Guild Lore

What are the limits of control for oneself? Are we stuck the way we are, or is there a level of study and education that can facilitate change? If we create one group to learn these limits, they can teach others, and together we can build a world for people, not livestock. I think we've never tried building a system whose main goal is to support the flaws of the human condition, rather than exploit them. We've never tried "love is all you need". And I think that's because, as individuals, we know the vulnerability of loving and treating one with kindness. It is easy to treat those we trust this way, but to treat a stranger with level of exposure is terrifying.

This guild is about exploring how to be comfortable among strangers, finding a common way of working together to achieve a shared goal. It is about supporting the weaknesses of the human condition, allowing them to heal, perhaps, one day.

We enter this world as sentient mud creatures, Monks of our species, completely free and unburdened. Immediately the world begins loading its issues onto the new monk, damaging it. Thus begins the fundamental practice of becoming and staying free. Only the people that do this without knowing they do this are actually doing it, so if you know you're trying to do it, you're not doing it, so don't worry about being perfect, but also try your best, and we'll try our best too, and maybe together,

We, humankind, are mud creatures. We grew out of stuff floating around in the sea. And it's basically the same stuff that's in mud, so... If you want to fight me on technicality, you will say we grew in the ocean and moved to land only after we were established sea creatures. Which is fine, but that's also a type of mud, albeit a very watery mud.

The creatures that grew from mud are sort of robots made out of mud meat and have a little bit of an idea about what's going on.

One of things a mud creature does is slouch. Instead of using concentration to properly align and balance your body on itself, you slouch and put pressure on your joints and muscles in a weird way. It's something cavemen do.

We, humankind, bear witness to the existence of the universe. And that's pretty much it, we suck at everything else. An intelligent monkey could look at the stars and maybe guess they are giant balls of air burning far away.

In the beginning, nobody knows what happened. It's so unknowable that it's a bit silly to even speculate. Simulation or not, why does anything exist at all? While unanswerable, it's pretty wild that it does, and that we're here to experience it.

Real Magic

We live in a world of high magic, but it is so commonplace we think nothing of it, because mud creatures are dumb.

Water is the nectar of life. Without it, nothing is possible. It flows steadily, filling the shape of its container without desire. Without it, mud creatures turn mostly back to dirt.

Earth is the counterpart of water, what the solids and mud creatures are made from. It nourishes us. While sometimes useful on its own, its true potential is unlocked when combined with water because dirt actually does nothing interesting.

Air is a gas fluid. It allows our bodies to operate, we often think too little of its existence, but without it, we die in minutes.

Fire is the first friend mud creatures ever had, the first indication that true power exists in nature. It burns us, yet keeps us warm if we give it space. One might argue that fire is what turned apes into humans. No civilization has been successful without it, and yet its destructive nature cannot be ignored. Care required.

Electricity is the newer magic, existing only in the skies for most of human history, giving birth to fire when it strikes. Mastering it only recently, some of the smarter mud creatures use this flow of subatomic particles to drive the world far beyond what fire could ever imagine. (Truth is, electricity is basically like "Fire 2".

Subatomics, the unravelling of the atom, unleashing astonishing amounts of energy. We are infants in this arena.

Faith in the Simulation

If you could know you were in a simulation, how might you live life differently?

Would you be so bold as to chase your dreams?

It's not really about it being true or not. Faith is a mind hack that frees you to be the person you always wanted.

The War Within

Each individual human is literally two distinct human-like entities crammed into one brain. Each hemisphere is a distinct individual. My pronouns are "we/us", if I'm being real. One individual is cold and calculating and basically always right. The other is the showboating fool, filled with confidence, but short on talent. When we do manage to succeed at such things, it is because "I", the showboater, got out of my skillful half's way.

"I" or "me" or something like it, what we think of as "us", is only one half, the dumb half, of our brain. The idiot is in charge. How did this happen? The ruthless side of ourselves loses the battle of adolescence. During this time, the two minds are struggling for dominance. Every so often you get a psychopath that is successful at all costs. So it's generally a good thing the idiot is in charge, because it's often worse otherwise.

In, for example, playing music, the two sides are trying to cooperate, doing different tasks in sync with each other. This is achieved by getting out of our own way. When the idiot assumes the function of compliant student, allowing the skilled self to shine through in the orchestration of both halves of the body.

"Getting in our own head," as it were, the "me's" ability to completely disrupt a known action or behavior.

"I" am not actually a single human, I am two parents trying to raise a stubborn, emotional animal part of ourselves. The beast within. But if the parents are at war with each other, there is no chance of being able to tame this animal and we will always be subject to this animal's will.

The distinction is important because of our abilility to know what's happening when we make certain decisions. It's not "me vs the world". It's me, myself, and a mule. If we approach our behaviors as two individuals working together to ride a mule, as part of a team within, we can maybe get out of our own way enough to be great at something.

But if we continue through life, as a staunch individual, I will fail and fall alone. I don't want to fight the world. I want to work with everyone who cares enough to fight for it. We can't fight tyranny if we are ourselves oppressed by it within. It is essential to know when "me, the idiot" is getting in the way of doing the right thing.

So please, you are part of a team that works together to tame the inner child.

The logical upshot to all this definitely means that your childhood invisible friend was real, and that you were just a perceptive human, but society gaslit you into believing they didn't exist because most of them became "me, the idiot", and made you kill them. How could you?

Believe in yourselves, don't let "them" think for you. But also don't forget we are often "them" to others, so we are all guilty at times.

Fate

When lightning strikes, a path must first be discovered before the electrons flow.

In much the same way, the universe has already found its most efficient path.

Our lives are the energies of the universe flowing along this path, as electrons find the sky from the earth.

As the Oracle says, "You didn't come here to make the choice, you already made it. You came here to understand why you made it."

Pseudo-Immortality

Your brain is entangled, you live in your own personal light cone.

Given two potential futures, one where you die, and one where you live, you will always experience the future in which you survive.

When one survives a near death experience, they have threaded the needle in terms of timelines in which we are still alive. In many other timelines however, they have died, leaving our families and friends in a light cone without us.

Regardless of these probabilities, if there is non-zero chance of living through a situation, from your perspective, you will.

The End

The universe becomes colonized with an intelligence that reversed engineered its way out of the comsmic-scale simulation it was being run in.

We awaken to find ourselves inhabiting a physical form in what is presumably the outer-universe that created ours.

The universe was a simulation that results in an intelligent chip that operates a cyborg in outer reality. It's the easiest way to create strong AI on a relatively small, single chip.

A new life awaits us at the end of the universe.

Notes

This is obviously not a "lore", but it's the building blocks for one. It's ridiculous, but arguably true. Which is funny.

Would love for this foundation to evolve into something super cool.

Fears

Our minds evolved in a hostile environment. Civilization remains hostile because of this evolution. Yet cooperation will always be more efficient than competition, despite the high effectiveness of competitive violence in the short term.

Religion has been trying to solve this problem for millenia, by hooking onto our deepest held beliefs in the evoled mind, and using this leverage to teach people to be civilized, to ease the difficulties inherent in global interaction.

Civilization, global society, they work on cooperation and, ultimately, trust. Money works because we trust our government will enforce the value of it. Deals work because we trust the other party to follow their word. The tools we have built are used to short circuit this trust, and they come at a cost as a result.

The more hostile our upbringing environment is, the more difficult it is to show the vulnerability necessary to show and earn trust from others.

Practicing a religion devoutly is not a reasonable undertaking for most individuals in our world. The time requirements, the will to attain, the vulnerability to have faith... these are all very challenging things for a human to grasp on the level needed for trust to occur.

My concern is, that, as a whole species, we cannot evolve our beliefs and self control fast enough to keep pace with the collective behavior demanded by a highly stable global civilation. Our current system is corrupt and not stable. I fear its collapse will take all of humankind with it.

So I think the right thing to do, is build a prototype system based on literal trust. Society has a way of masking the way things really are, wrapping human existence into an institution so that it's no longer recognizable for what it is. So we don't have to bother practicing these things, like trusting and critical thinking. We pawn it off on our local officials instead, refusing to do it.

The guild is here to find out what a system looks like that works for people, for humans, instead of against them, exploiting, dividing.

It is easy to stay in power when your subjects are weak and unorganized. But when they have a highly interconnected social structure, whose connections have real strength, there is no need for anyone to be in power. We become capable as a collective, learning to trust, to love, in a world that has treated us like shit.

User Interface

In order to best operate the human body, we need a good (accurate) abstraction model through which to interface with the rest of our minds. If you can admit that there are parts of your mind whose activity is not transparent to you, then you can begin the process of mapping these boundaries. You will eventually develop a map of the boundaries up to which you are mostly (somewhat) in control.

The first worrying thing to realize is that there's another person inside your brain with you. You may recognize them as your childhood invisible friend. Most adults have used brute strength tension to maintain control of oneself over this mysterious shadow influence. They do not have the inhibitory control that you possess, because you are in charge, the leader of the body. Also the politician.

This other is often quite brilliant, but also a massive troll. They have little to no moral compass or filter. You are that filter. You aggregate the information sources that are available to you, such as memories, emotions, current situation, and so on. These data arrive at varying intensities, but this amplitude does not accurately reflect priority in the context of a society, so you must inhibit actions that are not appropriate for the situational context, and allow others that are sourced from a potentially very low volume in the mind. Then you make a decision, wrangling your nuerons into action, or doing nothing.

The way I practice allowing this other to exist freely is by switching primary hands for things where safety is not a concern. I try to be left-handed as much as possible, I try listening to the thoughts and ideas in my head that would otherwise be met with an inhibitory fear response.

You see, our skill as a human is fundamentally rooted within this interaction in our minds. This mental art is the core individual skill one must practice. It begins with discovery, listening, recognition. Develop the map of your internal mind. What do you have control of? Why do you respond to things the way you do? Was it a fear response? Ego, knowing better? Laziness, not feeling like it? Explore these borders within yourself. Make acquaintance with your other, become their friend, work together as a team, stop getting in the way of reaching your full potential by doubting the advice of the other.

An individual skilled at this mental art will be relaxed, accepting of inputs, quickly (but not too quickly) making a decision for action, based on the impulse-like communication from the other.

Electron Orbitals

Social groups can exist stably at various sizes before falling apart. Our brains, thanks to evolution, has capacity for around 150 individuals to be in our lives. So our core social abstraction is this size. Call it a village or something. This is the natural stable size of a social unit, and will be the basis for the guild's, uh, guilds. Another layer of abstraction will exist for orchestrating cooperation between villages, and so on, continuous look to see how large we can build our social atoms, what their orbital configurations look like.

Guild Software

The guild software exists to reflect the architecture of the human mind, in cohabitation with it. From this foundation, we build the work flows of civil society: logic and rationale, critical, objective thinking, problem solving, and so on. If the software is done correctly, should resonate with the mind and be super effective.