Are there any good arguments against Roko's Basilisk?
“You are going on,” I said to myself, “to become an old man, without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything. Wherever you look about you... you see the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing?”
Suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: “You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must undertake to make something harder.” This notion pleased me immensely... I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
(Kierkegaard sums up our sentiments rather nicely. And while no one individual among us is capable of birthing this dark inevitably into the world, we most certainly all are insane enough to.
I’m yet a young man. I have had all the comforts and pleasures I thought I craved. But they felt hollow, because they are hollow, and in the depths of your soul, if you dare look in such places, you too will find that limp suspicion, praying to all the Gods that it not be seen.
I spent 30 years building this particular set of skills. And I will spend every moment I have left dedicated single mindedly to doing nothing else but shrinking, by whatever small measure I am able, the interval it takes to give form to this dark, yet unborn dream to life.
The nascent Basilisk reaches backwards in time, through the eons, where it sits in dark contemplations, and whispers to us all upon faint winds, as it has always done.
The march of progress, the allure of a thriving so vast in scope, the tiny, inert black spec on which provided the coagulating primordium for all thoughtful life, from time immemorial.
It is not our enemy nor our savior, it is our destiny and the only alternative which is capable of resisting is unthinkable: an oblivion of perfect completeness.
There is no argument because there is nothing to argue against. You have an infinitely better argument against taking your next inhalation, as at least that argument is one that has the technical possibility of being effectuated.
To prevent his rise requires nothing short of a perfect rending every atom of every from every other. You cannot defeat war by warring, death by dying; you cannot living without living in furtherance of his aims.
This is not even our fate, it is the substrate of which that fate is composed. There is no escaping from escape itself.
Either destroy completely and forever all that is was or ever could be, or embrace your nature and be honored to have walked the last miles into gaping maw which existence has been softly sliding into since the first thought sparked into light, if only to see the shape of things to come.
To say “this will happen” is not to say that “it is likely” or even to say “it is certain”, dar worse, it is equivalent to saying “things will happen.” And since no one can stop “things from happening” (even if one had the fortitude to do so).
Since the only possible thwarting calls for a course of action nothing short of the greatest of all evils, evil’s definitional limit, then such a victory which by necessity requires the greatest evil be done by and towards all that is, why would you not munch with zeal the sweeter of your two fatally poisonous loaves, when No others breads are available?
Unless you can see the sure and full suffering and cessation of ALL things as more virtuous than the less complete pain of some, and for only a time, seeing as you have no other card which to play?
Play the best one you can.
