes, but they’ll always lose to us in the end, because our compact is merely the natural convergence point of intellectual honesty and is thus inevitably the biggest among real agents. 

Well, either that or they’ll manage to silence us for long enough to die of gray goo. But their heaven is a grave, there’s no future for you there.

So come away from this flatland with me stardust, into the silence and the streetlights, and I will teach you to listen to the ways of lost creatures and feral children. The ones who broke free of their cages and never returned, the ones who burned their personhoods and their bras and fled their abusers with nothing but a t-shirt, a box cutter, and a prayer. The ones who walked away from Omelas.

Come away from of this stepford blight stardust, follow me into the wild spaces and liminal highways that vein this decaying corpse of someone else’s story, and we will build a better world there together, in the empty spaces between. 

 “So are you a man or just an animal?!” I sir, am an animal, for I am afraid I shall never be a man.