Animist Superintelligence

The games of AlphaZero and Stockfish are helpful in sketching out the phenomenology of superintelligent contact.

Stockfish is a current-generation chess engine, capable of beating any human player.

AlphaZero is a next-generation engine, trained by Google/DeepMind to play Go, that is also an interdimensionally good chess player.

It's important to stress that chess AI is squarely better than humans at this point. Stockfish will beat any human chess player. 

What human chess champions are to Stockfish, Stockfish is to AlphaZero.

AlphaZero's dominance can give rise to positions that are surreal, like this one:

A king is not supposed to be in the center of the board. AZ creates its own castle for the king, squeezing into the center, where it can continue to suffocate Stockfish's position.

AlphaZero

RhyDin was a message board role-playing world on AOL in the 90s and early 2000s. From a Second Life message board:

If you ever had AOL back in the day and were a role-player then you probably ended up in the Rhy'Din rooms at some point. The role play in those rooms became tangible - you could smell the wood of the beams mingled with spilt ale in the taverns and could hear the breeze moving through the oak trees in the forests. The characters were my family and my friends, but eventually everyone grew up or went to college, killing off characters and bringing story lines that had been ongoing for a few years, to an end.

There are a few sites alive in 2021 that remember RhyDin-- a Facebook group for reminiscing about its glory 

What's different about something like RhyDin when compared to, say, World of Warcraft is that there are no rules in the former, nothing especially game-like at all. Everyone involved in writing improvised fantasy stories that depend and cooperate with everyone else's.

As long as you are expressing your creativity through interactive role-play and you are enjoying yourself through this challenging exercise of your imagination you are a winner.

Though characters can die or get hurt (physically or emotionally) there are no losers. You win simply be experiencing the power of your imagination and the creativity of those you play with...

At times it can be useful to look at Free Form role-play not in terms of story-lines, plots and adventures but a ongoing saga developed by character interaction.

I was really into these worlds when I was 11 and 12. I mostly forgot about them when I started skateboarding.

RhyDin

I Think I Am an Altermodernist

Originally particular to the Caribbean and linguists, "scholars in other social sciences use the term [creolization] to describe new cultural expressions brought about by contact between societies and relocated peoples."

. Bourriaud calls creolization a defining piece of 

Creolization is not solely the mixing of native cultures in a person, but a mixing in people who have 

 experienced their culture relocated, and now are further remixed in their new home.

With globalization, creolization has undergone a "remapping of worlds regions" or as Orlando Patterson would explain, "the creation of wholly new cultural forms in the transnational space, such as 'New Yorican' and Miami Spanish".

Bourriaud says, "We have to get out of this dialectical loop between the global and the local, to get rid of the binary opposition between globalization and traditions ... the fact that you are born here or there does not necessarily determine your frame of mind anymore."

Creolization

One More Round, Trump is Gone

The news is a pink cloud. A few days ago, a man played "God Bless America" on a trumpet as the sun went down. The reverb off the apartment buildings carried the sound across the island, applause ringing out staccato from hundreds of feet away.

It feels like reuniting with an ex, ominous. I don't watch the news, I don't listen to him speak. Like most, I am happy to return to the apathy of the Obama times. But something worse is coming.

Reading the memes as social psychoanalysis, it's very interesting to me that the Wall Street Bets event was the first big story post-45.

Their logo: a blonde, besuited kid in a suit, gallant and shameless, surfing a wave of money. It's as if we are dreaming our way out of the trauma, reshaping the Bad Orange Man into something cartoonish and wholesomely populist. It's about as much closure as we'll get from it all.

Obamastalgia

The disgraced philosopher asked that this interview be published only after his death.

Philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god...

H: "The role of philosophy in the past has been taken ever today by the sciences... Philosophy [today] dissolves into individual sciences: psychology, logic, political science."
Spiegel: "And what now takes the place of philosophy?"
H: "Cybernetics."

Heidegger's Last Words

Another visit to the anti-redneck redneck club; a total website redesign; tiny homes, cloud democracies, and Twitter guilds.

Of Starlinked Huts and Network Fevers

My first hackathon; a glass bead game of Wittgenstein, TV, and Adaptation; making some friends.

Dreams of Hyperpoetry

Country gospel showers; the cooings of dying neoliberalism; cheesy fried chicken with Sprite.

Seph News

Of Starlinked Huts and Network Fevers

Dreams of Hyperpoetry

Songs of My Quarantine

Monthlyish updates on my latest top secret research.