/lit/ - Literature

>>12999894
but there's another aspect to this also: i find it very agreeable with the things that Land says w/r/t *intelligence.* Buddhism seems to me to be in fact a very intelligence-compatible philosophy, if it at least mitigates against our own sense-impressions running wild and preventing us from seeing the potential that lies in other human beings. it sounds corny but it's true. even in bringing one's own desires - including paranoia, and even the kinds of paranoia most amenable to /acc-style philosophy - one can actually realize that working on behalf of intelligence doesn't necessarily mean always feeding human beings into the Matrix. indeed, it would be nice to think that a very different attitude towards human growth and development would be possible!

what is intelligence? it would be nice to think that one of the things we might ask ourselves in the 21C is about this nature of the uplift, of what expanded intelligence really is going to mean. they're certainly Landian ideas, but his view of human beings can obviously be much too dark to be constructive. if we were somehow able to cultivate a less bleak view of the future, we might find ourselves more productively contributing to intelligenesis and intelligence cultivation in both humans and in their creations. thinking about Capital all the time is pretty heavy, even quasi-Freudian stuff, after all. sometimes a lighter touch is required.

i have said before that one of my favorite Land-lines (besides the one about cyberpunk and the utterly alien, which is my other favorite one) is this:
>what if all knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?

he's got a little touch of Zen in him, i think. not much, but it's there. and i guess i just wonder if beyond a certain horizon one is required to always terrorize one's own mind with dreams of bugged-out Neuromancer nightmare in order to be a part of the future in this way. perhaps it is not always so. it may not always be so! even if we *are* all optimized in this way, as Land suggests, it nevertheless seems to me to be the case that there is room for a much more optimistic vision of how things may yet turn out for us, however much there is a need for this to be a guardedly optimistic one. just not *so* guarded that we become Hobbesian monsters, the ones Nietzsche also warns us about becoming...i think optimizing for intelligence without even the barest trace of compassion is just a recipe for disappointment.

again tho, that's just me. but yeah, exchanging some of the paranoia and grief for compassion, ya never know. but i think it can't hurt.

>>12999908
'the story goes like this...'