Wirehead Media (tm :P) or how I became an anarchist.

Update: Well that was fast: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/17ecdab/we_are_now_at_10_frames_a_second_512x512_with/

Real time stable diffusion. ^^^

To be clear, I’d rather we have a government, but it seems to me that government is self annihilating. https://innomen.substack.com/p/we-dont-have-a-government

It’s a bit like free will. There isn’t any. it’s either determined or random. Similarly, it’s either anarchy with zero checks on power or government that instantly corrupts itself and offers zero checks on power.

I would like a state, but we can’t have nice things. http://underlore.com/an-argument-in-favor-of-the-state/ (old and possibly out of date I need to re-read.)

AI cleaned up transcript: I used to have this idea of a wirehead scenario and an early, before it really existed, concept of AI generative media where you would sit a person down in front of a screen and you would put a sensor on them of some sort that would detect how much they liked what they were seeing. Then you'd start a loop where the machine would generate a random image, like bit by bit randomly, and based on how much the person liked what they were seeing, it would feed back into the next one. We are kind of coming up on that reality now.

Right now it takes me like a half hour to generate a cool picture that I like on my computer with Stable Diffusion. This image here is one of them, but this one actually took several hours because of the resolution and my computer is very weak - it doesn't have powerful graphics, it's like a business laptop pretty much. I can generate them quicker at smaller resolutions than I do, but it's not fast enough to be truly entertaining. It's not on par with a video game or a good show or a song.

Even songs are an interesting thing. I'm just going to take that out because songs can be repeated and are still enjoyable - it's very different from other kinds of media. But we're coming up on a point where the latency time will be so low that the generation will simply occur at the speed of perception or lower - you know, faster - so it'll be able to just match and linger if that's good for the narrative goal, so to speak, if that's good for the generation of pleasure.

It has me thinking about a concept, a name for that, and I would call it wirehead media where the machine is generating something so pleasurable that it just short circuits everything - like being darted with heroin, only because it's being generated and adapting in real time, you can never get used to it. Like you would have to, in order to get used to it, you would have to be blind to media itself. Whatever the medium is you would have to just be blind to it or completely reject it.

Let's say it's a visual field, like trying to make a set of glasses that filters out all dangerous laser light. You'd end up with opaque blinders, goggles, so you would become tired of visual art, visual stuff, vision. You'd have to become tired of vision to be immune to this effect. And of course everybody wants to go dystopian and be a badass and think about horror and everything. Yeah, you can imagine it going in the other direction, tormenting someone infinitely. Have fun with your edgy fantasy and Hellraiser.

My point is the other direction, because that's just as destructive. A wirehead, it's like in Brainstorm where they had the tape that would play experiences back and a guy edited an orgasm into a loop and basically just wrecked himself. Now in that movie he actually kind of recovered, he just ended up with this syndrome where he would, like, orgasm randomly. I really think that that was fiction and nice, the sweet happy ending version of that, because what would actually happen is he wouldn't be able to enjoy anything ever again.

It's like his brain would need a level of, let's just say it's dopamine so you can understand what I'm talking about, but it's more complicated than just dopamine and it might not even be dopamine. It might be some other thing. But my point is he would completely wreck his chemical subjectivity, his ability to enjoy anything. It's kind of like what real addicts face. You experience this thing that bypasses all the hassle of pleasure seeking and just cuts straight to the chase, and it does to people in a lighter way what wireheading does to rats.

I mean a wirehead rat will do literally anything. They don't care about anything except pressing the button for more pleasure. That button becomes their raison d'être, their reason for being. And that's just fundamental to the way the brain evolved. I don't mean the human brain, I mean nerve clusters. It's all based on stimulus response: avoid the damage, seek the beneficial. And the way that that's mediated is always pleasure chemicals and pain chemicals, deterrence and attraction.

This wirehead media concept - just imagine a song and as it's playing it's getting better and better and better and better. Now imagine the power of temptation. I know you've been tempted at some point in your life and you've done something stupid because you wanted more of whatever that thing was. You couldn't stop yourself or you wouldn't avoid something because it's like, "Ah, this is just amazing." And the examples are endless. You can think of them. I'm not even going to generate any.

But imagine that dialed up to infinity. I mean, you, the like - I don't see where there would be a limit. Like once you got that working I don't see where there would be a limit. I kind of feel like it's probably already happening. I'd say that there are people out there who have the combination of knowing what to describe, knowing what to prompt, and the technical skill and the hardware to generate those prompts fast enough that they create an addiction loop.

I'm curious, I'm very curious about whether or not that's accurate. Like are there people - I know that there are people that generate stuff every day because I have a standing search going on 4chan for generated threads and there are, there's a consistent user base. There are people there that generate all the time. I'm kind of interested in it because it's like my absolute very best friend, she's all into a dress up game, like you would - it's like a mannequin and you put fashion on it, then you share it with others and they vote it up or vote it down.

They give you a theme and stuff and when Stable Diffusion came out I immediately thought of her and I told her about it. I was like this is like your game, only there's no limits. It's like you can generate your fashion with prompts now. You don't need to have a preset thing. You don't need any kind of moderator. Now you can just make the thing. And you - that means that Stable Diffusion effectively became a genre of game.

This kind of goes back to what I've been saying for many, many years about how a lucid dream is like the ultimate expression of game and that it would eat other forms of entertainment and media if we could induce it and share it, either one, both preferably. But we're coming up on it now, you know? Like I, I kind of wonder if people, if there are people that are getting close to that loop. Like they can make an image and they're getting better at prompting, and maybe even they buy hardware and get better - decrease the latency that way so they can attack it from both ends.

You can improve the quality of the images and you can increase the frequency of the images. Now I've been seeing Stable Diffusion has a live action kind of thing. It's like Animate Diffusion or something where you can map the movements of one thing onto a consistent generation on the other, like special effects - filtering and masking. We're coming up on a lucid dream state and the consequences are going to be pretty far reaching.

I want to be clear about where I stand on that. I'm saying let it all go. I'm saying let the chips fall where they may. I'm not a fan of censorship. I'm not a fan of any kind of, you know, I don't want - I definitely don't trust any system that currently exists to regulate because they have demonstrated that anytime they have the opportunity to regulate they regulate in favor of the most powerful agents in the room and at the expense of the people.

So as much as I would like, you know, as much as I like the idea of regulation and doing things right and having an adult in the room so to speak, that's not going to happen. I mean that doesn't really exist. It goes to my essay about how we don't have a government, we just have billionaires. So I'm just against all of it because currently it's all corrupted and as far as history goes I've never seen history produce a single one.

So I've kind of ended up being a bit of an anarchist. I did not expect that. You know, I'm also a little bit of a pessimist and a nihilist in that regard and that's weird because all of that is still coexisting with the data that never really got overwritten or obviated about how, you know, transhumanism, technological futurism - I have a lot of optimism and faith in humanity but at the same time I have zero faith in the systems that it puts in charge.

So it's a bit of a contradiction and I'm still working on it. But yeah, I just wanted to talk about this for a little bit and upload it because I don't know, it seems like it's something worth sharing. Because like I recently was playing Pokemon Go and long story short I got kind of dissuaded and it was like, is there a point? You know, it's starting to really feel the fact that it's just a game. It lost at least for now some entertainment value.

Looking for stuff, excuse me, looking for stuff, stuff to replace it with - media. I've been watching Netflix anime and stuff and that's cool, charging my Kindle and thinking about reading, just trying to find, I don't know, just doing my version of the wirehead thing, searching for something that makes me happy because as far as productivity goes there's really nothing that I feel like is worth doing. Like I don't have any resources to work with really and I just don't have a whole lot of desire or interest in torturing myself for really any reason.

That kind of cuts me off from a bunch of practical abilities. Like I just don't have the threshold, man. I don't see the point. It's like a lot of people, once you realize that everything that you do is about, you know, pleasure chemicals from a warm hug to an orgasm to a good meal to the feeling of accomplishment, helping someone - everything good is in a sense a fantasy.

It's all your brain drugging you along the lines of evolution. Like give the monkey a treat when it does this thing so that it continues to do this thing. It's like I am an animal being trained by my pleasure system, by my reward circuit, and I just won't have it. You know, like I feel very obstinate. I feel very oppressed by it. Like I would rather just - I'd rather be free.

But this goes back to the free will debate and about, you know, it's all either determined or random so there really is no room for freedom, period. So I'm kind of just living in the moment, going day by day, trying not to do anything stupid. Like in my opinion, de-intelligence is defined by the evasion of future constraint and conversely, stupidity is the embracer of future constraint and the expansion of it.

So I'm trying not to do anything stupid but as far as, and whenever possible, I will try and do the smart thing to expand future constraint but, or to reduce future constraint. But that's all in the context of that reward circuit and that's all in the context of understanding the value of subjectivity and ethical hedonism and everything. And the lack of value in logic and thinking and knowing and being right.

You know, I understand how pointless all of it is. I understand how pointless talking is. But how you feel and how you think are different things so it's like I continue to eat, I continue to sleep, I continue to avoid injury, you know. It's like I'm not going to act on the belief, the intellectual realization or whatever, that it's pointless because things change and it's all about mood.

And I just think about, you know, this whole Stable Diffusion generative AI thing in the context of antidepressants and other mood brighteners and whatever. And I think about augmented reality and how really all experience is inherently a fantasy so there really wouldn't be anything morally or logically wrong with heavily altering reality through some kind of augmented reality or maybe even some kind of engineered delusion, which kind of goes into a spiritualism about past lives and reincarnation and loss of memory between lives.

You know, and how valuable is memory anyway and how do you determine that? Would you forget if you could? And I'm sure most people would. And it's like how do you react when you've forgotten something but you know you did it? Or you don't know you did it? Or like I guess what I'm kind of trying to say is I could picture a scenario where this universe is fake and we put ourselves in it and we deleted our memory of putting ourselves in it to make it seem more valuable.

The only real thing that, if that's the case, the system has badly broken - it's almost like, like this image here, you know, it's almost like a city situation where we've been kicked out of the net sphere. Only it's like the reverse: you're trapped in the net sphere and you can't get out. It's like the thing that gives me an argument that that's not the case is how shitty reality is. You know, it's obviously not for us.

Space is instantly lethal. Lava, ice, water, deep forest jungle - it's all pretty much lethal to a naked human. So this isn't for us. And so that tells me that it's not something like that, unless things went catastrophically wrong at some point. You know, like the base state of the universe was just an infinite theme park of goodness in all directions, 3D, totally dense, or it's not, you know, and we are stuck in something else and I don't know.

But yeah, it's like the idea - if I could create a kind of matrix and delete my memory of it and put me, put me in it, you know, pull a, because the original Matrix movie was based on a whole bunch of philosophical tropes. The guys basically just made a laundry list of tropes - philosophy, consciousness, memory, shadows on the wall of the cave, all that stuff. And of course one of them was, I don't remember the formal name or anything, but it's the scene where he's eating the steak and he's like "ignorance is bliss" and he wants to go back in the matrix but he doesn't want to remember being out here.

You know, I don't know, it's like would I do that? Now obviously it failed for him and the hamfisted moral lesson was don't be a traitor. But you know, reality isn't like that. Morality is kind of a thing that we impose on it. The only real moral thing in nature is the subjective reality of pleasure and pain. It's like, axiomatically pain is bad, pleasure is good. That is the ultimate subjective, but it's also the ground floor for objectivity because what else matters?

I mean everything else matters in context of leading to that ground floor. Cruelty is cruelty because it causes suffering. If it doesn't cause suffering then it's not cruelty, you know. And people get hung up on technicalities and Ulysses pacts where they're like, "You can hurt now for more pleasure later." And I'm like, "Okay well just crush all that down to one thing," you know, and on balance, however you define it, net gains. Pleasure good, pain bad - we all agree on that.

And yet there are people, I think, that are so scared of being baited they're so scared of falling into some kind of trap, that they embrace suffering just to avoid bait, like they see it's like the recurring trope in movies of whenever a pretty girl is seducing you, it's because you're about to be completely damaged by something. You know, if she's tricking you, it's a scam, she's a demon, she's a vampire, whatever horrible thing. You know, it's never just a good idea to be like, "Yeah I'm being seduced, this is great. I'm going to enjoy it."

Media never, ever does that. And it's funny because we have a whole genre of extremely popular media that's all about that but we don't put any kind of artistic depth into it. It's called porn, you know. And like you can really see the difference. It's like picture a $50 million film and picture, uh, half that budget going to good writing and good actors so it's a good movie, it's like a four and a half star film. Now imagine a seduction scene in that movie. Okay, now imagine your typical porn.

It's like the first five minutes of a porno versus that seduction scene. How come there's not both, you know? And it's because there's this moralism that we have, this weird kind of puritanism going where we don't want to admit that we're sexual beings and that seduction is a thing and all that. And it's just a bunch of lies we tell ourselves and habits we've learned from and the wrong lessons we've learned from things. And it's, it's like, and all that's about to go away.

You know, to get back to my original point, Stable Diffusion is going to make it so that people can just explore those state spaces that have been neglected by our culture and that's going to have some consequences. And I say bring it on because clearly we've failed. Like our current approach is dogshit. Every reform has failed in history. You think of the hippies, they were like "Oh peace movement this and free love that" and then they ended up being Reaganites.

So it's like, just in the most blunt way, every peace movement has failed because war continues to exist. The largest global protest in human history, as far as we have recorded and are aware of, was in the run-up to the Iraq War and it did not stop the Iraq War. So every time we try and fix things it doesn't work. So I'm really, really keen to have some kind of disruption. And I believe that history has experienced a bunch of exterior disruptions like asteroid impact, that kind of stuff, great flood, whatever, solar flare - that kind of thing.

But clearly none of that led to a utopia so we need something else. We need something from inside. And if it turns out to be a massive disaster, so what? It doesn't seem like we've lost anything. Like let's say AI goes rogue and turns us all into paperclips. Okay fine, I'm willing to risk that because the alternative is doing nothing and doing nothing is just more of the same and more of the same is just war and torture and pain and pointless suffering for no reason.

So I'm just like fine, roll the dice. It's like it's like playing Russian roulette with one chamber being a bullet and the other chamber being a complete win condition, you know. So if I have nothing to lose, that's when it's time to gamble and we don't have anything to lose. I don't see us making any kind of progress. I mean even in the developed nations we have like infant mortality coming back up and stuff. And it's just like we have failed. We've just totally failed.

So I guess I'm just looking for people who I don't already know who can kind of understand stuff like that and have similar thoughts and have some stuff to say. I mean please comment, tell me what you think. I don't know, thanks for listening I guess.