Three modern qualia
....a triune hyperobject....
1. devariation
First the one you already know:
Billions of hours watching Game of Thrones. Tens of billions of hours listening to Joe Rogan. Tens of billions of hours of kids watching weird highly formulaic youtube videos. "The Anti-Social Century" replaces multi-human interplay both with TV——the medium is the message and the message is "We can obliviate you, no problem"——and also with faux collective consciousness——by the Friendship Paradox you mostly view popular tweets, and by hyper-Sturgeon's Law... If humanity were conscious, the value of information would diminish with each viewing. So either humanity is not conscious, or humanity is a consciousness wasting zer time.
I have spent dozens of hours walking down the very middle of the streets of suburban Berkeley past 0200 hours. Although the middle of streets are raised, so that I had a good vantage, nevertheless as I recall it, my only company——not enclosed in metal plastic rubber glass paint at 30 mph——has ever been the rats and raccoons, the cats and the skunks.
Living as short, homeostatic feedback loops, minimizing locally accessible free energy, embedded in cybernetic attenuation. Collapsed. All sufficiently big cities are the same. The letzten Menschen in the brave new world. RLHF'd etc. The Ease Disease, the Curse of Convenience, the principle of least effort, the greedy algorithm.
2. freakybig tooness
Something can be incomprehensible by being more refined, more climaxed, more transcendant, more integrated, deeper, more whole; like a visionary in a field you study, who is so excellent that you can't even follow along fully, but who has a coherence and value that you can partially recognize and appreciate, and aspire to.
A different way something can be incomprehensible is by being freakybig——composed of so many elements, each of which grows too lushly. Too much. Too anything, too many, too gross. Too much tooness (too-ness). You do integrate your mental activity——sense percepts, memory, generated actions, ideas——but your impression of the character of your mental activity is distorted by selection bias on legibility. Most of you is weird wormy little local relative-speed-prior solomonoff inductors forming and unforming little assemblies. How many? Too many. Now square that. 10 billion people.
Too many brains doing too many intersecting weird things at once. Too rich, to the point of bursting at the seams, spilling all over, infecting everything, overgrowing into each other, uncontrolled, algal bloom. Freaky, very interesting but also disgusting, like way too many sulci and gyri, one billion trillion neurons, cancer inevitable everywhere...
A deficient apprehension of the mess takes it to be a god with too many hands, too many eyes, too many attentions:
But this is not too disintegrated, not too heterogeneous, where it should be. An aiskheidoscopic pantheon is closer:
100,000,000,000 godworms worming their way through wormholes. Penetrating insight is vertical scaling; orthogonally, extreme horizontal scaling is impossible to interface with as an entity. Reading 10 million books is unnatural. The real lesson to be learned from LLMs is not this AI is scary but rather humanity is so wild and glorious. It shouldn't be more impressive just because it's in one box. You're interacting with 1/1000th the power of humanity and you're scared and disoriented——because humanity is creepy roiling freakybig tooness explosion.
Image by Android Jones.
3. overresonance
You bow the violin string, and it sounds out, and you drive it more and the amplitude increases, and the other strings and metal bars in the building resonate, and their vibration induces even more vibration in your violin string and in each other and they shake the building, louder, a self-sustaining terrible rich screech that doesn't die out from friction but only when it's shaken to bits everything that could vibrate.
Social media driven revolutions, vibe shift, sum-threshold attacks. Kaczynski self-props.
This is a qualia of things being set loose. Emancipated, or rather abjected, from the conditions of their genesis. Without the context that makes a thing, and gives it meaning, and constrains and checks it, and co-adapts to it, and hormetically keeps it on the rails, and grows to meet it——without the context the thing goes feral, goes loud, goes cancerous, goes loud, repeats itself, xeroxes itself, echoes, echo chamber with a negative coefficient of absorption. Highly frequency-dependent recursive runaway perceptual sexual selection, whiplash sociobiology.
Things expressing themselves intensely but flaccidly, with no stimulus to show or even maintain their rigid eternal structure——just belching. Neural hallucinations belching increasing-amplitude monotone nonsense forever fully outside of time. Like a dream.
Elements repeating and expanding themselves solipsistically, outside of the world, intricate ooze spreading out. In a dream, mental elements speak or think or act——but exaggeratedly, unconstrained to talk with other mental elements with any ettiquette——spewing their expectations to any adjacent arenas——playing out, acting out, maybe colliding——useful for internal coherentification, to a point, but not a way for the world to be structured at its core or crown.
Abundance looses constraints and offers overgrowth kindling. Vibrations are anti-dampened. Someone expresses an attitude——obscurely, obliquely, unconsciously, aspectually, conflationarily, proleptically——it is mimicked, copied, amplified, xeroxed, contorted——waaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh——categories solidify as alien standing waves in the stance-mimetic medium. Waaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
An activator-inhibitor system, but with not enough inhibitor, so the activators just go and go... The sound a truncated soul makes as it sputters fluid out of a severed pipe may resonate a bit then louder then louder louder then loUDER LOUDER LOUDER then LOUDER LOUDER then
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This tends toward everything hollowed out, the only sounds left are the overresonating rumbles and screeches.
