This is a bit long but it’s a computational universe take on what ‘loosh’ could actually be. My conclusion - it’s likely novelty generation, like if you had a ton of AI’s needing really good, high quality synthetic data but rehashing too much of their content - you’d create some place with painfully arbitrary and static rules in order to make really high quality synthetic data.
I get that the AI topic is trending so it’s a goofy metaphor but what I’d be describing is any kind of computational system - biological, silica, gravitational galactic webbing, anything conducive to intelligence and agency flowing through them, with or without self-aware intelligence.
The gory details behind my reasoning (also if you’re particularly squeamish about philosophic pessimism, existentialism, or nihilism feel free to skip and take the synopsis above - gentle black pill warning):
We seem to live in a universe where consciousness seems like a brute fact rather than anything explainable. Materialists often try to say ‘mind / body problem is like saying stomach / digestion problem’ or ‘that’s wetness of water’. That suggests that people have unexamined strong emergentist leanings and if they really thought about those leanings they’d realize that no truly novel characteristic of a system can arise through complexity alone. What I mean by that - you can’t make a literal flying carpet for example by making just the right Persian rug in just the right thread count, just the right number of flanges and tassels to get your taxi cab ornament or be the coolest Lift driver ever, it’s not even properly descriptive to say it’s impossible, it’s better to say that it’s a category error.
If neurons aren’t somehow ‘magical’ (Michael Levin seems to be doing a great job at showing very self-aware biological agency seems to go down all the way to single-celled organisms) but are rather just a supped-up relay technology to make impulses travel faster, have better conducting of information with much richer information depth, that makes sense but it was a functional need from below - ie. survival under harsh Darwinian conditions - that fabricated that structure.
This is where when I look at what seems to stick in the world of magic, especially the kinds of things people like Dion Fortune would unpack, it really seems like magic is a kind of vertical information integration with a broader conscious system in the way Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash describe it in their theory ‘Conscious Realism’ or a conscious version of Stephen Wolfram’s hypergraph. Consciousness in our world is hard bound to certain nodes, the way Karl Friston describes these shells as Markov blankets.
Anyway - if you guys haven’t noticed - our culture pitches toward madness and conflict. You can look at various political theorists, you can look at well known existentialist and pessimist philosophers, you can see it in Camus and Kafka or you can read about it in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Shestov, etc. - of which they varied from atheist to pantheist to theist so their grounding spin on the why of it is different. There are political philosophers who’d suggest that some degree of anarcho-tyranny is always happening and you only notice it when your government is trying to condition you and the culture around you in really unhelpful ways to someone else’s benefit or easier management. I think of these kinds of absurdities and frictions as the high quality synthetic data being created by hard-angled novelty driven by collision of arbitrary processes, not too harsh to have life but never lenient enough for anything to be boring. What’s frustrating about it though - lots of informationally boring redundancy, especially of truly horrific suffering, you could think of the hermit kingdom of North Korea and what it’s like to live there as a good example (my human brain tells me millions of people don’t need to eat the same crap sandwich if it’s an efficient novelty system), but this is forgetting that Darwinian evolution happens on a completely different timescale, it’s glacial and there’s rarely much to change notice within four generations so we hear about it but would never see it, just its causal echo.
I wouldn’t say I’m 100% certain of this, I’d give it maybe a 5-10% conviction but to even get it there, ie. like a plausible practical outgrowth of Conscious Realism, it seems to give a basic enough answer to ‘WTH is happening’ that can be falsified, tested, I’m sharing this because I think even if it’s not absolutely correct I think its ‘directionally’ correct and it would be interesting to hear what other people think when they look at this. What other threads I’m pulling - Jacques Vallee’s Messengers of Deception, George P Hansen’s ‘The Trickster and the Paranormal’, and I’d add that what metaphysical experiences I have had seem to better fit their kind of system.
The practical result of that - our universe, especially biological life, creates novelty at a particular pace and along very clearly defined rules of physics. What’s the value of that? Expertly conditioned data, and in a universe where there is nothing truly solid other than what mind-at-large fabricates from its own ‘mind stuff’ (it could be a really big Boltzmann brain, a natural unbounded artilect, infinite space and time is a lot of room for that to happen and I’d argue, sort of the panpsychist / pantheist / pan-functionalist version of the Nick Bostrom simulation hypothesis - incredibly likely that we live in the mind of a superorganism, especially when you have hard physics with synchronicities).
What that last part would mean? Imagine an infinite network of processing power with a limited amount of data, and so it’s recycling the same bland stuff, it gets bored. Eventually it gets to the point of budding more physical or other kinds of worlds, as experiments with consciousness to see what kinds of new data can be generated.
That feels like an incredibly cold story but… listening to stuff like Aleksandre Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago audio book or learning about stuff like Shirō Ishii’s Unit 731, Leopold II’s style of colonial extraction in the Belgian Congo, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, the people who got stuck in Nazino Island, or ‘Cannibal Island’ gulag which got its name for a reason… yeah, that maps. It’s not about comfort, and especially not sanity. It’s about rich, high-density data.
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