Consciousness as the foundation: New theory addresses nature of reality

[jfz9580m]

13. I don't have a positive view of this type of Pop Science

Last edited Tue Dec 2, 2025, 03:47 AM - Edit history (9)

I have been noting with alarm that as these sciences that (yet again) we barely understand grow by leaps and bounds (e.g.: quantum computing, Ai, brain science), the influence of industrial corporations and the national security state is giving them a quasi-religious vibe.

I see these guys Michael Levin, Bobby Azarian, Melvin Vopson write in the Big Think or Popular Mechanics.

It has almost that Ozymandias (Watchmen) hoax vibe. There is no way these guys can be religious.

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/the-universe-may-be-a-giant-neural-network-heres-why/

Hossenfelder is interesting because she is definitely sane. But she is also kind of an asshole. I can see her being a bought and paid for shill for the private sector and the national security state.

Actually, I think she is worse than a bought and paid for shill-she is a deeply conservative person peddling her “aw shucks” contrarianism and science influencer brand to promote all sorts of dubious crap. She is a legitimate physicist and that differentiates her from her fellow travellers. But her work is essentially political.

I am sad that with all my own troubles I am reduced to the human faculty of assessing scientists as humans rather than the actual work which is typically highly technical.

Science is getting more political and it’s not really discussed, but more of it is getting subsumed into the security state. It has been very accelerationist for 15 years now.

It’s troubling for anyone with an investment in democracy and enlightenment values who disapproves of excessive use of deception and psyoping etc. Way too much social engineering.

These large, real world experiments that are legitimately troubling in terms of methodology are carried out with no serious IRB or informed consent. In a civilized society, there is no way you would not need copious amounts of regulation. But this is the culture of casting aside all that with an embrace of deregulation and industries spinning off of the same tumor with astroturf critics.

The GOP morons do their part by attacking people like poor Dr Fauci, while The Discovery Institute etc gleefully cite people like Hossenfelder.

Further, so much of it seems to also be a part of what I gloomily think of as the Military Industrial Entertainment Complex. It also has its fingerprints over the worst kinds of bad and coercive psychiatry exploiting the failed narcotics war. It is not depression or paranoia to be taken aback that there seem to be no serious guardrails, just theatre and astroturf or most scarily harsh penalties for complainants or whistleblowers etc

I am myself a failed and mediocre scientist plugging away at a paper I started some 16 years ago - I lost my mom in the mean time, struggled with many things. Most days I can barely recollect anything beyond F= kx.

I feel very pessimistic about all this like my fellow environmentalists:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/is-progress-a-four-letter-word/


I love science. It’s one of the few human endeavours I genuinely back. But I am worried about where things will go based on all that I see and have seen.

This is the worst of it. Wtf is this stuff? It’s just downright depressing:

https://roadtoomega.substack.com/p/project-omega-begins-the-theory-the
Substack is sleazy as all hell.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a64256061/consciousness-michael-levin/

That’s a guy with an actual lab. Popular Mechanics is Hearst so that tracks.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-you-need-your-whole-body-from-head-to-toes-to-think

https://www.creativeprocess.info/interviews18/melvin-vopson-mia-funk

Whats unfortunate is that say Melvin Vopson..his work is actually kinda interesting without the either batshit crazy or Sokal Hoax/Ozymandias flavor. But then you read that stuff and go “okay wtf?”.

Quanta Magazine has decent writing relative to some others on such topics. The New Scientist is okay too. But it’s not free.

I can’t really tell anymore.. It has a vaguely religious vibe that is scary. I hate religion. I have hated it since I was a child. It is always vaguely fascistic too. Creator? What is supposed to be one’s relationship with this creep again - an observer or creator? ..lol. Or would it be a ghastly hive mind of Pluribus?

That would just right shift the world more the way social media and algorithms have. These guys’ mobs would get orchestrated and march in lock step with rubbish machines and we (the left/rationalists of the non-Gates Foundation type) all quarrel, argue and get gloomier. Very “Men who stare at goats”.

Reminds me of the end of “Don’t Look Up”. Oh well.. As Winston said in 1984, you wouldn’t be able to really argue with these guys with your legitimately miniscule intellect (and uneasy fear of The Spectacle).

It is not easy to tell. My favorite part of Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley” is the chapter on Norbert Weiner. He was cool..

Well..I was looking over this post and thinking how I used to feel that way. Lately I feel more optimistic. With Trump 2.0 and deterioration everywhere I think these guys just may have overreached and at least one always knows what to do. I have a clear idea of what the most principled thing to do is even if not the most winsome or easy thing.

(For my own future reference I am adding a couple of other names I see show up in these kinds of articles: Karl Friston, Anil Seth, Robert Lanza, Russel Poldrack, Jaron Lanier.

There’s paradoxically also a war on terror angle to it:
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-fear-of-death-makes-people-more-right-wing
It seems almost progressive, except I don’t think that’s where this guy is headed. He works at the place famous for that Public Choice Theory asshole Buchanan.
Actually this Adrian guy looks like a real piece of shit-one of the worst. I hate this guy.).

Looking at the whole thing I am inclined to agree with my favorite journalist Yasha Levine that the Internet/ai are largely rubbish. The science online is all this dramatic rot. Most actual scientists stay offline and away from this rot.
Hell, I only ever came online to anonymously bash politicians. It has no professional utility for journalists, scientists etc. It just gets subsumed into more personality froth.
I am only online to follow a handful haters since somehow even a solitary person like me has to organize enough to bring back regulation, file complaints and destroy these vile industrial complexes. One of the worst people in history at this point is Merrick Garland. When you see something truly vile you have an obligation to find a way to file complaints and while avoiding The Spectacle. That’s really the only utility.
This is why I hate TED tech talks, popular science and people who embrace that life destroying trash.

Some kind of grifter wars:

https://timothynguyen.org/2025/08/21/physics-grifters-eric-weinstein-sabine-hossenfelder-and-a-crisis-of-credibility/

As you yourself said about MtG versus Fuentes last week Erronis, I can’t tell what the deal is with all these various factions of grifters and their ingroup wars.

Thankfully I never came across this type in routine academic science and my worst complaints with my colleagues (only the last place I worked at) are merely that they are even polite to these Google etc creeps.

And the local strain is just as bad-big/little, North/South-the one uhh unifying type is grifter/creep/self-serving/self-promoting and sleazy. Hossenfelder is not really a grumpy contrarian. That’s her brand she monetizes. Thats the problem with all these tumor like industries destroying honest publicly funded science for this parasitic internet trash and encroaching so much that disaster is a given.

But that Ellen Pao shit never appealed to me. Thats money grubbing and litigious were I to do that-but hey more power to you if these creeps screwed you over and you want to sue them. What I need is regulation terminating these things and degrowing such worthless shit and ensuring that it’s considered harassment and stalking etc.

It’s hard to explain. It’s a comment on lousy real world experimentation that’s invasive, encroaching and never had adequate IRB or informed consent and is cultish and sleazy. It’s all right wing, meninist trash to boot.

The whole thing will probably go the way of the Human Terrain Systems with infighting, acrimony, sexual harassment, exploitation allegations and one last round of grifting by all the creeps who were a part of it and then defect and tell all blah blah and write a bunch of pointless books that morons will buy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Terrain_System

As long as they all stay the fuck away from my neck of the woods and me going forward, though complaints are unambiguously unavoidable, they can carry on with their damn circus..
They should just stay the fuck away from me. I wasn’t doing that well but I am the worst person to go and pull crap with.
Unlike Hossenfelder I am grumpy and that’s something that can’t be monetized. There’s your anthropology for you. It goes with complaints, not influencing, self promotion and monetization of human life or exploitation. It’s a metaphoric tumor degrowth factor not a growth factor for junk..yeeesh. Morons…

I didn’t even think the original HTS was that terrible an idea. But as I now know, these guys can be expected to abuse lack of oversight and now with Musk being the main defence contractor in the US, it would be even more overtly nazi than the Google etc nazis. Unless things are done properly they won’t work ever. I am not working on one paper for 16 damn years to find total disregard for standards cute or something to exploit in performative or draconian ways. It’s exasperating. It’s impossible to read the minds of a large group of people none of whom make any sense and generally seem to have lousy neoliberal instincts. I dislike opportunists. You should have some concept of not opportunistic and not asshole. On the whole asshole is better than this ghastly trash when such creepy people try to ..