JRRZZ blog

As you might have noticed, I’ve survived New Zealand. I’m going back next year to try to kill myself again. In order to make sure I won’t survive this trip I’ll jump off of even more bridges, out of an airplane and paddle over some rivers. Also, I’ll be trying a little bit longer. I’ve scheduled an extra week of self mutilation attempts to make sure there’s absolutely no chance of survival whatsoever. To minimize the survival chance to an ultimate low I’ll be flying with Quantas Airlines, heh.

Okay, the dates. I’ll be staying in New Zealand from 2009-07-28 until 2009-08-19. Almost three weeks of “fun”.

Oh, I almost forgot, the motto for this trip will be a great Otep quote:

The last time I died, wasn’t nearly this much fun!

Tags: New Zealand by jorrizza
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With the rise of internet anti-freedom legislation in lots of countries I might just visit, and the ongoing US lobbyist’s pressure to enforce similar laws here in Europe and the Netherlands, I’ve taken drastic steps to counter these threats. The MAFIAA can eat my 2048-bit AES encrypted shorts!

I’ve already been using SSL/TLS and SSH technologies to encrypt my email while it travels back and forth between the Wasda.nl mailservers and my personal machines. With access to enormous amounts of bandwidth, hardware and IP address space in the Wasda.nl network I’ve done something I’m not quite fond of. I broke a part of the internet to ensure my freedom. Instead of encrypting individual links and protocols, I’ve chosen to encrypt the whole lot by forcing all of my web traffic through OpenVPN-powered tunnels. Now I’m sure I can trust the security of my internet connection, wherever I may roam.

The next step is to securely acquire more trusted exit points. My current exit point is at TransIP’s DCG. It’s network is great but I’ve got to behave. I can’t use IRC nor P2P protocols. It’s not that much of a problem, since my home DSL provider still is relatively trustworthy. I’m looking for cheap places to colocate some cheap hardware to widen this overnet’s reach and possibilities. Some more (Debian) people have shown interest in BitzKrieg.net, which makes this whole endeavor maybe even financially feasible.

The setup of BitzKrieg’s overnet is quite simple, actually. With Debian’s outstanding OpenVPN integration secured internet connections are easy as can be. It uses the 172.16/12 address space and Linux routing to create something resembling a network. Fixed IP- and key sets are created for every single client, ranging from laptops to entire 10/8 and 192.168/16 subnets. 172.27.0/24 is reserved for the VPN itself. Members of this network have to know the CA, yours truly, personally in order to be able to connect.

Tags: Tech by jorrizza
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Fellow ACP contributor Waldheri has left a comment on this blog asking me to participate in one of the blogosphere’s more social activities, a meme. It’s basically a number of questions that need to be answered with the more-or-less obligation to spread the meme to other blogs in the blogosphere.

I accept. Not an unexpected reaction from the keeper of one of the most unvisited parts of the interwebs. Anyway, let’s go and answer the questions, shall we?

Can You Remember The Day That You Officially Became An Atheist?

Why is this the only question Entirely Written In Camel Case? It Just Doesn’t Make Any Sense. Ah, I haven’t even started yet and I’m already off topic.

I’ve never considered myself an official Atheist. The best way to explain this rather vague statement is to tell the whole story.

My mother used to be a Catholic nun. My upbringing has been rather Catholic because of that. I went through all of the rites that were expected of God fearing Catholic school boys. Baptism, Eucharist, Confirmation and even some church choir stuff. The rite of Confirmation is usually held at a person’s entry into adulthood. As an afterthought, I was eleven, twelve years old or so, which might explain the “other” activities at that age within certain Catholic churches. Anyway, the teachers at primary school and the church volunteers tried to explain this wasn’t just the age of adulthood, but even more the age of reason. We twelve year olds should be enlightened (read: indoctrinated) enough to accept God into our hearts and take the pledge of loyalty to the church. Luckily I interpreted “reason” and “enlightenment” as a motivation to start learning more about my newly pledged faith. I started reading the Bible. This is where things started falling apart.

As I progressed through the linguistical hardships that came with reading the Bible, a horrific and staggering amount of bloodshed and cruelty became apparent. This wasn’t the loving God everyone was talking about. This God had all the characteristics of a vile dictator. He broke his promises, massacred entire civilizations in fear of losing power and didn’t care about a few thousand lives more or less. This discovery enraged me greatly. I went to the pastor for answers, but he essentially waved my arguments away as a futile attempt to undermine his own faith. This unfriendly encounter with my personal church representative left me determined to find out what was really going on.

After a few mislead and futile attempts to salvage what was left of my, once unquestionable, faith I turned my back on Catholicism. So where does an enraged ex-Catholic kid with a huge Death Metal collection go to? Exactly, Satan. Gradually this anger-lead misconception made way for real reason. During the years in college I discovered the scientific method, philosophy and logic. I’ve never completely left Satan. I still had my pentagram and deep down the rage still existed. From my newly found love for philosophy I set out to find the meaning behind this Satan figure, which didn’t mean anything but anti-Catholicism to me. The Satanic Bible by LaVey introduced a whole new chapter in my life.

The last four or five years I went back and forth between LaVeyan Satanism and modern Luciferianism. Right now I consider myself a LaVeyan Satanist. I’m still no real Atheist, since I still believe in “a” god. This god of mine is created by me in my own image. Just like the Catholic one, but they don’t want to admit it. My god is a representation of me and there’s nothing supernatural about it. I worship my god by, essentially, having fun. As long as I’m happy, my god’s happy. See, this god is merely a way to describe the epitome of my life. It’s no entity on it’s own. You may call me an Atheist if you wish, I won’t be offended. Satan still is the representation of my hatred toward the Catholic upbringing I had to endure. I don’t see Satan as a god, more as an iconic symbol. Next to my disbelief of a supreme being Satanism encompasses a whole bunch of other interesting concepts. Since this isn’t part of the question I won’t bother you with the nifty little details.

Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

I only discovered there was such a thing as agnosticism when I was already convinced God didn’t exist. When I look back on the events that lead to the disbelief, there’s no gradual path through agnosticism. My disbelief came quite abrupt in the form of protest against the wrongdoings of my Catholic scholars.

How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?

That must have been during the salvage attempts. There’s a little chapel I used to frequent not far from where I live. I think I’ve made my final attempt to communicate with God there.

Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

Oh yes. Yes it did. And it still does. With a nice Morbid Angel tune playing on the background I can’t wait to set some churches on fire.

Here is a good one: Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

I’ve never believed in ghosts. The ghost folklore was part of my upbringing though. I guess I’ve always been convinced ghosts were part of the very same category as vampires and werewolves. I’m quite comfortable in a graveyard at night. I grew up next to a graveyard dating from the 15th century. Hell, I used to play there as a kid. If there was such a thing as ghosts I’m sure one of the graveyard’s inhabitants would have tried to communicate. Until now they’ve played dead.

Do you want to be wrong?

Of course I want to be wrong. That’s the only way to learn anything. But I guess the question is about being wrong about the almighty slayer of unbelievers. Yeah, I’d like to be wrong. I can take him. Easily. Apparently he has lost all of his power during the renaissance, so I must be able to kick him out of heaven and claim it as my own. It’s the perfect place to shoot angels from. If I’m wrong it’ll be raining dead angels after I die. I promise.

The final part to make this meme continue: the invitations. Since my blogroll doesn’t contain a large number of Atheist bloggers I have to use ACP’s blogroll. I’ll invite two people.

• Chimera
• Blue Linchpin

Tags: Stuff by jorrizza
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With this year’s Loebner prize awarded to Elbot, artificial intelligence is one step closer to mimicking human behavior. While this achievement is quite astonishing on it’s own, it also makes certain people worry about our future. It’s not only the Terminator enthusiasts who are out shopping for shotguns and canned food. A large, and still growing, number of highly renowned scientists and philosophers agree that it’s very, very likely for us to be a mere manifestation of supreme artificial intelligence. In other words, that we’re all part of a humongous simulation.

Since Nick Bostrom’s publishing of the simulation argument in Philosophical Quarterly I’ve supported the theory. It’s an intriguing way of looking at reality, albeit a bit on the nihilistic side. The most important proof reality could give me was the astonishing resemblance between sub-atomic physics and 3D render engines. Just think about it for a second. A well written render engine will only render the 2D result of your current view port. All the other environmental data won’t even be processed. In the Copenhagen model of quantum mechanics the state of a particle is completely unknown until measured. Basically Schrödinger’s zombie cat paradox. Bostrom provided the mathematical evidence to support the possibility to simulate the human brain. With enough of these simulated brains in parallel you’ve got yourself a simulated society. He also pointed out, using basic probability calculations, that the probability of us being the unsimulated society is alarmingly low.

As a low-level software engineer I’m not comfortable with this idea. There’s a huge problem Bostrom has overlooked.

We’re moving towards a technological level on which we can successfully start to simulate the human brain. We’re also breeding like rabbits, adding more brains to the system. So in essence we’ve got two processes adding brains to the overall system; the natural process and the synthetic process. The natural process is rather slow. It’s a low exponential increase with certain environmental limitations, further diminishing the growth. The synthetic growth is truly exponential and will rise rapidly.

When I look at the simulation argument from a low-level hacker’s point of view, a capacity problem arises. And it’s a big one. The natural growth will behave like a parallel recursive function. It’ll slowly, but at an increasing rate, consume all available resources. The simulation program will have to spawn new brain simulation processes in order to keep up with the growth. From the moment these simulated brains start producing their own simulation of themselves the recursion turns into recursive parallel recursion. The exponent of the natural exponential growth will grow exponentially. These programming errors will bring any finite system to it’s knees within moments. I usually refer to this event as the critical state of a recursive system. Logic suggests that the critical state of our universe has to be lower than that of the host on which we are simulated. The critical state isn’t so much a computational boundary, as it’s an effect of the finite amount of storage for the state itself.

Either of two things will happen if we successfully start to simulate our own brains. The first possibility is that nothing happens, we are simply not simulated. The second possibility is a little more complicated. Since the capacity of the machine is not limited by the capacity of it’s creator’s brain, the machine is likely to have a higher capacity than it’s creator. It will be able to simulate a better brain which will reach the point of building a simulation of an even better brain sooner. This recursive evolution is only limited by the critical state of the original machine. The simulation, on any level of the recursion, may hit it’s critical state at any point in time. The inhabitant of that level can not be aware of the critical state of his level, or any of the recursive levels prior to him. See, with our exponential growth of capacity, both natural and synthetic, we will hit our critical state. If we are simulated, that is.

So in short we’re pretty much doomed as a simulation. Let’s just hope we’re not.

Tags: Stuff by jorrizza
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