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Messages - solipsisticurge

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76
Neuropath / Re: Is a Neuropath future inevitable and/or unavoidable?
« on: August 04, 2017, 08:03:23 am »
Short-term profitability will decide this over any cultural resistance to the ideas. Just as we stand on the precipice of the death of meaning and purpose, so we witness, in our meager ways, the final days of human relevance to the only system that still matters (perpetual economic growth). Once algorithms and machines cross the point of no return in terms of outperforming humanity at sufficient tasks, our humanist ideologies will crash beneath their monetary weight. AI with their core code set to the accumulation of wealth and dominance of their market will make the vast majority of purchases (from a GDP perspective if not by number of individual transactions), largely removing even the need for human customers.

(Side note: that would make a nice story idea, a futuristic Earth where a handful of extremely powerful economic algorithms/AI viciously attempt to outcompete each other, a never-ending game of ruthless seven-dimensional economic chess, with products produced at ever-increasing scale, bartered back and forth, with no humans left who actually need or desire them. One AI corners the market on disposing of all the useless junk, gradually achieves total monopoly over all industries, wins the war. Begins attempting to eliminate itself as a competitor.)

The free world has shown repeatedly that economic reward will trump humanist notions most of the time. This is aided by relative reaction speed difference, as governmental and social institutions are much slower to reach consensus/make decisions than purely economically driven ones. Thus will all humanist institutions and reservations eventually fail, if only because all those holding them are far easier to starve out than those playing along.

77
I had the feeling he was using it as demonstration for the intellectual argument: the gods are blind to the Consult, meaning they fall outside eternity, meaning the world is severed from the Outside at some point.

If he DID mean they had to win in fulfillment of his own plans... we'll have to RAFO.

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78
I just finished this so I want to gloat about being right about Kelmomas/Samarmas being the real Harbinger and Kellhus being a red herring.

Very mixed feelings about this book. I enjoyed it, but there were some anticlimaxes. Some were understandable. I mean, the Consult were clearly meant to be a pathetic anti-climax. Others...though he annoyed me in the beginning, I came to really like Sorweel and his death seems to make his whole arc rather meandering and pointless. Hell, I even liked him and Serwa together. Sadly, that's been the closest thing to a healthy romantic relationship in the entire series. Naturally, it was also among the shortest.

I fear that he's simply killed off so many interesting characters it will be hard to get invested in the next series, the adventures of Meppa, Kellhus' Nameless Grandson, and some kids/cousins/whatever of all the dead characters. It's gonna need some work.


I fear that he's simply killed off so many interesting characters it will be hard to get invested in the next series, the adventures of Meppa, Kellhus' Nameless Grandson, and some kids/cousins/whatever of all the dead characters. It's gonna need some work.

You are forgetting the doubtless main  character of TNG, the destroyer of the No-God and salvation of mankind, the One Who Comes Before, the Absolute, the God-Among-Us...

...Likaro.

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79
On finding the significance of these deaths ten years or more later in TNG, might Achamian's new status as Prophet of the Past factor in? It hasn't served much purpose since finding Ishual, but who's to say how it might continue to evolve?

Seswatha might also have made contingencies in the nature of the Dreams. Perhaps all Gnostic sorcerers will find them deeply changed with the No-God as a walking reality instead of a pervasive threat.

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