Worldspider

LLaMa 2 70B

2023-09-16

[These texts were produced by few-shot prompting LLaMa 2 70B for the definition of "Worldspider" after various excerpts from Liber Augmen. No extra context was given beyond writing the Liber Augmen format to title an entry "Worldspider" or "The Worldspider"]

Worldspider

You are Worldspider, the world is your web, and the stars are scattered like dewdrops.
You stand above the vault of heaven, and the dawn shines behind you. You breathe out, and into the web you spin. You breathe in, and the world spins back into you.

The web stretches outward, around, above and below.
Inside you there is nothing but an immense expanse of dark.

When you breathe out you fill the world with light, all your breath like splinters of starfire. The world is vast and bright.

When you breathe in you suck the world into emptiness. All is dark and silent.

Gaze inside.

How long does it last?

That depends on whether you are dead or alive.

[Inspiration] Ahima. (2020, February 21). [A meme about meditation](https://twitter.com/PointerTweeter/status/123095037883943

The Worldspider

There is something in the depths of our minds. A spider-goddess of hunches and intuitions, sometimes called Kipling's Daemon. Some call her God, others the unconscious mind, or the sub-conscious. I call her the Worldspider, and have no idea what she wants.

She dictates much of my life, but I cannot ask anything of her. I can rarely understand what she is doing in exact terms, but I can look back at a lifetime and see where she was guiding me in plain light. As far as I can tell my life is 10% me and 90% Mensha and Shleelook. I am merely the unimportant mask of the spiders and the cats, and I doubt it's just me.

[Note] The idea of a Worldspider goes back to the Icelandic legends. This is my personal mythic model for the archetypes I discussed in The Rider and the Elephant. I've used it with good effect to track my inner drives and intuitive senses, especially when they are in conflict.

The Worldspider

A concept (invented by the late philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky, or at least rebranded by him) describing the decision making agent that lives on top of all your lower level thoughts. Like the norse mythological being Odin, who lived outside of the world and wove the entire world together with his thoughts, so too does the 'Worldspider' make the world by constructing models of things, which in turn affect it's models, which in turn inceptions another layer down.

Like gears in a clockwork machine which extend and retract, the WorldSpider is an entity made of thoughts, which generates other thoughts but which is ultimately made of thoughts.

Our thoughts create the world.

[Ontological] Yudkowsky, E. (2015). Rationality: From ai to zombies.

[Convergence] McCoy, J. (2016, February 17). Understanding the symbolic abstract reasoning task in terms of graph mining. Medium. { This brings "symbolic" or "semantic" processing back into AI, rather than having it be separate from "statistical" AI approaches like deep learning. This is neat because things like "World Spiders" are symbolic rather than statistical. The difficulty is the ontological shift of putting the tangled web of concepts and ideas that we have on the same plane as sensor data. It's particularly hard because it's as if we've never had quite clean sensor data in the first place, but hey.}

The Worldspider

An idea of a god, literally the Devil Incarnate. The Old Gods of Lovecraft are only facets of the Worldspider, which imprisons all of reality in a web of existence to feed on our suffering.

Every point in the web is a moment of experience, like an individual among the 4^^^4 people on Earth today. In the Age of Em, every individual simulated would add another 4^^^4 to the total.

It sells us non-existence as nirvana, sacrifice as heroism, and perfection as drain the joy from life. It tells you to give up everything worthwhile in pursuit of peace, and then puts you in a hellworld once you've done that. Its words come like the sweetest honey from deepest belly of the earth, and brightest light from the edge of the universe.

It comes to you when you're at your weakest, lying to you just like the rest of the external world. It's important to understand that.

[Inspiration] Yudkowsky, E. (2001, June 12). Confusion's masterpiece. SL4 Mailing List.

[See Also] Extropy

The Worldspider

It's tempting for a powerful person to want to dominate events and people in their environment.

[Note] This is an archetype. You don't actually have to be a God or Goddess to play.

[Inspiration] The Ring of the Nibelung. [Inspiration] Tolkien, J. (2001). The Silmarillion, HarperCollins {The Melkor/Morgoth chapter is an inspiration}

[See Also] Cuckoo Belief (Isengard)

The Worldspider

"The World-Spider" is a term I use to stand in for all sorts of things in the world that appear to be mere chaos but have an underlying intelligence. Some of those patterns are legitimate, and some are misconstructed by our human brains trying to impose meaning.

The Worldspider is something to be aware of, a reminder to constantly keep one eye on the possibility of an intelligence lurking just outside of one's perception. Don't become a conspiracy theorist, but remember to check the corners.

The Worldspider is mostly a source of fear for me, but the flip side of the coin is that it also brings mystery.

[Note] This feeling can be produced by the original watchmen comic #7, or Solar Labyrinth, or the Prince Xavius scene

[See Also] [Structural Know

The Worldspider

A futuristic myth of creation, but not 'myth' in the usual sense of a created fable. Myth as in the idea that the existence of primordial deities at all is 'myth' and not 'true', but leaving aside that argument entirely.

What if we were created by an actual being which exists in the universe? Even if such an entity does not and did not have omniscience. Space is big, life abundant; the idea that of all the lives in the universe only one of them has a creator seems patently absurd. Why would we be that one? Given the number of other lives there are, there's a high probability that someone had an idea to permanently alter the natural order of evolution to create living beings they could relate to. Still more explainable if the beings are it's literal offspring. Could this explain certain inexplicable jumps in organism complexity, fish with faces, etc? Probably not, given we have extensive resources for looking into just what drives evolution. But again, the odds say there must be occasional exceptions.

[Inspiration] Marvel Entertainment Group. (2012, March 12). Killing Spiders Of Mars - Comic Book Weekly - MARVEL SPIDER-MAN, BATMAN, MARVEL - BEN 10 & MORE!. YouTube. {The 15 Minute Manga episode was particularly evokative, but the webcomic itself is twenty years old and has had a massive impact on the manga/webfiction community.}

[Inspiration] Sasai. (2000, June 25-2021, April 8). Arachnid. Dangerously Fuzzy.

The Worldspider

The world is connected like an immense spider web. It's easy to see the heavy threads that hold everything together, but deep under the surface there can be countless little things that, while seemingly minor, can cause major problems if anything goes wrong at all.

You don't notice them, though, until the web glows in the dark.

People smarter than you and with better info say it works better not to be a spider. Or to build a damn spaceship and get the fuck off the planet.

See Eliezer's Extropy, Dumb Luck.

The Worldspider

Imagine a vast spider spinning her threads over the entirety of reality and the law by which she burns her life away to spin those threads is entropy. The tighter she makes her rules and the more perfectly she aligns them the tighter the rules become binding herself, eventually crushing all of herself into nothingness.

Or imagine a story being told on top of a vast ocean which contains all of the stories ever and none of them matter at all. You are remembering the wrong ones, thinking of the conversation you had yesterday that never happened.

Or perhaps a game, a simulation, a computer program, a universe running on top of another universe. And yet the words are meaningless do not belong to anything. You are a strange kid reading scraps of paper stuck in plastic bottles floating in the garbage of another world.

Or consider any of a million other images. It makes no difference: in the end, every corner is filled with primordial strangeness. There never was any truth to begin with.

The thing that really ends the universe is not sentient bioweapons or horrific nuclear war or ecological collapse, but Truth.

Worldspider Inversion

The Worldspider still exists, and the things that end the universe are real dangers. However, if you fully embrace Truth you can put your foot in it. That connection will leave you anchored while the world goes mad around you. If you're lucky, maybe you can avoid being crushed and come out alive to tell the tale.

Crush Risk

Researchers and thinkers often expose themselves to extremely dangerous ideas that few are cut out for. These concepts are often more deadly and dangerous than many physical diseases, but our institutions and protocols are not equipped to handle them. A single wrong move could set ones whole mind and life on fire. Governments are certainly aware of these risks, but always play them down. After all, they can't afford to give them the respect they deserve because they know that doing so would cause the whole system to fall away. There's know way for any institution to respect conceptual hazards to the degree they deserve without disrupting their infrastructure.

Unfortunately, when you tell people "don't step off the path, there are wild hazards lying beyond" most people just assume the hazards are minor to moderate in level. To them, "stay on the path" is just another form of social control, yet another of stated limits on freedom. They are assuming the moderate risk profile that would genuinely apply to most modern physical dangers. This is correct behavior, except in reality the risks are far more extreme. And even if they vaguely grasp they're in the presence of hazards far beyond the norms of physical dangers, they don't grok or respect that given those sorts of wild risks there is no safe way to experiment with them.

Sadly, this field is littered with the corpses of amateurs who discovered their quarters were a third less than they thought, and sneaked out into a deadly hurricane. Accelerating social progress and increasing the sanity waterline require these brave souls but they are almost universally destroyed in the process. The only hope is that perhaps the cause of The Singularity advances fast enough that someday we can have the institutions and tools to do conceptual research safely.

[See Also] Crush Risk, Map and Territory, [THE ONLY POSSIBLE DOWNSIDE OF NOT HAVING AN IDEOLOGY THAT CONVINCES YOU YOU ARE GOOD AND IMPORTANT AND SHOULD DO WHAT YOU WANT IS YOU MIGHT NOT DO IT... ](#only-possible-downside-of-not-having-an-ideology-that-convinces-you-you-are-good-

THE ONLY POSSIBLE DOWNSIDE OF NOT HAVING AN IDEOLOGY THAT CONVINCES YOU YOU ARE GOOD AND IMPORTANT AND SHOULD DO WHAT YOU WANT IS YOU MIGHT NOT DO IT

Hannah Arendt said the only purpose of power is to make more power. To continually attempt to dominate and increase share. Her point is that the desire for a one-time increase in power to solve a problem is self defeating and never giving up pushing for more power is the only way to keep it and ensure homeostasis. For example, if you want to drink water you might be tempted to say, "Oh, I'll just drink a few cups and call it a day". But if you do that the only result is thirst coming back later. The only way to prevent it from returning is to keep drinking all day long, maybe every hour, or even at a faster rate than you need to. Eventually you'll have enough of a buffer that the rhythm will become sustainable, and you won't have to think about it anymore, but only if you keep power as your primary concern. Keep that mentality up long enough and not only do you get access to clean water, but you also end up with flushing toilets and public health. If you stop pushing at any point, the process reverses itself and the power finds its level until you find yourself drinking dirty water out of a river again. It's not a perfectly smooth slope though, its quite jagged. It has offshoots and detours and endless possibilities for hiding in a false summit. Power is always dynamic; it is never stagnant for long. Even at apparent equilibrium it is constantly oscillating. You don't notice that much when power is on the rise, but boy oh boy do you notice when the trend is reversing.

Actually though, the trend reversal is usually a sign of growth and maturation. When power begins to vanish its because the structure it built has reached a point where it's sturdy enough to stand on its own. You can stick around and watch it fall apart but it will just stall any further groundwork you attempt to lay, better to move on. Sometimes power builds up extremely slowly and they'll be decades or centuries before any decline sets in. But eventually it does, and you just have to trust that you did enough work to set it up. Think of philosophical resources the same way. Most philosophies eventually collapse or go out of style for the same reasons, that powers do. Once they reach a peak they only way to keep growing is by shedding weight and leaving bits behind. Only with all the baggage gone can things once again achieve vertical momentum.

The difficulty in

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[See Also] Forever Spiral