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TRANSCENDENCE – US Prog Metal Pioneers To Release First Album In 22 Years Next Month; “The Edge Awaits” Music Video Posted

https://bravewords.com/news/transcendence-us-prog-metal-pioneers-to-release-first-album-in-22-years-next-month-the-edge-awaits-music-video-posted/

#Transcendence #ProgressiveMetal #TheEdgeAwaits #CosmicFireRecords #NothingEtchedInStone #BrianDixon #JeffFord #KirkWood #JohnHowser #DerekEdwards

"You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

#UrsulaLeGuin #transcendence #TheDispossessed

On Nov 17th, 2024, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award–winning classic book, Harper Perennial published a commemorative edition, with a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler.

#books #culture #critique

The latest instalment of the Almost Real newsletter: my review of classic 1937 British sci-fi novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.

#classic #1930s #british #scifi #novel #starmaker #stapledon
#hegel #leibniz #philosophy #cosmic #transcendence

https://elikpwilliam.substack.com/p/star-maker-by-olaf-stapledon

The millions of instances of (accidental) torture which Ray Kurzweil believes will precede the Singularity

Once you accept the premise that brain uploading is possible, Kurzweil’s assumption here that it will take trial and error in order to get it right is clearly plausible. Quoted in Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever loc 1525:

trial-and-error risks here are pretty awful. Let’s say we start to get close to making a sentient representation of a human brain in a computer. . . . If you have a small difference in the information your eye is giving your brain and your ear is giving your brain, that’s already an awful feeling. It’s like seasickness, and nausea, or different types of pain. So what we’re promising to do here is to create thousands or millions of instances of sentient beings in computers that are probably suffering horribly, and are just going to get turned off. I mean, you could see this really macabre process of creating—if you imagine you can—sentient things in computers. There’s a lot of things to get wrong. And those outcomes are terrible.

What’s striking is how these ‘terrible’ outcomes are presented as a detail about implementation. They are a stepping stone, part of the journey, rather than something which might lead us to pause. If uploading is happening at scale, might these not be billions of souls tortured before being put out of their misery, like the digital hells conceived of by Iain M Banks which still haunt me fifteen years after I read the book?

They are presumably licensed by the outcome of infinite life for an infinite humanity. But if millions of instances of torture are licensed by the goodness of the outcome then what wouldn’t be? What more mundane viciousness and injuries might be enacted in pursuit of digital transcendence? I always thought the TESCREAL stuff was slightly overstated, in the sense of taking the intellectual games of digital elites too seriously, but I’m starting to revise that opinion.

What if this did become the dominant ideology amongst the most powerful people in the world, as opposed to something they like discussing when they’re high at parties? How would the goal of transcendence they conceived play out against a backdrop of spiralling inequality, social unravelling and climate chaos? It makes me want to go back to Peter Frase’s Four Futures and suggest a Fifth future, not quite what he called eliminativism but something close to it.

As Becker goes on to observe, Kurzweil’s vision of a universe subordinated to computation is colonialism on a vast scale, which unlike the mass psychological torture which precedes our glorious digital futures (whoops!) the guru only implicitly recognises, even as he insists that restraint would be exercised to prevent the entirety of existence becoming grist to the computational mill. From loc 1534:

There’s still a serious problem with Kurzweil’s notion of waking up the universe: it’s a euphemism for total destruction. It would be the end of nature, colonialism on a universal scale, with entire galaxies’ worth of planets and stars chewed up to provide more computing power for the digital remnants of humanity. Hence Kurzweil’s insistence that alien life is unlikely: it is an assurance that the universe is ours for the taking, with nobody else there to worry about.

And it’s also one in which coding would be the ultimate form of power, creating a universe where one imagines it would be quite a good life for a principle researcher at Google and his descendants. From loc 1652:

With the end of nature and the advent of a universe that is simply one enormous, artificial computer—where we live in still-more-artificial worlds generated by those computers—the promise of control is total, especially for those who know how to control computers. This is a fantasy of a world where the single most important thing, the thing that literally determines all aspects of reality, is computer programming. All of humanity, running on a computer, until the end of time.

Fun fact: I just found out Kurzweil is married to a psychotherapist who he credits here for “her love, guidance and insight into the interpersonal world” (my emphasis). I would be genuinely curious as to whether/how she interprets Kurzweil’s attachment to the Singularity and whether they discuss these ideas in psychodynamic terms.

#AdamBecker #climateCrisis #digitalElites #IainMBanks #ideology #postNeoliberalCivics #postNeoliberalism #postpandemicCivics #RayKurzweil #singularity #TESCREAL #transcendence

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CRIMSON GLORY Is 'Three Quarters Of The Way Finished' With First New Album In More Than 25 Years

https://blabbermouth.net/news/crimson-glory-is-three-quarters-of-the-way-finished-with-first-new-album-in-more-than-25-years

#CrimsonGlory #NewAlbum #ProgressiveMetal #TravisWills #BenJackson #JeffLords #DanaBurnell #MarkBorgmeyer #Midnight #Transcendence

Rise above what terrifies you.

🏔️ 👁️ 🧠

#Transcendence #FearConqueror #SpiritualGrowth #InnerStrength