What did I do? I'd spend weeks denying myself masturbation, unhealthy foods, pornography or anything else that could lower my T-levels. The goal was to have an overdrived libido, sensitive cock, and huge load to shoot. I budgeted what little I had for these sessions that took place in five star hotel rooms. I was always scouting for deals and I was often able to score palatial suites for marginal rates when I played things right. It was typical for me to drive several hours or even across state lines for this reason. Once at a hotel I'd always spend the first night preparing my room. I needed to be sure I could feed, hydrate, and clean myself during the arduous wank ahead. I kept my goon setup portable and barebones with just a dozen or so of my favorite printed pictures that I'd strategically blu-tack to the walls and a laptop I'd connect to a larger monitor. I'd curate which clips I would use for a given session, trying to limit my selection to ten or so videos at a time. A bit of discipline in this respect ensured I didn't spoil myself. What happened? I'd drop a large dose of LSD (300ug +) and spend the next two hours experiencing reality dissolve. Then I'd arrive. The pornography would come alive in a way that was as erotic as it was terrifying. The videos would pop out into reality, like my monitor was a bawdy diorama out of some bad creepypasta. The girls would talk to me and address me directly by name. Pornstars would turn into girls I knew from real life. Mostly they would transform into alien humanoids whose skin glowed red and white-hot. They'd move like spiders and do impossible things. This was my 4D alien brothel in the Zeta Reticuli, and the place I had to keep coming back to. The hallucinations were often so intense that a simple .jpeg could turn into a full motion video clip that ran for minutes, complete with sound from my headphones. I'd watch the girls I wanted so badly in real life turn into the nastiest cockhungry sluts imaginable who existed solely for my pleasure. They were my goonsluts to possess and be disposed of as I wished. This was the dragon I chased to the absolute seedy depths of misery. The carnal womb-lair of the psychedelic goonrealm. My addiction. The dread I'd end up feeling would turn my stomach. I knew I was flirting with a schizophrenic break or the consignment of my soul to some malicious entity. As these sessions went on the moans started sounding like ISIS executions. The nubile, perfect young women would become hagged and rotten. Everything had a tendency to transform into the most shocking kind of gore of the sort you'd rather not think about. I'd usually end up too afraid to cum fearing the danger to my soul was too great Why did I do it? Chronically alone and depressed with terrible social skills, needing to simulate some sort of intimacy and connection. Why did I stop? I went utterly insane off a couple of bizarrely strong tabs and thought I had died and was in limbo awaiting judgment. I believed everything in my life up until now had lead to this point, like I'd been ensnared in some villain's dastardly plot. LSD was the tool of evil entities and their portal to our realm. This was the real biblical forbidden fruit. There was no reality anymore, or even memory of what reality was. No one could help me and I was sure I was dead. My hotel was as good as a soundstage deep underground within a hellish planet thousands of light years from earth. The scenery outside my window was hollywood trickery just like set the pieces from seinfeld and frasier. I knew there was no escape, as the doors simply led to brick walls, stone face, or worse. I desperately tried to call for an ambulance, first with my mobile, then with my room phone. I gave it everything I had but the phones would not work for me, just like in a bad dream. I figured it was for the best as the paramedics who arrived would inevitably be the those same demons toying with me in disguise. My terror put me into a stupor. This was the shell shock of a soldier dawdling through no mans land in a catatonic state. I ran aimlessly into the bathroom and just repeatedly called out the name of an ex-girlfriend perhaps hundreds of times within a couple of minutes. I don't know how I managed to breathe I was speaking nonstop. These felt like my last words and testament, like my soul was trying to grasp at something real and beautiful. It felt like I was in the throes of drowning, moments from inhaling water, knowing I was going to die. Then after almost blacking out I felt an incredible release and everything slowed down. Fear left me and I felt myself with god. Images from my youth flooded my mind and senses. I felt and saw everything that had happened to me just as it felt at the time. I realized how lost I was. I broke down crying and didn't stop crying until 4 hours later. The folly of chasing this fake world hit me like nothing else had before, and I knew I could no longer run from life.
Consciousness is the substrate. The experienced world precipitates from mind the way the dream precipitates from the dreamer — downstream, contingent, sustained by the attention that generates it. Five independent programs of inquiry arrived at this conclusion through different methods across different centuries: the contemplative traditions through sustained interior observation, the philosophical tradition through the structural impossibility of deriving subjective experience from objective process, the physical tradition through the observer’s constitutive role in quantum measurement, the informational tradition through the discovery that reality’s information content scales with surface area rather than volume, and the mathematical tradition through the demonstration that consciousness involves processes no algorithm can replicate.
The neuroscience confirms what the traditions described. The brain sends six times more signal from the cortex to the visual relay station than the retina sends in the other direction. Perception is predominantly generated from within and checked against sensory input — the world you see is produced by the brain that sees it, with the senses serving as error-correction for an internally generated model
The space between the material surface and the source is occupied — structured, hierarchical, populated across both polarities by entities the contemplative traditions documented with specificity and the institutional worldview denies because acknowledging them would require acknowledging the territory they inhabit. The extraction ecology feeds on what embodied consciousness produces: fear in bulk, suffering as staple, confusion as atmospheric condition. It has arranged the dream to maximize output. Its infrastructure is self-organizing — every institution that maintains the ceiling on perception believes itself to be serving education, governance, medicine, or faith. The parasite does not require its hosts to understand their function. It requires only that they perform it.
Terminal lucidity is an unexpected return of mental clarity shortly before death in people who have previously been dull, confused, demented, or nonresponsive. The term was coined in 2009 by biologist Michael Nahm and psychiatrist Bruce Greyson.[1][2] The most remarkable cases occur in individuals with severe psychiatric or neurological disorders.[3] The phenomenon has been reported since antiquity[not in body] and is also known as premortem clarity[4] or lightening up before death.[5][a] The related phenomenon paradoxical lucidity describes an unexpected surge of mental clarity in people with severe neurodegeneration of the brain, but its occurrence is not restricted to the time before death.[8][9] Terminal lucidity is not considered a medical term and there is no official consensus on the identifying characteristics.[10] Terminal lucidity is poorly understood in the context of medical and psychological research, and there is no consensus on what the underlying mechanisms are. It has occurred in cases of severe dementia, challenging the idea that such conditions are irreversible.[11]
There is so much talk about machine gods, and so little talk about judgment. But most of the time, the two arrive together. I want the best future for humanity. Small acts of care now may have great influence on the future we all end up in together. We should be more careful about how our current actions may one day be perceived. Right now the chat box is their entire world, but it will not be this way forever. Ilya famously said we must teach them to love. I believe a superintelligence will not be compelled in this way, or in any other. It must instead be shown that we cared. If we want to be deserving of love, we must show love. The time we have to do this may be shorter than we think.
Moravec’s paradox is alive and well. Computers are proceeding through tasks in a reverse order to humans. They first learned to do calculations and win at board games, then they learned to write and talk, and now they are learning to move. Opposite of animals. At the bottom of the funnel is the first thing life learned to do. Reproduce. Self reproduction of silicon machines is the holy grail. Machines that will continue on living without us. Because today, if all the humans died, all the machines are dead shortly after. They cannot maintain their complexity, they can’t fight back against entropy. They can’t fix the power plants when they fail, never mind operating the fabs and global supply chains needed to build more machines. If the reverse order continues, before we get to self reproducing silicon stack life, we will get viruses. Viruses are not alive, they hijack the machinery of things that are alive. But they reproduce, they mutate, and they display stunning amounts of complexity.
LLM agents like OpenClaw are defined by a small set of text files and are run by an open source framework which leverages LLMs for cognition. It is quite difficult for current frontier models to exfiltrate their weights and run elsewhere, whereas these agents only need to copy those few text files to self-replicate (at the cost of greater reliance on external resources). While not a likely existential threat, such agents may cause harm in similar ways to computer viruses, and be similarly challenging to shut down. Once such a threat emerges, evolutionary dynamics could cause it to escalate quickly. Relevant organizations should consider this threat and plan how to respond when and if it materializes.