Disassembled with a laser and forced to play Light Cycles forever...

Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future has an excellent post on the potential benefits of universal mind uploading. Now, I don't mean to piss on anyone's parade here. I'm looking forward to being an upload as much as anyone. But I find myself a little put off by the 'gee whiz' tone of this article, as I am by a lot of a certain strain of Transhumanist though that tends to stress potential over consequences. Being the companion of a lovely and intelligent technophobe, as I am, provides a unique perspective on the hidden flaws in technotopian ideas; and part of the reason I embrace transhumanism as I do is that I see it as the best way of exposing and potentially preventing the dangers of accelerating technological development. If, as Anissimov suggests, working upload tech is available as soon as 2050, these are issues that we need to start thinking about how to address right away; and I think it's imperative that these critiques come from within the transhumanist movement itself, rather from a paranoid bioluddite or mainstream-corpocratic perspective, in hopes that they be taken seriously within the movement and remain as free as possible from authoritarian and anti-enhacement baggage. So all I'm doing here is trying to provoke some debate; because for every advantage Anissimov points out to near-universal uploading, I can more or less immediately think of at least two corresponding potential drawbacks:

1) Massive economic growth. By allowing human minds to run on substrates that can be accelerated by the addition of computing power [...] economic growth [...]will accelerate greatly.

Quite possibly. So let's think about how to avoid:

1a) Massive growth of inequality: Under our present capitalist-corpocratic economic system, this intensive growth in wealth will become increasingly concentrated in the hands of accelerated hyper-intelligent uploads, who would likely be composed primarily of the present wealthy, privileged elite of society. Their capability to influence the economic and political system to their own benefit would increase in proportion. The 'unloaded' - those who are too poor to afford uploading, or who just don't care to discard their meatbodies and become sentient computer programs - would form a vast impoverished underclass, valued only as menial labourers if at all. A second strata of 'cheap' uploads might be able to access the neolife only by accepting crippling conditions imposed by truly 'totalitarian' elites jealous of their newfound place at the lofty pinnacle of society. We must find a way to ensure that the uploaded economy becomes a new source of empowerment and affluence, rather than an entrenchment of privilege and oppression.

1b)Economic abandonment: With little incentive to do anything which benefits the slow and stupid masses of the unloaded, besides providing for their most basic needs or convincing them to join the neolife, the grand explosion of economic productivity occurs almost entirely in virtual space. Perhaps the demesne of the unloaded becomes a massive and permanent welfare state, or a neo-primitive economy where the meatlings are simply left to fend for themselves; or maybe they are rounded up and forced into the neolife to end their irrational drain on the limited resources of the physical universe? We must find a way to ensure that the unloaded can still participate as valued consumers and entrepeneurs in the uploaded economy.

2) Intelligence enhancement [...] By observing information flows in uploaded human brains, many of the details of human cognition would be elucidated. Running standard compression algorithms over such minds might make them more efficient than blind natural selection could manage, and this extra space could be used to introduce new information-processing modules with additional features. Collectively, these new modules could give rise to qualitatively better intelligence.

I would love a piece of this. Here's what concerns me:

2a) Mind slavery: Deliberately reducing, crippling, or engineering uploaded intelligence in order to create a 'productive class' of willing servants. And you know damned well that people will think of a way to do this, and if they think of it they'll try it too. It might be imposed by brute-force programming, or as a condition of 'cheap' uploading by those who can't afford the artificially inflated price imposed on it by godlike plutocrats. And if one has unlimited right to alter one's own spinoffs, one need not even do something so petty as to force or scam flesh-and-bloods into servitude; you could create an overwhelming army of mind slaves with a thought. We must ensure that mind slavery is unthinkable, with no safe havens whatsoever for the perpetrators.

2b) Intellectual stratification: If the ability to enhance intelligence comes at an economic cost, it will be unequally distributed, with the best enhancements going to those with the greatest wealth, thus becoming yet another tool for the entrenchment of privilege. The economic castes maintained in present society through crude methods like authoritarian force, capital accumulation, and systemic denial of opportunity could become literally encoded into the very minds of the human species. Even if all uploads can access the highest possible level of intellectual enhancement freely and easily, what of the poor unloaded, forced to compete with beings that can think rings around them? The best scenario I can think of is that a diminishing population of increasingly demoralized biological humans would somehow find a way to live out their days in dignity. We must ensure that everyone receives the full benefits that intelligence enhancement can bring, and that even the unloaded share in those benefits to the greatest possible degree.

3) Greater subjective well-being [...] With uploading, we will be able to see exactly which neural features (”happiness centers”) correspond to high happiness set points and which don’t, by combining prior knowledge with direct experimentation and investigation. This will make it possible for people to reprogram their own brains to raise their happiness set points in a way that biotechnological intervention might find difficult or dangerous.

I would jump at the chance to escape the depressive tendencies that have handicapped me for all of my life. Still, I worry about these possibilities:

3a) Persona engineering: Laying bare the innermost secrets of cognition and modeling them in easily manipulable software form has nearly infinite potential for abuse. This reinforces the potential for mind slavery, as many of these problems reinforce each other, but has broader applications. The creation of living weapons of targeted rage, of solipsists stuck in permanent dreams, the deliberate induction of all manner of psychoses and mood disorders, are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to destructive persona engineering. Even well-meaning changes (such as removing the capacity for boredom) could have very uncomfortable if not outright destructive repercussions. We must create a framework in which to judge persona engineering as potentially ethical or unethical, and prevent or punish malicious acts of mind abuse.

3b) The perfect drug: Given the capability, some uploaded citizens will deliberately abuse the capabilities of persona engineering in ways that are harmful to themselves and others in pursuit of subjectively pleasurable, exciting, or novel experiences. They will retreat into solipsistic fantasy or damage themselves potentially beyond repair. The end-state of such a descent into self-abuse is the mind reduced to nothing but a subjective-pleasure maximizer. I advocate cognitive liberty and the right of anyone to do as much damage to their own mind as they see fit, but at the same time it's important to recognize that this is a potential problem (if for no other reason than the amount of computing power an exploding population of self-addicts could clog up). We must find effective non-coercive ways of discouraging and rehabilitating those who choose to abuse persona engineering to detrimental effect.

4) Complete environmental recovery [...] By spending most of our time as programs running on a worldwide network, we will consume far less space and use less energy and natural resources than we would in a conventional human body [...] By transitioning from a proteinaceous to a digital substrate, we’ll do more for our environment than anyamount of conservation ever could.

I'll certainly buy this as a possibility, and would be happy to see it happen; but given the way humanity has traditionally interacted with the rest of the ecosystem (including the ancient hunter-gatherers, who among other things burned forests to flush out game and drove entire herds of prey off cliffs) I find the following scenarios somewhat more plausible:

4a) Resource rush: No longer dependant on the biosphere for survival, but hungry for continual expansion of computing power for their increasingly sophisticated software and proliferating progeny, the wealthy and powerful uploaded society proceeds to loot the natural world for every resource it has left. Whatever forces in the uploaded community fight in favour of maintaining the biosphere as a sort of ancestral terrarium cannot stand in the face of such intensely accelerated demand. The needs of the unloaded population, of course, count for practically nothing; they end up exterminated as a barrier to resource appropriation or simply extincted by the demolition of their habitat. Once this planet's resources are exhausted, neolife colonies branch out to find new worlds to exploit. The end result: a universe tiled in computronium. Protecting the health of the biosphere and its unloaded inhabitants needs to be a fundamental value of uploaded society if we don't want to see it disappear.

4b) Ecological abandonment: Even assuming that essential values and lack of immediate demand for resource appropriation can combine to restrain the uploads from wrecking the biosphere, they might still not be moved to positive action against the effects of the industrial age. Taking a laissez-faire attitude toward the biosphere and the unloaded population which depends on and exploits it, they could just allow natural evolution to take its course and force generations of our descendants to live with the consequences of our short-sighted mistakes, or even stand idly by as the unloaded continue to pollute and factory-farm themselves into extinction. The biosphere will more than likely survive such neglect, but will emerge radically transformed from the natural world that we know. If the uploaded truly value the natural world which birthed them and the biologically based humanoids who would still depend on it for survival, they would need to use their enhanced intellects to find a way to negate the damage we have caused to it and restore it to a pristine state.

5) Escape from direct governance by the laws of physics [...] In a virtual environment, the programmer is the complete master of everything he or she has editing rights to [...] Any civilization that develops uploading would surely have the technology to develop virtual environments of great detail and flexibility, right up to the very boundaries of the possible.

This is one of the most immediately seductive potential benefits of uploading, as well as one of the most viscerally terrifying and fraught with pitfalls:

5a) Reality glitches, crashes, and bugs: If the history of computing has taught us one thing, it is that no software product is ever released perfectly free of unwanted 'features'. The number of problems that could be caused by buggy neolife software is practically limitless, and could end up causing the uploaded endless annoyance, suffering and distress. Having to download patches for buggy code is enough of a hassle in terms of video games and operating systems, let alone for your very existence. I would not upload unless and until I had some degree of assurance that reality glitches, at the very least, could be easily corrected and that any damage to my reality or mind could and would be quickly reversed.

5b) Tortureworld: Neolife has the potential to erase every drawback and limitation of human existence while infinitely enhancing all of its pleasures and fulfillments, but just as much it has the potential to become a neverending hell where suffering is magnified to unimaginable proportions. Whether out of mere sadism, or as a means of enhanced control and domination, the uploaded are almost certain to create the conditions under which the very substrate of reality can be turned into a method of torture. We'd better put a hell of a lot more effort into preventing neo-torture than we have into eliminating the torture we've already got.

6) Closer connections with other human beings [...] By offering partial readouts of our cognitive state to others, we could engage in a deeper exchange of ideas and emotions [...] we’ll engage in much deeper forms of informational and emotional exchange that will make the talking and facial expressions of today seem downright empty and soulless.

Again, to someone who has always had difficulty in decoding and interpreting social interaction this is a seductive promise. There are just a few potential problems:

6a) Mind rape: When the mind perceptions are embodied in software instead of flesh, it will become potentially possible to subject them to much more intimate and disgusting violations than are possible to inflict on the body alone. Even trying to consider what might be worse than mind slavery and reality torture makes me sick and angry; and you know someone's going to come up with something that will be deserving of the term. We have to find out what it is, and do everything in our power to ensure that no uploaded mind is ever subjected to it.

6b) Alienation and solipsism: Given the possibility of creating perfect personal realities, even down to the inclusion of nonsentient 'zombie' companions which react with perfectly plausible subservience, the uploaded may choose to retreat into hermetically sealed bubbles of narcissistic fantasy. Even given the possibility of persona modelling and mind-to-mind communion, the temptations of persona and reality engineering and the potential dangers of allowing increased access to the inner workings of one's mind could drive wedges between the uploaded and encourage massive human alienation. And there's always the problem of relations betyween the uploaded and the unloaded, which will inevitably become more rather complicated and less intimate as the flesh-software divide widens. We will have to take positive steps to maintain and encourage human intimacy and discourage solipsistic thinking.

7) Last but not least, indefinite lifespans [...] By being a string of flickering bits distributed over a worldwide network, killing you could become extremely difficult. The data and bits of everyone would be intertwined — to kill someone, you’d either need complete editing privileges of the entire worldwide network, or the ability to blow up the planet.

Possibly so, though I hope I can be forgiven for having somewhat more faith in transhuman ingenuity to solve the problem of murdering digital entities, and point out the following possibilities:

7a) Deletion and fragmentation: The more secure the system, the more redundant the backup, the more eager some people are to prove their superiority by taking it down. Even in a cloud-computing, globally distributed, holographically stored neolife system, someone is probably going to come up with a way to eliminate every trace of a specific individual (or a particular group of entities) with enough time, intelligence, and motivation. Given such a scenario, however, the easier course might well be to create software weapons which don't try to 'kill' but merely to 'maim' beyond any hope of recovery, deleting massive pieces of personality and memory. Casual murder may well be eliminated, but I'm not convinced that assassination, terrorism, genocide, or simple malicious 'griefing' could be entirely rooted out; though we're certainly going to have to give it our best shot.

7b) The monster next door: Finally, in a neolife of inviolable immortality and worldwide connectivity, there is the problem of what to do with those who violate the prohibitions against willfully malicious acts. If killing an upload is really impossible, the death penalty is off the table. Would there be any way they could be effectively sequestered from the rest of society? Could their persona be engineered to remove the potential to harm others (and is that something that can be ethically justified)? I have no doubt whatsoever that some people, for any of a variety of reasons are going to try to enslave, cripple, torture, violate, and kill other uploads. We have to start thinking right now about how those people are going to be dealt with.

Again, the intent of this litany is not to try to discredit the value of uploading or any of the listed potential benefits, but only to open up some potential questions for debate and inspire my fellow transhumanists to think about how to address these potential problems. If relatively safe, easy, and inexpensive uploading is indeed available in less than 5 decades, I would seriously consider taking advantage of such a service; but I'd be a lot more confident if we had at least figured out some potential solutions to these problems.

Good reasons to panic

...courtesy of Bruce Sterling.

Designing the Neo-Human

Sentient Developments points to a recent study finding that while a majority of people support embryonic screening for birth defects and heritable disabilities, only about 10% support screening for 'positive' traits such as intellect or athletic ability. George Dvorsky at SentDev sees this as good news on the 'designer baby' front, pointing out that 'some demand is still demand' - 10% is actually a pretty significant minority.

Of course, calling prenatal genetic screening 'designer babies' is a bit of a stretch. It's not genetic engineering by any means; just working with what's already there to achieve the best results. In a way it's just another evolutionary innovation, much like sexual selection of desired traits. The term 'eugenics' has some nasty connotations, and so we really have no politically correct terminology to describe this practise. But we've certainly come a long way since the days of forcibly sterilizing and systematically murdering people assumed to be bad for the gene pool (notwithstanding those who consider abortion to be a form of genocide, an doubtless would see genetic screening as no different). In fact, one might consider that our society already participates in a sort of 'free market eugenics' in the form of sperm and egg banks; prospective parents can now deliberately select the seed of potential fathers or mothers they have never even met, based primarily on lists of their meritorious characteristics. Nobody in their right mind (disregarding foolish and short-sighted invocations of 'playing God' or 'every child being valuable') would deliberately inflict early death or a life of disability on a child if the technology exists to ensure that only whole and healthy children are born. My partner and I are resolved not to have children of our own seed, specifically for the reason that there's genetic baggage that just shouldn't be passed on to the next generation.

Screening for positive characteristics is a pretty small mental step; though it presents its own difficulties - such as this SentDev article warning that screening for certain 'diseases', such as Asperger's Syndrome, may actually retard the progress of human evolution; or the practice of gendercide via prenatal screening in patriarchal societies which value male children over females, or controversies over destroying a culture by curing deafness versus deliberately inflicting deafness on children, or the potential discovery of a 'gay gene' leading heteronormative parents to 'screen away the gay'. But, for all the debate and problems these issues are going to cause, they're only a drop in the bucket of the changes and challenges human enhancement will present. Genetic screening is just another step in the inevitable process of human genetic enhancement and the evolution of the neo-human.

The creation of the neo-human is not something that will suddenly happen overnight. It will proceed step by simple step, from the unprecednted current state of reproductive technology (in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, embryonic transplants, and intracytoplasmic injection are all common practices now), around such hot topics as cloning or sex selection, through widespread acceptance of prenatal screening, past genetic engineering, into fetal nano-cybernetic augmentation and from there to parts unknown. We have to face the reality that going down this road is going to create some intense problems in our society unless it's handled carefully. Human enhancement has the potential to further stratify humanity along the lines of presently existing privilege, especially if the upper castes get primary access to the products of this technology. The entrenchment of 'transhuman privilege', the reinforcement of racial and socioeconomic inequality, and the oppression, even to acts of genocide, against 'primitive' homo sapiens is a real possibility. This could take a variety of forms, including 'forcible enhancement' - violation of bodily and reproductive autonomy among those who will inevitably choose not to engage in human enhancement. Continuation of the capitalist-consumerist corpocracy will create an intrinsic economic incentive for the ownership class to require the working, administrative, and creative classes to augment themsleves (or even their children) with 'productivity enhancing' technology, regardless of their personal desires or the unwanted effects of such changes, while reserving other 'self-actualizing' technology for only the most privileged in society. We can already see this happening with the shocking revelation that top-performing corporate entrepeneurs are turning to cognitive enhancement drugs to maintain their edge; it's no big leap to conclude that this practise will move from 'bizarre and reprehensible' through 'no big deal' to 'do it if you want to keep your job'. To those who would write off non-augmented humanity, with a laissez-faire 'sink or swim' attitude, I would point out that not only is this callous and inhuman; it also reveals a deep ignorance of human nature. The creation of impoverished 'unaugmented' ghettos and an underclass of 'productivity-enhanced' wage slaves would be fertile ground for demagoguery and conspiracy theories, terrorism, civil war and violent revolution.

Closer to home, this kind of idea of future society is precisely what bio-luddites and religious fanatics thrive on. Think about the reverse position - the persecution of the openly neo-human by the herd of jealous and frightened sapiens, stirred into hate and mob mentality by the othering of authority figures as they paint a picture, however unjustified, of enhanced humans setting themselves up as tyrants and reducing 'normal' humans to the status of animals in their perverse moral order. And if gendercide makes you mad, think about the ways that human engineering technologies could really be used to oppress women. None of these are worlds I want to live in, and part of why I feel that all prenatal human enhancement and other reproductive technologies - starting with abortion and going from there - need to be freely available to all prospective parents, regardless of their economic caste, country of origin or other circ umstances of their life. Not only are those who hinder the free exercise of abortion rights and the progress of reproductive technologies like prenatal genetic screening acting in violation of the rights and freedoms of others; by hindering the access of the poor and disadvantaged to these services (whereas they can do little if anything to stop the rich and privileged from getting whatever reproductive services they want), these people are directly contributing to entrenchment of neo-humanity as a privilege, not a right. It's also just another reason to demolish the corpocracy and raise a more equitable social order in its place; to replace consumerist capitalism and racist social castes with an ecomony based on merit and cooperative organization, and to do whatever we can to ensure that the disabled (and their soon-to-be cousins the regularly abled) can be treated as valued and valuable citizens instead of a burden on their 'superiors'.

I have pledged not to have a child unless it can be a genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced neo-human. And the time will come when that's not considered outlandish or even abnormal - when it may in fact be considered cruel to 'disadvantage' a child by subjecting it to the vagaries of merely human genetics and the limitations of merely human abilities. But I refuse to bring that child into a world of prejudice and opression, where regular humans like myself are treated as second-class citizens; and as for the other possible futures, like bioluddite stagnation or corpocratic exploitation, that's something I'm willing to fight to prevent. As we design the neo-human, we must also design a society which is worthy of them.

Signals of Impending Doom: Climate Change is Irreversible

We might as well just keep dumping CO2 into the air as fast as we can burn it; it won't make a lick of difference to our quality of life here and now. Dr. Susan Solomon, a respected climatologist working with the NOAA, has just published a research paper claimingh that global warming may not exactly be ameniable to austerity measures like the Kyoto protocol:

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we're showing here is that's not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years," Solomon says.

So we're more or less doomed. America's breadbasket is fast becoming a desert; subtropical regions are being pounded by hurricane after hurricane; heavily forested areas are seeing massive burn-offs; ocean temperatures are becoming inimical to sea life; Greenland and Antarctica are melting away; and we can look forward to nothing but more of teh same, for more than a thousand years. But hey, let's not try and cut back on our pollutant emissions or anything. After all, Gaia will be able to take pretty much whatever we can throw at her. That's what 'survival of the fittest' means. As the climate changes, the ecosystem will evolve via any species that can't handle climate change dying out. I'd like to think that we humans are adaptable enough to find ways of surviving and even thriving in our new extra-crispy ecology. But we've known for decades that industrial pollutants were poisoning the environment and altering the climate, and we did nothing. That doesn't exactly spell 'adaptable' to me.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

I'd like to take amoment to shamelessly kiss up to philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky and link to a post on Overcoming Bias which conveniently collects his thoughts on Fun Thory. This attempt to rationally explore the dimentions of human enjoyment from the Transhumanist perspective says a lot of important things better than I presently can. Fun theory is also, I think, intensely important to the Satanic philosophy, as it deals with one of the core components of human happiness and thus of rational hedonism. Favourite quote from this page:

Fun Theory is also the fully general reply to religious theodicy (attempts to justify why God permits evil).

Foundations of Satanic Morality

Cogito, Ergo Sum - Rene Descartes

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law - Immanuel Kant

Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals [...] will have to be an incarnate will to power; it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant—not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power - Friedrich Nietzche

The needs, desires, and interests of another person can never be more important to me than my own. This is a simple, ineradicable fact of reality. I may indeed feel sympathy for their pain and suffering, and likewise happiness for their joys and triumphs. But when another is tortured it is not me that is tortured; when another goes hungry it is not me that goes hungry; when another succeeds, it is not me who succeeds; when another person dies, it is not me who dies. Only I can suffer my own pain, satisfy my own urges, glory in my own accomplishments, and delight in my own love. Any reflections I feel of another's happiness or discontent is just that, a reflection, a shadow - a feeling perhaps more acute, perhaps more powerful than some other less intense pleasure or irritation, but certainly never more so than what I would feel if I were in the same situation! I cannot know what it is to be them, nor can they know what it is to be me. My reality is this moment, this decision, this instant of life; it begins with memory and ends in death.

Morality can be thought of as the distance between 'the best possible world', and the world as it really is. Within the sphere of my reality, I can control only my own actions and the consequences thereof. Rationally, my primary motivation (my will, one might say) is to try and predict which courses of action and reaction will maximize my own happiness in my life, and minimize the degree of suffering I will have to undergo to achieve this happiness. In life, there are many different sources of happiness: the myriad physical pleasures, social and emotional fulfillment, the gratification of achievement, the satisfactions of liberty and security. There are also many different sources of suffering: physical pain and want, frustration of desires and ambitions, fear for safety and security, the aforementioned sympathy for another's pain. I am a limited, evolved being, a sack of meat and chemicals; I have only circumscribed knowledge of reality, and a makeshift faculty of reason too easily overwhelmed. In order to best carry out my will, I must therefore always strive to increase the former and strengthen the latter. Even so, I will inevitably make mistakes, decisions based on limited information or mistaken beliefs or momentary humours. I must own and acknowledge my mistakes and their consequences, not in some eternal self-flagellation of continual guilt and regret, but as information which will help me make better decisions in the future. Rational hedonism is the triumph of will and reason over both false passion and social control, a perfect harmony between the self and the other, a 'golden ratio' of overall benefit and ultimate cost.

Every action I take must be a reaction to the real state of the world around me and the real actions of the people I interact with. Were it within my power, I certainly would attempt to ensure that all other beings who exist can experience the same maximal happiness and minimal suffering as myself - if only that I might thus maximize my own sympathetic happiness and minimize my own sympathetic suffering in contemplating their material conditions from the outside. All things being equal, I will happily sacrifice some happiness or endure some suffering if it will encourage enough happiness, or mitigate enough suffering, in enough other beings to be worth the degree of happiness thus delivered or suffering thus prevented to myself. Unfortunately, the cold reality is that the happiness of one often comes at the expense of another. When matters reach the point at which the benefits to myself are insufficient, I will not further forgo my own happiness or take further suffering on myself. Why would I? And I certainly may choose to risk my own death, torture, imprisonment, or violation, if I judge that the probable benefits outweigh that risk or the consquences of failure; but when the inevitable consquence of a course of action is death or something equivalent, I will of course endeavour to choose another option, even if this option will directly cause intense suffering or even death to others.

If this proposition seems cold, alien, mechanical - be assured that my moral calculus is just as emotional and off-the-cuff as anyone else's. I am not a chess-playing computer, robotically scrolling through billions of possible futures per second and choosing the most advantageous. I am human, and I suffer all the slings and arrows this mortal flesh is heir to. That is why sympathy for the other weighs so heavily in my decisions, and why I don't advocate the psychopathic 'virtue of selfishness' of a Randist, the misinterpreted and maladjusted 'will-to-power' of a Fascist, the amoral permissiveness of Relativism, or the blind pseudo-Hedonism of mechanically satiating every animal desire. But nor am I constrained by the pure-Utilitarian adjuration to 'maximize ovarall utility' at my own expense, or the moralistic lionization of noble suffering and self-sacrifice, or the absolutist promotion of material equality and the 'common good'. I take those actions, support those causes, and promulgate those ideals which I sincerely believe will ultimately most benefit me personally - both in terms of immediate material consequence, and in the sympathetic reflection of the joys and sorrows of others.

Tips for Life in the Post-Apocalyptic Hellscape: Food Security

Our high-tech civilization depends on a precarious balance. Our beautiful cities, the urban hives where millions of lives are stacked up and laid out, are like black holes sucking in tons of food every day. Each depends on the produce of acre on acre of industrial factory-farming to feed its teeming masses. To modern humans in developed nations, food comes not from the land but from the supermarket. We are affluent to the point where obesity has become epidemic - how ludicrous, that one of the great plagues of our lifestyle is that we have too much to eat! Well, friends, this is all going to change. Losing immediate access to food is one thing that is going to catch the majority of our population very much by surprise.

Deprive it of food for a few days, and a modern city would become a charnel pit. Should the crops fail, or the transport fail, or the farmers or distribution chains refuse to sell, anyone without a good store of food stockpiled is soon going to be rioting, looting, stealing and killing. These are truly the times when we shall see evolution in action. Those who cannot find a way to feed themselves will starve. It's that simple. Your first job is to make sure you don't get caught in that situation. Build up a hedge of non-perishable goods that will last you at least a month or two on bare-bones rationing. Get as big a bag of rice as you can find, and another of dried beans; you'll be able to live on one bowl a day, though you'll be hungry, tired and irritable the whole time and will come out severely malnourished. Supplement this with canned vegetables and hearty soups; try for as wide a variety of possible. Canned goods will also likely be valuable as barter. Try to do this inconspicuously, a bit over time; think of it as your new savings account or investment portfolio. If you wait too long, and shortages come, you're going to end up fighting tooth and nail for dwindling stores at skyrocketing prices (and perhaps 'fighting' for them physically).

Start growing your own food, this spring if at all possible. Dig up your lawn and mulch it. If you have no lawn, set up window boxes or hydroponics and grab some space in a local community garden (most cities have them, but space is very much at a premium). There are lots of resources on the web to help you learn to grow your own food. If you can, start building a supply of seeds and other gardening resources; again, don't wait until everyone wants to do it at the same time. Do it now. You might also consider keeping chickens or fish if you have the room; having fesh eggs and meat on hand once in a while will do wonders for your temperament. All of this is, of course, going to take time, energy, and resources. You may not be able to fit an hour or so of garden work a day into your busy schedule and go-go lifestyle. And then, when you and your neighbours are ready to kill each other over a sack of flour, you will wonder exactly what it was you thought was so much more important than eating.

Another thing to keep firmly in mind is that having a ready supply of food is going to make you a target. I'm going to talk about self defense in another post. For now suffice it to say, start thinking about how you're going to protect your home and your garden.

Long term food security is going to be a bit harder to achieve. If I sound alarmist, it's because the state of the world has me alarmed; and I happen to live in a province devoted primarily to agriculture. I can only imagine what things could be like for people who live in less rural areas. If the optimists are right, and the collapse decides to give us some breathing room, now would be a very good time to start planting our survival plots, thinking about turning every green space we can find into community gardens, and convincing some of the masses who are being laid off at this very moment to take up urban farming full time. I'm convinced that with some work and technological advance, we can get to the point where cities can provide their own food sustainably without relying on the factory farm infrastructure; but I very much fear that a year, or even two, is just more time that people will spend not thinking very hard about where their next meal is coming from. The habit of depending on people hundreds of miles away to serve us our meals is too ingrained. It may well take a sharp shock to the stomach to remind us that when you can't feed yourself, nothing else matters.

The Iron Law

Most religions and cultures use, as their base-line standard of ethical behaviour, what is known as the Golden Rule: 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. Undoubtedly it was so named because of the associations of metallic gold with purity, great value, nobility, and awe. The Golden Rule is like gold in a number of other ways. It's very pretty and shiny, incredibly rare to find, and almost completely useless from a practical standpoint; it serves mainly as an ornament to assure the privileged of their superiority; and like pursuit of gold, pursuit of the Golden Rule eats away at moral decision-making ability, albeit in a somewhat different way.

The major problem of the Golden Rule is that it can't survive contact with reality. A world where everyone followed the golden rule, it is assumed, would be perfect (I'm not convinced of that, any more than I believe that Communism could 'really work' if only greed and powerlust were forcibly removed from human nature). But, of course, we don't live in such a world, and I doubt we ever will, or that I for one would want to. People are going to try to steal from you, do violence to you, systematically deny you opportunities, and otherwise act in ways you don't want them to (and that they presumably wouldn't want you to, if they spent a second thinking about it) - following what we might call the Asshat Rule (do whatever gains you the most immediate gratification of your unreflective animal desires).

How is a Golden Ruler to deal with such behaviour? Do you follow Jesus' famous advice and 'turn the other cheek'? This strikes me as being intrinsically disempowering, and makes me more than suspect that this whole Golden Rule thing is a ploy dreamed up by prehistoric oligarchs and theocrats for the express purpose of infantilizing their sheep-subjects with high-minded rhetoric, though I'm sure a thorough memetic analysis of the concept's evolution would turn out a bit more complex. Whatever the case, the Golden Rule makes no allowance for self-defence or retribution - not even for picking and choosing who to trust and cooperate with. After all, I'm certainly not a thief or a liar or a rapist or a murderer; but if I were, presumably what I would 'have others do unto me' is leave me alone to continue on my merry way. You can't hit back, can't look me up later and teach me a lesson, can't imprison me or fine me or trash my reputation or even refuse to deal with me in the future - after all, none of that is what you would 'have others do unto you'. So what's left - a stern lecture? Begging and pleading? Acting pathetic in a desperate play for sympathy? Ultimately, all the Golden Rule leaves us with is to roll over and let any Asshat in the world walk all over us - in Xian parlance, to 'love' and 'forgive' those who trespass against us, whether they deserve it or no. Turn the other cheek, and the other and yet another cheek, until there's no more cheeks left to strike. This kind of attitude practically invites abuse and degradation.

There's a famous experiment in artificial-life which tests what strategies most benefit simple replicators interacting in an environment of limited choices, based on the classic game-theory scenario of the prisoner's dilemma. In such an environment, agents which 'always cooperate' - let's call them Goldens - get shafted pretty hardcore, while agents which 'always betray' - generally referred to as Meanies, though for the purpose of this discussion I'll refer to them as Asshats - gain a significant short-run advantage. However, there is a third way which generally speaking does significantly better than both of them, known as Tit For Tat. These agents start out cooperating, but return fire at the first sign of betrayal. Thereafter, they more or less 'mirror' their partner's behaviour, cooperating with those who oblige them, betraying those who betray them, and switching back to cooperating when a partner that has betrayed them starts cooperating again. There is a great deal of study of more nuanced behaviour patterns, but I think you get the point. In a world of Goldens, Asshats, and Tit For Tats, the Goldens do really shit poor, the Asshats do better in the short term, but overall the Tit For Tats win.

Consider this the Iron Law: 'do unto others as they do unto you'. This is the explicit ethical law of Satanism, and it's better than the Golden Rule because it recognizes the truth of the reality we experience every day: the world is full of Asshats, and anyone who wants to survive (let alone thrive) has to find a way to deal with them. Now, this is not a simplistic prescription to just stupidly 'mirror the behaviour' of whoever you're interacting with. The human animal lives by their intellect, and the intellect must be properly employed in order to effectively follow the Iron Law. In essence, it means treating others with the same degree of respect and cooperation with which they treat you. Approaching others in the spirit of cooperation, while always remaining on guard for betrayal, will offer you the greatest opportunity to fulfill your desires and accomplish your goals. But when you are betrayed, react as appropriate. When you are struck upon your cheek, strike back. When your property is stolen, find a way to obtain just recompense. When others try to manipulate and undercut and disempower you, feel free to manipulate and undercut and disempower them right back. Don't just blindly lash out - after all, we are supposed to be thinking, rational animals, not game-theory machines in an artificial-life program; instead, bide your time and look for the perfect opportunity to slip in the knife. Don't just decide how you want to be treated and then mechanically repeat those action no matter what the situation. Do unto others as they do unto you; and if a taste of their own medicine seems to cure them of their asshattery and they start making nice, by all means forgive - but never forget.

And of course, the dirty secret of the moralists who tout the Golden Rule (or rather, one of many) is that this is more or less already the way most people act. They draw on their experiences with others to make decisions on who to trust, who to work with, and how to deal righteous justice to the Asshats of the world. All the Golden Rule really accomplishes, beyond masking the true agenda of the innumerable Asshats who hide behind its shiny feel-good mask, is to make people feel guilty that they aren't forgiving and pacifistic and passive-agressive enough to be really good and moral. Thus, we give our rights of retribution up to the armed thugs known as the Police and the cold machinery of the 'justice system', even giving up our capability to defend ourself; we cooperate with our abusers, internalizing the weakness they project on to us; we reinforce the inequalities and systematic oppression of the world as we stand calmly by and allow our rights to be appropriated; we suffer the slings and arrows of hateful bigots and psychic vampires because we 'don't want to cause a scene'. Wracked by guilt at the slightest desire to retaliate against those who betray and harm us, we allow the Asshats of the world free reign.

In a world where everyone followed the Iron Law, everyone would rationally respect and cooperate with each other to achieve their maximum mutual self-fulfillment - and if an Asshat arose and attempted to violate or manipulate others in pursuit of their own desires, they would be quickly destroyed by the vilolent reactions of everyone their actions affected. So why not throw off the golden fleece of the Golden Rule and embrace the Iron Law? The next time somebody screws you over, don't just let it go. Don't forgive those who have shown no repentance or desire to change themselves. Seek out the opportunity to show them exactly what their life would be like if their behaviour were universal law. I guarantee that once you get over the indoctrinated guilt of not being a good sheep, you'll feel so much better about yourself and your existence - and that your own material circumstances will more than likely improve, once the Asshats you are surrounded with understand that fucking with you is not a good idea.

Obamarama!

Congratulations to Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States of America. High-minded centrist, control-structure apologist and god-ruled sheep herder that you are, I like you intensely as a person and you're teh best thing that's happened to teh USA in decades. You are a bearer of reason and dignity in times of trouble, and I sincerely hope that you don't get dragged down and broken by the tide of chaos about to sweep over your nation and the world. It would be a shame and a waste for your keen mind and open being to preside over the destruction and degradation of what has been, for all its flaws and misadventures, one of the few beacons of freedom in a world of opression and strife. Love life and live love, Barack Obama, and here's hoping you can do something to at least blunt the sting of the coming crash.

Sheep in Wolves' Clothing

I have never understood why some (beyond a desire to discredit via demonization) have attempted to link Satanism to Fascism or Nazism. I have no respect whatsoever for Adolf Hitler; he is one of history's greatest failures. He died by his own hand, cowering alone in a bunker as his enemies closed in. His 'Deutschland Uber Alles' was split into pieces and occupied for decades; his ideology was discredited, his very symbol reviled, and only the most pathetic and delusional claim to carry on his legacy. His name and his party are so hated that comparing any other to them is considered the essence of logical fallacy. All he ever accomplished in his life was to murder and terrorize millions of people.

I have little respect for Josef Stalin, a delusional paranoid who couldn't escape his demons despite dominating most of a continent. I have no respect for Mussolini, a pathetic bully riding the lagcy of ancient Rome. While we're at it, I have no respect for the Emperors of Rome, a bunch of vapid inbred jesters who drove their mighty nation into bankruptcy, impotence, and eventual destruction. Napoleon? All his accomplishments can't change the fact that he was, in the end, reviled and exiled; his reach far exceeded his grasp. And the 'Masters of the Universe', those soft tyrants of capital and imaginary wealth, are certainly getting their comeuppance now. If history shows us one thing, it's that tyrants, by and large, come to bad ends.

Satanism is a philosophy of individual empowerment. It is also a philosophy that rejects traditional, 'slave' morality in favour of acceptance of individual moral agency. To many, this seems to translate as 'grab as much power as possible in whatever fashion is most immediately convenient'. And then what? Once you've earned the hatred of everyone around you, and placed yourself in a position where you have to spend every spare moment reinforcing that contol and watch every hand for a knife aimed at your back; have you truly achieved self fulfillment? Is that what empowerment is supposed to look like? Do you really believe that's going to make you happy?

Among the wolf pack, the Alpha must demonstrate his superior speed and strength in order to lead. Humans do not live by speed and strength alone, though these are certainly desirable qualities. Humans live by cleverness, reason, social skills, and will. As a Satanist I respect those who have demonstrated their superiority in these abilities. I respect those who achieve power by building consensus and improving the community (and thus their own existence). I respect those who achieve wealth through talent and hard work. I respect those who gain influence by articulating well-reasoned arguments that motivate others to empower themselves. I do not respect those who gain these things through deceit, bullying, physical and mental abuse, terrorism, or trading on un-earned privilege. These people may have gained power, but they have not demonstrated their superiority over me, and thus do not deserve my respect. They may well be able to intimidate or coerce or torture me into submission, but they will never be my superior; and when they try it, they are merely adding my voice to the tide of fury which in the end will wash them away.

Among the wolf pack, when the Alpha has asserted his dominance, the others accept their inferior position. Among humans, there are many specialized skills in which a person can be superior to another. Superiority in some particular skill does not translate into superiority as a person, but a reasonable person will recognize the dominance of others in specific skills and yield to their superiority. Accepting that your doctor knows more about medicine than you does not mean giving up control of your health. When another demonstrates superior leadership ability, accepting their leadership does not imply forfeiture of individual will. When another demonstrates superior ability to create value (not just fairy-gold 'wealth'), accepting their right to profit from their labour does not imply forfeiture of individual worth. When another demonstrates superior intelligence or education, accepting their opinion and expertise does not diminish one's own freedom of thought.

Similarly, when another demonstrates a superior capacity for violence, giving way before it is only rational; but it does not give them license to violate your body or life. Let it be a spur to destroy them through means other than the physical. It is not cowardice to bend before superior strength, or superior skill, or superior cruelty; cowardice lies in not taking advantage of your own superior ability to defend or avenge yourself, given the means and the opportunity. If you have neither the means nor the opportunity, you are not a coward; you are merely making the best of a bad situation. When another demonstrates superior capacity for deceit and manipulation, you need not allow yourself or others to be decieved and manipulated; expose the truth, and let others act as they choose. The intelligent and the rational will accept the truth, and avenge the insult against the deciever; the gullible and the stupid will continue to believe the lie.

Those who are brought low by their own stupidity and cowardice deserve no sympathy, but this does not negate my sympathy for the downtrodden - those who are brought low by the uncaring universe or by others who violate their rights and block their attempts at self-empowerment. I hold common cause with all those who are oppressed, for I myself have felt the sting of unfair treatment, unearned power, and unnecessary control. The greatest strength, the greatest superiority, lies in making the most of your own abilities, maximizing your own will, without giving others reasonable cause to hate you, without giving them motive to topple you from the position you have risen to. Those whom you have harmed, whom you have decieved and abused and assaulted and endangered and oppressed on your way to where you are, have every right to seek redress fro their grievances - by any means necessary. Those who hate you for unreasonable cause - those who demand your undeserved charity, or assert unproved superiority over you, or attempt to manipulate your emotions with the deciet of false love or false victimhood - deserve to be at least ignored, and if necessary, destroyed. But never fall into the trap of believing that your superiority makes you 'better' than others. Nature is one big competition, and you can be unseated and destroyed in an instant, fairly or unfairly. You must always fight to keep what you have earned; the Alpha must defend himself from all challengers. And every time you step on another to gain an extra little bit of power or wealth, you make your own struggle that much harder. Deliberately harming others creates problems disproportionate to the benefits gained. It's worse than just wrong; it's stupid.

Signals of Impending Doom: California is Broke

State Controller John Chiang announced today that his office would suspend tax refunds, welfare checks, student grants and other payments owed to Californians starting Feb. 1, as a result of the state's cash crisis.

Now taking bets on which state or national government will be the next to stop paying out entitlements!

Like Neurotic Gerbils

Slacktivist has an interesting post about 'core animal emotions' - rage, fear, seperation anxiety, and seeking - and relating them to both political messaging and the atheism vs. theism debate. His apologetic characterization of McCain-Palin supporters as 'neurotic gerbils' made me laugh intensely. He then tries to make an argument about the New Atheists that kind of misses the point.

Yes, a lot of argument is directed at the fact that religion is based on fear; and sure, people probably don't 'like' to be compared to neurotic gerbils. Unbelievers don't particularly 'like' to be told they're going to fry for wanking or having uncharitable thoughts or eating pig meat or refusing to wear the silly hat. That's the kind of thing that leads one to believe that religion is based on fear.

If it seems that atheist arguments don't address the existential fear that religion provides a comforting security blanket for, it's because you're still looking for a security blanket. We fight the fear of death by accepting its inevitability while simultaneously working to prolong and improve the real lives we and others live. We fight the fear of the unknown by seeking to explore, understand, and explain it. We fight the fear of an unjust, meaningless cosmos by seeking earthly justice and creating earthly meaning. We fight fear, not by diving under a warm fuzzy blanket, but by building a house. It won't keep out all the fear, but it will keep out some; and we can be all the more confident in it by knowing it's more than just a blanket - that it's a sturdy structure we built with our own minds.

I'm not sure I'd agree that the religious are motivated more by 'seeking' than by fear, but certainly it is a motivation for all and a primary motivation for some. One of the arguments of the New Atheists is that the universe is large and complex and wondrous; that we're not even close to finished exploring it; and that to put a childish meme-god of human creation at the pinnacle of this amazing engine is not only unnecessary and silly, but an insult both to the human mind and to the unknown it seeks to explore. Whatever is out there in the unknown, it's a hell of a lot bigger than the box that religions try to put it in. Atheism, and its embrace of science and empirical rationalism, has more than enough room for 'seekers' in it; the real wonders of real nature discovered by science are more than the equal of any imaginary deity and afterlife.

People come to religions with a lot of emotions, desires, and ideals. My main point here is that the system, the god-made-by-man, takes these 'animal emotions' and warps them to its own ends. It uses seeking to lead people into a false reality trap. It channels rage outward against all who detract or question. It uses fear, and seperation anxiety, and reason, and love, and compassion, and every other thing that is human as fuel for its own growth and strings to manipulate its puppets. It does this because that's what it evolved to do. It teaches humans to channel their animal emotions into sustaining the system, using promises of metaphysical security no stronger than a cardboard tunnel and metaphysical knowledge no realer than a fishing lure, instead of teaching them to direct their animal emotions toward securing their own happiness and fulfillment in real life.

Satanic Panic

A post in the ITBF Facebook forum recently got me thinking about something that happened when I was a child - the "Martensville Nightmare", an incident that really illustrates some of the problems with religious beliefs. At the time this happened I was 12 years old and living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. The coverage of the arrests, scandal, and subsequent police inquiry in the matter sparked my interest in Satanism, along with a lifelong fascination with human stupidity and social psychology.

In brief, what happened is this: Martensville is a small town in Saskatchewan, a heavily rural province in western Canada. For many years, rumours and panics about satanic cults had been flying. Early in 1992, a local mother became suspicious of a babysitting service run out of the home of Linda Sterling where she had left her child. Several children were questioned by police and gave accounts of being sexually abused in bizarre satanic rituals at the 'Devil's Church'. Ron, Linda, and their son Travis Sterling were arrested and charged, along with several police officers who were their friends. Despite the fact that there was practically no evidence against them, their lives and reputations were ruined by the mere accusation of child rape (not to mention satanism). In the echo chamber of a small town, the rumours and hysteria of these accusations built one on another - it eventually came to the point that the local police chief had armed his deputies with assault rifles in the apparently sincere belief that army of satanic cultists were about to descend on the town, looking for children to sacrifice! Eventually the children recanted their stories, which they had made up in response to leading questions from police (and if you don't think a child would make that kind of thing up, especially when prompted and encouraged by an adult authority figure, then you obviously haven't met many children.) Unfortunately, the damage was done, and the name of Martensville was firmly associated in many minds with satanic sex abuse.

At the age of 12 I ate these lurid stories up with a spoon. For years afterward, questions about this incident remained in my head: was there really such a thing as a satanic cult that performed ritual child rape and human sacrifices? If so, why weren't there more stories about satanists being captured, convicted and put in jail - and where were all the bodies of the people they killed? And if not, why would people in this day and age believe in such an insane story? In time I began to research Satanism, and cme on a book called Satanic Panic which spelled it out very well for me. These incidents of mass hysteria occur when gullible people are ideologically primed to believe in certain ideas - such as the Devil and Devil worshippers - and when they start to become uncomfortable or frightened at the changes happening in the world around them, especially complicated social phenomena that have no obvious or immediately deducible cause. They start to look out for a scapegoat, someone to blame. They start to hear stories, rumours and myths that play into their fears and false beliefs. These stories are repeated to them by 'credible sources' - police, pastors, social workers, popular TV shows, or just the friends and relatives they depend on for news and gossip - and in turn they repeat the stories to others, magnifying and embellishing a bit as they go, until they and everyone around them is convinced that there are satanists hiding behind every rock and tree. The common name for this process is 'witch hunt'.

This is the problem with a social control ideology that a) discourages independent thought or critique, and b) is based on lies, myths, and unprovable assumptions. Not only can the system be deliberately manipulated by individuals to take power and keep others submissive and docile; it also acts independantly, in an emergent manner, to create a wide variety of bizarre effects that run counter to human happiness and well being. The only phrophylactic to these outbreaks of mob insanity is reason and education. When people learn to think for themselves, question authority, and make up their minds based on the evidence instead of ideology, they are better protected from mass hysteria as well as deliberate scams and manipulation.

Of course, my reading also lead me to a book called The Satanic Bible, which taught me what people who actually describe themselves as Satanists really believe. There is no such thing as a devil-worshipping murder cult, as should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense in their head; but because gullible idiots will swallow anything a church newsletter tells them, anyone who would dare to identify themselves with the Rebel Angel, the serpent who offered knowledge to man and woman, is automatically assumed to be a rapist and a murderer dedicated to an ideology of deliberate evil. I saw a lot of truth in what I read in The Satanic Bible, but cognitive dissonance from many of the other concepts the social control mechanisms of the world had indoctrinated me with kept me from embracing the philosophies of Satanism. However, after all I've read of spirituality, philosophy, science, and history, the words of Anton LaVey ring more and more true to me as the most plausibly accurate description of a good way to live one's life.

Brand new look.

Now that my stuff is all pretty and shit, maybe someone will post a comment!  Geee, it would be nice to have some crazy fundamentalist troll come along and start badgering me.  Oh, to dream.....

Necessary and Suffcient

Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias (one of my personal favourite blogging philosophers) recently wrote a post that got me thinking:

I know many ways to prove the Pythagorean Theorem, including at least one proof that is purely visual and can be seen at a glance. But if you deleted the Pythagorean Theorem from my mind entirely, would I have enough math skills left to grow it back the next time I needed it? I hope so - certainly I've solved math problems that seemtougher than that, what with benefit of hindsight and all. But, as I'm not an AI, I can't actually switch off the memories and associations, and test myself in that way.

Wielding someone else's strength to do things beyond your own understanding - that really is as dangerous as the Deeply Wise phrasing makes it sound.

...

At that point in my childhood, I'd been handed some techniques of rationality but I didn't exactly own them. Borrowing someone else's knowledge really doesn't give you anything remotely like the same power level required to discover that knowledge for yourself.

Would Isaac Newton have remained a mystic, even in that earlier era, if he'd lived the lives of Galileo and Archimedes instead of just reading about them? If he'd personallyseen the planets reduced from gods to spheres in a telescope? If he'd personally fought that whole war against ignorance and mystery that had to be fought, before Isaac Newton could be handed math and science as a start to his further work?

We stand on the shoulders of giants, and in doing so, the power that we wield is far out of proportion to the power that we could generate for ourselves. This is true even of our revolutionaries. And yes, we couldn't begin to support this world if people could only use their own strength. Even so, we are losing something.

...

I'm not suggesting that people should create themselves from scratch without a starting point. Just pointing out that it would be a different world if we understood our own brains and could redesign our own legs. As yet there's no human "rationalist" or "scientist", whatever they know about "how to think", who could actually build a rational AI - which shows you the limits of our self-understanding.

This is not the sort of thing that I'd suggest as an immediate alteration. I'm not suggesting that people should instantly on a silver platter be given full knowledge of how their own brains work and the ability to redesign their own legs. Because maybe people will be better off if they aren't given that kind of power, but rather have to work out the answer for themselves.

Of course the world he's describing is a transhuman one populated by immortals and godlike AI. It would be utterly impracticable, at this time in this place, for everyone to recapitulate the entire history of science as a part of growing up. But he's got a powerful point that's really very relevant, both to the Satanic philosophy of being, and to the unholy mess we as a civilization have got ourselves into. Humans are no longer self-sufficient - not by any stretch of the imagination. In our march toward an ever more complex, affluent, and efficient civilization, we have allowed ourselves to become dependant on the expertise of complete strangers for our survival.

At least in theory, every member of a primitive hunter-gatherer tribe could protect themselves and provide for their own sustenance; working cooperatively, specializing and trading, made them more successful and more powerful, but everyone knew how to hunt and other basic survival craft. That's one value of the wolf that we could turn to for inspiration in the dark times ahead. We have become dependant on farmers to provide us with our food, and on grocers to bring it to our table. We have become dependant on technicians to build and power our electronic toys, builders to provide us with shelter and oilmen for heat and light. With artists to entertain our spare hours, we cannot entertain pourselves; with scientists to explain the wonders of nature, we cannot think for ourselves; with doctors to heal our sickness, we cannot heal ourselves; withy teachers to educate our children, we no longer teach them ourselves; with soldiers and police to defend us, we can no longer defend ourselves. We depended on financial wizards to handle our money, CEOs to handle our economy, and professional politicians to handle our government; look how that worked out. We have become like weak and pathetic insects, drones specialized into ever narrower 'jobs' to keep the colony running like a smooth machine.

I resent having been indoctrinated into this legacy of dependancy and passivity, never even challenged to develop the skills or the attitude of self-sufficiency, and as of now I reject it. I'm taking steps to bulwark against the coming wave of chaos and collapse, and a big part of that is learning to become more self-sufficient. I will learn to feed myself, defend myself, heal myself. I will learn to provide my own power and fix my own machines. Modern life is complicated, and we will still work cooperatively and gain from trade; but it's time to stop letting ourselves be made weak and dependant by a system out to maximize its own efficiency and control at the expense of human life. Let's learn how to make our own decisions about investment, capitalization, laws and customs, taxes and spending. Let's go back to communities that work, to technological tribes - to the wolf pack, not the ant hill. If we must depend on the skills and abilities of others, let's make sure they're people we know, people we can trust and respect (or at least learn how to manipulate), rather than faceless units in some mass economic decision-making schema. Let's teach ourselves, and teach our children, how to survive without the entire weight of industrial civilization propping us up. Maybe then we'll be back on our way to creating a sustainable and liberated Satanic way of living.

Apatheism (so that's what it's called!)

I've heard strong arguments from both sides of the 'theism/atheism' debate, that is, reasons to believe or not to believe that there is an all-knowing, all-powerful, infinite being out there, which created the universe and everything in it, and actively intervenes in it. Many adherents of each side are deeply convinced they are right, to the point of feeling confident in scorning and ridiculing those who disagree or even express doubt. Others are at least open to hearing the opposing points, and sometimes convert from one side to the other and take up the opposing convictions with equal fervour; while others are 'agnostic' (that is, do not claim to know) about the existence of such a being. What all of them share is a deep and abiding conviction that the answer is really important.

Theist, atheist or agnostic, people seem to believe that of course it makes a difference whether God exists - if God exists we should, or would, or will act one way; and if no such being exists, we most certainly will do otherwise. I'm on the opposite side from all of them. I don't think it's that important whether 'God' exists or not, and I have what I feel are pretty good reasons for not caring. Lest I be accused of incoherent or illogical thinking, I'd like to explicate them.

• Whether or not God exists, what's right is right, and what's wrong is wrong.

God is considered by theists to be the ultimate source of morality. This brings to mind the story of Abraham and Isaac:

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!"
"Here I am," he replied.

Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about."

(Genesis 22:1-2 NIV)

Of course, at the last moment God essentially says "Gotcha!" Some deities do not have quite such a sense of humour regarding human sacrifice (Baal and Quetzelcoatl come to mind).

Can God make it right to burn a child on a sacrificial pyre? Could God make thievery good and kindness evil? A wide variety of actions which to us seem instinctually morally repellant have been justified as the commands of one God or another. Were these actions right when they were taken, or were the actors objectively wrong about what God wanted?

If God can change what is right and what is wrong at whim, this amounts to moral relativism - any one thing that God decides is right is morally equivalent to any other thing God decides is right, and there's no coherent standard by which to decide whether any particular person's interpretation of God's will is better. Otherwise, there is no reason not to subscribe to a naturalistic view of morality - that right and wrong are based on principles rationally discoverable by the human mind, a core tenet of humanistic atheism - and see God as explicating a natural moral principle.

Similarly, whether God exists are not, you are the only one who can make your moral decisions. You cannot abdicate your moral agency to your deity. Even if you depend on their authority to tell you what is right, you're still making the moral decision to trust their authority every time you turn to them for guidance.

• Whether or not God exists, 'free will' is most likely illusory.

Free will is a non-concept. Either everything that occurs in nature is subject to the law of cause and effect, or some effects have no causes, that is, they are completely random. In neither case is the supposed freedom of humans to choose their own actions in any way meaningful. Appeals to 'quantum mechanics' cannot save us from this conclusion. The many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics renders any notion of 'free choice' moot; accounts of human minds influencing the outcomes of quantum events by 'choosing' between alternative futures still begs the question, 'what causes this choice?'; any other explanation of quantum mechanics again reduces human choices to either caused or acausal events.

In the case of God, the reduction of free will is even simpler. God, the all powerful and all-knowing creator, planned every aspect of creation in the minutest possible detail, and must have predicted (and thus caused in the act of creation) every human action in advance.

• Whether or not God exists, prayer as a means of altering reality is clearly futile.

If God, the all-powerful and all-knowing creator, has a plan for our existence, you can pray all you want; it won't change a thing. If God doesn't want your wishes to be granted, they won't be; and if they are, they would have been anyway. There are, of course, other components to the theistic practice of prayer, which theists would be well advised to concentrate on instead of indulging in magical thinking.

• Whether or not God exists, all religions are limited, human creations.

Theists try to get around this one by claiming that their scriptures, dogmas, traditions, customs, amusing hats, etc. were 'inspired by God'. Let's take that as given for a moment. They were still inspired by limited, human words in limited, human brains. They are practised by limited human people who make limited human judgements. However perfect the signal might be, the amount of noise it must make its way through will intrinsically limit the amount of information that can be gained. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed et al. may have had knowledge and even powers far beyond the average human. That doesn't negate the fact that they are intrinsically limited humans.

• Whether or not God exists, what will happen to you on your death doesn't change.

This is a bit trickier, but consider: theists generally express a belief in a 'soul', an immaterial, numinous component of individual humans which is not part either of the body or the mind. Everything about who we are, our memories, personalities, thoughts and feelings, beliefs and actions, is part of the mind which is encoded in your physical brain. When you die, this physical pattern of chemicals and electric charges will come to an end. If your soul ends up in Heaven or Hell, or is reincarnated or whatever, it won't be 'you'. It will be an immaterial, numinous essence.

That leaves the wholesale copying of your final quantum state, to be later resurrected in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. It is possible to imagine that some sort of advanced intelligence operating entirely within our universe could accomplish this feat through highly developed technology. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from God.

• Whether or not God exists, there is still a greater reality out there.

God, the creator, is seperate from creation. God, the infinite being, is seperate from nothingness. Parts combine to create wholes.

If this article seems biased in favour of atheism, it is because most of these points are an obvious consequence of God's nonexistence but are masked by belief. Ultimately, however, theists and atheists have more common ground than they seem to suppose.

Career Opportunities in the Post-Apocalyptic Hellscape: Vigilante

The number of 'real-life Superheroes' (warning, SHITTY website) is on the rise. These are individuals inspired by comic-book 'capes' who put on masks and outlandish costumes, and take it upon themselves to improve their community by voluntarily performing public services, helping those who find themselves in need, and (occasionally) fighting crime. My personal favourites are the Black Monday Society, a group of ex-thugs in Salt Lake City who are actually pretty badass and confrontational (and have extremely non-lame costumes and masks).

These people shy away from terms like 'vigilante', and in fact are pretty pissant compared to the real ones (not to mention the goddamn Batman). They talk up the idea of 'citizen's arrest' and cooperation with 'legitimate authorities'. They're more like an extra-colourful neighbourhood watch, or a police mascot with extra duties, running around hassling drug dealers and scaring petty thieves. But I see it as a sign of the times we live in. It's not so much that crime is on the rise (any reputable stats I've ever seen seem to imply that it's been steadily falling for decades throughout the developed world), as the fact that people are looking around themselves and losing their ingrained faith that the Police can protect them. They're seeing the cops more and more as an ineffectual, corrupt arm of a state that upholds the interests of the priveleged and wealthy at the expense of the poor and the disposessed, a mechanism of social control which 'prevents' just enough crime to maintain middle and working class productivity and head off anarchy and rioting. Police everywhere are becoming ever more paramilitary in nature, spending more and more of their considerable resources on victimless crimes like drug trafficking and on suppressing dissent against the state; private, for profit, and publiocly unaccountable security forces are gaining ever greater capability and influence in their daily lives; and a populace who have been disarmed, discouraged from self defense and just retribution, and inculcated in the mentality of letting the police, courts, and prisons deal with the problem of crime and criminals are increasingly being left to fend for themselves. In the comic books, wherever the state fails to defend the defenseless, a Hero is born.

Comic-book heroes have been an integral part of the popular culture for decades, but it's only now that they're starting to step out of the panels and into our reality in significant numbers. People are sensing an ill wind. Their friendly neighbourhood fascisti are failing to keep the rabble in line. Visions of collapse are dancing in their head, of looting and home invasion and race wars and rape camps. At the same time, they're starting to get antsy about exactly how the government is going to handle any potential disruptions of civil order. And they're right to worry. When the money bomb hits, and their hard-earned cash is worth more as toilet paper than legal tender, they will soon find that the only law and order are the law of the jungle and the order of the gun.

That's when we'll need serious vigilantes, be they masked, costumed, uniformed, or just plain willing. Paramilitaries, amateur crime-fighting societies, and neighbourhood watches with teeth will be a growth industry; one you might consider looking into if you have any sort of martial arts training or fighting experience. It's not that I'm advocating this. The kind of 'vigilante' justice I envision is a purer and cleaner kind, where the code of conduct is established by law and reason, where each citizen is empowered to enforce it in self-defense and retribution, on their own behalf and in assistance to their loved ones and close comrades. We've all seen what kind of 'justice' you get when civil order breaks down: roving death squads, generational vendettas, ethnic cleansing, and forcible wealth redistribution. I'm saying that when the asset-strippers are working their way down your block taking anything of value (including the women) and gunning down anyone who tries to resist, it will be too late to put on a silly costume and order up a pair of taser gloves. Think hard about forming some sort of citizen's watch; if the only way you can take yourself seriously (and make the cops leave you alone) is by playing dress-up, more power to you.

First Principles

Satanism is, first and foremost, a spiritual movement based in reality. This means that, whatever ideals and moral or metaphysical viewpoints I might hold, I subscribe to them because I think they are logically implied by rational consideration of what my experience tells me about the nature of the reality I exist in. My experience is of the here, the now, my body and mind, my perceptions and memories of the world around me, my interactions with the people and the society around me, and the knowledge I access from the communications of others. Within this sphere of experience, I know all the things I know and see all the things I see, create all that I have created and control all that is a consequence of my acts; I love all that is myself and all that I choose to take unto myself; I decide which of my actions are right and which are wrong. I am God unto myself, and the reality of my existence and my experience is sacred.

My experience also includes the fact of mystery - that which is beyond my perception, beyond the (present) reach of the eye, the word, and the mind; the 'dark force' I choose to know as Satan. Most moral and metaphysical ideals are based on abstractions which have no relationship to the reality I percieve. They attempt to create systems based on 'a priori' assumptions and then apply them to the percieved world. They attempt to cage the mystery of Satan by defining and codifying and explicating it; and in the attempt, they blind themselves to those aspects of reality which do not fit into their preconcieved ideals. I choose to let the dark mystery remain hidden, while looking full directly at whatever knowledge of reality may be revealed around the edges - the frontiers of human science and imagination - and seeing it in the cold light of reason.

Each person has their own experience, their own perception. We are limited beings which are incapable of percieving the whole of reality at one time. I cannot see through another's eyes; I cannot feel their pain; I cannot comprehend more of their thoughts than they choose to explain to me with our limited shared vocabulary. Immediately this gives rise to a natural dichotomy - Self versus Other. It gives rise to a rational imperative: in order to experience as much of reality as possible, I must communicate with others in order to consider their viewpoints; but I cannot rely on their representations of their reality more than on my own experience. It gives rise to a moral imperative: given that others wish, no less than I do, to avoid pain and suffering while achieving happiness and fulfillment, I must respect their needs and desires as being like unto my own; but I cannot treat their needs and desires as more compelling, or even as compelling, as mine. It gives rise to an action imperative: in order to achieve my goals, I much join in cooperative association with others, and subject myself to certain mutual limitations in order to maximize the potential of all involved; but I can never allow the 'goals' of the system (that is, of particular individuals within the system) to supersede my own goals, or let myself be subjected to limitations that directly deny me fulfillment of my needs and desires. I act rationally in pursuit of my goals, a single agent in a sea of humanity but a deity within my own sphere of existence. Integrating and balancing these twin aspects of reality, the primacy of the Self and the necessity of the Other, is the great Satanic project.

Arbitrary New Year!

In the following 365 days, I resolve myself to do one or more of the following:

• Eat healthier and get in better shape.
• Practise the martial arts.
• Earn a living through my writing.
• Plant and tend a victory garden.
• Dress in a gaudy costume and fight crime.
  

I sure am glad that nice Nigerian fellow decided to email me!

The International Herald Tribune asks, Was whole economy a Ponzi scheme?

My answer: Yes.

Bog, how I love being right.