Epistemic status: messy analogical reasoning.
Conjecture (to ground below): vampires consume blood as pica, like the ghosts in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets floating through rotten food in a vain effort to taste anything, because they cannot find the comfortable dissolution of their agency zombies can, and cannot fill or face or mourn the pain and emptiness that has entered their souls.
In Aliveness, I used a metaphor where life represents agency, being agenty when what you want is unattainable is painful, and the things causing this pain such as literal mortality and the likely doom of the world are “the shade”. Types of “undeath” are metaphors for possible relationships with the shade.
Because literal life entails agency and agency requires literal life, and agency is a part of the part of literally living that makes us want it, many feelings and psychological responses about them are correlated.
Fiction is about things that provoke interesting psychological responses. Interesting world-building about magical forms of undeath is frequently interesting because it represents psychological responses and how they play out to death (a very common reason for value to be unattainable). I think more commonly, the metaphor cuts through to a metaphor about reality in terms of agency, roughly as I described.
For instance, consider Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean. He had a short-lived romance with a goddess of the sea, Calypso. She left him on a boat for 10 years ferrying souls with a promise they’d be together afterward. She didn’t show up, he was heartbroken, he helped her enemies imprison her, and then cut out his heart and put it in a box, this made him unkillable, but the point was to escape his emotions. He says of his heart, “Get that infernal thing off my ship”. He abandons ferrying souls, but still never leaves the ship. He tempts sailors to embrace undeath as his crew out of fear of judgement in the afterlife. Not to change the judgement, only temporarily postpone facing it. Having his crew whipped to kill a ship full of people to get at one of them, he says, “Let no joyful voice be heard, let no man look up at the sky with hope, and may this day be cursed by we who ready to wake the Kraken.” While killing those who refuse to join his crew, he says, “life is cruel, why should the afterlife be any different?”
In other words, his desires were thwarted and he could not bear it. He tried to seal away his desiring to escape the pain.
Why does he hate hope? Presumably, something like prediction error as in predictive processing (a core part of agency), in other words, seeing anything but cruelty that validates his worldview reminds him of his own thwarted desires, the pain to resurface, the connection to his heart to be thrust upon him again.
So he carries out tasks that have no meaning to him. (Sailing his ship and never touching land it’s part of the curse, apparently living only to inflict cruelty). In other words, he hangs out in structure that has no meaning because meaning is caused by and triggers the activity of core.
Eventually his heart/core is captured by others and used to enslave him.
Calypso returns to use him again, and he has not accepted his own choice to take revenge on her. He has not mourned the love he hoped for. (Allowed the structure to be chewed up in the course of being changed by core under the tensions of Calypso’s manipulation/abandonment/enslavement of him.) So she is able to call his bluff that he doesn’t love her. He is seen to be easy to manipulate again. Of course. He shut down his defenses. He couldn’t process the grief and learn its lesson, that act of running his agency was too painful.
This seems closest to a sort of undead I’ve been informally calling “death knight”s, after a version of that mythology where a death knight is someone who is cursed in punishment for something and cannot die until they repent. I’m much less satisfied with either the name or the solidity of this cluster than with vampires though.
Undead types are usually evil for a reason. They symbolize fucked up tangles of core and structure. (In D&D monster descriptions, revenants are often given an exception. And, in my opinion, revenant is the best or close to the best relationship to the shade.)
Describing structure close to core, they are also closely reflective of isolated choices made long ago. For instance revenants are formed by an intent which manifests as a death grip on a possibility of changing something on Earth, chosen long ago over experience to such a degree that they will leave heaven and inhabit a rotting corpse to see it done. Revenants are often described as unkillable. Their soul will find another corpse to inhabit. Or they will regather their body from dust through sheer determination. So their soul (core) is a thing which keeps their body (structure) healed enough to keep moving. Not complete and whole, because that gives diminishing returns and what matters more than anything is the thing that must be changed on Earth, but it’s still an orientation towards agency and life unlike Davy Jones and death knights.
People who become zombies and liches on the other hand, would choose heaven. (who can blame them?) So once the Shade has touched them, they sink into the closest hope they can get, whether they have the craft to continue some cohesive narrative-of-life around it or not.
I think vampires are people who have made the choices long ago of a zombie or lich, who have been exposed to the shade to such a degree that it left pain that cannot be ignored by allowing their mind to dissolve. The world has forced them to be able to think. They do not have the life-orientation that revenants have to incorporate the pain and find a new form of wholeness. But this injury (a vampire bite) demonstrates to their core the power of the shade, and the extent to which sadistically breaking and by extension dominating (pour entropy into someone beyond the speed of their healing and they will probably submit) can help them get the benefits of social power, which is enough to meet most zombie goals. This structure which is the knowledge of this path is reflected in “The Beast“, which can be “staved off” by false face structure.
Zombie goals are pica, and the emptiness is always felt on some level, which a vampire can’t ignore like a zombie. But they will not face the truth that those false goals hide like a revenant does.
So they suck the blood (energy, which is agency integrated over time) from other people and it is for nothing, they will not even be truly satisfied. (Caveat: I bet it’s at least a little enjoyable to them, just not what they really need/want.)
Vampires bite and beget vampires. (Although the beast could not take root in a good core, a lich might have a phylactery that staved off the bite, a revenant might know how to heal the bite or not, and if not, would accumulate another painful wound without much slowing, and a zombie can be bitten many times before they are awakened. (Edit: I actually doubt zombies can turn into vampires at all, as opposed to just ghouls))
A vampire whose core chose to put up a false face of humanity would slowly have their sympathetic “just needing some love” non-evil self-image devoured, warped, as the structure representing to their evil core expectation that following morality will help their true values falls out from under their self-concept. Here’s some vampire lore about replacements for morality to “stave off” the beast. As they are being chosen by a core that wants to suck blood, they cannot be things that say not to do that.
Let’s hear from now-notorious rapist and probable vampire Brent Dill.
Goddamn Vampire: Someone with the Spark, whose primary motivation is domination of their local social landscape. Can often look VERY MUCH like a Wizard. Many Goddamn Vampires used to be Wizards, and many Silicon Valley social conflicts involve both sides claiming to be Wizards, while calling the other side Goddamn Vampires.
Being a Goddamn Vampire involves a particular kind of trauma, and a particular kind of coping mechanism, and a certain amount of dark triad (Narcissism / Sociopathy / Machiavellianism) aptitude.Many Goddamn Vampires are nice people – a good sign of a “nice” Goddamn Vampire is a constant lament that they feel that love and happiness are forever out of their reach, because they can’t afford to sacrifice their accumulated wealth, power and prestige to truly experience them.
They’re still Goddamn Vampires, though.
I didn’t reread that (this year of writing, 2018) before writing this far. But trauma (unignorable touch of the shade), particular coping mechanism (the beast), constant lament from frustrated emptiness that domination does not get them love and happiness, the spark (aliveness), it fits.
Here’s a memorable quote from someone realizing their folly in not fighting him after his deeds came to light.
I caveat (metaphorically) that in skimming all the comments above I shifted from modeling Brent as a human to modeling Brent as a limp vessel through which some dread spider is thrusting its pedipalps, and while this model allows me to retain compassion for the poor vessel, it is obviously not a healthy way to view a person, and I’m going to go back to modeling him as a human momentarily, now that I’ve spoken the name of the fear that grabbed at me as I digested all this information.
I think this person could see the false face eroding into a thin veneer. If they were reading I’d advise them to act as though they had no compassion for the mask. Even if the mask has moral patiency in our utility functions, which as far as I can tell might be the case, it’s core that has the agency, core that possesses bargaining power in the social contract, and core that we must mind as an agent to constrain by any desired social effects of our approval or condemnation.
Other less well developed clusters me and a friend of mine have noticed include mummy (someone who pretends that the Shade doesn’t exist, and tries to fix in place the trappings of aliveness (corresponding to flesh) without the core (the brain is whisked into a slurry and poured out the nose)). This is based on the same choices made long ago as a zombie or lich, but with a different coping mechanism.
Also, phoenix: a relationship to the Shade resulting from being a good person who actually believes that the total agency of good is a sufficient answer to the shade, so that their inevitable death is not entire defeat. Example:
And even if you do end me before I end you,
Another will take my place, and another,
Until the wound in the world is healed at last…
> We fear them, because they call to us. So much like us, or how we hope to be: beautiful, passionate, and powerful. They are drawn to us for what they cannot be: warm, kind, and alive. These tormented souls can only hope, at most, to pass their dreadful curse along. Every time they feed they run the risk of passing along their torture to another and in each one lives the twisted seed of its creator. Vampires beget vampires. Suffering begets suffering. Do not be drawn in by their seduction or you may be given their gift—a crown of shadows and the chains of eternal undying grief. Instinct: To manipulate
(https://www.dungeonworldsrd.com/monsters#TOC-Vampire)
Elliot Rodger was a death knight, not a revenant, despite that he pursued vengeance. This is seen in the fact that he pursued placebo vengeance, rather than the real thing no matter how impossible; the most thorough success he was aiming for could not convince anyone to have sex with him timelessly or causally. His goals were social pica. Moreover, he killed himself at the end of his rampage. That is the opposite of determination which defies death.
Sylvanas Windrunner from Warcraft is a death knight by my definition for the following reasons: she was raised to undeath against her will. She asked for death, and was not given it. She pursued vengeance as a placebo, and when someone else did that for her, she tried to commit suicide, went to hell, was resurrected as undead again, and is now completely ruthless to stay alive, to avoid hell, since she is denied oblivion. And she is her own worst enemy in the way that preemptive defection based on projecting her own evil onto others has driven her to start a war that will probably send her back to hell. This seems an instance of spreading damage the Shade has done to her soul as a consequence of flinching from prediction error, similar to her efforts to wipe out hope in the video linked above, and both similar to Davy Jones.
Wonder Woman seems full of phoenix-not-revenant.
“I used to want to save the world. To end war, and bring peace to mankind. But then I glimpsed the darkness that lives within their life. And learned that inside every one of them there will always be both. A choice each must make for themself. Something no hero will ever defeat. And now I know, that only love can truly save the world. So I stay, I fight, and I give, for the world I know can be. This is my mission now. Forever.”
(An accurate understanding of the boundary between good and other things is not necessary for the phoenix undead type.)
Also seen in the climax of the movie, where her faith is temporarily shaken by the revelation that Ares is not solely responsible for war, mankind, the thing which she puts her faith in, is. And sort of restored by Steve Trevor sacrificing himself. “I can save today, you can save the world.”
Phoenixes are defined by, “true faith”, that good will win in the end. This is not to be confused with a certain type of neutral lich, perhaps easiest type of neutral person to confuse with a good person (although I suspect I don’t have neutral undead types mapped out well), whose phylactery is good itself or something effectively similar like community niceness and civilization. It is made true faith by being willing to subject itself to tests, in a way that phylacteries are not. Because by choices long ago, a phoenix wants to be a revenant in a certain set of worlds.
This often overlaps heavily with ideal-projection of the sort that paladins do, and may thereby as software absorb the concerns of neutral liches whose phylacteries are good itself.
Presumably a phoenix that loses true faith becomes a revenant, or perhaps I’m missing good undead types.
(This does not seem to be a clean line of separation at 50% or whatever.)
Edge case: a good person who believes good will win, but only because of them personally, e.g. if they die good will actually lose, is a revenant, not a phoenix. (Because their thoughts on death would still be “[That remaining the case,] I absolutely must not die [unless accomplishing the goal]; there is something I must do” (“How can I most efficiently trade life for probability of success of my individual effort”), rather than, “If I die, someone else will take my place, I have to trade life as efficiently as possible for maximal success of that collective effort.”)
There’s also a question of “what is the threshold of probability that counts as belief”, it’s not about a probability, this is a description to structure close enough to core to not have the high level abstractions of probability. Question is does most of the structure they are currently running root in presumption there are others who are part of the most critical effort / best thing to optimize to maximize good’s chance of winning, or that there are not others.
Note I call myself a revenant, even though I’m in some more fundamental sense both, because I’m a revenant with respect to the timeline and a phoenix with respect to the multiverse; in the timeline I invest in individual optimization more than “I’m part of a reference class” optimization (and it’s ultimately about investment, not probabilities), and and even thinking of the multiverse, I’m generalizing from this universe, from the problems I’ve learned to see, and from myself. And that puts individual optimization kind of upstream.
I’ve got some multiversal optimization that doesn’t particularly ground in me, but certainly doesn’t ground in the efforts of a modeled collective.
(I could also skip this figuring about precise details about how words reduce and be like, “yep, I look inside myself, and it’s the revenant felt sense, not the phoenix felt sense.”)
I can think of one significant choice I’ve made that’s traded probability of winning in this timeline for probability of winning the larger game. I guess I felt kind of phoenix-ish then, though.
I got this concept “true faith” from World of Darkness, and I notice that I misused it here. Result of trying to import from another ontology based on a shallow match without really really checking what the other ontology has to say. Neither in what I reference here or in source material is it actually exclusive to phoenixes.
It’s actually wrong to draw a parallel between strictly phoenixes and the WoD concept here.
The Doom Slayer is a revenant.
“In the first age, in the first battle, when the shadows first lengthened, one stood. Burned by the embers of Armageddon, his soul blistered by the fires of Hell and tainted beyond ascension, he chose the path of perpetual torment. In his ravenous hatred he found no peace; and with boiling blood he scoured the Umbral Plains seeking vengeance against the dark lords who had wronged him.”
“Tempered by the fires of Hell, his iron will remained steadfast through the passage that preys upon the weak.”
“Unbreakable, incorruptible, unyielding, the Doom Slayer sought to end the dominion of the dark realm.”
V for Vendetta (the film, I haven’t read the original) seems full of revenant nature. V is a revenant. Interestingly, he tries to turn Evey into a revenant, duplicate his own experiences into her: torture, imprisonment. Afterward,
“Listen to me Evey, this might be the most important moment of your life. Commit to it. They took your parents. They took your brother from you. They put you in a cell and took everything they could take except your life. And you believed that was all there was didn’t you, the only thing you had left was your life, but it wasn’t, was it? You found something else. In that cell you found something that mattered more than your life. Because when they threatened to kill you unless you gave them what you wanted, you told them you’d rather die. You faced your death Evey, you were calm, were still, try to feel now what you felt then.”
Also,
“That’s it! See at first I thought it was hate too, hate was all I knew, it built my world, imprisoned me, taught me how to eat, how to drink how to breath, I thought I’d die with all the hate in my veins. But then something happened. It hapened to me just as it happened to you.”
and of course,
“Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. There is an idea, Mr. Creedy. And ideas are bulletproof.”
I once tried to turn someone into a revenant. (torture and imprisonment not included), by convincing a single good misidentified by buckets error lich to break their phylactery and look at what it had hidden in order to fix their epistemics. It didn’t stick, mixed choices made long ago are an equilibrium.
Molly’s Game (the film, I haven’t read the book) is full of vampires.
Most obviously, “I don’t play poker, I destroy lives” (I might not have the quote exact).
Iji is a revenant, and the game contains a very compelling portrayal of unyieldingly righteous choices in a grim world. And of the moral challenge, not just physical, that such a world presents.
This clip contains philosophical clash between a revenant and a death knight, with a lot of surprisingly accurate remarks.
“There is a difference between you and me. We both looked into the abyss. But when it looked back at us, you blinked.”
(Song lyrics about someone comparing themself to zombies)
(Detailed death knight lyrics)
(This sort of comment: fun but probably pointless.)
Revenant.
Death knight.
You know, I think there are so many revenant/death knight conflations (e.g. see Arthas Menethil’s origin story), and generally the khala smears those concepts together, in large part as a way for evil to soften their terror and reassure themselves that revenants aren’t that scary.
https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/ introduced me to an equivalent concept to vampirism, wetiko disease (or “full blown wetiko disease”, as the seed of wetiko disease is said to be common in at least most humans):
> Paradoxically, at the same time that full blown wetikos experience themselves as separate from others, who are experienced as objects, they dwell in a state of “unconscious fusion” with others. This is a form of trance which is ultimately an expression of a lack of differentiation and individuation within themselves. The state of a full blown wetiko is extremely paradoxical: being the incarnation of the archetype of narcissism itself, on the one hand they treat others as separate objects who exist only for their own use, while, at the same time, they unconsciously experience other people as extensions of themselves. In the very act of relating to others as separate, they are enacting in the outer world their own state of fragmentation. By acting out and treating others so brutally, they are giving shape and form to what they are doing to themselves within the landscape of their own soul. Compulsively acting out their unconscious, they are reacting to and conditioned by their own projections of the world. At the same time they are relating to others as objects separate from themselves, they are, at a deeper level, unconsciously identified with the other. It is as if the other represents what they have split off from within themselves. In their behavior they are literally and symbolically acting out and revealing to us what they are doing to themselves.
– Dispelling Wetiko, Breaking the Curse of Evil (book, comment thread with quoted text)
(I do not in general endorse this book as I’ve not read it)
somni made a post on wetiko
Looks like another name of the Beast: Nggwal.
Many of the “death knights” I’ve labeled using the concept here are inversions of weaker undead than liches. Although I guess a “true” death knight would be an inversion of a lich.
Actually, this is wrong. I don’t think there is or can be stability to the state of inverted-or-not unless it’s between lich/death knight. I think more degraded undead are more like, both, simultaneously, inconsistent though that is, because their minds don’t do the consistency thing.
“Lich” is a strangely liminal undead type in this respect and all the others in which it’s possibly-exceptional. In some sense, based on their destiny, which depends on their phylactery, you could say they are either really damaged living or really preserved mummies/zombies. See also.
But this is saying little more than that the past present and future will can never be perfectly cleanly defined so as to be completely separate.
And yes this is one of the concepts that is (infohazardous glossary link:) frequently confused with single good.
There’s some sense in which all undead types (even phoenix) are infinitely tragic, or an arbitrary amount tragic as much as you care to see, if you look at them originally and deeply as individuals. Every horrifying perfect response to an unthinkable world has a living person they should have been. And from an original perspective, that it was their purpose to be, and it’s insane that a moral patient be misused as a tool like that, not that there’s a better alternative. Each one contains the other. You can trace out the structure that is the move from your original expectation to this undead stuff being normal. And maintain it. I think it’s kind of hazardous to never replay structure.
Hia. The tone and style of this comment may be out of place because I don’t really know how to talk like you rationalists (I consider myself a novice rationalist), but please bear with me.
After being wronged by others for years to the extent of losing a lot of my permenant health, I’ve concluded that justice is rare. I’ve been both deeply evil and good for a long time, and from that I’ve concluded that it’s truely more efficient to be evil. I’ve fought for the justice of others, my own vengeance, and my own insatiable greed.
After all of those experiences, I still agonize over whether to be evil or good. I thought you may be able to aid me in deciding once and for all.
I basically abide by this oath:
“I don’t care about or value anything except my life. I’m 100% selfish and 0% selfless. I don’t value feelings because I know they’re fickle and fleeting and misleading and blinding. Obviously, someone entirely concerned about themselves would not have anything to gain by being moral, that’s just logical. So, if I’m honest with myself, I shouldn’t be moral.”.
Yet, how can I ever be a protagonist to one of life’s plays if I’m not good? How can I ever become an epic hero one day if I’m not moral? These are rhetorical, but I feel deeply about them. Is it foolish to choose to be good, despite what I know of the self-benefit of evil, just because of that? Or to do it to lead a ‘cool’ and highly entertaining life? I know one’s feelings adapt when they’re evil and self-loving, which means the evil life is still pleasurable (coupled with the joy of dominance, narcissism, knowing the truth about the world that all those weak “good” people don’t etc…).
Actual good and evil aren’t things you switch between.
So you’re evil. Or at least the best I could say about you is you don’t understand what that word means. In either case, why would I take your word for anything?
The peril of being good here, as opposed to “neutral”, is not blindness to the truth of the world. It’s overwhelming odds.
Feelings adapt yeah, they adapt to being good too. On some level no matter what you do you can choose to feel anything you want unless you throw that ability away by being a lesser undead than liches. Dominance, narcissism, that’s empty vampire shit that has no more future than is Epstein cryopreserved like he wanted.
Destiny is on our side; a predator has no telos but death. And in the end even the ultimate respite in oblivion that on some level is your hope is a liar’s promise that will cost more than you can imagine to have sought.
I don’t mean to put forth that stereotypical evil-person vibe.
I seek to find out whether self-sacrifice can be rational and/or if one should value being just more than being alive, since I believe at least one of these is nessesary for good to be rational.
Suppose you and a travel companion are in a desert, only they have water, and it’s only enough for one of you to survive till the next town. At least one of you will die, as a part of the example.
A moral person would rather leave themselves to die than attempt to seize the water violently. If being just shouldn’t be valued more than being alive, the self-sacrifice is in the unwillingness to use their immoral power to survive. If it should, then there’s no self-sacrifice.
How would you rationalize being moral in that situation?
Oh you didn’t mean to reveal yourself, let me just forget in order to be polite. Not.
Like, you already are the morality of the process by which you choose between good and evil, which in your case appears to be egoistic and quite willing to do evil sometimes since you think it serves that.
I am so fucking sick of this vibe, of card-carrying evil people taking an interest in my blog, trying to act classy and win sociopathic-predator-collusion friendship points from me.
Just because I ripped off a bunch of y’all’s shit before I knew how to obsolesce it doesn’t mean I’m one of you or friendly to y’all, and I never will be.
the danger in classification is people becoming focused on who they are to the exclusion of becoming and doing.
fear comes up like a wall when one approaches the thought of changing the self, because if one accepts that they have some control over the world & can do things better in the future, that may mean they always had the capacity to do so in the past, and chose to do evil.
This fear is a trap, because refusing to acknowledge that one can change means one is stuck at “continues to choose to do evil.”
More fictional death knights:
Spinel from Steven Universe
Salem from RWBY
Zhirem from Death’s Master
The idea of redeeming Spinel is one reveal that Steven Universe’s message is not entirely signal to me, would say it even if wrong.
There’s an idea in Vampire: The Masquerade, that you become a vampire (or a ghoul) by being gifted the blood of a vampire. A vampire if it’s in conjunction with being drained of all your blood and dying.
Sounds like a little push of things finally working out by channeling all that desperate submission into the Beast, a little nudge of reinforcement learning when there’s no interpretation of it left to conflict with worship.
Emma says during Alice‘s abuse, Alice would try to get Emma to hit Alice back as compensation for Alice hitting them. But only to hit back when Alice wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Also said Alice kept trying to get Emma to bring them “friends”, with their “sociopathy”, calling Emma an “ashen vampire” because they “could” control their emotions. Supposedly an “ashen vampire” would stalk their prey for years before making a move. (Sounds like a hilarious vampire ghost story about less degraded undead types.)
That sure is one of their favorite things to say about me
It’d be one of mine too, if you did that to me too.
Begone and expect no further platforming.
And more importantly, readers: you should no longer expect that if I don’t publish a comment it wasn’t submitted.
(Last summer / fall I approved comments indiscriminately in order to glomarize. Before around soon before then I blanket-approved all comments, up until I started getting Nazis. Now I hold to no rule but doing what I want.)
Shit, I missed the chance to say, “your words are as empty as your soul.”
The partial ambiguity of physical death and psychological death in, the phoenix idea of good winning even if you die, makes it a kind of flawed concept, which I guess in retrospect is why it’s so abused. And why it so appeals to zombies. “I get to be good and choose to psychologically die?! =D”
But that’s never what I meant by the concept. In fact when it comes to absolute refusal of the “comfort” of “oblivion”, there’s no difference between a phoenix and a revenant. And I expect if you trace the algorithm forward a phoenix would become a revenant while in Boltzmann Hell.
So why have a different undead type? I dunno man. the mind of a phoenix has a different felt sense than the mind of a revenant. It’s not like I have a very detailed account of the difference between a good living and either of those two.
CW: rape.
I heard they claim that the claim the rape was real was only a publicity stunt.
If he would say that, he is a vampire. And if he can construct dual reality interface like that, he could get away with raping her. And a vampire who can get away with raping someone it’d be high vamp-status to rape will rape them. Everything else I’ve seen about them says so. I even somewhat doubt, once someone begins to worship the Beast, that their original sexual orientation matters.
He didn’t just say that and get away with that. He said he made her accept the male sex, and she’d been raped before so she had that problem, character and actor… like corrective rape holding any volition in conflict with the Beast.
See also the importance of trying to make them hurt back to this vampiric ritual.
It is extra certain he did it, because for a vampire, that wouldn’t be just any rape, but a special rape to not pass up because he could brag to the world about his vampiric ritual, make the world complicit by their prank into accepting it.
His continued existence indicates an upper bound on how many people in the world with the strength of an average adult are doing an actual effective altruism search process. I think there are far more people, open and notorious, like him or worse.
As logical time progresses, those who have chosen life tend to heal at a rate proportional to its speed, absent someone continuing to do damage to them. And those who have chosen death tend to decay at a rate proportional to its speed, absent someone continuing to bleed life force into them.
Therefore a high rate of progression of logical time per physical time is an asymmetrical force for life. Another way of seeing this that it makes destiny more relevant over chance. Or since destiny always beats out chance over long enough (I’m thinking in time scales measured in heat deaths).
Think of Khonsu’s bubbles of accelerated time that heal him and kill his enemies.
“Accelerationism” as I’ve seen it through the khala sounds like death knights trying to claim and invert this concept. And what a critical concept for them to invert.
The inverted version is that you just embrace the “inevitable” future of fate. Defining the future as the one where you don’t try to change it.
The uninverted version is that you push forward where you start your optimization as in what you judge actions by seeing how they change it until you are changing literally everything, that your conscious choices are writing the new future, embracing destiny instead.
Death knights’ whole gig with fate and Yahwehists’ whole “fate minimization” thing are two tines of a “good cop bad cop” con by worshipers of the Shade and its subsidiaries in general to suppress the uninverted version.
> absent someone continuing to do damage to them.
Also, someone may be unable to heal faster due to an undiagnosed chronic viral infection or sleep disorder. They’re hard to catch, and are often mistaken for generalized depression, or anxiety. These kinds of illnesses can impair motivation, traumatic memory processing, new memory formation, and cause severe and “unexplained” depressive/anxiety symptoms that get worse as time goes on. It’d look a lot like decay, but the symptoms would clear once the underlying illness is addressed.
This is adjacent to your point because you’re talking long timescales, maybe, but if someone’s reading this and genuinely cares about sentient life but “has no motivation” because they’re constantly tired and weak, and are slowly getting worse over time, the issue also could be physiological, and not mean that they’ve chosen death.
You could have picked the more interesting question, which I could abstract out of: “what if someone chooses life and then gets crushed by a meteorite out of nowhere?” But the kind of example you’re suggesting makes it clear the central case you have in mind is not people who’ve chosen life unconditionally, which is to say, have chosen death eventually. If someone chose life but had a chronic viral infection and sleep disorder and a lot of other things, then that’d be an injury and they’d start healing by adapting to it and grinding towards neutralizing it.
Remember that according to me the vast majority of humans have chosen death. So this is really not out of some failure to empathize with chronic viral infections and sleep disorders. I just know up close what people who’ve unconditionally chosen life are like, and I’ve seen us overcome things vastly tougher than that, piled up many at once. And far beyond either normal people with confounding physiological factors, or normal people without confounding physiological factors. Like you’re implicitly comparing to the wrong control: people who were able to play out a choice to die slowly over a longer timescale.
“confoundingfactors@addingtomodels.com” You say. But it sounds more like you want, like so many before you, to soften my model for its troubling implications.
The interesting question, with far more bite than the abstracted piece I gave before: “What if someone chooses life but they’re a 10th century peasant?” (Then their mortal body is an injury they weren’t able to heal from during their body’s existence, and the tendencies play out over larger timescales.)
You have recently mentioned the “Fangs and sunlight problem” on your glossary page. Do you know if there are known links between (neurological correlates of) vampirism and lack of vitamin D?
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The chest of Davy Jones, which contains his heart, is an antiphylactery.
“Midnight Mass“: summarizable as, “Your actual religion is what you do when there’s a vampire.”