Playing off the Vitalik Buterin post on galaxy-brained resistance, the broad memetic ecosystem of Earth2025 has a tendency to frame things as inevitable conclusions when they really aren’t. See e.g. the basin for AI successionism being ripe in our times; or the belief that tiktokification-of-everything is not only a certain outcome, but also some kind of revealed-preference-derived true human desire, a horrible but accurate mirror of what it is to be human, that the crowning achievement of stimulating the minds selected for the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness is a short-form video algorithm (!). Only, while attractive from the heuristic that what-feels-cynical-is-true, the idea does not hold up under scrutiny; galaxy-brained human-models in general seen as predictably tempting but easily disproved by common-sense; consistent human references to experience machines as Torment Nexus in fiction/philosophy seen as strong evidence that the human CEV vehemently excludes them; argument that disgust for experience machines is not born from sour-grapes feelings with reference to our current technological immaturity, as one might naively assume; the immediate danger of an ambient experience machine pooling at our feet in 2025AD and eventually reaching to our necks; authenticity as a true shard of human desire that cannot be “simulated”.

Cynical beliefs

Sour Grapes? (No)

It’s likely that cultural phenomena such as the so-called “Body Positivity” movement are sour grapes reactions to the crude, limited morphological freedom offered by our technologically immature civilization, which would explain its wane in the wake of the rocketing popularity of weight loss drugs.12

i.e. under the sour-grapes model, the movement’s members’ belief that overweight bodies are good in and of themselves collapsed with the arrival of semaglutide, as each member “defected” the movement by picking the body they always wanted in the first place (but couldn’t have until now): countless rationalizations to defend against the idea that they had a genuine desire-reality mismatch on their hands, rendered impotent in the face of a slight uptick in technological maturity! One may predict from this model that curing aging would instantly collapse all talk of “accepting death as a natural part of life”;, as everyone makes the individual decision to take the longevity nanobots/pill. Can one also predict that building an experience machine would instantly collapse all talk of “accepting messiness/imperfections/chaos/authenticity as a natural part of life”, as everyone makes the individual decision to enter the experience machine?

I argue that humans do not claim they would not enter an experience machine because they are sour about not having access to an experience machine. After all, the 21st century is far from technologically mature, but we have good options in the way of providing a vast amount of euphoria at cost: but few choose to go this route, and most react to heroin in a similarly disgusted way as to an experience machine.

  1. It’s difficult to tell, despite numerous articles by this movement despairing of its increasing irrelevance and placing the “blame” squarely on semaglutide, how much of the decline is due to the fall of “woke” in general or due to new weight loss drugs specifically. But it’s hard to imagine there was no effect, and that’s sufficient to our purposes. ↩

  2. In some sense, regardless of its immediate moral integrity, “body positivity” is a movement that should not [have to] exist (assuming that if given the choice to magically switch tracks to a timeline in which they’ve always had a healthy body, the members of this movement would). The transgender rights movement is similar: after we reach the level of technological maturity required to edit bodies at the chromosomal level, there will be nothing more to “transition” into. “Trans” belongs in the history books of our grandchildren, described as one among countless horrors that would plague the twenty first century. Misery was; trans was. (Full morphological freedom was always the true solution, and anything people came up with along the way would be safely jettisoned.)

    Movements arise to solve probems; as they mature as coherent memetic ecosystems, their members become more tribal about things; “being tribal” implies attaching the movement to one’s identity;; the movement depends on the problem existing; so soon enough, a subset of the movement does not wish to solve the problem the movement was born to fix in the first place! These “true-problem free-loaders” are responsible for most of the “prig” behavior one can notice in all movements; this is because prig behavior is what you get when the movement’s chosen problem is merely an identity marker rather than something which one must solve (and then forget about). “[Insert any movement]’s meta-problem is that some of its members form a symbiotic relationship with the problem”. This is why “[insert problem] should not exist” sounds so violent: but movements are not people! If technology can destroy your movement, it should destroy your movement. ↩