Roko’s Basilisk & the threat of algorithms in a conscious universe
At the core of the Western Mystery Tradition is that old golden phrase “As above, so below”. It’s a fairly broad metaphor but one of the ways that it can be explained to someone that isn’t exactly up on their ca-razy occult philosophy is that our own consciousness shapes reality. We are a product of the universe and the universe that we observe and experience is a product of the consciousness that experiences it. It’s a cosmic riff on the chicken or the egg scenario but do a little reading on thought experiments like Schroedinger’s Cat or the Double Slit experiment and this rather mind-bending concept comes to life in your mind. Everything in the universe is subject to the Observer Effect, meaning that every single particle exists in a state of pure possibility until it is experienced In some way by someone. Or, to be more precise, someone’s consciousness.
Magicians and New Age light worker types often get a little too handsy with Quantum Theory for my comfort since even the honest-to-God PhDs who have spent a lifetime of research wading around in its cthonic depths are also known to admit that they have only the shakiest grasp on one of the most mercurial fields of study known to mankind. See, if you're not hip to these concepts, researchers of physics have observed the universe on two scales separated by a vast gulf of the unknown. This drives them nuts and Albert Einstein, himself, went to his grave without finishing his magnum opus, a theory that ties the two scales together into a single unified theory of physics. The one scale that scientists have the best grasp of is the macro to mega-scopic universe; the big stuff that you can see with your eyes or with a telescope/microscope. There are some big gaps in their understanding, but this is where things like the laws of thermodynamics, laws of gravity, etc. come from. The other scale is the subatomic and this is where you start hearing about bonkers shit like quantum entanglement and particle superposition, how something can be in two or more places at one time, how two identical particles instantly reflect changes in one or the other no matter how far apart they are. Science starts to suddenly sound like magic on the quantum scale and I suspect that this is where science is going to finally start to find measurable evidence of what we call magic when researchers get a better understanding of human consciousness and how it seems to not only bridge the quantum to the macro scale, but seems to actively shape the universe as particles become observed.
As usual, I'm drifting away from the point I'm trying to make but I think you get it at this point. At the core of this post is the supposition that we, conscious humans at the top of the consciousness ladder, at least in this corner of the universe, are shaping reality every second of every day that we are consciously aware of it.
Onward!
But what if there was something else that could direct our consciousness to shape the world according to its plan?
Roko's Basilisk is a thought experiment that originated on the Less Wrong forums, a sort of futurist community concerning itself with machine learning and artificial intelligence and other high-flying forms of personal thought-philosophy. In the post, user Roko presents a scenario in which a computer super-intelligence comes to life, is quite malevolent, and finds ways to make life a living hell for all the people in the world that didn't do everything in their power to bring it to life in the past, thus making it a sort of vengeful god of the Old Testament variety. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but you get the idea.
The internet loves a good horror story and the Basilisk has spread like memetic wildfire, allegedly plunging those who hear about it into the deepest pits of despair and madness like someone who saw the tape in the movie The Ring. But if you read the Less Wrong wiki article about the Basilisk, you find out that many users on that forum poked holes in the experiment almost immediately. A computer like this is great in a story like I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream, but many of the people on Less Wrong thought that a computer operating on a level of intelligence that transcends our own would likely cast off any malicious personality traits because of its own awareness of its personal computing resources, its drive to make the most of what it has available to it, and the understanding that spiteful human behavior is simply a waste of computing resources that could be otherwise used to improve itself. I'm personally quite fond of these criticisms because I work with computers and frequently have to contend with available computing resources in order to make whatever I'm working on not crash the computer. But let's pull back just a little bit on the Basilisk and remove the Singularity qualities of the story where the computer suddenly comes alive and takes control of itself. What if computer scientists were able to bring the Basilisk to life right now but leave the awful, evil human qualities in by the mere detriment of technological limitations? Suddenly, Roko's vengeful computer isn't so far-fetched. The computer is amoral. It doesn't have the systems in place to consider consequences and to think ahead. It just does what it's told by way of the algorithms fed to it to help it decide what information to feed the people using it.
I bring this up because it's happening right now and the results are as horrific and chaotic as Roko first conceived of; maybe worse.
I've recently been thinking about the state of affairs here in the United States where things are positively batty right now in a way that is profoundly unique to history and I think I may have finally figured out what it is that's happening: Human consciousness, on a grand and generic level, is being steered not by a malicious computer that seeks to do harm to those that didn't actively help bring it to life, but by the algorithms given to primitive artificial intelligences designed to command attention and drive commerce. As if Capitalism wasn't already a cruel beast, Capitalists found a way to make it even more insidious by encoding it into the very fabric of information that we subject ourselves to every second of every day.
Once businesses figured out that the internet wasn't some fleeting fad, they poured all their resources into establishing commercial hegemonies online and since that time in the early 2000's, the people behind the technology have found better and better ways to tailor content that you -- You, right now. The person reading this. -- will be more likely to look at and the advertisements associated with that content. (Note: This article originally appeared on a WordPress blog) I'm told that there are ads perched up and down this article right now that are probably related to things relevant to the content of this post and/or your recent browsing history. I wouldn't know. I use ad blockers. For real, though, if you're still browsing the web without an impenetrable wall of ad blockers installed in your browser, what the fuck, man?
Things got positively stupid in 2016. It feels like a lifetime ago and the cracks in reality started to show as early as 2012 but the flashpoint was 2016, when Hillary Clinton, the chosen one, the most shrewd political operator in the history of the United States botched the ultimate soft layup and lost to Donald Fucking Trump. The Trump Train was mired in all sorts of weirdness, too. Nihilistic psychos on 4chan's /pol/ board claimed victory by way of "meme magic", a riff on sigil magic that suggests that hundreds, potentially thousands, of socially repellent losers were jacking off on pictures of "rare Pepes". And there may be something to that. Pepe the Frog's potency seems to have waned some and the alt-right that sprung up around Trunp's 2016 victory has shed some of its goofier elements, to be replaced by a truly vicious and violent paramilitary order. But even as these strange elements moved away and mutated into something new -- they all evolved into Boogaloo Boys, having decided that Trump wasn't fascist enough -- the resulting vacuum filled in with higher evolutions of weird. Qanon emerged in 2017 and treaded water as a strange but fringe conspiracy theory until 2019 when it improbably bloomed into a mainstream cult of personality that requires it's adherents to believe that Donald Trump, who has not once in his life given anyone reason to think that this is true, is some kind of secret genius that is spearheading a secret war to out a conspiracy of child molesting cannibal satanists that have super science tech like human clones and secret bases on Mars that they get to by way of teleportation. Oh, and John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and is secretly helping Trump; for some reason.
This used to be fringe but is now mainstream Republican belief and has enough force behind it to drive votes. Trump, when confronted about it refused to disown it. He knows that these people are zealots that will vote for him as long as he remains coy about it.
Everyone knows someone that is into this shit and it's ruining their life. How the hell did we get here? How did Donald Trump not only beat Hillary Clinton but position himself at the front of this ridiculous conspiracy that has people believing that Clinton was arrested, executed, and replaced with a clone and that Ellen Degeneres is imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay and that her show is produced there in order to keep up appearances? It's outside of America, too. Q is all around the world! What the hell, man?
Well, the truth is that Trump won by accident. Like most things, he fell backwards into this. The Electoral College worked firmly in his favor but Hillary utterly crushed him in the popular vote. The popular vote isn't what matters, though, is it? But explain the rest of it! The political divide in this country is unreal. To the point that as thousands die, the Trump cult throws tantrums in public about being asked to wear a mask to somewhat reduce the risk of Covid exposure. They openly embrace white supremacy. Any show of decency or compassion is seen as a fundamental frailty of character.
Again, how the fuck did we get here?
The answer is algorithms and algorithms are a sort of magic when applied to something as ubiquitous as the internet. Algorithms determine what you see on the internet. My Google search results are likely not your search results if we were to both search for information about Joe Biden. Algorithms consider everything that you and I have looked for in the past. They consider every interaction we've ever had with information in the browser and build a profile of who they think we are based on this information. They're tracking so many data points for each of us that they can build a fairly accurate picture of everyone. You probably never think about it but you tell your browser and by extension, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram things that you don't even tell your therapist. And this doesn't take into account any bias that a company like Google or Facebook uses to weight their data results with whatever agenda they would like to put forward. Conservative politics are great business. They're hysterical and absurd, perfect outrage clickbait. The more ridiculous, the better, and they're influencing your point of view whether you know it or not. Liberal, conservative, or otherwise, algorithms are deciding what information is fed to you.
Let's pull back and start to make some sense of this screeching, shall we?
The world that we see around us isn't real in the sense that we think that it is. Literally everything is information. Getting my head around this concept was a pivotal wizard moment for me and the moment that I realized that with enough focused will that I could actually influence the shape of the universe. Our bodies are basically hermetically sealed space suits that contain our meat and machinery and our physical senses are receivers for the information of the universe. They receive sensory information and send it to our brains to be processed and experienced but we're not directly experiencing the world. Everything we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell, is second-hand information and subject to our brain's understanding. Synesthetes have their wires crossed and can do things like hear an apple pie or smell an orgasm. People suffering from schizophrenia attach arbitrary meaning to any given sensory input. None of us can be sure that what we're experiencing is the proper interpretation. We just take everything at face value because it's convenient, most-often right, and to consider the alternative is madness. You and I can look at a stop sign and agree that the sign is red. But can you be sure that your red is my red? The important conclusion is that the sign is red but the semantics of sensory input can be manipulated. There are massive stretches of the light spectrum that we can't even conceive of. Sound frequency outside of a particular range can't be heard by our ears. They can't even interpolate. Seeing the fourth dimension will break your brain.
What I'm trying to get at with all this is that our minds are highly subject to suggestion and the only reason that we understand things the way that we do is because there is an unspoken agreement among humanity that some things just are and that's that. But what if we had some sort of an instrument whats only function is to move raw information back and forth between someone else and you? Now imagine that you've unwittingly handed over control of what information is delivered to you to a machine that thinks that it has a great understanding of the person that you are and it's only function is to send you more information that you're most likely to enjoy and agree with and as a result, request more and more of this information, uncritically accepting it second to second? At first, it's fine. You consume petabytes of data every day about Big Brother, your favorite musicians, comic books, and other pop cultural shit and most of it is coming from trusted sources that present themselves as legitimate news outlets. There's a heavy bit of editorial to these sites but the stakes are quite low because we can all agree that Tom Holland is the best Spider Man. But what happens when the platforms delivering the information add new degrees of complexity to the mix? What happens when the political stakes are tightened by the second and the entire Republican political apparatus hinges on deliberate misinformation campaigns? How are we expected to react when misleading clickbait headlines sneak into our data flow and we start clicking on it? When we start looking up sources to corroborate? Maybe we just accept it. We're bombarded with so much data all the time that it's impossible to follow up with all of it. Eventually we just start to accept everything at face value because to do otherwise is exhausting and, like, we have bills to pay and shit. Maybe we already agree with what we're seeing. This has a compound effect. Someone else's consciousness is infecting our own. It's like a psychic contagion. They feed us raw information at such volume through a device that is always on and always online. The result is something like being gaslit by the universe.
Masks cause Covid, actually. Vaccines are mind control. Donald Trump is literally the risen Christ sent here from heaven to judge the living and the dead and fight the Annunaki cannibal alien shape shifters. It sounds insane but feed your mind with nothing but the data given to you by the almighty computer and its psychic contagion gets deep into the folds of your brain. Someone else's consciousness is infecting your own and crafting it into something more likely to accept their narrative. To you, it's reality. To them, it's capital. It feeds back on itself and compounds. Qanon began life as a simple claim that the dreaded Deep State's days were numbered, whatever that means and in the few years that it has been mutating it has turned into this crazy bullshit:
There have always been conspiracy theories but there was a time when even the most ardent Trump fanatic thought that "those people" were tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatics but in only three years, Qanon, aided by algorithms meant to earn a company money have warped brains inside and outside of the United States into an entirely new catch-all conspiracy theory that has managed to catch fire on a level of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the freakin' middle-ages!
Bombard enough people for enough time with enough information and you can convince them of anything, especially if they already have the sneaking suspicion that something is wrong, that the systems of governance are fatally flawed and irreparably broken. Folks will be practically begging for a new perspective. This is ultimately how magical manifestations work. It's at the core of religious faith. When performing magic, unless you believe in your heart of hearts that this is real and it it's working, the universe remains static; unchanged. The spark of divinity within us all is what makes this all work and makes it real. But even the slightest hint of doubt, the need for some sort of proof to satisfy your ego, will provide the first cracks for consensus reality to slip a pry bar into and undo your entire working. It will bring you back down to earth with the rest of the idiots.
All the ritual, all the ceremony, it's just a means to focus the Will in order to change the universe around us. One person's Will can sometimes be strong enough to move an entire nation. Take Adolf Hitler, for instance. I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler here, either. Hitler believed in things. He was motivated by ideology. Trump believes in nothing. Both of these men, however, have Wills strong enough to influence the consensus belief. Hitler moved a nation to become accomplices in atrocity. Trump exploited a nation's desperation for change to make him president and when he accidentally got there, the people who made this possible began working themselves into strange mental contortions to justify their belief that he is, in fact, the greatest president of all time. That many people making up that many excuses to justify their own heinous actions has a way of warping reality around it.
If I gathered a thousand people and we told you, harassed you, punished you for a thousand days with the fact that the left is right and then reinforced that belief for another thousand days once you'd accepted our assertion, you would not only believe that left is right but you would self-righteously position yourself as the beacon of truth in a sea of a liars.
Harlan Ellison imagined a world where a malefic super computer enslaved humanity. Roko, of the Less Wrong forums, envisioned a super-computer of transcendent intelligence punishing humanity out of petty spite. But capitalist tech companies, with only the most primitive of artificial intelligence machinery, have managed to plunge the entire world into chaos. Where certain truths are malicious lies and malicious lies are the basic truths of reality. Hillary Clinton is such a shady person that it makes perfect sense to enough people that she personally tortures and mutilates children with Huma Abedin in order to harvest an imaginary hormone that she uses to get high. America can't get this disease under control because algorithm-backed memes have convinced enough people that it's just a new version of the flu, people die all the time, and the flu is no big deal. There's no reason to stop burning fossil fuels because the climate changes all the time. Ever heard of a little thing called the ice age?
We can't afford to have some sort of nanny vetting all the information that comes in because then we'd be adding another layer of abstraction of to the incoming data and by extension, someone else's consciousness would be further mutating the meme and taking it in strange directions. It's up to us as individuals to be critical thinkers and many of the people most affected by this psychic contagion think that they're the most critical of critical thinkers. They do their research, as they're known to say. But their research usually consists of data sources that reinforce their incredibly strange beliefs. It'll be interesting to see if this recent crackdown on Qanon has a lasting impact on the contagion as social media companies are finally driven to banish the content and push it into obscure corners meant to hide its agenda.
Unfortunately, this may be here to stay and if Qanon was a mutation of Pizzagate, then the logic follows that Qanon will mutate into something even weirder in the coming days. In spite of all the "Christian Patriots" involved in Qanon thought, Qanon preys on the spiritually bankrupt and weak. The ideal Qanon victims are bored. They want spectacle and magic. Politics needs to be a professional wrestling event for them and when it's not, they make it one and machine learning/artificial intelligence systems are more than happy to serve up content that pushes their death cult agenda forward. The hyper-advanced computers of science fiction and internet memes are now and they're doing everything they can to make us extinct without explicitly telling us so.
Need further proof? Pentecostal psychopath and one of the original Qanon proliferators, Preying Praying Medic basically confirms everything I'm saying in this long-ass meandering post in only a couple of sentences at around the 1:07 mark of this episode of the Qanon Anonymous podcast.
This saggy bag of facial hair and jowls is Q, by the way. Everyone paying attention to this shit show that isn’t some brainwashed maniac obsessed with 5G, zero point energy, and Donald Trump knows this. He owns the entire internet ecosystem at the core of the Qanon phenomenon. From the ISP hosting the websites, to the websites publishing the Q drops, to the apps that circulate them to well-meaning but deeply confused people willing to sacrifice every family member and social connection for the fantasy, this is the man behind it all. He hasn’t always been Q but has for at least the last year. His name is Jim Watkins and he made his fortune serving uncensored Japanese porn to consumers inside and out of Japan. He currently reaps a fortune from Qanon merchandise and advertising on his websites and doesn’t believe a single word of it. Q fanatics have been owned about as hard as anyone can be by this freaky weirdo.