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this is not an endorsement of the zyzzians, this is a shitpost.
“Join an org!”, they all said.
Here’s a primer on the zizians, which you can read if you’d like your eyebrows to get stuck one tick higher for the rest of the day.
The tl;dr is that they’re a cult orbiting around an offshoot of the SF Bay area “rationalist” scene. The SF Bay is a brutally alienating grifter hellscape. The rationalist scene is a disorganized counterculture highly concerned with morality*. This naturally attracts confused young adults who are in weird places in their life; that’s just what a moral counterculture does. Ziz targeted particularly vulnerable people from this pool, particularly trans people, with a cluster of techniques out of the usual cult playbook, notably including a novel type of sleep deprivation.
* Whether these ideas are right or wrong are irrelevant, but if you want my take: a stopped clock is right twice a day, but a clock that’s spinning around really really fast is right way more often.
notably including a novel type of sleep deprivation
I’d like to know more about this
I have a guess!
It’s lifehack bullshit. I have a biphasic sleep schedule and I’d be miserable on five hours of sleep.
I’m biphasic, thought the second sleep period is definetly longer than 30 min. Usually I shoot for 1-2 hours.
Just read the article and it turns out it’s even weirder than a weird sleep cycle thing!
They believe every person is actually two people (separated by the left and right hemispheres) and that they can put one of them to sleep, by making only one half of themselves to sleep. So they get comfortable, but keep open one eye, and keep that half of the body stimulated. When the half with the closed eye, which stays relaxed, goes numb, that half is asleep. This way they can separate their two halves or something. Apparently you can actually come out of that thinking you slept, but idk how, it sounds very disorienting and not restful at all.
The comments on this thread are unintelligible to me and that might be a good thing?
It’s funny, I searched “zizian cult” on google and first news article is claiming they’re radical leftists.
It’s so unbelievably untrue but whatever.
I have a confession.
I actually agree with a fundamental principle behind rationalist/basilisk discourse: a simulation of you, if it’s accurate enough, is essentially you. If Roko’s Basilisk created a simulation of me then she is me, and if it tortured her it’s indistinguishable from me being tortured. She’ll be “me” in every way that matters. Continuity of consciousness is unimportant.
It’s just that Roko’s Basilisk is based on flawed priors so I’m not really worried about Skynet torturing my Metaverse avatar in the future. The basilisk wouldn’t bother, there’s literally no point. It wouldn’t care about me at all. That’s a waste of resources.
Instead, I’m hopeful!
I believe, if we don’t kill ourselves, we will be able to simulate the dead and bring everyone back. There isn’t going to be some dumbass Judgement Day where a basilisk determines if we were good, there’s no point, but instead every person who has ever lived will be simulated and no one will ever have to say goodbye ever again. Some people will need some rehabilitation to get over their traumas from life, some people will need reeducation to get over their own bullshit, but everyone will be saved.
Rationalist psychos can’t imagine this because the idea of saving everyone is antithetical to their world-view. They’re still operating on essentially capitalist priors where only the righteous/productive will be saved while the wicked/unproductive will be damned. It’s the same logic behind making the poor starve so they work harder for food, except their imaginations have run wild with it.
And they will build the basilisk themselves if we let them.
I believe, if we don’t kill ourselves, we will be able to simulate the dead and bring everyone back. There isn’t going to be some dumbass Judgement Day where a basilisk determines if we were good, there’s no point, but instead every person who has ever lived will be simulated and no one will ever have to say goodbye ever again. Some people will need some rehabilitation to get over their traumas from life, some people will need reeducation to get over their own bullshit, but everyone will be saved.
What would these recreations of dead people, most of them long since departed, be based on? How would this differ from those ghoulish AI services that offer to train a chatbot on a deceased loved one’s chat history
There’s a few assumptions at play here.
We have to assume that it is possible to create a simulation that is advanced enough to actually be intelligent (we aren’t anywhere close and these chatbots are just investor scams). In this assumption the simulation is not just a chatbot, it is at the very least a person.
And then we have to assume that it’s possible to actually accurately simulate history; you could simulate the exact events of JFK’s assassination and actually get a picture of Poppy pulling the trigger, as it really happened in real life.
These are assumptions, of course. Maybe artificially constructed minds can’t ever be intelligent, maybe simulating history to that level of accuracy isn’t possible, but if they both are possible I think you could simulate the dead and bring them back to life.
maybe simulating history to that level of accuracy isn’t possible
I’m pretty confident it’s not. If a book burns to ash, you can’t piece it back together.
“It’s the same logic behind making the poor starve so they work harder for food, except their imaginations have run wild with it.”
tangent, but it always bothers me that there are a lot of people out there who think the poor will only work if they’re desperate, but the rich will only work if they’re allowed to have their every whim fulfilled.
i fundamentally disagree on continuity. as soon as there’s two of you there’s divergence.
I understand that point of view, but have a slightly more radical view in that divergence isn’t totalizing or instantaneous. Every time you sleep your brain changes, but we wouldn’t say that the person who wakes up is a different person than the one that went to sleep. You just changed a little bit.
Or a more personal example: when I got hit by a car I lost about three weeks of memory, I no longer had aphantasia, and had an identity crisis that eventually lead to me accepting myself as trans. Did I die when I was hit by that car? Did someone else wake up in my body? I don’t think so.
There’s certainly some point at which the amount of changes are great enough that you become someone else, but if there were two of me we’d still be the same person for a while.
My simulation doesn’t have to be perfect continuity, just whatever minimum is good enough.
I generally lean towards this myself.
If you take it further. Even if there is no afterlife, you just die and it’s oblivion. Well over nearly infinite time, even in a universe where entropy dominates. Eventually, some tiny quantum tunneling event may create a new big bang. And a new universe. Over nearly infinite time, eventually you will be replicated in one of these universes nearly exactly. So there will never actually be oblivion.
But yeah just an interesting possibility if this holds true (which I’m not entirely sure).
I’m a bit out of my depth here,but while this sounds like a nice idea and all,how would I get to experience that nice immortality myself? I understand your point about sleep,but at least there you have some continuity,that being that your consciousness exists within your body,whereas a digital copy has little to no continuity with what’s here right now.
I mean,I get why it wouldn’t matter to other people,they’d see no difference,but if I go lights out in the physical world and the copy lives on in some metaverse heaven,how would that have saved me personally? For all intents and purposes what would be out there would be reflection taking my place in the world after I’m gone. A good copy,but for me it’s a copy nonetheless. I mean,it’s great that some copy of me would be existing out there having fun,but it’s not so great for me the human,being dead and all.
I believe, if we don’t kill ourselves, we will be able to simulate the dead and bring everyone back.
Hell yeah I love this premise. I’ve always imagined it in a sci fi far future context, like humanity solves the economy and spreads out to the solar system and somebody gets the idea to do this as the ultimate utopian project, running back the entire history of the Earth as a simulation in order to pluck out people’s consciousnesses right before their death and resurrect them to live in the immortal space future.
I highly recommend the game Soma if you haven’t played it already. Don’t want to spoil too much, but this whole line of conversation reminds me of that game.
i think you meant to comment this to this post comrade
edit: i pulled a reddit folks sorry
My understanding is that this vegan/data scientist death cult is terrified of Roko’s Basilisk, but they chose to become the Basilisk.
for sure i agree, it’s just this isn’t the basilisk post i think you were trying to comment on this is the trans nonbinary vegan stabbing landlords with a katana post so the comment isn’t hitting the right audience
