(2022-02-02) Hunt Narrative And Metaverse Pt2 Gain Of Function

Ben Hunt: Narrative and Metaverse, Pt. 2: Gain of Function

(see (2022-01-18) Hunt Narrative And Metaverse Pt1 The Living Word)

As regular readers of Epsilon Theory know, I’m a dilettante farmer (family farm)

My grandfather and namesake, who was a non-dilettante dairy farmer in North Alabama, would find my attitude towards these animals entirely alien and more than a little comical

That Ben Hunt, unlike this Ben Hunt, was in the business of farming, which requires thinking about animals in a very different way than dilettante farming.

It’s interesting to me that our society-wide thinking about animals has changed so dramatically in less than 100 years, and I believe it’s because on a society-wide basis we have hidden away all of the billions of poultry and livestock animals that used to live among us.

An ocean of shrink-wrapped animal flesh becomes the water in which we swim, invisible to conscious thought, much less consternation.

We no longer think of animal-as-food because we no longer have the story of animal-as-food.

The story of animal-as-food has been erased from the metaverse.

It starts, as it always does, with the words.

My point is not that our modern words and grammar of food are ‘bad’. My point is not that we should stop eating animals-as-food. My point is that ALL of our modern words and grammar of food refer to the (literally) disembodied animal part as the singular object of attention

Well of course we don’t have butchering competitions on TV, Ben, that would be horrible.

Every consumption of animal-as-food is a story of sacrifice. It’s why we used to give thanks and “say grace” before a big meal with a big cooked animal

Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that restored the land. Imagine if we could eat every meal knowing these few simple things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what it really cost.

Imagine it: Every meal would connect us to the joy of living and the wonder of nature. Every meal would be like saying grace: Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

one exception. My eggs

There is one animal on our dilettante farm where my thinking is as utilitarian as my grandfather’s, and that’s our chickens.

To keep the eggs coming, it’s important to provide minerals in your chickens’ diet, particularly calcium for sturdy egg shells.

the cheapest and most effective way to accomplish this dietary supplement is to feed the chickens their own egg shells.

you have to grind them up.

Because the dinosaur brain of every chicken has clusters of neurons evolved to recognize a curved macro surface … like an egg.

So we have a big old-fashioned mortar and pestle in our kitchen which for the past 12 years has been used for nothing other than grinding down egg shells until they’re not easily recognizable as a curved macro surface

And now for a thought experiment. Imagine if I didn’t want to prevent my chickens from destroying their own eggs. Imagine if I wanted to make them do it. How simple it would be! I’d just feed them the uncrushed shells. But that’s crazy, Ben. Why would you want to trigger specific neural clusters in your chickens’ brains in a way that would cause them to start pecking at their own eggs?

This is the point where we stop talking about chickens.

Eggs aren’t at the center of meaning for our species. The center of our species is language. And our brains protect and nurture it at all costs.

The takeover of the human brain by language is not like a parasitic invasion. It IS a parasitic invasion. Well, more symbiotic than parasitic, maybe. But an invasion by an alien lifeform nonetheless.

There are billions of neurons in my brain and your brain devoted to language, billions of self-organizing neurons providing the ideal host environment for persistent linguistic entities – words, grammars, story arcs – that are physically instantiated within that vast neurochemical network of the human brain and are perfect symbiotes for the human brain and yet are fundamentally foreign to the human brain.

I am saying that language, through its symbiotic relationship with the human brain and its hijacking of all human thought, has convinced us that it does not exist in the physical universe, that it is a merely a ghost in the machine.

I am saying that the metaverse – a profoundly alien environment made up of quadrillions of human neurons across billions of human brains – is as real as the microverse, and that linguistic structures exist in the metaverse in exactly the same profoundly alien way that viruses and other microbial lifeforms exist in the microverse

I am saying that perceptive humans, from the earliest days of a language-symbiotic human species, have recognized that the use of specific linguistic structures – words and grammars and story arcs – can be used to trigger certain neural clusters in humans in exactly the same way that a chicken’s macro curve-recognition neural clusters can be triggered.

I am saying that for all but the last few decades of human existence, the Snake operated in the background, disjointedly, as an inchoate collection of ad men. (advertising)

I am saying that for all but the last few decades of human existence, the powers of the Snake have been limited by a) the absence of more than simple intuition and isolated personal experience that human behavior is biologically controllable through linguistic structures, and b) the absence of technological scale for the rapid development and global distribution of these linguistic triggers.

I am saying that all of that has changed

I am saying that the modern Snakes of Big Tech, Big Media and Big Politics (Big Government) – those who are in the business of changing the way we think through purposeful linguistic triggers – consider humans in the same utilitarian way that my grandfather considered his farm animals.

people don’t know their own self-interest. They need to be led. They need to be nudged. They need to be milked.

I am saying that by building a ubiquitous, always-on digital window to the metaverse, the modern Snakes of Big Tech, Big Media and Big Politics are able to develop and distribute their linguistic triggers at a scale and speed that was unimaginable even 20 years ago.

The always-on digital window into the metaverse is the foundation of Fiat World, where our reality is given to us by proclamation

I am saying that the modern Snakes of Big Tech, Big Media and Big Politics are engaged in a widespread program of gain-of-function research on the linguistic entities of the metaverse

At this point, if you don’t understand that every consumer-facing public company and every voter-facing political party is engaged in intensive R&D efforts to automate and maximize consumer/voter engagement.

what I am describing goes far beyond Google and Facebook. The engineering of language for neural effect is now the water in which we swim, ubiquitous and invisible. It’s the Speculation Layer.

Within five years, I believe that almost every form of organized social behavior will be fully abstracted into a speculation layer made up of 1) objects: a set of symbols representing real world entities formerly at the heart of those organized behaviors, 2) protocols: a government-sanctioned and oligarchy-established set of rules for a virtual betting market in those symbols, and 3) tokens: a similarly sanctioned and established set of casino chips providing liquidity for the betting market in those symbols. (web3)

gamification of everything through intentionally engineered linguistic triggers of our primate brains

I believe that any top-down, centralized sanction of the modern Snakes of Big Tech, Big Media and Big Politics is likely to be subverted

I believe there is a decentralized, bottom-up way to break the whispering power of the modern Snake

Because all of this has happened before.