Mark Recommends Things (#4)

Tears in Rain; Dueling Singularities

I’m changing the title and format of my “Recommends” series. It’s not my fault. There are just too many Substack peeps out there, writing too much sensational shit. What a bunch of jerks!

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Before I get started, here’s a long overdue apology.

When I first encountered this author, it was neither on my stack nor on her own. I was in the middle of an investigation at the time, keeping an eye on a certain suspicious blog. My stakeout was prompted by the following bon mot, delivered to me on a friend’s comments’ thread like a flaming bag of dookie on a doorstep.

When I saw this lovely author’s name appear in the comments of that (since deactivated) publication, conversing with its supposed “owner”, I became immediately suspicious of her as well. And when that same name appeared shortly thereafter on one of my own articles, I handled the situation very poorly.

As you might imagine, I was in quite the surly mood at the time. But that’s no excuse for boorish behavior, for which I apologize to her unreservedly. I also owe her a debt of thanks, because the experience has helped me better develop my investigative ethics and techniques going forward.

With that out of the way, I’d like to introduce you to Sharine Borslien, poetess:

"Raining On My Pillow"

While the work is not technically a poem, I find Sharine’s writing has much the same effect on me as that artistic form. There's a richness to prose like this, equal parts painterly and frank. It has the effect of transporting me through space and time, igniting all the meta-senses of my imagination in ways that even the best theater and cinema fall well short of.

An excerpt:

In the dark of night — as if in some kind of film noire — loud thunder crashed and lightning flashed, as if the sky itself had finally cracked open. The sound of the rain hitting my tiny roof was unbelievably loud, like death metal drumming. I was wide awake from my sickened stuporous slumber, wondering if my little house would slip off its foundation and go floating down to the Mighty Pacific Ocean.

Eventually (was it an hour or much longer? I don’t recall), the deafening noise subsided and “normal” El Niño rain continued. I heard a strange, surreal sound in the living room, like soft mallets hitting tiny timpani. I carefully moved Jazz off the bed and slowly emerged from my delicate “don’t move the water pan” cocoon. I shuffled into the next room and saw the visual horror begetting that bizarre tone:

It was the oddly melodic, metallic yet deeply wooden sound of raindrops falling onto the strings of my only guitar as it rested in its stand.

That's a feast of language, in my humble opinion. Of course Sharine defeated El Nino; what chance would Nature's hobgoblins have against language like this? By its climax, I had the feeling of being there, on that night, in that room, shivering in the dark, feeling the warmth of Jazz, hearing the plaintive cries of her mortally wounded guitar. I swear that I could smell that savage rain.

Sharine’s song at the end acts as a pitch perfect coda to her harrowing tale. Haunting, tragic, but sung with such sweetness and light that I couldn't help but smile. Like a Murder Ballad without all that pesky murder (which strikes me as the best kind, these days).

Show her some love, if you get the chance.

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For quite some time now, Harrison Koehli has been doing indispensable writing on the subject of evil. Last week, his investigations led him (and, by extension, me) to the work of Christopher Michael Langan, and a compelling notion which seemed oxymoronic at first: what if there is more than one Singularity, and what we are seeing now is the acceleration of opposing teleologies? What if these telic forces are dualistic as a consequence of human agency, and thus are sorting us all into two ultimate — and perhaps, in some ways “fated” — binary camps: that of the Human and that of the Machine?

Big Tech Totalitarianism and the "Poneric Telon"

This theory is of much interest to me, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who’s been reading my “Devil Incarnate” series. And I’m far from the only one who seems to have taken notice:

Two Possible Futures for Humanity

Harrison helpfully starts things off with a crash course in Langan’s CTMU (Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe).

Telic recursion is also the source of novelty—new possibilities that are formed out of telesis as a result of this dynamic, recursive process. Telors are the actual agents that interact creatively with telesis—things like cells and humans. Telons are the telic potentials that are produced in this process, and which attract telors into new configurations. As Langan describes it, there is a “relievable stress” generated between the existing states of telors, and the syntax or rules governing their transition to new states. This is because telors have some degree of free will. They self-configure, and thus there will always be some degree of mismatch between the global telons and the telons resulting from the telors’ own independent telic recursion. This “stress” is relieved through the further generation of new telons.

(…)

In more technical language, the body self-selects states for itself (body temperature, biochemical balances, balance, pain avoidance, etc.) using a parameter that prioritizes life. This is what ultimate reality (God, the global telor) does, constantly adjusting the balance between global telons—the overall directionality and purpose of the cosmos—and individual telons—the self-chosen directions and purposes of individual telors. Langan calls the universal selection parameter “generalized utility”—that which is maximized during telic recursion.

Because generalized utility requires no novel claims or special pleading, the phenomena of telic recursion appears identifiable and reproducible at every level of scale. This is important, since poor scalability is a boogeyman hiding in the bushes of every precious theory.

But there’s trouble in paradise, and at this stage in the game practically anyone with eyes could see it. Sight alone isn’t sufficient, however; we need useful and mutually comprehensible language to describe the key components, which both Koehli and Langan supply here:

(Koehli) Our current paths are converging; they are heading in a particular direction. As I described in my Desmet piece, this particular direction is shaped by many people all thinking the same way. This “way” can be described as materialistic, technocratic, atheistic, and scientistic, to pick just a handful. The limits inherent in these ways of thinking naturally result in limited choices of actions. And humanity’s resulting actions will produce certain results. There is a syntax governing all this. As Langan points out, it appears to be heading for a very specific result.

(Langan) The related forms of dualism thus far discussed — Cartesian dualism, naturalism, NOMA [the “non-overlapping magisteria” of science and religion], and so on — are opposed to the human need for a coherent spiritual identity. This implies a bifurcation or divergence, a human evolutionary choice between two possible adaptations or destinies respectively corresponding to the anthropic and technological aspects of an impending “singular” transformation. Each possible destiny corresponds to the dominance of one aspect over the other, and may be associated with its own conventional type of singularity.

As I see it, the situation as described by Langan, and as further probed and interpreted by Koehli, has many merits. By approaching the rampant rise of global evil from a teleological perspective, the human need for spirituality and religion is organically emergent, without tripping through the usual minefields of systems-specificity. All religions eventually become one religion, all faiths one faith, all gods one God. This merging occurs not by any specific planning or design, but via the gradual agreement of agents as to which camp they belong in, and the snowballing of all incentives, priorities, efficiencies and actions in the direction of said camp. Team Human and Team Machine aren’t just moving away from each other, we are doing so with ever greater speed/force, and with ever more costs associated with breaking the other way.

Langan, Koelhi, Malone and little ol’ me are clearly drawn towards Team Human. Meahwhile, the opposing direction — that of the Machine — has become well trod metaphysical terrain, even in the mostly unsuspecting superculture being driven towards it. There are undoubtedly men and women reading these words who will maintain that the Machine Singularity is the only course, because the world of the deterministic, mechanistic and materialistic is the only one that is actually real. To these people, spirituality, divinity and humanity’s unique role in the cosmos are mere products of delusion; born of some mental faculty that was perhaps at one time evolutionarily useful, but has since proven obsolete.

It’s perhaps instructive that we can see and describe their telos so clearly, while they remain fully blind to our own. The Machine’s singularity inevitably curves toward blindness of both the inward and eternal varieties, to the disconnect of humans from reality, the disfigurement the body, the deconstruction of agency, the fragmentation of being into a scrap heap of disparate parts. In short, that path leads to death, in its coldest, most brutal and irretrievably final form. That so many have been lead to believe otherwise might be a signal that other kinds of telors exist, via non-human agents that are difficult to observe and describe.

But that’s just me, editorializing.

No matter what you might believe with regards to that thorny subject, be sure to give Harrison a read and “Political Ponerology” a follow. Investigating the Enemy’s means, motives and methods is critical to success for Team Humanity. And for my money, he’s one of the top gumshoes working the case today.

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P.S. If you found any of this valuable (and can spare any change), consider dropping a tip in the cup for ya boy. Suggested donation is $1 USD. I’ll try to figure out something I can give you back. Thanks in advance.