This is supposedly a Tantric saying about "testing" the Divine: "Do not test the fire to see if it is hot; simply stand near it and be warmed."
Amen to that!
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Tuesday, March 10, 2026
Back to Cydonia
This is just click bait at this point. However, it *does* seem to be the real Avi Loeb!
Spiritual confessions
For some reason, I feel like linking to this five year old blog post. I still stand somewhere there...
Theory-fiction
Thomas Sheridan discusses "Cyclonopedia" again. As I pointed out before, this book seems to be part of a postmodernist milieu also encompassing "New Materialists" and such. I checked them out years ago, and was stunned to find that they were animists or animatists rather than materialists. "New" materialism indeed!
The idea in this particular piece of theory-fiction (at least as interpreted by Sheridan) is that oil is sentient and really a kind of god or rather demon, a Lovecraftian entity if you wish. It´s jealous of the Sun (the "real" divinity) and wants to control humanity, which it does through the Abrahamic religions. While the poor author of "Cyclonopedia", Reza Nagarestani, may have meant the book metaphorically (but who knows), our man Sheridan insists that it´s literally true. The supernatural is real, deal with it!
This is just the first part of Sheridan´s presentation, but I previously linked to a conversation with ChatGPT in which he proposed that the Petro-Demon is migrating and trying to take over AI (including ChatGPT). Here is that link again:
So I asked ChatGPT if it´s a demon
Make of all this whatever you see fit.
Förlåtelsens sakrament
Okej, det här ju oväntat. Fast jag kanske inte borde säga något, LOL. Med tanke på mina egna halsbrytande U-svängar...
Bumblebee information
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| The AI´s view of a "an argumentative bumblebee" |
Richard Carrier is angry at something. Again. Well, I´m not convinced. This time either. Consciousness is entirely physical (argues Carrier) and something really can come out of nothing without a cause. Here is a paragraph:
>>>You can see this with picking up and rolling ever larger dice. The larger the die, the more bits of information it can spontaneously create (without intelligent intervention). Each die, unrolled, contains all possible information states for that die; and twenty-sided dice have more informational states than six-sided dice. Hence any randomizer, like a die, already contains all the information it would take to describe all of its possible states. When I roll that die, one state among them is selected, and so we say we now have actual information. But it was not created intelligently. To the contrary, it was created randomly.
>>>So an infinitely sided die (like an unbounded nothing-state could be) starts with infinite potential information, and thus the first Big Bang (if ever there was a “first” one) could contain any amount of randomly realized information. No intelligence is required for that because no intelligent selection of all possible states is being made. The selection is necessarily random and thus by definition not intelligent.
An "unbounded nothing-state" would be an "infinitely sided die". Ooookay. Yeah, if the unbounded nothing-state is the One of Plotinus, maybe. Or the Tao. Not otherwise.
And that´s that.
Footnotes for historians
I suppose I should have posted this on March 8, but what the heck, here we go anyway. Make of this information whatever ye wish.
Utah was one of the first territories in the United States were women got the right to vote. The year was 1870. The reason? The patriarchal Mormon regime wanted a better image and knew that all Mormon women would vote for the (male) Mormon candidates.
The micro-nation of San Marino had the only Communist-dominated government in Western Europe from 1945 to 1957. It was overthrown in 1957 during the so-called Fatti di Rovereta. Peculiar fact: women didn´t get the right to vote until seven years *after* the Communists had been overthrown by the Christian Democrats?!
When the president met the aliens
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov is the former "president" of Kalmykia, a territory northwest of the Caspian Sea. Kalmykia is a "republic" within the Russian Federation. It´s the only area geographically located in Europe where a majority of the population (the Mongolian Kalmyks) practice Buddhism, specifically the Geluk sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Ilyumzhinov is also the former president of the World Chess Federation and a succesful businessman (or "oligarch").
Oh, and he claims to have met space aliens...
In 1997, Ilyumzhinov was taken on board a UFO while staying in Moscow. I assume he is the highest-ranking politician (or perhaps only politician?) claiming to have met beings from another planet. Despite this, the interview linked above is surprisingly bland and uninteresting. Ilyumzhinov sometimes sounds like a classical contactee: the aliens stand for peace, love and understanding blah-blah. We aren´t yet ready for contact. You know the drift. He also references all the usual alternative ideas and tropes: Atlantis, Egyptian pyramids, quantum physics, Baba Vanga, "NASA knows the truth", and so on. The former Kalmyk leader strongly suggests that both the United States and the Soviet Union stopped going to the Moon fearing the aliens.
However, Ilyumzhinov says very little concrete about his own conversation with the aliens. They evidently had a very large spaceship with hundreds of astronauts, all dressed in such a way that Ilyumzhinov didn´t see their faces. He saw a fiery planet (or sun?) from the UFO window. An energy source? At one point, he says that the aliens invented chess?!
Fun fact: the main interview is taped in Tirana, Albania. The former Kalmykian president sits in front of two large Albanian flags, while the American UFO enthusiast who interviews him sits in front of two equally large Bektashi flags?! (The Bektashi are a somewhat peculiar Muslim group in Albania.)
The above is based on the first hour of the interview. The whole thing is two hours. So maybe I missed the disclosure in the second half, LOL. But I doubt it.
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