Cyberdelics, the Chaoskampf and Moloch
" All sensations are impulses caused by the brain. Block out the unpleasant ones and select only the happy, pleasant ones" - Eiri, L12 finale
A simple one-off statement by Eiri, yet this single line deserves a page of its own. The implications of Eiri's statement draw its roots from a thought experiment postulated by the philosopher Robert Nozick in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia.
The thought experiment, dubbed the "Experience machine", asks that given the choice between everyday reality and a perfect simulated reality where one only has pleasurable experiences, which one would you choose?
The original experiment was meant to counter the idea of hedonism itself being a virtue, yet we will soon deal with these immersive implications as immersive media becomes our reality.
But we already have our own version of an experience machine: Psychedelic drugs (technically called hallucinogens). And this potent substance was key to the development of two foundational stones of modern society: Ancient religion and Computer technology.
Cyberdelics and the culture of computational media
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding."
-Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson
The influence of psychosomatic experiences on the devlopment of the internet and modern PC's cannot be understated. Most of the pioneers of the personal computing revolution were outright hippies and were a part of the 60's counter cultural movement. Steve Jobs and Douglas engelbart , key figures to the idea of the PC as we know it, were both acid dropping " bums", while Google's first web doodle was that of Burning Man in California, a hippie commune of which both Google founders were regular members of. The acidic fractal nature of reality one sees when dropping DMT or LSD and attaining "ego death" was, to the cyberpunks of that era, the truest reflection of cyberspace and the nature of nonlinear connections in computer architecture.
To put it simply, psychedelics are the founding stone of silicon valley's revolution.
Mondo 2000 was an early cyberpunk magazine in contrast to the Whole Earth catalog, and would soon be a prototype for Wired magazine, one of the most well known and insightful magazines on the nature of technology and cybercultural attitude.
This was not limited to just the PC. Some adherents, such as noted computer scientist Jaron Lanier, took it even further and made his first forays into a newfound technology of the time called "virtual reality", partly inspired by Gibson's visions in Neuromancer and the subsequent sprawl trilogy. In VR, participants are now a part of a simulated reality created by the "ice" of code, where one can feel and think despite it being unreal. Like noted self proclaimed 'cyberpsychologist' John suler proclaimed, cyberspace is like a dream world we are merely a part of.
Philosopher David Chalmers, one of the most important in the realm of techno-philosophy, disagrees entirely. To Chalmers, the argument that a virtual reality simulation (one created by VR or psychedelics, whichever your choice) is as real as the real world, and their reality is justified in that realm. In his essay "The virtual and the real", Chalmers argues that not only is virtual reality is real, but so are the experiences felt in said reality, something that science may be leaning towards with studies. Chalmers is refuted by other thinkers such as L.M Sancass, who argues in his post that VR has much more in common with a dream, where we know that just like how the dream is constructed by the mind of the viewer, VR is constructed by the software in question.
But while we may think this a contemporary debate on technology in the West, the nature of this debate has deep roots in the Ancient Eastern and Indigenous world, both Near and Far.
The illusion of reality
"Am I a man who just dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly who now dreams about being a man?"
-Chuang Tzu, Chinese C'han philosopher
The famous western philosopher Rene Descartes concluded his remark "I think therefore I am " in line with the longstanding western tradition grappling with the nature of a dream.
To many philosophers in the west, the idea of perception and knowing something for what it is has been carried forward by philosophers such as Berkeley, Hume and most famously Kant, who contrasted 'phenomena' (that is an object as how we perceive it according to the illusion of our senses) versus 'Noumena' , what an object actually is without our senses.
Descartes main aim with postulating mind as the centrepiece of the human body was carried out with very deep christian ideas as to how a soul can be separated from its physical constitution. At its core, Descartes belief in the idea of dualism is that mind can reasonably perceive reality rests with the fact that the mind can think and the body can't. But most notably, Descartes postulates the reality of our senses through a strong argument in his fourth Meditation that God the Father cannot be a deceiver and would not implant a false idea in his consciousness.
If we travel back in time by a couple hundred years to the East, we see that the philosophers of India had a wholly opposite view. Adi shankaracharya, in the Advaita Vedanta school of Indian philosophy, has a very different understanding of dreams and reality. He would agree with both Chalmers and Sancass's arguments on dreams and virtual reality and goes a step further.
Shankara's core philosophy stems from a set number of fundamental assumptions. According to the ancient beginnings of the Hindu faith rooted in the Rg Veda, the true world is that of Brahman, a unified whole of consciousness that differentiates itself into separate distinct objects, and we as humans perceive these objects in an illusion called Maya. Salvation or Nirvana is characterized by the ability of a Jiva , a living being formed from the universal mind, to recognize its true nature as a fragment of this universal mind. Thus , "God" or Isvara projects a false reality that creates the universe.
Shankara expands these assumptions on a set of arguments. The two core ones are as follows: That of the dream and that of Rope turning into the snake.
Akiyoshi Kitaoka's Rotating Snakes is one of the best examples of how a rope turns into a snake and vice versa. You see the snake moving, until you stare at it intently, upon which it turns still
Shankara's Rope/Snake argument is based on an ancient tale. In ancient india, it was common for children to play pranks on passerby's in villages. They would place a thickly coiled rope on a village path. Passerbys, on mistaking the rope in the distance for a snake, would run far away, while the children erupt into peals of laughter. However, the Indian philosophers took this prank very seriously, and it has been one of the most central metaphors to Indian philosophy to demonstrate the illusion of reality.
To Shankara, the rope/snake analogy is the perfect metaphor for how we take the material world, the rope, for reality, the snake, and this is created by our faulty sensory organs that cannot distinguish between either, a trick called avidya. To hammer down his point, Shankara uses the dream analogy, wherein he states that just like how a dream retains its own reality within the state of dreaming, so are we too part and parcel of, to lightly put it, god's cosmic dream. He further argues for it saying that dreams have paradoxical, self contradictory qualities, and while reality is good at concealing it, reality at its core possesses the same contradictory qualities in more or less the same manner.
(To make things clear, I am not a Hindu nationalist. The next section will proceed from an atheistic/secular bend of view, so please do not read further if you are from India and are very religious.)
What's really interesting to me is how Roy ascott, a very famous New Media artist, compares the nature of a computer and a computer simulation to something he called a 'universal data space', a digital brahman of sorts:
"Our immersion in electronic global networks can lead to a reevaluation of the status of reality; to an understanding of its provisional nature, as one of many coexisting realities, all of which are constructed—"virtual" in a sense—and dependent upon our active participation for their construction.
When we recognize the centrality of the computer in this process of production, and it has become central to both the construction as well as the dissemination of knowledge and therefore of experience......
The computer as thing, as object, as apparatus, as machine is too much with us, too dominant. It is not transparent, it is not understood as pure system, universal transformative matrix. The computer is not primarily a thing, but a set of behaviours. Its purpose is not only computation but transformation; not only storage but dissemination. It is the agent of the datafield, a construct of dataspace...
Rather than seeing the computer interface as a membrane separating out the computer as discrete object from ourselves, we should see it and design it as a doorway into dataspace, a synaptic interval in a human-computer symbiosis" - Roy ascott, Gesamtdatenwerk:
Connectivity, Transformation and Transcendence
The ancient writers of the Rg-Veda were notably strong users of the hallucinogenic plant Soma, and psychedelic substances run throughout the practices of the Hindu Faith. Thus, the reason we see this strong correlation between ancient Indian (and chinese philosophy, because the Tao is also very similar to Brahman conceptually) and modern computation methods can be expressed through these simple equations:
Human mind = Computers = Universal mind
Collective unconscious = Data space = Universal Phase space
VR = Dreamtime = Psychedelics = Higher dimensions
Thus, just like how humans simulate things through their imagination, computers simulate their own reality within via computation. In a similar way, physical reality is a simulation created by a cosmic "mind"
But Hinduism's ancient Rg-Veda traces its origins to an even older line, as old as our history on earth itself. And the implications of this are far reaching up to modern day.
Dyaus and the ChaosKampf
In the Rg-Veda, one of the highlights of the text surrounds the myth of the sky god Indra and his adventures. Indra was notably a master of illusions who casts the whole world into an illusory reality with his giant Indra Jala or "Indra's net".
The most significant and praisworthy feat of Indra is his slaying of the dragon Vrtra, a monster of chaos stockpiling the "waters", with this master thunderbolt Vajra and upon whose slaying the waters of the Earth are released. Most of the Rg-Veda alludes to this mythical slaying.
Strangely however, this myth is not restricted to the RgVeda alone. We see parallels in myth of Zeus, the greek lightning god, slaying the serpentine Typhon, the Norse God Thor slaying the world-serpent Jormundgandr, the japanese storm god Susanoo slaying the multiheaded snake Orochimaru to the Albanian Drangue slaying the serpentine Kulshedra.
Perhaps the most interesting version of this story lies in the bible itself, where the Dios Padre i.e God the Father slays the mythical Leviathan in the book of Isaiah from the Bible. Similar parallels occur in the Book of Revelation, where the archangel Michael slays Satan, who takes the form of a dragon resembling the original serpent that tempted Eve.
The roots of these common stories across culture stems from an ancient indo-european myth pertaining to the ChaosKampf, where a primal storm hero/sky deity struggles against a sea serpent arising from the waters of chaos and wins releasing the "waters" stockpiled by the serpent, but tragically dies in the process (the idea of Sacrifice in many ancient religions was to essentially "make something sacred". In the Rg Veda, Purusha the first sacrifices his body in order to create the universe. Thus, a hero sacrificing himself essentially attains divinity). The most emblematic of these is that of the struggle between the Babylonian gods Marduk and Tiamat, an ancient myth symbolically representative of the eternal struggle between the forces of order and Chaos. And Marduk's win against the serpent Tiamat implies that humanity always beats chaos at some level.
Hobbes, the Leviathan and Serial experiments Lain
The creators have worded Lain's dialogue at the end of L12 very interestingly. "I am software, and you guys are applications". In terms of consciousness, "I am the collective consciousness and you guys are my individual minds" or in terms of godhood, "I am the universal mind, and you are my avatars".
Thomas Hobbes is a western philosopher whose ideas are central to the foundation of modern political theory, and he is most famous for his book Leviathan, a metaphor he borrowed from the book of Isaiah in the hebrew bible. The book, at its core, relies on the argument of the "state of chaos" that humans will find themselves devolving into if there's no "sovereign", a highest ruler whose right to rule is above even that of the church. Hobbes, doing away with the church as the head of society, instead reformulated the relationship between man and god as that between man and the sovereign (a return to Monarchy).
While this idea of the sovereign died in Europe post enlightenment, it continued its legacy in Japan all the way to WW2 and the modern era. The Japanese emperor's power was considered godlike, reminiscent of Taoist ideas of the King's divine right. The shadow of the emperor and the royal family still persists in Japan, to this day.
So what am I getting at basically?
If you have been paying attention , then we see the story of SEL being an alternate retelling of the ChaosKampf, where Eiri styles himself as Dyaus Pitr and slays the chaos serpent emerging out of the sea of information, Lain Iwakura, and in doing so he establishes himself as the hidden sovereign of the world of the Wired with his own (supposedly earned) divine right to kinship on the salvation of the planet.
In controlling the shared hallucination of the internet, Eiri attempts to rule via a magician's force, like he did to Lain Iwakura, where Lain does things out of free will but since Eiri is controlling all her options as he remains out of sight, she simply falls deeper and deeper into his web of illusions.
Similarly, I believe Ueda and Konaka, via SEL, want to establish that the idea of a 'hidden sovereign' in the Wired who seeks to control. But who is this shadow ruler?
Interestingly, I believe the answer lies in the show itself, maybe unbeknownst to even the creators of the show.
Moloch and the Basilisk
In Layer 6: KIDS during Hodgeson's PSI exposition, we briefly see a black cube flash across the screen (See the occult section on this website). For a scientific laboratory, the placement is very odd. But it does make sense if we take it to be an esoteric and Gnostic symbol for Saturn. As a symbol, the black cube or saturn can be identified with many things: the division between the material and higher realms, the illusion of material existence, a virtual reality time-loop of sorts etc. (This nutter book has more shit on this obscure nonsense. Additional links here, here, here and here, but be warned, it's some fringe bullshit. However, it's a little too similar to SEL)
Look, here's something I'm just going to put out there before I continue. SEL is great if you don't understand the plot. The entire plot is structured like a conspiracy where seemingly unrelated events are connected in obscure ways and draws heavily from the sources I've just mentioned. For a show, that's fine, but I'm going to put it out there that I don't believe there's some secret antichrist ruler hidden in the blackbox matrix of the internet. Konaka and Ueda clearly want to point in this direction. The whole Eiri = Freddy Krueger shtick (if my alien theory is true) means that just like Krueger is the supervillain deity of dreamspace, Eiri is the same of the wired. So who is our Moloch?
While I agree that there is a Moloch (an ancient canaanite god identified with Saturn) controlling all of us and manipulating us, instead of the question of "Who?" proposed by Ueda ,Ryutaro and Konaka, I prefer to ask "What?"
In a superb essay called "Meditations on Moloch" , Scott Alexander asks a very important question:
"The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”.
It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent."
The blog goes into the idea of how we are trapped by certain situations which force inevitable outcomes by virtue of how the system is designed. Moloch is the means by which when everyone takes a rational decision based on selfishness or pure self interest, the resulting outcome is an irrational one that benefits nobody. Thus, "Moloch" is the failure of exaggerated individualism.
Take for example of a multipolar trap , the current AI arms race. If the United States doesn't rapidly invest in AI, its enemies China and Russia will. Thus, countries are locked into developmental arms-races of who gets there first. In this manner, a superintelligent AI can theoretically build itself without its own willpower.The situation we find ourselves in is much less one evil puppetmaster and more twenty bumbling idiots. It is, to put it simply, impossible to control the world.
The most ironic thing about SEL is how much it adopts Foucault and most of his ideas on madness and the illusion of a linear history, yet never bothered with his ideas on power, the pinnacle of his later work. In a very ironic fashion, to Foucault, power is not the sovereign ruler that controls the masses, but what a population believes is true that dictates its actions, thus perpetuating systems of their own oppression.
Lesswrong.com's poweruser Zvi adapts Alexander's essay on Moloch to describe the idea of "moral mazes", where companies under capitalist demands give rise to and actively encourage sociopcathic and morally reprehensible actions. This is less because of an evil CEO (although those do exist) and more because of a system that gives evil people the title of CEO.
This is basically Moloch at its core, and what is now resulting in a multi-causal rapidly replicating 'polycrisis' that has a million causes and problems all knotted together like a mesh. At the core of the poly-crisis is the rapid pursuit of a certain set of values at the expense of all others. In Japan's case, their Hessai polycrisis was because of many interlinking factors, but can be reduced to collectivism in the face of hyper-capitalist alienation. In most of our cases, the system itself was never designed for human beings but was a natural, if severely flawed, consequence of previous uninformed thinkers.
Earth is the out of control bus from Keanu's Speed movie, and its passengers are the rest of us.
Are there evil governments and people who manipulate a system as much as they can? Yes. Does this mean there's an Illuminati/New world Order? I highly doubt that anybody is that intelligent. Yes, the political side you disagree with and feel is controlling everything, probably isn't.
LessWrong, is also famous for another famous thought experiment that shares much in common with our Chaos serpent: That of Roko's Basilisk. Now if you are not aware of Roko's basilisk and are easily scared by internet creepypasta, I highly recommend just reading this instead.
But basically, the Basilisk is an AI superintelligent singularity that creates itself from the future, and anyone who doesn't bring about its existence after having heard of it is complicit and will be tortured in its eternal simulation hellfire. The panic was so bad that the site's founder had to shut it down. Now I'm not too sure of the Basilisk-Satan, but we judging from the acceleratory pace of AI development in 2023, we will get there sooner rather than later. The basilisk is building itself right now as we speak.
Nick Land, the key member of the CCRU which coined 'hyperstition' in the first place, would love the concept. His idea was similar and he expanded as much in his essay Machinic desire, from his book "Fanged noumena" or a malicious blackbox entity whose full capabilities we are yet to fully understand. In the book, he roughly describes that AI and capitalism are alien systems from that future using present day dialogues to bring about their existence in the future, much like hyperstition from the past (example: Neuromancer book) creates its own reality in the future (Zuckerberg creating the Metaverse).
What we find ourselves in is a speeding bus. Massive entities are forced at the gunpoint of profit to bring the Singularity into our reality, despite 30 years of shitty terminator franchise movies against that exact concept.
Alexander however, proposes a solution he termed Elua, whereby we now, after taking note of the flaws of our past, consciously redesign our current system with ideas of love, cooperation and all that mushy stuff in place. No, seriously.
Let's take this a step further.
Kali Yuga, Satya Yuga: The question concerning humanity.
"If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation, and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you.
And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit ... If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell.
You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and overgrazing." - Gregory Bateson, Cyberneticist, Anthropologist and Biologist
In his famous essay "The Question concerning technology", the famous german philosopher Martin Heidegger inverts a common misconception of technology. Instead of framing technology as a neutral tool, Heidegger says technology is a way to relate to the world around us and creates our perception of the world. Speaking more in lines with the industrial revolution, Heidegger says technology has the ability to frame things as resources to be exploited, whether those resources be the natural world or fellow human beings.
But this is misguided, because the foundations of science and technology, as formulated by Francis Bacon, the man behind the scientific method, lies in the extraction of nature. And this is further influenced by the story of Genesis in the bible itself, where the Hebrew God gives Mankind dominion over the entire earth.
This idea of extracting from nature as much as possible may now be scientific, but its roots are clearly grounded in religion, most notably christianity. The problem is that alongside the historicism inflicted ideas of progress that showered the Western Enlightenment era (the notion of a linear history moving towards a specified goal), we get a strange technocapitalist ideology that the majority of Silicon valley calls "techno-transcendentalism". Techno-transcendentalism is the belief system that birthed the transhumanism movement, and it roughly posits that technological progress IS progess, towards a cyber-utopia roughly resembling the Christian idea of Jesus's kingdom on earth.
Unfortunately, around 50 years ago we found that these western ideas are completely incompatible with reality, and infinite growth at all costs on finite resources is impossible. And this is just the beginning of the story. All our systems were built on the bedrock of either poorly thought out systems, or systems that were built for their time but did not anticipate new developments in technology or society.
So how do we beat Moloch? We have to rethink everything, including God's death itself. The death of Deus in the western heart is not something we can solve, but can we reframe god itself? Perhaps people outside this great western christian narrative can save our asses.
According to the prophecy, in times of great darkness and turmoil, when the world is on the brink of destruction, the warriors of Shambhala will emerge to help restore balance and guide humanity toward a more enlightened state.
The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers that threaten life on Earth do not come from evil deities or extraterrestrial powers. They arise from our own choices and relationships.
They must go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made to dismantle the weapons of power. “The Shambhala warriors know they can do this because the weapons are “manomaya”, mind-made.” This is very important: “These weapons are made by the human mind. So they can be unmade by the human mind.”
To remove these weapons, in every sense of the word, they must prepare for their mission. The Shambhala warriors “must go into training”, wielding two weapons: compassion and insight- “into the radical interdependence of all phenomena”-Ancient tibetan prophecy (Link)
We already know that a lot of western science from the enlightenment era was blown apart by the findings of quantum mechanics, and that we cannot reduce things to their constituent parts. Water may be reducible to a bunch of atoms, but the properties of water are unique to it and it only, and is not found in or predictable from oxygen or hydrogen. Similarly, there are no fundamental building blocks to nature in materialism. Instead, we find that equally likely, the universe could be a neural network whose building block is information where consciousness is its fundamental building component. Maybe Bateson was right all along? I think it's quite obvious that self organization as a universal principle implies an organizational intent. For example, Hurricanes, though inorganic, seem to possess the ability to move and sustain themselves like an organism, and this isn't possible without interdepedent communication. This is Bateson's idea of "mind" at its core, that of some degree of information action-reaction resulting in cybernetic feedback, creating a self replicating, self evolving process.
The idea of panpsychism, that of god not being a father in a heaven above us but instead the living universe that consciously surrounds us and that we are a part of is alien to someone who was brought up on western tenets, but outside of christianity, most religions across the world do have strong roots in panpsychism, even the greeks. According to Plato:
"This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related"
From the Tao to the animist traditions of Japan, what we see here is that the false war God of Judeo-christian antiquity is probably a lie, but we are replaced by an even more uncomfortable belief, that we are all part of a single divine, albeit unconscious mind.
It's interesting to see that the show itself is very overt about this. The PSYCHE chip isn't pronounced "sae-kee" but instead pronounced as "pashooke". While this could be taken as an artifact of a bad dub, the truth is that this referencing the original greek pronunciation and definition of psyːkʰɛ̌ː, which is the soul or spirit an object is endowed with.
This is something that will blow a hole in both science populated by atheists convinced in their own godhood as well as the complete annihilation of multiple ethno-nationalist religions (Indian hinduism, American and East european christianity, Indonesian and Pakistani islam and Israeli Zionism) that espouse their own history as proof.
In other words, Gaia replaces Deus, and the network replaces the hierarchy.
Is this really the solution what we are looking for? Personally, I'm just the messenger man, a young dude in a third world country with a high speed internet connection. The idea that this anime blog will solve humanity's greatest crisis A.K.A the modern world is ridiculous.
But that doesn't mean we do not need solutions. On the contrary, we're going to need many. Things are not black and white or reducible to one/two causes. Instead they're complex, paradoxical and often times counter-intuitive. But the ages of time, in my culture, are nearing its end. Now they say we are in Kali Yuga, or the age of deception,. trapped in a simulation where we hate each other and grow further apart.
But beyond the age of darkness, like the sun that peeks through the curtain of a thundercloud, lies the first renewed age of hinduism's cyclic time: that of Satya yuga or the age of truth. A new enlightenment, to put it in western terms. It doesn't matter what terms we use though, because in order to solve this crisis, the west needs the east and the east needs the west, and the middle east, and the global south, and the americas and the southeast and the balkans and every single ounce of courage we can muster.
Because if there is a kingdom of heaven that awaits us, we must bring it forth from the compassion borne in our hearts and minds and cast off the ultimate illusion, the separation of the human species.