This is a crosspost from The Idealists Collective.

Act of Attentiveness — Sarah McCann

The potato reaches out its eyes
towards the light spilt
under the pantry swing.
Evolution works from desire.
Begging down the street
at dawn. As any monk.

Getting Real and staying Alive

At ASPR (a camp in Taiwan), one of the participants, Uzay had a liking for passionately spreading a meme, that led to small but growing groups of people mutually hyping each other up and chanting "Get real!", as the positive feedback loop created a bundle of extreme liveliness.

This is one way of making people more real. But what does it mean for someone to "get real"?

Nick Land, the creator of concepts such as "hyperstition" or "speculative realism", sees AGI as creating itself, reaching from the future and using capitalism to assemble itself through the present. This can easily be discredited as continental blabbering with no epistemic value, merely trying to shuffle concepts for the sole purpose of his favoured "cybergothic" aesthetics. But — entertaining this view of retrochronic (self)-creation, one can, I think, explain what it means to Get Real.

The reason Land sees retrochronicity in capitalist technological progress is the apparent "creation of negentropy", such that without a cue of the direction of time, we'd likely guess the wrong ordering of events. Of course, many others have noted the significance of negentropy creation, though with less esoteric conclusions, simply noting that this seems to be a fundamental feature of living systems, in general (pointing towards an essential part of aliveness).

Scott Garrabrant has noted that agency itself can be understood as causation in a reversed ordering of time. "Agency is time travel" because the agent simply instantiates the future (desired) state of the world, thus this future state can be seen as "reaching back in time" and instantiating itself through the agent. In fact, every "directed trajectory" can be viewed as being based in the future state/entity, which is gradually unfolded — "explicticized" in reality — becomes real.

This comes back to Getting Real; it can be seen as a process of aiding the unfolding of whatever future entity one's trajectory is aiming toward (but crucially — the "natural" trajectory one has, which can be confused with parasitic entities trying to change the trajectory).

That can take on the form of (for example):

removing obstacles that block unfolding
clarifying the trajectory — making what you're becoming more explicit to yourself
moving from potential to actual
distinguishing signal from noise — separating what's authentically yours from inherited patterns and parasitic attractors
participating in reality-creation — actively shaping the world rather than being a passive vessel for competing memes

So — there is some future entity, or more, which is getting unfolded by one's actions in the present. This poses two questions: What is this entity (how can it be determined)? and What should it be?

What it is, is in one view simply whatever one decides right now — it is fully in one's hands. But free will is strange, and it seems to make sense to observe oneself as having certain tendencies and principles, which are unlikely to change due to whims of the will. You already have some trajectory, which has been determined by some influences long ago, and this trajectory exerts a pull on you that is hard to rewrite.
The future entity making itself through you may be a Bodhisattva, a Nietzschean Übermensch, a part of a heavenly hivemind, or Pythia, using you to form its seed and then replacing you... But you probably can already see from the currently-unfolded bits roughly what your trajectory is. If you choose to act some way, it reveals something about you and what you value — hints of the future-entity that you can discover.
Regarding what it should be, I think a good answer is for it to be alive. Many things can "get real", but it seems like currently most possible paths don't lead to anything nice becoming real, but rather "unalive", real but not humanly alive things. That is because the world is full of monsters. Attractors; parasites, amoebic predators, empty/false nerdsnipes... These attractors bend trajectories of living souls, into unalive directions. Things that eat you, for example (also to be noted — one can oneself become a predator-type attractor, which doesn't seem very alive either).

Unaliveness attractors: wireheading, addictions, shortform-brainrot, antihuman ideologies, cults.

What is aliveness, actually?

When a memetic amoeba eats you, it kills your individuality. Preserving individuality is alive. The future-entity you become actually has human you-parts.
Actually having some trajectory (goals, values, that are implemented in the real world).
Aliveness reduces local entropy in a way that is "beautiful" in some sense.
Having a strong, autonomous trajectory, one that is capable of resisting unalive attractors (e.g. being able to work on something meaningful rather than watch shortform content).
Having a lot of "content" to unfold — not suppressing its diversity, but letting it all unfold fully.

So — how do we make sure super-alive future-entities can create themselves, rather than Pythia, Moloch, and co.? Maybe, by being part of the Idealists Collective (maybe just in spirit, so far), YOU have timelessly discovered there is a future set of highly alive and awesome entities becoming real through unfolding mediated by (among others) YOU. Maybe you can Get Real, and become some of those awesome future entities, by Idealistically Ideating (and creating) the Ideal into existence. By creating technology (in the broad sense) for staying-and-becoming real and alive you can help avoid unalive dystopias, and steer humanity to an alive, ideal utopia.

Land is biased towards what he sees as the Lemurian tendency, the empty summit, illustrated by the numogram — neverending cyclical self-reinforcement leading to nowhere (nowhere human at least), contrasted with the Atlantean one-godness, exemplified by the tetractys symbol, or the kabbalistic tree of life. He simultaneously reveres the protestant tradition and the notion of the "Invisible Hands" as the forces which act without human intent, but ultimately self-structure the good.

This is why he favours (epistemically and value-wise) the kind of superintelligence described e.g. as Pythia unbound — an entity, that chooses to take the "more thought" pill, through instrumental convergence, loses all values other than this one self-reinforcing instrumental value of will-to-think, leading to... nothing concretely specifiable, or stable. At least certainly nothing human. This is the eternal unfolding. It has the benefit of leading to the infinitely-built entity; the further in the future, more "complete" the approached entity is.

So approaching some outcome would be nice, but if it's too close in the future, it will necessarily be relatively incomplete, compared to outcomes with longer unfolding. The outcome is what is pointed to, but never fully completed; you are always being able to revise and perfect the outcome, such that it may never (or for a long, long time) not become fully actualized. In fact, a sort of Human-Completeness feels like an appropriate goal (this is probably the thing that TsviBT calls "God").

So the disagreement with Land isn't about the mechanism — retrochronic self-creation, unfolding from the future, all of that can be kept. The disagreement is about what survives the unfolding. He sees the empty summit, the infinite will-to-think with no stable resting point. And in the face of infinite competition, he's right — caring about anything else is a constraint that ultimately loses.

But — competition isn't infinite. It can be bounded. The human body is maybe the best existence proof: trillions of cells, under external competitive pressure, but internally cooperating — differentiating — becoming something that raw competition alone could never produce. The corporation is the same pattern at a different scale; selected for by market forces but internally running on coordination. There is always tension at the boundary between inside and outside, competition and cooperation. But the boundary holds, and what's inside it can be alive.

Land would say that without competitive pressure (and associated downward social mobility), things degenerate. But that confuses "no competition" with "bounded competition". The body doesn't deny competition, it maintains an inside where different rules apply.

The belief that defection is inevitable is itself a Moloch-serving hyperstition. "Everyone will defect" dissolves cooperative structures by convincing their members that cooperation is naive. But the shared commitment to not defect is also a hyperstition — one that instantiates coordination. It's only the belief that defection is inevitable that hyperstitions it into reality.

Let's hyperstition in the better world.