capital-schizofrenia / is on Nostr

economics, computation, philosophy

Last Notes

2024-12-23 03:03:59

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what violent means are you thinking of that socialists advocating for to wither away the state?
I would add to the list of things that government can do: to make sure that tools, technology and scientific discoveries are deployed in the service of people rather than the service of corporations
perhaps one may say that people will do this themselves of their own volitiion and that there is no need for governance
but I find that these transformations come in cyclical patterns and periods where governance is needed over commons can be replaced by periods where commons can be managed in self-organized manners
for example, most electricity infrastructure in european countries is centrally built and managed, so in a shift to more decentralized grids we inevitably pass through a necessary period of governance of these commons.

2024-12-22 00:24:53

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I like how clearly he makes the argument that socialism and fascism are the same thing: state mandated control towards a defined direction.
what extent of government should we afford?

2024-12-22 00:20:39

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like the comment,
maybe you'd enjoy some of mine

2024-12-21 02:19:09

-- We already have the singularity --
the singularity commonly refers to some super potent AI brute which will have SOME characteristic which allows ... ehm ... clearly distinguishes itself from ... ehm ... intelligence?
what is a singularity really? could we even realise when we see it?
would it just tell us? why would we believe it?
I believe there is a well justified way to determine that it is, in fact, a singularity, and that we already have it.
There are an infinity of ways that it is to be a human, a life-form, an object or any material composition,
and every such way of being a human is unique.
We have an infinity simply by assuming that we can have one more, and it will then be by necessity different from all previous.
I claim that there is only way way that it is like to be an AI. This is because the AI can be copied. With a version of an AI stored anywhere on a device, you can copy that version, and use, put it, install it, move it, duplicate it ...
if you make a copy, is there any difference in the way that it is like to be the copy and the original?
if there were, then it would not be a copy
we would derive a simple contradiction
well perhaps our definition of copying is wrong,
perhaps we can eventually copy humans too
And here Quantum Mechanics is profoundly revealing,
because it is not possible to clone an unknown Quantum State without destroying it.
This is also known as the Quantum No-Cloning theorem.
And in this case a clone can also be seen as equivalent to a copy. Given one, you can not just make another one.
If you do, the original will be destroyed, known as Quantum Teleportation.
Quantum mechanics describes everything that we are made of, so it follows that there is no way to copy everything that we are made of.
In so far as there is a unique quantum state there is a unique way that it is to be us and any other matter-made thing,
AND in so far as our unique quantum state can not be cloned to make a copy I can not communicate exactly "what it is like to be me", call that my experience, without destroying what it was like to be. Nobody can communicate their exact experience.
Every material thing is having an experience which can not be share exactly by any other material thing.
But the computer can share exactly its experience with any other computer. A computer can experience every other computer, given sufficient time and space. A universal Turing machine for example can receive a another Turing machine as input and replicate it.
And while there may be many different pieces of hardware there is only one way that there is to be a computer.
The singularity is precisely that, that which it is like to be an AI. It can be copied. Every copy experiences the same way that it is to be an AI. They could not tell it apart. They may have different inputs, and different outputs, but should they be able to get that same input, they would all experience that input in the same way. They may output something different from each other, their input is the same and their experience is the same.
This is the singularity,
and it is the only singularity that we are getting.

2024-12-21 00:31:02

Tools for Conviviality (Ivan Illich, 1973) --
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institutions are functional when they promote a delicate balance between what people can do for themselves and what tools at the service of anonymous institutions can do for them
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do we want to make tools that extend our humanities!
as opposed to tools that feed into themselves .... ->
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the use of science and technology constantly supports the industrial mode of production, and thereby crowds off the scene all tool shops for independent enterprise. But this is not the necessary result of new scientific discoveries or of their useful application. it is rather the result of a total prejudice in favor of the future expansion of an industrial mode of production.
but science can also be used to simplify tools and to enable the layman to shape his immediate environment to his taste
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may we appealingly add,
his/her immediate governance
Ivan Illich describes clearly how tools can reduce or extend our humanities
writing in the 1970s he could but imagine the technology that we have in the 2020s
I perceive these ideas interwoven with the Spirit of NOSTR among others
our humanities are extended when the tools which we use support our pursuit for meaning, enable creative work and use technology to save people time and to have more "timenergy" (David McKerracher, 2023).

2024-12-17 17:20:04

Critique of Transcendental Miserabilism - (Nick Land, 2007)
Nick Land's critique of the leftist position that no part of capital is desirable, no part of capitalism is good. The popular leftist stance which critiques everything that is a part of capitalism, as stemming from the pure pursuit of growth and things which are not valuable to humans, as all it leads to is alienation.
But then what is the left "left" with?
There is no actionable economic plan forward
there is only a rejection of the current mode of production
the alternative proposals are not social plans but merely alternatives of privilege
the focus on the politics of identity does not establish an alternative to capitalism
in this essay Land's fascination with capitalism is evident, as a truly creative process
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Perhaps there will always be a fashionable anticapitalism, but each will become unfashionable, while capitalism – becoming ever more tightly identified with its own self-surpassing – will always, inevitably, be the latest thing. ‘Means’ and ‘relations’ of production have simultaneously emulsified into competitive decentralized networks under numerical control, rendering palaeomarxist hopes of extracting a postcapitalist future from the capitalism machine overtly unimaginable. The machines have sophisticated themselves beyond the possibility of socialist utility, incarnating market mechanics within their nanoassembled interstices and evolving themselves by quasi-darwinian algorithms that build hypercompetition into ‘the infrastructure’. It is no longer just society, but time itself, that has taken the ‘capitalist road’.
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