You all must know how grief besets
us at the memory
of bygone times of happiness.
The Marble Cliffs call thee.

My review of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs became a finalist in the Astral Codex Ten 2023 book review contest, and now that the anonymous vote is closed, I can say that. So I got the opportunity to give Scott a link he’d post. This is to introduce my Big Writing Project, and explain why it may be especially interesting to ACX readers in particular.

Although the Sermons are far from finished, I have shared the finished parts with various people and groups in order to get feedback and improve the text – and also to learn how they affect readers and listeners. Here is what I have learned about that so far.

tl/dr: This article

• summarizes what is known about ecstatic and mystical experiences,
• argues that in order to end (supernaturalist) religion, it is necessary to have a nonreligious appreciation of these experiences and
• claims these experiences have specific advantageous effects that make them worth having for atheists.

It also contains sex, drugs and Sufi whirling.

Vast waves of researchers must crash
on cliffs of ignorance
to grind them down into a stash
of knowledge fine as sands.

I first saw automatically generated poems in 1998. They were randomly arranged picks from a corpus of clichéd goth lines, clearly terrible and presented as a parody on terrible goth poetry. I had run into them because I had just started to study IT and this was one of the first examples of CGI programming that I had happened to find. I played with it for longer than I might have, because I was writing terrible goth poems.

Anyway, I did know about the Turing test (where a machine passes if it cannot be reliably distinguished from a human) and I knew machines were getting better at seeming like humans, because my dad was having way too much fun coding a chatbot and pointing out how it was better than ELIZA. Those terrible poems seemed like the same kind of thing, where machines would inevitably get better at seeming human. And poems are clearly easier to fake than conversation. So, it has been twenty years. Did the machines get better at poetry? Oh yes. Oh hell yes.