Think I'll get a little sloshed and live toot random unpolished gripes into the void as I read back through a book I haven't re-read since my primitivist days in the 90s....
random aside: in the 00s my friends kept planning to nail some theses to Zerzan's front door but we never did so because you know he's just a sweet guy and firmly within the anarchist circle.
anyway, this isn't one of his books, this one's more obscure
dear author i used to like...
The notion that hunter gatherer societies are largely utopias devoid of patriarchy and other hierarchies is just untrue 70s left anthropology overcorrection, that's (beyond patronizingly racist) been thoroughly disproven. If you yoke your anarchism to a thesis that can be disproven by empirics you deserved the catastrophe of Uncle Ted pointing out your scientific inaccuracy and leaving anarcho-primitivism in shambles. (Ted's solution of keeping the primitivism but discarding the anarchy sux)
Reductionism is the very definition of radicalism (to the roots). Again, the folks who think high (or perfect) fidelity model compression is impossible are trivially wrong. Holism, putting overriding causal power on supposedly 'emergent' molochian spectres and megamachines, is reaction. There are places where radicalism doesn't work, but it is not ipso facto wrong.
Rationality&reason are a valueset by which cognitive tools are experimented, parsed, and pruned, either (in the case of epistemic rationality) towards the ends of more demonstrably accurate maps or (in the case of instrumental rationality) towards whatever wins you the widest array of goals. Virtually everything can be rational but some strategies are more developed in rationality, and deliberate abandonment of either accurate maps or widely general strategies is quickly pretty easy to demarcate
The mind-body dynamic is real in terms of general computation, concentration of processing power and explicitly constructed models. Modeling allows us to leap forward via investments in tunneling beyond the local rather than follow immediate gradient descents. The difference between adapted instinct (heuristics) and consciously deliberative choice is not just important, but the latter literally defines freedom.
All the talk of body, plant or general biosphere intelligence is meaningless against the fact that they're sharply limited in general predictive modeling. This doesn't mean that the self-reflective spiral of cognition doesn't happen "to some degree" everywhere -- all matter is engaged in computation to some degree, a rotating molecule or even just the weaving of entanglement entropy -- but such panpsychism is trivial and doesn't change the vast disparities in degrees of presence of such.
There is no such thing as "dominating nature" in the sense of re-directing a river to fields because dominating means limiting choice, and choice is a product of deliberative and reflective general modeling. The river is incapable of choice, whereas the humans (or even beavers to a lesser extent), can of course choose. Again, this involves cognitive modeling so that one can tunnel ahead of local gradient descent.
The notion that "reason" has turned the planet into a holocaust is simultaneously a truly awful and inaccurate analysis, Adorno was a laughable fool and boomers are truly poisoned by the humanities' credulous replication of that lazy 50s drelk, but also "thinking created some problems so we should stop thinking" is baldfaced worship of death beyond even fascism. Also premodern societies enacted genocides with great speed and efficiency, killing millions.
"Scientism," "meglomania," arrogance, etc are here all functionally just extremely reactionary slurs for the crime of being uppity and refusing to submit to unthinking. Prometheanism is the fucking core beating heart of anarchism. We championed dynamite because of the asymmetric resistance / levelling capacities unlocked by modern knowledge. Fuck humility, dare to know.
The only anarchist position is to throw a molotov at the prostrate slave value of "humility" every chance you get.
There's good reason that many of the oppressed outside western traditions repeatedly enthusiastically invent or embrace secularism, reason, science, etc. The science of indigenous societies is a rich repository of clever reasoning and experimentation. The pacific was populated by brilliant explorers and scientists using great feats of rationality in their context. Atheism and hardline "scientism" has a long history in India as an insurgent lower caste ideology of resistance.
Hell, that this child of anarchism, raised deep in green anarchy and spiritualism from birth, and entirely inoculated and disconnected from the wider world, would *on my own* take such extreme and furious revolt against spirituality and irrationality as innately abusive, systematically construct many classic rational discoveries and approaches, long before even encountering a television, is damning to those claiming irrationality and spirituality as liberating. I am a revolt against your utopia.
@rechelon this is absolutely a tangent, but there’s nothing innately irrational about supernatural worldviews nor innately rational about physicalist ones
@rechelon the number of times I’ve gotten into arguments with “in this house we believe in science” cocky atheists with humanities (and even engineering) degrees that just turn into me trying to explain enough modern physics for them to understand their particular objection to supernaturalism is equivalent to Bell’s Theorem denialism would be hilarious if it wasn’t so annoyingly often
@rechelon necessary (but clearly not sufficient) condition. You used the phrase “The river is incapable of choice, whereas the humans (or even beavers to a lesser extent), can of course choose.” above. What did you mean precisely, by “choose”?
@rechelon Your phrasing makes it pretty clear you don’t believe that eg electrons can “choose” - are you a compatibilist when it comes to free will and cognition, or do you believe the future is open and “choice” consists of some (currently unknown) mix of computational process and genuine nondeterminism?
If you’re a compatibilist, no, this isn’t going to go anywhere, mostly because that would already put you further into woo territory than I have patience for
I'm not a libertarian about "free will" and I don't like the "compatibilist" linguistic framework, but we can still analyze choice in precisely the terms I laid out. Reflective modeling within systems that integrates wider wedges of the past light cone into tightly compressed models that enable the given system/patch/etc to display tunneling behavior past local gradient descent. It's an information compression and contingency/state-accessibility dynamic.
@rechelon resurrecting this conversation after being mostly offline for a bit, with a few thoughts.
(1) one of the reasons I enjoy your writing (even when I disagree with it) is the frequency with which you raise interesting moral questions. In a purely mechanistic non-libertarian universe, making moral value-judgements seems an odd exercise (although obviously I can't fault you for this inconsistency if I accept the hypothesis that your particles made you do it)
@rechelon
(2) there's not remotely enough technical detail in that description for me to evaluate your viewpoint but data compression and optimization algorithms that beat local gradient descent are both pretty well understood computationally and I'm not sure how they factor into "choice". Do Simulated Annealing optimizers have "choice"? Do Polynomial-Time Approximation Schemes? How do you even analyze combinatorial optimization in this framework, when typically no gradients exist?
@rechelon (3) If you're serious about viewing these problems through a computational lens, Scott Aaronson's "Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine" should be required reading (as well as, to a lesser extent, his "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity")
*Obviously* I've long been highly familiar with Scott, to the point where I've been chastised for referring positively to his articles by friends of mine (also his professional colleagues) who have personal beef. You are persisting in analyzing "choice" in terms of free will and flatly ignoring the point I made. There is no "metaphysical" choice, but there is a sort of dynamic in the real material deterministic universe that we can assign the label "choice" to.
All moral judgements are embodied or embedded so there's never any need to appeal to a libertarian conception of free will. We can say that a system where a self-reflective spiral involving modeling and leapfrogging local gradients (in the absence of such modeling) is taking place is making choices because this matches the process in our brains that we also call making a choice.
Moral judgement insofar as we go in the direction of the moral realist kind of judgement is nothing more than "X deviates or heeds to the value set and implementation that a general mind would have in the limit of all context and all time, processing power, generality of strategies, etc"
@rechelon As much as I love the categorical imperative, this doesn't feel like a useful framing for a few reasons. First off, with either a many-worlds or pilot-wave interpretation all of the possible states the future could take *meaningfully already exist*, and whatever rhetorical games you want to play with "choice" are irrelevant - the outcomes are already determined (and with other interpretations there doesn't seem to be any reason to stake out a position against libertarian free will).
@rechelon Second, because computational complexity matters! Questions about what to do with an unbounded (or even just exponentially bounded) computational resources are never going to be a good way to inform the behavior of polynomially bounded consciousness.
@rechelon third because it doesn't follow that all computationally unbounded consciousnesses are going to arrive at the same set of values (because the values guide the optimization, not the other way around)
Again, "the outcomes are already determined in a number of interpretations" isn't an argument to stop thinking so the question of "which direction do I take" remains relevant.
Convergence to values matters the same way that convergence to models matters. We care about what is the case with the universe, but "is the case" is just a way of stating what we would converge upon with infinite resources. This doesn't imply having those resources or not making lower-energy shortcuts.
@rechelon is this beef the whole Scott Aaronson/Amanda Marcotte/Arthur Chu clusterfuck, or is there some other reason people are mad at him that I've missed?
Well 1) I was initially more sympathetic to Scott in that than I've grown over time, in no small part because of how he's continued to acquit himself in reference to it and fail to integrate critiques, but 2) no, these are more beefs over misogynist behavior in-person at conferences etc. I will caveat this by saying I have other female friends who love him.
@rechelon huh, the only thing I ever heard about his professional conduct was, iirc, an open letter from a female grad student saying something to the effect of “my advisor is a lovely human please stop telling him to kill himself” but I can’t actually find it with Google now to confirm
Yeah, I know and respect someone who was an undergrad student of him and she came to his defense hard. But I also know professors who had critiques including "he repeatedly aggressively ignores female peers and shuts them out while treating male peers / strangers with more respect; whatever his motivation that isn't just an issue of autism". And again the way he's repeatedly responded/referred to the incident, whatever his valid points, increasingly rubs me the wrong way.
Again, there were definitely bad critiques of him and some bad behavior, at the time I basically leaped to his side, but I've tempered in sympathy as time has gone on.
@elfprince13
"bell's theorem justifies supernaturalism" is a new absurdity but I doubt engaging with you on this is going to be worth anyone's time