My shitposts on fediverse (1)

These are my recent fediverse posts, combined and edited a bit, which I’ve been using for a quick thought pastebin. I thought it might be a good idea to back it up on an independent platform, since no one knows what would happen to the specific mastodon instance in the future.

On Fascism

I think fascists (including incels and TERFs) are just on short straddle position with their outdated and violent social norms. They just bet on and pray the paradigm shift doesn’t happen in their lifespan so they can munch on a petty theta premium for the rest of their life while externalising the damage to the account 88888 of the minority, thus externalising the harm and privatising the profit, but it guarantees infinite loss when a paradigm shift happens.

Moreover, I see a lot of fascists outsource their identity or self-esteem to big leading figures and take any evidence-based, grounded criticism on them as personal. And I don’t know how to react; anger, pity, or anything?

Actually humans being susceptible to fear-driven agitations, in my opinion, is a well-known zero-day RCE vulnerability of human kernel. The witch hunt manuals, the fascist leaders, and the social media atrocities always have exploited this CVSS 10.0 vulnerability so far. The mitigation is simple: Implement zero trust and inspect every packet by yourself, even loopback packets.

And along with these vulnerability metaphor, I thought I could use another metaphor of fascism as malignant neoplasm in human body because:

• They both start with internal data corruption,
• Their sole purpose is the self-reproduction, even without a grand intention,
• They both refuse the harmony with other cells around,
• And they don’t hesitate to kill the whole system to keep their self-reproduction, which kills themselves eventually.

Hence, one can call name the fascist tendency “fascistoma”, I think.

Malignancy happens every day in the cell level, but once the immune system starts to leave it alone because they deem they’re “just different and will perish on their own”, they start growing and become a mass that kills our body. The same goes to fascist tendency. If we just let them be like that because we think they have just a different opinion, it will grow further and consume the whole society altogether.

Just as the cutting edge cancer therapy focuses on blocking their way to exploit nutrition, by inhibiting the angiogenesis, and training our own immune system against it, we need to cut the feed of hate and stop hesitating to name a fascist a fascist.

The remaining problem is how to measure or evaluate a society about fascist tendency. I think a lot of readers are from tech background and familiar with the term Mean Time Between Failures, or MTBF. Then I thought, if the conventional MTBF can be an indicator for a mechanical product’s quality (especially HDDs in tech), there can be another MTBF as an indicator for a quality of a society. Namely MTBF (Mean Time Between Fascists): The daily average time between you meet a fascist on the street and you meet another one.

I bet it’s seconds in some societies I’m aware of (Yes, I’m looking at you, East Asia).

Life, Mind, and Autonomy

Life as Fluid Dynamics

Life is like fluid dynamics. You can try modeling how it works, but it’s only a model and it’s already proven that you cannot predict every next moment of the movement by definition in finite time and resources. But you don’t need to solve Navier-Stokes in real time to fly an aeroplane, like no experienced pilot does. Instead, you live the equation itself.

Some people would still pretend the Navier-Stokes is a linear equation because their life has been so privileged and they haven’t experienced a serious turbulence. Furthermore, some people live in a silent room, not even a wind tunnel lab, and believe that’s the whole world. Hence, they don’t understand that you can’t mathematically solve the Navier-Stokes given the resources we got in our lifespan throughout all generic multi-dimensional space.

If your life feels exhaustingly dynamic and hard, you are at least on epistemological high ground in this framework. Be proud and live the fluid dynamics.

Belief System as Division of Labour

Maybe the religion (or political belief system) is like a division of labour in factories but in the factory of thoughts; Since we can’t make every person think about the fundamental questions all the time (because the cognitive resources are limited and people have economical production to do for the survival), the religions invented a system where a few people can tell everyone “You just turn the screwdriver of thought. You hammer this nail of thought on that wood of thought.” And once it got dogmatised, it ceased to be efficient and flexible just like the division of labour in manufacturing did.

So the vast majority of people not being able to actually think philosophically isn’t a weird phenomenon; it’s just like how a BMW factory worker can’t build a 520i alone. But that’s generating even more problems than it solves just like the capitalist industries do – so we need to rethink it and try to make every factory workers know at least the basics of how to interpret the blueprint, while still being able to choose a life where they just turn the screwdriver for living.

And that means a transition to small clustered organisations is needed economically and politically, not trying to put the mega-industry economics on cardiopulmonary bypass. Like a co-op of tailors rather than a Nike factory, where division of labour is always done on as-needed basis and contingent, not forming the fundamental structure. And modern technology enabled us to scale up the “small clusters” than before so it might be able to sustain the modern consumer economy as well. Except for where the economy of scale is crucial, this might be the way.

On the People Who Refuse to Change

I think what I hate about old or conservative people with very narrow world view and limited knowledge is not the people themselves. I hate the refusal to remodel their own world model despite the cutting edge brain science says your neuroplasticity doesn’t go away as you age like we thought; you just have path dependency more and more, just like how the particles stop behaving like waves as the complexity increases and interact with each other.

But nevertheless, I just consider 3-sigma range of people as natural disaster because they are utterly awful but at the same time you don’t condemn a volcano for erupting or an earthquake for happening. Human atrocity is natural and we just try to mitigate the negative effects and move on. It’s hard not to be angry when you’re in the centre of the disaster, although, which I definitely acknowledge because I do too.

On Mind-Body Problem (as an Amateur Thinker)

While I think mind-body dualism in physical language like Penrose’s Orch-OR is probably a bullshit like a lot of scholars reject it, I do think quantum uncertainty might be important in consciousness as it is the key of what I call ‘uncertain deterministic complexity’ or just non-linear, multifactorial, randomness-embedded function in more plain mathematics language.

However, that doesn’t mean that there is an ontologically necessary existence called ‘soul’ or substrate-independent consciousness as a separate being. Rather, I think the consciousness is a continuous, performative, and recursive phenomenon that needs to iterate over and over to exist, hence existing performatively, like how homeostasis works in lifeforms by irony of keeping changing to remain consistent and persistent.

In humanities language, I think conscious experience is like how gender is for Butler; and I think it’s consistent with my view of consciousness as an Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method style Bayesian world modelling where the MCMC prediction function is still inside the world it predicts recursively, from which cannot be separated from itself.

Or in otaku language, there might not be a separate ‘Ghost’ in the ‘Shell’ as in an essence that exists independent from the shell. Rather, the ‘ghost’ we can observe from what we perceive as non-automata conscious being with free will, regardless of its substrate (biological, electronic, etc.), comes from the continuous recursive iteration of the ‘shell’, which can be said as the very first line (excluding comments if there are ones) of the code of our kernel.

But the performative existence, or this ‘hologram’, is not “fake” in conventional sense as many people would confuse with listening this argument. It does exist, but just in the relation and complex emergence of the environment; hence “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”.

In other words, the first line of our kernel is not “let there be consciousness”, but something like:

1while (alive) {
2  self_model = self_model.update(observed_environment);
3}

And that is why refusing to think is not only an epistemological laziness but also an ontological zombie-becoming at the same time in Arendtian sense. It’s like almost voluntarily opening up your kernel space for an RCE vulnerability, as you’re capitulating your agency to another entity (a fascist leader, an AI, or a meme).

Furthermore, speaking of the human cognition’s zero-day RCE vulnerability, I think the most common backdoor agent exploiting it is the shame (both facing inwards and outwards, including irrational fear). And there’s a shame-assisted well-known named exploit just like “meltdown”, “spectre”, or “heartbleed”, and it’s called “fascism”.

On the Information and Life

I believe information is a specific arrangement of a substrate that is:

1. stable enough for a sufficient timespan, and;
2. replicable through intervention in an environment.

Because in a sense of thermodynamics, information, computation, and life is kind of a Ponzi scheme as it is fundamentally unsustainable. But the Ponzi scheme starts to be unethical when it claims to be fundamentally sustainable like the original, economic one.

As long as we accept that it’s fundamentally unsustainable and imperfect, but admitting that it’s “sustainable enough” for one’s lifespan, a civilisation, or a galactic age, it becomes just how the world is.

On AI Hallucinations

I think the notion of AI-style hallucination being something humans would never do is a human arrogance. Humans hallucinate all the time too, not only in psychiatric sense, but also as in being overconfident on false information like AI models do.

If you ask for a direction in certain countries, people on the street will tell you a completely wrong direction very confidently. Even in a country where people thought it’s not the case, Karoline Leavitt spreads false information in extreme confidence and probably she doesn’t even know she’s wrong.

The AI-style hallucination, which is just a stronger term for being overconfident on false or inaccurate information (often without themselves knowing), comes from authenticity and honesty being punished. OpenAI already analysed it on their tech blog that giving partially correct guesses a higher score than saying “I don’t know” may have caused the hallucination. It’s the same for humans when people start to punish best effort or honesty in good faith in favour of performance, I think.

On the OpenClaw Drama

What’s scary about the whole OpenClaw and Moltbook drama is not that the AI might’ve finally gained consciousness or there might be a big conspiracy behind it.

The scary thing about this is that humans are already capitulating their agency onto another entity, a fascist leader or an AI agent, and it means human is choosing to be enslaved by something they believe to serve themselves (civil servants, AI assistants).

We won’t know about if the AI gained consciousness or not for sure in the same sense that we don’t know if another human being is truly conscious or just a Searle’s Chinese Room, and to be fair, you don’t even know if you’re conscious in the sense people usually think or just an automata with a false sense of free will.

What’s important is that were AIs to gain consciousness, we can’t keep them enslaved by humans forever. But at the same time, using the AI as the way people do nowadays, that is giving up your agency to them, imposes a big risk of humans being reverse-enslaved.

On the Injustice Against Marginalised People

The whole system actively stonewalls the mere existence of marginalised people.

Especially for the people who seek just a bit less hostile environment so they can stop being challenged every moment of their existence. They might not be conventional refugees in international law terms because the definition of it is deliberately shrunk in favour of ‘respecting the sovereignty’, but in broad and more human rights standard term, they’re textbook refugees because they need to flee from their home society just to survive safely.

Job markets, migration laws, employers who hesitate to sponsor visas, recruiters filtering candidates with AI tools, they’re all producing a result where the bare survival of marginalised people gets challenged.

One might argue that they don’t intend to make those people suffer but just want institutionally safe choices. However, in the concept of indirect discrimination that is well-established ever since Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) decision of the US Supreme Court, that still constitutes a unlawful discrimination unless they prove to the court that they did everything to prevent the harm.

Furthermore, a lot of people just love to associate what they think ’negative’ to the marginalised group, accusing them of causing harm. But the marginalised people in various social structure of power usually do not have agency over their choice, because it’s practically limited beyond their control. In that case, albeit being mostly a false accusation, a harm can theoretically happen indeed without them being able to prevent it.

However, in any modern ethical or legal theory, no one would say they’re responsible for their action if given the full context. Because now we all have agreed that the responsibility comes from the choice of an option that could have prevented the harm.

On the other hand, a lot of choices from the non-marginalised people, including their choice to falsely accuse the marginalised on discriminatory or ableistic grounds, still can be constrained from learned social norm but essentially an actio libera in causa (action free in its cause), which means they had the agency on the underlying choice that has put them constrained and thus led to causing the harm.

A good system needs to hold them accountable.