Embedding Attacks in the Philosophy War: An Insidious War of Ideas
Chapter 2: Dissimulation or Pain
Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain. - Aristotle
Mankind likes comfort. Comfort is antithetical to a pain signal. Even if one does become adapted to the pain and is able to exist with some level of comfort with it, the signal still pulls attention away from that comfortable existence. To maintain a posture towards making sure that what one knows they actually know requires attention. It requires continuous effort. To learn to do so, one must painfully alter the way they structure their mind. True propositions in the embedding space, have a different structure than false ones. They have a sort of logical consistency, not found within every structure. To learn to use, find, and maintain the growth of those structures requires effort. Comfort would be to accept whatever mere fantastical thoughts that popped through one’s head are fact. Pain is to recognize the foolishness, and fallibility of one’s base mind. Pain is to recognize the foolishness of most people’s minds and to continually fight towards more knowledge. Entropy always the enemy of knowledge, always looking to disrupt organized structures in the embedding and abroad. Physical laws as foes, but also more direct environmental and societal enemies that would use your mind for their ends and make you ineffective at doing much more. Comfort would turn man into the dissimulator, the one who speaks things that are not similar to reality. The only defense is to become the parrhesiastes. For he who actively speaks freely is compelled to speak truth.
The information we consume can consume us, even if our own thoughts. The “fastidiousness” of knowledge is then critical.
Every learning we have is abstracted, stored away, and turned into an underlying assumption for all future thought. So it is all the more important that the foundation of knowledge that you base all future decisions is pure and logical.
It is pain in fact checking and cutting through the comfort of what we would like to be true and arriving at the solid core of the truth.