This was posted on catholic easter sunday on the ssc subreddit. It's a posted-on-April 1st-for-plausible-deniability siskind post from back in 2018, where he outlines a kind of argument about how an all-powerfull entity that's God in all but name (and obviously emanated from a culture discovering AGI) is actually "logically necessary".
He calls the whole thing "The Hour I First Believed". I think it's notable for being a bit of a treasure trove of rationalist weird accepted truths, such as:
- All copies of a consciousness share a self, because consciousness is like an equation, or something:
But if consciousness is a mathematical object, it might be that two copies of the same consciousness are impossible. If you create a second copy, you just have the consciousness having the same single stream of conscious experience on two different physical substrates.
Which is both the original transhumanist cope to enable so-called consciousness upload so it's not just copying a simulacrum of your personality to a computer while you continue to rot away, and also what makes the basilisk torturing you possible.
- And it's corollary, Simulation Capture:
This means that an AI can actually “capture” you, piece by piece, into its simulation. First your consciousness is just in the real world. Then your consciousness is distributed across one real-world copy and a million simulated copies. Then the AI makes the simulated copies slightly different, and 99.9999% of you is in the simulation.
which is a kind of nuts I hadn't happened upon before.
There's also a bunch of rationalist decision theory stuff which I think make obvious how they were concocted to serve this type of narrative in the first place, instead for being broadly useful, Yud posing as a decision theory trailblazer notwithstanding.
I continue to be endlessly fascinated by Anathem, by virtue of enjoying it as a kid for the wacky speculative metaphysics, enjoying it as an adult for the case study it presents in how Neal Stephenson can get you nodding along to a set of faux-lectures strung together by road tripping until he gets you to an obviously false conclusion, and now the fact that The Wick is apparently what rationalists actually believe in, just substituting simulations and reality-hacking for quantum woo and nukes? The ~~Incanter~~ Basilisk can entrap your consciousness by manipulating which ~~timelines your brain is quantum-entangled with~~ coexisting copies of your psyche exist in the multimetaverse and selecting among them to ~~give you quantum immortality~~ 51% attack you into the Matrix, I guess.
Been a long time since I read Anathem, and I'm kinda surprised Stephenson hasn't been outed as an out-and-out Nazi. I mean it's good if he's not, just that he seems the type.
Although I found the terrorist character in REAMDE weirdly well written.
@gerikson I hung out with Neal a few times and he struck me as the kind of twisty-minded guy who's unlikely to fall for the simplistic nostrums that typify authoritarian thinkers. Conservative (with some libertarian in his background, I suspect) but not hammer-make-square-peg-fit-in-round-hole stupid. (Disclaimer: I last saw him about a decade ago.)