A Deal with the Devil | Hacker News Reader

A Deal with the Devil

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The whole concept of the devil is problematic. It prevents reconciliation of self and denies us the chance to do better. It cheapens choice and absolves wrongdoers of responsibility for choosing correct action. Blaming the devil for incorrect action is merely following sin with sin and hiding it all behind a lie. Stand up, take responsibility for your actions and do better. You are not a child to hide behind your mother’s skirts and blame an invisible made up evil for your actions. You are a self, responsible for your choices and accountable for your actions. There is no devil whispering in your ear, that voice is you. But the angel on your other shoulder is also you and you alone get to choose.

Some adaptions of Faust deal with this theme exactly (ex. Kamelot's Epica and The Black Halo, or the film The Devil's Advocate). In these adaptions, Mephistopheles makes a deal with Faust for earthly bliss or power in exchange for Faust's soul upon death. Faust willingly accepts, then chooses to further pursue this power or bliss at some personal expense, a decision he later regrets, but blames Mephistopheles for. Mephistopheles then generously offers a genuine way to alleviate his loss, which Faust distrusts and declines, and he continues to suffer while blaming Mephistopheles for the consequences of his own free choices. Eventually, after much internal conflict, Faust accepts he alone is to blame for his loss and suffering, and at that moment he is given a second chance to choose differently.

There is no proverbial Devil. But there are people who are willing to "do Devils work".

So we should not "blame the Devil". We should blame the people who do the Devil's work or let it continue.

For instance slavery. Was it Devil that enslaved all the kidnapped people? No, it was Devil's co-conspirators, the slave-owners.

"Devil" is a social concept and construct, and a very important one. It's not much different from asking "What would Jesus Do?"

> It prevents reconciliation of self and denies us the chance to do better.

It's also a way to forgive yourself, and others, more easily. Don't get me wrong, I think it's fantastic to take responsibility, and I believe society would be so much better for it. But in some circumstances, some people are simply bound to fail: there are limits to how perfect one can be.

I suppose we can set aside the special case where genuinely malign & vicious devils would really exist, and be in position of truly wrecking havoc!

> There is no devil whispering in your ear, that voice is you.

In general, I agree with you. But there is some nuance here. Some of us really do have devils whispering in our ears. We do not always have the agency to make correct decisions.

Responsibility takes different forms. Somebody took my body and I'm left holding the consequences. No one is going to clean up this mess and I have to deal with it. Personally, I was shocked how many of friends understood what happened and offered their support. Those that understood made no attempt to "hold me responsible" for my actions.

The problem is omniscience. With that, not only do you need a villain to take the blame, you also need a special ability called free-will that gets around the omniscience issue. Otherwise the only conclusion is that your god is both good and evil and chooses who gets to experience which.

The concept also gives a great outline of a shifty target to be wary of that must be out manoeuvred regularly. Full control is great except when you are fooled into thinking you are in full control. Reward vectors out of our control rewire us way too easily if we don't stay wary of their power.

You seem to be claiming that having a personification of evil that gives malicious advice also necessarily implies a lack of free will to be able to reject that advice.

As an occultist, I would recommend you to read The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial magic and realize that blaming the devil can be highly rational; for were one bad at articulating themselves, would it make sense to blame themselves as whole, or the parts of themselves that is related to articulation directly? The jock who blames their lazy intellectual spirit for turning into a devil will not fallaciously believe that because they are bad at academic because they are a jock. You may ALSO want to learn about the internal family systems theory and k. sotala.

Demonology: The non-science that involves programming one's own consciousness using techniques developed in computational regard for the nervous system.

Demonlogy most often has a theme of destroying one's enemies: Precisely because you separate your consciousness into small spirits you become able strategically CRUSADE the enemies of yer Agency within.

That will not apply to those who know not what they want, EG purpose of life; values; virtue ethics etc. similar systems. One who has no agency will not have any power within.

Traditional christian interpretation makes no sense to me whatsoever unless one believes they are god; but the bible actually is perfect, for let the religion and spiritualism be God and let yourself be Jesus, and then you kill god as whole, EG all three parts like Nietsche; then you will be able to raise Jesusesque!

This line of makes reincarnation myths insane, because analogy then is; your decide your values and you die that is decide them again and this repeats forever such that the only choice is to not to decide the values. I have not thought about this view yet...

I was intrigued not so much by the TFA but about the painting used to illustrate it. That figure behind the two chess players is not a devil as typically depicted, it is instead an angel, a symbol of heaven and almost the exact opposite of an evil devil. Instead, the devil, Mephistopheles, is the player on the left.

It seems the artist, Moritz Retzsch, painted several versions of this image [1]. The painting(s) have gone by several names, such as "The Chess Players", "The Game of Life", or "Checkmate". More interesting is the story that a grandmaster examined the painting and discovered that the player on the right, looking defeated and forlorn, can still win the game! I have not verified this, but the story goes that the grandmaster demanded the gallery change the name of the painting from "Checkmate" to something else [2].

[1]. https://www.one-more-move-chess-art.com/MoritzRetzsch.html

[2]. https://haventoday.org/blog/closer-look-checkmate/

It would help to know the FEN. I can see the picture, that there seems to be more black pieces on the board than white, but I don't know what pieces or where on the board they are; the picture does not make that clear.

A Pyrrhic tradeoff.

[Compare to Bell Labs]

Google had as part of it's origin myth done a deal with the Devil. The warding spells they had to invoke to channel some of that largesse from advertiser/advertisee exploitation into marginally useful AI. Also, that deal demands that nothing meaningful can come out of GoogleX unless you use a liberal dose of that sociopathic magic dust ("self-driving tech")

Is AI a proverbial deal with the devil?

No, but it’s adjacent to one in the form of where the data comes from.

The modern practice of trading all our data and privacy for free services and convenience is definitely one.

The devil just hasn’t come to collect yet. When we get a more authoritarian government that’s when the bill will come due.

William Gibson's Neuromancer makes that analogy, at least. From the scene where Case is apprehended by the "Turing Police" who regulate the human-level AIs of the setting:

>`You are worse than a fool,' Michelle said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. `You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?'

Is a deal with any god, even a benevolent one (like a Culture Mind), a deal with the devil?

On HN I've seen the reading that Culture humans are pretty much housecats to the Culture Minds. Is that a mainstream reading, or fringe?

Seen it a couple of times on /r/theculture, once or twice on spacebattles as well. The lack of purpose in the Culture, of meaning of life, spawns in some readers all kind of coping mechanisms.

Most sane take was that the relationships between the Minds and humans is like the relationship between grown-up children and their elderly parents.

Thanks so much for pointing out that subreddit. I've read and re-read Banks' novels and now I can read about them every now and then.

>On HN I've seen the reading that Culture humans are pretty much housecats to the Culture Minds.

HN is the only place I've seen that take. It may be present in the books of the series I haven't read yet, but I feel like it was mostly one person's interpretation that gets repeated here.

No it's not, I agree, except I think they're worse off than housecats. Not that cats have it the best: https://gwern.net/review/cat "Cat Psychology & Domestication: Are We Good Owners?"

> On HN I've seen the reading that Culture humans are pretty much housecats to the Culture Minds. Is that a mainstream reading, or fringe?

I think it's a pretty mainstream reading. I've seen it a lot, and, IMHO, it'd be pretty hard to interpret those books any other way. IIRC, there's even one other species in that has that view, and chose to use "accelerated copies" of themselves to command their ships instead of AI, to avoid that fate.

It has been a while since I read any of the books but I feel like this is a thing that is explicitly noted in the text of the books here and there. It's certainly in "A Few Notes On The Culture", a post Banks made to rec.arts.sf.written back in 1994:

"Humans and independent drones (the Culture's non-android individual AIs of roughly human-equivalent intelligence) are unnecessary for the running of the starships, and have a status somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites."

(taken from a copy found at http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm)

What's not so mainstream [knowledge] is that housecats are de facto sacred to Iain Banks' millieu (as well as to the otherwise iconoclastic Mohammedans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_cats)

Ok, I(M)B himself has compared lesser beings in the Culture to peasants

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/a-few-questi...

https://www.burninghou.se/p/the-naming-of-cats-and-an-offeri...

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euIrO9spk2A

Taisho guardian Kota

https://youtu.be/ZMQLWKZjsbc

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/goblin-cat-finale--37703580006...

Interview with the novelizer pointing out some of the Chinese elements

https://www.bookbang.jp/review/article/734915

> 何かを禁ずることで力を引き出す。「形・真・理」は、禁じているわけではないですが、条件が揃わなければ力が発揮できない。制約を与えることで、力、強大な力が発揮されるんだ、と捉えています。

That's why I find myself drawn to the algebraic — in hopes of drawing out some unreasonable (monstrous?) effectiveness...

> "The syntax is the soul. Study the soul to know the syntax. Evil mind, evil syntax". —not Toranosuke Shimada

https://www.theonion.com/kitten-thinks-of-nothing-but-murder...

Cats as (Arab/syriac) guest demon/god of algebra? (It's just inconvenient that they are also associated with category theory)

Brings to mind the Atiyah (who was Lebanese) quote.

At least as far as typesetting commutative diagrams goes, could category theory be the revenge of geometry?

Ahh yes, LLMs ( preneutered!) may cause a resurgence of diagramming (used in vengeance)

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2023/11/18/formalizing-the-pr...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40978033

Given that gov ai is a foregone conclusion that no civilian had free will over the existence of, deciding whether to admire any civ ai attempts is just a measure of how liberating or disruptive and regretful you think civ ai could be.

Nope. It's the classic "disruption" aka. mowing down the Garden of Eden, turning it into a golf course, and using the last supply of clean water as a latrine.

(the Garden of Eden being the collective scientific and creative output of the whole of humanity so far)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37055388

My own take on AI as a short SF story co-written by AI.

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