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JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics

@psychopopular.com

78 followers 190 following 120 posts

"The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true." – Hannah Arendt https://blog.psychopopular.com/

blog.psychopopular.com

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JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · Jun 3

I guess I'll pin an introduction.

Hi I'm JellyJar. Maybe you've read my (quite bad and facetious) Umineko review or my (much better) retrospective analysis of Kinoko Nasu.

I mostly blog stuff over on blog.psychopopular.com

The Orient Express

I am Walter Benjamin's greatest soldier

blog.psychopopular.com

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JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 5d

What they don't tell you is that even if you write 50 words in 20 different documents, that's still writing 1000 words per day. Just a little life hack in never releasing anything.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 8d

I really wasn't lying. Sorry but I will continue having nothing interesting to say for awhile. I am reading and rereading a bunch of very dense books and it will be years before I can promise any results from this time wasted.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · Sep 8

Unfortunately for anyone who enjoys anything I write or do, I just bought a bunch of books on Ancient Greek and Medieval economic theory. The value theory arc may be just around the corner.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 9d

The point isn't just whether you're pro- or anti-AI. It is to think what you are doing. To respond to the evolving reality of experience by thinking over your basic criteria and taking them seriously.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 9d

Insomuch as the possibility of AI makes you aware of the feeling that humans are in a different ethical category to machines, you should take that seriously and examine its underlying assumptions. People are letting themselves accept the feeling while operating under contrary assumptions.

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JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 9d

If you took the argument seriously, there's a series of syllogisms here that would push you into being anti-abortion in a number of situations. That's another situation where people often hold opinions that are at odds with their stated standards.

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JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 9d

The fact that the common arguments against computerised sentience are incoherent shouldn't lead reflexively to giving computers rights. It should also lead to some scepticism of sentience as a metric of moral worth.

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JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 9d

Correct as far as it goes—deserves a passing mark. But people need be more critical of the mechanical naturalism and utilitarianism that is so often taken as the default ethical framework, beyond just pointing out the hypocrisy of anti-AI arguments. Even if that hypocrisy is apparent.

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JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 14d

Such inconsistencies are a recipe for a failure to predict or understand the future. I worry that this is exactly what many anti-AI folks are doing when they claim to be materialists and then operate with a model of consciousness that treats consciousness as spiritual.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 14d

It's important to maintain a strict line between these categorical and non-categorical denials of AI. If your underlying ontology only supports non-categorical denials of AI while you separately make predictions based on categorical denials, you're tangling yourself up in contradictory assumptions.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 14d

The problem is that even that metaphor doesn't make the difference categorical. Animals can fly with the lift generated through flapping. Naturally, humans lack the anatomy for this. But this means that the analogy only highlights the nonexistence and impracticality of AI, not its impossibility.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 15d

Maybe I need to drop the other things I am doing and write something about transhumanism

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 15d

This is a frustratingly Heideggerian conclusion of course, and therefore one that I am loath to accept. But it is the only one that survives scrutiny.

*By "computers," I obviously mean the hypothetical future of "AI" far beyond stupid LLM hype, not anything currently existing.

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JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 15d

It's a very lonely place being "anti-AI" but also reminded endlessly that "anti-AI" people are often metaphysically incoherent and dependent upon magical/spiritual thinking.

The only categorical gap between people and computers* that holds up for me is humanity's embodied being-there in the world.

Croissanthology is in SF and has a tagname now @croissanthology.com · 15d

I continue to have the oddest interactions with people whom I suspect *literally do not believe in the existence of atoms*.

They might nominally claim they believe in atoms, but nothing in their belief network includes any kind of atom-modelling or grappling with the consequences here.

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JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

I deal with the history and underlying methodology of The Phenomenology of Terrorism in some detail here, so check that out if you want:

drive.google.com/file/d/1oubO...

Terrorism and Phenomenology - Jared Jellson.pdf

drive.google.com

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

But I think people are free to disagree with this conclusion and relitigate where the USSR "went bad" without disregarding the whole argument.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

Perhaps most controversially, Kasai also identifies "terror" in the sense of totalitarianism and the party state—fascism and Leninism—as adventurist terrorism in this nihilistic mode as well. For Kasai, a coup d'état by a party is not revolution—and totalitarianism follows non-revolution logically.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

It is important to understand lone wolf assassination and the like, as with the Kirk situation, as a kind of nihilistic outgrowth of a political terrain that is devoid of revolution. It does not build towards the political space where revolution in the anti-nihilistic, non-ideal sense happens.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

Therefore, the very structure of the small cell, partisan group, or lone wolf as a political unit is conducive to terrorism. You interpellate yourself as a utopian agent who is at odds with the world, and destroying the given world is a necessary reconciliation for the stability of your identity.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

Violence against the world is a logical outlet for this predicament. Using Arendtian language: where mere thought is worldless, violence against nature—the given—is world-building. Once one is alienated from mass politics, violence has a certain ontological appeal in bending politics by force.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

The agent of political action (what Marxists might call the subject of history) becomes the one who holds the idea of revolution, not political citizens in general. Therefore, the problem becomes how to reconcile your own worldlessness and rootlessness in a world devoid of revolutionary possibility.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

In contrast to revolution in a political context that aspires to the freedom of the people to shape history, revolution as a mere idea takes the form of world alienation. Trusting in a desire for change that is in tension with your feelings towards existing political possibilities drives nihilism.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

But what about lone wolf terrorism and adventurism?

Kasai argues that consciousness of and attention towards (partially what Husserl means by intentionality) the desire to change the political community (the desire for revolution) can metastasise revolution as a phenomenal idea.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

I'll try explaining Kiyoshi Kasai's "Phenomenology of Terrorism" in "basic" terms and link it to Charlie Kirk:

There is of course a sense of revolution that means a historical phenomenon. It is the sudden and explosive action of a mass of people based on the particular circumstances of the moment.

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JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 26d

When people were reaching for stuff like Bioshock to talk about the medium as art, part of what they meant is the kinds of stories that ought to be told through games. Even if you like it, I don't think Subahibi could ever stand out in this regard when it does next to nothing with its gameplay.

JellyJar | Mystery novels / Weeb stuff / Politics @psychopopular.com · 27d

The next volume is 750 tanko pages long and it is the Heidegger book. To say I'm scared of it would be an understatement. It's going to be awesome in the classical sense of awe.