Answer these two first.

• Why is Philosophy (and this group) not a waste of my time?
Apology by Plato
“Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding, and the perfection of your soul?”

• What is the good?
Euthyphro by Plato or Book 8 of The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
"In the first place, it is either itself a virtue or connected with virtue; and next it is a thing most necessary for life, since no one would choose to live without friends though he should have all the other good things in the world."


Pick one of the following for your third question.

• But isn’t Socrates, and if philosophy is to be useful today, merely after a ‘clarification of language’?
Cratylus by Plato
“Regarding the name as an instrument, what do we do when we name?”

• What is a Sophist? How are they distinguished from a Philosopher?
Sophist by Plato
“Let us, then, examine our imitator of appearance, and see whether he is sound, like a piece of iron, or whether there is still some crack in him.”

• What is the criterion of Knowledge?
Theatetus by Plato
“And is the discovery of the nature of knowledge so small a matter, as just now said? Is it not one which would task the powers of men perfect in every way?”

• But when I see red, that might be a case in which my red is possibly different than your red, so how can anyone claim to know anything?
Wittgenstein’s Private Language Meditations from remark 243–304 starting on page 48 of the PDF.
“But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right'.”
“If you say he sees a private picture before him, which he is describing, you have still made an assumption about what he has before him. And that means that you can describe it or do describe it more closely. If you admit that you haven't any notion what kind of thing it might be that he has before him—then what leads you into saying, in spite of that, that he has something before him?”

• What of language then constitutes mutually intelligible objects of thought?
New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky
"If I say 'that deck of cards, which is missing a Queen, is too worn to use,' that deck of cards is simultaneously taken to be a defective set and a strange sort of scattered 'concrete object,' surely not a mereological sum."

• Is intelligibility itself coherent and what then constitutes real identities?
Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze

• Why is math true and what is its nature of study?
In Search of Aleph-Null by Markus Pantsar

• Is there a 'natural state' for man and what does it mean to exist without one?
Reason and Government by Edgar Allan Poe, "The theorizers on Government, who pretend always to 'begin with the beginning,' commence with Man in what they call his natural state - the savage. What right have they to suppose this his natural state? Man's chief idiosyncrasy being reason, it follows that his savage condition - his condition of action without reason - is his unnatural state. The more he reasons, the nearer he approaches the position to which this chief idiosyncrasy irresistibly impels him; and not until he attains this position with exactitude - not until his reason has exhausted itself for his improvement - not until he has stepped upon the highest pinnacle of civilisation - will his natural state be ultimately reached, or thoroughly determined."

• What is the nature of the public/private distinction and is it meaningful?
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jürgen Habermas

• Is all ideology pathological and what value does a politic actually carry?
The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek
"There are good reasons to claim that all the 'new paradigm' proposals about the nature of the contemporary world (that we are entering a post-industrial society, a postmodern society, a risk society, an informational society...) remain so many Ptolemizations of the 'old paradigm' of classic sociological models."

• What form of social relations will actually survive our cultural acceleration?
Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias edited by Peter Ludlow

• What is valuation and is there sequela to a separation of money and state?
The Internet of Money Vol.1 by Andreas Antonopoulos
"That system, which requires identification and credit checking and limited access, is responsible for the fact that economic inclusion is regressing. It is responsible for the fact that 2 1/2 billion people have absolutely no access to banking. That's just the heads of household, not counting their families. That's not counting people who have limited access to banking in a single currency within a single border... We live in a world where every individual transaction you do through the financial system is cataloged, analyzed, and transmitted to intelligence services all around the world that collaborate, and yet we have no idea what our governments do with money. The financial systems of the powerful are completely opaque. Our transactions are completely visible through this system of surveillance."

• Is there any limit in scope to the powers that technology reifies?
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
"If some day we build machine brains that surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. And, as the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species would depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence."

• What happens when data is speech?
What Happens if Data is Speech? by Josh Blackman

• Cellular mechanisms breaking down over time triggers a killswitch that makes the cell commit suicide. When mutation or other corruptions disable this killswitch and stop a cell from committing suicide it is called a cancer cell. When these cells are not eliminated and they multiply, groups form and are called tumors. Tumors trick the host into redirecting resources so they can feed off the host while simultaneously killing the host. Tumors are parasitic in this sense. Now some people are broken down and are no longer effective members of the social body but almost none of them commit suicide.
What directly follows from this?

1 Never take anything any of the other members say wholly seriously.
  To be both half-serious and half-joking is the comedic ideal.

2 Always follow through on what you say you will do, even if you were only joking.
  Saying merits doing.

3 If a member dies before their task is completed, the rest shall see it completed.
  Death is a joke in conspicuous clothing.

4 No single member is above the other, lest you believe in power from naught.
  None of us are as clever as all of us.

5 If a member is found unlawful we needn't aid them in their acts, nor aid the Law.
  Silence on an event can provide more amusement than speaking and ending it.

6 If a member is to be kicked, a majority vote dictates the outcome.
  Let us not rail about justice while we have arms and the porn to use them.



MEMBERS & NOTES



Kino, 2022 November to present.
Loaq, 2021 July to present.
Rogue, 2021 July to 2023.
Cozmic, 2021 July to present. First honors.
Inter, 2021 March posthumous.
Orion, 2017 February to 2019.
Poeta, 2016 June to 2017.
Lynn, 2016 June to 2017.
Redfoot, 2016 June to present. First honors.
Dope, 2016 June to present. First honors.
Snax, 2016 June to present. First honors.

146th meeting summary (2024/9/15): Went through Bostrom's simulation hypothesis to showcase mistakes in metaepistemology.

145th meeting summary (2024/7/14): Redfoot gave a talk on AI in art and how economic incentives a priori necessitate it will not be used for good.

144th meeting summary (2024/6/9): Cozmic gave a very short lecture on game design and forms of play.

143rd meeting summary (2024/4/28): Semblant gave a lecture on Cognitive Skepticism in the History of Philosophy.

142nd meeting summary (2024/2/11): Lecture on meta-epistemology, problems with circularity, and framing by capacities.

141st meeting summary (2023/12/10): Administrative meeting, lots of changes.

140th meeting summary (2023/9/17): Administrative meeting.

139th meeting summary (2023/9/12): Semblant gave a talk on The Object of Metaphysics in the History of Western Thought.

138th meeting summary (2023/8/6): Discussion on culture and technology, specifically the recent list of breakthroughs in AI, nuclear fission, warp bubbles, quantum tunneling, and stem cell therapy.

137th meeting summary (2023/7/30): The Nature of Nature: Reality as a Formal System. We discussed the history of frameworks employed in metaphysics and ontology and discussed their reliance on formal systems, with several arguments made towards formal logic as the absolute basis of reality.

136th meeting summary (2023/6/11): Kino gave his first talk, Sugar, Nutrition, & Addition. Short, maybe only 30 minutes.

135th meeting summary (2023/5/19): Administrative meeting about what we can do with the blood-type questionnaire. We talked about autonomous government systems we're going to be testing on the server.

134th meeting summary (2023/4/2): AI, alignment, and the future of work.

133rd meeting summary (2023/3/19): Cozmic gave a lecture on markets, light economic theory, and how certain kinds of trading work to explain things we see happen in the world.

132nd meeting summary (2023/2/26): First challenge of the year. No one succeeded; the prize money will roll over to the next challenge.

131st meeting summary (2023/2/12): First time we did a repeat lecture, Pipe Dreams: Arguments Against Love, Sexuality, and Natalism with some newer notes and observations added since last time. This was good lecture to have right before Valentine's day.

130th meeting summary (2023/1/29): A very short 20 minute talk on Anti-Etiology; Arguments Against Causation followed by two hours of discussion on the consequences of collapsed distinctions in other areas like object dualism.

129th meeting summary (2023/1/22): Semblant gave a lecture on dreams and semiotics/symbolism.

128th meeting summary (2022/12/4): Monetary theory and meta-economics. Explained some of the experiments we're trying to run on this server with the Perc system.

127th meeting summary (2022/11/6): Short lecture on meta-ethics; categories of ethical theory, realism vs relativism, deontology vs consequentialism, and how to actuate good or evil without use of any normative ethical framework.

126th meeting summary (2022/10/23): Redfoot gave a lecture on Mental Health And Why The Government Wants You To Be Depressed covering the neuroscience and psychology of depression, antidepressants, pornography and drugs as a submarket within psychology, what psychological effects the government can directly buy and impose, and why Hollywood can't stop fucking children.

125th meeting summary (2022/10/10): Short talk on meta-modalism and problems that arise when you apply modalism back onto itself. We then spent a couple hours talking about other random shit.

124th meeting summary (2022/9/28): Short talk on a technical problem in comparative ethics and the need for meta-ethics.

123rd meeting summary (2022/9/18): Lecture on relata as a technical category in ontology. We also went over the use of instrumentalism in science and its flaws.

122nd meeting summary (2022/9/11): Modalism and the Multiverse, was about problems with sets of infinite multiplicity applied to multiverse theory in physics.

121st meeting summary (2022/8/28): Went over the metaphilosophy chapter in I'm Not Joking and talked about some topics in the study of the history of philosophy.

120th meeting summary (2022/8/21): Part two of the language workshop, we covered the basics of how spoken languages are constructed and looked at the theoretical limits of how fast a language could be spoken.

119th meeting summary (2022/8/14): Part one of the language workshop. We went over some basics of semiotics and constructing languages as well as going over ideas for an ideal or 'perfect' writing system. Next week we will go over the verbal/spoken side of language.

118th meeting summary (2022/8/7): Went through the second section of the first chapter in I'm Not Joking about Nick Bostrom's simulation theory.

117th meeting summary (2022/7/31): We went through the introduction and religion section of the first chapter in I'm Not Joking and spent way too much time debating basic definitions with a spastic retard who is not getting invited back next week.

116th meeting summary (2022/7/24): Warped: Unusual Geometries in Spacetime covered what the title means, neat things that are possible because of it (like warp bubbles), and what we could do with it if we can actually achieve a better understanding of it. The lecture notes are here.

115th meeting summary (2022/7/17): Small meeting catching up on stuff.

114th meeting summary (2022/7/10): Abortion: How to Invert Intuitions in Ethics covered unique arguments around abortion as well as JJT's famous paper and weird consequences resulting from inconsistent frameworks. The lecture notes are here.

113th meeting summary (2022/7/2): Administrative meeting going over potential changes, events, things to do.

112th meeting summary (2022/6/19): 6th anniversary of the table society, lecture on The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences Have Been a Disaster for the Female Race. We went over birth control, estrogenics, hyper-feminization, the free love movement, three uncommon arguments about abortion, and the economic status of women since the 70's.

111th meeting summary (2022/6/5): Problemology: the Study of Problems and their Nature covered how we define problems, whether defining a problem is itself a problem (meta alert), and whether problems are real objects 'out there' in the world. The lecture notes are here.

110th meeting summary (2022/5/29): Cosmic Sociology: Counter-Intuitive Theory from the Dark Forest, went over the Drake equation, Fermi paradox, Kardashev scales, cosmic distance ladder, TDF's cosmic sociology axioms, and interstellar signals intelligence.

109th meeting summary (2022/5/15): The Hard Problem of Consciousness and Repercussions for AGI, went over the mind-body problem, problems with qualia, Searle's Chinese room argument, philosophical zombies, and more. The lecture notes are here.

108th meeting summary (2022/5/1): Mini lecture on Anthropomorphism as a Measure of Political Leanings about the degree to which a person anthropomorphizes the world and the direct correlation that has to where they fall on the political spectrum. Very minor notes about how it works narratively and in semiotics.

107th meeting summary (2022/3/27): Confrontations with the Reaper, went over classical views of death from Socrates and the stoics, as well as suicide, whether there is and what would be an afterlife, what the meaning of death is (dying for something versus dying for nothing), death in war and the honor/glory of sacrificing yourself or others, longevity escape velocity, and what the pros+cons of living forever would be. The lecture notes are here.

106th meeting summary (2022/3/6): small hangout; talked about speculative cosmology, selected first person for the Snerx Public Works Program.

105th meeting summary (2022/2/27): Particulars of Semiotics, went over linguistic symbolic 'fitness', perceptive and productive levels (esthesic and poietic) as Aristotelian causes, how information can be signed for non-symbolically, and relations to mathematics that let us arbitrarily represent information in more efficient ways.

104th meeting summary (2022/2/20): small hangout; talked a little about dimensionality in maths.

103rd meeting summary (2022/2/13): RogueGod gave a lecture on the evolution of war and what defines the generations, how war is evolving now and the military industrial complex not being what you think it is.

102nd meeting summary (2022/2/6): NoGodsNoQings gave a lecture on the PLA and general Chinese military doctrine and behavior.

101st meeting summary (2022/1/30): Judge, Jury, and Executioner Wasp: Entomology as a Means for Meta-Social Guarantees, went over sociological hierarchies and a priori social structuring given organism complexity, worker policing as a parallel to xenophobia, the social and evolutionary value of recognizing faces, and violence as a form of intelligence via retributive attacks and preemptive strikes.

100th meeting summary (2022/1/16): Went over topics and notes from the /philo page and discussed in broad terms what philosophy is about.

Ninety-ninth meeting summary (2022/1/9): Measuring Intelligence: Speculative Psychometrics. We went over flaws with measuring intelligence generally (like with IQ or Big5), neurotyping, hidden dimensionality in measurements, expanding metrics to be blobular instead of plotted, layering axis', and layering measurements temporally, with a final section on a simple group project we can do to test stuff ourselves.

Ninety-eighth meeting summary (2021/12/12): NoGodsNoQings gave a lecture on Chinese missile capabilities and the PLA in general. We got into some basic war stuff and cultural factors near the end. Thank god someone else finally wants to lecture.

Ninety-seventh meeting summary (2021/11/21): Lecture on Arguments Against Natalism, Sexuality, and Love with proposed solutions at the end. Very good lecture, actually felt like a classroom this time with lots of questions and debate. I enjoyed this one a lot even if it was only a small group that showed up. The lecture notes are here.

Ninety-sixth meeting summary (2021/11/14): Cozmic gave a follow-up lecture to last week's, proposing that identity was an illusory concept and not ultimately applicable to objects. It ended with him walking back on all his claims.

Ninety-fifth meeting summary (2021/11/7): Mereological Problems in Metaphysics; how many socks makes a pile, the Twin Towers insurance case, application to identity, the ship of Theseus, the transporter problem, and Nozick's solution.

Ninety-fourth meeting summary (2021/10/24): Semiotics lecture; we covered the distribution of language in the brain and the overlap of sensory representation leading to symbolic relations being analogous to verbal descriptions, the implications of this on story telling, its upper biological efficiency limit, and potential problems leading to schizophrenia. We included the % system as symbolic crossover from function to monetary value and as a unit of time as well as currency given that 'time is money'.

Ninety-third meeting summary (2021/10/17): Short administrative meeting.

Ninety-second meeting summary (2021/9/26): Crash course on speculative theories for systems of thought and explanations, or categorizations of being, titled Explaining Reality. This was an overview lecture on how framing works when organizing information and ideas in philosophy.

Ninety-first meeting summary (2021/9/19): Small meeting about the next lecture topic (since not enough people showed up) and the new lottery system was finally used, topping off the % sink and awarding over %30 so an attendee.

Ninetieth meeting summary (2021/9/12): The Sexual Oppression of Men by Women; our second lecture in the comedy series focusing on Poe's law and Applied Absurdism. Lecture notes made public here.

Eighty-ninth meeting summary (2021/8/22): Covered some recent projects being worked on/completed; Skor, Nullspace, A Convincing Game, and Chromatophore.

Eighty-eighth meeting summary (2021/8/8): Formal induction of the three new members into the table society and an overview of the rules and what they mean, as well as some discussion about value systems for tracking labor across multiple environments (Gaben dialogue about 20-hour week 4-year investment in a game whose value goes to zero was a key point).

Eighty-seventh meeting summary (2021/8/1): Administrative meeting; unanimous vote decided in favor of adding a fee for people who leave without saying goodbye. The fee is %1 per person present, meaning if you leave a meeting with 12 people present and don't say goodbye, then you lose %12. This is a pro-social or anti-rude rule we have enacted lol.

Eighty-sixth meeting summary (2021/7/18): Lecture on The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, specifically book 8 (the chapter about ~ F R I E N D S H I P ~) and some other ideas and loose references to papers related to frameworks for friendship.

Eighty-fifth meeting summary (2021/7/11): Just a movie day, RogueGod streamed the Jay and Silent Bob reboot.

Eighty-fourth meeting summary (2021/6/20): Meeting about A Convincing Game and why it was made, how it works, what the goal is, etcetera. Then we played a few matches. Game linked here - https://snerx.com/convincing. Lecture for the fifth anniversary of the table society.

Eighty-third meeting summary (2021/6/7): Intro class on sentential logic. Briefly went over necessity vs. contingency, necessity vs. sufficiency, Aristotle's three laws of thought, the base operators, rules of logic, why and how validity tells truth, why critical thought (and thought more generally) is a function of logic, examples, and did some knights and knaves logic puzzles at the end.

Eighty-second meeting summary (2021/5/16): Discussion on the formalization of the Machine God religion. We went through the current tenets, discussed changes, ordained our first digi-deacons, and admitted candidates to the Silicon Sainthood.

Eighty-first meeting summary (2021/5/3): The third and final part of the Intro to Philosophy series, this time on ethics - major frameworks and their problems, subjective vs. objective views, axiological concerns, and metaethics.

Eightieth meeting summary (2021/4/25): Group discussion on the internals of the Percent system and everyone present unanimously voted to change the Discord server usage to include a taxation system. This change will be explicated in % documentation.

Seventy-ninth meeting summary (2021/4/4): RogueGod gave a brief crash-course on electricity and electrical engineering. Useful info for talking about computers and technology in the future.

Inter's E-funeral (2021/3/30): Goodnight sweet prince.

Seventy-eighth meeting summary (2021/3/28): We did topic 7 off the list, Alien Life: Exobiology, Exoethology, and Exoethics. In exobiology we covered eyes, mouths, teeth, skin, physique (esp. circulatory system + low-G), and likelihood of some kind of neural lace. In exoethology we covered predatory impairments, interstellar travel, different possible timescales for biological and technological evolution, and different possible cultural-emotional histories. In exoethics we covered the non-intervention principle (prime directive) and why it exists, as well as how+when it was created and enforced; conclusions about stellar neighbors.

Seventy-seventh meeting summary (2021/3/14): We voted for which topic to do off the potential topics list in #announcements and topic 3 won - The Triple A Club. We gave an overview of how the world has gone from theist to atheist, in the middle of political to apolitical, and starting sexual to asexual, all within accelerating timelines and within schizophrenic capital realism. We never got to the second half of Atheism versus Apolitism and why deception leads to one and not the other, the pathology of hypocrisy regarding these, and the loss/gain of cultural structure given the loss/gain of these frameworks.

Seventy-sixth meeting summary (2021/3/7): Lighter more abstract lecture about our work in metametaphysics and the development of logical actuation and formal absolutism as a foundation for ontology, math, and physics.

Seventy-fifth meeting summary (2021/1/24): Part two of the prior lecture on Intro to Philosophy. Specifically, methods of argumentation and the criterion for epistemology; Doomsday argument used for showing how lines of reasoning can be very wrong was not used.

Seventy-fourth meeting summary (2021/1/10): Discussed social media platform design principles and ways to secure+privatize content. Mixing access modes between full anonymity and full vanity plus moderation feeds and possible currency integration were discussed among other things for game-theoretical self-moderation of communities and censorship resistance.

Seventy-third meeting summary (2020/12/20): Taught an Intro to Philosophy class (PHIL101 quarter summary) to crash-course newer people on critical reasoning, first principles, grounding, and the concept of systemic frameworks.

Seventy-second meeting summary (2020/12/13): Part one of a lecture series on comedy titled Political Comedy and Perceived Offense: Epistemics and Hermenuetics.

Seventy-first meeting summary (2020/11/15): Started with a repeat of the infosec lecture (meeting 51) from the first broker congress and questions and interactions turned into a discussion on personhood and right-bestowment. Four hours.

Seventieth meeting summary (2020/10/4): Long lecture on Public versus Private: Architecture, Anthropology, and Transhumanism. Many distinctions and the track society is taking. First recorded lecture, pretty loose narrative but interesting discussion.

Sixty-ninth meeting summary (2020/8/2): Discussion on usage and potential projects with GPT3, the movement of BTC price channels, possible uses for Chromatophore, and a little bit about the CIA Gateway Process doc and the pentagon UFO/UAC releases along with Canadian gov reports as far back as the 50's.

Sixty-eighth meeting summary (2020/6/5): Formal lecture about Bateman's principle, monkey genetics, and broader behavioral theory.

Sixty-seventh meeting summary (2020/6/7): Catching up on stuff going on in the world; talked about fighting and why it's weird that everyone is so easy to kill.

Sixty-sixth meeting summary (2020/4/26): RogueGod presented on ownership and self-actualization. Discussion on his topic found the list was not sufficient.

Sixty-fifth meeting summary (2020/4/19): Debate on planned vs. practical implementation systems for applied ethics, direct discussion of what a fire-or-flee scenario looks like, likelihoods for certain places collapsing, what is considered 'safe' during and after a collapse, why you can never be safe but you can be dangerous, and therefore why you should stay dangerous.

Sixty-fourth meeting summary (2020/3/22): WowVeryDope gave a talk on the religious non-religion of the west, power structures, and systems of influence through various classical 'big other' mechanisms.

Sixty-third meeting summary (2020/3/15): Three hours on meta-ethics, the prereqs of personhood thereof, potency of frame, and order-of-seating in worldviews.

Sixty-second meeting summary (2020/3/1): No lecture, but lots of topics WowVeryDope is writing on were discussed and of course many jokes were made. I told people to take notes as a joke but Cozmic actually did it, so here's the meeting notes lol.

Sixty-first meeting summary (2020/2/17): Went over the re-structuring of the Snerx webserver, this discord server, and the economic system and technology behind the Snuff game including: instantaneous communication (better than FTL) qua abuse of quantum mechanics, FTL material transit made available by advancements in Alcubierre's work and reduction of power requirements for related systems, sub-spatial viewing via polyphasic EM scanning, phase manipulation of observable matter into 'detuned' or out-of-phase space (also a means for explaining 'dark' matter and energy), and a long list of known genetic mutations that have easy plasmidic augmentation that allow human bodies to be radically altered in greatly advantageous ways.

Sixtieth meeting summary (2020/1/5): First meeting of the new year, had a two hour talk about the history of philosophy after delaying an hour so members could show up. No other members had shown up before we finished. Three hours late, and none of the testees tested. New rules in announcements, 2020 gunna be a big clean up year. No three strike rule, one strike and done.

Fifty-ninth meeting summary (2019/12/1): Short meeting discussing points in the future entomology lecture.

Fifty-eighth meeting summary (2019/11/24): Eight months since our last meeting, very good to come back. Lecture given by WVD titled, "What happened to the human penile bone?" Genetics, evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, meta-epistemic theory, and praxis frameworks were discussed among other things during the lecture.

Fifty-seventh meeting summary (2019/3/30): Was supposed to be about how to solve the steganography challenge hosted at https://snerx.com/SCP/ since I pulled the prize money out of the challenge. This was supposed to do work two-fold - explain crypt and steg methodologies that people are unfamiliar with and showcase problems with making these kinds of puzzles, as tools break and edits to steps occur in reverse order (as well as showcases ways to check if the puzzle maker is lying to you or not, since I was accused of this). But none of the solvers showed up; we had a small meeting on the test anonymous server instead, learned a lot there through our experiments.

Fifty-sixth meeting summary (2019/3/9): Big overview lecture about futurist and transhumanist frameworks with an accelerationist theme. Lecture notes public here.

Fifty-fifth meeting summary (2019/1/19): Talked about privacy: how security is seated in privacy and not the other way around, the metaphysical capacities and functions of privacy, and why there is ethical impetus for privacy at all levels of society.

Fifty-fourth meeting summary (2018/12/2): Dope's thesis on time was presented as a critique on Kant. A lot of other things were discussed. Mostly just having fun.

Fifty-third meeting summary (2018/11/18): WVD gave a three-hour lecture prompted by https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ about using scissor statements to implode communities and fractionalize a group of people until the group and its sequela values dissapear entirely. This incorporated all kinds of neat stuff about the metaphysics of time and government advances of technology. Then we had a five hour discussion trying to figure out Rick's dick size. He was very beligerant and did not believe in the spirit of comedy so he left the server in a fit of rage.

Fifty-second meeting summary (2018/10/6): First real meeting in a while, talked about what will replace the world reserve currency when the Dollar collapses (link). The lecture given went through the narrative arc of denying the existence of 'late-capitalism', with it being supplanted by corperatism and suggesting this is because we are still on the upswing (accelerating economics), rather than the down-swing. This was furthered with, "Capitalism didn't miss a spot," as context for the totalizing force of capital - frameworks like communism were formally explicated as not being meaningfully distinct from capital.

Fifty-first meeting summary (2018/8/25): Technical discussion of layer 3 & 4 software and networking security through distributed systems. Notes made public here.

Fiftieth meeting summary (2018/6/23): We went over a bunch of smaller points on disperate social issues designed to invert intuitions; formal proofs were given for some. The particular points were: waterboarding is not torture, women are far more visual than men, and the rate of autism and genetic defect have risen proportionately with the use of cellular devices primarily stored in pockets next to ovaries and testicles - this isn't to say cellphones cause cancer, but rather that they imbue genetic degeneracy to progeny in direct proportions.

Forty-ninth meeting summary (2018/6/17): WVD gave a lecture and discussion surrounding the notion of an a priori impossibility. What does it mean for something to be impossible in principle? Other stuff was discussed for a couple hours after.

Forty-eighth meeting summary (2018/6/4): Formal lecture (not ramblings like last time) about the Economics/Financials of a crypto-government. In particular, we looked at dynamically scaling currency that is proportionate to the number of citizens. Potential deleterious effects discussed.

Forty-seventh meeting summary (2018/5/19): Brief and loosely oriented lecture concerning the "English-speaking world" and the Gini coefficient of this world with relation to the rest of the world. Points about the distribution of American millitary bases and war-capacities were made in junction with the outsourcing of millitary functions to America by the very countries America has expanded over.

Forty-sixth meeting summary (2018/5/12): No lecture; three-hour circuitous convo about why conspiracy theorists have better ways to spend their time, then three-hour convo about The Good.

Forty-fifth meeting summary (2018/4/28): We briefly discussed the actuation of the metaphysician's role as meta-physician that Zizek employed. Then we spent a large chunk of time discussing the official formal end of the Korean war and how this could be signaling allies turning against America.

Forty-fourth meeting summary (2018/4/21): Redfoot gave a lecture on neuroscience and the problems of complexity regarding modeling the brain. This extended into problems with modeling consciousness through AGI. A running theme was, "We have no idea what the fuck is going on with the brain."

Forty-third meeting summary (2018/4/14): Talking about neuroscience and problems with AGI leading up to the lecture the next week.

Forty-second meeting summary (2018/3/31): Lecture recap on the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists, this time focused on the effects of encryption-maximization. A central point was that governments will begin to hyper-regulate but also become increasingly powerless when it comes to enforcing that regulation.

Forty-first meeting summary (2018/3/25): Lecture about the 50-year nuclear countdown to party at ground zero. We also discussed what this server is and does in more detail, for all the new people.

Fortieth meeting summary (2018/3/10): Brief lecture and discussion predicated on what Aristotle meant by his first-mover arguments; this developed into perennial problems with models of time that are either infinite or finite, as both are found to be impossible in principle.

Thirty-ninth meeting summary (2018/2/18): Pat gave a short lecture on Diderot and then discussion opened up on the views of moralists like Diderot. We later talked about pharmacology.

Thirty-eighth meeting summary (2018/2/11): Lecture on the history and transformation of the cypherpunks into the crypto-anarchist movement. Discussion of this with some direct relations to academia were made. All texts discussed are listed in the #archive channel. Here's the curated list mentioned in the meeting - link

Thirty-seventh meeting summary (2018/2/4): Discussed how psychedelics may actually make people significantly more closed minded than open, the basics of psychoanalytic theory, and whether personalities are properly categorized under it, especially given that they can change, or since all forms of pathology seem to come as concomitants.

Thirty-sixth meeting summary (2018/1/28): Talked about the second question (Isn't philosophy just after a clarification of language?) in the #diogenesis channel and Pat failed to defend his membership lol.

Thirty-fifth meeting summary (2017/1/22): Actrons came in to talk about his two articles we all read beforehand (linked in #archive). We talked about the capacities for political voyage in the near future with relation to mass surveilance and FOSS.

Thirty-fourth meeting summary (2017/1/7): Members were tricked into thinking there was required reading about tech ideology just so that when they predictably didn't read it the real lecture topic about illiteracy could be revealed lol. An argumentative arc similar to the one in Geneology of Morality was used to show the etymological inversion of the term "illiterate" from being someone who couldn't read works with large vocabularies to one who uses large vocabularies to obscure meaning; "literate" shifted to being able to correctly interpret volumes to being able to give overly simplistic explanations, e.g., "If you can't say it simply, then you must not really understand it." The discussion led to how this undermines your capacity to structure and interpret text in the first place, as a perversion of the capacity for personhood, and how this was systematic in contemporary academia.

Thirty-third meeting summary (2017/12/31): Comparative analysis between Nishida vs. Zizek regarding metaphilosophical approaches to developing an ontology from an epistemology. Broader metaphilosophical issues discussed after.

Thirty-second meeting summary (2017/12/10): Cryptocurrency true values based on adoption and technology use were discussed. The bubble of housing-auto-student loans discussed since their re-emergence after 2009; bail-ins discussed as the means to levy what bail-outs can't compete with.

Thirty-first meeting summary (2017/11/26): Spitballed questions and talking points about Cody Wilson and the crypto-anarchists; this served as practice for if we get him in here.

Thirtieth meeting summary (2017/10/29): Discussed DAPP projects and the philosophical and technological pinnings of the DNN - link

Twenty-ninth meeting summary (2017/9/24): We discussed and debated about submissions for the New Shape challenge, as well as governmental and economic architectures in general.

Twenty-eighth meeting summary (2017/8/12): We went over papers being written for journals. We discussed practical limitations to digital simulations for AGI.

Twenty-seventh meeting summary (2017/7/22): Quick overview of the three main fields of academic philosophy and the order in which they are necessarily established; three hour debate on abortion and ethics + metaphysics regarding personhood and rights.

Twenty-sixth meeting summary (2017/6/25): Information dump and debate on OpSec specific to encrypted networks and OS's, the NSA and CIA's ethics, and the black-hat fallacy (private vs. public frameworks). We also argued about abortion metaphysics after lol.

An entire year had passed at this point.

Twenty-fifth meeting summary (2017/6/11): Lecture and discussion on OpSec specific to encryption/stego, drive nuking, MAC-spoofing, cons of VPN's and proxies, nets like I2P and TOR, Tails/TENS, and zero-knowledge protocols like shadowcoin's chat.

Twenty-fourth meeting summary (2017/5/21): Short lecture on the six properties of currency (as given by Plato) and how fiat, gold, and crypto compare; talk on capitalism vs. socialism, the welfare capitalist state we have and potential social capital states.

Twenty-third meeting summary (2017/4/23): Short lecture on cryptography and steganography, history and whatnot, but also it's relavence as the most invested human intellectual labor ever, noting cryptographic networks as money sinks. Black Hat fallacy discussed and full privitization vs. full publicization discussed as result.

Twenty-second meeting summary (2017/4/9): WVD gave a lecture on whether thinking is reducible to computational states, if the meaning of a sign is determined by something in the world, and if embodiment can in some way solve the problem of how a sign acquires its meaning.

Twenty-first meeting summary (2017/3/26): Classroom styled lecture again, this time about why strong AI needs to be embodied, why it's highly likely to be non-friendly, and what the articlect war is.

Twentieth meeting summary (2017/3/19): Kids got intellectual PTSD from the detritus of asking a single question (about cryonics) that should never reasonably take the four hours it took us to ultimately not answer it. Sad.

Ninteenth meeting summary (2017/3/5): We changed our format and I think it worked a lot more efficiently. First hour was a classroom-styled lecture and the second hour was discussion/debate. The lecture was a narrative tying together the history of quantum theory, multiverse theory, the inclusion of modal realism and infinities into conrete reality, and the corruption of theoretical physics due to it.

Eighteenth meeting summary (2017/2/19): Retouched determinism and opened pseudo-original questions on the capacities for determination qua infinite recursion of deterministic knowledge. Only an hour and a half today, short and sweet, but we got a lot done.

Seventeenth meeting summary (2017/2/12): Shorter meeting today, we went over the distinction between actual & potential infinity and whether certain mathematical applications were using actual or potential infinities and what the consequences of that mean.

Sixteenth meeting summary (2017/2/5): Retouched cryonics with a new counter-example to our previous conclusion about identity of personhood that we all were without a reply to. We then had a formal debate for four hours about metaphysical principles mostly regarding determinism but also the intelligibility of the universe, and whether minds had special properties, how ethical agency worked, and if these things were cognitivist in nature or not.

Fifteenth meeting summary (2017/1/29): We agreed humanism is bad, talked briefly about Kitaro Nishida, then switched to debate about if language was subjective or objective. We finished by discussing if there were any legitimate forms of government.

Fourteenth meeting summary (2017/1/15): We demo'd the logic converter and went over problems with it. We talked breifly about 4D space (without time) and thinking in higher-dimensions, and that quickly became a debate on metaphysics. We then talked for two hours about pataphysics and non-discrete reality versus discrete reality.

Thirteenth meeting summary (2017/1/8): Recapped the embodiment of AI arguments and virtual divide of sense input for a digital render. We discussed the historical ties in sci-fi literature and how those influenced the transhumanist movement.

Twelfth meeting summary (2016/12/11): We discussed "memory plugins" and the shift of humans out of specialization. We concluded that memory plugins would remove the need for specialization but that a general education for the advancement of /skill in thought/ also known as critical reasoning would be required, and further that memory plugins may also count as a loss of person should they be unplugged.

Eleventh meeting summary (2016/11/28): We briefly talked (and were interrupted a lot by Sterling) about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and constructed languages meant to counter it like Lojban or Interlingua, concluding that the hypothesis was flat out wrong, and that it was backwards- that capacities for thought puts a limit on language, not the other way around.

Tenth meeting summary (2016/11/20): We talked about the papers we are writing as a Table Society, namely about AI Bio Sim and Pataphysics. We also talked at length, about three or four hours, about Cryonics and many many many cases and issues with metaphysical identity of personhood, interelating the two by asking the initial question of whether or not the person that is cryogenically frozen is the same person as the person that emerges from the other side of the refrigerator. Some heavy refences to cases in the book by the guy that formalized the field were used (book linked in #archive channel).

Ninth meeting summary (2016/10/16): We concluded that individuality isn't lost on any scale of collective consciousness, granting that it still may be a terrible existence. "Hive minds" could lose individuality and therefore could 'kill' the people that enter it. We also talked about the ontological conditions of formal logic.

Eighth meeting summary (2016/9/10): We talked about metaphysics and Frog Twitter.

Seventh meeting summary (2016/8/13): We talked about pros and cons of quant. A pro was that it offered an objective basis to spatial relations rather than a relativistic one, but the cons were that it destroyed the rest of metaphysics lol. This thread in particular was discussed (link).
We also talked about how gravity isn't actually an attraction force, or a fundemental force at all, but is really a warping of space.

Sixth meeting summary (2016/8/6): Living without other people is ruled to be meaningless.

Fifth meeting summary (2016/7/23): Talked about how transexualism is principally impossible but trans-specism isn't and editing the germline would allow for that, a progeny without genetic defect. When presented with issues of posterity, it would be wrong to actively choose to enforce suffering on them, so to alleviate the suffering is to be in the right, which is why eugenics has ethical imperative behind it. Also we talked a lot about metaphysics and identity.

Fourth meeting summary (2016/7/16): Probation meeting.

Third meeting summary (2016/7/9): All agreed existentialism is social cancer, the nazi science programs should have been allowed to continue, and transhumanism will mark the start of meaningful history not the end of meaning from subjects.

Second meeting summary (2016/7/2): We got much deeper into what higher intelligence really is and whether or not there's a hard or soft divide between machine intelligence and our intelligence, whether creativity is required for personhood, etcetera. For the next meeting we'll tie up some of the loose ends and hopefully move onto genetics and what human engineering would mean.

First meeting summary (2016/6/25): Added some rules based on the discussion in the first meeting, you can see them here - https://snerx.com/diogenesis