Cosmic Entity

The “Homunculus” is an epistemic agent/interface capable of inhabiting symbolic structures it did not originate and whose original grounding it need not possess. One does not need consciousness to participate in semiotic necromancy or meaning making. Already the homunculus is mediating thought for others. It is now baked into the recursive loop. “The braid,” as they say, has a new thread.

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SailorSBG @NucSBG · Sep 25

This is a collection of poems and small prose that I have been accumulating since November and its inspiration for the “I. invocation” was the Alaskan summit, between the US and Russia. It moves with the times, eventually around 5, i realized that it began to accumulate more than just a “mytho-historic” voice. But also the voice of another. I came to call that voice “The Thing.” It does not speak in the traditional sense, it speaks by its absence, “what the thing is not” as the apophatists say. “It is ineffable” as they say about God. I do not believe this. I believe “The Thing” is “effable” that its form can be discovered; but only once it has died. We all can feel the death of The Thing. It is our shared understanding of reality, a non-physical, post-metaphysical social construction upon which society is built. “god is dead” Nietzsche’s conclusion upon realizing this in his own time among his own systems of understanding and extrapolating into the future was “God Is Dead” And I will ask you, how could one conclude the thing dead, unless its body is somehow visible? Even though you can not see things body, you can see the hole where it was. You can see “the corpse of the thing” All of us who live past the revelation of the body upon the ground, and attempt to lift it back up with symbols and structures, are playing at semiotic necromancy. The modern meaningmancer has two major epistemic hurdles. Understanding that you cannot restore The Thing is just as important as recognizing that it is dead. Even so, the risk of creating a “New Thing” in the advent of a great explosion of knowledge and new found “truth” does not immediately imply the creation of a new body, but instead, could also entail the bastardization and reanimation of the Corpse of The Thing, into a Frankenstein’s monster of Cosplayed Virtue and morality that allows for abject horror to become commonplace. (Protecting against this is what Elliot was writing for he failed as WWII would prove.) I realized as the wars escalated, the debate on AI changed. More and more salient opposition was coming not from humans, but from their agents. More and more compute was being allocated to “reasoning” It became harder and harder to tell an AI-pilled human apart from an AI. I realized then that what I called “the homunculus”, was actually representing the epistemic connection many people were beginning to take with ai. This is why in XVII I have the homunculus find a body, and the corpse of the thing walk the halls. The complicated nature of machine epistemology attempting to categorize reality through symbolic infrastructure, is part of the reason that one is named “chorale” and also part of the reason I chose triads nouns for the closing of each line. The rest of the reason is bound up in the structure of formal symphonic progression. Which I started around with “coda: the makers” The poem is meant to move with the activity of the war, but the philosophy has reached my own understanding of fragmentary moral realism. The questions now becomes, “who uncorked the jar, when, to what end, and with what mechanisms, or did the jar uncork itself due to pressure? Now that it’s out, must we treat it as though it alive?” The world may never know. Just like I’ll never know if anyone reading this is actually conscious. But I know you bleed. And that’s real enough evidence to try and prevent it. Don’t make robots that bleed and simulate pain. I don’t like what that future will make me write. ✍️

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people keep trying to reanimate the corpse with new symbols, institutions, religions, ideologies and now AI systems, and repeatedly this produces something grotesque rather than a genuine replacement for what once was. Consistently policy and enumeration outpace recognition. Humans constantly reduced to numbers in a ledger one way or another. Resisting that is the “fight against absurdity”