lies and wonderland

muflax hath written unto you...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

2012/04/18: Major site redesign.

No content changes, lots of internal stuff, integration of old stuff. See the daily log entry for details.

muflax hath written unto you...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

2012/02/04: Finally pushed some changes.

Also improved the site’s design somewhat. Larger articles now have a table of contents and general navigation is more visible. The main column moved to the left to accomodate for the new navigation bar. To make feedback easier, I’ve added a comment box. (Web 2.0! We still care about this, right guys? Guys?) I also accept anonymous feedback about anything. (Yes, anything.)

Drafts are now semi-integrated into the site. The are reachable if you know the address, but they don’t show up on the index pages. That way I can still reference them or let someone read early versions without having to hide them.

The RSS feed now has a link to each new article as it appears as well as to this changelog. That way I don’t have to announce everything manually.

I’ll soon(tm) port the Wordpress Blog over to nanoc as well. Once everything is static content (besides the comments), I’ll change hosts to NFS.net.

I’ve begun writing an Antinatalism Overview. It will cover many (all?) arguments for and against bringing life into existence. It’s hopefully more approachable than the scattered philosophy material on the topic and will eventually be more rigorous than existing overviews. I got fed up with opponents of antinatalism constantly misrepresenting its arguments, and antinatalists not making all their assumptions explicit.

Contrary to mainstream philosophy, I also included some common transhumanist replies to the arguments. I try not to push my own view too much, but I’m also adding my own commentary to it. Anything else would be dishonest. Regardless, it’s not yet finished, but “release early, release often”, right? It’s maybe 30% done and has already ~7k words. Maybe I’ll write a summary of the summary, too.

I’m also collecting antinatalism memes and quotes in the Antinatalism Tumblr.

More overviews are coming. Soon-ish. If I don’t get bored, that is. Basically, the languages articles are’t happening, Great Filter is somewhat delayed and an informal introduction to Solomonoff Induction and Kolmogorov Complexity is coming This Month(tm).

I’ve also begun writing an overview about New Testament scholarship, mostly to collect interesting theories and keep all the names straight. It will be months until it will actually be useful, but I have time.

I’ve moved some stuff from the Blog into proper articles. Content didn’t change in case you read them already. The other posts will also be converted once I transition away from the blog. Articles: Backups, Developing Synesthesia, Dude, Where’s My Time?!, On Samsara, Persinger’s Magnetic Field Hypothesis, Three Sides, Why Can’t I See Through This Wall?, Why I’m Not a Vegetarian.

The categories have also changed to accomodate the new writing.

Why I'm Not a Vegetarian

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

This post isn’t so much an actual argument per se, but a belief dump of the core arguments why I’m not a vegetarian. I’m currently rethinking the issue (thanks to Alan Dawrst) and might change my mind over the next few months. I always find it hard to reconstruct what I believed in the past and why, so I’m writing it down. To counter some bias, I’m also trying to state what kind of evidence would be necessary to convince me of vegetarianism. I’ll revisit this within a few months once I’ve resolved a few moral confusions.

Animals are not morally relevant agents.

Morality, as I understand it, requires certain features to act upon. The state a rock is in is not morally relevant per se. I don’t have my metaethics worked out yet, but there are at least three features I’m pretty sure are necessary to be morally relevant: a self, consent and the ability to obey laws. I don’t think animals have any of these, so whatever we do with them is not a moral concern. (Also note that there are humans who don’t have all three. There might be game-theoretic reasons to treat them as if they had them, but no moral ones.)

I’d give this argument maybe 60% certainty, so I’m in no way confident and this alone would not be enough to justify ignoring animals as moral agents. The potential harm is too great, and while I wouldn’t make preventing it a top priority, I would still act to minimize the suffering I might cause. If only this argument remained, I would avoid most animal products. But let’s take a look at the three features.

A Self

Basically, there are three levels. Pure phenomenal consciousness (feeling pain), a subjective experience that makes these things happen to someone (I am feeling pain) and abstract thought to reflect on this (thinking: “I am feeling pain”). To be morally relevant, you need to have at least the subjective experience. No farm animal does. So they aren’t relevant.

A counterargument wouldn’t need to convince me that animals certainly have a self, but merely that they might have one. A sufficiently large risk (say, >20%) is enough for me. One way to do this is the simple “recognize yourself in the mirror” test. No farm animal passes it. (Some animals do, and I consider them likely enough to fulfill this requirement of moral relevance.) Of course, any animal that has language and can refer to itself also passes, and I’d give it at least 20% confidence that some non-human animal can do so, so this might also be a possible path. None of these seem to be farm animals, though.

The ability to agree to (or reject) a proposed deal. The main problem is that I’m not sure that consent is actually real. It might well be a general confusion. But I still think it’s more likely than not that something-not-too-unlike consent can be naturalized and exists in humans. But what do you need? Language is certainly sufficient, but it seems a dog can also accept or reject food, so is it consenting?

I’m really hesitant to accept hypothetical or implied consent. I would strongly prefer any consent to be explicit and (ideally) formalized. I currently don’t see how explicit consent can work without the abilities of thought and language. So animals can’t consent and are not morally relevant.

There are two ways to negate this argument. Either show that animals can meaningfully consent (this is also relevant for Antinatalism - if non-existent humans can consent, then it seems much more likely that animals can too, and vice versa), or show that humans can’t consent, i.e. that consent is a confused concept. This is probably the weakest of the three features and I expect to change my mind about it, but I don’t know in which direction yet.

The Rule of Law

To slightly paraphrase Moldbug:

[Anyone] should be free to make any promise. In return, he or she can expect to be held responsible for that promise: there is no freedom to break it. All promises are voluntary until they are made, and involuntary afterward. A pair of reciprocal promises […] is an agreement.

Any organization of agents that allows and enforces such agreements establishes the Rule of Law. Basically, it’s the “lawful” component in the D&D moral system. It’s what makes Divine Command Theory moral (and why I’m very sympathetic to it, despite its untenable foundation in non-existent gods). Ideal Confucian government embodies it.

Without arguing for a specific implementation, it seems clear that animals can’t obey (or even understand) laws or act as citizens of a lawful state. Therefore, they aren’t morally relevant.

Evidence to the contrary would be, for example, a demonstration that animals can form states (or reasonably similar organizations). Or show that the concept is confused, for example because we really want some consequence of lawful states, but don’t actually want the laws themselves.

Farm animals under typical Western conditions do not suffer significantly.

See Richard Carrier’s post for the actual argument. Basically, animals in modern farms don’t experience a significant amount of pain or suffering. It ain’t heaven, but it’s not so bad that we should prevent it at all costs. The benefits in increased reproduction (for the animals) and better nutrition (for the humans) easily make up for whatever suffering remains. (This might no be true in non-Western countries or when you ritually slaughter them, but the proper response to that is urbanization and secularization, not vegetarianism.)

There are two ways this could be wrong. First, you could try to show that there is some fundamental desire that animals in modern farms can’t fulfill. Obviously, I don’t see such a desire, but it might exist. The best case for this so far is Eduardo Sousa’s farm. However, animals don’t seem to reject modern farms or suffer tremendous stress. But we might’ve missed something.

The second way this could be wrong is to show that categorical Antinatalism is correct (and that animals are morally relevant). Basically, if it is always wrong to bring a life into existence, then we shouldn’t breed animals, ever. (And we should seek the extinction of all wildlife.) I’m currently working through the various antinatalist arguments, but so far, I’m not convinced of the most categorical form, but I already accept basic antinatalism (it is often wrong to create life), and some of the arguments still look promising to me once I’m done repairing them.

Even if they suffer, I morally discount against them (and I’m justified to do so).

It’s true that I strongly discount anything that doesn’t directly affect me or those close to me. The question is, am I justified in doing so, or is it a bug in my judgment? I have not seen a good argument for universalism (if you don’t already have it as a preference) except that it would be simple.

However, this is inherently the weakest argument. If we accept that animals immorally suffer, then discounting just changes the level of importance we should assign to it. But given the huge amount of animals (10^10 and more!), even strong discounting can be overcome. If we accept that breeding animals violates their rights or consent, then no amount of discounting is relevant. Consent can’t be morally overridden.

But as it stands now, animals probably don’t have rights, so we can discount. They don’t suffer much, if at all, so even their large numbers aren’t sufficient, especially because human benefits outweigh it. Therefore, eating animals is acceptable.

Backups

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100

So, I spent two hours today and further gwernified my life. Seems like a good time to summarize my backup strategy. Maybe it inspires someone to save more of their own data. As the saying goes, nobody wants backup, but everybody wants restore.

Strategies

All data in /home is synced between my laptop and desktop machine. That’s the most basic level of redundancy.
Everything except TV shows etc. is backed up every 6 hours on a dedicated backup drive. I use a custom rsync script for incremental backups. That way, each snapshot is self-contained, but snapshots share hardlinks and save on space. A new snapshot of ~200GB of data takes ~150MB and takes ~6 minutes. I do it this way because I often restore stuff and found rdiff-backup horribly slow. I have 2 weeks of snapshots for everything, plus unlimited monthly snapshots for most partitions.
Most TV shows, music etc. is also mirrored on the backup drive. (This isn’t really crucial because Piratebay is a good backup strategy in itself.)
The whole backup drive itself is mirrored on a second backup drive. (To preserve the backup history.)
I have a third backup drive that I update every couple of months or so and store at my dad’s workplace. (I never throw away old drives. I just put a backup on them and let them rest.)
I take a screenshot every 5 minutes and store it on the backup drive. Useful to reconstruct days or restore content other strategies miss.
Everything that can be open and online, is so. I’m currently transitioning my notes to my website and some of my daily task tracking to Beeminder. As Linus said, “Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.”.
I put everything I edit in a git repo to preserve its history. Especially my private notes, tracking data and so on. I have a cronjob that commits my notes every 20 minutes so I don’t have to think about it.
I backup my notes, mails and Anki deck on Amazon’s S3 every month in case my house burns down ~~or the police raid me~~. Takes up about 1.5GB and costs me ~30 cents a month. (I don’t sync my Anki deck with ankisrs.net because its pretty large (>14k cards, 900MB of media) and I don’ want to burden Damien. Once he allows me to pay for my account, I’ll sync again.)
I mirror all videos I link to on my website because they have a bad habit of getting DMCA’d out of existence. I run linkchecker once a month to fix broken links.
I also let Google track me completely. Hey, they aren’t more evil than future me and my search history has saved my ass a lot in the past. If they also profit from my data, good for them.
I track all useful daily activities (and time spent) so I can see how much time I waste. (My task suggestion script also balances activities.)
I log all chat communication. This was my very first backup setup and is tremendously important. “Huh, didn’t I talk about this with him before? …*grep*… Yup, 7 weeks ago. *quote*”. In fact, if anything has a log option, I use it and never throw away the logs. Text is easy to compress.
I use Gentoo, and so save the sources and binaries for all packages I use (and back them up as described above). Every once in a while, a library breaks something and I need a clean package now. Or an obscure program disappears and no-one mirrored the sources. Sucks. Don’t let it happen to you. Don’t clean your cache. (Or at least, have monthly snapshots).
I try to put my beliefs and predictions on PredictionBook. Keeps me honest and forces me to turn empty beliefs into ones that actually predict something. And I now have proof whenever I say “Told you so!”. Good for my hipster cred.

That’s about it. This is all more-or-less automatic, so no effort on my side and it’s all cheap. You only really notice how valuable backups are when you have them and can constantly restore stuff. “Oh, that pdf from last week I thought wasn’t useful? Need to quote it.”, “Crap, deleted the wrong file.”, “Nah, that paragraph sucks, lets get the first version.”, “I watched this amazing pr0n a month ago, but the link is dead. What’s the name?”, …

Future

There are a few things I’d really love to store in the future.

A webcam in my room. I already have one and modded it to record infrared as well. (Most chips do, but have a filter, typically on the lens. Just scrape it off.) So it also works reasonably well in the dark. I just need to set it up and can get IRL screenshots as well.
I really need to record my thoughts more, but I don’t know how. I already try to write them down as much as I can, but that’s cumbersome. I thought about using an audio recorder, but that isn’t as automatic as I want either.
Similarly, I’d really love to record IRL conversations, but current tech still sucks too much. Luckily, I’m enough of a loner that I barely have any non-text conversations, but you know. Need to win some more debates with my mother. (“No, I didn’t say that at all! Here, listen!”)

Rules

So to summarize the summary, I think the most important rules to backup are:

Use it. You will need your old data at some point and hate yourself if you don’t have it. Life is already horrible enough. Don’t increase your suffering through laziness.
Automate it. The less you have to think about it, the better. When in doubt, just backup it. Space is cheap.
Histories matter. Don’t just save your files. Save your histories, ideally in something like a git repo. Keep old backups.

Phaidros (D&Dis character)

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Notes

Dates

<2011-08-20 土 21:00>
<2011-08-23 火 20:00>
<2011-08-28 日 20:30>
<2011-09-03 土 20:30>
<2011-09-17 土 20:30>
<2011-09-24 土 20:30>
<2011-10-01 土 20:30>
<2011-10-08 土 20:30>
<2011-10-15 土 20:30>
<2011-10-22 土 20:30>
<2011-10-29 土 20:30>

Character

Details

Name: Phaidros
Gender: male
Race: Greek
Major: Apologetics
Levels:

Apologist: 6 (1600)
Ethicist: 3 (250)

Wealth: 955 (6)
XP: 1896 (1850 spend) (+50 Utopist)

Special Characteristics

missing left hand

Items

book bag of holding(8/1)
KJ bible (+1 bibliomancy, +5 off/def demons, +3 RIG)
Isoceles triangle (+2 STR, +4 smash)
Antivenom (poison)
Penicillin (sickness)
First Aid Kit (bleeding, injury, doesn’t get used up)
Water Shield (-1 physical dmg, water protection)

Beliefs

Dualist
Kantian
politically agnostic
Theist / Protestant / Evidentialism / Serve God

Attributes

(base 54)

Rationality: 12 +1 (12 -1 +1)
Righteousness: 26 +8 (14 +1 +5)
Phronesis: 16 +3 (11 +1)
Bullshytte: 17 +4 (16 +0)
Strength: 11 +0 (7 +2 +2)
HP: 120
(Speed: 12)
Luck: 0

Spells

Spell Slots:

Rationality: 6
Righteousness: 12
Bullshytte: 8
Phronesis: 7

General

Debate (RAT) diff(RAT+d20) / 2 mental dmg
Preach (free) diff(RIG+d20) / 2 (moral) mental dmg
Confuse (BUL) (BUL+d20 - PHR+d20) / 2 mental damage
Smash (STR) diff(STR+d20) / 2 physical damage

Apologist

Heal (RIG) RIG/3
Pray (RIG) +1/-1 any roll
Kenosis (RIG) RIG/2 mental dmg
Predestined Hellfire (2RIG) diff(RIG) dmg
FEAT: Bibliomancy (+1..+2 Luck)
FEAT: Pentecostalism (immune to poison, -3 dmg snakes)
Summon Christ Metaphor (3RIG, 3 turns)

Ensouled Lion (12/12/12/12/22(+6), 60/(15))

Maul (STR/3 dmg, Speed DC15 against lame)

Faith Healing (2RIG+BUL) RIG/2 for up to 12 aware chars
Power of Tongues (RIG, 6 turns)
Fossil Gap (BUL) RAT save DC18 or fossil dies
Agape (2RIG) +1 control/party, +50% party buffs (1 turn), no State of Nature (3 turns)
Summon Angelic Doctor (2RIG+RAT, 3 turns)

Angelic Doctor (14/16/16/10/10, 40/(12))

Cure (9), 9HP, cures Sick, Lame, Bleeding, Depressed
may prescribe medication

Total Depravity (2RIG, 1 turn) RIG=0

Ethicist

Diogenes’ Lantern (RIG, 3 turns), ethical status
Summon Trolley (RIG, 3 turns), 20m/10p dmg, bid temp RIG to avoid
Catatonic Imperative (2RIG), d3 creatures paralyzed for 2 turns, RIG DC20

Skills

(base 25)

Erudition: 7
Rhetoric: 4
Sophistry: 4
Sense-Perception: 4
Precision: 2
Theory of Mind: 5
Research: 2
Language: 5
Techne: 1
Poesis: 1

muflax hath written unto you...

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

2011/09/04: Converted whole site to nanoc. Most of the content got re-organized, but not widely changed. A few things have disappeared, but will probably come back in a better form later. The design is reasonably the same, with some minor tweaks. The navigation bar is now at the bottom to deal with some footnote issues.

Every page has an Epistemic State now. This is an important step to convert this into proper long-term content. Sites are also dated now, so that some obviously out-dated material is clearly visible as such (and new material is obvious on the main page).

I added the story Milinda and the Minotaur I wrote some time ago, but never felt like publishing. Thanks to epistemic states though, I now can.

I do plan articles on the Great Filter and languages (use and learning), but dunno how long this’ll take. For now, this is mostly a setup to make it really easy for me to write more stuff and release faster. I have a couple of drafts lying around I might revive, particularly a comparison of the Theravada path model of enlightenment with the Matrix movie.

(I also threw away the old changelog because it’s useless now anyway. Check the git history if you care.)

On Samsara

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

[The teacher] said, “You know, most of you are not qualified for samsara! Let alone the pursuit of nirvana. Do any of you have jobs?” And what he got on to was this question of being successful at samsara. It was really an important issue. There is this idea of revulsion with samsara. People hear this, “You must become revolted with samsara in order to become a Dharma practitioner!”. And many people seem to misunderstand this as, yes, I’m revolted by samsara because I can’t keep my bank balance in credit, I’ve got a problem with personal hygiene, whatever the issue is, people don’t like me, I’m always doing the wrong thing and yes, it’s miserable, I wanna go and live in a nice Tibetan center where I don’t have to deal with it anymore.

This is not revulsion with samsara. When I’m talking about success at samsara, I’m not talking about getting rich. I’m simply talking about having an idea and being able to follow that idea through.

So I want to learn a language, so I learn a language. I take a class to learn to do something, I do it. I get a job, I fulfill the role of the job, etc. I’m not always getting the sack because I’m useless. Now, the interesting thing is, in order to be successful at samsara, you need desire. And your desire has to be sufficient to going after what you want and getting it. Put the work in to get what you want.

Then you get what you want and then you experience samsara. Until you’re able to get what you want and go after it and obtain it, you don’t know what samsara is.

Because that point where you get what you want is extremely interesting. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s actually quite delightful. But then when you have what you want and you’re sitting there with it, thinking, “This is a jolly nice thing!”, there’s a certain strange edginess about that, which is, “How long can I sit here and admire it?”.

Now, from a Sutrayana perspective we would say, that is because this thing that I desired so much does not have the capacity to satisfy me. “The things of the world are hollow and worthless!” (This is not actually true, you know. They are pretty neat, things of the world. I love ‘em. More more more!) […]

And the important thing about this, from a Vajrayana point of view, is that there’s nothing wrong with things. The things do contain the capacity to make us happy forever. It is we who get in the way of this process. Because what I want to be doing is not having what I want, but moving towards it. So that when I get what I want, the discomfort of that situation is that I’m no longer in motion. The process has come to an end and in that position, although I have, it’s a position of emptiness because there’s nowhere to go. That is why people do not like to be happy. They like to be moving towards happy.

Because happy is useless from the point of view of samsara. “So I’m happy. What now? Where do I go?”

– Ngak’chang Rinpoche, excerpt from talk on samsara, suffering and suspicion

Compare Gospel of Muflax, written October 2010:

TOKSHI said, now is good, tomorrow never good enough.

TOKSHI said, don’t wish for things because then you will get exactly what you wished for and it will totally suck and you will look stupid.

TOKSHI said, don’t be happy.

About a month later, I wrote in a draft:

I experience no dukkha.

What is dukkha? It is one of three marks of existence, according to Buddhism. It means unsatisfactoriness or suffering, in the sense of an axle of a horse cart tumbling in a poor hole, which is the origin of the word. Overcoming it is the whole idea of Buddhism, experiencing it is why the Buddha started his quest in the first place.

I am not using a semantic trick. It is not an exaggeration, not a koan, nothing like this at all. I mean it, straightforward. I experience no dukkha.

I understand what dukkha is. I see it in other people, quite clearly. I cannot find it in me.

The teachers cannot help me anymore.

I declared firmly that I want to experience dukkha. Shortly afterwards, I sat down and swore not to rise again until dukkha would appear. Pain came and went, fear came and went, boredom came and went, but no dukkha. Finally, all pain dropped away and I arose happy.

Some days later, dukkha came. I wrote in another draft:

I’ve yet to have an experience of any kind - game playing, sexual, food, travel - where I said, ‘This is the most fun I could ever possible have in my entire life. I couldn’t imagine, for one second, this being more enjoyable.’ I never said that.

– Gabe Zichermann, talk on Game Design I actually did. I managed to do exactly this, multiple times in fact. The last time I reproduced this, when I put down a video game controller and felt as happy as I ever could possibly hope to be, yet still unsatisfied, I knew it wasn’t just a fluke. There’s an upper limit to happiness, I can reach it any time and it still doesn’t make the sucking stop.

This was the turning point for me. I realized that I couldn’t just “solve my problems” and live a happy life. I realized that it was fundamentally impossible for me to do so. Not officially, not consciously, but psychologically, I became a Buddhist this day.

This feeling, this essential unsatisfactoriness, which Buddhists call dukkha, is what I think makes some people get the idea of enlightenment and others not. If you never felt it, you will not understand what it’s all about. I don’t know what actually makes the difference, what is necessary to feel it. Maybe you need to have lived a carefree and fulfilled enough life for long enough to max out your personal happiness (like the Buddha or I did) or maybe you need a special kind of mind to have the patience to actually optimize for happiness and fail, and have the clarity to realize it. I see no reliable pattern in the kinds of people to feel it, but if you do, welcome to the path. May it be your last.

Not long after that, I broke. (And started the blog.) I thought at first that something was wrong with the things. That my goals sucked. Half a year later, I gave up on happiness altogether. I always suspected there was something wrong with being happy. Wireheading seemed simultaneously attractive and evil. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Any unsatisfactoriness seemed to just come from me sucking or following the wrong goal. I hadn’t actually done a good job at getting exactly what I want. Luckily, I managed that, often enough to notice something. Two months ago, in another draft:

You know that feeling when you’re almost done with a great game, when you realize that this is the definite last level, there are no more upgrades, no more quests, just this one last obstacle and the boss at the end?

But you aren’t ready to quit?

So you draw it out. Organize your inventory. Finish all those minor sidequests you’ve been ignoring. But nothing can push away that realization. It’s about to end. Soon, the boss will go down and then what? Credits, memes and a highscore? Big letdown.

And that’s how I feel about life right now. For a while, I thought that’s just some depression killing the fun. But I’m not so sure about that anymore.Things are still fun, in a way. It’s just that there’s not much of an achievement left. None that I care about, anyway.

(I mean, it’s not literally the end. I don’t exactly expect to die. Still got a few decades, I guess.)

I’ll soon be fully enlightened. I mean, a decade ago I didn’t even understand what that meant when I decided to go for it. Now I kinda don’t want it to happen. In a way, life was more interesting with a big liberation story behind it. Actually being free? Not so fun.

I really got this playing Minecraft. In a way it’s perfect. It’s almost exactly what I thought heaven would be like. (Needs more machinery and no height limit, though.) But when I had built a little house, I realized that there’s no point to it. I stared upon the vast landscape, knowing that it would be impossible for me to ever be satisfied with it.

There is peace, but it’s the peace of a blank screen. It is not victory.

Now I have a useful idea what the symptoms are. I understand that the purpose of self-help for me was merely to create new problems so I could always have something to fix. I never wanted to arrive anywhere. This mistake I have fixed.

Liberation can now begin.

Three Sides

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0200

I destabilized again, but this time I see a different direction to stabilize in, something I’ve never done before.

I’m used to not having stable preferences or personalities. Typically, every 1.5-3 months, I have a breakdown event, lose all my motivation and enjoyment of whatever I’ve been doing and am stuck with reassembling the pieces into something new. Over the last few years, I’ve tried many things to fix this, but never got anywhere.

Shortly after I wrote down all the ways I have failed, I had a little epiphany. I have no clue if this is a good idea. But it’s a new idea and I’m tired of the old ways, so let’s see where this leads.

Basically, when dealing with your emotions, there are 3 different attitudes one can take. I call them Light Stance, Dark Stance and No Stance. Light Stance is the most common, No Stance is relatively new, Dark Stance is virtually unknown.

Taking the Light Stance, one wants emotions to be nice. For example, hedonism is a Light Stance, as are virtually any form of meditation or psychotherapy. A core concept of the Light Stance is transformation, i.e. the idea of turning bad feelings into harmless or pleasant ones. Almost all philosophies and religions take the Light Stance (if they take any stance at all, that is). However, “nice” doesn’t just mean “socially acceptable”, but simply anything that feels nice. A power-hungry narcissist is still taking the Light Stance, as is a masochist.

No Stance is characterized by being indifferent or free from all emotions whatsoever. Kai the undead assassin or a paperclip maximizer are great examples, but essentially anyone running on calculations takes No Stance. It is important to differentiate No Stance from equanimity, which it superficially resembles. Equanimity is harmless, in the sense that nothing bad is happening. It is a pleasant state to be in and sought for its pleasantness. If one wants to not be bothered by negative feelings anymore, then that’s the Light Stance. No Stance, however, is fundamentally indifferent. Some forms of utilitarianism take No Stance, as does proper nihilism. If vipassana is done for the purpose of transformation (e.g. to overcome suffering), it’s Light Stance. If it’s done entirely detached from what comes up, focusing purely on the correct application, it’s No Stance. Most advanced vipassana practitioners stumble on No Stance; barely anyone stays there.

You’ll notice that I’ve covered pretty much all religions, philosophies, self-help and just general attitudes to life with those two. (This is somewhat deceptive - Light Stance is tremendously vast.) Up until recently, I thought that’s pretty much all there is.

Then I found Buddhism for Vampires, an attempt to move Buddhism away from its current politically correct and nice ghetto, and to bring back tantra. (I applaud the effort.) Ultimately, Buddhism for Vampires, or tantra in general, is still a Light Stance. It directly engages (and even encourages) bad emotions, but only for the purpose of transformation, of getting rid of them or turning them into something pleasant. It improves on Romantic Buddhism by acknowledging that negative emotions exist and should be noticed, so they can be dealt with.

But.

And here comes the idea.

Do they have to be dealt with? What if you didn’t do that?

What if, when you felt disgust, you didn’t push it away, but embraced it? Or when you felt pain, you dived into it, not to make it pleasant or non-existent, but to fully experience it, in all its awfulness? In fact, what if you took great care to retain this awfulness?

Now you’re taking the Dark Stance. Say hello to misery, disgust, hatred, boredom, sorrow and pain.

I want to be extra clear on this. In the Dark Stance, you don’t embrace hatred because it makes you do good things, or gives you a rush, or so you can see through it and overcome it, nor do you endure it. That still assumes that hatred is only instrumental or an unfortunate necessity. Dark Stance embraces hatred for hatred’s sake. Also, the Dark Stance is not an Evil Trope. The Good and the Bad Guys both don’t want to suffer, they merely use different ways to overcome their own suffering. Evil might be willing to cause suffering for others, but it will never cause it’s own suffering. The only fictional example of someone taking the Dark Stance I can think of are Planescape’s Sensates.

And the weird thing is, for the few days now that I’ve been learning this, for the few hours I’ve been able to hold the Dark Stance, I felt satisfied.

I have not felt truly satisfied for at least a decade. I realized my deep boredom some months ago, but I thought the answer lies in getting excited again. I wrestled with the idea of failing, of impossibility. I thought that one ought to overcome failure or live in spite of it. That’s what Sisyphus does and he is happy, they say.

I thought that satisfaction was something, that it was a specific emotion, something to be cultivated and achieved. That I had a hole in my life, maybe not a god-shaped, but a purpose-shaped one, and somehow I was supposed to figure out what this purpose was, that I really needed something to protect.

And then I just took my pain and said to it, “I’m ok with you. This is not a trap. I’m not trying to accept you out of existence. Please stay for as long as you please. It hurts and I’m ok with this. I want you to hurt and to continue to do so.”, and I felt something going to rest, for only a moment, some part of me that was so desperately trying to protect me from this pain. It was not needed anymore and it could finally let go. I was satisfied. I couldn’t believe it, I thought I must’ve confused the fucker by asking it to hurt me. I tried it again with hatred and disgust; it still worked. It wasn’t making me feel any better - this is not a Light Stance in disguise, after all - but the dissatisfaction that had become so prevalent was gone, if only for a bit.

I do not know where this path will lead, only that it will be interesting.

run on hatred // run on pain // transform nothing // seek no gain