Welcome back to your favorite fourth or possibly by now fifth tier Bitcoin podcast.
We're now a ZenoSystems podcast all the way.
We're now just a strip.
This is our third shot, not third shot, but our third podcast here talking about Nickland's ZenoSystems.
We're going to release these separately, but we're actually recording them all at the same time.
Wending our way deep into the night.
Yeah.
By candlelight.
And Grant has promised to unbutton one more every time we do another episode.
So I may chop this into nine or 10 because I've just never gotten anybody shirtless on the show.
Can't wait.
Despite your best efforts.
Yeah.
Trust me, I've tried.
The shirtless Bitcoiner was the alternate kind of model for Bitcoin study sessions.
And they were kind of rival thoughts on how to proceed.
And we kind of went with studying instead of being shirtless.
Shirtless Bitcoiner would have been a way better Halloween costume for you than Autonomous Capital.
People have understood that, by the way.
Autonomous Capital, nobody was going to get.
But by the way, let me finish.
The first one, we basically defined a bunch of terms that land puts out. The degenerative ratchet, the cathedral democracy. Turns out there's a different definition for that. The trichotomy.
this kind of laid the groundwork for what we got into more into episode two which is land and by
the way so this book it's this series of of of writings of blogs that were its philosophy being
writ in real time with an audience and so as i mentioned in chapter in the second one it's
basically like there's this big stone block and he's the sculptor and he's got his hammer and
chisel and he's chiseling away in real time. He's not telling us what neoreactionism is to start off
with. He's telling us what it is not. And then in our second episode, we started to get into more
of what neoreactionism is, which is that it's more of a system for evaluating systems. It's not here
to argue. It's here to basically stand back and see what wins and not be a participant in a game
that it cannot win for multiple reasons. One, that the language is not sufficient to do it.
Two, that in order to engage in the battle, you have to go fight it on the home field of the enemy
under their rules using their weapons. And by the way, that means you have no weapons.
Um, and, uh, so now we're going to move into, um, kind of land's, uh, thoughts on time.
Yeah.
I would say this is, this is land's metaphysics to the extent we get a metaphysics and Zen,
Xeno systems.
It's kind of some speculations on the nature of reality and the nature of, I mean, the
whole, my summary of Neo reaction, it is, is that it is an unflinching approach to reality,
which is as we're going to learn or discuss today the outside the outside is reality unfiltered
and we that sounds like um like shocking or something like that or like something you say
if you're going to have like a risque nighttime television show reality unfiltered reality
unfiltered is actually horrific and anti-human because the filter is humanity that is what makes
reality. Perceptible is all of the human senses that bring reality inside. The outside is reality
before it kind of arrives at human perception. Before, though, we're going to talk about land
on time. Let's talk about a few frameworks of time. One, Plato gave us a notion. So we're
all the way back in history of philosophy. Plato is going to give us a notion of absolute time.
Imagine time as a box in which things occur.
So this is the notion that time is outside of reality and reality occurs inside of the box that is time.
Aristotle is going to give us a different notion after Plato.
So Plato, again, time is above reality in which reality occurs.
Aristotle says time is a thing that happens in the world.
It's change amongst the objects in the world.
It's like entropy, the arrow of time as entropic disintegration or whatever happens.
So time is derived from change.
This is kind of where we got to in the essay Bitcoin is Time by Durjiji, where he was saying that Bitcoin defines an arrow of time through its internal operation.
That was an Aristotelian notion because it was a notion of change, tick tock next block that we use to mark time.
It wasn't that Bitcoin sat in an external container that was time.
It was that Bitcoin, through its change, marked time and made time in that way.
So Aristotle brings time into the world and makes it a matter of change in matter.
That's what time is.
Land says, though, that this hides the real problem of time.
You begin not to be able to talk about time in itself as such, only about the changes that are happening that we use to measure time.
That's what we got with Bitcoin and time.
It turned out Bitcoin was not time.
Bitcoin is time as a title, but really it was Bitcoin is a clock.
And so we called time the thing that Bitcoin was measuring with each tick.
But really, the only thing we actually showed or arrived at was that Bitcoin is a clock.
and time must be occurring because that's what clocks measure, right?
Things that happen at a certain interval.
Land, though, is saying to think about time in that way hides the problem of time.
You're looking only at the watch and not the thing that it's measuring,
which is time itself, which is, again, Plato had that idea that time was separate
or a box in which everything occurred, and so you could look at time itself.
So our watch, with Plato's theory, our watch is basically our portal into that thing that is time.
It's our mirror into the earth.
It's our looking glass into a different world.
Into the box.
Yeah, because it's measuring.
Because it exists separately.
It's like measuring a separate thing.
Like a thermostat measures heat.
Yeah.
On the platonic view, a clock measures a separate thing, which is time.
On the Aristotelian view.
In the Italian view, it measures that which is occurring there.
It's not separate.
It just calls that time.
It just calls, right, it just calls time.
The thing that is being measured is defines it as the change in the mechanism is what time is.
Yeah.
And so Land wants to get back to that platonic view, but it's actually the next step in philosophy, the Kantian view, that's going to serve as the bridge or the way out for him.
And that is that time is a way that we structure our experience of the world.
Time is a necessary condition for having experience.
On the Kantian view, you can't talk about time in itself, though, because that's like talking about experience prior to having experience.
Time is a thing that conditions or makes possible experience.
So you can't talk about the condition that makes possible the thought, if that makes sense.
Without time, everything would happen all at once.
Something like that, or it would be so incredibly bizarre and unthinkable.
We can't talk about time in itself because that's separate from our experience of the thing.
To quote Land, it is a limit that we cannot see beyond because that would be a contradiction.
That would be to experience beyond the thing, the condition, or makes experience possible.
So for Land, this makes time in itself the singular problem of primordial philosophy.
I guess I'll stop there.
That's a romp inadequately through my interpretation of Land's interpretation of the history of the philosophy of time.
Go back to the last thing that you said.
Kant's idea of time.
Yeah.
So Kant had this idea.
Because I get the other two.
Yeah, that we never experience reality in itself.
We only experience our experience of reality.
So if you want to see the world, you don't see the world.
You just see the sensations that your eyes give you of the world.
So when you feel this table, you don't feel the table.
You feel like the tips of your fingers and the sensations that are occurring there.
You never experience the world as it is in itself. You only experience the world as it arrives to you already structured by the conditions of experience, which are things like space and time.
these things make possible our experience of reality but space doesn't exist only space as
a structuring condition making possible our experience of reality time doesn't exist or
maybe it does but whatever it is we can't experience it we only experience it as the
condition that makes possible our experience of reality so plato time is something that we look to
in order to measure what we experience.
Time is a separate thing from reality.
It's separate.
Yeah.
Aristotle, time is in reality.
It is inextricable from reality.
And Kant, time gives us reality.
That's one way to put it.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's a transcendental condition.
It is a condition that makes possible experience.
Yeah, it's conditional for reality.
Yeah.
Yeah. So as a critique of Aristotelian time, Land notes that this privileges the origin of the universe over the destination, because everything that came after the origin is dependent on that origin.
it's an arrow of time kind of causally dictated where you're moving forward and so um the origin
of the universe becomes very important because that kind of causally dictates the things that
come after it so you kind of look backwards but time but but land says that's actually
a misconception because time was no denser or realer just because it was in the past and quote
unquote already happened the past experience of time is no different from the future of time
and yet we tend to think of it that way because quote unquote it already happened time um
he says time cannot come from the past because it can't come from a place that presupposes the
order of time because it cannot time cannot come from that's not a quote that's my
summary so maybe that's not just let me think about that time cannot come from the past because
it cannot come from a place that presupposes the order that assumes the order of time so
basically it's just are we just saying that time cannot be linear
i think what in his discussion i think what he wants to do with the aristotelian time
is reassert the realness of the future if you think because the way that we think about time
is that time only exists now and in the past.
Yeah, because what has already happened is time.
Because what is in the future is in the future.
And it's just like, yeah, you're right.
Like, we don't even think of it that way.
Okay.
And so that makes sense kind of on an Aristotelian view
because time is only the change within the mechanism.
It's only marking change.
Yeah.
And that's why...
And future change hasn't occurred yet.
Yeah.
And so Land thinks that that's restrictive
because the future, there is a realness to the future.
And there's a realness to the time of the future.
Yeah, and to say that there is a realness to the future and a realness to the time of the future is, on the Aristotelian view, kind of maybe not possible.
Yeah, and so Land wants to get us to think about time in itself, which Kant says we can't do, but Land wants to do that.
He wants to get back to philosophizing in that way.
That's, he says, the singular problem of time.
Kant kind of showed us the difficulty of it, but Land wants to do it.
It was what I kind of take part of this to be saying.
So Aristotle would tell me that when I have my eggs and flour and sugar, that I cannot say that there's a cake in my future.
but
Kant would tell me that
the cake was there
when I went to the grocery store
and picked up those things
and it was there when I brought them home
and I put them in the shelves
and it was there when I got out the mixing bowls
and I started putting it together
and it was there after I popped it into the oven
and it was there when I pulled it out of the oven and frosted it.
I think that's more a platonic view. I think that, yeah, I think Kant wants to say that you shouldn't even, you're getting yourself in thought loops and philosophical problems by trying to think of time in itself, whereas you should just be thinking about time as an internal principle of structuring and making possible your experience.
Okay.
Yeah.
And Aristotle, again, I'm not presuming to speak to Aristotle's notion of time.
This is just my interpretation of land's very bare notes on Aristotle.
Aristotle thought very deeply about causation.
He had, I think, a fourfold notion of like principle and efficient cause and what like causation actually means.
And so he's thought very deeply about these things.
We have to really gloss over that for the purposes of this conversation.
I think what's important is to get us to where land is, to where he's thinking deeply about time in itself. And, you know, that's a very philosophical, you might say, thing to do because Kant said it was impossible.
Aristotle showed us that it was
unnecessary for doing science
you know you think about the world
as it is you don't need this separate notion
of time like you just measured the
regularities or intervals in the world
that's sufficient to mark
any sort of unit of time we might need
so to speak so for Land
then thinking about time in itself
is to think of something
that is like the pure philosophical
thought I think
he plays with the notion of
time in his discussion of entropy. So this may be, I don't know if we look at this as just kind
of mental play or if there's something here, but if time is defined by change in this kind of
Aristotelian sense where it's the ticking of the mechanism itself, which is a result of entropy
that marks the direction of the arrow of time, then, Lan says, can we think about localized
entropy reduction or what he calls extropy as time travel in a sense okay yeah if you're creating
centers if you're creating order exporting entropy to other places is that freezing or changing time
um is it reversing the direction of time what does that mean essentially on the aristotelian
conception of time or on that conception of time marked by entropy if we can create localized bubbles of entropy reduction I having a beautiful thought Okay So land is giving us this view that we going one way
There's only one place that we're going and nothing we can do.
There's nothing we can do to stop it.
That capital will find a way to reach escape velocity
and that we will be inconsequential after that, whether we'll be targeted or forgotten or subsumed or whatever, that we will be inconsequential.
And the way that we are slowing that is by applying morals.
And those morals are breaks. Those morals are we are trumping intelligence with our own moral structures that we put in place through frameworks such as democracy and communism and MAGA and woke and all of these all of these things that are our morals.
and those are the things that are slowing the entropy.
No, I don't think so.
No, I think he sees entropy reduction as intelligence.
What intelligence does is reduce entropy and create order.
So I think he thinks of entropy reduction
not as a dampening mechanism on acceleration,
but kind of what acceleration does
is create localized pockets of reduced entropy.
Well, the beautiful thought that I was having was that love does that as well.
And it was making me think of the discussion with Jeff Booth is that, you know, the more love that we put in the world, the more we're going to impose this moral of love.
And that's going to trump intelligence.
And I don't know.
This romantic notion is definitely something ground in the gears of machine intelligence, Sunland's view.
It's just one of those re-descriptions of reality as a fantasy.
It's something the cathedral would say to you that this is about love, this operation.
It's not about the generation of a spontaneous order outside of your control, some notion of fate or, you know, destiny.
I bet Land's not a hugger.
Carry on.
Yeah.
That's pretty good.
That's a funny thing to think.
It would be really funny if it was.
I can say that about any philosopher.
I bet Kant's not a hugger.
It's just funny to think that a philosopher might hug.
Because there's nothing more embodied and, like, pointless and yet so essential as human conduct or contact like that.
Politics and time.
So, the progress—let's see if this is—yeah, this is new, I think.
The progressive conclusion is that the past can teach us nothing.
the future just gets better and better that's what progress is all about right progressivism
progress is in the future let's head onward it's the arrow pointing up into the right essentially
up it's self-justifying too this must be better or else why would we be doing it yeah there we go
that's one of the way the cathedral whispers to people too is like that's why it's good is because
it happened so exactly exactly um but if you believe and there's a separate notion of time
though there's the arrow of time there's also cyclical time this is like the fourth turning
right this is rise and fall of empires this is we go through periods of ascent and descent
in that sort of view which is can be a very kind of conservative view where you turn towards the
past you begin to believe in the importance of deep history because you could see repetitions
it's not just up and to the right but it's like waves you're looking at that way too yeah um
We can now, again, begin to understand where we're at by looking at the past.
And you know it's an interesting thing here, too, that rising civilizations are all unique.
Declining civilizations are all the same.
In collapse, kind of the dynamics are all the same.
So this is a very cool notion.
A declining civilization is the age of prophecy.
Declining civilization is the age of prophecy.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Because that's when you can tell, you can say what's going to happen.
You can say what's going to happen. Yeah, you can look to the past to predict the future and you can make claims about the future that have much more likelihood of coming true.
He had a line about senility, too, that was basically like, it was basically saying that all, like, all failures, like, all country failures, government failures, everything, are due to senility.
It's just like.
Senescence and aging decline.
Yeah, you just get old, you can't learn.
Yeah, yeah.
I wouldn't.
That is the corruption of the feedback mechanism.
That is the cathedral.
and refusal to learn.
And that's what it is.
That is a feature of the system.
Feature, not a bug.
Yeah, definitely.
So the neoreaction is not an arrow of time,
nor is it a circle of time.
It is both.
What is both an arrow and a circle?
A circle with an arrow.
A snake eating its own ass.
Not the Ouroboros.
That's just a circle redescribed.
It's a spiral.
it moves it moves upward but it circles so we go through series we go through cycles of rise and
fall but all of that propelling us upward into the future towards the inevitable conclusion of
machine intelligence explosion something like that yeah so this he says um essentially this
like a spiral is like the occult signifier of neo-reaction or something like that you had to
put it into an image it would be a spiral the best um visualization of bitcoin price that i've
ever seen was a guy who did it in a spiral have you seen this one no i don't know um it was uh
i think it was a bitcoin um i think it was a bitcoin prog last year but i'm not sure but
Yeah. When you look at it in this spiral and you see the timing as it continues to grow, like it may, yeah, it just matches this. It's fascinating.
So, yeah, so what we're saying is that progress, not progressivism, but progress is not linear, nor is it all this chaotic mess is that it's spiraling.
It spirals.
It goes.
I wouldn't say progress.
I would say time itself.
Time.
Okay.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
Time itself is a political construction.
Time considered as political unfolding of history, maybe.
Yeah.
Cool.
That's why I'm looking at it.
All right.
I like this time.
Time and perception.
So we're considering, like, again, what Land is doing, I think, is making the notion of time philosophical again by resting it either from over-eminentization of Aristotle, where time sort of disappears.
because it is just the operation of the world itself.
And also he's taking it back from Kant,
who's saying time is unthinkable.
But also he's not like reverting to Plato
where like time is just this discrete separate thing.
He's really doing some interesting thinking about time
as a philosophical problem.
So there's also the notion then of time and perception.
Our notions of time are, this part is so cool.
Our notions of time are anthropocentric, right?
your perception of time is based on the fact that we're humans navigating the world and using time
in a certain way for example the second is like the lower limit of human experience of time and
we might say the century is the upper limit one the second is like that lower boundary in which
we can still think and react to the second once you get kind of below that you begin to escape
outside of human perception the century is like the human lifespan more or less and so beyond that
you're like moving into something beyond the human so that's kind of like the human anthropocentrized
anthropocentric conception of time is the second based around the biophysics of mammalian motility
and the century around the limits of mortality but there are different natural time scales
Land points out, obviously, that are not anthropocentric.
The lower range of that, much lower than the second.
Right.
That's, he says, the movement of a photon across a Planck length, if we want to try to measure it.
And then on the upper bounds, he talks about something called the stelliferous era.
This is the era when stars are born.
This is expected to last 100 trillion years and is expected to last 7,000 times longer than has occurred since the Big Bang, essentially.
And that's just the area in which new stars are born.
Wait, how much did you say? 100,000 years?
It doesn't even matter the number.
I mean, it's just like so immense that it's beyond sense, essentially.
But the cooler part is not even that upward boundary.
The cooler part is moving downward.
Okay.
Moving downward towards closer to the instant when time maybe breaks down, like what does it mean to get closer to that Planck length estimation of time?
And I'll just give you a quote to what Land is thinking here.
A femtoscale intelligence system could explore the rise and fall of entire biological phyla in detail in a period so minuscule it would entirely escape human apprehension as submomentary or subliminal.
the ultimate eons are less ahead than within if you really want to travel into time reduce your
perception of time to where go just essentially go down into time closer to if you're experiencing
time at the second level the level of the second where that's your like base level experience of
time what happens when you do that at half a second a quarter of a second one one thousandth
of a second then you can do a university education in five minutes and that's what i think he's saying
in artificial intelligence is going to do or does it collapses time by moving closer to that plank
length of a photon traveling or whatever but i just think that's so interesting because we think of
the bigger a thing is the more expansive it is but it's actually there's more space at the bottom he
says once you begin to get into that's just so cool i don't know it's like imagine zooming in
on reality you know and going down to the atomic level then you see how immense atoms are because
of how empty the spaces are between like the yeah it's just the same way with time itself
the second is immense and when you break that down into these trillions and you know whatever
It's just like, it's incredible.
Yeah.
And it's, I mean, it goes hand in hand with what we're finding with everything else, like that's changing the world.
Everything else that's changing the world is doing things on a smaller scale.
Yeah.
You know, like we've made more advancements in, you know, medicine and longevity and human performance and stuff by going from the cell to subcellular in what, I don't know, a hundred years or less.
than we did in the entirety of history coming up to that on the larger scale.
Yeah.
And you bring up the really interesting point, which is like this table,
this table is mostly empty space.
And I'm not saying anything that's attention-grabbing
in just trying to be like, oh, there's more to it than what I'm saying.
Like, it literally is mostly empty space.
Like, the atoms that comprise this are surrounded by empty space.
It's like figuratively massive distances in between atoms.
It's most, like, everything is mostly empty space.
And so, yeah, to think about traversing that Planck length.
And what we can do with it, if we could utilize it, we have our clumsy human bodies occupying anthropocentric designations of space and time.
What happens when anthropocentrism is not the model of space and time, when we can utilize vast portions of space at the bottom?
That's nanotechnology, right?
That's what nanotechnology is, is that ability to utilize space.
And that's what like Moore's law does, like utilizes space with much more efficiency. What happens when we do that with time? And maybe kind of that's what computation does by becoming quicker and quicker in relation to human thinking.
And once there's an interface between artificial intelligence and its ability to utilize time and human intelligence or experience of time, then you can increase the human lifespan subjectively almost indefinitely.
Yeah, I'm excited about being able to compress an 11-day meditation retreat into –
Yeah.
Because it's going to be hard for me to sit still that long.
That's the only thing. It wouldn't be possible because meditation is actually so embodied.
That's the weirdest thing about meditation is it depends.
When I went to the meditation tree, one of the things that struck me was the practice of sitting in an uncomfortable position is not a hindrance to meditation.
It is a key part of meditation.
And so it's interesting to think about which of our practices are anthropocentric because they are embodied.
They depend on the human body and which of them, what new practices will be available.
Maybe new forms of meditation will be available once we're able to do them without the body at scales that escape the body.
You do lose your sense of time, right?
It dilates.
It dilates, right.
Or it contracts.
Right.
It could do both.
maybe pass faster if you get into the period where you're feeling like blissful waves of energy over
your body then it's kind of like time is kind of irrelevant because if you're caught in this
beautiful stasis of pleasure in a way that's sustainable where it's non-hedonic treadmill
style pleasure where it's just like self-sustaining be there indefinitely that's fine whereas like if
you're in pain you know every second is an agony because you're assailed by this constant stream
of thoughts telling you where you should otherwise be. So yeah, but time at the bottom is immense.
And the second is a vast scale of time. It's just such a, again, it's the most philosophical thing
you can do maybe is to look at your watch and imagine how time might be different than the
watch that you were using to measure it. What does it mean when we consider time as such?
Some people will tell you that's an idle philosophical speculation. Kant might say
that land is going to say that's where philosophy begins.
Yeah.
And this is the outside movie,
but this brings us into the next topic.
This I think is going to be my most like for me,
like interpretive of what land is saying because it's my own,
a most emotional reaction to land and his most suggests the most suggested feature of land is Twitter handle used to be outsideness um outside in is a framing he uses i forget if it was also in his blog as well i think his blog was called
xenosystem i think outside in was like maybe the subtitle or coldest oh my god regardless
this idea of the outside is a rhetorical framing that land uses i think um in a few different ways
One of which is just to give himself an escape hatch into a different realm, if that makes sense.
So all of the banal observations of reality can kind of be—they're only banal to the extent that we reflect on reality only as our own reflection on reality, as something that has arrived at us through our human senses.
Yeah, everything's perspective.
Yeah, everything is.
We talked about filters earlier.
Yeah.
Like the filter that this, one of the things that changed my life was understanding that everything that we experience goes through two filters prior to our experiencing of it.
We have the eyes, which are an external part of our central nervous system that are filtering for threats.
And then we have our beliefs.
And so we get, first we filter for threats and then we filter for things that align with our beliefs.
And now we have our experience.
So we're two filters removed from reality at all times, minimum.
This is the inside, I think.
This is conditioned experience that is human experience because there's nothing wrong with that.
You're always going to be conditioned in that way.
Those filters are essential to what it means to be human.
The narratives of what our life means to us, like facts have meaning only in a narrative structure that we give them.
And so to be free of all filters would be to be in the outside without human filters either is just like terror and dementia in equal measure because you don't understand the terror you experience.
It's not filtered.
It's not structured for you.
Or it's just not experience because experience is inherently human.
It occurs through these filters.
The construction, talking about Kant earlier, experience only happens due to the transcendental conditions we impose on it of space and time.
What happens when you're outside of space and time, in the world, in reality, as it actually is?
Like, there is no experience.
So the outside is beyond filters, the thing in itself, beyond human comprehension, reality in its raw state prior to be converted into any human comprehensible input is how I think of it.
And it's like part of Lan's idea of escape is escape towards the outside.
You're always kind of moving away from these filters, trying to get closer to a reality you can never actually inhabit because to inhabit that reality is to cease to be human.
Yeah. And so outside in, you want to move towards the outside, but you're moving towards a limit.
Okay.
Does this all make sense?
I'm trying. I'm doing what I can.
You want to move towards the outside, but you're moving towards the limit.
You have limits because if you didn't have limits, you wouldn't be human.
Yes. And that's the ultimate escape is escaping your humanity.
I mean, that's machine intelligence in a word is like the final escape.
We talk exit, right?
The final exit is exit into machine intelligence, exit into autonomous capital, something like that.
Yeah.
A future that is not human because the human future is always bounded by filters, one of which is the cathedral, the other of which is the monkey business filter of doing things because they make us happy.
What's that?
And what was it?
Anthropocentric.
I mean, that's what monkey business is, right?
It's everything is because we want it to be.
It's around us.
I would say monkey business more gestures towards our evolutionary past as certain sorts of evolved creatures that therefore have certain desires.
Whereas anthropocentric is more you have a body.
And so reality is in your experience a certain experience of reality.
I don't know.
Maybe there's a distinction there that is not fine.
But the matrix in the red pill analogy is something he gives when he's kind of talking about this.
The critical key to gnosis, and so gnosis is kind of that idea of knowledge, right?
Gnosis is, yeah.
The critical key to gnosis.
Is this everything to do with the Gnostics?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
The critical ketonosis is the realization that the whole of your world is an inside, implying an outside in the radical possibility of escape.
And then, you know, again, you can look at the three strands of neoreaction.
What is the outside for religious people?
God.
Yeah, heaven.
Something like that.
Some sort of metaphysics beyond the physical.
And so what is the outside for ethno-nationalists or geneticists, hereditarians?
I don't know.
Thousand-Year Reich?
That's a political instantiation, maybe, cynically stated.
But I would say, like, the outside is evolution beyond our current human state.
Okay.
Yeah, it's evolved beyond the human.
Okay.
So what's the outside for techno-commercialism?
just techno i i'm trying to think yeah yeah no i don't know i mean maybe it's like we we've
what techno commercialism is commercializing technology to feed our anthropocentric so
techno commercialism is that strand of neo-reaction that focuses on catalaxy as the
strand of fate dictating how reality generates itself to a predetermined future.
So the outside is that future, which is autonomous capital, machine intelligence,
apolitical property. These are the outside. When human experience ceases to matter because capital
generates further capital for its own purposes, intelligence optimization maybe is the outside
for techno-commercialists.
Techno-intelligence optimization
considered as artificial intelligence.
So most people fear and loathe the outside.
That makes sense, right?
That means shedding your human nature,
everything human about you.
That's one of the things that I think is underthought about
is how, this is maybe going to sound heretical,
but how horrific is the idea of heaven, right?
because we can't even, it's so mysterious.
I mean, it's only good because we've kind of predetermined that it's going to be good.
But if you didn't have the predetermination that it was going to be good
and you were only told that you will not have your body
and you will exist in a space outside of time indefinitely,
you might be a little bit anxious about that.
Yeah, it'd be cause for concern.
You wouldn't know what to do with your favorite hat.
Maybe, yeah, something like that. And so any sort of outside, anything beyond the human, it's only because we have fantasies that anthropomorphize them for us, where heaven is us walking around with our grandparents and our new bodies, our souls, and we just got like colored outlines for forms.
Yeah, and I think we also maybe like incorrectly believe that what we are experiencing at all times is good because we are experiencing it or it's.
That's the cathedral in your head.
Or we think like, or we think like we chose this.
So you didn't choose this.
You didn't choose to be born.
You didn't choose to be white.
You didn't choose to be male.
You didn't choose to be any of this.
I guess you chose a couple things, maybe.
Like you chose to read this book.
Maybe.
You chose what to eat and you chose to wipe instead of air drying.
No.
Oops.
Gotta get up a day, man.
Gotta get up a day.
I don't load the outside.
I embrace it, man, whether that's air drying or like contemplating machine intelligence.
A little Neuralink.
Yeah.
A little bit of that tap it in.
So some of the things that terrify us about the outside.
So he says fate, genetic determinism, divine will, those terrify us, kind of as you've been hinting, because these all deny human agency.
Like we're no longer actors if everything is predetermined.
The outside too, another way to look at it, this is all just ways of looking at a thing that you can't look at.
Again, the outside is beyond human experience.
When I say let's talk about the outside is, well, let's talk about a thing we can't really talk about.
And so all we can do is give like a bunch of different approaches to it.
One is philosophical speculation about the thing in itself.
One is kind of the fears we have of what that might entail.
Another one is to conceive of it as an absolute state of nature and therefore war.
For the outside is like that thing that precedes all order.
So a popular paradigm he gives is that you need peace to have order, to have law, to have freedom.
He says there's actually, of course, a state before that.
There's war that leads to peace, order, law, freedom.
But even this privileges peace as preferable to any conflict, as if you need to resolve war in order to get to order, law, and freedom.
Whereas Land kind of disagrees that reducing war to entropy, although entropy is bad, entropy production is synonymous with intelligence.
That's different than something I said earlier.
But I think this is his position.
that intelligence produces entropy
because it uses energy in all the things it constructs.
Intelligence produces entropy
or entropy produces intelligence?
That might be a better way to...
I think both.
It's like a loop, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, because intelligence produces intelligence.
More is a necessary condition for peace.
Disorder is a necessary condition for order.
Kind of?
I think that and that also, I mean, this has this really cool blog entry essay in here on Cormac McCarthy, which I actually read a passage from that in our discussion on software.
That war is just something that, and this is a software point, at the end of the day, to resolve a dispute at the base level, you resort to war to determine what is true.
To quote Land, it is the ultimate tribunal beyond which any appeal is a senseless prayer to the void.
Peace is just one possible result of war and not permanent.
And then he has a quote from Herodotus here to show that this just isn't Land saying weird things.
This has deep historical lineage.
Herodotus says, war is the father of all things and of all things king.
Hmm.
there's the sound of war a signal or civil war assigned yeah yeah as the sirens go by as order
seeks to reassert itself through law enforcement what is the quote about like politics is the
continuation continuation so the war is the continuation of politics by other means yeah
is i think klaus witz but then he also quotes michelle foucault who inverts that and says
politics is the continuation of war by other means.
So one of them is the inversion of the other.
War is politics by other means.
Then someone inverted to say politics is war by other means.
And they both make sense.
Yeah.
Well, good for her.
I was thinking big thoughts back then.
It is.
War is king of all things.
I mean, they lived closer maybe than we did to the state of war back in the day, so to speak,
where wars occurred with much more frequency.
Not if war is politics.
If war is politics, then we live on the front lines.
I mean, that's true.
Yeah.
He has an essay talking about unrestricted warfare
where war includes all sorts of things that happen
like within our financial system
and just any sort of thing can be a maneuver within war.
I listened to a podcast that was reviewing Zeno systems
and the guy gave what he,
it was either his determination of land's definition of war or it was land's definition of war.
And it was something about like basically a conflict without rules.
Yeah.
It's war.
Yeah.
It's like there's, you know, no.
Because in order to have rules, you have to be able to impose them on other people.
And so the war is already won at that point.
Yeah.
Like war determines what the rules are.
Yeah.
So war as such has no rules or else there's already a war that's been lost.
Yeah.
Here's a quote.
So to maybe sum up and bridge on to the next and I think last part of maybe not the last one of the last parts.
So here's a quote on, to tie up our discussion of the outside, tying it to the notion of exit and neoreaction.
So Land says, outer NRX, which is his abbreviation for neoreaction, outer NRX, defined primarily by exit, relates itself to what it escapes.
It is refuge in periphery, more than a substitute core.
it does not ever expect to rule anything at all above the most microscopic level of social reality
and even then under quite different names the patchwork is for it a set of options and
opportunities for leverage rather than a menu of potential homes it is intrinsically nomad
unsettled and micro agitational it is culture its culture consists of departures it does not regret
While not remotely globalist, it is unmistakably cosmopolitan with the understanding that the cosmos consists of chances to split.
Does that mean anything to you?
Nope.
Okay.
The outside, for NRX purposes, is that possibility of escape.
The inside is to be inside, trapped in the cathedral, trapped in a democracy, trapped in a state you don't want to be in.
The patchwork then is all these other options of places you can go. You move towards the outside to something that is not filtered in the same way to a different reality, but not with the thought that you're escaping to your new home.
You're escaping to a place that is a new point of potential departure, but also not something you regret.
So a movement towards the outside is the movement towards, I think, the possibility of continual departure.
So that you always are moving faster than the degenerative ratchet of the place in which you inhabit, maybe.
Is the outside taken from Plato's Cave?
Is that where he gets that?
That it the outside of the cave which cannot like you I mean you can imagine it when you inside the cave And is that where that comes from
So that would be to give it a platonic spin.
And so the outside on the platonic view, the outside of that cave, you enter the realm of pure platonic forms,
the pure form of the good, the pure form of time, as we talked about,
the pure form of all these different things.
Whereas I think for land, when you enter the outside, you begin to encounter things in themselves, not as forms that illuminate human experience, but as things that are alien to human experience.
So when you escape from the cave, I think it's almost like you're moving towards reality illuminated and made much more clear.
When you move to the outside, things become less clear in a sense because you move beyond experience.
You move into unfiltered reality.
It's only not human experience because humans haven't experienced it.
If they'd experienced it, it would be human experience.
Kind of.
Which makes me think of the Buddha, right, leaving the walled garden and then experiencing the world for the first time.
Except for there is no.
And then he achieves.
But yeah, this is where I was taking it.
I'm trying to put a positive spin on this.
Is that Buddha leaving the walled garden, experiencing the world and all the horrors of it.
And what happens as a result is that he achieves enlightenment.
Yeah.
So maybe, I don't know, that's my positive spin.
Is that we reach the outside through this effective accelerationism.
accelerationism we reach escape velocity um and maybe enlightenment enlightenment waits i don't
know yeah that could be it's like the outside of the cave is you arrive and look at your filters
at that point you look at all the filters that you have and understand your reality better because
now you can see the things by which you are interpreting the world whereas the outside for
land is you arrive outside your filters and so you simply become a different thing a different
filter a different thing different thing which maybe has different you are a thing because of
your filters we're human because of our filters we've talked about yeah yeah you just you lose
all the conditions of experience i think if you move into the pure outside and so you i don't know
like what does reality mean if you encounter it unfiltered does that even make sense to say
you know yeah well it kind of does it's like you know because it's oh man filters make possibly
the possibility of experience though right so if you encounter it outside your filters
then what even is that you're not touching or seeing or feeling or tasting or whatever hearing
john verveke talks about this perspectival knowing and it to know something you have to
Like if you remove your perspective, if you no longer have a perspective, and a perspective is inherently formed by the filters that you have.
And so if you remove all those filters, you also remove your perspective.
Perspective is something you don't know you have until you've left it behind.
Yeah.
And moved on to a new perspective with new filters and new blind spots that you're unaware of.
Yeah.
Right?
So.
I mean, it could be the simulation of an infinite number of perspectives simultaneously, something like that, like a fly's eye imagined as faucets all viewing the same thing. Or, you know, if you could, in some sense, embody different perspectives and incorporate them. I don't know. But that's all speculative, which leads us to why Land focuses on horror.
A lot of his rhetoric in here, he's really into Lovecraft as a way to talk about things that can't be talked about. So horror as like a cinematic and fictional device. He has a whole couple of essays on that, abstract horror. Like why is horror an infatuation for land?
And again, this is like language is compromised. How do we talk about things that we otherwise can't talk about? Art now allows us to do that. Horror is a specific form of art that allows us to think and say specific things, to envision specific futures or something like that.
that um like within horror land knows there's like a certain relationship of abstraction that
monsters have it's not like you might imagine like a scary movie is like jason chasing somebody with
a knife or like you know that's like okay that's scary because you're gonna get killed by this thing
with a knife whereas a horror movie is you're going to experience something that exceeds human
experience and the representation of that is going to take a certain abstraction it's going to be
both something that you don't want to look at because the look at it forces you to acknowledge
some aberration of natural law but also you can't not look at it because we're evolutionarily
conditioned to look at the dangerous thing to protect ourselves from it and so one example he
gives is Cronenberg's The Fly where mutation is a flight from form and so you might like put
capital f form like the idea of form as such the horror is that our notions of form might be imposed
on the world and the world itself might be a fluid structure and constant flux and change and
mutation that's what evolution is right whereas we tend to view it as stable maybe the true horror
is something like cronenberg's fly where form is contingent or fluid or always changing and we
learn something about like the abstract horror of the outside by contemplating a work of fiction
i don't know i just looked up nick land's favorite movies what does it say man terminator one
definitely he talks about that a couple times blade runner predator yep he talks about that
in here i don't know what i don't know what akira or videodrome yeah videodrome is more
Cronenberg Akira's anime right ghost in the shell another good anime yeah yeah that's what you got
yeah ghost in the shell is the one I was talking about the other day when I was trying to create a
bitcoin study sessions logo with grok is my inept assistant yeah trying to like to like make it like
ghost in the shell and at one point it like it said I can't do this it violates my terms of service
I was like, why is that?
And he's like, I can't create fetish content.
I was like, I got to step away now.
I was like, I didn't know what I was trying to do with this whole logo I was describing.
But old Grok was getting the wrong ideas about my motives.
Oh, dude.
What a surprise that would be.
This door gets kicked in and all of a sudden you get busted.
You're like, I had no idea what I was doing.
Literally no clue.
I'm sorry.
But like Ghost of the Shell, like it's kind of Matrix type theme where I had a person in a vat.
And then they had tubes going into their head, right?
And then I was like, make some of those tubes into tentacles.
That's what it accused me of fetishism.
So I was like, ah, nicely played.
Yeah, well done.
I get you.
I see what happened.
Yeah.
A step too far.
and then i was like but so i was like okay but make it like manga style pen and ink now it's
not finished it's like okay i used to try to tell it to um it would be like i can't do that because
it whatever like violates this whatever yeah and i would be like okay rewrite my prompt so that
doesn't violate your thing nice doesn't work no it doesn't no it didn't work it's like i'm not
going to do your dirty work that was what i was trying that was when i was trying to make the uh
the flyer for the birthday party oh and i put this like my prompt to chat gpt this was back
when i was dumb and i was using chat gpt and man and chat gpt that's what i use actually i use the
chat i mean it's okay but it's got a good it's got a workspace you got this walled garden so you
used to be horrific okay like right yeah because like at this time i was like create a like uh
create a image of a party happening in a Sherlock Holmes style apartment with a diverse group of
fit, beautiful people. And it was like, can't do that. Now, that'd be an offense to all the
ugly people, except, of course, it couldn't say ugly people or the unfit people. And I kept trying
to, this violates my policies. I kept trying to get it to redo it. This is such a good point about
the nature of intelligence optimization that you can't box it in with morality as soon as you begin
to impose our morality of egalitarianism on the ai it becomes useless fucking retarded utterly
useless yeah yeah utterly useless i ended up instead of having a very cool flyer for our party
i literally had a one line that said what it said like dress as your own hero come come at what it
It was a come at once if possible.
It's the Sherlock Holmes quote.
Come at once if convenient.
If inconvenient, come all the same.
Ah, nice.
Yep.
That's about all I had, though.
We end on land and horror.
He does talk about zombie movies.
He has a couple of essays on those.
They were okay.
They were nice.
I don't have anything against them.
They're just okay.
No, I mean, what he's saying, like, again, it's interesting that he uses horror as a prism through which to make certain realities visible.
And what zombies do, like zombie movies, zombie is kind of like in the apocalypse movie genre where we survive a catastrophe and now certain moralities are stripped away.
And so the zombie apocalypse is we can kill unfettered.
The vengeance fantasy is unleashed.
And so some people like it's almost like you pray for catastrophe, the final fall of government, because then you're free.
And then act your impulses to do whatever you want.
Yeah.
Purge.
Just murder, murder, murder.
And he notes the specific thing that's interesting in light of kind of some things that are highlighted on Twitter every once in a while is that when the state is seen as protecting criminals from retaliation, people dream of vengeance through catastrophe.
so imagine like when that that ukrainian gal irina was killed like you see that these like
the person who killed her had been shielded from certain judges releasing them on bail constantly
and then we see that's a recurring pattern right and the reaction a lot of people have is like
burn it all down yeah like vengeance is so critical to human notions of justice that
the whole justice system has got to go if it can't do this basic thing and so people are willing to
yeah like the zombie apocalypse becomes kind of a revenge fantasy at that point like we can load
our rifle and go out there and enact what we need to do so yeah yeah but you want them to suffer
you don't want to be zombies because it won't hurt you want to be alive that yeah that that
kind of unleashes though any last moral compunction we have by making them like unfeeling unthinking
fodder for our vengeance yeah yeah that's a good point yeah he's got a little numerology on here
a little three three he's way into yeah um that used to be when outsideness was his twitter handle
he had a digital clock with three three three on it um that that was his old thing so six nine damn
good time he's always been and still is into when he was on tucker carlson that was brought up or
not he when somebody was on tucker carlson kind of throwing shade at land um they were it kind of
went into land as i think an influence on silicon valley trying to summon demons because he's into
this numerology and i mean the thing with land it's it's all just like a vector for stimulating
thought is how i see it i mean philosophy is an initiation into thought a lot of these um
And ways to think through probabilistic methodologies, like reducing things to numbers and the ways to use randomness to incite creativity.
I think, I don't know if I'm framing this really well, but I understand, like a lot of people use the tarot for that reason, that you can throw a set of cards and get a new random constellation of facts to stimulate thought in a new direction, right?
Yeah. And this is the definition of philosophy that you gave. It's like philosophy is the thing that makes you think.
Yeah, exactly.
So I don't know enough about that side of Land's project, though, to talk about it, which hasn't stopped me in the past at all.
Yeah, me neither. Ever.
Yeah.
He's a real good guy.
Land, you hear him talk on podcasts, and you can tell when somebody is just, like, quote, unquote, a good dude.
And he sees a good dude.
Like, I love a dude who's got like, you know, their own freak philosophy and they're willing to just like let it all out stylistically and go out to whatever excess is necessary to say what is necessary without fear, with courage.
He does that and then he comes on a podcast and just like just so kind and nice and a normal dude.
Yeah.
Yeah, bravery is really, I mean, one way you can think about it is like bravery is a need or is not having the need to be understood.
Yeah, that's really good.
It's really brave, I think, to tackle these subjects because he, yeah, he just, I mean, first he points out the stuff about the cathedral that makes it verboten to talk about these subjects.
And then he talks about them because you're not beholden to those things.
You're not beholden to the rules that are being imposed on you by the system that's ratcheting out of control, downward in a spiral, or hopefully upward, who knows.
But yeah, nickel and xenosystems.
That's all I got.
Yeah, that's a fit.
It's been a fun discussion.
Yeah.
I loved his book.
I loved his blog back when it was operational.
And the next thing we have to do with some indeterminate point in the future, he has a book-length essay called Cryptocurrent, which is about Bitcoin as philosophy.
Yeah.
And it's like Bitcoin as transcendental critique.
So we were talking about the way that Kant did philosophy was to talk about what conditions make experience possible, something like that.
And Land talks about Bitcoin as one of the conditions that makes an experience of reality possible.
So basically he uses Bitcoin as a way to critique, as a form of thinking in cryptocurrency.
But if you think this is dense, cryptocurrency is a difficult read.
I've worked through it a little bit with some AI assistance.
It's really good, but it would take concerted effort.
I like conserting my effort.
I like conserving my effort, too.
I'm about to go do that by laying down in bed.
So are you.
We've both got days tomorrow that we've got to get to.
It is.
That is very true.
So thank you for this discussion.
It was a lot of fun.
Once again, nobody got shirtless.
Thank you for tuning in to your fifth-tier Bitcoin podcast.
I'm Lucas, that's Grant.
We've really enjoyed our time with you.