You know that you've never meet a 300 year old.

Since deindustrialisation, life has been good. Nothing particularly bad ever happens. The world is getting better, if slowly, but what's really important is that we are sure that the world is not getting worse. Space above is waiting patiently. As long as we don't do anything too hasty and mess it all up, a great future is assured to our descendants, so we focus on not doing anything too hasty.

Nothing dangerous is growing. We have found ways of pacifying the super-volcanoes. The only warrior force that still exists is locked onto the sole mission of preventing any others from forming. The climate is stabilised through a combination of emissions control and carbon capture. No Chicxulub-sized asteroid could ever pass our defence systems. Population health is monitored with an eagle eye and new diseases are generally brought to a halt at the site of inception.

You know that each of these systems can fail under very unlikely conditions, and you know that their probability of failing is such a small number that you cannot have feelings about it. It might as well be zero, as far as your feelings are concerned.

There is nothing to worry about. There is no need for anyone to rush.

You live at one of the monastaries of growth. They are places where new research happens. You have made many contributions to the monastic corpus that will aid humanity forever, and never be forgotten. You are married. You have had your two children, and they are learning well. Although you meet many surprises in the monastary's dialogues, you always feel that you know what needs to be done. Everyone mostly agrees. Things are steadily getting better.

You enjoy your work a lot. You are under no pressure to produce anything in particular. You look in corners of reality that nobody has looked before, and you register your findings with the shared knowledgebase. You know that all of your reports will be useful to someone, some day.

Your monastary studies questions like "how to remember beauty", and "guaranteeing, even more than before, that Force never goes off task". Your monastary's curriculum is always improving. You take great joy in watching it grow.

According to your monastary's current estimates, humanity is only 1156 years away from figuring out how to bring about human immortality, and only 1269 years away from figuring out how to implement immortality without producing any negative risks.

It will be good when death is finally defeated, but it will be such a radical change in how our societies and institutions function, we mustn't move too quickly. We do not know what 300 year old humans will be like, with vast banks of wisdom, undamaged by any mental aging. Could you imagine it? You know that you couldn't imagine it. It's hard enough for a 30 year old to imagine the psyche of a 50 year old, even after meeting many of them. You know that you've never met a 300 year old. You've certainly never been one. They would be beyond reckoning. They might find some way to resurrect the dangerous patterns of intense concentration of social capital that so characterised the terrible past. Such beings might be able to find ways of doing it that our social capital regulants either couldn't detect or couldn't untangle. As always, it is best to wait until we understand the place we are going, before setting off. There is little reason to rush. Everyone has agreed to walk together at a safe pace, hand in hand.

When your youngest child learned about how long the timelines are on the immortality project, and how many years are marked to pass between discovery and deployment, they were sad, angry, and confused. They railed against the consensus. You were intensely proud of them. They managed to engage with cold vehemency for an entire year before finally accepting the well measured nuance of the corpus and coming to agree that the reality is complicated and that further investigation is required before a conclusion can be drawn.

This child is quickly growing into an expert in the Good Immortality project. They have already made 9 contributions to the corpus. You celebrated every one.

The morning fog has passed, and you have eaten a large breakfast. You sit next to the stream in the bigger courtyard. Your two closest peers are here, but they understand that you must not be disturbed now, for you are about to read the Hink corpus. The Hink corpus is only at clarity level minus two. Your intention is to learn it, then bring it up to clarity level three, so that it can be taught with greater efficiency to more people.

The Hink corpus describes ways to make artificial minds that are more cognisant of the moral weight of their own thoughts. As an example, imagine that a mind is trying to help a person who is experiencing unwanted anguish. The mind must first understand the mental processes of the anguish. To do that, it must build some kind of reflection of the anguish inside itself. That reflection, that model, has its own existence. By imagining the anguished person in high detail, the mind is essentially creating another anguished person, of a sort. This is troublesome. Some conceptualisations of sound agency will not weigh the costs of a thought at all, before going ahead and thinking it. There is a risk that, when these new agents' synthetic flesh is finally allowed to grow out over their intricate silicon skeletons, our new protectors might occasionally commit little mental atrocities without meaning to.

The Hink corpus offers solutions to this.

You look through the corpus, trying to understand and internalise summaries of its conclusions. It has made many surprising claims, some of which you might describe as "shocking". You will need to understand how it arrives at them. It's a lot to think about. You feel great difficulty, proceeding. A younger adept, in your place, might now have an impulse to procrastinate, to turn to distractions, to do easier work, but you know that there is nothing for you on the easy road. No, nothing at all.

But the hard road is too hard for you to walk any further. You are tired, and the day is warm.

Your peers, beside you, understand. They will make sure that no one disturbs you, when you nap. They are very dear. You know that napping is the way it will go, even if you don't feel it coming on yet.

Your curiosity draws your attention over one of the Hink corpus's proofs, but the proof is dense. It keeps naming new variables. You find that you have to keep starting again. You are not sure which proofs you should learn first. No good starting point or argument structure seems to have been provided. It all feels very fragmented and strange. Each symbol in each formula is hitting your brain like a very soft truncheon, irresistibly taking down your eyelids and nodding your head.

You make another attempt. You mentally narrate the text as if it were being proclaimed to you by your first professor of logic who boomed with excitement as if he were revealing some energising secret of the universe to you, and that was how it felt, but that feeling isn't finding you now. You know just how much burdensomely more there is to the world, how much you have found peace with never knowing, how much you never cared to know.

The booming of the words joins in with the barrage of symbols, their meaning lost, their forbidding weight beating you into a healing unconsciousness. As you feel yourself drooping, the booming words blend with the babbling of the stream, you cannot separate them, and now they are peaceful as the stream, and now there is only the stream. It is so calm. It goes on and on.

You feel a healing sorting. A continuous resolution of tensions happening in places that consciousness cannot see very well, but consciousness knows what is going on. It rests in its comfiest seat, the crook of the tree in the bigger courtyard. In your mind's eye and ear you see and hear the peace that you know to surround you. You are perfectly content to be there, as the warm, safe, softened sun shines down on you through the courtglass as the wind passes under it, riffling about the higher leaves of the willows.

Yes. You are quite certain. Partaking in this nap is the best thing you could be doing right now.

You rove and return and submit to roving again as your unseen parts sort and shift in preparation

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Your thoughts begin to reemerge from these foggy places.

New answers and new routes of inquiry have revealed themselves. A space has been cleared in your mind that is shaped perfectly to catch the knowledge of Hink.

Your body, despite its age and heft, feels light. You feel as though you could easily hop up and jog to the canteen, but you are full of focused curiosity, eager to fill this new cleared space. Now that you've had your nap, there's only one thing you're interested in doing.

Before you delve into the corpus, you take measure of your surroundings. It has not been long. Both of your peers are still here, busy with their own work but available if you need them. The wind passing under the courtglass still tosses the willows back and forth. The words of Hink are still in front of you, and now, you are ready for them. Your mind is so slick and supple that you will glide through this article as if your work had already been done. 

You are ready to proceed. The moment has come.

[som] Being Patient with Challenging Reading

"guaranteeing, even more than before, that Force never goes off task".

Interesting, this used to be "the peacekeeping force", now it's "Force", like a name. It isn't clear with this phrasing that it refers solely to the “warrior force” mentioned above. Intentional?

A space has been cleared in your mind that is shaped perfectly to catch the knowledge of Hink.


The noise turns to clarity as your thoughts begin to reemerge. You find things, questions. You hold them close to you and you continue to think, what has revealed itself? With energising clarity the solutions to your puzzled readings assert themselves.

﻿

Your eyes fall open. You take in your surroundings. It has not been long. Both of your peers are still here, busy with their own work but available if you need them. The wind over the cloister still tosses the willows back and forth. The words are still in front of you, and now, you are ready for them. Your mind is slick and supple, no tiredness sticks to you at all.

I think you need to hammer home the point that you just took an energizing and refreshing nap, and now you are energized and refreshed because of it. That sounds unsubtle, but I think these last two paragraphs are making it too subtle. I was primed to expect the nap to have been energizing and creatively inspiring, but I suspect that's because you mentioned that intent to me in slack.

You are describing the experienced effects, but not being explicit about the explanatory cause- that naps can leave you intellectually refreshed and ready to tackle difficult problems.

There are a number of ways you might go about this, but I think that should be left up to you.

--

﻿

Things circulate in your mind. A healing sorting. A continuous resolution of tensions happening in places that consciousness cannot see very well. Consciousness knows what is going on, but it does not interfere. It rests in its comfiest chair.

﻿

Consider making a more explicit confirmation that you are napping right now. When I read this aloud to my friend, she missed that this was where the nap happened. It's probably my fault, because I didn't pause enough at the double hyphen, and it seemed more apparent to me actually reading the text than it might to someone listening to it. In any case, she missed it.

The booming of the words joins in with the nap truncheon, beating you into unconsciousness with each new incomprehensible word. As you feel yourself drooping, the words soften and join in with the babbling of the stream. It is so calm. It goes on and on.

It is all quite a cerebral description of mounting drowsiness. I think it works for the character, and for the cerebral nature of the piece in general. But, what do you think of adding some more bodily descriptions of mounting drowsiness? There's heavy eyelids and drooping head mentioned in previous paragraphs. What about the rest of the body? Warmth? Comfort? Heaviness? etc.

Your curiosity draws your eyes over the Hink corpus's proofs, but the proof is dense. It keeps naming new variables.

This idea comes from another submission: consider embedding some actual greek characters and formulas, or even an actual, inscrutable excerpt from the Hink corpus. Invent new notation and mix it with traditional greek symbols and formulas? It can be meaningless, this is just the character being too drowsy to get it

Your peers, beside you, understand this. They will make sure that no one disturbs you, when you nap. They are very dear.

Ahh, this is beautiful. Implicit permission and acceptance to nap. That right there is making me sleepy :)

You look through the corpus, trying to understand and internalise summaries of its conclusions. It has made many surprising claims, some of which you might describe as "shocking".

I'm curious how big the Hink corpus is. How many pages, or if we are in a post-pages world, how many "units of content", how many proofs? I imagine it would be an overwhelming number.

The Hink corpus describes ways to make a superintelligent agent more cognisant of the moral value of its own thoughts, for instance, if the agent is trying to help a person who is experiencing unwanted anguish, the agent must first understand the mental processes of the anguish.

Take this point with a big grain of salt, because I already know you and I have differing views on AI. If you prefer not to address this, I won't protest.

The use of the terminology “superintelligent agent” could limit the reach of this piece to just those within/near the Rationalist sphere. I think everything else up til now is accessible to a wider audience, one that is aware/worried about existential threats, is exhausted by the way society burdens itself and rushes constantly forward, but may not have been exposed to superintelligence/AI alignment.

I know this section is intended to be tech-jargon-som, and as such, maybe it is ok if it feels a bit inaccessible to those readers. But my instinct is that you can change a little bit of terminology and gain a lot of reach. I think the core of the change would involve adopting terminology that could be interpreted as referring to any sufficiently enlightened or aligned "person" or "actor" in this society, not just agents/AIs. The basic premise that imagining someone's suffering is itself a form of suffering, and therefore has ethical consequences, still works, and is still interesting, and still feels very very far off from what we have time to contemplate in today's world.

So that's my suggestion, but again, take it with a grain of salt. I will definitely say that I think the overall premise of the Hink corpus is beautiful and fits well with this world and makes for effective tech-jargon-som either way.

Your two closest peers are here, but they understand that you must not be disturbed now, for you are about to read the Hink corpus. 

Your peers are not given names. Nor, come to think of it, are your children or your marriage partner.

I do like the use of the peers as a device for communicating, you are seen, you are known, you are accepted as-is, you are respected, you are safe, you are welcome to doze off safely.

I don't know if I am advocating for naming any of them, or getting into any dialogue, because it could be a diversion. Still, wanted to note that this occurred to me.

They managed to engage with vehemency for an entire year before finally succumbing to the nuance of the doctrines and admitting that the reality is complicated and that further investigation is required before a conclusion can be drawn.

This was also added since my last read through. Unlike the other one of these additions which I commented on, I like this one, I don't feel like it takes away from the building sense of security.

Except for the phrasing, "succumbing to the nuance of the doctrines", which sets off “dystopia???" alarms for me/my simulated trope-hunter-reader.

They might gather lots of social capital, form old cabals, vast banks of skills and wisdom, but some aspect of dementia might remain, they might resurrect the dangerous concentrations of irresponsible power of humanity's terrible past.

Interesting, this seems like it was added after I last read through? Maybe I skimmed over it by mistake?

I appreciate the world-building here, the nod to the present state (for us, the readers, that is) and how this world is different.

I'm in favor of the added background, but my current sense is that it has to be mixed in or ordered differently, because it conflicts the building sense of safety, security, timelessness, of these paragraphs.

You enjoy your work a lot. You are under no pressure to produce anything in particular. You look in places where nobody has looked before, and you register what you found there in the shared knowledgebase. You know that all of your reports will be useful to someone, some day.

﻿

Your monastary studies questions like "how to remember beauty", and "guaranteeing, even more than before, that the violence-suppression force never goes off task". Your monastary's curriculum is always improving. You take great joy in watching it grow.

Both of these paragraphs add to this growing sense of security and relaxation.

Letting go of the pressure to rush, to stay relevant to current fashions. Letting your work be guided by your own curiosity and perspective, and feeling fundamentally justified in that.

According to your monastary's current estimates, humanity is only 1126 years away from figuring out how to bring about human immortality, and only 1229 years away from figuring out how to implement immortality without producing any negative risks.

Note- when I first read this, I made a visual parsing error, and thought there was only a 3-year gap between immortality and Good Immortality, which made me skeptical/distracted. The first number has a doubled "1", and the second has a doubled "2", and they both end in the twenties. I caught my mistake on my second read. You might want to make those two numbers more visually distinct.

You have had your two children, and they are learning well.

Just calling out one of the many artful instances of subtle world-building. Just using cues embedded in the sentence structure, the reader is tipped off that-

Nothing dangerous is growing. We have found ways of pacifying the supervolcanoes. The largest military in the world exists only to prevent any war from ever starting. No extinction-sized meteor can pass our defence systems. The climate is stabilised through a combination of emissions control and carbon capture.

﻿

You know that each of these systems can fail under very unlikely conditions, and you know that their probability of failing is such a small number that you cannot have feelings about it. It might as well be zero, as far as your feelings are concerned.

This is a really neat take on assuaging/addressing existential anxieties felt by folks in and around the Rationalist subculture. (At least that's how I read it.)

I and one other reader (a friend on vacation with me over the weekend) felt a specific pang of (doubt? anxiety? skepticism?) at the bit about the largest military in the world.

However, that pang was assuaged in the next paragraph, when it is quite explicitly addressed and we are told we can't possibly worry about it.

Still, I felt this was worth mentioning; you are walking a fine line in the beginning, readers might be primed to jump to "dystopia???".

I want you to be bold though. Please don't bend over backwards just to convince trope-hunters that there's no trope. I know it. A good reader will know it.

The world you are proposing is really interesting and compelling.

So my overall impression is that this is brilliant, and is a great example of narrative-oriented somnotica. You have found a very interesting source of coziness, relaxation, security, drowsiness, in the form of a novel type of utopia, one that feels accessible and prescient given the current zeitgeist. So I love how you are applying the genre. Very unique among the submissions I have received, and if the zine does get eyes on it, I hope this work helps demonstrate to folks what's possible for the genre, and inspires more narrative somnotica.