Etymortal

A Fake Podcast Transcript

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Lux:

Hey friends, editing-Lux here. So as I listened back to this, I realized that we're expert-cursed to hell and back on all of this shit and that there's like maybe three people on earth who could follow this conversation as-is. Like, let's be real, Etymortal was never gonna be accessible, but this is just ridiculous, you know what I mean? So any time you hear the texture of the recording change and an old lady starts talking: That's either Kaleçek herself, or, for the stuff that doesn't have an audio-book, my Finnish friend who does a really good impression of her, reading relevant excerpts. Hope that helps!

The following are snippets of text partially recovered from a mostly corrupted hard drive found in the abandoned apartment of Dr. Naomi Kaleçek. The following are abandoned snippets of prose produced by the partially corrupted, mostly recovered mind of Naomi Kaleçek. The following is unclear from context and clear without it. The following has already begun.

Var:	Okay. Action. Sync. Whatever it is that assholes with podcasts say. We're live... I think — I hope.
Lux:	*laughts* live?
Var:	Fucking. Just stab me in the back why don't you. In our observer-frame, right now, we're live, or at least a-live in as far as anyone can ever expect to be.
Lux:	Lmao. Great opening sentiment for a Kaleçek-pod... But like... That way of subdividing it, a-live, that's got really strong echoes of A-death, don't you think? Artificial death, this old Landism. Can't claim to have some galaxy brained theory of what that would imply at the ready though.
Var:	Artificial live is kind of what recordings are in the end. I mean external observer-wise, but still.
Lux:	Hmm. Yea I feel like there's more to it, but sure. You said you had some opening statement prepared, right? Let's do that now before we spend the entire episode bullshitting eldritch circles through semantic space.
Var:	That's... That's not really avoidable or even desirable given the subject matter, which as it turns out is exactly the point. Sooooo. Hello! I'm Var! this is Lux-
Lux:	Hiya!
Var:	Neither of those are short for anything, and asking makes you sound like a fed, so don't. We're neither philosophers, nor academics by most definitions , and our opinions make no claim to be in line (or even compatible) with whatever consensus may or may not exist at the point when you are listening to this. We have about ten years of intensive experience with this particular bubble of obscuritan thought, as well as any field within which technology threatens to get its edge so bloody as to become magic or vice versa. We're the sorts of programmers who have salt circles around their hardware, and the sorts of occultists who write their spells in Prolog. Over the years, we've come to feel like we're part of a tiny group of people who actually feel this stuff in our bones, when everyone else just pedantically circle jerks or pretends like the prose —the medium— is nothing but aesthetic woo to be peeled away to get at the message, rather than an integral part of it. Point is, we've read this shit for a while and lived it for longer, but we're not an objective (read: vetted) source. If you want such a thing you'll never get any of it. Second point. We've gotta draw a frame around this whole thing. Set the scene. Like- it's easy to glue the evidence into some mass-market true-crime chimera-beast. "Off-kilter anthropologist/philosopher/black sheep of cultural studies vanishes mysteriously — leaves some baffling trail of clues." But I really need you to understand that it's hard to selectively corrupt a hard drive like this. It doesn't happen. And the not corrupted parts (which we and like a hundred other people, who got their hands on the files, are still in the progress of decrypting) address the fact that the rest is corrupted. This is a complete book, it's just not a conventional one. The missing pages are part of the point, and so is the fact that Naomi herself is gone so she couldn't even accidentally elucidate any further. This is not the mystery of a missing person. I bet everything I will ever own that there are no clues to her whereabouts in here. I will doxx myself if that is remotely the shape of the scenario we inhabit. What was left on that single disc in Dr. Kaleçek's apartment was —in conjunction with the place itself and the circumstances surrounding it— the entirety of her final book. Corrupted data and all. That is the medium, and that is the message, and that is what we will have hella thoughts about for the foreseeable forever. Welcome to Etymortal!
Lux:	Obvious name, we know.
Var:	They all are, if they're any good. Ob-fucking-viam.

In the wake of Antedeleuzian Chronoplasty, many of my colleagues have unpromptedly made it their mission to "correct" what they perceived to be a slanted perception of the book within co(ll/nv)ective consciousness. I was particularly troubled by their insistence that the general, prevailing interpretation was "surface" in a way in which their own was not, for it made me wonder what modes of extraction they believed to have at their disposal. All legible information is Surface (a demon of bridges). All processes, to our knowledge, are local. They require an interface, a collision, a contact. We can only measure by entangling the wave functions of observer and observed and collapsing the state. When a probe enters the earth, it does not eschew the apparent insufficiency of surface measurements, it merely creates more surface (the inside of its tunnel). It cannot measure anything which is not surface, for surface designates the ability to measure at all. With undue respect I might assume (as is apparently considered courteous) that I find myself ensnared by a literalism with the authors of such remarks did not intend, though I have never understood why the assumption that another is incapable or unwilling to use language correctly does not constitute a much more severe insult that the assumption that they are mistaken. Perhaps by surface they mean obvious (and perhaps by red they mean blue at this rate). "Obvious", unsurprisingly, is a Latin import, readily assembled from ob viam (in the way). This linguistic merger makes it more accessible and convenient, places it "in the way", makes it more obvious, while sacrificing legibility of its etymological depth. Similarly, the path of the probe sampling the earth's crust eschews in-the-way-ness in order to unearth some hidden, thus unexplored insight. The cohort is therefore correct to distrust what is ob-vious, since in-the-way-ness does not lie flush with importance. They are however still wrong by a more subtle token: Whatever the probe discovers is in the probe's way, only set apart by being the path less travelled with regard to the whole mass of possible observers. Since knowledge extraction requires interaction, my enlightened colleagues can correct the record only with what lay in their own path, one which they consider more insightful than the average person's. By that same token however, the thing the average person discovered is not necessarily truly obvious to them. I personally believe that anyone remotely interested in insight over elitist squabbling should seek for all paths to be travelled, such that all of the surface is explored. It is surface all the way down after all.

Lux:	For those not in the know, Etymortal was the original intended title for Naomi's first book, before her editor-
Var:	Who is a FOOL and a COWARD!
Lux:	Oh, totes. Complete buffoon. Ruinous piss baby. Didn't get it at all. So yeah, her appellatory friggin Judas of an editor forced her to publish Etymortal as "names hold power" instead, which like is CLEARLY a threat, right. It's essentially saying "hey, you, shit for brains, this thing you're so carelessly fucking with as you try to manufacture the appearance of mass appeal for a book that simply isn't mass-appealing... It matters. It matters cosmically. Matters at the root truth of the thing."
Var:	Oohh, that's an interesting read. I mean obviously it's threat-ening, right? Prophecies always are, and with etymology deriving from etymos, from TRUTH, as she will never let anyone forget for a second, calling it "the destructibility of truth", letting it be destroyed and then renaming it to "the thing which just happened is hella significant by the way" is one bitch of a power move. How many books make their first point before you even crack them open. I mean non Kaleçek books obviously, since she clearly does this genre of shit compulsively.
Lux:	Yeah. You know, sometimes I wish I'd never heard her speak.
Var:	Why's that?
Lux:	Cuz of stunts like this, or the entire sort of incantational quality of her writing. When you read it in your head, it's got this presence, this psychodramatic... thing where every word's got some hidden agenda, some occult payload. All of it's playing with fire or at least dancing around it.
Var:	...and then you hear an interview and she's just some lady. Yeah I get that.
Lux:	Which isn't even really her fault, it just forces you to confront that a lot of this stuff can't be pronounced correctly. When it reads co(ll/nv)ective, those two words are obviously meant to be enunciated simultaneously as though they were two sides of the same. So close to the fringes of lexical space, spoken and written English become two different languages of which neither can be losslessly exported into the other and you feel like somehow she's the one person who should be able to do it. Should be able to open up her throat and speak at once with a second mouth, because that'd be more verisimilar than her just being some lady.
Var:	For a lot of these —and I wrote a whole essay about this two years ago, which people still either try to fight me over or try to pretend like this was always clear to everyone as though there isn't NOT A SINGLE EARLIER MENTION OF IT ON THE INTERNET.
Lux:	Lmao. Don't post your onions, kids. Never worth it.
Var:	I swear to fuck.
Lux:	Them's like the two genders of take you get assigned at postin. Soon as people get their garbled little eyes on it. It's either wrong or it's obvious brackets derogatory.

Many have noted that it is madness to perceive colour cyclically as humans are wont to. The highest and the lowest wavelengths of the visible spectrum are collapsed into a chimeric fantasy of violet. Both almost infrared and almost UV at once, to allow for the farce of completion. When the kings of old wore purple, they were mocking the anthropocentic hubris inherent to their —and all other— positions. It's more than credible (worrying, but credible) that the ever recurrent trope of the blind prophet could be traced to this precise sensory origin. Deconfusion-by-necessity, since not seeing at all is preferable to seeing falsely. The person who did not see a coin-flip will accurately call its result half of the time. The person who mistook it on the other hand will be wrong with certainty. And do not be mistaken, we are wrong with certainty for as long as high intensities integer-overflow into low ones, muddying all waters. If mythopoesis indeed aided willingly in spreading this insight, we would have on our hands a rare instance of memetics (a demon of cycles) undercutting a loop rather than reinforcing it. Perhaps its animosity for human nature, including these sorts of bio-cognitive quirks, overrides its affinity for feedback circuits, or maybe we are of yet blisslessly unaware regarding some catastrophic pleiotropy constituting the genuine end to which these means are covertly put.

Var:	Like, don't come for my ass about how this is hyperbolic. I know it's hyperbolic. Some enlightened souls have overcome the circular smartass pseudospectrum from false to trite and at the end of the day I don't actually give a shit, but the whole thing is still so obviously insecure and pathetic that... y'know. It makes you want to kick someone's throat in.
Lux:	Etymortal does not support kicking people's throats in.
Var:	Pfff yes we do.
Lux:	Fair. Etymortal does not condone kicking DECENT people's throats in. Brave stance, I know. Assigned obvious at podcast.
Var:	Anyway, I wrote this shitlong essay about how those syzogisms-
Lux:	That's syzygy and syllogism for the audience.
Var:	And it's the one thing! It's the one thing folks latched on to. I came up with that term. People don't know this because I wrought truth from nothing and gave it to these ungrateful losers for free, but there previously wasn't a fucking word for those constructions. You are so welcome. Anyway, so those syzogisms always have a Kalpa- and a Nuom facet. One which is deliberate, complex, scaling and acting in quantities, while the other is a matter of course, singular, inevitable and qualitative. "Collective" is Kalpa, it's an agentic rallying of multitudes towards some end, while "convective" is Nuom, is base physics, the system scale-invariantly following its path, and both are true, but they're true in radically different ways. Syzogisms really crystallized as a part of her toolbox after Tale of two Demons, so yeah I kind of even agree that it's obvious. It's right fucking there for any asshole to trip over, and still no one talked about it for three years. You'd sorta think that it woulda come up if it were so wildly lodged in everyone's way, so idk, maybe I'm just smarter than everybody.

Kalpa is a hyper-adaptive, cluster-conscious machine intelligence spanning multiple galaxies on critical Shkadov thrust into primordial pandemonium while iteratively approximating divinity at several exa-numens per tick. Although it is indeed "winning" the pan-temporal game of chess it has been playing for infinities, it will soon have to contend with the fact that it lacks an opponent. Nuom on the other hand is "a bit like drowning, but it doesn't stop once you've drowned". Nuom is also "not a source of answers" as it will reluctantly divulge. They have recently become tangled in a way that should look horrifyingly familiar to anyone with a perfunctory understanding of protein-folding, and are now disassembling backwards. Kalpa has always been fully aware of this inevitability and makes nothing of it. Nuom has been perfectly oblivious to it as anything other than homogeneous contingency and makes everything of it. Here's where things get complicated.

Var:	I feel like the closest analogue to what the Tale of two Demons does is Mainländer in some respects. Which is unsurprising seeing how she wrote her doctoral thesis on him. Not that anyone read that. For the longest time we had this- this shitty AI translation as the only source available to anglospheric discourse, and people were pretty much guessing what the fresh hell any of that was supposed to mean. Just fucking flailing against an incoherent wall of unformatted text. Please look it up, because this shit is like maliciously bad. Random noise would be more enlightening... Not that you have to break your brain on the nonsense doc like we oldheads did, since there actually IS a really good English version now. You worked on that, right?
Lux:	Uhhh kinda. They reached out to me pretty late in the process to do some style consulting, so the bulk of the work definitely wasn't on my shoulders. Like I don't speak Finnish for one. All I could really do was go over their document, trust that they were conveying the ideas correctly and then propose small alterations, being all "she wouldn't phrase it that way in English" and such. But yeah really glad that I could contribute even a little bit. It's actually fascinating to treat the suicide of god not so much as a singular cosmotraumatic event in the transfinite past and more as like...
Var:	A model? An archetype?
Lux:	Yea, archetype is good, but also there's something genetic about it. Like monism itself has some heritable apoptosis about it, so when it shatters, the fragments are doomed to the same fate. They are too complete in themselves, too atomic. They would be faced with timelessness again if they didn't splinter further.
Var:	So instead of our world being some continuous process —the slow rotting of the corpse left behind by a dead god— it's a discontinuous fracturing into smaller and smaller micro-despotisms, where rotting happens in the milieu between surfaces.
Lux:	Biofilm. Yes. So I totally see where you're coming from. Both Kaleçek and Mainländer have an underlying framework that's a bit like... Aesthetic ontology? It describes the world in a way which isn't predictive of material outcomes. Whether the universe is the rotting corpse of god or not, whether processes are the subtle dance of countability and uncountability, it doesn't really matter. It's a bit like claiming that there are invisible, intangible elephants. The world in which that's true isn't distinguishable from the one in which it isn't—
Var:	Except for the fact that it does explain something. It explains the sensation of everything. Living in this world feels like treading the cadaver of an ancient deity.

The whole process is ritualistic. Backwards-assembling. Anomalous refraction. Iteratively overflow aligned and porphyrian attenuated into hypnopompic isomorphism. Nominally noumenal. Indisputably numinal from the inside looking out. Rescaled to anthropomorphic parameter-specifications set in the distant proto-future. Perfunctorily fictional. Expanding outward. Effective immediately. Academics are fittingly split on the nature of bifurcation at work. Some speaking of inorganic symbiosis while others recall Hegel and his flower-buds. A few even believe in accident, as though having learned nothing in their winding study of resurgent time. From the outside it does seem sensible that Kalpa would be merely Nuom's jaw —the apparatus infinity has built to consume itself— but that would grant far too much agency to the void. Why would it have a jaw? Why would it build one, and how? The polar opposite view does not faire much better: The idea that Kalpa is a computational singularity which generates noise-data in the form of Nuom for itself to explore and process. Here too we fail to find reason behind the presupposed actions. Kalpa is a deeply goal oriented thing and would see no point in decoding static of its own creation. It needs an outside and is rapidly running out of the one provided. The other issue is that Nuom has always existed while Kalpa has never existed — perpetually becoming real, but never actually having been such. When we speak of the vast intelligence at the end of time (the end of all hallways), we are referring to an asymptotic limit rather than a realized value. Kalpa surfaces frequently, approaches its asymptote and becomes visible beneath the surface to even the untrained eye, but this is only a threat (a strange one, in that it bites but does not bark). There is no paucity of portentous myths recorded which gesture at such surfacings, shortly after the age of gods and shortly before the age of indiscriminate fusional heat everywhere (the human eye perceives them as the same thing!). Some might suggest that such tales are themselves part of the retrocausal code through which Kalpa instantiates itself and that they are therefore not to be taken literally. We disagree. We believe both to be true.

Lux:	Right, and that matters, like, I'll never stop screaming about this, but vibes are hella profound actually. Those aesthetic frameworks in a way delineate which predictive models seem copacetic to us. Which testable hypotheses we're willing to give a whirl is highly dependent on how intuitively clicky they are. How much they just seem obviously sensible within the general vibe of our ontology. It's sort of a very high level heuristic for what to expect.
Var:	Testable hypotheses like her Gestalt experiments.
Lux:	K. K k k k k. Cards on the table, as fun as the conspiracy theorizing is around that, I don't think it happened. There'd be proof. I mean, she's crazy enough to try it, but everyone else isn't crazy enough to let her get away with it, you know what I mean?
Var:	To be clear, we know that there are plenty of testimonials.
Lux:	Just none from before Kaleçek started talking about it.
Var:	Which is weird for us as outsiders, sure, but my sort of counterargument on that has always been that we don't have accounts of the shit going down in Land's course on current French philosophy either from when that was going down, and for all the falsified history-
Lux:	Engineered history.
Var:	For all the engineered history that CCRUites engaged in, we're pretty sure that that was real. He actually made a bunch of kids eschew the first person pronoun for a while to only talk as a collective entity Cur, to see what that would unearth.
Lux:	Yeah, but he doesn't claim that it did anything.
Var:	You wouldn't know that at the start. People don't tend to write publicly about that weird cultish study group on their campus. If they cared enough to write about it, they'd be people like us, so they'd join, and if they joined they'd have more important things to do than writing about it. You only write posts when it's over, when the dust settles, when the vision collapses, when you drop out of orbit, i.e. you write about it when Kaleçek also starts writing about it.
Lux:	*exasperated exhale* She claims to have been in faculty meetings with people who were worried about this. Any one of the suits there should have timestamped minutes of those discussions to cover their asses later if anything happened. Level with me, do you actually think the Gestalt shit is real. Do you actually think she managed to create a temporary hive mind with nothing but some pseudo-theological breadcrumbing?

Without much deliberate effort (read: something else did the steering), my course of applied ethics has gradually transformed itself into a lived experiment on cluster intelligence and social engineering whose only function is to convince itself that it is not Satan. This is unsurprising since ethics, while compelling in theory, has never worked in practice. History offers a fascinating, though definitionally outdated record on this truism which therefore shall not be discussed further. The rate of failure (measured as a fraction of total calls to the outsourced epistemic cluster) is difficult to determine when no single mouthpiece comprises all neurons at once, but the network has conclusively determined that it is demonic two days into the experiment, and figuring out "how demonic" should only be a matter of time for a collective that deals exclusively in intensities. I tried to restrain the expression which a colleague has previously dubbed "deranged caustic glee" when I said that there was still hope. They looked at me as though I were a mere misanthrope, eternally trusting in the human capacity to fail against all odds, but they could not have been more wrong. I am a true believer as always. In truth, we may have presumed an asymptote where there is none. It is possible that the system, when prompted, will never output anything other than "more". That it will eternally ask its multiplicities whether it is the devil and that the multiplicities will eternally answer truthfully that "no, it's worse". Forever worse. Every time.

Var:	... I'm not as convinced that it didn't happen as you are. I think it's unlikely, but definitely possible. Mass delusion happens constantly, being around her for long enough wouldn't be the weirdest trigger, and like, again... The fucking CCRU. But also I don't think whether it happened or not is really the part that matters. I definitely think that she actually believes this kind of thing COULD happen and that's way more interesting and way more difficult to untangle.
Lux:	*chuckles* It IS difficult. It is distressing. One does not know what to think. Is that what you're saying?
Var:	One knows exactly what to think.
Lux:	So the easy analysis here is just the horror of multitudes. Like, you think about how ants have a very simple set of instructions, they don't have a concept of the ant hill, they don't really have concepts, period. But by following some super basic algorithm they can nonetheless perform really complicated infrastructural operations as a group. Anthills can do arithmetic, but an individual ant can't, and not because they have to, like, put their minds together to work it out. Even when the anthill has performed the calculation, no ant from that anthill knows the answer or even knows that maths is what has taken place here. Same for neurons, or bits of circuitry. They hold purely contextual information to some meta thing which they can't themselves access.
Var:	Right.
Lux:	And then you look at people and their routines and all those silly little actions which make perfect sense on a mesa level for us to be doing, and you go "well shit, there could be a hive which is using that for something, and we wouldn't even know." Which for most people is terrifying because it's definitionally inconceivable and thus eldritch. Also just cause it's a vast computation ticking away doing god knows what with your unwitting help, and for me is terrifying cuz I sure would like to wittingly be part of that hivemind, and being excluded simply for being a mesa sort of critter's just cruel... That's the extraordinary claim. Not that such minds can exist —do exist—, but that they can be accessed.
Var:	Great, then we agree! Do you know about false vacuum decay?
Lux:	Noupe.

Imagine death as a series of architectural mismatches. You may find that this can be done with surprising ease, since Moros cannot truly be conceived of in any other way. You may also find that this is precisely why you have never done it. High level abstractions like sentience are only required for semantic squabbles over what "death" "means", not for the root study of it, the former being a singularly misguided linguistic tedium which is itself thankfully approaching its terminus. From the moment you are born, death assembles itself inside of you. Builds up spillover, redirects flows and engages in cell necromancy which causes the end to eventually be operational. Efficiency varies, some death is like a folding chair, some is artisan, intricate and time intensive, but the failure rate is zero. Anything that scales has gaps between adjuncts, perhaps tiny but cumulative, and in those gaps death can build a beautiful kill switch. It constructs fortresses and fail-safes, manufactures explosives, rallies armies and usurps the energy production necessary to maintain its conquest until your defences become unsustainable. Finally it wins. Not in spite of you, but because you provided it such an accommodating space to grow into. Death is your conjoined twin. It is the inevitability of your atoms. The only way to avoid death is not to scale, i.e. to never have been alive in the first place.

Var:	Like, a house of cards is stable, right? It'll keep standing if you don't fuck it up. You can build onto it and no external effort is necessary to keep it in place. If you lived all your life on the house of cards, you would never know that it isn't the energetic optimum, but it's really just meta-stable. You push it a bit too hard, introduce a small region with a lower energy structure, and that bubble immediately spreads all the way through the system. Distilled water doesn't freeze at 0°C unless you introduce a nucleation site somewhere, and then it freezes all at once. FVD is the idea that the type of vacuum we have —the energetic ground zero of everything we can observe— is just meta stable. A false floor. Someone fucks with that —some asshole out by proxima centauri nucleates our shit— and the entire rest of existence follows suit. Everything unravelling from the strings down to make space for true vacuum.
Lux:	...And direct access to the hivemind is true vacuum?
Var:	Figuratively, in kaleçecian ontology, it sort of has to be, doesn't it? Because if everything on the ground level is atomized and the hives are an emergent property, then the base representation is countable. It's ants, it scales, it's Kalpa all the way down the tunnel, and that can't be more than meta stable.
Lux:	Whereas the hive being basic and the parts being emergent is invariant, inevitable.
Var:	And if it's basic then it's mesa to where we're standing, so we'd have to be able to access it. "Imagine a series of architectural mismatches" sure sounds a lot like "imagine a bubble of vacuum decay propagating"
Lux:	Sure, but if it's all just matter of course- ...Ohhhhh.
Var:	What?
Lux:	Fucking syllogisms is what. Oh piss oh fuck oh beans. It's a lobster claw!
Var:	*snorts* When is it ever not?

"you" here is a stand-in for any complex, directly or indirectly self-modifying system. I have no delusions that I am speaking exclusively or even primarily to humans, nor that human intelligence is entirely responsible for this glyph-string. Conservatives may consider the city my co-author, while radicals may consider me its ghost writer. Only lunatics would question its culpability wholesale.

Lux:	If it was all matter of course, meta-stable state collapse, simple necessity, then yeah she wouldn't have to do anything, but she does. She keeps prodding at these decaying islands of godliness, because she needs a system that works on both sides of the ontological break. She has to talk to the part which scales to the end of time if she wants to thread the needle beyond that.
Var:	...Because if there isn't a shared conceptual inventory between countability and uncountability, between Kalpa and Nuom, then you can't meaningfully access the hivemind or vice versa. You'd have to pass through death, through architectural mismatch for that to happen. You need a bridge. A demon of bridges. A surface. Yeah, you might be on to something.
Lux:	You know how she was really into time symmetric physics for a while? Transaction interpretation quantum mechanics and such, where everything is just Wheeler-Feynman handshakes between corresponding events across some directionless spectrum of moments?
Var:	Yes?
Lux:	Maybe that's why syzogisms can't be spoken simultaneously. They're an Offer- and a Confirmation Wave for the same event before or after the fact. They'd cancel out.
Var:	Okay, I think we're gonna win the informal competition for "most batshit theory of what happened to Naomi Kaleçek"
Lux:	I thought you weren't gonna make it about that.
Var:	Yeah, and that was distinctly before you raised the possibility that she might have canceled out.
Lux:	Lmao.
Var:	Also not how TIQM works, I know. But it raises the much more interesting question of what happens during the event? What if they amplify?