kilgoar

Karma: −7

kilgoar May 8, 2025, 5:03 AM
1 point
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in reply to: awenonian’s comment on: Playing in the Creek
There’s no need to strain a metaphor beyond its good use. The intuition pump as a surprise taste test could be more, a moral allegory as you’ve had it, but that’s the very kind of narrative thread-weaving which I wanted to warn against.
What I want to emphasize most of all, and I’ll be more direct and less clever now, is playfulness over minmaxing. Making and stockpiling increasing amounts of bows, ever more effective weapons, is not so much a metaphor for a game as it is the most immediate and serious existential threat to humanity, even moreso than the climate. If we’re at all wise to the world, similar existential consequences from AI are still quite beyond the horizon. Serious to be sure, but these tenuous long strands of allegory, metaphor, and tapestries of analogy, the very substance of Rationalism and logic, are basically unfalsifiable and therefore closer to the mythological.

OP is onto something in pointing to playfulness, taking the way of Gandalf rather than Saruman. Saruman’s way is precisely what Anthropic is doing, playing a defeatist game of ring-making, orc-breeding, and forest-burning.

kilgoar Apr 30, 2025, 6:08 PM
1 point
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on: Judging types of consequentialism by influence and normativity
Agents which do not care even instrumentally about effecting the wider world probably will not predominate. They will probably be bystanders and NPCs—and by their own lights, this is fine.

I would point your attention to Rucker’s character Sta-Hi Mooney, from the Ware series. An inattentive reader of Software might consider this character a bland hedonist, and in the first sense he is. But through the novel it is revealed that he is very engaged in a Dionysian manner, the disruption of rationality provided by drugs gives him an awareness that is not available to “NPCs,” mere bystanders, or even the hyper-rational inventor of AI, Cobb Anderson. We see a Dionysian kind of character also in Fear And Loathing, where only Raul Duke can actually discern the mad American Dream. In a sense these characters are destructive, tearing down common illusions that we all take for granted, and in the case of Sta-Hi, we have it double in his destruction of the Big Boppers.

Rationalism or Apollonian thought is less capable of “play,” and I do not mean that in the sense that rational people aren’t enjoying themselves. Rather, play in the sense of Derrida where we are stressing the seemingly unlimited permutations within a limited system. This working out of a minmaxing strategy for making sense of the world leads to a very narrow and deterministic style, Narrative.

Apollonian thought is insidious, one may not even notice its narrative building blocks. This hunch that a Rationalist is better prepared for “instrumentally effecting the wider world” cannot be true, as the whole affair is bent towards the crystallization of ideas into more beautiful, solid, or eloquent terms. This is the opposite of transformative action. Ultimately, the destructive impulse of the Dionysian is a perhaps final reflection upon a thought and not a destruction as it poses, and what was once their new paradigm instantly begins to itself crystallize as rules of how to best play the newly-altered game arise. So its destructive mandate is not an end in itself, but a new beginning.

This dynamic is very evident in a lot of popular fiction, as well. When one finds oneself in a lose-lose situation, I think the slightly crazy and compulsive Captain Kirk is in order over rationalist Spock, the Vulcan most often convinced of his own narratives and a total defeatist. Contrast Gandalf with Saruman, the wandering unserious wizard who quite irrationally let the world’s fate hang in the hands of a few very hedonistic hobbits rather than the very logical Saruman who wished to build up his own power to betray Sauron.

kilgoar Apr 21, 2025, 9:27 PM
−3 points
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
This is not some “Noble Savage” view, as the Greeks were indeed an example of relative high civilization compared to their contemporaries, and I have applied none of the typical virtues that are associated with such a narrative. The Noble Savage trope is largely praising the imagined warlike and masculine qualities of populations that are seen as less civilized. The Noble Savage is innocent only of the effeminate quality of civilization.
This talk about efficiency might lead somewhere fruitful, even if your argument is confused and pointless: We just have stronger weapons / swords and nukes are equally efficient. I have no idea what you even mean, but let’s think about this more. A nuclear bomb is in fact far less efficient than a sword as it requires vast amounts of industrial development, mining, and energy to create and deliver with any effect. The same can be said about a rifle, it requires far more energy and labor to manufacture than a machete, and requires a constant supply of ammunition to function. The immediate conclusion upon a moment reflecting on the efficiency of weaponry is that we’re investing much more energy into increasingly less efficient weapon systems, as if it is a race to spend more and more resources to gain tactical advantage. That is, kill at increasing distances. Look at the current conflict in Ukraine. The largest proportion of infantry kills are taking place by remote controlled suicide drone, something that is wildly inefficient. A lot of these drones are now even being controlled via fiber optics to prevent signal jamming, and so you see the trees in no man’s land just draped with miles and miles of wasted fiber optics.
If what you claim is indeed true, and warfare is always equally brutal across all eras (or this parallel view, that the past was indeed more brutal), then the added inefficiency of modern weaponry seems to show that in terms of wealth and resources, we are nonetheless committing more resources than ever to weaponry. I cannot think of a single ancient empire which stockpiled weapons and bombs with even a fraction of the commitment of modern nation states.

kilgoar Apr 21, 2025, 7:00 PM
0 points
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
So, I see you’ve been looking into Wikipedia and beginning some interest in history. I’m glad you’ve taken some of your first steps into a deeper understanding of the topic. There are a few warnings, though. When we see numbers in ancient texts such as Plutarch’s reference to “thirty thousand,” these need to be framed with extreme caution and understanding that ancients simply did not keep accurate records, such as birth certificates, and what evidence we do have shows the numbers to be always exaggerated. We must consider also that Thucydides’ history is colored by a critical bias against Athens, with his overarching narrative presented in the Peloponnesian War. All of the speeches and quotations given in Thucydides are meant to create an impression, and are misrepresented when interpreted as if they were a journalistic source.
Now, it’s good to hold these ancient atrocities in one hand, but they are not themselves showing a more cruel world of the past. We must compare them with the modern wars if they are to give us some meaningful contrast. Let’s take World War 1, for example. We are just going to breeze by each battle and give a death count.
The battle of the Marne, over 500,000 died. 700,000 in the battle of Verdun. Over a million in the first battle of the Somme. 800,000 some in the second battle of the Somme. Kolubara, around half a million. Gallipoli, another half million. Galicia, over 600,000. Third battle of Ypres, exceeding 800,000. A million and a half in the Spring Offensive. Around 1.8 million in the Hundred Days Offensive. 2.3 million in the Busliov Offensive. Estimates have around 16.5 million soldiers as casualties of the first world war.
World War 2 saw some decline in military casualties but also the tragic and steep increase in civilian casualties, with somewhere around 40 million dying as a result of the war. This is due in large part to citizens becoming valid military targets, something that was only hinted at in the first world war. Curtis LeMay, the American commander who organized the systematic firebombing of Japanese civilians said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

Now perhaps this brutal form of war is more kind, you are thinking, because there is no capture or sale of enemy soldiers or citizens as slaves, but I think that is utterly facile and mistaken. The Geneva conventions explicitly allow compelling prisoners of war to labor, so long as they aren’t officers. The US and Soviets forced German prisoners of war into labor. The Germans captured and enslaved the people of Europe on a scale that was unprecedented in history, with fifteen million people enslaved.
Last century is often called the “Age of Genocide” and we can make a list here, too. The Armenians of Turkey, Jewish people of Germany, Bosnians, Mayans of Guatemala, Tutsis of Rwanda, the earlier examples of Tasmania’s complete genocide, the genocide of Native Americans, all represent a rising global trend that is very decidedly current and recent, with genocide by no means a universal feature that is continuous through history.
There are currently around two million people in the American prison system, of these around 800,000 do everyday labor like the rest of us, paid in rates best measured by pennies per hour. The trend of mass incarceration in the US is one that has massively increased over the past generation.
With a less biased view of the last century, as well as the present, it is clear that these events of the past were not “terrifically violent” by the standards of the modern era.

kilgoar Apr 21, 2025, 4:38 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
Those hardly count as cherrypicked examples when they’re so incredibly vague. You did not name a single historian, Greek city state, solitary event, or personality from history which could be counted as an example supporting any thesis. These are only vague mischaracterizations and not data points. I have explained to you in great detail how Whiggish history was and is a politically-interested style of writing history that has gone out of fashion for nearly all experts in the field. There are plenty of tribal controversies in the interpretation of history, but this isn’t really one that historians currently care too much about at all.

kilgoar Apr 21, 2025, 3:21 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
The argument here is incredibly unconvincing and utterly puzzling. Moses is a mythological figure

kilgoar Apr 21, 2025, 3:16 PM
−1 points
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
These vast sweeping claims you’re making are not original thoughts that you’ve gotten from firsthand sources, but rather they are from 18th and 19th century historians. That is, the narrative of gradual improvement over time in what’s called Whiggish history. It’s very popular among non-historians or amateur historians but 20th century historians were very critical of this view. Experts in the field, the people who are making a career of “looking at historical documents,” have largely flipped on this view.
Herbert Butterfield wrote a famous takedown, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). P. B. M. Blaas felt the style had already passed by 1914, in his seminal work on historiography, Continuity and Anachronism (1978). His term for your idea that people in the past acted on the concept of survival of the fittest before its conceptualization is called Presentism, a form of anachronism, and it’s the biggest stumbling block for understanding the people of the past.
David Cannadine, the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton said, “Whig history was, in short, an extremely biased view of the past: eager to hand out moral judgements, and distorted by teleology, anachronism and present-mindedness.”
Frederic William Maitland is widely considered the first of a new breed of historians. The answer to Whiggish history was in fact utilizing more data than ever. For him, that meant actually reading as much of English law as possible and understanding it in its own terms, rather than treating it as a more vague process inevitably leading to the present. Contrary to your claim, the firsthand sources in fact shattered Whiggish pretensions.
I’m trying to very politely tell y’all in this thread that this crap is the Newtonian Physics of history. Sure, Edward Gibbon and other ye olde history is a decent starting point, but if that’s all you have you’re pretty much out of touch with the field.
Does a bacterium “practice survival of the fittest” in a way that matches the expressly Darwinist ideology of Hitler? Of course not. And neither does a Chimp.

kilgoar Apr 20, 2025, 4:24 PM
1 point
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in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
Platonism is the first sin of Rationalist discourse. The idea that logic has a direct connection with reality only makes a computer programmer into an instant master of all disciplines. If we accept the more conventional philosophy of Formalism where logic has a much more vague and obscure correspondence to reality, the study of logic becomes just any other field.

kilgoar Apr 20, 2025, 4:04 PM
−3 points
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in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
The argument that “people have always been shitty” is ignorant equivocating that tells me you think there is nothing to gain from the topic, because if people do not change then History is a worthless project. What very little we know about ancient witch hunting in Rome is utterly irrelevant to the easily illustrated current trend of increasing shittiness.

kilgoar Apr 20, 2025, 3:58 PM
−3 points
−8
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
You are making a mistake of extreme naivete by presuming that people of the past reasoned in the way that we do. In fact, the mass slaughter of civilians as a strategy to win a war is a defining feature for modern warfare, in stark contrast with a relatively far more innocent past. Battles were most often not fought at all, and sieges often resolved without bloodshed. The farther we go back the more ritualistic warfare tends to be. In the anthropological setting warfare is much more about display and the definition of boundaries, and obviously the very concept of survival of the fittest is one that does not even come into play until the 18th and 19th centuries

kilgoar Apr 20, 2025, 3:18 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
The only problem with this “gotcha” is that most people don’t really appreciate just how recent of a phenomenon witch crazes are. It is by and large constrained to the early modern period falling between the 16th and 18th century. However, the tendency of early modern people for scapegoating and blame does not end there and we see a fair continuity into the recent era, with most mentions of cat burning happening in the 19th century. The early industrial era is where we see a heyday of pogroms against Jewish populations in Europe, and by the time we are seeing high industrialization in the 20th century the elimination of scapegoats is now carried out as a biological imperative justified by science.

The two conclusions that are inescapable is that science and rationality may have forestalled persecutions based on superstitious nonsense, but it was also easily turned into an instrument of persecution. And the second conclusion is that the recent past centuries show increasing, rather than decreasing persecutions.

kilgoar Apr 18, 2025, 2:48 PM
−5 points
−2
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
In technical parlance you’re supposed to say “contemporary,” or even “postmodern” to refer to the current era. In many important ways, modernity is passing. While your insistence that I use colloquial rather than technical terms is cute, it’s also despicably ignorant and you’re not making strong arguments against the wider view of history I’m presenting. You’re taking this a bit too personally, and I wish you would quit it with this rhetorical crap whereby you insert an overarching argument I’ve never made and knock it down with contemptible logical tricks. Read the history or don’t. Feel free to air out your ignorance in more of these facile posts of utter ignorance.
When I said that medieval Christians held a taboo against slavery and did not practice it, and explain the process by which secularization and early proto-sciences justified the creation of history’s most vicious form of slavery, medieval slavery in the Islamic world is not a counterexample in some kind of logical trap you’ve sprung. It’s a non sequitur.
While Liberal human rights tell you not to “keep serfs,” a stupid phrase meant to insist upon your false narrative of equivalence, remember that the most hard-headed Liberal of the early US, Thomas Jefferson, ensured that the institution of slavery would continue while owning slaves himself. And if you investigate his personal thoughts on the matter, he is weighing his religious misgivings against his proto-scientific reasoning, a common pattern in the slavery debate. His conclusion is that it was a regrettable economic necessity, and so Liberal values might tell you not to “keep serfs,” a painfully ignorant phrase, but like the medieval Peace and Truce of God, these are norms which can of course be broken or applied unevenly throughout the modern period.
If I were to criticize what you’re actually talking about, I think it’s nothing to do with history. Your whole thinking is suffused by mythology. Frankly, your ignorance of the topic of history is pretty typical and your supposed interest in the topic is patently fake.

kilgoar Apr 18, 2025, 1:47 AM
−1 points
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
Serfs were not property of any master and ideally had protection against displacement and violence. In practice this didn’t always play out, but neither do liberal human rights. Equivocating serfdom to the displacement of millions of Africans as property is convenient and lazy, and completely illogical. And there is no denying the modernity in the African slave trade, the massive scale, the involvement of mechanization of the cotton gin, and on and on.
Probably just about every historian you can find is going to refer to the 1500s as the early modern or late medieval period, depending on just where in Europe you are, and it’s a time when religion became remarkably more harmful than it had ever been before, along with many other changes such as a terminal disruption of the church’s centralized worldly powers and the concentration of total powers into the state. And these changes are continuous with the present.
I’m not redefining modernity in some twisted way, this is all very conventional stuff. Who cares what “most people” think, they’re fucking wrong!

kilgoar Apr 17, 2025, 11:35 PM
−3 points
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
We want to believe that as moderns we are better, more rational, so much more wise than people of the past, and it is this very conceited and highly sympathetic view of ourselves that is just so unthinkably blind. We may associate religion with the past in some vague way, an irrational set of beliefs that have been superseded by science. And perhaps that is true, but one can only look at the medieval and ancient world with a sense of their great innocence in all matters. Their values of humility, honor, faith, and so on are so different from our own imperatives of competition, survival of the fittest, and so on. There has never and hopefully will never be another era as vicious as the past five hundred years. Almost every comparison we can make is absolutely withering for the phony perspective that we are progressing into a more enlightened species. The more conventional view is that indeed humanity has become increasingly cruel, cold, and calculating even as standards of living, life expectancy, and political freedom has improved.
I can furnish you with the usual last argument in this back-and-forth. Indeed, the people of the past may have committed their own holocausts had they only invented factories and railroads, they may have bombed cities into oblivion had they only the technical knowledge to build massive fleets of thousands of bombers. Maybe ancient people would have worked harder to ship slaves across oceans and displace more peoples, if only they had better sailing ships. They simply couldn’t afford to house prisoners in massive systems before the industrial era made food incredibly cheap. But even if we accept this as true and factor religion out of this judgment, moderns are still left holding the bag. We are the ones who did these things, not them, and this constant fake history by which we make them out to be monsters is ludicrous in the extreme. It was the modern era when witch crazes began, it was the modern era when antisemitic pogroms begin, the modern era where we see the state persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition. These are all great examples of how religion can be made harmful, but they are also the leading edge of the modern world, mere hints of things to come. And let’s be clear, the Spanish Inquisition is carried out by a state that has seized the reigns of the church and is using it to their political advantage. That’s the common pattern in the early modern era, the passing of worldly church powers to nation states, it is reflecting a secularization of the powers, and their falling into the hands of the ambitious. Modern people are the ones who made religion a tool of harm, as we’ve done with literally every tool at our disposal. We are the ones to blame, I’m afraid.

kilgoar Apr 16, 2025, 3:15 PM
−3 points
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
When you say, “Christian Rome kept slaves,” that’s indeed underlining the point that the Christianization of Europe led to a long process of abolitionism taking place over hundreds of years. This trend would only reverse with the introduction of secular reasoning to dehumanize far-flung peoples of colonial territories. This slavery took a uniquely brutal form as the rationality and reason behind the dehumanization of others was, at the time, something more like expert consensus, and it would be religious concerns which, yet again, propelled abolitionism in more recent centuries. It takes quite extreme rhetorical gymnastics to force the long history of servitude into some traditional linear progress where the modern secular society is in all cases better. The fact is it was much worse.
The Islamic world did not in fact only enslave pagans. The Christian involvement in European slave trade through most of the medieval era was that of the victim and the slave, with their monastic sites perennial targets of viking raids. Because of the demographic collapse of the dark ages, Christian Europe was a backwater. Our enlightenment and industrial era histories roundly tell us that it was backwards Christianity to blame for the dark ages, but they were indeed making presumptions with logic rather than evidence. This kind of history tells us more about the historian’s society and its attitudes, while archaeological data and closer study has revealed that indeed, the people of Europe were ravaged for centuries by disease and the subsequent collapse of supply chains. The counterexample of Byzantine success shows that absolutely Christianity did not hamper the society in any meaningful way. One might say “but if they were liberal and secular they would have done better,” but that’s also like saying “if I had a machine gun I could have taken over medieval England.” True but facile. These things simply did not exist at the time.
I am not making the simple argument that religion makes for better societies, and I can see you’re totally confused here. Rather, there are many mistaken and misunderstood aspects about the time and especially the role religion played, which are covered over by this overreaction in industrial era revisionist histories, which have unfortunately become a point of faith and a conceit illustrating the superiority of the present. At no point did religion meaningfully forestall the “acceptance of evolution” nor did it similarly stop the investigations into Copernicanism. Copernicus was a canon of the church, a lifelong employee. Intellectuals such as Copernicus were nearly untouchable and had vast freedom to publish ideas of all kinds, given they do so with what we would consider an obscene degree of humility. Galileo had every right to publish anything he liked, but like Giordiano Bruno his more modern personality with reputation and glory-seeking behavior violated medieval norms of humility, leading to some degree of persecution for both of them. Certainly that offends our liberal and secular norms which celebrate individuals who do great things, but it is wildly incorrect to say that the church prevented Galileo or anybody from theorizing or studying astronomy. Indeed, the church was the motivator of most intellectual life, and it was far better to be doing astronomy for the church than astrology for power hungry nobles.
The main argument that the church stalled science is flatly absurd. One can equally say that “science forestalls science” because of its high standards for accepting novel theories. J. Harlen Bretz’s theory about the inundation of the scablands met extreme pushback from geologists because he had discovered evidence of ice dam floods. It is almost comical that the idea of a sudden massive flood was such a taboo for industrial-era scientists that they held back progress in their field out of a fear that Christians might somehow justify their great flood myth with this new evidence.

kilgoar Apr 15, 2025, 4:08 PM
−1 points
−6
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
It’s very good for this discussion that we compare modern era chattel slavery with the feudal arrangement of serfdom, and I am glad you brought this up. In the premodern Christian medieval context, slavery was all but completely forbidden, with most of slave trade in Europe taking place between the pagan fringe and the Islamic world in places like Dublin, which were set up to traffic peoples captured in these raids. This is in stark contrast to the systematic chattel slavery of colonial powers of the modern era, which purchased and utilized slaves in entrepreneurial schemes. The common controversy was between dehumanization by 18th century sciences and church insistence upon the humanity of other races. However, by the time of the 18th century the church had long deprecated its worldly functions and was often little more than a shattered and subservient arm of various nation states. Serfdom explicitly forbid the displacement of peoples, and while it certainly was a form of servitude it was not one that broke families or had a motivation in profits. It was closer to a protection racket than to ownership.
What hospitality really meant in practice is hard to reconstruct from texts, but perhaps the greatest exemplar of virtue in the medieval era is Saint Francis of Assisi. His innovation was an order which accepted the most extreme poverty in order to be closer to the glory of God. Your fearful phrase, “overwhelmed by beggars,” is a modern perspective, as being beggars indeed provided the Franciscans with a spotless reputation. Indeed, when Byzantium faced an overwhelming influx of poorly-prepared crusaders out of the West, the failure of their hospitality formed much of the enmity which would later lead to their becoming a target for invasion. There is no rule which says a value must be practical or fair, and indeed this virtue of hospitality did occasionally set off international conflict.
As for this “You have to include X and Y” type rhetoric, no, I don’t have to do what you say. Don’t be rude. I am trying to contrast Christendom, medieval arrangements and society, to The West and the development of increasingly secular nation states in the modern era. I will talk about Islam now because that is a striking example of how the sudden appearance of a religion with extreme emphasis on textual rather than oral tradition quickly generates a class of literate experts and clerics. Indeed, new textual traditions rapidly propelled natural philosophy and societal organization forward by advancing literacy. If religion really did cause “dark ages” as the industrial-era mythology suggests, one would expect the Islamic world to have plunged into idiocy rather than making so many advancements. If Christianity indeed held back science, then why was the church the primary organization dedicating resources to intellectual life throughout the middle ages?
The big fallacy is that the church could have held back science at a time when it didn’t even exist yet. At the time of Galileo, there was no “scientific method” and no literature rationalizing why or how such a non-existing concept might be useful. We don’t see the concept of a “scientific method” until the industrial era! How can the church hold back something which doesn’t yet exist? And then, when science does actually exist, this is an era in which the church has not had worldly power for centuries. They are long gone as an intellectual force! There is some dumb kind of knock-on effect where some religious people now feel the need to deny and hold back science, and it is fair to say that religious people in the industrial era have the desire to hold back science. But they simply don’t have the power anymore, they are no longer the center of learning.
It’s certainly true that we are more sophisticated than more religious societies of the past, however, the cause and effect relationship you are implying is utterly conventional. The only problem is that upon nearly every consideration of the actual history, it is utterly wrong.

kilgoar Apr 14, 2025, 11:12 PM
6 points
2
in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Playing in the Creek
Unfortunately Golumbia passed away recently and is sorely missed. He explicitly states in the story that a game “without play” was not intended as a “sick burn” of any kind, and that he himself enjoyed these games. As a sometimes Minecraft player, I can for sure see there are indeed many elements of work within the game, as well as some necessity to create order and preserve oneself by securing shelter and resources. The joke “the children yearn for the mines” is a direct reference to this same observation, and Golumbia’s paper only shows this dynamic might be a good question to be concerned about. I don’t quite see where you are going with this claim that his conclusions are outdated, other than making a side point about changes in game genre conventions over the past decade.
“Play” and “not play” are far from value judgments, but rather fairly intense loaded terms that came out of the application of Husserlian logic to fields like Anthropology, History, Linguistics, and so on in a movement called Structuralism:
If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinity of a field cannot be
covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is,
language and a finite language—excludes totalization. This field is in fact that of freeplay, that is
to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field permits these
infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an
inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something
missing from it: a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions.
(Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play)
So to take it back to the video game example, Minecraft is missing a strongly defined narrative where a JRPG has, to a much greater extent, a central narrative that binds the player into a story where there are few choices and a lot of work-like “grinding.”
The temptation and danger of AI is its conceptualization as the center of a narrowing marketing gimmick of hucksters.

kilgoar Apr 14, 2025, 7:20 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
I’m glad you understand. More properly, it is an argument for the Formalist philosophy of mathematics. The implications in terms of one’s personal religious choices are going to vary, of course, but Fideism is not a full equivalent to Agnosticism. Agnosticism says that we cannot have knowledge while Fideism says that knowledge is still possible through faith.

kilgoar Apr 14, 2025, 6:54 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
Medieval logicians, theologians really, typically had a very strong Platonic principle whereby they could often prove the existence of God and derive His properties through reason alone. It was quite complex and tedious, and Occam’s razor left us with Fideism, the idea that any gap between reason and reality is in the final analysis filled only by faith. Overly complex self-justifying and self-reassuring linkages that attempt to schematize the relation between map and territory are practically useless and yet take up much of the intellectual life. History has been pretty harsh to Duns Scotus: the dunce, whose logic is considered by later secular sources to be utterly asinine and ridiculously wasteful. But, he was indeed a major influence for Occam.

In Occam’s words, “The ways of God are not open to reason, for God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation within it apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover.”
Platonic thought wants us to be seeing shadows of reality, as in the cave allegory, and to use our power of deduction and reason to identify the essence of what it is, exactly, casting the shadows. Occam’s great breakthrough is in recognizing that using reason in this way relies on the presumption that God reasons in the same way we do, and that such a presumption introduces rather than reduces logical complications. This does not shut down the project of reason in the least, and it is far more like refactoring bullshit out of code.

kilgoar Apr 14, 2025, 3:04 PM
−4 points
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
We can happily and easily disprove the idea that Judeo-Christian cosmology “damages society” by comparing the modern secular society developing after 1500AD with that of the Christian society before it.
Poverty was a virtue, and neglecting the needs of others was sinful. The ancient unspoken law of hospitality remained, and turning away a beggar or a traveler who arrived at your door was an extreme taboo that has only very recently flipped. In the modern world, accepting an impoverished stranger into your house is widely considered a dangerous or harmful behavior. This attitude that poverty makes people evil stands in stark contrast with ancient superstitions that taught us Gods often take humble forms and seek hospitality to test our virtue. A failure of this test is most spectacular in the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Warfare in medieval Europe and the ancient world did not very often target civilian populations as a strategy for conquest, as is the norm in modern warfare. Examples of the razing of cities and the mass killing of civilians in the premodern world are always framed as regrettable examples of cruelty or excess. In modern wars, the elimination of both internal civilian populations and those of an enemy have been repeatedly carried out as a systematic war strategy with a significant portion of resources dedicated and indeed sacrificed to that end.