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Compromise/Collaboration.

Started by LMNO, March 16, 2007, 05:32:54 PM

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LMNO

Ok, it has pretty much been agreed upon that we will never all agree upon the use of BIP as a name or metaphor.  Some like it, some don't.

However, I don't hear anyone saying anything against the contents of what the metaphor stands for.

So, as I posted before, but got buried, here's what we do.

If you don't like the BIP metaphor, write your own metaphor.  That's right, write an essay on what you thing best captures what we're trying to say.  Whether it's the Golden Sphere of Opportunity, The Dream in a Dream, or Happy Funtime Dachau, write it down.

Then, we'll gather all those together, and put out a pdf called "7 Ideas of One Thing", or however many essays we get.  I'm already writing a new BIP essay.



Ok, get to it.  Put money where your mouths are.

rygD

May take me a few days (or more) to get it here. 

Mine will be called "Teh Matrix"...kidding, can't stand those movies.
:rbtg:

Quote from: rygD on March 07, 2007, 02:53:03 PM
...nuke Iraq and give it to the Jews...

P3nT4gR4m

#2
If you think this is bad you should see the state of my first attempt

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a reality hacker. My stock in trade is reverse engineering complex systems in order to pervert, subvert and otherwise fuck around with the very fabric of what most take for granted as the way things are, for no higher purpose than it amuses me to do so.

Sounds like magic right?

Dead wrong. Magic is turning lead into gold, sawing a woman in half, pulling a rodent, by the ears, from some old fashioned headgear...

Headgear might describe what I do but gold, women and rabbits aint my fucking business.

Seeing into the future? Bringing rain to the desert? Walking through walls?

I hate to rain on your parade, sunshine, but all of that shit is fairy stories. Earth, air fire and water are what we reality hackers would refer to as 'Read only'. Gravity, time and tablets of stone are hardware. Reality Hackers, much like their real-world counterparts, don't hack either. Is it possible?

Quick answer - no

Slightly more honest answer - Maybe but if it is I'll be fucked if I know how. You wanna learn to teleport? Good luck to ya but you best be off. There aint no supernatural powers gonna be explained here. You wanna communicate with someone on the other side of the world? Pick up a fucking phone and drop your quarter in the slot same as everyone else. You want magic? I'm afraid miracles of modern science are about as mystical as I'm gonna get here.

Broomsticks are good for sweeping up leaves in autumn. Wanna fly? Use AT&Telepathy and book a seat with Pan-Am. Check out the in flight movie, they're playing "The Witches of Eastwick". Enjoy the air con and the plush reclining seat. Sure beats the hell out having a stick up your ass like those women in the movie huh?

But I just said I hack reality. What's magic if it isn't hacking reality? What's Reality Hacking if it aint magic? Like I already explained magic is the impossible art of hacking the firmware. Reality hacking is the much more plausible art of altering the software. Believe it or not the fabric of reality is composed of both these components.

"Believe it or not" is an unpatched vulnerability in the system, one of many exploits Reality Hackers will employ to gain 'backdoor' access to the main framework and insert their malware.

How does "Believe it or not" work?

Simple. Take a statement of consensus truth and believe it.

..or don't.

Makes no difference - this is software. Just an opinion. Good Reality Hackers become practised in telling the difference between opinions and facts. Facts are tablets of stone. Firmware. They won't budge. Opinions on the other hand can be reprogrammed in accordance with the design of the reality hacker.

"He's evil" / "He's nice"

"The aliens are coming" / "Get Real"

So we can only change some bits of reality(the opinions) but not other bits(the facts) but here's the best part...

99.9% of reality is opinion.

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." -- Mark Twain --

That's right. I just said 99.9% Where did I get this figure from? I plucked it out my ass. Believe it or not. You have a different opinion? Good. Now you're starting to get it. We all got different opinions. Some of them we have in common and others set us apart but, the bottom line is that these are nothing more than opinions.

Software.

Revise, rewrite, reboot and reload.

Believe it or don't. Makes no difference to the facts but it makes all the difference to reality. Change sides, flip the coin. If you believe it then don't. Pick a number. Believe it or not.

Revise, rewrite, reboot and reload.

Congratulations you just made your first reality hack. How does it feel?

Hardly noticed a difference huh?

Not surprising you just altered one line of code. Programming reality is like programming any complex system. Takes a lot of lines of code to make anything significant happen.

Don't believe me?

Good - you're getting the hang of this. You're a natural. "Great," You're thinking. You've just learned another useless skill? You'd better believe it.

Now you'd better not.

The first program they teach you to write when you go to computer programming class makes the computer print the words "Hello World" on the screen. The ability to make a computer print the words "Hello World" is probably about as useless as abilities come. More effort than scratching your ass and probably just about as likely to impress members of the opposite sex. But it's the first step on the journey to CIO of microsoft, the ferarri's and the sixteen bedroom lakeshore villa.

I'll end lesson 1 with a warning. I'm not the only reality hacker out there. A lot of skilled operatives, with a vested interest in controlling reality are at work, right under your nose, probably most waking hours of your average day. You yourself have probably been hacked countless times in the past. Right now 99.9% of your
reality has been programmed by people just like me.

Believe it or not.

I aint going to attempt to prove this, I already told you I pulled that figure out my ass. What I will do, however, is show you one relatively harmless hack that was carried out on your good self just a few minutes ago.

Remember the Mark Twain quote?

No you don't.

Mark Twain never said that. Winston Churchill did.

Believe it or not.

Maybe you were already familiar with this quote. Maybe if you were you noticed the mistake. If you weren't then imagine how stupid you'd have felt, at the cocktail party, spouting quotes til someone who knew better corrected you.

Next time we'll take this a little further and re-engineer some bigger chunks of reality.

Til then this is the Reality Hacker

Logging out of your mind.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

guest7654


LMNO

Pretty good, SC.

I like the bit with the quotes.

P3nT4gR4m

ta :)

Just realised notepad had shafted my formatting - fixxored for easier to read-ness

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Cramulus

Good stuff SC.

IMHO I would explain what reality hacking is a bit more clearly at the beginning. What sort of stuff can you achieve with it? If the reader doesn't have a good idea of what you're talking about, the next section does little to explain it - just what it isn't. The Mark Twain / Winston Churchill flip is really tasty. Could you elaborate more on rebooting? To me it seems that's the hardest part, the part that's involved with accepting these new opinions and outlooks that you've designed.


Cramulus

#7
Okay here's my Take One.


Within a Dream

We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk.
-Carlos Castaneda

It's a Dream Within A Dream
within a dream
within a dream


The difference between a regular dream and a lucid dream is that in the lucid dream you're aware that you're dreaming. These dreams are more memorable. Despite awareness of the illusion, the experience of seems more real. In a lucid dream, you have control over what's going on. When I realize I'm not in the real world but in a dream world, I will myself to escape it, to fly away into a cooler place.

You can teach yourself how to have lucid dreams. To do this, you learn to make constant reality checks. Some people say you should try flipping a light switch on or off (notoriously useless in dreams), or try to read printed text. They provide clues to your mental state and can wake up your forebrain enough to take the reigns of your consciousness

within a dream
within a dream

See in dreams, your forebrain isn't usually working. Inside your brain, there's a lizard, a monkey, and a human all in competition. The human is winning, but only by a little. It's an uneven balance at best. In dreams, it's mostly the monkey and the lizard at the wheel. They hold up these images and symbols and memories and lick them and bang them on rocks and shake them up. Then we wake up and it doesn't make any sense to us because those other two lobes weren't trying to make sense. They're irrational by their very nature. When we dream, they drive.

The waking world is a lot like that too. People only use their human brain for a small portion of the day. The rest of the time the monkey and the lizard are driving. That's why people are territorial, that's why they get defensive, that's why they do the same stupid shit every day and never question why.

Now I'm not saying that the human brain is better or more important than the other two brains you have. That lizard brain keeps you safe. That monkey brain gets you laid. The forebrain - the human brain - is easily confused and conflicted. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's still very new - not fully baked. Millennia from now, maybe humans will have different brains, keener and more efficient. Today, we've got to try to make good use of what we've got.

There are times in my life when I realize that I'm in a terrible rut and it's No Fun. We walk around with monkey and lizard brain on, just doing things repetitively, ritualistically. These are the best times to make reality checks. This is the best time to ask "Am I actually awake?"

That reality check is about evaluating which elements of the rut are necessary and good and which should be stripped out. For me, the escape from the rut usually involves me picking up a new hobby, doing something drastically different, or in some way altering my day-to-day me. It's sort of like waking up from a dream

within a dream
within a dream

But instead of waking up into reality I'm really just waking up into another dream. Because that new hobby will one day get boring, and that new me is in no way the ultimate me.

See, it's not enough to be lucid briefly and say (for example) "hey, I'm miserable because I surround myself with morons", and then get new friends. You've got to keep that spark lit. You've got to shine its light on everything you do and think for yourself all the time. Upon self-examination, I've realized I have hundreds of opinions and attitudes that are borrowed from somewhere else. To some extent, that's the human condition.

People read movie reviews because they want an opinion about the movie before they even see it. People listen to pundits vivisect the body politic because they want to know what supposedly educated, well informed people are thinking. People religiously watch TV shows that they don't actually even fucking enjoy. There's a mass hypnosis going on here. The collective consciousness is standing on higher ground than individual consciousness. We're being blown around like leaves, and the wind is fashion, is politics, is culture itself

within a dream
within a dream

It's not just about escaping the rut. Learn to wake up, in general, and you'll become aware of all the parts of your life that are a dream. Learn to think for yourself and be lucid.

See I believe reality is what you make of it. All the parts of this dream are your creation. Think of something important. Think of something boring. Think of something exciting. The importance, the boredom, the excitement, all these things only exist in your mind. They're things you actually do have control over.

Once you realize you're dreaming, you can change your dream from a nightmare to a wet dream. Once you realize that, say, your morning commute is boring as hell, you can engineer ways to make it less so. You've just got to awaken your forebrain enough.

If you're in a nightmare, realize that it's a nightmare. Realize that it's YOUR nightmare. Realize that YOU are the one who is making it awful, YOU are the one who is dreaming it bad.

So wake up and change it - it's a false awakening, but an awakening none the less.

The point of learning how to wake up is not to find the top-level reality, but to achieve lucidity

within a dream
within a dream...

Cramulus

edited -
two of the quotes at the top were talking about dreams as a symbol for hopes (hurk!) , and upon examination, not really relevant.
ironically, the castaneda quote, which says nothing about dreams, is very relevant. But it may need some editing too.

Added a paragraph towards the end about reality being as real as you make it.

I'd love to hear some feedback from you gents.

Is there a Black Iron Prison passage which sums the whole thing up fairly briefly? Should probably be posted in this thread.

One of the difficulties in comparing these metaphors is that the BIP metaphor is far more developed and discussed and fleshed out than the others.

I've tried to avoid building the dream metaphor purely from the ideas in the Black Iron Prison metaphor. Rather, the dream metaphor is an attempt to tackle the same core idea but from my own angle and address the things I think are important.

I think we've got the start of a pretty good pamphlet already. Anyone else have another take?

LHX

neat hell

AFK

If you want a reference point for the BIP I would suggest the Welcome to the Prison piece from the pamphlet. 
Cynicism is a blank check for failure.

LHX

i think this thread is trying to move away from that
neat hell

AFK

Maybe I misunderstood what Prof was asking for from the BIP. 
Cynicism is a blank check for failure.

LMNO

Basically, here is the challenge:




"Explain the BIP using a completely different metaphor."



Hey, my avatar went bye-bye.
:cry:



The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: LMNO on March 16, 2007, 05:32:54 PM
Ok, get to it.  Put money where your mouths are.

I've always liked eating bread!

HYUK HYUK HYUK!
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.