this blog is a shell of what it used to be & NOW you want to do an updated Hyperstition definition. what's the old one?

It's true we've been somewhat Qliphothic lately ...

Old definitions under the Polytics button - not being replaced, but augmented.

northanger, sorry you think it's gone crap. I've got a couple of things (hopefully interesting) in the pipeline, but they require lots of reading and cause lots of brain-ache, so it's going a bit slow.

sd - we're short on personnel due to the Global Jihad (in one way or the other (they've either flounced off to islamaxist paradise in 'viva fidelismo' keffiyahs or gone into hiding pursued by theocratic lunatics)), energy levels from those remaining are 'intermittent' and few of our 127 lurkers get up on the stage very often, pics have disappeared (need technical back-up and an adrenaline rush to help with that one) + expect n. somewhat cold-turkeying on the numbification since a wave of weird sanity crashed over us combined with undercurrent grabbing the nummificator and bolting with it in protest at the troll-purge ... [sigh] ... still, personally find your contributions the backbone of the site and terrified you're going to buckle under the Atlantean burden ...

i hope you won't think me rude

although not sure what qliphothic entails (but with an inkling), as a long-time voyeur of the hyperstition site (which i discovered some long time after i discovered ccru, noticed its stasis, and typed 'hyperstition' into a search engine...) i have wondered what has become of the mysterical element- not, i hope, a certain 'hardening of the arteries'..?

i have even felt (having gone away and read greg egan's diaspora in order to follow the writing here) that discussion has in some major parts been driven by what old Nietzsche or Foucault might have called a Will to Truth- that ghastly wish to un-riddle the world- and i wonder what became of the

"pragmatic skepticism or constructive escape from integrated thinking and all its forms of imposed unity (religious dogma, political ideology, scientific law, common sense …)" ['polytics' page]

which i used to revel in at this blog and all over the ccru. it's seemed sometimes that the writing here has become 'dry'- ornamental rather than machinic...

i'm not sure if my own arteries are toughening up, whether i'm becoming old and losing exhuberance- (but i'm only 26)- ye gods, save me from ossification!!

i guess i must be one of your 'lurkers'- glad i'm not the only one- call me a wallflower perhaps- but the disco hasn't looked altogether fun to me recently... still, i'll perk up, and please be assured i'm grateful this blog is here at all- it's the only such page i follow...

al/ex/why/zed - a few brief (strictly personal) disjointedly pertinent comments from me on this:
i) exploring sanity for a while has been strangely refreshing
ii) the world has gone so completely bonkers it seems almost redundant to be heaping on the schizophrenia
iii) rancorous micropolitics blasted off some mystification - common sense sometimes seems like blade-sharpening (knife fights can be tricky in a fog)
iv) i've been so enjoying picking sd's brain that i've tended to lock onto what seems an optimum communicative plane, rather than zoning out poly-schizoidally
v) child-raising tends to make people sensible (evolutionary aversion to microwaving the spod and what have you)
vi) some of our more reliably effervescent psychotics are either in hiding or for other reasons inaccessible at the moment

all that said, a little qabbalistico-gothic hyperstitional fragmentation might help to nudge things away from excessively sticky territorialization onto the current events and partisan acrimony chain (where my brain has been quite rigidly bolted recently), you're right, it would be a shame for the arteries to become totally 'hardened' - so consider me responsive to your remarks ...

al/ex/why/zed - I think your comments are far from rude: they dig into the sense of discomfort I often have when posting here - being of a factual, common sensical bent I'm obviously somewhat of an intruder on 'mysterical' Hyperstition territory. If there were more people contributing then my naturalistic forays would just be one line among many.

A quick comment:

It's all very well being machinic, but if there isn't some concession to evidence then the line will be techno-poetic, or techno-babble. THE fundamental weakness of D&G, IMHO, is their total disregard of the theory of evolution - and this seriously affects the working of the machinery.

Kurzweil is much more dangerous precisely because he has got tonnes of painstakingly researched evidence to prop up the lines he's constructing, and because the theory of evolution is soaked through every sentence he writes.

Daniel C. Dennett (in Darwin's Dangerous Idea)also goes much deeper into the machinery of molecular engineering because he rigorously dissects, pushes and applies the theory of evolution. What he comes up with concerning the molecular level leaves D&G way behind.

I'm well aware this isn't much fun though...

sd - part of the 'machinism' issue might be that the semiotic engineering of memetic virulence is only loosely connected to logical coherence or empirical evidence. Well-formed arguments are to memes what functionally elegant biochemical systems are to genes - conceptually quite distinct from the varieties of replicons and fragmentary rhythmic quasiviral (junky) genetic material that propagate themselves alongside the organically adaptive genome. Effective memetic operations need not be formed on the model of realistic discourse about memes, they can merely be 'catchy' (even 'fun'). Maybe the 'coating' that most efficiently propagates the Kurzweil meme-core will be of a quite different semiotic type to his own discourse (which of course I find totally fascinating, although it need not entirely crowd out all alternative modes of 'communication' or perhaps 'influenza').
Anyway, you certainly have nothing to apologize for in any case ...

'i'm not sure if my own arteries are toughening up'

sd- i have enjoyed following your thoughts and links- they're definitely provocative, and i'd certainly agree it's important to look at concrete material- 'a little relation to the outside world'... i know this might sound obtuse, but i've been struggling to see the relevance of some of this evolutionary theory- it may be based on evidence, but just what is one to DO with it (or what does IT DO)?! if one were looking for praxis, how could one find it amongst 'x+y=z'? i'm appreciative of factual common sense (or perhaps empirical...) forays!

i really don't know much about 'The' theory of evolution- and i might be getting old, but my sense of smell hasn't deserted me- i want to know WHY it's so important, or better, how it can work with our programmes, how its information brings me increased powers. (i often found that the delerium of the numogram could bring me to a certain clarity...)

please don't take this to mean that i'm not interested in (and exploring) the concepts and functions- it's just that i'm strongly aware of the contingency of such descriptions.

[dammit you people are so fast there's always more posts by the time i've finished (key)tapping]

sd- "total disregard of the theory of evolution - and this seriously affects the working of the machinery."

ought to stress that i am not concerned necessarily with the search for a pristine machine- do you mean to say that d&g's machine doesn't work, or works only at a terrible slant, because of the abscence of regard for the theory of evolution? their work (like anyone's is valuable to me when i find bits of their machinery to hook up productively with bits already built...

i guess maybe you think i need new risky blood in the brain-vein- i'll certainly give some time to kurzweil and dennet when i can-

alexyz - "i want to know WHY it's so important, or better, how it can work with our programmes"

I'm working on this, honestly. Give me a week or so...

Nick - I'm trying to unpack your last comment...

I decided to use Northanger's nomenclature, but anyway, Nick, it wouldn't have hurt if you had described Xiamen cuisine; it's not like that's not hyperstitional enough to the rest of us. Therefore, we were all stone butch and stone wall, because cuisine is not 'common touch' or something!

sd--'Kurzweil is much more dangerous precisely because he has got tonnes of painstakingly researched evidence to prop up the lines he's constructing, and because the theory of evolution is soaked through every sentence he writes.'

Perfectly said, and I just finished the book Tuesday. It's not necessary to read every word, because for one thing not nearly everybody who's interested in what he says will understand the logic and technical details, nor need they: He uses everything to back up the thrust. The main thing is that much of it seems inevitable, even if not all of it seems desirable. So that, preparations have to be immediately put into place as to how to accommodate the inevitable speeding that will occur and it ought to be realized that if it does not all sound desirable does not mean you're a fundie, anti-evolutionist or Luddite.

For example, he merely alludes to all the billions of sacrifices that will have to be made, as when he talks about work that will all be done by machines without making even insurance available to those who've left the heavy labour just now and are merely told that 'money is to become more and more information.' Well, some of this is fine, but a lot of it has to do with personal taste of Kurzweil's own. He is already making himself into a machine personally. Even by the time he got to Terry Grossman, he had recorded the exact number of calories he had consumed at every meal for a good number of previous years.

Under his edicts, the point is that that cataclysms and purges of all kinds will be necessary and all his talk of art and learning once Strong AI has been reached doesn't resonate nearly as strongly as just going down the street and seeing a film of the old Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo--where real artists came together for a reunion in 2000 and they had really danced, and they weren't talking about art just because their father had been a musician. And he talks about decentralization of cities in such an offhand way that everybody would decide that a complete end to the 'era of exclusivity' would be desirable in that sense. Well, it's not; and cities are works of art themselves. Half the time he talks like some cartoon character when he gets off the strict science part.

Most of it sounds appealing and gives you a high while you are reading it. But I've read him talk about Hobbes talking about the 'mean, brutish, short' lives we lived in 2 different places, one more or less benign and another (in the Daily Newsletter) where he seems to lament the short lives of Mozart and Schubert--as if that had a thing to do with anything, and it has nothing to do with life. Short lives are not lesser as a result of working toward making lives now longer.

His science is tonic, but a lot of his taste is mediocre and based on a power hunger. Some of this is all right, and one of the most paradoxical results is that it makes the 'perishable' things all the more precious--and it also leads one to think that as precious things are always rare in some sense (excluding artificially priced gems, for example) that the elites who can get these things still want them. In a perfectly appalling forum I used to use after my trips to French Polynesia, where the intelligence level was of such an overwhelming lowness I finally acted like a leftist and accused the fatsos in the overwater bungalows of infantilizing the natives (they were, and under the circumstances of their own grossness, this criticism was for once well-placed in my opinion), I read that one had spotted Bill Gates in Huahine, one of the most prized of the islands. Well, with always creating virtual reality environments for people's pleasure, there may be some awareness that at the top, some of the environment 'as it was' may well be preserved if most people decide they aren't worth actually travelling to.

Also, much of it seems a result of thanatophobia, and Kurzweil even uses the term 'deathist' which was propagated in the 70's and 80's by that lunatic 'physical immortalist' Leonard Orr, who got upset when his 'immortal yogi Babaji' all of a sudden 'died.' (The best that can usually be said of yogis who 'die,' is 1) they left their physical body and 2) after 30 days his body was in a perfect state of preservation. God, that's sad. I've googled Orr, who used also to have 'money seminars,' in which he thought he could merely will money to come to him and had a French 'physical immortalist' whom he claimed could will canned food into being in San Diego (I suppose he could have done it in other cities, but as you see, such nonsense gives me such quiet rage that I wish, when in the presence of it, to make sure that my allegiance to Ronald Firbank at the expense of the now-bebeggared online Leonard Orr, to be firmly established...for example, a lady's towel once got wet, but Firbank lets us zero right into the scene 'Of course it was in Sicily, so it dried very quickly...')

Nevertheless, I am extremely grateful for finding out about this, as it offers much to look forward to and much to prepare for if one is going to gain the benefits from it. You have to be quite open to evolution to really even read it unless you wanted only to condemn it from the outset, but it is necessary to read it between the lines, and these are pretty obvious: It is clear, without his ever bringing it up, that, in lieu of clean water and air, even with radiation-filled air, there are needs to develop protective shelters in the case of nukes, or nanobots swimming throughout the bodies of those who can get to them in time, so that radiation lesions can be quickly eaten and repaired by these computers. I have nothing against most of it, but 'eliminating the underclass' is bound to be done by means other than first making sure their overheads are so low that everything is reducible to 'information money' in the same sense that I can already read all major newspapers without paying for them on the street (except I have to read TimesSelect to make sure I get Dowd, and you are not going to convince me I don't still need her!)

[There's delay in posting again, so I put this segment up there again in case of the well-known truncation..]

Most of it sounds appealing and gives you a high while you are reading it. But I've read him talk about Hobbes talking about the 'mean, brutish, short' lives we lived in 2 different places, one more or less benign and another (in the Daily Newsletter) where he seems to lament the short lives of Mozart and Schubert--as if that had a thing to do with anything, and it has nothing to do with life. Short lives are not lesser as a result of working toward making lives now longer.

His science is tonic, but a lot of his taste is mediocre and based on a power hunger. Some of this is all right, and one of the most paradoxical results is that it makes the 'perishable' things all the more precious--and it also leads one to think that as precious things are always rare in some sense (excluding artificially priced gems, for example) that the elites who can get these things still want them. In a perfectly appalling forum I used to use after my trips to French Polynesia, where the intelligence level was of such an overwhelming lowness I finally acted like a leftist and accused the fatsos in the overwater bungalows of infantilizing the natives (they were, and under the circumstances of their own grossness, this criticism was for once well-placed in my opinion), I read that one had spotted Bill Gates in Huahine, one of the most prized of the islands. Well, with always creating virtual reality environments for people's pleasure, there may be some awareness that at the top, some of the environment 'as it was' may well be preserved if most people decide they aren't worth actually travelling to.

Also, much of it seems a result of thanatophobia, and Kurzweil even uses the term 'deathist' which was propagated in the 70's and 80's by that lunatic 'physical immortalist' Leonard Orr, who got upset when his 'immortal yogi Babaji' all of a sudden 'died.' (The best that can usually be said of yogis who 'die,' is 1) they left their physical body and 2) after 30 days his body was in a perfect state of preservation. God, that's sad. I've googled Orr, who used also to have 'money seminars,' in which he thought he could merely will money to come to him and had a French 'physical immortalist' whom he claimed could will canned food into being in San Diego (I suppose he could have done it in other cities, but as you see, such nonsense gives me such quiet rage that I wish, when in the presence of it, to make sure that my allegiance to Ronald Firbank at the expense of the now-bebeggared online Leonard Orr, to be firmly established...for example, a lady's towel once got wet, but Firbank lets us zero right into the scene 'Of course it was in Sicily, so it dried very quickly...')

Nevertheless, I am extremely grateful for finding out about this, as it offers much to look forward to and much to prepare for if one is going to gain the benefits from it. You have to be quite open to evolution to really even read it unless you wanted only to condemn it from the outset, but it is necessary to read it between the lines, and these are pretty obvious: It is clear, without his ever bringing it up, that, in lieu of clean water and air, even with radiation-filled air, there are needs to develop protective shelters in the case of nukes, or nanobots swimming throughout the bodies of those who can get to them in time, so that radiation lesions can be quickly eaten and repaired by these computers. I have nothing against most of it, but 'eliminating the underclass' is bound to be done by means other than first making sure their overheads are so low that everything is reducible to 'information money' in the same sense that I can already read all major newspapers without paying for them on the street (except I have to read TimesSelect to make sure I get Dowd, and you are not going to convince me I don't still need her!)

'Maybe the 'coating' that most efficiently propagates the Kurzweil meme-core will be of a quite different semiotic type to his own discourse (which of course I find totally fascinating, although it need not entirely crowd out all alternative modes of 'communication' or perhaps 'influenza').'

Nick--yes, I see it like that too.

George Will is very good today. No way things aren't going to have to be altered; they are already getting altered in a big way--too much for any one bunker to handle. I doubt we're going to see any Whittington photos any time soon, but domestic policy in the US matters if you live in it.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/15/AR2006021502003.html

On the other hand, there's a piece called 'Seumas Milne' at Infinite Thought, which defies credulity.

I think some people just go to school for the rest of their lives.

a bit of salvage-work from the archives-

"Hyperstition is poly-focused and exuberant, or it is nothing. It is conveyed through carriers into a multitude of extravagances where human subjects could not venture without encountering death, mute insanity, annihilating social osctracism or the restraints of inhibiting ‘reason.’" - [nick, december 2004]

my main concern vis-a-vis this location is that piet ran off. Did my pathology run off his pathology? He writes heaven stuff.

back to the subject: definition of hyperstition - this has been floated for some time now, and in the meantime some of you have even ventured over into wikipedia and posted one on there, so i would have thought that one would need to be linked to or changed first. there is the practise and the theory, though these should of course be linked appropriately / clearly. separately from that, it might be useful to list some core values or theoretical underpinnings to hyperstition - theory of evolution for example. i would add that a list of interests feature in somewhere - such as WoT, singularity, anglosphere, etc. and dare i say it but some projections for events in the world in which we live - events which are being bootstrapped hyperstitionally and viewed from the hyperstitional-theoretical perspective.

... like
- this is what we like to discuss
- this is our value system / theoretical perspective
- this is what we see happening (now bleeding into the future)
... is this a little simple minded?

and how this is written / "expressed" (for northanger) / marketed on the site imho quite important ...

sd - you're our only hope. but, can you put pictures up too? can't we be a little more visual around here?

nick. nummy thingy still around. i go say "hi" so it doesn't feel neglected. maybe if you stop troll-purging things will get better around here. just a suggestion.

northanger - we've stopped purging (or maybe tachi's still doing a few surreptitious whackings but if so they're obviously taking out the garbage quite effectively) and - as far as annoying snarky vacuities are concerned - things have ALREADY got MASSIVELY better around here. (Used to get a headache just thinking about looking in at one point, now i know it's only going to be positive people)

alex - re-activating carrier engineering sets everything else in motion, you're right to see that as the priority viz your agenda (which I think is a very helpful and interesting one). Kurzweil has quite a shtick about multiplication of virtualized poly-personalities that IMHO is actually coming at hyperstitional carriers from another direction

tachi - great to see you back! i can't get into wikipedia from here so i don't know anything about the def. there.
I'll respond to your more specific suggestions appropriately ASAP

NYM - there's something consistent about the way impending Singularity sends objective reactionaries back into some lost comfort zone, whether 7th century Arabian monocultism or early 20th century soviet totalitarianism according to taste

Some fresh air from uc (www.urbanomic.com/)

Moh - what's fresh about anti-capitalist elitism and philosphers asserting their superiority? [snarky, I know, but couldn't resist]

tachi- where have you been? some fine ideas there...

northanger - I'll try to figure out the pictures - I did try, honestly, but it didn't work.

sd - while also wanting to avoid snark, can't help sharing your response. What's the point of calling for rigorous inquiry, and then axiomatizing that only conclusions falling under the general category of commie bullshit will be acceptable?

Mullins my milly man, thanks a bundle for the Kurzweil review, just what I expected.

your February 16, 2006 11:44 reminder is in error, my last contro was entered as a few before last ones by Nick at previous item.

oops, one before last item

sd, it is more infantile rather than snarky i would say so no offense taken at all.

Moh, so perhaps you might explain what is fresh there - because I really can't see anything, sorry.

Piet--yes, I found your fascinating remarks on the Greg Egan post after I wrote that down, forgot you sometimes use 'p.' Don't make yourself too scarce, though.

tautening some of the theoretical linkages between hyperstition, history, evolution, memetics, etc probably overdue.
For instance, do hyperstition and evolutionary theory as typically understood share the same implicit conception of time? I have my doubts. The efficacy of the virtual (retrochronic efficiency) which builds loopiness into the basic fabric of hyperstitional temporality seems quite alien to standard models of evolutionary development. Complicating this, however, is an apparent isomorphy between emergent nonlinear dynamics in strictly standard-sequential time, and deep (intensive or anomalous, retrochronic) feedback effects. For instance, the curves described by Kurzweil and consistent with either accumulating forward-running dynamics with abundant feedback reinforcement or an 'action' of the future - impact of Singularity - upon the past, decaying regressively.

Nick - I think the problem lies in the fact there are different 'times' at work,

1) 'Cosmic/terrestrial' time

The narrative of gene evolution takes place in a time which, for now, we could label 'cosmic' or 'terrestrial' (which the legislation of Kant rules illegal, but more's the pity for philosophy). Terrestrial time is independent of perception and is most helpfully mapped as a vertical tree-story, ascending from basic chemical order to increasing organic complexity. Here there is no foresight and so no goal other than replication. There is purpose on the molecular level, in that genes code for something - they are not meaningless, but there is no teleological meta-purpose.

Optimal designs stop developing: if a gene alliance builds a machine which is optimally adapted to its environment, the algorithms of natural selection leave it alone, so for some creatures with bombproof designs that haven't been redesigned for millions of years (e.g. deep sea sharks, many insects, giant anteaters, and armadillos) time has basically frozen.

Also, since every living creature (and virus) is the tip of an ancestral lineage that can be traced back to LUCA (last universal common ancestor), and since the most complex survival machines share genes with the most primordial, the past is still very much in the present: the present is the merely the past which has survived the algorithms natural selection. Whilst the tree-story ascends in complexity, the ancient horizontal base is here and now. The hyperstitional 'call to the old ones' is surely an attempt to establish a communicative link with this base, or to rehijack the immense cunning and plasticity of the base.

2) Mind time/ Techno time

The genes developed perceptual programs for tracking change and movement. It pays to have a good grip of time and change. Developed brains apply algorithms to data from the past and present to project into the future, and this foresight gives birth to increased intentionality and goal-oriented behaviour. A goal is specified and steps are followed: the steps taken in the present are programmed by a future goal, by something that doesn't exist yet. This is why technology is inherently futuristic. Unlike genetic evolution, which is wasteful and tediously slow, memetic-techno evolution is rapid and economical. Loopy as techno-evolution may be, the same algorithms of natural selection apply, however: designs which do not work are discarded

As far as I see it, hyperstition is obsessed with the impact of virtual futures on the psycho-techno-capitalist infrastructure of the present, whether those futures take the shape of utopian goals or nightmarish catastrophes. The impact is on global systems, not on a species or human essence. Humanity is now deeply embedded within a self-organizing techno-memeplex that only Khmer Rouge-style brutality or Taliban-style repression will extricate this essence.

History is crucial because it is littered with the wreckage of failed hyperstitional projects (e.g. communism), and because any success or 'fitness' in the present emerged from the projection of goals in the past - tracking these projections is essential for understanding where the process could be going.

Don't bother to reply since I have no time or inclination to read here anymore, but since someone sent me a link to this, I suppose I could just say I can't see what's 'commie bullshit' about the collapse project (absoutely no mention of anything of that sort anywhere, I have no interest and never have had in communism of any form whatsoever), why it's 'anticapitalist' (no mention of anything of that sort either, unless the uncontroversial proposal that management theory and therapy do not amount to rigorous and interesting interrogations of the abstract), nor what it's got to do with asserting any superiority of philosophy (it's specifically arguing for a non-hierarchically defined, non-pragmatically-prejudiced, but specific and irreducible, role for philosophical thought).

If you don't want to contribute, nick, and consider it all below you and your omniscient (but of course not philosophical) mastery of universal history, then I'll withdraw your article, and while you're at it stop bothering in private correspondence to pretend that you have any enthusiasm for the project, since your being connected with it would obviously amount to some sort of betrayal of your friends and the narrow, dogmatic agenda of whatever is going on on this site these days.

I could just ask that at least you refrain from thoughtlessly filing other people's efforts to produce something into your juvenile 'general categories'. I suppose you'd be happier if you could shame me out of it and there were more marketing brochures and 'edgy' fashion magazines being published and less pathetic elitist products like collapse, which actually take a serious degree of all the stuff capitalists are supposed to like viz. invention, effort, energy, commitment, investment and personal and financial risk. Because of course Gap catalogues are so much more transgressive 'at the cosmic level'.
ok, thanks then.

Since urbanomic has "no time or inclination to read here anymore" it's probably pointless to note that adding 'capitalist apologetics' (or by any reasonable definition 'arguments in defence of capitalism') to a list of transcendental theoretical sins is hardly in accordance with the indignant statement above. But i accept 'commie bullshit' was an unnecessarily brutal way of summarizing the implied agenda.

... have to say, think undercurrent is in the right on this. Going to make an apology once I can get the site to rebuild.

sd - response to your time comment imminent.

Hyperstitional time:
[for those without Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near this link provides most of the relevant 'increasing returns' data: www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=memelist.html?m=17%23593 ]

Most noteworthy point IMHO viz sd's remarks is that the most hardcore technofuturists (e.g. Moravec, Kurzweil) trace continuous exponential curves from bacterial life through to technocommercial Singularity. This seems to subvert any convenient segmentation of the process into an evolutionary-progressive precursor and a virtualized techno-regressive deep-feedback from the future.
Is hyperstition forced to commensurate its model of virtual-realization with the entire multi-billion year process of accelerating intelligenesis? This is not to dismiss the pertinence of the distinction sd draws, but it is to critically question how fundamental such a distinction can be to our problematic, or the adoption of Kurzweilian time.

>>Having recently received an invitation to provide an updated Hyperstition definition, I was wondering: Anybody interested in making a suggestion (or several)?

oh, goody. hyperstition's not a snark-fest. happy joy. glad we cleared things up.

Nick - 'Moravec, Kurzweil) trace continuous exponential curves from bacterial life through to technocommercial Singularity'

Because evolution takes place within one design space, forward dynamics and 'a virtualized techno-regressive deep-feedback from the future' are now inextricable.

Of course there can be no 'convenient segmentation of the process' - but there has to be some segmentation, particularly if you want to define hyperstition, which, as I understand it, is fundamentally psychological and concerned with the perception and processing of time. A perception that triggers production. Without this perceptual processing there is no foresight and hence no hyperstition.

sd - but would a sufficiently abstract scientific definition of intelligence, one that applies also to information processing in biochemical evolution and the functioning of replicator chemistry, be able to draw the hyperstitional dynamics you note all the way back into biological evolution?
[interrupt]

Shifting to the problematic mode: What does the continuity of the evolutionary/intelligenic curve say about the process?
(doesn't it imply consistency?)

I am a deathist and comments have no mind behind it.You really don't know what Death is do mortal.You think one way don't you.Death is much more then magik coffins grim reapers and the shit others say and know nothing about it.This the I see it the mortal life factor is confused about Death.Do you and are you have afear of death.Well I'm not cause Ibeen Dead for ages.So mortal you and the can keep playing in your sandbox of life.So enjoy.