—slime mold—

PUMO:̸̧̤̥̋͊͒̆͊̕3̶̠͎̹̬̰̍̄ @EmojiPan , William Gillis @rechelon

PUMO:̸̧̤̥̋͊͒̆͊̕3̶̠͎̹̬̰̍̄ @EmojiPan

Much confusion has arised about what #SlimeMoldTwitter (Green circle) even is about, and it’s really funny. I have no interest in controlling the meme, but I have an interest in clarity, so I will detail, once, how this came to be, the questions no one asked.

The whole thing is rather non-linear, but it could be said that it all started with Black Cat (For a while known as The Anarcho-Accelerationist) pondering on wheter capitalism could become Conscious.

Listen to Slime Mold Sing a Song txt audio

The idea was that human desire wasn’t yet entirely produced by it, but it could be, and once it was it would go from an unconscious intelligence that operates with externally recieved values, to a conscious one which created its own.

Cyborg Nomade stepped in and that, eventually, leads us to this:

Consciousness could be a phase, a blink of self-awareness surrounded by two cones of darkness extending towards the deep past and future. Seriously consider it.

It was some time after this that I met Vanse, and even later that mentioned this and she recommended me Blindsight. Blindsight makes (More or less) the same argument, including the one about the problems of centralization.It was some time after this that I met Vanse, and even later that mentioned this and she recommended me Blindsight. Blindsight makes (More or less) the same argument, including the one about the problems of centralization.

What if humans are the dodos, and the humans are acephalous assemblages of unconscious subsystems which coordinate without agreement?. In reference to Blindsight, this realization was nicknamed the “Black Scramblerpill”.

Cyborg Nomade holds the black scramblerpill, the scrambler in this case would be specialized AI coordinating through cryptocurrency in annonymous networks.

But he didn’t arrive to that from Blindsight, rather, from libidinal materialism and blind brain theory. The dividde between libmat and neorat seems to be mostly about the primacy of either Desire (As an unconscious will) or Reason (As consciouss metacognition).

Neuroscience seems to support, to some degree, the libidinal materialist notion of consciousness as a puppet of blind thought. Decisions are pre-conscious, as is much of what the brain does.

Blind Brain Theory explains the inability of consciousness to understand itself as an inability to understand its outer borders, tracking environments requires resources which themselves cannot be tracked.

There is also the PRISM hypothesis, consciousness arising to mediate conflict of skeletomotor coordination (This part some of you know, I will go back a it later), and thus being theory replaceable by another mechanism.

Similar case with consciousness as attention distribution.

However, it’s not that conscious choice is fake, it’s just not as in control as it appears to itself. It’s effect on actions is real but indirect (“Lagged”), but it percieves itself as making every decision.

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William Gillis @rechelon

Why I think it’s important to focus on power as an value system and paradigm is that there are specific mechanisms by which someone temporarily swaps from one point of view to another and specific maneuvers that enable power in particular. This is cuz the mind is an assemblage.

While the brain has a single utility function by virtue of it having an energy potential, it can be loosely decomposed into a bunch of clusters of perspective (values+models) that rise and fall in relative influence upon the emergent singular thread of conscious narrative/action.

Who you are when you wake up is different from who you are on a carb crash after lunch. Different desires and motivations get different weightings, this can come different models of the world and narratives about it, others, & yourself. One moment you hate X the next you love X.

Things like moods, addictions, & fixations however are different from narrative clusters, although the latter can emerge from them, one of the things that make the latter especially powerful is their capacity to influence conscious deliberation via explanations of other desires.

It’s a trivial fact that most on-the-fly choices we make aren’t particularly deliberative, our conscious experience of them is a sense-making construction after the fact. Subprocesses, heuristics, habits, impulses, kinda stochastically fire and can happen into causal influence.

However this doesn’t in fact mean that conscious choice is bullshit. Conscious deliberation is how we can order and sort through various conflicting impulses. We resolve conflicts by elevating some over others, often with narrative scaffolding, to lasting impacts.

A couple years ago I went on a rather severe diet change that required conscious overruling of long supreme impulses, this happened by consciously reflecting on impulses, dragging them into awareness and arranging + marshaling other impulses or desires against them.

The diet was not a matter of single instances of conscious choice — those were mostly illusory — but rather the narrative reorderings brought about by conscious reflection and deliberation that made eg craving terrible shit excommunicated as a rogue sub agent.

When my lower brain/body cried out for X and it was easy to acquire I would on some level start to go for it, but then dissonance would happen in my conscious narrative. It would be hard to construct an explanation for why I was going for X.

For a rogue subagent to take the reigns it requires an consciously parsible explanation for everything else in your brain jockeying with it. At the very least cuz other impulses are going to affect action at points and need to not shatter the singular conscious thread.

In normal life we accumulate a variety of narrative structures that guide day-to-day decisions. eg One big quest that other things are subordinate to! Or a self-image. Or an exemplar we seek to emulate. Etc. These can and do rise and fall in contest w/ each other.

Someone might have “I’m a caring person” because situations of visceral empathy resonated itself into self-narrative, or “I’m a snarky grump” arrived at through feedback with social norms that rewarded that personality as cool/acceptable into becoming character.

These metastructures rise and fall, but particularly analytic and self-reflective people create fierce internal evolutionary pressures towards metastructures with more meta capacity and explanatory scope, which can lock in harder and last longer.

(There’s another direction of cognitive strategies by which a metastructure can lock in hard, and it’s aggressive hostility towards intellectual engagement/analysis/etc.)

Anyway, because the universe has structure so too is there structure to the values/models/metanarratives/etc that rise to the top.

eg a mind that doesn’t pursue accurate models will get surprisingly eaten by a large friendly cat with cool stripes.

Now there’s a whole saga here about how emergent instrumental values (like accurately percieving the world) can slide or bootstrap into core values. I’ve written on this but let’s just take it for granted here. text

What I want to emphasize is that the systems that tend to win out do so by sliding towards valuing maximizing options. This is an area of exploding research. But there’s two paths to it: maximize accessible configuration states overall or “to me.”

Is this agent operating in a positive sum social context or a negative sum one? Different contexts can breed different approaches. But the latter implicitly requires a demarcation of a static self. Which is intensely arbitrary.

Once someone is on the “maximize options FOR ME” track it’s natural for them to try to instrumentalize other agents. Slaves can provide you options you couldn’t get on your own. However very rapidly several dynamics emerge:

1) To control slaves requires curtailing their capacity to create possibilities outside your prediction or that mess w/ your control apparatus. Net choice decreases, and also you often get locked into spiraling constraint loops.

2) The arbitrariness of the “self” is a weakness to both planning and the persistent frictionless supremacy of the metanarrative structure. You need to suppress or fence in both internal cognition AND external prompts/engagements.

This means that the selfish choice-maximizer ends up collapsing to the previously parenthetically mentioned anti-engagement cognitive strategy. Not necessarily all at once, but it’s ultimately infectious.

What we’re describing is the path of power. More diversified desires end up collapsing to capacity / possibility maximization because it’s a universal currency to achieve various desires, then this gets transmuted into dominate and control, then into borders and ossification.

Most people most of the time are not raw sociopathic monsters consciously out for nothing but power, you end up looking like Ted Cruz, no one will play ball with you. However, most people are also at least occasionally in thrall to such perspective.

What often happens is the ideology of power ends up operating as a lurker metanarrative in the brain that, when it emerges, has permissions and fitness capable of demolishing and overruling the usually dominant metanarratives and seizing conscious control.

Jane in Accounting has a conscious narrative usually determined by frames where eg she’s a “gentle presence”, etc, and these self-images or narratives are usually sufficient to mediate and resolve the lowest level conflicting impulses and desires.

But then she gets fired by her friend fucking her over for a promotion and a cold, forgotten presence leaks back into charge. She remembers things she almost always forgets or suppresses. A crystal clarity seems to emerge…

This new narrative has an explanation for her usual self, the one that doesn’t remember, that chooses not to look at this colder self narrative. That usual self, those metanarratives, are LIES, says the colder paradigm. Useful lies you told yourself.

The cold vicious metanarrative ascending the throne of consciousness in her brain now provokes a conscious narrative very different than she usually has, running through mental circuits she forgot she had. It tells her this is the one real her, the apex/alpha metanarrative.

And how can her other metanarratives overrule this cold power-oriented metanarrative. It knows them, it has explanations for them, whereas they have no explanation for it.

They don’t even like looking at it, they try to forget it, avoid its remnants.

And so Jane in Accounting plots her revenge, her counter-move, viciously instrumentalizing people around her. Deviating from the habits and indeed the entire order of desires she normally keeps, if she has another ethical compass or ordering it’s muted.

There are, however, exceptions.

The other path requires turning the acid of reflection, the hyper evolutionary chamber of metaconsideration, upon itself until the self is revealed to be completely unstable, and the path of power a long decline into death.

This does not involve abandoning ordering desires — one always has a structured order of desires and framing models — to abandon desire structuring, to dismiss them as spooks — is just to undermine one’s capacity to recognize and evaluate internal tensions.

The problem with power lies not in the fact that it coheres as a universal metanarrative, but that it’s a broken, weak, metanarrative crippled and eventually led to ruin by the incoherence of “self”.

There is another path besides incoherent dissolution and the death spiral of the power metanarrative. This is the path of freedom for everyone of not trying to maximize “your” choices, but rather to maximize everyone’s choices, overall possibility.

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PUMO:̸̧̤̥̋͊͒̆͊̕3̶̠͎̹̬̰̍̄ @EmojiPan
In that sense, its endless recursion is not a waste of resources by-product of a simpler function, but what allows the reconfiguration of desire (Even if the order of events it’s not what it percieves), a Slack generator for the molochian process neural competition.

This was later nicknamed the “White Scramblerpill”

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Every day I’m getting more convinced that Unconsciouss Intelligence is smarter. But is it an enemy within to fear? Or our greatest ally? Self-automation frees awareness to dedicate itself to anything but currently defined “Work”, smartly applied this is a slack-positive loop, armonization of desire to the point of effortless self-improvement as an alternative to classical discipline: the tyranny of consciousness over desire.
Consciousness can mediate and micromanage, but also go meta, rearrange, let go, and go more meta.

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Vanse @VansianMagic
Is this the scramblerpill?

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PUMO:̸̧̤̥̋͊͒̆͊̕3̶̠͎̹̬̰̍̄ @EmojiPan
Yeah, though it’s not about renouncing conscioussness itself but but using it to manage ever more meta processes of behaviour. If qualia is just thought looking at itself, as Blindsight suggest, then this way it wouldn’t ever outlive is usefulness or become a parasitic useless micromanager.

So in a way this is the “white scramblerpill”. Can’t know if it’s right but it was inspired by some methods of self-improvement alternative to classical discipline.

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However this still faces the problem of centralization, why would consciousness still persist outside enbodied cognition (The type of cognition that needs to arrive at a single agreement/decision)?.

And here comes the core of the issue: If consciousness is indeed synonymous with the centralization of cognition, then the decentralization of cognition implies its dissapearence.

But if consciousness is the Legibility/Representation of cognitive processes, then, while it’s obvious while centralized cognition needs consciousness, the opposite is not necessarily true. If it’s not the implication is the Slimemind.

The Slimemind is the alternative to the Blindmind, Metacognition without centralized/unitary decision-making, mutual legibility of subsystems (And thus general internal legibility of the Mind) without the need for agreement. Exit (But also Voice).

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There is the argument that consciousness might be maladaptive, even parasitic to some degree, a centralized system that could eventually be outcompeted. It’s possible, but I wonder if ‘consciousness’ in this sense might be referring to things that might or might

not be necessarily tied together. There is consciousness as a centralized system that coordinates conflicting impulses, consciousness as a Noun (This is “us”). And there is consciousness as “a certain loop of thought aware of both it’s outside and itself”

consciousness as Verb (This is “qualia”). It might be possible that the radical decentralization of information processing, the “Anarchy of Thoughts”, comes not with the elimination of qualia but it’s equally radical decentralization into egoless forms.

The ‘self’ seems clearly like a coordinator, a thoughtform that solidifies a coherent narrative and shields it from the insurrection of “intrusive thoughts”, that coherent narrative can then be internalized by unconsciouss intelligence, which is better at the execution of

This process of thought becoming coherent and shielding itself from stochastic intrusivity is easier to see in the process of tulpa development, and the host might as well be just the oldest, strongest, default tulpa.

In this self-organizing centralization of thought there is a clear role for qualia, but it’s not so clear if qualia is the same as this process, or intrinsically tied, or it’s consequence. It might just be (part of) its cause.

Because qualia seems to persist after the dissipation of the self, in the process of ego death, or the more permanent egocide (It’s unclear however if a singlet can do the later, leaving their body in a scrambler-like state).

Qualia, if conceptualized as an ability (Thought-Recursion), it’s clearly useful for coordination, but maybe not limited to only that. Because fundamentally it’s the ability of thought to look at itself which allows it to change in a more complex and context-aware way than mere automated reaction.

You are more efficient at what you do when you don’t know what you are doing, but expanding the Choice over what you do requires that awareness.

Unconsciouss pure reactivity is faster and cognitively cheaper, but much more enslaved to deterministic macro-dynamics than the more chaotic loop of vigilance. Their failure mode is the Ant Mill. text

Just like ants generally avoid the Ant Mill, it might be possible for an organism to have highly complex and intelligent thought that never loops into itself and avoids cognitive ant mills most of the time. But nonetheless, how do you stop the ant mill?.

One way is centralized decision-making, but that comes with great costs of efficiency. Another, costly in resources instead, would require every ant to be able to, to some degree, model themselves within the larger system and understand the context of their actions.

An insurrection is called an army of generals because the discordinated attack it’s actually an internalization and fragmentation of strategy, not it’s abandonment. The whole attack it’s not (Centrally) consciouss, but net consciousness (Context Aware Choice) increases.

It might as well be that the ego is a limiter of consciousness, which keeps thought-recursion in a coherent and organized form. Necessary for the hardware limitations of the human.

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The Slimemind essentially posits a separation between Unified Will (A product of morphological limitations) and Self-Awareness (Recursive modeling of systems, good for the reasons that having ever more accurate knowledge is good).

This has important implications, the Blindmind points towards a future of irreflective whatever-maximizer coordinating through blockchain, with an ever more local, fragmented understanding. The Slimemind points towards a transparent world, local action global knowledge.

Anarcho-Annonymous VS Anarcho-Panopticon.

The rival of Slime Twitter (Green circle) (Rorschach Twitter ⚫ ? (?)) remains appropiately invisible and unaware of its role. I would characterize the black scramblerpill, only ocascionally consciously embraced, as perhaps the strongest, sharpest defense of Negative Freedom.

Because the point, in Land, in CN, etc, is an escape From accountability as the maximal expression of intelligence. Fragmentation, Ofuscation, Refusal of Agreement. In short, freedom as separation, illegibility.

This freedom as fragmentation ties to the Hoppean and Neocameralist endorsement of monarchy (Precisely because it cuts social feedback, identified as communism), itself a derivation from the right libertarian identification of freedom as sharp simple delineations.

The feedback in which this position is interested is the feedback of war, and more specifically war between cleanly demarcated selves, Land’s problem with the Paperclip Maximizer (If he assumed it was possible) would be the existence of only one.

No special objection to the existence of multiple x-maximizers battling each other in an eternal arms race, this maximizes intelligence. But deep communication, merging and compatibilization of goals, and emergent generality is seen as communism.

And the characterization of consciousness as a mere puppet of the Outside, is technically but trivially true. As an attack on reason, it is a cover for immediatism, the valuation of immediate desire as more real than examined desire.

No need to think, the outside thinks through me, do what thou wilt and let go (Grill).

Ok but enough about that, how did all this become compressed as (Green circle) ?.

Well, thanks to the gorillas of course.

I explained to @kgorilla5 the PRISM hypothesis and its implication of domination existing even within our skulls, and this being an example of it being temporarily justified by morphological limitations.

He then went to the people saying “no justified hierarchies” and asked them about the hierarchy of the skeleto-motor coordination system, hilarity ensues. So I made this meme:

Some time after that @kgorilla5 and a few others came up with #SlimeMoldTwitter and its memetic potential quickly outclassed the theoretical origins to get transmitted. So everyone got a vague idea that wasn’t exactly inaccurate and sounded cool, but was vague.

Mention to @kgorilla10 for suggesting the green circle.

original thread on twitter