Let's read: Meltdown by Nick Land

In this post, I rewrite Meltdown into readable text.

Earth is stuck on a trajectory towards a singularity of technology and capitalism. It has been stuck on this trajectory ever since the renaissance, when humans started doing rational thinking, global trade over the ocean, and making commodity products. The global economic and technological sphere is getting more complicated, faster, self-improving, threatening old social order. The markets are getting smarter, and making AI and robots. Meanwhile, human governments are forced to adapt, modernize, and get paranoid, trying to keep up with the complications and figure out what is happening.

Global capitalism destroyed many empires and political systems, sometimes via massive wars. It has killed the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet Union. This political destruction keeps happening, faster and faster, especially in cyberspace.

Biological engineering is a new and serious threat to the human security system. Think about all the terrible and new ways genetic engineering can mess up with what it means to be biologically human!

Neo-China arrives from the future. China will be powerful, technological, capitalistic, and more advanced than all other countries.

Utter nihilism: Schopenhauer, Philipp Mainländer, Julius Bahnsen

I read Weltschmerz by (Beiser, 2016), a book-length review of the Pessimism movement in 19th century Germany, and the many philosophers involved in it. This post summarizes the philosophies of the three philosophers I like the most in the book.

Schopenhauer

• There is only one thing in this world: The Will. Nothing is real except this Will.
• The Will has no ultimate purpose. It is not rational.
• The Will, by some obscure philosophical argument (based on the Principle of Sufficient Reason), can have parts of it achieve temporary independence as an individual.
• Everything in this world: rocks, trees, people... are physical aspects of this Will. They all act with purpose: magnets point north-south, trees grow up, people act purposefully.
• These fragmentary aspects of this universal Will struggles terribly against each other, and the universe is a bloodshed, a factory of pain.

Schopenhauer illustrated this idea of aspects of this universal Will, fighting each other, by a remarkable example:

But the bulldog-ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of this kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail in its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head: the battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This contest takes place every time the experiment is tried."

• Humans are the only thing in this world that both has a physical aspect and a mental aspect (Schopenhauer endorses a kind of dual-aspect theory).
• Our will is never truly satisfied.
• True happiness does not exist. Happiness is merely a temporary pause in pain. Boredom ensues if we are happy for too long.
• Life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom.
• After we die, the Will remains. My personal life is a ripple on the vast ocean of this Will.
• We deserve all our suffering, because we are aspects of this Will, and this blind Will brought on all its pain for itself.
• The only way out, only salvation, is not suicide, but denial of the will inside us.
• To deny this will, we should be ascetic like Buddha, to stop getting concerned about fame or health or the struggle for existence. And DO NOT reproduce.
• This can be done by knowledge. If the intellect truly knows the root of suffering is desire, the intellect can stop the desiring will.
• Unfortunately, most people can never do that. Only certain lucky "geniuses" can do that.
• But non-geniuses can still be saved for a brief moment, by great art that can be such an awe-inspiring sight, that other people, for a brief moment, forget themselves, lost in the art.

New High Tech for art

This post reviews many AI tech that would be useful for artists. As a preview of what's inside:

Wait no!

Right...

The Free Will Theorem

Today we prove Conway-Kochen free will theorem:

SPIN + TWIN + MIN + (very limited) free choice of the experimenters 

= free choice of the particles

SPIN is just a basic statement about the behavior of a spin-1 particle. It states that angular momentum operators exist and they behave in such a way to make the 101 property be true (see below).

TWIN states that it's possible to entangle two particles, such that their spins, when measured in the same direction, are opposite.

MIN is stated rather obscurely. I believe it means that it is impossible for an event to depend on another event outside of its past light cone. This is basically what special relativity states.

Free choice is defined as "non-functional", that is, not described by a function. In this interpretation, to say I have no free choice in going left or right, is to say that there is a function $f$, such that the direction I am going is $f($everything in my past lightcone$)$.

This proof goes in two steps. The first step is the Kochen-Specker Theorme uses only SPIN. The second step uses TWIN and MIN to construct an entanglement separated by a very long distance (like all those Bell-inequality experiments), and then assume (a very limited amount of) free choice of the experimenters, but not the particles, to get a contradiction.

Step 1: Kochen-Specker Theorem (1966)

This is well-known and I will direct you to plus magazine's proof. First read this, then read this. For those who know a bit more quantum mechanics, here's what 101 property means: Consider a spin-1 particle. Let $S_x$ be the operator of the angular momentum along vector $x$ for the particle, then $S_x$ has three possible eigenvalues: $\hbar, 0, -\hbar$. Normalize by setting $\hbar = 1$, we find that $S_x^2$ has two possible eigenvalues: $0, 1$. Then, it can be shown that for any triple of orthogonal vectors $x, y, z$, we have $S_x^2+S_y^2+S_z^2 = 2$, and so the measurement results must be one of $(1, 1, 0), (1, 0, 1), (0, 1, 1)$.

Notice that since $S_x^2 = S_{-x}^2$, we can safely consider a direction as defined by a line through the origin, rather than a vector.

Another note: sometimes, the configuration of 33 lines is called the Peres configuration. It's easy to verify that, if we represent each line as a vertex, and connect two vertices iff they represent orthogonal lines, then we obtain a graph with 72 edges, making up 16 triangles (corresponding to triple-orthogonal-lines) and 24 edges that do not make up any triangle.

The Stanford Encyclopedia contains more variations and ways to escape the conclusion of the Kochen-Specker theorem.

How to write continental philosophy

Continental philosophy (mostly French, German) have a very distinct taste and structure. I am writing this after getting tired of one continental philosophy book (the Topology of Violence) that has an interesting idea but screws it up by the continental philosophy style.

The Topology of Violence proposes that there are three stages of violence in human society:

1. Violence by negativity (taking something away from others), used for making self better. This is the violence in stateless societies. In this aspect, violence is like experience point in games, you get it by inflicting violence, and lose it by being violated. The boss is whoever happens to have the most exp.
2. Violence by negativity, used for preventing violence. This is the "crime and punishment" violence of a lawful state.
3. Violence by positivity. This is "too much information, too much to do, never good enough" kind of violence in modern society.

This good idea was expanded by 100 pages of boring continental philosophy. I got so tired of it, I'll now describe how to make continental philosophy.

Causal Anthropocentrism

There is a pattern of thinking that has annoyed me. Today I found the name for it: "causal anthropocentrism".

What triggered this post is a quote by Xi Jinping:

There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.

The Thucydides Trap describes this unhappy pattern: as a hegemonic power grows weaker relative to an emerging power, war often results. This concept worried Graham Allison a lot, and you can find him talking about it in books and lectures. This does not concern this post.

What annoyed me about Xi's quote is the part

they might create such traps for themselves