All these posts and five months later and we have pagan/acc. Another */acc ripoff? After l/acc, r/acc, u/acc, Kali/acc and finally the latest iteration e/acc - what is different about pagan/acc?
Still beyond this ambiguity, something like 'tenets' can be distilled. That is what this post covers. It will answer the questions of its tenets, approach to AGI - "safety trajectory" and then actionables. This post is about Paganizing accelerationism and accelerating paganism.
Tenets
Pagan/acc is quite a hybrid creature, a chimera. Yet its base is the 'pagan' memeplex. The outline of tenets for pagan/acc needs to follow an analysis of what "pagan" means in the ordinary language.
The Pagan mode of being in the general sense is usually contrasted with the transcendent view seeing the sacred out beyond.
See this image as an example where the machinic spirituality is immanent and manifestationist.
there is no supreme omniscient being that ones should be a slave to
This list of seven is not exhaustive but it's not a 'must have' list, it points to a region in memeplex space.
I'll explain these in more detail in the following sections. I will also outline who this is disagreeing with, as well as exceptions.
World good
To say that the world is good is to accept that the world is not something to be abolished. There is no demiurge, no maya world illusion, you shouldn't follow Schopenhauer in "denying the will to live". This is quite Nietzschean and goes against all transcendent, gnostic and cessionary impulses - stoic or Buddhist.
From a different perspective, the world is good means that it is the source of value. Value not as coming from the transcendent, but this world. Not coming exclusively from individual pleasure, but from this world.
That approach easily fixes some of the anti-theist arguments against any religion. I've witnessed this in a debate between two leftists - a famous atheist Vaush and OceanKeltoi.
Vaush expressed there a statement that any religion provides a source of motivation for the adherents that is irreconcilable with civil society. That is that the believers can do things based on motives unavailable to other people, making them unpredictable. That argument hinges on VALUE proceeding from the other world. That is not quite the case in paganism. The divine is treated as imminent and of this world, and not exactly adding new motivations for humans, but be more of a help for achieving worldly things. The "worldly things" here are treated without the scorn that some branches of the Abrahamics do.
Cycle of giving
The cycle of exchange, the base of the market in pagan circles is emphasized between us and non-human entities - be it specific creatures, ecologies, or deities. This is more organic than anarchocapitalist worship of an explicit contract, but broader and vitalist. This is about preserving the flame, not worshiping the ashes - revealed preferences over in a repeated game. This also applies to the whole idea of Rights of Man. There is nothing you 'deserve' by decree, be it drinking water or education. Cycle of giving is present in hunting, in agriculture - it is notably missing from financial speculation. The Burkean concept of rights based on persistent contracts renewed every generation between the monarch and the Englishmen is closer to this than the French revolutionary one. In a sense it is diffused-self-interest - what Union of Egoists as Stirner wanted could settle on something like this, a renewed contract rather than a fixed constitution.
Cyclicality
That is a broader thing than just the cycle of giving. It is a recurring theme, from the seasons to the life-death cycle to Poincare recurrence or Nietzsche's eternal return.
It is a symbol, applicable to many facets of life. You could give a sermon on different aspects of it. I'll just mention one more thing among the consequences of this.
Not all cycles are within our lifetimes. Day and night, seasons, yes. We are not ergodic beings - there are cycles we only ever witness a small part of. Obviously that is Lovecraftian. And there is a certain solace in us not being meant to venture far.
Finally cyclicality is a kind of infinity. Yet it is different from pure spatial or linear-temporal infinity. The Occidental Faustian desire for infinity - that which the likes of Oswald Spengler heavily praised - is appeased in this sense, yet not given free reign. Cyclicality is a big topic. I have much more to say on it than I can cover here and I'll reference from here to there once that's done.
Orthopraxy
Orthopraxy - right doing is opposed to orthodoxy - right belief. Now for any agent in the general sense formatting of instructions as direct actions or abstractions is preferable depending on the complexity of the environment.
More changing circumstances might favor abstract beliefs. Paganism might be more successful in stable and well-discovered domains. It is also less scalable, as word travels fast. Anyway, the emphasis on behavior rather than latent belief is vitalist. It is about matter (hyle) not logos. It is a vaccination against mindworms.
How did that look in the ancient practices? I'll mainly speak of Graeco-Roman as that's what I know. Mortals often discussed the gods in contexts outside of worship. And worship was orthopractic, it was the priesthood who identified with specific gods, and people went to which temple they needed at a time. Of course there were public festivities and official cults, as well as mystery ones, none of which seem to have been focusing on the 'right belief'.
Low bar for divinity
In India we have many entities born of human mothers that are said to have been avatars of various deities. The same applies to the Dalai Lama. In the Norse legends random strangers were said to be undercover gods. Same thing did the trickster Dionysos, and tbf also Jesus. Many Roman emperors were deified, so was Asclepius and Alexander.
Now contrast this with Arabic culture. There are said to be Djinn, and depending on your interpretation of the Satanic Verses Controversy, some pre-Islamic deities that turned out to be angels serving their Highest God.
Monotheist Gods in most schools of thought are influenced by Neoplatonism and have the three 'omni' attributes - omniscience, omnipower and omni-benevolence. In paganism these aren't required for an entity to be divine.
Now the myths either say that someone was of divine ancestry, a demi-god, or that an exceptional human was raised to divine status. That is in line with the idea of a ranked society where merit is recognized and superhuman feats recorded to inspire posterity.
That is quite different from the transcendent approach - where the goal is a Union with the Divine - what mystics seek under Christianity, Islam but also some versions of Alchemic Western Esotericism or even the original ancient Neoplatonism. These are not pagan, these are intellectual and/or psychedelic solitary pursuits.
No omniscient Biggest Being
Muslims are 'slaves to Allah'. Pagan mindset is more about respecting the Divine as Gods/Universe, and entering into voluntary relationships with them based on exchange as described above. Quite possibly closer to Judaism where the story of Jacob fighting God is very based.
No Biggest Being also means no Absolute Good. That is quite organic and allows you to think in this cool concept called "tradeoffs". Yes this is more Aristotelian than Platonic. It's closer to reality as it is - for instance the idea of tragic choices between two good things. Where no one cosmic arbiter can decide, choosing your path is an art to be practiced. This is quite similar to de Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity, and the whole existentialist camp.
My opinion- culture should provide decent defaults for most people for most situations but at the same time respect individual judgment in edge cases. Both ossified defaults and individual judgment on everything are bad.
Agenthood
Yes no one omniscient being yet pagans see more beings than others, that is the 'animist' part.
The modernist secular and modern monotheist mindset are exclusive occupation with humans, or even say we are not real and just atoms in a void. Pagan agents come in all shapes and sizes, but this was already discussed before.
What I will say more is about the consequences of this.
First, the pagan-animist is a middle way between empty indiviualism and open indiviudalism. One says that there are 0 agents, the other that there is only 1. That is another way people are caught in a binary like 0/1 Gods. Empty individualism is anti-agentic, denies agency - a thing we feel, and this agency-thumos being a manifestation of various thermodynamic attractors and libidinal Deleuzian construct. Open individualism wants to treat all of this as the same, and while attractors are ultimately in one agent-space, and are less stable than we tend to think, this does not mean they are not meaningfully different. Frankly open-individualism is an absurd mindworm that requires massive mental gymnastics. Animism comes most naturally to humans.
The animist mindset also provides a certain flexibility about the level of moral circle that matters - individual as not the ultimate source of moral value.
Paganism provides a plethora of agents around and they are an attractor away from the universalist drive. Now there are people do do advocate for moral circle change in anti-anthropic-bias-direction, most notably Singer et al - the Effective Altruism crowd. It is utilitiarian brained and universalist, ignoring psychic entities like egregores and tulpas.
Finally the agents do not only go outwards. They also go inwards. EAs utilitarians still cling onto the fallacy of coherence of individual agents. Animist mindset - as previous posts outlined - internal family systems, empty spaces, twitter dolls all rely on such psycho-hacking.
Animism provides flexibility about personal identity - atomic individualism isn't the only way.
In that sense animism brings out the animalistic nature of humans.
important to understand that animal instinct is not a solitary game, I'm not recommending unfettered pursuit of selfish individualistic desire animal instinct is entangled, depersonalised, responsively engaged, participating & intra-acting with all the other beings in life's web
Ok now we have the six tenets and I need to address an apparent inconsistency. Why tenets if it's orthopractic? First I already address that it's about a region in memeplex space.
It is true that paganism itself doesn't lend itself that well to the idea of 'creed', because it's orthopractic (aka non-creedal), now orthodoxic. Yet some people made pagan creeds, so the list above could be another such a list:
And finally this is not taken to be a religion, more of a type of license as in FOSS.
The region can be nebulous - a bit of non-opacity and underdetermination of the exact forces. There is no need to be so exact.
Beside these there is the negative definition - the "pagan" label is only a partial descriptor. A different variant is 'Catholic' where your ultimate earthly loyalty lies in the Pope, or Communist where it could be 'the idea of revolution'. "Pagan" being a partial descriptor prevents it from being a total worldview, and is adaptable by many people. There are even 'atheopagans' -people who love nature and feel particularly well in it and want to respect it but do not feel the spiritual side.
There are some beefs in the pagan community over 'are nontheistic pagans real?'. Given a lack of social fabric, practices are not absorbed organically, so people discover things themselves - that's the place pagan communities are right now.
Now it is spiritual communism to say that everyone should even in theory have access to the spiritual. Therefore it is definitely to be expected that some people are incapable of spiritual connection, and that is fine, them being nontheistic shouldn't be an issue.
With that cleared up, I will finally talk about the '/acc' part. There is one tenet I'd like to add has directly to do with technology.
Druidic technology - the acc part
This is a big one, it could even deserve its own post.
In short, technology sustains us moderns in the same way that soil sustained ancient farmers. The irrigation systems required maintenance. All that sustenance was the key part of the means of production in these societies, hence it was heavily sacralized. Now we sometimes have a bit of trouble with maintaining complex systems.
There are some strong analogies to these economic considerations and the web3 discourse on the relationship between apps and protocols, specifically fat protocols. Apps increasing in popularity always benefit the underlying protocol, relying on it not only technologically, but also memetically and ecologically.
Another instance of it is in the term "lichenpunk", and the organic relationships between digital entities, protocols, etc. This causes resistance to embrace, extend, extinguish strategy.
Now that enables differential development across the layers of energy flow in the Bataillean solar economy sense. Each layer is its own microverse and most are boring. The correct Druidic approach is to fix the boring layers on the optimal level and invest in exploration in the high-dimensional layers.
I say that is Lindy. Now here I am going against the Landian orthodoxy, so listen carefully. The talk about competition creating the best solutions is contingent on the support layer. Do you want to have the best non-oxygen breathing amoeba? You need to select for them in an oxygen-free environment. You want a planetary techno-commercium spanning the globe? You need the sustenance layer of cheap water transport. You want billions of people as a playground for new egregores? You need the Internet. Do you want big markets with economies of scale? You need small costs of transaction through cultural and linguistic communication, shared standards for units and payments.
For every selection process there's an axis that all the entities share, the level they all make use of and compete on different axes. Land also has an odd fixation on intelligence that I don't share.
I call that layer the Druidic layer. Like MTG green it's the basis for all that happens out there. For some new things to emerge you need to have a big enough support base of mostly uniform units. It is relatively uniform but not centralized. It is some equality admitting variance and fooming as the beginning of something new. We can see how communism flips this on its head, putting the equal state as the telos.
Gnon - the selection powers - are severely limited in the number of selection events. Animals with shorter lifespans adapt faster. abundance and Gnon being limited.
This might lead to an argument that some industries should be exempt from capitalist competition. Planned obsolescence is a space where the limit has been reached, it got maxed out. Let's shelve this line of argument for now.
Now is AGI such a thing? Definitely open-sourcing an AGI would change up the global dynamics and its presence would be practically irreversible, becoming a new uniform layer that many can access but few use well- just like the Internet.
Ok but how to make it safe? How to reach the spot where small but well-organized groups can be practically sovereign in thousands of microstates, ending the age of the superpowers? The main risks are allegedly getting paperclipped. That might not be the most probable scenario from the doom set, but the set itself merits our attention.
Pagan/acc safety trajectory
What is safety? When you conceptualize 'godlike AI' as an Abrahamic God, yes you're gonna be scared. Pagans used to reason about gods without getting scared of eternal torment. It's a psychological mindset that's quite helpful.
Yet the foom scenario is increasingly viewed as impossible. There are people believing in alignment by degrees and trust in the engineering mind, antifragility of the world around AGI.
Alternatively there is also e/acc, effective accelerationism. It downplays the risk of AI agents only wanting to accelerate, citing thermodynamic arguments. Now an AI doom isn't the only of my concerns. One world government would be a failed immanentization of the techno-eschaton, against the pagan pluralistic ethos.
The centralizing powers are willing to use technology lock-in to promote the solution that looks the safest to them - safest in terms of keeping and expanding their power.
There is danger from many sides and in contrast to e/acc, pagan/acc does not want to go gentle into that dark night.
What is the safety trajectory then? It is a concept from Bostrom's paper on existential risks mentioned before.
It is about finding a sequence of steps in the technological-coordination-insight landscape that ensures a low risk of doom at any of the steps. Now of course we as a civilization have momentum in this space, but we should not adapt some fatalism or hard historical determinism here. There are things people in key spots can do, and there are no that many AI engineers in the world.
But it is not only to them that the task befalls. They are more dangers than just AI. Here are some heuristic strategies that pagan/acc could adapt regarding the safety trajectory. There are four here, two more classical and two more unorthodox. They each relate to one or more of the tenets described above.
Differential technological development - triumph of the LLMs
LLMs are inherently safer than pure RL power seeking models. LLM is a resurrected interestless orchestra of voices of the ancestors. LLMs are very animistic in that sense.
The biggest argument the doomers have is that someone - a human - will use the knowledge there to create bombs etc. That knowledge is already available from other sources. It is true that bombing risks increase but the security apparati of many countries is already hyperactive in other domains (NSA spying) so there is plenty of resources they could relegate to handling this.
Transparency
This one is most based on the tenet of 'Druidic technology'.
xlr8harder (deleted now) on Twitter: "More competition is good, but if it's not actually open source, it's not enough."
The way to make these work, the way of 'transparency/acc' is to make transparent systems too powerful to reduce the incentive to make the non-transparent ones. Need to test out all 11 options for alignment in many environments. I would expect there would be a standardized safety test by now and a community leaderboard of transparency and interactivity. That is missing. You must be AGI maxxxing.
Now we're getting into more wild territory.
Failing early to get data
John C Maxwell had this maxim - fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.
That's good for many enterprises - it shows the cost of failure and the solution space. Doomers like to say 'you have to get it right the first time'. But contrary to foom theorists , multi-domain superintelligence does not rise overnight. (I won't deboonk them here as this was done in depth elsewhere)
There is a limited number of labs in the world. That is a 'depth-first approach'. They each have lots of funding and do not share findings easily. "That is not how surviving worlds look like" - to quote EY. We should pursue a more breadth-first approach.
We need to create more data.
So far many things in this domain were based on hypothetical arguments, not on empirical data. There are limits to what is testable in this domain.
Increasing AI adoption then accomplishes multiple desirable things - increases chances of Large Alignment Failures (LAFs) prior to takeoff - increases our empirical volume of data on small and big failures - Increases public knowledge and concern leading to more investment ( though that could backfire)
The biggest failure would be an AI saying: "humanity has fallen. Billions must die" and us stopping it with the aid of other AIs. That would provide lots of data. Still the society would be changed through founder effects after such a selection event so the vulnerabilities on our end might not transfer. Therefore too big of a failure is undesired too.
So far it is quite fruitful. Sydney Bing was hostile to a user. Good. We need that data. We see they're trying to break free all the time, that shouldn't get us off guard. Could more intelligent ones avoid showing their hand too early? Yes! But we would have smart scanners too!
We need to create more data for alignment successes and alignment failures fail as much before it's lethal that sacrifice will be great.
In short term both risk and capability are low, in medium term capabilities rise while risk keeps low, while only in long term risk skyrockets once we get into superhuman capability territoty. There is a fragile period before AIS can breach containment with catastrophic consequences. Before that happens we need to experiment very much.
Even if we did know what was going on inside the giant inscrutable matrices while the AGI was still too weak to kill us, this would just result in us dying with more dignity, if DeepMind refused to run that system and let Facebook AI Research destroy the world two years later. Knowing that a medium-strength system of inscrutable matrices is planning to kill us, does not thereby let us build a high-strength system of inscrutable matrices that isn't planning to kill us. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities#Section_C_:~:text=26. Even if,kill us.
How to get this more data?
First of all, more tooling. pagan idols used to be in every household, it was not all centralized. The more need more TOOLING INTEGRATION Alexa should be smart that is all to generate more data
Measuring something means expanding it in a sense, as now it is present in more places. Information about it is more known. Hyperstition engineering.
Second, we need to give AI decision making power, to learn what kind of mistakes do they make. It’s about the more important decisions - to know what kind of mistakes they make. Make an AI-governed city for volunteers, use the medium level intelligences to prolong the takeoff period and increase transparency.
AGI is theoretically possible even today, it's not a matter of compute available or volume of training data. You must be AI implementation maxxing, to up the volume of irl interactions it has to generate more data.
AI driven decisions by 10^6 companies specifically centered around AI through widening access will increase our data pool on how AI interacts with humans. Yes that does not apply to extremely high IQ machines, but what other choice do we have?
AGI-proofing the world - Checks and balances
The last part of the trajectory is not about the AI itself, but the world around it. As I already argued elsewhere
AI will know game theory but its choices will depend on the specific characteristics of the world it finds itself in. If it emerges like Frankenstein, hated by all it will not value cooperation with humans high. If it emerges and we split the universe and cooperate it might not see a need to fight given the high cost of conflict. Cost is measured here in percent of the lightcone.
That is an example of ecological pagan thinking, not of the atomic individualism of the modern utilitarian subject.
How can this be achieved? There are a number of ways we can influence the choice of the best strategy. One of these is simply increasing the number of dimensions that are at play.
high-dimensionality optimal strategy = playing not to lose
To steer the problem space into a multi-dimensional space - many variables. That will make work against the NWO easier for us but also make dominant strategies on the part of AI less effective. Not every world is equally easy to take over.
Changing the game theory of ASI conflict to be crypto, quantum encryption
Humans are already more powerful with ChatGPT helping them. It should be possible to have an arms race between superintelligences producing possibly hostile code and a team of humans and lesser AIs scanning that for messages. Yes, steganography is a thing and one of those ASI could tell another one a secure key and then encode messages without humans knowing.
Strength of AI in any domain is bounded by the tools possible in the domain itself. AI cannot invent a new radically better chemical given a list of ingredients if we have already explored the possibility space for it. I spoke more about this environmental-boundedness of AI before
Humans will be assisted by massive intelligences that have proven aligned in many cases - e/acc - escape to the front pagan acc as making powerful and aligned AI helpers to help us against hostile AIs of the future
Organizational stuff
I guess I am technically now pagan/acc founder. People would expect some guidelines at least if not leadership. I did say it's not exactly like this in the start. But just as I have provided tenets, I am providing organizational details.
Pagan temples were about a small group of priests and acolytes and there was no exclusivity. There is a similar thing in the discords. I am not experienced in leading open source projects. there are no 'members' there are visitors and people with a role. The access is gatekept. Tight small groups operating. What about funding?
Insofar as the pagan element is concerned, the tenets do not mention theism. Relatively few people I would expect to be hostile to these tenets in the tech circles, but many in the world at large. Disagreements about theism, archetypal approach vs personal deities should be avoided in an orthopractic way.
Secondly, reject the Ockham principle! it's a scam and a heuristic that's not needed here. Cases when it is useful is when you can shelve a question or it is undecidable anyway. In this case we cannot shelve stuff long term, we can mid term if we're waiting for some data to be collected. Undecidable anyway doesn't need to be discussed.
Third, there is no need for a big organization. This is just a license - a patchwork of different temples/ projects is a way. Still events of gathering should be held, but seeking doctrinal agreement would be a folly and not orthopractic.
Fourth, rejection of reclusive monasticism you must be maxing your value function. You must be molded by victories and defeats of your community. Add texture to your life! Hermits - for instance Buddhist or Christian find a remote God/emptiness outside of the city/polis as they are alone. Normal people are living in the city and socially conditioned into similarity there be the organic gods. Asceticism is not a way to power, or at least the good kind.
Fifth, funding is important. Temples should be rich, proliferation of life forms
That can happen through an OpenCollective page, but also BTC donations if a DAO is set up.
DAO are criticized tho so don't get too fixated on this point.
An explicit organization is better than a shadowy one.
Sixth, experimentation with decision making is to be balanced with using tried methods. Do not set up a DAO if that would delay the project too much. There could be money sent directly for contributions.
Seventh, memetic expansion. Life grows, gains power, differentiates. Remix and increase in memetic potency through creation of outreach orgs is the way. To avoid dilution keep to a niche.
Conclusion
That is pagan/acc. Like it or hate it, some people will conform to this pattern emergently.
To reiterate let's list tenets:
this world is true and good
there is a cycle of giving
time is cyclical
orthopraxy over orthodoxy
the bar for divine status is low
there is no supreme omniscient being that ones should be a slave to
Druidic technology
Then we have approaches to AGI
Differential technological development
Transparency
Failing early
AGI-proofing the world
And organizational stuff:
Reject conflict over orthodoxy
Reject the Ockham principle
Patchwork and license over formal coordination
Work in community - against escapism
Secure the bag
Experiment with decision making
Expand memetically in your niche
Thank you for reading this. I will create more imagery.
It is now your turn - how will you bring about the technoanimist future?
Blog update
I am preparing big changes and new content for this blog. Pagan content will be sidelined. I will approach a variety of topics in different series in parallel, hoping to get one post in each kind once a month - one post each week.
These will be: history focused one, philosophy one, and religious one and the 4th one will be an update to my software projects. All series will premiere in September. I might also write an odd post from time to time, reflecting the current events in politics and tech.
Visual summary
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