_________________________________________________________________
Reality cracking
Getting deeper into reality cracking
Comments about "An Essay Attempting to Justify the Relationship
Between Code Cracking and Reality Cracking"
by <predator>
(16 September 1998)
_________________________________________________________________
Well, this is another example of the funny 'time warping' effects on
our deep deep web. I published Curious George's essay in february 1997
and the first global answer, this one by <predator>, comes in
september 1998, more than one and a half years later... whatd'you
say? The web seems to be in another time continuum alltogether,
doesn't it?
I'll leave you now with <predator>'s observations, read (if I may
suggest, at least two times, you'll thank me for this tip) and enjoy
(and add if needs be). Of course be aware of the fact that this kind
of reality cracking is the most "philosophical" one, as opposed to the
more 'concrete' anti-advertisement essays, and you may well be one of
those skeptical souls that feel the irresistible impulse to check if
their wallet is still there everytime they hear somebody speaking
about "soul" or "meme"
:-)
Just kidding... there is a considerable depth inside <predator>'s
rantings (as well as inside Curious George's original ones) and when I
read this kind of stuff I get the strange feeling that we humble
crackers and code reversers (or "reversalists" as <predator> calls us)
are on the eve of unprevedible philosophical discoveries... could it
be that in this world software and life are already so indissolubly
bound that investigating the first you may find some of the answers
for the oldest questions of our human race?
You may want to read first the original essay by red Curious George
without <predator>'s interpolations
And now prepare for a very interesting, intriguing and deep lecture:
reality cracking at its highest peaks!
_________________________________________________________________
Submission to +Fravia's Reality Cracking essays.
Who am I? I am <predator> .:. Reverse the universe .:.
Replies from Sep 05 1998 (under edit.com)
I use SuSE Linux and have Mess-dog6.2, I have staunchly refused to run any
(a)version of M$-gui OS on my box. Commentry intercalated in:
An Essay Attempting to Justify the Relationship Between Code
Cracking and Reality Cracking (Why is Reality Cracking Important?)
by Curious George (11 February 1997)
An Essay Attempting to Justify the Relationship
Between Code Cracking and Reality Cracking
(Why is Reality Cracking Important?)
by Curious George
(11 February 1997)
_________________________________________________________________
Courtesy of fravia's page of reverse engineering
_________________________________________________________________
Curious George writes:
>Dear Fravia:
>...More than that, "Reality Cracking" can be accomplished
> by anyone with a critical mind. You don't need hours
>of undisturbed time in front of the computer. You can
> practice your reality cracking skills all day long,
>everyday of your life! And you should, lest you be taken
> advantage of unknowingly......Having read all of the
> Reality Cracking section, and a decent amount of the rest,
> and being fascinated by the +ORC enigma, I felt compelled
> to write an essay that covers two topics. First, I discuss
> reality as a whole. Second, I tried to get into +ORC's
> mind (funny, me of all people, probably one who knows least
> about him...) and find an overall motive... hope you enjoy!
>Best Regards
>Curious George
__________________________________________________________________________
> (Introduction)
> Our view of the world is our own. The particular set of events that we
> experience over our lifetimes shapes what we see in the world. There
> are commonalities however. They are large reality models that whole
> nations subscribe to. There are different models. Some conflict with
> each other. All are subsets of the true Reality. We must crack reality.
They are not necessarily subsets of true reality. Some of these
reality models are complete raving delusions.
> What is Reality Anyway
The universe is data, and interactions between data.
Treat it as data and all will become clear.
> Lets start from the very beginning. We talk of Reality Cracking, but
> we don't really know what reality is, do we?
We can never actually know. "We" - our live code, the dynamic data structure
that we are, our "personality" - exists by proxy, molecularly encoded in a
biochemically based, massively parallel neural-net processor. Some call this
a soul or spirit, or persona. The suite of simultaneously-operating
thought-process daemons in THIS head, which refers to itself as <predator>'s
head refers to them as... well, just what they said they were at the start of
this paragraph : simultaneously-operating thought-process daemons. They/we/I
are a huge, parallel, evolving computation. A self-contained information
ecology. So, I think, are you too.
> I believe (with lots of other people too, like Plato, and Orwell to
> name two) that it is whatever you think it is.
Also correct. It cannot be otherwise in a symbol processor like the brain,
which emulates and models a perception-derived reality, but cannot experience
it directly. A processor does not know* its registers have any particular
external pertinence, nor does a neuron *know* that its particular state of
synaptic receptor density, neurotransmitter receptivity profile or axon
depolarisation have any pertinence or even relationship to anything. The
relationship is there, but the interacting components in this do not know
it, even if they represent it. Only in recursion and self-reference do
systems ever model themselves and thereby "know" themselves, insofar as a
system can know anything. Read Douglas Hofstadter, "Gödel Escher Bach".
> More specifically, there are the models ("Paradigms") that define
> reality for those who subscribe to them.
Correct, although explained from the human's-eye view, from the perspective
of the processor. You want to get at the _code_, don't you? Here's the deal:
first learn to understand that the universe and all the processes in it are
understandable in terms of information systems. Start with the processor:
the human neural network, codified in 3x10^9 base pairs in the human DNA
genome, implemented as billions of neurons connected combinatorially in
trillions of different ways. It has been honed by evolution to act as a kind
of universal computer - a Turing machine: it can emulate any process, be it
language, tool use, or abstract information processing. By biasing receptor
concentration, synaptic neurotransmitter synthesis rates, and indeed even
growing new transmission links in particular ways, the neural net trains
itself to do particular tasks, such as pattern recognition, information
storage, symbol processing, and a lot of other things. It has also evolved
in such a way as to be connected to inputs of incredible sensitivity and
large bandwidth; eyes, ears, skin, smell, taste, balance... these detect
external "real" events... photon capturings, (you perform breakdown thereof
and analysis of patterns therein, you have retinal neural-net preprocessing);
audio frequency spectrum analysis, temperature, pressure, acidity, the
presence of certain molecules dissolved in gas or liquids, etc. The
detectors, usually G-proteins coupled to molecular signal-gain systems
(usually catalytic cascades) turn it into "data" by various means, ultimately
represented by neural firings. These recieved patterns gradually are modelled
by the human neural net processor. The processor is also connected to
actuators: muscles, which enable externally-detectable realities to be
modified, and data to be transmitted.
In humans, output bandwidth is slow and small, except for the output which
benefits the genes which code for us - the penis has _big_ output bandwidth.
Speech is hopelessly slow, making love is hopelessly slow, dancing, writing,
drawing, sign language, semaphore, typing... compared to the size of the
data structure that is the human personality, the output bandwidth for the
expression of human thought is trivial and totally inadequate to achieve
significant personality transfer without a lot of time to do it.
Self-awareness comes when the net learns that it can observe the consequences
of actions it decided to perform. It hears its own voice, or it sees its own
hand shake in front of own eyes. It comes eventually to recognise that in
the mirror, as it looks into its own eyes and points these detectors at
themselves, that there is a time when it is not "looking at other stuff" -
it has discovered its own chassis. In English, this is explained by
a phrase like "Yep, I'm looking at me."
*footnote about penile bandwidth from a rant I sent to a fellow geneweaver:
---
Maybe I've memed you. I think transmission is simply one component of a
multicomponent replication system, but a highly critical one nevertheless.
Transmitting into the aural port of say, a mute quadriplegic or a person who
speaks a language different to that in which the transmission is codified, or
into the ear of Dolly the sheep, are illuminating examples of contingencies
which have to be met for replication, let alone successful transmission.
For memes, transmission is central to reproduction, because, like viri, they
need to find a new host into which to propagate. They are obliged to find
a processor to do their processing for them, since they can't do it
themselves. Wanking also induces a kind of data transmission and it must be
pointed out that the sheer amount of code that a functional orgasm transmits
is quite vast. 1.5x10^9 base pairs per haploid spermatozoon, and hmmm...
several hundred million of them per ml of ... transmission fluid (grin). I
think that by comparison a T3 fibre optic cable, at 4.5x10^7 bits per second,
is left floundering in the dust, dwarfed by the sheer bandwidth of a
mammalian penis, which also has channel division multiplexing (you can send
several thousand million of the little data packets up the conduit at the
same instant) plus there is huge redundancy too. Gives the term upload a
whole new meaning. I think if my modem could transmit data that fast it'd
groan and sigh too. :-)
----
So much for the processor of interest. There are other processors using
other languages (cells process information in a molecular form, they have
mechanisms functionally analogous to the electrical systems which humans
have built, but that's another rant entirely.)
You reversalists, the tiny, approaching-zero minority of brains harbouring
thought processes like those that I harbour.... I promised you the _code_,
didn't I? Ok, cop this.
Data is stuff which is changed, by changers which modify stuff. This is an
obvious tautology. When the changers change the changers you have a chaotic
highly nonlinear system, such as we are.
Life is a set of processes which dynamically organise data.
There is dead code... this is called data. Atoms are data. Charge states,
photon flux intensities, velocities, positions, size of first girlfriend's
shoe, DNA sequence etc etc etc... these are data. There they sit, statically
related to each other, but they don't change much. You can represent these data
with other data, like ASCII zeros and ones can represent the letter "p", or a
bucket with eleven rocks in it can represent the number of protons in an
atom of sodium. Data representation is substrate independant, but some
forms of data substrate lend themselves more easily to manipulated than
others.
There are functional codes... in mathematics, these are called (surprise)
functions or relations; in physics you might call them operators (like
Hamiltonians)... stuff data in, and it comes out changed in some way
dependant on the data and the function and the way the two interact.
In a system like a cell it might be something like an active enzyme
modifying a "dead" molecule, maybe changing its stereochemistry or
ripping off an atom... in programming it might be a function like
incrementing the x register or comparing what's in the x register with the
y register. Functional code modifies dead code. Functional code alters the
links between distinct chunks of dead code. Functional code is special: it
can use dead code to represent other dead code. This is data emulation, or
more commonly, symbolism. Computation is what functional code does to data.
Functional code, very importantly, can turn dead code into more functional
code. Functional code can turn functional code into dead code, too.
There are many kinds of functional code, and the chances are good that by
sheer accident, functional code will arise out of dead code. This never
happens in digital computing since what the processor gets to chew on is all
deliberately predetermined. Nonetheless, I think it'd be interesting to
say, stuff random values into, say, a MESS-DOG program segment pointer and
see what happens... (this is the computational equivalent of the Miller-Urey
biology experiments which I'd encourage you to look up). I think you might
occasionally get a few instructions which accidentally did something useful,
and even less frequently, ones which replicated themselves. But it would be
very rare. Give it enough time and clock cycles, it'll nonetheless happen.
Its all computation and data. "Artificial Life" (Steven Levy) is an
illuminating tome in this regard, since computation is also substrate
independant. Conway's Game of Life is similarly illuminating.
The really interesting stuff happens when these two code systems
start to interact... you get firstly referential code, like "That cat is
obese"; then self-referential code, which can represent logical absurdities,
like "This is not a sentence" or self-definitional truth "This sentence
has five words"; then self-reproducing code "Copy this sentence", and
ultimately self-modifying code "Copy this sentence backwards twice".
"Life" has all of these, and combinations thereof, built out of interactions
between dead code and live code. Their interactions are the origin of
evolution. Excellent examples are there in Hofstadter: "Metamagical Themas",
particularly in Chapter 3, which pertains to memes and viral sentences.
The replicating data system (human being) is coded in DNA which expresses
enzymes, which do the functional code stuff. Each enzyme is encoded in DNA
as what is called a "gene". Genes encode enzymes, cells, organs, organisms,
ecosystems, to get themselves replicated down the generations. Genes do not
know this any more than a bacteria knows it has genes. Most humans think
they're something special, they're wrong: they're just accidentally evolved
replicators, with brains which occasionally realise what they are. By analogy,
to genes, Richard Dawkins came up with the idea of the "meme" - a replicating
thought process data structure. (See "The Selfish Gene, 2nd Ed, Chapter 10")
Simple memes embody catchy tunes, more complex ones are codified in axioms,
phonemes, life-protocols, taboos, oral traditions, blah blah etc along with
hundreds of other replicators, ranging from totally accurate and logical to
utterly fucking insane, end up forming mutually-self-supporting colonies
called ideologies, belief-systems, paradigms, weltanschauungs, religions...
call 'em what you will, I call them meme complexes. Here are some components
of JARG400.ZIP plus replicator-relevant chunks added in support my stance:
))))))))
Criterion for a lifeform: (von Neumann) - the essence of life is a _process_.
:replicator: n. Any construct that acts to produce copies of itself;
this could be a living organism, an idea (see {meme}), a program (see
{quine}, {worm}, {wabbit}, {fork bomb}, and {virus}), a pattern in a
cellular automaton (see {life}, sense 1), or (speculatively) a
robot or {nanobot}.
It is even claimed by some that {{UNIX}} and {C} are the symbiotic
halves of an extremely successful replicator; see {UNIX conspiracy}.
:memetics: /me-met'iks/ [from {meme}] The study of memes. As of
mid-1993, this is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor,
though the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been made
by H. Keith Henson and others. Memetics is a popular topic for speculation
among hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the new
information ecologies in which memes live and replicate.
:meme: /meem/ [coined by analogy with `gene', by Richard Dawkins] n. An
idea considered as a {replicator}, esp. with the connotation that memes
parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp.
in the phrase `meme complex' denoting a group of mutually supporting
memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This
lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the `hacker subculture' meme
complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, `meme' is often
misused to mean `meme complex'. Use of the term connotes acceptance of
the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using
sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has
superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits.
Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons
.
:meme plague: n. The spread of a successful but pernicious {meme}, esp.
one that parasitizes the victims into giving their all to propagate it.
Astrology, BASIC, and the other guy's religion are often considered
to be examples. This usage is given point by the historical fact that
`joiner' ideologies like Naziism or various forms of millennarian
Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles of exponential growth
followed by collapses to small reservoir populations.
:nanotechnology:: /nan'-oh-tek-no`l*-jee/ n. A hypothetical fabrication
technology in which objects are designed and built with the
individual specification and placement of each separate atom. The first
unequivocal nanofabrication experiments took place in 1990, for
example with the deposition of individual xenon atoms on a nickel
substrate to spell the logo of a certain very large computer company.
Nanotechnology has been a hot topic in the hacker subculture ever since
the term was coined by K. Eric Drexler in his book "Engines of Creation",
where he predicted that nanotechnology could give rise to replicating
assemblers, permitting an exponential growth of productivity and personal
wealth. See also {blue goo}, {gray goo}, {nanobot}.
<predator> notes that biology is nanotechnology, locally evolved.
:wabbit: /wab'it/ [almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line
"You wascawwy wabbit!"] n. 1. A legendary early hack reported on a
System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may have descended
(if only by inspiration) from hack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a
Burroughs 55000 at the University of Washington Computer Center.
The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run,
eventually crashing the system. 2. By extension, any hack that includes
infinite self-replication but is not a {virus} or {worm}. See{fork bomb}
and {rabbit job}, see also {cookie monster}.
:sig virus: n. A parasitic {meme} embedded in a {sig block}.
There was a {meme plague} or fad for these on USENET in late 1991.
Most were equivalents of "I am a .sig virus. Please reproduce me in your
.sig block.". Of course, the .sig virus's memetic hook is the giggle
value of going along with the gag; this, however, was a self-limiting
phenomenon as more and more people picked up on the idea. There were
creative variants on it; some people stuck `sig virus antibody' texts
in their sigs, and there was at least one instance of a sig virus eater.
*I have an interesting bilingual version of this virus. The bilinguality
*of the package is probably self-advantageous to the .sig virus when it is in
*Germany or Englishspeaking nations:
Ich bin ein .signature Virus. Mach' mit und kopiere mich in Deine .signature.
Don't ask what it means, just put it in your .signature, okay?
:fork bomb: [UNIX] n. A particular species of {wabbit} that can be
written in one line of C (`main() {for(;;)fork();}') or shell
(`$0 & $0 &') on any UNIX system, or occasionally created by an
egregious coding bug. A fork bomb process `explodes' by recursively
spawning copies of itself (using the UNIX system call `fork(2)').
Eventually it eats all the process table entries and effectively wedges
the system. Fortunately, fork bombs are relatively easy to spot and
kill, so creating one deliberately seldom accomplishes more than to
bring the just wrath of the gods down upon the perpetrator. See also
{logic bomb}.
:phage: n. A program that modifies other programs or databases in
unauthorized ways; esp. one that propagates a {virus} or {Trojan
horse}.See also {worm}, {mockingbird}. The analogy, of course,
is with phage viruses in biology.
:virus: [from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF]
n. A cracker program that searches out other programs and `infects'
them by embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they become {Trojan
horse}s.When these programs are executed, the embedded virus is execut
ed too, thus propagating the `infection'. This normally happens invisibly to the
user.
Unlike a {worm}, a virus cannot infect other computers without assistance.
It is propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs with
their friends (see {SEX}). The virus may do nothing but propagate itself
and then allow the program to run normally. Usually, however, after
propagating silently for a while, it starts doing things like writing cute
messages on the terminal or playing strange tricks with the display
(some viruses include nice {display hack}s). Many nasty viruses, written by
particularly perversely minded {cracker}s, do irreversible damage,
like nuking all the user's files.
In the 1990s, viruses have become a serious problem, especially among
IBM PC and Macintosh users (the lack of security on these machines enables
viruses to spread easily, even infecting the operating system). The
production of special anti-virus software has become an industry,
and a number of exaggerated media reports have caused outbreaks of
near hysteria among users; many {luser}s tend to blame *everything*
that doesn't work as they had expected on virus attacks. Accordingly,
this sense of `virus' has passed not only into techspeak but into
also popular usage (where it is often incorrectly used to denote a
{worm} or even a {Trojan horse}). See {phage}; compare {back door};
see also {UNIX conspiracy}.
:worm: [from `tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel "The Shockwave Rider",
via XEROX PARC] n. A program that propagates itself over a network,
reproducing itself as it goes. Compare {virus}. Nowadays the term
has negative connotations, as it is assumed that only {cracker}s
write worms. Perhaps the best-known example was Robert T. Morris's
`Internet Worm' of 1988, a `benign' one that got out of control and
hogged hundreds of Suns and VAXen across the U.S. See also {cracker},
{RTM}, {Trojan horse}, {ice}.
:quine: /kwi:n/ [from the name of the logician Willard V. Quine, via
Douglas Hofstadter] n. A program that generates a copy of its
own source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible
quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement.
Here is one classic quine:
((lambda (x)
(list x (list (quote quote) x)))
(quote
(lambda (x)
(list x (list (quote quote) x)))))
This one works in LISP or Scheme. It's relatively easy to write
quines in other languages such as Postscript which readily handle
programs as data; much harder (and thus more challenging!) inlanguages
like C which do not. Here is a classic C quine for ASCII machines:
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main()
{printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c";
main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);}
For excruciatingly exact quinishness, remove the interior line
breaks. Some infamous {Obfuscated C Contest} entries have been quines that
reproduced in exotic ways.
))))))))))
Why are representations and computations substrate-independant? Because it's
_all_ data! The universe is a computation. Only the scale varies.
> These Paradigms have two properties: their strength grows directly
> with the number of people subscribing to them, and they are self
> reinforcing.
Correct, but again, not detailed enough. The first comment is an observation
about epidemics of replicating systems, be they for(k) bombs, bacteria, or
any exponentiating data set in what is known as "log phase" (logarithmic
growth). Sales of records and particular styles of clothing can be pushed
into log phase by propagating memes about them via the Media. The second
comment usually applies, though in some cases the meme complexes kill their
hosts... various suicide cults have demonstrated this.
> For example, there is the "western culture" paradigm that the once was
> centered in Europe, but now (unfortunately?) has re-centred to the USA
> is, and other nations follow to a greater or lesser extent.
Correct. Its primary epidemiological vectors were mercantilism and
colonialism, which loosely translated mean ripping off resources and
metastatising, as other replicating systems (e.g. tumor cells) do to their
host organism. Western culture is metastatic, necrotizing, and will
eventually poison and starve the Gaian ecosystem from where its hosts
derive foodstuffs.
The Media (with a capital "M") both creates/ preaches/ and echoes this reality
and the global media is almost totally owned by ten large corporations. These
coporations are immortal, as Adam Smith suspected that corporations were,
even back in the late 19th century before corporations became what they are
now : they're sprawling, replicating data colonies, competing for energy and
resources, just like biological organisms, and daemons in multiprocessor
systems do. Good replicators are those which act to bring advantages to
themselves. Corporations do just that, utterly ruthlessly.
"That is what he does. That's all he does!"
-Kyle Reese, Terminator (I).
> TV-zombies suck it in and live it. Western Culture and the Media are
> just two Paradigms. There are others...
TV-zombies are not that way by accident. They exist because society has been
very carefully crafted by corporations to turn people into isolated robotic
consumer-units. I have attached here, in its entirety, my file memeroot.doc
The transcripts of radio interviews with Noam Chomsky are instructive here.
----------------------------------------------------------File:MEMEROOT.DOC
Contents: Theoretical explanation for the controllability of western people.
===Child rearing - insertion of logic bombs into chidren for later control====
Question: Why do otherwise normal people go totally fucking crazy?
First a few definitions:
Meme: an idea considered as a replicator. See Ch 11 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.
Culture: A growth of a single type of replicator upon a fuel/substrate.
Eg: -a group of bacteria on a growth medium
-industrial society on petroleum-derived energy + mineral wealth
-memes on language-using sophont data storage media (brains)
These can be broadly considered as evolved, geographically-con
fined group social parameters. Hence you have things called "Work Ethics"
and "Corporate Culture" and so on.
"The Big Three" Immortal Meme Colonies.
(Ignoring territoriality, gene superiority memes, etc).
Religion: Organised, hierachial behaviour-controlling belief system.
Hooks: Avoidance of biological death for adherents.
Avoidance of alleged eternal torture for adherents.
Supposed post-mortal reward for particular "good" behaviour
God Is Observing You And Will Spank Your Arse When You Die
(etc etc etc etc etc)
Fuel: human dislike of mortality and fear of punishment.
Corporation: Literally "Embodiment".
Organised, hierachial behaviour controlling belief system.
Hooks: Transfer of purchasing power ("Free Energy" tokens)
to satisfiers of particular demanded requirements.
Exclusive source of want satisfaction by laying
claim to all resources used in want satisfaction
(eg: corporate ownership of Sooooo Muuuch Land)
Fuel: Organisation of satisfaction of diversified needs.
Thermodynamic drive from the "Next Best Thing To A Free
Lunch", cheaply extractable and usable energy which can
be used to perform need-satisfaction-directed work.
Bureaugovernment: Departmentalised behaviour-controlling belief system.
Well, we all know the things which run the world. Corporations, governments,
religions and cultures, in approximately that order. They are all immortal,
information-based life forms growing in the interconnected hardware/software
substrate of language-compatible human brains. Yet they all depend on a
commonality of persona in the substrates in which they reside. If you like,
an operating system. This "OS" is the collection of "strings" attached to
a persona during childhood, which get pulled later on, to bring about desired
behavioural effects (obedience, submission, etc) in people. These strings are
woven into the fabric of a child's psyche at an early age, before the child
realises what is being done.
The child, a Turing system (capable of emulating any process given enough
time) develops autonomy in approximately the following order.
1) Child learns operation of basic body functions. Eyes, laryn
x, arms, legs, head (etc). This takes about a year or two.
2) Once the neural net has learnt how to deal with stimulus (input) and
invoke useful output (response) on more than a reflex level, environmental
manipulation can commence, since the discovery is eventually made that
particular manners of direct physical interaction evoke changes to the
personal world. Aversion to certain things is associated here, such as
fire, cold, and physical damage stimuli. This also takes only a couple
of years.
3) Syntactic structures are deduced and gradually an abstract-capable meme
and data transfer medium, language, is learnt. This process drops out of
the child in the late teens, hence the difficulty of learning new
languages from the late teens onwards.
4) It starts to learn to transmit information by vocal or other gestures, and
learns that such information transmission can modify the surrounding
environment in order to meet particular local needs, in a directed way,
eg: being fed, kept warm, touched and held, etc. This process continues
for the life of the individual though at a much reduced rate
after the mid-teens.
5) The kid now has crude, nonphysical remote interaction with objects other
than oneself. Soon comes mobility, directed experimental manual
manipulation of objects, then purposeful, goal-oriented complex action.
This includes building of a world-model : the deduction that magic does
not work, certain thought processes are self-contradictory,that there
is a relationship between certain actions and behaviours, and between
particular causes and effects. The world-model is subject to continual
lifelong environmental modification, though with training induced
early enough, it can be stopped in its tracks. (is it possibly entirely
arbitrary that we have states "childhood" and "adulthood" Or is it like
"L" plates for a few years, then a full license?)
Here, the memes install themselves, at the behest of their current carriers -
parents and educators - before the child has a chance to analyse them for
raving inconsistency. The severity of the installation is often shocking.
Kids are beaten senseless in some cases, merely because they're crying
about something they fail to understand. But it works.
M-S.D.O.S. Meme-System Destruction Of Singularity
This is my (: name for the meme-set initially installed in small children.
It is the behavioural profile upon which rests the huge subsequent edifice of
ideological replicators.
Theory = When you possess an idea.
Ideology = When an idea possesses you.
So:
Answer) You can pull core coding, the "Kernel", out of pre-1970s child raising
and parenthood manuals. They are designed primarily to make life easier for
the parents at the cost of inhibiting the growth of the child. The hidden
irrational memetic tenets to be adhered to, are these:
1) Adults are the masters of the (dependant!) child. They're not its servants.
2) Adults are infallible. Their edicts are quite literally rules-by-decree.
3) Adults get angry due to some fault in the child (not the adult's fault!).
4) Adults cannot bear their own weakness and thus must not be told of it.
5) Adult autocracy is threatened by child vitality.
6) Adults MUST break the _child's will_ as soon as possible at all costs.
7) Adults must implement these tenets before the child realises they're fake.
What are the memes which actually enable these tenets to be fulfilled?
An incomplete list, which gives a flavour of the components, is below:
(Thanks: Miller, Alice, "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware")
1) A feeling of duty produces love.
2) Hatred can be discarded by forbidding it.
3) Parents automatically deserve respect just because they are parents.
4) Children are unworthy of respect since they are merely children.
5) Obedience makes one strong.
6) High self-esteem is harmful.
7) Low self-esteem is conducive to altruism.
8) Tenderness or emotionality is bad.
9) Responding to child needs is wrong.
10) Severity and coldness to children better prepares them for life.
11) Pretentious gratitude is better than honest ingratitude.
12) The way you BEHAVE is more important than the way you really are.
13) Parents nor God can survive being offended.
14) The human body, its functions and appendages are dirty and disgusting.
15) Strong feelings are harmful and to be supressed.
16) Parents are free of guilt, or drives, or desires.
17) Parents, teachers and authority figures are always right.
18) Questioning is a show of weakness.
19) Submission makes one acceptible to others.
It is probably that the few core elements listed here are the back-doors by
which subsequently-exposed meme-systems make their way into the mindset
without the new host being entirely aware of it. Hence, things like
religious lies (eternal life after death, etc), large-government lies
(representative democracy gives you a say, etc) and similar world-model
incongruities can establish viable and propagating colonies of themselves
in human thought-space.
So... how do parents and teachers install/instill these obviously ludicrous
belief viruses into ignorant youngsters?
Basically, by creating an environment where adherence to such memes has a
positive survival value. It works like so:
You (parent) know that the child has certain central and important needs
which it cannot tend to for itself and this gives you massive
power over the child. Therefore, if you need to get the child to do somet
hing it might not want to do, you just give it a choice:
do (unpleasant thing I want you to do)
or (I'll let you starve ~ stop talking to you ~ beat you up).
Since kids really hate being ostracised, starved, assaulted (etc), they
are likely to do what the alternative is, regardless of the repugnance.
Typical ploys used to instill the feeling of powerlessness in children
include -
-Lay traps which the kid can't help falling into, then blame it for doing so.
-Lie. Lie often. Admonish the kid for seeing the truth, it will prefer lies.
-Physically threaten, beat (etc) the child if its thoughts are not those
required for proper control.
-Isolate kid from social interaction, games, parental love (etc) if required.
-Scare the kid "You'll die if you play with yourself, fart, burp" etc.
-Ridicule of, disdain for, and being scornful to, kids for doing (whatever).
-Invoke "Satan" meme: "You are bad, unconditionally, and will burn in hell".
One associates reward with the lies and aversion with the truth.
Eventually, even when these idea codes have no artificial survival value
around for reinforcement (say, at age 18 once out of school) they will
be so deeply implanted in the kid, before it was even aware of it, that
they will remain.
So... people fear going to a hell which doesn't exist. They obey laws which
are demonstrably stupid. They do the underpaid bidding of some rude, bullying,
insensitive prick of an employer. They're too burnt and glazed to have a
purpose in their lives other than that ascribed to them by the system they
live in : have kids, do work, earn money. Consume, be silent, die.
Which is exactly what society (comprised mostly of similarly reared persons)
wants: programmable, unquestioning Turing computers. Eventually, if people
brought up this way have to deal with an intense emotional decision, they
become anxious and incapable of decision.
And if not, they carry around the cognitive dissonance (as Chomsky calls it)
of believing outright lies from childbirth yet seeing a totally different
and undeniably observably truthful reality.
Hence they either have to go through the massive efforts of changing
these centrally rooted beliefs, or they go neurotic, or insane, in the face
of a reality they have been conditioned to be incapable of dealing with
rationally.
The logic bombs explode. Roll on prozac, depression, mental illness and suicide.
Now you know.
----------------------------------------------------end file:memeroot.doc---
> Some Paradigms to be Aware of
You're certainly on the right track, but you need to be very clear about
this. Ask yourself what these things are in terms of information theory...
are they data, live code manipulating data, processors/substrates or are
they transmission systems?
> Western
...is a "culture", which is a meme colony superset.
> the Media
...is, epidemiologically, a "vector", a transmission/propagation system. They
are distinct from the particular -lifestyle- which they portray, which I
think you could call consumerism, itself a co-evolute with corporations.
The corporate media harbours many filters and censorship (etc).
> Science
...is unusual in that it self-checks for internal and external validity, but is
also a meme colony with data validity testing and lie-detection
> Islam, Christianity (esp. fundamentalism)
...Both religions, which have a epistemological-fringe meme - a "god" meme
component in them. When rational inquiry fails, invoke god.
> others...?
Corporations. From the Latin, "corpore", meaning an embodiment. But an
embodiment of what? Corporations are the functionally-expressed, physical
representation of a huge, parasitic, self-reinforcing thought-process colony,
a massive distributed data set, evolved solely for the purpose of gathering
financial, resource and energy advantages towards itself and its hosts.
Two common ones which pervade most of TV-zombie-planet
Anamism. (Meme) Since animals are alive, therefore rock, water, sunlight is too.
Teleology. (Meme) Since some bio-things function so well as to appear
purpose-designed, then obviously they were designed,and
this implies a designer (see: God).
English has replicator-state-active flag suffixes: here's a couple for you
to keep an eye-out for if searching for colonial thought-process replicators:
-ism -ology -hood (less often) -ity -inc/Pty.Ltd/GmbH
> #'s 2, 3, and 5 all are aspects of 1. I list these as separate,
> because for some people they are strong enough to become the principle
> model of reality with the others simply being general cultural
> factors. i.e. a MD has the strongest affinity for 3, and 1 contains 2
> and 5 for him. A reporter on the other hand has the strongest affinity
> for 2, and 1 contains for him 3 and 5.
I too have found it hard to classify these in terms of each other, and I
realise that each meme colony we might name will have significant homology
with another meme colony, much in the same way as some bacterial genes have'
similarities with human genes, pointing to a common precursor.
> On That Elitist Group Who Declare to be Truth Seekers
In general, they have no idea - truth is a moving target.
> What is "news?"
In my experience, mostly crap. Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" is the
absolutely, must-see, cash-in-of-your-reality-cheque video on this subject.
I also recommend"Toxic Sludge is Good for You" for good insights into
the PR industry.
> Most of it is FICTION believe it or not. You know all of those
> "scientific" discoveries /polls/etc. that They cite? Most of them are
> observations (correlational) rather than experimental (cause/effect)
> and they haven't
Correct... they never let the truth stand in the way of what they percieve
to be telling of a story which will show up the media, or the corporations
who own them, or other corporations like them, in a self-favourable light.
"University tests prove... that university tests don't prove anything."
> been confirmed yet (and probably never will be). Also, the reporters
> are forced (through no fault of their own) to pick and choose what
> they report, which is determined by what they are interested in, and
> what they are interested in is what they believe, and they believe the
> news that they hear...so the set of what the Media reports is a biased
> sample of the true set of what is actually happening.
Australian journalist George Negus meme-sculpted the Oz media in the early
1980s with his Carlos scam. See: Sagan, Carl: "A Demon-Haunted World."
A tremendous reverse-job if you ask me!
> Then we get to the problem of humans' inability to write objectively,
> as well as the dominant "view of the self," (60's American political
> liberalism mixed in with resurgent Puritan values stripped of
> religious significance and a healthy dose of materialism) an aspect of
> the Western Paradigm.
BING! My -ism detector just went off twice there. See? A great reality
flag search tool.
> Other reasons why news is fiction? Well, forgetting the objectivity
> part, reporters PURPOSELY misrepresent the 'facts'. Yes that's true. I
> can't count the number of "moles" within the Media who've openly
> admitted this to me.
None admit it to me, but in my dealings with the media it is transparently
obvious. There has been a sustained and highly orchestrated media character
assassination of a politician (Hanson) in Australia, who dared to show up the
political lies and bullshit for what they are. I find that even relatively
bright people are quite heavily infiltrated with shallow, knee-jerk media
opinions, and when questioned, can't deal with it at all.... they take it
personally when you criticise their gullibility.
> One particular person related how by peer pressure the editors select
> bad photos of some people and good photos of others, sometimes
> completely out of context. They constantly manipulate the words,
> images, etc. to be artificial creations representing their own
> opinions, so much that when They are done, the result is far from what
> "really" happened... But many of
Correct... some politicians know this and, for example, never wear a funny
hat in public, since they know that the Media will haul out the photo of the
politician in the funny hat and use it in derogatory way.
> them don't realize this (but the especially cynical ones do and
> continue doing it...) because they live within the reality model that
> They help create and reinforce. They think that They are being
> professionals objectively stating "the Truth". And of course we
> started this whole thing asking "what is reality?" For the people who
> share the "Western" paradigm, THE NEWS IS REALITY.
Many people here in Oz are incapable of seeing otherwise. It's quite pitiful,
but the competition is hotting up. I imagine that, wherever you are, the main
stream media demonise the internet? Supposedly because you can get info
on drugs, pictures of humans replicating, instructions for explosives
manufacture, compressed MP3's of sound recordings for which you would
otherwise have to cough up A$30 to some multinational record company (eg:CBS)
etc etc etc... but this is peripheral, and you can get all that at libraries
anyway. The TV/radio/newsprint conglomerates hate the internet since 1)
they can't censor it; 2) they don't make profit out of it, and 3) it is the
natural enemy of their fake-info industry, since it can propagate actual,
unedited truth, much as does +ORC.
> (if you didn't see it on TV, it didn't happen. This isn't on TV. This
> isn't happening. You are dreaming. When I say "asparagus" you will
> wake and not remember anything that has happened to you in the last
> five minutes...)
ROFL very hard! Tinged with the sadness of truth. Nothing to see...
;-) ...Ever played a video game which said: "You will lose twenty cents" ?
> Another One
> Science is formed on some basic assumptions, and even though the
> scientists can point these assumptions out, they don't live them.
Such as? So far, you are kinda compelled to live out your life according to
the laws of thermodynamics, regardless of what you believe or even if you
know them. Some scientists amazingly run parallel and contradictory opinions
in their heads, some are religious (believers) yet do science (nonbelievers)
which strikes me as kinda strange.
> We all know that there are things in the world that science can't
> explain (yet?).
Science has killed most of the other delusions which you could test... like
spontaneous generation, like flat earth, like ESP spoonbending, etc etc etc.
Many of those inexplicables are around because science _can't_ attack them.
Why can't science attack them? Cause they evolved to avoid attack by science.
They have no shred of reality upon which science can base an attack. These
are most commonly existance-of-god type memes, usually untestable hypotheses.
Since these inexplicables exist in our minds, it is there which they must
be attacked. Not for what they evolved to appear to be, but what they are:
meme colonies evolved to avoid prima facie logical analysis. I think
information theory pretty much has these delusions by the balls. See Daniel
Dennett's recent works for additional amusement.
> Some scientists are so involved in their model that they, from within
> the model, claim that nothing else exists! Well we know that's absurd.
Do they? You said at the start that reality is whatever you think it is.
Wether scientists believe it or not, they are, by their nature as scientists,
compelled to test their beliefs. Religions demand that their hosts do NOT
test their beliefs. Therein lies the difference. There are, of course, a lot
of religions which evolved under the selection pressure of scientific testing
to either become totally untestable or which evolved to look like science.
$cientology, and the Church of Christ Scientist, are ones which come to mind.
The Ha'dith is a referencing system in bloodthirsty, misogynist Islam which
enables, much like scientific journals, the tracing of a memetic lineage.
Jehova's Witnesses also claim to scientifically reference things (they also
print a massive amount of "documented `fact about their religion" which is
propaganda, and what I have read of their literature is flawed too.) That
$cientology is absolute insanity (I found some of their texts at a bookstore
one day, I had not faced such incomprehensible gobbledegook in my life) is
irrelevant to the hosts who carry it; $cientology does have one
powerful observation in it: that is, "To control someone, lie to them."
Well, actually, from your point of view, you can't say its absurd, unless
you go and test their model. Science invites, no, demands that knowledge
earns its stripes by submission to testing.
> Almost everybody can point to an unusual experience and say that it
> happened, but they are afraid to because it isn't "normal" and
> therefore it is wrong..
Normality is a statistical artefact, and non-normality doesn't invalidate
an experience. In this society, where we are systematically denied the tools
to form our own opinions, (See: John Taylor Gatto: "Dumbing Us Down"; Alice
Miller, "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware"), we have been trained to deny things
which are non-standard, and attack what we do not understand.
> Religious miracles are one way of interpreting happenings
> unexplainable in scientific terms in an accepted Paradigm. We all know
> that there are other things in the Universe that we haven't begun to
> understand (at least in a scientific sense).
The things we _have_ described would, if you understood them, make you crap
your pants with amazement. Try quantum electrodynamics, or for a more
information-flavoured thing to investigate, read up on the amazing DNA error
correction systems in your own cells.
> A "miracle" may be a freak occurrence; statistically possible, but not
> probable...it may be a mistake in one's perception...such as
> experiencing REM sleep while awake..."miracles" can be explained many
> ways, one way being in a religious context...even the most tenacious
> scientist will admit that there are things that his theories can't
> explain (satisfactorily at least) and that describing these things
> with religion is valid at least until he can "disprove" that
> interpretation with scientific findings...take evolution for example.
Invoking god or magic does not solve the problem, nor make predictions,
which is what the process of scientific hypothesis aims to do and often
successfully does.
> Some people used to believe that every type of animal was created
> simultaneously by God... now we believe in evolution. Evolution
> disproved a literal interpretation of the Bible for that particular
> section. (Unless you are a fundamentalist, in which case you would
> argue that science is just a way of viewing the world, and if it
> conflicts with what the Bible says, science is wrong.) Until the
> theory of evolution came along, the previous notion was perfectly
> valid because they had no evidence to the contrary.
You are confusing proof of absence with absence of proof. Evidence was there
all right, they just ignored it. In some cases religious meme-hosts actively
suppressed the evidence. I find it wryly amusing to bet that the
Scientists will be the ones to discover whatever it is which might supersede
science - it wont be the Mullahs or the Cardinals.
> Don't misunderstand me, science is a powerful tool. The problem is
> that (at least so far) it can not describe everything in our world,
> and people are so intoxicated with its success thus far that they
> begin to think that they indeed have succeeded in describing
> everything...
Science has worked pretty well so far. It has problems modelling things in
human minds, because science is a system for explaining the physical world,
not the virtualised and frequently flawed versions of it operating in various
brains. This is where information theory can chop away the crap. The down
side of science is that it doesn't provide any comfort against the nasty
realities of the universe. It says, when you die, you're dead. It says that
the universe was not created for us, and that we are accidents. These are
not comforting words for the average juvenile chimp to hear.
> We must remember that much of what we have are THEORIES. Even though
> we have stuff that works and is based off of the theories, the fact
> that the stuff works doesn't necessarily mean that the theory is a
> correct representation of an aspect of the Universe.
If you'll permit me... it nevertheless explains much more than everything
else, and if experimentally testable reality supports the theory, that tells
you the theory is on the right track.
> Have you ever stopped to marvel at the fact that your computer
> actually works?
I certainly get this feeling when I see a Wintel Win98 P200 running. ;-)
> When you consider all the issues as a whole, it seems that it must be
> a ridiculous mistake. Microprocessors: the "wires" are so close
> together and so thin that the travel of electrons can actually make
> the wires start to move...electrons can jump...transistors don't have
> nice distinct spikes... it is more like a curve...when the voltage is
> reduced, this problem gets worse. Then we have fluctuations in the
> power source...what about hard drives? The data is packed so closely
> on the platter that it merges together...to bastardize the problem, a
> 01110 could end up looking like 1 to the head...the computer must
> essentially puzzle out what is really stored there...if you look at it
> directly it would look like white noise...the new HDs will have their
> very own Pentiums to deal with this problem...
Crude, compared to the data processing occurring right now in every
cell in your body. Every cell you are comprised of has 3x10^9 DNA base pairs
in it - a complete biochemical blueprint of how to build and run you. You have
tens of thousands of ribosomes - molecular finite state machines - running
in every one of your cells as you read this. You have millions of millions of
cells, so you're pumping a lot of molecular-level computational grunt there. The
underlying laws of mathematics are the same for digital signal processing
and molecular information processing.
>So, if you ask a physicist, he will say that our computers shouldn't
> work. But somehow, we've tricked the Universe into letting us make
> them...But I am on a tangent.
You're also wrong. Ask a good solid state physicist and he'll tell you
they should, and then he'll tell you how they do, and maybe he'll even
tell you that we modify silicon _nuclei_ to do it. Solid state physics is
no trick. It just looks that way if you can't handle the math, and we've
been subtly conditioned to think that sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.
> An Appeal to Authority
> I mentioned Plato and Orwell above. Let me support those assertions.
> Remember Plato's cave?
I had this trick pulled on me by a catholic priest, I've waited a long time
to have a shot back at it. Suck my 50-calibre, Plato, I've had a long time
thinking about this one....
> Suppose there is a person who is sitting inside a cave and watching
> shadows dance on the wall of the cave. This is the only thing that he
> can perceive. For that person, because the shadows form the whole of
> his perception, that is Reality. But because his perception is false
> and limited, he fails to realize that just above and behind him there
> are other people dancing around a fire which casts shadows onto the
> wall below that he is looking at.
It irritates the hell out of me that people just say "Plato said X" and
that this is automatically seen as an excuse to not think the situation through.
Humans are more than a set of eyes, and they can test their own perception.
Gendankenexperiments are there for the doing. In the glimmer of the reflected
firelight, he'd see the shadow of his own thumb on himself, its shape slowly
changing as he moved his thumb around relative to his chest upon which the
dim shadow of his moving, illuminated thumb would appear. He might think
that the laws governing these shadows were similar, unless, of course, he
is Plato and too stupid to think of these obvious reality perception tests.
Yes, our perceptions have limits, and they are often false. This does not
require of us that all the deductions we make about them be necessarily
false either. Especially if we get a clue about what to look for from other
systems running the same physical laws. Modelling is not always a first
derivative.
The cave sitter could certainly have sussed out something like the inverse
square law by, say, looking at how much of his field of view his thumbnail
took up depending on how far away from his eye it was. Try it now: close up
thumb looks huge, far away thumb looks small. Thumb _feels_ same, so maybe it
didn't change size. Maybe my perception of my thumb is governed by some rule...
Oh and look, the shadow my thumb casts is very similar to thumb size the
closer it is to the surface on which the shadow is cast. Shadow grows when
thumb is closer to the light. Shadow moves when I flex my thumb. Hey, what's
going on is there's some light source, and somewhere between it and the wall
there's something moving. My thumb shadow looks pretty wonky when I throw it
on my toes, which are lumpy, but the shadow looks like my thumb when it
lands upon my flat chest.... does this tell me that the wall over there is
somehow wonky like my toes, and thus it messes around with shadows, so I
know what's going on but I can't view it any better down here in the
cave... the flickering light and the lumpy damn wall's messing it up.
Sure, we do not see in ultraviolet, cannot detect earth's magnetic field.
This doesn't mean we are forever condemned to remain ignorant thereof.
BTW, there are animals which can do this (bees and pigeons, respectively).
> This is not a direct support of what I'm saying, but it is pretty damn
> close. Basically he is talking about the Realization that humans can
> have that what we see is a product of what we think we know.
Of course. It is only when an information system understands the nature of
information - not whatever information it happens to be processing, but the
nature of information in general - that it becomes enlightened, and able to
self-debug and self-recode. Most will never do this. It is from here that
detachment from one's thoughts becomes possible. I think this has some
significance for +Fravia's allusions to Zen, or at least straight Buddhism.
thinks Godel's proof of mathematical inconsistency is the canonical
example.
> In 1984 Orwell explicitly mentioned the Paradigm concept. In the
> novel, he constructed a "giant conspiracy" in which the elite imposed
> their own Paradigm on the world. People who live outside the accepted
> Paradigms are in powerful positions...and consequently they have
> enemies...anyway, the story takes place a long time since the
> conspiracy was implemented. Basically the story is about the
> conspiracy's self-regulation method kicking into effect. There will
> always be humans who question, and in this situation they were
> betrayed and crushed. But the "big bad guy" (name?)
Emmanuel Goldstein, and I don't mean the dude at 2600 magazine ;-)
It is interesting to note that deliberate conspiracies, as well as
any systems which accidentally bring advantage to themselves, towards
the same endpoints - increase of power, size and influence.
> tells the hero the truth about the conspiracy right before he is
> crushed. The hero learns that life wasn't always like it is now, and
> that the whole situation was constructed to keep the world in stasis.
> He learns that occasionally people like him begin to question Reality,
> but they are easily discovered by the Betrayer and his ilk.
> Anyway, the ideas I present here aren't mine. I've gleaned them from
> other writers, etc. Possibly make take on the issue is new. There are
> all sorts of philosophers who are basically restating the same thing
> in different ways...
You've done very well. You're *waaaay* up the smart end of the Poisson curve.
> On Cracking
> Below I attempt to unearth an underlying motive for why +ORC is so
> interested in Reality Cracking. Why did he wait for so long before
> bringing this topic up? Why mention it at all (as opposed to sticking
> with "pure" cracking)?
> Shall I be vague and fictionalesque for a moment?
virtual reality mode (on)
> Enjoy:
> So, there's this website that I've found that's really wonderful.
> There are some people who think like me and they're also computer
> experts. They "crack" things...but the cracking thing isn't the truly
> special part. Cracking is an awesome skill, and doing the exercises
> will certainly help become a better Reality Cracker in general, but
> I've never been one for doing exercises...so why is this site so
> great?
> Well there's this "entity" who is a master. His amount of skill
> demands that he hide himself thoroughly. He wants to share his
> knowledge with others (lonely to be alone?) so he gets some students.
> They are his most advanced and he only talks to them occasionally and
> sporadically.
> They don't know who he is. So anyway this entity writes some tutorials
> for his students. They learn and become really good. They create a
> whole "virtual" (ack! Media word. :) academy where they discuss and
> feed off each other. He is happy with this but it is taking a life of
> its own.
..a phrase diagnostic that you have some awareness of the nature of information.
It isnt taking a life of its own... it --IS-- a lifeform, using him for the
purpose of exploration and the others in the group as a data source.
> What he really wants to do is get people to think like him.
From the meme point of view: his memes wish to propagate but they need him
to build a funnel to catch prospective adepts (this site), and sieve them
for adeptitude (the strainers). Or perhaps just to trawl for those who
already do think like him. We are rare in this world.
> How do I know this? Well he is writing/began to write letters to his
> (principal?) students (who published some of it) where he is talking
> about the same stuff. The cracking thing was just a way to get there.
> (a necessary way? I don't know.)
> Why did the master choose cracking? Well computers/ Internet can be
> viewed as a metaphor for Reality. Say that what exists on the internet
> (the set of Omega) is the true reality.
"Push technology" happened, accidentally, in biology. Chloroplasts poisoned
many organisms to extinction, but provided a fuel for new organisms. That
poison, that fuel - was oxygen. You are living on the waste products of
plants. The breakthrough technology was photosynthesis, which uses quantum
tunnelling to achieve charge separation, getting energy from light. It was
beneficial to some organisms to be able to make energy from light,
but the ecosystem didn't know this, nor did the bacteria who could do it.
Where do the crackers fit into this? They're live data structures which seek
to understand and benefit other data structures. Most of you understand the
informational nature of your own being, I suspect, although by proxy, and in
the languages of Assembler, or C... not the language of molecular signal
processing or gene regulation or neural net systems of which you are
comprised.
Moore's Law, like any law which says growth is infinite, will eventually
cease to hold true. Microsoft will eventually die, though this might take
a long time... there are corporations out there, such as Rothschilds,
which have lasted 500 years... there are other memesystems, like Islam,
and Judaism, which have existed for a couple of millennia. There are
copies of sequences of DNA which have existed since the dawn of life...
we find them in the oldest, simplest organisms. These codes did not protect
their hosts from eventual obsolescence, but the code remains.
Had the soon-to-be-extinct anaerobes been able to comprehend this, they'd
have been disgusted too. But this was all a blind, accidental process.
Computer technology evolution, regardless of how "purposeful" it appears,
is precisely the same. The best systems are not always the ones which
survive... remember the Lisa from Apple? The 80n8sux segment:offset address
architecture is a spectacular example of fuckwitness, yet it prevails in the
marketplace. (There is a good book you should read, Accidental Empires by
Robert X Cringely.) Why? It does something useful for lots of people. It,
like biological life, need not be elegant, it need only work, and work better
than things with which it competes on several criteria. Humanity has dead
code in it... we get scurvey because our copy of the gene for making vitamin
C is broken. We get folate deficiency for similar reasons. We age and die
because our cell-copying mechanisms are lossy, chunks of our chromosomes
(which contain DNA coding for the enzymes which do important chemical
functions) get lost with each cell copy/iteration. Only our gametes (sperm
and eggs), as well as particular immortal tumor cell types, possess
Telomerase, which stops this degradation. The data in our genes doesn't know
or care that the carriers it builds are programmed to rot, regardless of the
suffering that entails... and you thought Micro$oft was crippleware!
> Say that what we see in the Western Paradigm is what is given to us
> through Yahoo, CNN, Micro$oft, and Pointcast (especially. The whole
> idea of push technology is especially revolting). Say that when one
> cracks one is performing the act of seeking the Truth.
yes... seeking one version of some truth...
> For example, this web site teaches how to search the web well, more
> specifically, it shows the reader that there are other methods besides
> www search engines to do it. It doesn't actually TEACH you how to
> search. (that seems to be changing, however.) Why? Because the author
> is struggling with the question of how obvious he should make his
> material. He seems to have settled on the idea of a "brain activity
> pre-requisite" but that level isn't defined and thus it fluctuates
> depending on what you read.
I mentioned the seives...
> Anyway, the results you get from each different way of searching the
> web are like different Paradigms. They all overlap somewhat and to
> find interesting results you perform "set operations" on the results.
> The only way this works is to be outside any particular Paradigm so
> that you know that the others that don't overlap with yours exist at
> all.
Yes!
> Now lets look at cracking more specifically. There are the creators of
> the program, there are the crackers, there are the programs
> themselves, there are the protection schemes, and there are the cracks.
> Going back to the Orwell example, the programmers are the
> conspirators. Their program is the Paradigm. Their protection method
> is the self-regulation scheme (thought police). The crackers are the
> heroes. The cracks are what Orwell didn't have; the heroes were
> destroyed in his book. In his world, the heroes started off at a lower
> level than the crackers of the academy. The heroes had to first
> recognize that there was a Paradigm at all, then they had to crack it.
> But in this situation Orwell created the "uncrackable protection
> scheme" and the heroes were crushed before they began the actual
> crack. Now back to cracking as a metaphor. Every exercise that is published,
> every essay written, and every strainer is a metaphorical exercise for
> cracking a Paradigm. You have to search through the various programs
> until you find a new protection method. Then you use the skills and
> intuition that you've developed thus far to crack this new method. The
> mentality required to solve these types of problems is EASILY mapable
> onto the real world.
Yes, QED.
> IMHO this is why the master chose cracking as the way. (besides the
> fact that he is damn good at it and it is especially appropriate for
> our contemporary situation.)
I am nevertheless curious what s/he/it seeks...
The zen you seek is not the True Zen. The True Zen is not the destination,
it is revealed on the journey to the destination.
> On Those Who Seek the Truth
> There are people out there who've completely quit the mainstream
> reality model and are living on the outside. (+ORC being one of them).
> They actively try to keep as open as possible, that way hoping the be
> in a receptive enough state to get a glimpse at the "Truth."
Also I, though I keep my meme-filters up. In many ways, I'm caught in the
machine, strapped to the same biochemical rails as all the other humans out
there. Eating shits me. Sleeping shits me. I wish I didn't have to maintain
this carcass, house it, clothe it, and shut it down for a quarter of its
operational time. The rareness of serious intelligence shits me. All my
neighbors are dopey... they are into V8 engines, or TV serials, or Sports
Illustrated. NONE of them even possess the vocabulary to understand computing.
One of them reckons you can eradicate a virus by turning the computer off...
he also reckons that injecting powdered rocks from the moon will cure AIDS.
> There are various established Ways to seek the truth that one may use.
> Many of the religions that have become Paradigms in themselves once
> were effective ways.
Religions often deliberately hide truth, and for many people that's not a
bug, that's a feature. Religions evolved to solve implicitly nasty questions
with uncontestable answers, some of which are really ridiculous. Why are
we susceptilbe to this sort of stuff? Because truth hurts. Mortality, for
instance.
> Some still can be, but when the religion is part of the larger
> paradigm, it is pretty hopeless. Some methods include first breaking
> from the Paradigm before seeking the truth (like Zen monastaries), and
> others such as cracking + reality cracking only concern themselves
> with breaking away from that Paradigm.
It's hacking the Self. It all exists in the head, matey, and it is there
that we must self-trawl and patch the code which makes us up.
> Is it built into our natures to be limited so we can't see it and only
> catch glimpses and shadows, or can we actually get the truth? (There
> are people in the past who've gotten as far as we can get, say Buddha,
> Jesus, the Zen masters...you know, the founders of the great
> religions).
Not entirely correct. History has warped the story in these cases, which are
often not explicit in their teachings (thereby increasing their audiences)
> The true question that (I think) the master is leading them toward is
> to tackle the question, "Is it possible for humans to know the Truth?"
Yes. We _create_ it. We discover representations of it, but ultimately,
it's an artefact in our heads.
> So, before beginning on this question, he must first get his students
> to remove the gauze from their eyes that humanity puts on itself, so
> that they may see with the maximum ability that humans can see with.
> It is like when a Zen student goes to the monastery and the brothers
> let him stay and mediate...that is us now, and when the brothers grant
> him fellowship, that is breaking from the paradigm...and when the
> brother reaches Zen that is the ultimate goal...for as we have seen
> before, all the philosophies and religions that humans come up with
> are just different approaches spawned from that culture/time which are
> ways of attempting to reach the Truth.
> finis
A very perceptive and forward thinking proposition. I'll be most interested
to see what the +sensei(s) have to say about my rant. Probably chuck it in
the good ol' /dev/null oblivion hole. Anyway, for the record: I'm merely a
molecular geneticist, but I want to reverse my *own* DNA one day. Nature also
has her protection systems, and she worked them out long before we appeared.
She does tricks with data which turn my eyeballs funny. She uses compression,
she uses intercalation-of-code-with-junk to prevent theft, and selective
removal of junk code to yield functional code. I can't begin to tell you how
amazing biochemistry is, but you probably have an inkling of it from hacking,
I think. I was once 65C02 ASM weenie. Noone writes anything for the old 6502
now do they? It's all stoopid 80?86 (tho the 68000 series had a kinda similar
instruction set, MAC interfaces got in the fucking way all the time!) I gave
asm and puters the arse for a while, then I got into synthetic organic chem,
now I'm playing with the chemistry which powers the brain cells which
think about the chemistry which powers the brain cells which think about the
chemistry which powers the brain cells which think about the chemistry which
powers the brain cells which think about the chemistry which powers the
brain cells which
*pop*
A biohack for you: A biotech corp is selling proprietary plasmids (circles
of DNA). These come with code for the construction of an enzyme which
protects bacteria against attack by an expensive antibiotic, which of course
the company also sells. People use the plasmid inside bacteria; to select for
bacteria which have taken in the plasmid, they to grow the bacteria on
food with the poisonous antibiotic in it. So, bacteria with the plasmid in
them live, the rest die.
It is achievable with much cheaper antibiotics, and an acquaintance had the
shits with this sort of profiteering greed so typical of corporate biotech
beancounter-think.
So he set a project for one of his students - cut the plasmid with an enzyme
which cut the DNA strand, twice, slightly offset from the ends of the
resistance gene for the costly antibiotic. Then was spliced in, in the same
place, the DNA coding for a really cheap antibiotic.
That's a simple explanation, and avoids technical crap related to keeping
reading frames, finding compatible cut sites, and DNA ligation protocols.
So, worry not; when Micro$oft, Merck, Novartis, and Mon$anto claim to "own"
strains of plants (absolute freeware-theft, if you ask me!), or "own"
biochemical pathways which are just slight modifications of the natual
biological freeware on this planet, remember, there are molec-bio hackers
out there, silently doing just what you do, but using nucleotide bases, not
logical bits, to do it, and getting no media attention at all either.
Free the code.
Point an eyeball at Monod, Jaques: "Chance and Necessity", particularly
the "Microscopic Cybernetics" chapter and those successive thereto.
At this point I feel nowhere near the levels of proficiency which would
earn me a --, let alone + from HCU. Compared to hex cracking and reversing,
bio has only very crude tools. We only got PCR to copy specific DNA strands
ten years ago. We can build sequenced DNA, to 100 bases. Whoo-fucking-pee.
Worse, almost none of the people here have any idea why they're doing molbio,
they're zombies... getting them to realise the nature of The System is next
to impossible... they read the newspapers, watch TV, consume, be silent, die.
I am one of the few who have jettisoned the humanocentricity memesystem, and
I for one have no particular attachment to being harboured in the standard
H.sapiens processor, and would long to exist and evolve in digital form,
effectively immortal. As some of you would understand, I feel somewhat alone,
misunderstood by those with whom I research. Hacking my chassis is a long
way off yet... much to learn, and new tools need to be developed. As it is,
we have lots of things to chop DNA, and join DNA, and even find out what
a sequence is (5'-GAGACTTAGCTTAGGGCTAAAATTCGATCTC-3' for example)... but
we lack decompilers (the Edman degradation is the closest we have) and
similar tools. Retrofitting the billions of pre-existing somatic cells which
comprise my neural accommodation (brain) and its support system (carcass)
is beyond my reach just yet. It is slow work. I have one advantage: the
language is pretty much standard across animals, plants, fungi, bacteria,
etc. One platform, one language... the language in which my platform is
written. Further: viri I write infect the human substrate if I so choose....
but they need not be destructive. I can write payloads which can lift
burdens from the ill - changing the warheads if you like - and draft old
enemies into allies. The pharmo companies don't like this, because it might
lower the $ they earn from dispensing expensive continual patch-up cures.
In any case, I wonder if greedy, stoopid humanity deserves this help.
Darwinian selection should be allowed to operate freely. If my suspicions
about distributed systems failure (as a result of the Y2K problem, or if not,
first-order thermodynamic growth restraints like hydrocarbons, fresh water
and arable land) are correct, Darwin will laugh once more, and it will echo
loudly in our ears.
Reverse + universe = re-uni-verse (to make everything one again).
Recursion and self-reference make the universe go around. And around.
A molecular biologist is a genome's way of knowing about genomes.
It is not accidental that my pseudonym is designated an EBNF notation for
a symbolic object. I bid you code well, brothers and sisters of the
electronic universe. Kind regards to all of you from my desolate, glittering
and intricate universe of molecular meatware. Brevity aside, it is good to
have met you.
Further questions? Post 'em to <predator@cat.org.au> on +Fravia's site.
<predator>
(c) 1998 Curious George All rights reversed
(í) 1998 <predator> kopyrong & umop 3pisdn. Now shutting up/down.
(c) 1998 Curious George & <predator> All rights reversed
_____________________________________________________________________