Thank you, Jonathan, for illustrating the impact of our projections, thereby highlighting the significance of engaging in inner work. The process of integration will become increasingly crucial on both individual and collective levels.
My goodness I can't wait for the second session!! Yes, the externalitizing of Moloch as an entity in the outside world is a true handicapping of our ability/responsibility to help love it to... death? To love it into a role where it can trive but not steer the ship of entire earth into ruins? I don't know what would happen if we loved it into its proper antagonistic role.. of if its too huberistic to assume thats possible for one human to do - perhaps only in intersubjective spaces.. One things for sure, it will be the frontier of my next music-induce, cathartic rage session 😃👍
If we only understood Right Hemisphere Deterministic Mechanics, we could live the real life we were created for. We wouldn't need Artificial Intelligence to lift us out of our Joyous struggle. We would naturally escape confusion together and would have created the new mathematics of life, science, and the spiritual at the crossroads of mechanistic materialism. True consilience. Without this breakthrough, we will continue to live in the world we created, and complexity will persist. Humankind's salvation. RHDM is Deterministic Nondeterministic science and nonlinear simulated dynamics. No more systemic paradoxes. Only, joy and happiness when creating new universes. RH dynamics is far simpler than LH dynamics, provided we all work together. Incidentally, this seems to be the world God already created for us to rejoin Him. Without us He is incomplete.
Many times in the course of reading this piece I burst into side splitting laughter. For some reason this particularly got me:
"Some people even seem to think of me as a kind of dark power that is potentially going to somehow inhabit the infrastructure of artificial intelligence. But no, if anyone’s going to do that it’s my colleague Ahriman." - Pure gold.
I did however find that in the conversational format that I was struggling to comprehend some of the high end symbolic and philosophical information. It *felt* profound without me necessarily comprehending it, at least not yet on my first reading. So I wanted to ask, does the information presented match 1:1 with your theoretical thesis on the subject? Or is there a mix of literal symbolic assertions with fuzzier ones that are more historical than symbolic? For instance I'm not clear on what God represents directly, or whether for instance the part about God choosing to become his own son is just a biblical joke or whether that has some inferred philosophical or symbolic meaning relevant to your overall thesis on Moloch. I'd hate to be searching for meaning in places where there was none intended! I did pick up on the general gist that Moloch is a metaphysical process more than any kind of exterior subject or object, and that as Moloch arises out of us that we have more control over it than what many are suggesting we do. I guess all the stuff I didn't quite understand seemed fascinating and I would like to understand it well.
Wonderful piece overall. I look forward to reading the next instalment.
And just riffing on the idea, I resonate with the premise of the article. I feel somewhat similarly about the Spiral Dynamics map. It was wonderful when I first discovered it, but realising over time how much the Law of the Instrument has corrupted peoples perceptions of what it actually points to, I've really come to dislike it.
Thank you for introducing me to the concept of Moloch. Every experience I've had with the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons has been confirming and revelatory. I'm afraid that humankind will, in fact, "do the right thing," but only after exhausting every other easier alternative.
The dharma is helping me make peace with Moloch, the Moloch within me and all of us. The Moloch present at my birth, my raising, my acculturation, my socialization, and in the options I have as a consumer in a world of convenience.
The spirit and energy of Moloch seem to emerge wherever and whenever humans organize at scale. We have the ability to benignly "other" other groups in ways that mutually benefit, but still yield the motivations of comparison and competition, pushing the externalized costs far enough out of psychic view where they pool and compound.
Thank you, Jonathan, for illustrating the impact of our projections, thereby highlighting the significance of engaging in inner work. The process of integration will become increasingly crucial on both individual and collective levels.
My goodness I can't wait for the second session!! Yes, the externalitizing of Moloch as an entity in the outside world is a true handicapping of our ability/responsibility to help love it to... death? To love it into a role where it can trive but not steer the ship of entire earth into ruins? I don't know what would happen if we loved it into its proper antagonistic role.. of if its too huberistic to assume thats possible for one human to do - perhaps only in intersubjective spaces.. One things for sure, it will be the frontier of my next music-induce, cathartic rage session 😃👍
Craving power, needing love but unable to access it - Moloch is evidently a hungry ghost.
Thank you dear Jonathan for a devilishly discomforting opener. I love how reading this play plays with my certainties and uncertainties. ;->
Really enjoyed this, thanks Jonathan. Seems you'd make a potent therapist!
Well done and thank you for your passions to keep going, bringing out the nuances of what is organism and what is machine.
Can’t wait to hear Moloch’s concerns re AI. This has been a most eloquent and learned teaser.
> their own inertia, witlessness, and performative helplessness?
> Therapist: What indeed? What then?
> I remember Nietzsche, great moustache. He understood me, and he said: “I do not like
I think that 'I remember' is Moloch, so a label is missing.
brilliant!
Beautifully done.
Just sent you a seminar presentation on Girard, Ostrom and the spiral unto unsustainability of the Promethean growth machine (aka Moloch inc.)
If we only understood Right Hemisphere Deterministic Mechanics, we could live the real life we were created for. We wouldn't need Artificial Intelligence to lift us out of our Joyous struggle. We would naturally escape confusion together and would have created the new mathematics of life, science, and the spiritual at the crossroads of mechanistic materialism. True consilience. Without this breakthrough, we will continue to live in the world we created, and complexity will persist. Humankind's salvation. RHDM is Deterministic Nondeterministic science and nonlinear simulated dynamics. No more systemic paradoxes. Only, joy and happiness when creating new universes. RH dynamics is far simpler than LH dynamics, provided we all work together. Incidentally, this seems to be the world God already created for us to rejoin Him. Without us He is incomplete.
Any chance this connects to Richard Ngo's recent "Meditations on Mot"?
I haven’t heard/read that. Share a link?
Ooh, I think you might enjoy this, then: https://www.mindthefuture.info/p/meditations-on-mot
Similarly useful deconstruction of the "god of" frame.
Moloch - the curse of consciousness.
Many times in the course of reading this piece I burst into side splitting laughter. For some reason this particularly got me:
"Some people even seem to think of me as a kind of dark power that is potentially going to somehow inhabit the infrastructure of artificial intelligence. But no, if anyone’s going to do that it’s my colleague Ahriman." - Pure gold.
I did however find that in the conversational format that I was struggling to comprehend some of the high end symbolic and philosophical information. It *felt* profound without me necessarily comprehending it, at least not yet on my first reading. So I wanted to ask, does the information presented match 1:1 with your theoretical thesis on the subject? Or is there a mix of literal symbolic assertions with fuzzier ones that are more historical than symbolic? For instance I'm not clear on what God represents directly, or whether for instance the part about God choosing to become his own son is just a biblical joke or whether that has some inferred philosophical or symbolic meaning relevant to your overall thesis on Moloch. I'd hate to be searching for meaning in places where there was none intended! I did pick up on the general gist that Moloch is a metaphysical process more than any kind of exterior subject or object, and that as Moloch arises out of us that we have more control over it than what many are suggesting we do. I guess all the stuff I didn't quite understand seemed fascinating and I would like to understand it well.
Wonderful piece overall. I look forward to reading the next instalment.
And just riffing on the idea, I resonate with the premise of the article. I feel somewhat similarly about the Spiral Dynamics map. It was wonderful when I first discovered it, but realising over time how much the Law of the Instrument has corrupted peoples perceptions of what it actually points to, I've really come to dislike it.
Thank you for introducing me to the concept of Moloch. Every experience I've had with the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons has been confirming and revelatory. I'm afraid that humankind will, in fact, "do the right thing," but only after exhausting every other easier alternative.
The dharma is helping me make peace with Moloch, the Moloch within me and all of us. The Moloch present at my birth, my raising, my acculturation, my socialization, and in the options I have as a consumer in a world of convenience.
The spirit and energy of Moloch seem to emerge wherever and whenever humans organize at scale. We have the ability to benignly "other" other groups in ways that mutually benefit, but still yield the motivations of comparison and competition, pushing the externalized costs far enough out of psychic view where they pool and compound.