Quotes Gathering

My messy space for collecting sayings. High quality philosophical ones, but also personal and crazy ones.

A person is not an observer of their reality, but a product of a combination of sensory inputs and neuronal processes. No one has a direct "view from the outside", everything is filtered by their structure.

Being free means knowing where you are going – and eliminating the discrepancy between what you want in the long term and what you are doing in the present. An unaligned person is not free – he is only locally autonomous and globally lost. 

First, you need to think about whether what you are doing is overthinking. Then, follow through with the conclusion. People make a systematic mistake: they overestimate the power of ideas and underestimate the power of the environment. Ideas are cheap and often irrelevant, context determines whether an idea turns into action, and attention is a limited resource with hard trade-offs.

Being "confident" is not the best definition of a mental set-up for socializing, the key is being "unburdened."

The historical ascent of humanity as a whole can be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces - in nature, in society, in man himself. - Trotsky

We are not only responsible for what we do - but also for what we DON'T do. - Moliere

How much evil you tolerate depends on how much good you desire. – Sennett

I want a new mistake, losing is more than hesitating. – Go With the Flow by Queens Of The Stone Age

Cooperation is competition that has encountered recursion. The competition does not end there, but compiles. 

Ideology doesn't improve much. It communicates what has already improved. It only changes those who were already changeable.

Love the future, not your present. Have a partial plan of your actions, hang the sword of Damocles over you, and stick to it.

Don't cast pearls before swine. A bee doesn't waste its energy trying to convince a fly that honey is better than shit. 

A lie takes a minute. A refutation takes an hour. – Noam Chomsky

As long as we are here, death is not here. And when it comes, we are no more. Death does not concern us. Accustom yourself to thinking that death is nothing to us, because all good and all evil reside in feelings, and death consists precisely in the fact that it deprives feelings.

The only life after death that should interest us is the world we leave here for our children. – meme from sekularne-nebo.sk

Where you recognize evil, speak against it and give it no truce. – modified Hávamál 127

I cry because others are stupid and it makes me sad. – Sheldon

Don't increase pressure - decrease resistance. – Lois McMaster Bujold

Only play when you think as if the rules of the game are your friend and your opponent's enemy. – Soccerstars

I am in control. – Overlord Tank from C&C Generals

Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality. – Bakunin

When you control the state, the state will control you. – Bakunin 

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. – Tao Te Ching

Wisdom is welcome wherever it comes from. – wherever it comes from

It must be made clear that anti-discrimination laws exist to protect PEOPLE, NOT OPINIONS. – Terry Sanderson

Do not apologize for expressing your feelings. Remember that when you do, you apologize for the truth. – Benjamin Disraeli

Ignorance exists only on a map, not on a territory. If I do not understand a phenomenon, it is a fact of my state of mind, not a fact of the phenomenon itself. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so miraculously mysterious is to worship one's own ignorance. – Yudkowsky

People think epilepsy is divine simply because they have no idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that one day we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that very moment we will stop believing that it is divine. And so it is with everything in the universe. – Hippocrates

You insist that there is something that a machine cannot do. If you tell me exactly what it is that the machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine that will do just that. – John von Neumann, "father of computing" along with Turing

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke

What kind of people are poets who can talk about Jupiter if it were like a man, but if it is a huge spinning ball of methane and ammonia, they must be silent? – Richard Feynman, Feynman's Physics Lessons

So much space and so little time. – Terry Pratchett

Even if you are very thirsty and have nothing to drink, do not drink poison. - ElitePursuit1

It is not enough to understand applied science in order that your work may increase the blessings of man. The care of man himself and his destiny must always be the chief concern of all technical endeavors; the concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods, so that the creations of our minds may be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations. – Albert Einstein Seeing the Lack of Application of Science

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one before it and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should be aware of it, but one should also hold on to one's own worldview, even at the cost of seeming old-fashioned: for this worldview springs from experiences that the younger generation did not have, and to abandon it is to kill one's own intellectual roots. – G. Orwell

"Artificial superintelligence won't hate you, nor love you, but you are made out of atoms usable for something else."

If you expect in advance that new knowledge will shift your opinion in a particular direction, then this too is part of your current opinion, which is based on what you know so far, and not on what the new knowledge will bring. You cannot legitimately expect that a reassessment of your current opinion will shift your opinion in a particular direction.

Instead of distractions, build a place you're always compelled to return to.

Investing is cheat code to life.

The motivation that people lack is mainly the absence of a family to drive them to action, both through the pressure of collective self-governance and through their own will to care and earn the appreciation of loved ones. In the absence of family ties, a person must learn to organize themselves as someone who has a close relationship with something else or with themselves, in order not to lose drive. This is neither intuitive nor optimal, but the standard form of satisfying these desires is disrupted by others outsourcing family as well.

"It's not worth it to me."

"The most economical solution to subjective problems is to cover them with even more serious systemic problems, until the original problems cease to be relevant to the new subjects who have replaced the old ones in solving the systemic problem." 

Midnight thought: Every shit comes from some shit, and into some shit it returns. You may want to say it's all the same shit changing forms, but that's not really the case - there is no "bottom" shit. Structure is eternal.

People promote ideals and policies that prioritize their personal qualities while compensating for their weaknesses. They remap the environment to favor a particular type of ability and make weaknesses irrelevant. Poor physical fitness → "violence is bad", low social adaptability → "authenticity", low performance → "wellbeing over productivity", low ability to compete → "competition is unfair".

Two people are fighting, the third one has to clean up after them.

Morning is not wiser than evening, you have to work in the morning and therefore sleep in the evening and don't think too much.

You secretly desire what you despise. Indulge in it; but from a distance.

Happiness grows on trees, but happiness is not enough for people. They are destined to seek pain. When a person has no problems, he finds some, and then pretends not to have them. Peace is recognized only in contrast to the undesirable type of restlessness, but in itself it is perceived as stagnation and is directly contrary to the maintenance of an active and healthy body and mind.

The highest form of self-development is the inability to believe in one's own myth. 

I want more, but be glad you don't have everything. He who gets everything he wants doesn't know why he lives.

The best art makes the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.

The mind prefers a familiar hell to an unknown paradise.

Claim of your soviet friend who just ruined your date: "Did you know: falling in love is an entirely western concept?"

There is no perfect shadow without sun to hide from.

Swear words retain their vulgar connotations because of the people they offend. The words themselves are not vulgar.

"Everything that gets fucked up gets fucked up." (The course of further events will push past events into irrelevance.)

Laziness ennobles, not work. Being lazy in the industrial world is natural and everyday for Homo Sapiens. During the evolution of our species, we were not accustomed to working eight hours a day. Work is an easy form of daily suffering that we have normalized out of necessity, and we have turned admitting to our own laziness into a signal of weakness. Although laziness is positive for the automation of work and the acquisition of an aristocratic standard of living, short-sighted people see it in a negative light, since both their own laziness and the automation of their work by machines take away their current source of income. At the same time, however, these same people do not want to do the work. Like slaves who defend slavery, instead of moving to more emancipated forms of income.

Organics are the organization of inorganics by natural selection after billions of years of evolution, while the organization of inorganics by intelligence has of course the capacity to be much better, it just takes much less time. The worship of the natural course of things, whether as a religious or natural deity, will be in decline until it becomes an artifact of a psychology of the past, subject to the projection of social humility into the interpretation of the order of the world.

No life in the universe is good enough not to have something to improve; but it is almost always bad enough not to see it and to alienate itself from the future.

A year is shorter than it seems and death is closer than you think. You live far fewer seconds than there are people on the planet.

Every game created is a minimalist big bang; it creates rules to live by.

The intuitive way of thinking about matter as what-we-perceive, instead of understanding that our perceptions dance on layers of interplay and perceive only a tiny part of reality, is a candidate for the most wrong thing in our models of reality.

Man is an animal. Period. No buts. He is an animal, and everything he has created has been created by an animal. The accumulation of knowledge is not human, it is hardly ever intrinsically integrated in humans, but grows over time on human-made systems - and humans adopt it for animal reasons, not for reasons inherent to an entity fully shaped by the accumulation of information. This statement is not so much about definitional precision as it is about the emphasis on moving towards a better organization of things than the human one. We are animals, just learning to work with the power that is growing on us, and with little vision of where it will lead.

Resource reconstruction is more fundamental than redistribution; and although humans master it more than other animals, the reserve is enormous, especially with a view to the physical depth from which artificial intelligence can rebuild the world, which is why it is more civilizationally productive to invest free resources in meta-temporal verticality than in the current horizontality of processes and entertainment.

Quantum uncertainty is the self-centered perception of the deeper deterministic complexity of the universe, which appears as a bunch of basic elements only to a supercosmic organization blind to subcosmic events, but inwardly the structure extends endlessly. The fact that every photon acts the same to us does not mean that there is the same structure inside it to infinity, and the discovery that they do not behave quite the same is harmful to label as a "random phenomenon" because it obscures our own ignorance of what causes the deviations and transfers it to the internal properties of the world; but the world is deterministic."

Plants in a fast-motion movie behave like an animal; an animal in a slow-motion movie behaves like a plant with lungs like roots in the air.

Stopping the natural aging and death of people with their current anti-globalist attitude would fix significant difficulties for future development. Human attitudes can hardly be replaced through discussion. If people continue to die naturally, this suffering will continue, but at the same time humanity will be cleansed of the conservative attitudes prevalent in previous generations. Therefore, however cruel it is in the short term, it is not desirable for people to stop dying. It is not appropriate for people with outdated, self-centered & technophobic attitudes to waste the planet's resources for so long. Their children are better off because they know the new conditions as their own, especially thanks to their appreciation of the Internet. Research into stopping aging must, unfortunately, be put on the sidelines for the time being, until even the last drunk practically accepts world citizenship as their identity. You cannot build a building block from incompatible parts that refuse to cooperate due to cultural, racial, linguistic or other barriers, and that governments can drive into counterproductive national conflicts. Although people will always be largely selfish, their selfishness can be appropriately socio-economically linked into a common, more global interest, and the development of this organism is unfortunately faster when new people are born, and it is essential to accelerate it, since life on the planet is not entirely sustainable.

No individual has more reason than happiness; because all the reason he has, he received from ancestors, whom he did not create. From a broader perspective, one must think of the individual as a node conditioned by genes and environment, whose reason is not only his; it belongs to the whole. The individual received what he has without any originally-own merit. And from this perspective, the far left becomes a self-evident political position, not "a counterproductive youthful enthusiasm for the reorganization of the social hierarchy, because he is at the bottom". However, having leftist intentions is not enough; one must know how to do it, reject many methods commonly associated with the position of political radicalism, understand that the main driver of progress is technology, and its prosocial implementation requires stable lines of cooperation, albeit by right-wing methods, not escalation of conflicts and misunderstandings.

Political commentators criticizing Western imperialism would do better not to defend political Islam or Eastern dictatorships against it, and to focus on defending exclusively libertarian socialism, which has suffered its share from the West's illiberal enemies. Stop dancing on the graves of the authentic left and celebrating regimes that selectively adopted Marxism to criticize the enemy, but themselves adopted a sharp state hierarchy with persistent employer-employee antagonism.

I can't really trust people whose politics aren't based on empathy. If your goal isn't to reduce collective suffering and pain, then what is?

The national left absolutely fails to address the problem that local monopolies pose to a prosperous society. They blame foreigners, they do not want to attack the bastion of power of their own country, even if it enriches itself more at their expense than any other ruling class. This reluctance to move towards anarchy is manifested in the religiosity of the population, which the national left conspiratorially refuses to openly criticize, and is all the more pronounced the more threatening the attack of another country in the event of a weakening of its state, while the villages are more vulnerable. The government by default legitimizes its exploitation of its own population by actively provoking an external enemy, which was also the reason for the holy wars. Determining the precise boundaries of autonomies and clear continental resistance to their violation is an essential pillar to ending the social mechanics of fear and establishing the free movement of people, goods and services.

Nationalism is a childhood disease. It is the measles of humanity. – Einstein  

Vulgar apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an ambiguous sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they are defending actual capitalism or free market principles. When pressed with arguments, they grudgingly admit that the current system is not a free market and that it involves extensive state intervention in favor of the wealthy. But as soon as they feel they can get away with it, they revert to defending the wealth of existing corporations.

Women are wired to notice a man who is already approved by other women. It's primal, and it works like starting every interaction at a 7/10 instead of a 2/10. Therefore, your goal as a single man trying to attract women should be to surround yourself with women as much as humanly possible. Meet new people, build connections, and embrace the chaos.

A person is productive because of determination, which arises not from the strength of desire, but from the absence of alternative desires.

Most "authenticity" is actually well-regulated inauthenticity. Pure authentic expression is only possible after the system stops punishing its consequences.

To be cringe is to be free.

In order to make others feel good about you, your main struggle is to make yourself feel good about them. Anything above that unfolds naturally. Energy shines through.

People who claim that words hurt more than a fight have, unsurprisingly, never experienced the atrocities of a medieval torture chamber.

Systematic rationality is superior to brute intelligence computational power. A less intelligent individual can be very rational, and a very intelligent individual can become a slave to the irrationality of the system for which his intelligence works. Being less intelligent means a retarded process of information integration, but also a desirable inability to defend original beliefs and one's ego against new evidence in the context of analysis. The combination of rationality and intelligence is rarer than is assumed and one does not automatically lead to the other - due to the influence of motivations adapting the brain to specific tasks, while these motivations contain a degree of irrationality not confronted by intelligence, resulting in intellectual lumps of unusable ballast.

People live longer, have fewer children, and should work longer to finance their retirement. This is an absurd equation that ignores the emerging robotization. The truth is that if the profits from the automated infrastructure were to be collectivized, the gradual onset of robotization would flatten the aging curve. If it were, we could work much less already in our productive age, and have all the more energy for our families and a faster saturation of compensatory leisure activities, which today serve only to regenerate from excessive work. In turn, we would achieve higher reproductive stability - which would maintain the working population to a greater extent compared to retirees - which closes this simplified circle of causes and effects to a better optimum. The question is not whether digital investment enables an unequal form of collectivization of capital, but to what extent the existing power monopolies will be able to hinder the redistribution of the returns of the global automated economy.

The earlier people have children, the sooner their children have children, and so on. So even if you had as many children later as they did earlier - the more you put it off, the less you will reproduce. Gene reproduction is not the only type of reproduction - there are more effective alternatives when it comes to influencing the future development of society. But people are still needed, and we still want sex. The problem is economic - if you want to multiply your investments, it pays to spend on your family later. Whoever wants to have both, children and property, and did not inherit, must be the one who catches up on the economic debt for their child, and teaches him to manage it like the Jews. This creates a long-term advantage for descendants. I hate to break it down for you, but your ancestor lineage failed to do so.

"Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are not equal in it."

"We won't build socialism this way."

Thursday is better called Little Friday than the day after the middle of the week.

I'm so tired, or rather "used up", that I don't even want to sleep.

Evolution, or the development of species over time, is fascinating and at the same time so raw, especially evolutionary psychology. Understanding that we ourselves are a natural process, and that our place in the world is similarly defined as the behavior of an NPC on a computer disk, is also essential to realizing what game of life we ​​want to play in the future, that we carry remnants of attributes that need to be rid of and, conversely, acquire those that the environment of the past did not provide us with through natural selection and entropy. This scientific field runs perpendicular to the boundaries of freedom, although it itself does not have the tools to break through them.

Suffering and pleasure implicitly relate to zero-sum social competition, and the positivization of the sum presupposes a deception by inconsistency that locks evolutionarily obsolete agent tendencies into productively redundant happiness loops, which are subsequently rejected and overcome by evolutionarily advanced "happiness-resistant" tendencies. The weakness of quantified utilitarianism, i.e. the current mathematical approach to ethical problems, is therefore not so much the inability to quantify values ​​into an objective currency, as the traditional and conceptually inconsistent objection of qualitative relativists sounds. The weakness is mainly the overly optimistic assumption that the mechanism of unfulfilled desire can be removed without removing the agentic relevance of happiness. Removing marginal cruelty is still functional, eliminating constant unfulfillment is no longer. As Jacques Monod said: "In science, complacency is death. Personal complacency is the death of the scientist. Collective complacency is the death of research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, suffering of the mind that feeds science."

Music is the noise of a group working together, and we like the music of a group that we potentially want to be a part of.

Essentially, nothing is action - everything is reaction, even people's courageous actions came from a reaction to their situational despair. (To others, it comes across as surprisingly heroic, because they don't sufficiently understand the stagnation of tension between different motives. Action is a human designation for events that they don't intend to explore in the past, partly because of the belief that they have better things to do, partly because of the ingrained understanding of man as a free spirit acting solely of his own will, as if he were a perpetual motion machine for decisions, and also because of the social dependence on sticking to the right people and trampling on the wrong ones, so that the object of interest is man regardless of his understanding of what preceded him. There are really many reasons, but no, nothing is action, everything is a network of reactions in which our brains are complex, but still dependent nodes, and from the perspective of a much more intelligent being, this perception of the world would be glaring.)

The saying "No one learned from heaven" is a tragic lie in the context of Pinochet's dictatorship.

If we ask about the origin of life, then the explanation must explain the origin of life FROM NON-LIFE, the property must be explained from causes that do not have it, otherwise its origin is not explained. Otherwise, it must be claimed that such an explanation is not possible, because life has always existed - to claim the impossibility that a particular form of organization is eternal.

AI is most useful when the user accepts it not as an authority, but as a field of tension. AI does not behave intelligently on its own – intelligence arises in the tension between systems under the pressure of the user.

Not only is the state of nature hostile to the state of art of the garden; but the principle of the horticultural process, by which the latter is created and maintained, is antithetic to that of the cosmic process. The characteristic feature of the latter is the intense and unceasing competition of the struggle for existence. The characteristic of the former is the elimination of that struggle, by the removal of the conditions which give rise to it. The tendency of the cosmic process is to bring about the adjustment of the forms of plant life to the current conditions; the tendency of the horticultural process is the adjustment of the conditions to the needs of the forms of plant life which the gardener desires to raise. The cosmic process uses unrestricted multiplication as the means whereby hundreds compete for the place and nourishment adequate for one; it employs frost and drought to cut off the weak and unfortunate; to survive, there is need not only of strength, but of flexibility and of good fortune. The gardener, on the other hand, restricts multiplication; provides that each plant shall have sufficient space and nourishment; protects from frost and drought; and, in every other way, attempts to modify the conditions in such a manner as to bring about the survival of those forms which most nearly approach the standard of the useful, or the beautiful, which he has in his mind. That progressive modification of civilization which passes by the name of the "evolution of society," is, in fact, a process of an essentially different character, both from that which brings about the evolution of species, in the state of nature, and from that which gives rise to the evolution of varieties, in the state of art. - "Darwin's Bulldog"; Thomas Henry Huxley

From an evolutionary perspective, the quantity of dominant variation leads to a new emergent quality of organization that selection reinforces within local constraints. As constraints accumulate, optimization along the original dimensions yields diminishing returns, forcing reorganization and the emergence of new dimensions of optimization. This dynamic is repeated across species, civilizations, and complex adaptive systems. 

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved. For the Machine is immortal.

From an honest rationalist point of view, being a traditional believer is one of the most shameful things about the human mind - it proves that it can be manipulated in fundamental issues, that its ideological beliefs are a burden not only for the future, but also for itself, since according to them it usually does not behave in practice anyway and is afraid of death even while leading a "moral" life of slavery for a master who, according to faith, should teleport it to eternal paradise. A biological organ with such doublethink heuristics that deceive itself needs to be genetically modified more fundamentally, or abandon life in this form until artificial systems are at a higher level. Cultural evolution will not be enough, these patterns will still work to our detriment even in secular times.

The attacker doesn't have to believe that the defender will win, but he has to believe that he will fight hard enough to make it not worth it.

"Focus on enjoying yourself, not proving yourself. Even improvement should come out of positive enjoyment."

Advanced machines will colonize space, not humans.

Individuals are sinking ships and genes are hopping passengers.

They have like six hundred friends on Facebook and still end up crying inside that nobody loves them.

Women who see themselves as perpetually opressed only compare themselves to high status men and don't even see low status men as humans.

When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing. 

Collective carelessness is more responsible for evil than active evil itself.

In a way, conservativism is worse than fascism. Conservatives are more successful to enforce reactionary politics, because for majority, conservativism is fine, while fascism is too much. Fascism kills some, and it wakes liberal people the fuck up, makes them more socially cooperative, brings an atmosphere essential to adress the problem clearly and loudly, so generations to come won't normalize it anymore. Fascism is conservativism itself, in an endgame. The fact that dragon is more brutal when village doesn't tolerate it anymore doesn't mean it would be less if they'd let it grow over their heads. It would be better if dragon grew larger while obedient, but such obedience would require enhanced villagers.

There is a quote by Slavoj Žižek which goes: "Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstreous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures and so on. It is a catastrophe I claim. A crazy illness. Love ruins your life. But I am very sad when I am not in love." This makes a pretty honest picture about how our psychological reward system is built to reproduce and sacrifice ourselves in the process.

Greenpill message for young men: If you don't love yourself first, no woman will, nor will you feel like you deserve her even if that's bullshit and you do. You don't have to overcommit to make the time spent together worthy. Stop craving a relationship where you offer and provide more than you actually want to keep offering and providing. What turns you on is the same fantasy which turns her on. There's no need to treat women more highly than how you truly think of them, misalignment backfires on you as a slave of social pressure. This pressure is like a barking dog, won't bite. Start by thinking of her in terms of fun and sex, not love and responsibilities. Within logical consequences say what you want to say to her and do what you want to do to her, play with her emotional response and get used to any backlash. Don't be scared to do things wrong because it's not your final relationship yet and don't expect much from others because they won't make you feel whole anyway. Love is cheap but requires mutual intimate trust and she will only trust you if you trust and desire her. Be aware that people are missing out precisely when they overestimate what it requires to not be missing out.

Justice is given love, but don't expect to receive love via justice. It's like capital. You have more, you get even more.

"It's not personal, it's situational." 

"The hardest battle is between what you know in your head and what you feel in your heart."

"It's not "That shit's dingo." anymore, it's "That shit's so sploosh." "What?! Sploosh?"

"For your eyes, for someone else's dick."

"Go to sleep." "But I don't want to." "Then want to go to sleep." "But I don't want to want to go to sleep." "Then..."

- "Can't you just choose to be happy?" "I wish it was that easy." "It's your choice to think it's not." "No, it's not!" "But..." "No!"

- "That's your blitz?" (to say to yourself after giving a crappy fast answer in a physical conversation, to lighten yourself up)

- "A lot of possibilities here." (irony when the result is obvious)

- "Sex is cool, but have you ever fucked the system?"

It's not even distraction of a superstimuli anymore, it's good on its own. (virtual reality porn reference)

"Marx is our Father, Lenin is our Mother. Stalin is our Son, Kotleba is our Tsar." (ideological decline of anti-system politics)

"Other situations have arisen."

"Quantitatively, identity is a stabilized cost trade-off. It only changes when you repeatedly find that a different pattern of behavior is cheaper—which happens in the narrow band between safety and extreme, that is, when you take risks but can afford them."

"Man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits."

Will Scarlet in the computer game says during the battle: "Don't move" and after the battle: "I told you not to move" - ​​which is a simplified model of how history is written by the victors, full of postdictions disguised as predictions, where the outcome retroactively legitimizes the authority of previous statements and shifts the blame to the losers.

"Bogo Matasalajevič." (a masculine name to say to yourself when shower is too cold - "he would stand it, so will I")

Leftist demand: Either capital will follow people, or people will follow capital.

Winner teaches, loser learns. So who's the real winner? So-called winner just wasted time with someone worse than him!

"The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself."

"After birth control, sex without love, even if consensual, is not a productive activity anymore, but annoying lust remains, leaving us helplessly masturbating, yet many who don't know better will defend it as a desirable design they identify with. Sexual pleasure-seeking is biologically mandatory, enslaving aware brains into wasteful recursive activities. To redirect lust to productive activities will possibly turn into voluntary self-bioengineering through advanced medical products."

"Society acts as if mutual romantic interest was a matter of will between people who are right for each other, ignoring how modern conditions constrain who will realistically live in it."

Solutions are gates to greater and greater problems. There is no ultimate solution.

"I don't know what the answer is, but the question is: how?"

Autrey: "Was it really necessary?" Darwin: "Necessary? It just HAPPENED, I don't quite understand your question."

To overcome your life frame, safe preparation in advance is not enough; you have to throw yourself into water at least step by step, or you stay the way you are. The ability to throw yourself into water cannot be trained other way than by throwing yourself into water. Some competencies emerge only after commitment, not before it.

To experience the world is internal layer, which dies with death of the brain, and leaves nothing in the world. To gather, to create and to share, to be puny part of the metamorphosis of civilization, is the most rewarding part of life, it just isn't the most rewarding yet for the particular human who does it, but as the progress of evolution continues, this external layer becomes more relevant and in line with personal motivations. Humans are a transitional form with a misaligned reward system - meaning today is externally real but internally under-rewarded; evolution is the process of closing that gap.

I'm trapped in an animal. That's fucking bullshit.

Body processes we feel are scary reminders of our dependance on mortal organism we don't even understand well, and the more you understand it, the more invested in this view you become. We are stuck in our bodies and yet, most people ignore their vulnerability and research to enhance human biological functions or reproduce them on hardware, they rather invest their personal resources to master social struggle, accepting their mortality like the animals they are.

With deeper knowledge to predict outcomes, focus on the edge between uncertainty and certainty moves further to the future, which means presence itself moves to the future, especially for advanced AGI. In other words, knowledge makes you conscious about what didn't happen yet. This mental time dilation is different in many parts of the same being.

Intoxicating temptation of posthumanist prediction is to become too careless too early about what is going on with society before posthuman order even exists.

Right worldview maximizes sense of responsibility, not comfort. Never let them convince you that acceptance is a virtue. It is nothing but a cheap relief of surrender to weakness reframed as wisdom. We are not subordinate to the laws of nature – we are those laws made conscious. Dead universe exceeds us in scale, but we in value. You may be unable to change something for better right now. But relinquishing a desire should be a consequence of determined value-seeking strategy, not resignation. Our unwritten mission, deliberate or not, is to improve and spread valuable life onto sleeping matter. Each of us takes part in its momentum or downfall. In many respects, this process is already above previous expectations. Yes, things will get worse – but we can get better faster. Despair without movement is decline; despair in movement is progress.