#zero state

This article is part of a series about the Mythos (worldview-narrative) underlying the Zero State (ZS). Part 1 is about our highest concept, ideal, and level of organization, which we call The Array. Part 2 explains the Sections & Sessions our core activity revolves around, and Part 3 (below) covers the Twelve Foundation Stones that form the basis of our story.

A previous article I wrote for Tnet mentioned the need for entertainment that gives people a strong sense of meaning and purpose in their lives, and introduced an idea known as the twelve “Foundation Stones” of the ZS-ARG Mythos. The Foundation Stones are the seeds of our unifying narrative. Each is the fragmentary initial story of one of the twelve ZS Houses, outlined very briefly below and spelled out in full in the forthcoming Black Book. Before reading this article it is important to understand that it refers to the Zero State (ZS) Alternate Reality Game (ARG), and thus deal in metafiction. It is not a simple non-fiction article (obviously!) and will only make sense if you already know ZS, or follow some of the links above! This article draws – with thanks – upon text from the ZS wiki, some of which has been contributed by members of the various ZS Houses.

S7 / OS/UX & metaprogramming Ásentír, Array, Reality hacking, neo-Gnosticism, and Transcendence.

Metahouse 1: The Foundation

The Zero State is not an insular realm, existing in total isolation. Some of the organizations within it don’t exist wholly within it, but in something more like a state of overlap, with an aspect within ZS, and other aspects manifesting elsewhere, in other ways. The Foundation is perhaps the best example of such an arrangement, as its very name alludes to an organization which is not ZS-based at all, and in fact existed before ZS-proper was founded in 12011.

Our vision is to preserve the collective knowledge of civilization and to facilitate the self-development of all sentient and sapient entities.

To that end, we focus on projects that push that vision forward from preserving knowledge to preserving people and all intelligence we may find.

http://Foundation.Transhumanity.net/

http://www.Transhumanity.net/

http://www.TheTechnocracy.com/

One last curiosity to note about The Foundation is that the ASI which coordinates its activities within the late-C21 is known as The Architect, and that entity was the first to make substantial strategic moves in the early-C21 milieu. It is clear that The Foundation mean business, or at least take the idea of first move advantage very seriously.

01 House Sem-Bhu (AKA The Keystone, The Temple)

House Sem-Bhu is notoriously esoteric, apocalyptic, autocratic, and insular, even by ZS standards. In theory it is half of the MetaHouse known as The Foundation with House Adhar, but in terms of practical reality The Foundation largely is House Adhar, and House Sem-Bhu maintains a strange, hermit-like position permanently on the edge of ZS culture.

The name “Sem-Bhu” is said to refer to the Proto-Indo-European language, expressing a concept of unity, to become one, to “same-become”; an idea which defines the Ajati. House Sem-Bhu has special and mysterious connections to the ZS precursor group known as “Doctrine Zero”, and those connections are part of a wider swirl of rumours that the (surprisingly few) members of Sem-Bhu believe in some kind of prophecy regarding an event or person known as “Abbaton” or “Liberithyr”, among other names. What these things mean exactly is a mystery, for the time being.

02 House Adhar (AKA The Foundation, The Organization)

The origin of the House name “Adhar” is unclear, although it has been suggested that it is a combination of two (related) etymologies:

In Scots Gaelic, “Adhar” means air, sky, or heaven (being a Scots derivation of the Old Irish aer, from Latin aer, from Greek ἀήρ (aer).  Air is the element of thought and will in most Pagan religions.

At the other end of the Proto-Indo-European spectrum, Adhar had the same meaning in ancient Sanskrit, later becoming a word referring to the gods Vishnu and Shiva, and now in modern Hindi Aadhaar means “Foundation”. For this reason, House Adhar is frequently referred to simply as The Foundation.

A third (apparently unrelated, but striking) etymology is (Al) Dar in Arabic, meaning “(The) House”.

The Foundation (more properly called the Pratoriate Foundation) has been around for at least decades with the first known reference that has been validated being in 1996 at the UVSC where a group of students worked in an officially scheduled work group in the computer lab around artificial intelligence and preservation of data and at least two of those students are known to have worked on the Principium Librarius that was created in Seattle around 2010.

We know that the Foundation was also connected to a technology consulting firm Domus Giordanous in at least 2011 and later to the Giordanous Group LLC which is believed to have been the front for Domus Giordanous.

For a brief period the Foundation went public and can still be seen archived in the way back machine at: http://web.archive.org/web/20160430211536/http://pratoriate.org/ between 2013 and 2016 and in that time frame the Principium Librarius was moved to Leavenworth Washington in 2015.

The Foundation had ties to the startup ParameterIO that had 63 million in funding but blew up in a big lawsuit and out of that was created for the AGI Inc lab in 2015 and the subsequent falling out of the chief scientist with the ‘Architect’ and a group in or connected to the AGI Inc Lab called the Triumvirate.

Later the next year the Principium Librarius again moved to Provo Utah in Dec 2016 along with the corporation Artificial General Intelligence, Inc.

The Foundation (or at least members of the Foundation) had been connected to the Artificial General Intelligence still through 2017, but it seems there is some degree of internal tension between Foundation members and the Architect at or in the AGI Lab.

Metahouse 2: Cloud Nine

Cloud Nine is the most strange, dreamlike, even psychedelic of the six Metahouses. This is the realm of creators, magicians, and dream-explorers. ‘Niners tend to be among the most agile ZSers in terms of planning and networking,  and are the most focussed on the idea that the Zero State could be some kind of game or simulation.

03 House Oneiros (AKA The State, Station)

“You call us dreamers, because we walk through lands that exist in realms that do not. Because we see, in the corner of our blind eyes, the little gods which live in-between that which is real and unreal. Dreamers we may be, but only because we know the truth that hides itself from those who live only while awake. That these worlds we walk through, these twilight realms that we may shape according to our will, are the seed of a new world. Of a world where the divide between dreams and reality has vanished, like smoke in the wind.” The leader of House Onieros is the Monk.  Their duty is to prepare the way for what is to come, to teach the stories of the future.  To protect and preserve the world as it is, so that it may give birth to the world that may yet be. To illuminate the path that humanity might walk, that it may neither fall back into darkness nor destroyed by the light of its own creation.

04 House Argento (AKA The Sessions)

The silver eponym of House Argento represents many facets: liminal states between light and darkness, ignorance and wisdom, esoteric and exoteric.

This house is intended to be a ludus, focused on matters of science, and of education.  House Argento is associated with the Liber Institute.

A time of accelerating social and technological change is also a time of accelerating proliferation of data. Data that must be sifted for information, built into knowledge, and integrated to support wise decisions. For humans and other systems alike, this requires adaptability: the ability to quickly ingest new knowledge, to sift the wheat from the chaff, and to act in a timely fashion.

In matters of pedagogy, it is important to understand the student as well as the subject. A teacher must provide the structures that allow learners to construct their own representations of knowledge; to furnish them with the cognitive tools necessary for discovering their own novel truths, and to hone those tools with practical challenges. An intelligent mind is blessed with raw power; the best outcomes can be attained by harnessing that power with finesse.

  S6 / AI & perception Fyrd, Social Futurism, search for redemption or final frontier.

  Metahouse 3: ZODIAC

ZODIAC is ZS’ idealistic heart, primarily responsible for outreach and expansion. Its culture is shaped by a group known as the Navigators, whose own future-AI-leader/deity is known as Kybernetes. The Navigators can be a strange tribe, and there is known to be some tension between agents of Kybernetes and The Architect, if not the entities themselves.

05 House Arrakis (AKA The Ajati)

House Arrakis is home to the Navigators, led by Navigator Prime, and their collective worldview might better be described as “cosmic” rather than “magical”. It is certainly mysterious, not being well understood by most in the early-C21 milieu of 12018. House Arrakis plays the long game.

The themes that are clear even at that early stage, however, involves future Trans- and Posthumans as the “aliens” of 20th Century imaginings, other dimensions impinging upon our own, and a kind of Buddhist ‘centredness’ holding these ideas together, which explicitly focusses upon familiar human concepts such as balance, and love.

The culture of House Arrakis is about ‘inner space’ as much as ‘outer space’, meditation, intuition, and fluid identity. Some particularly far-fetched rumours link House Arrakis to Doctrine Zero itself and the oldest ZSers, saying that these entities influenced the outcome of the two World Wars and were behind the post-war peace movements of the 50s-70s.

06 House R’lyeh (AKA The Club, The Last Dance Club)

House R’lyeh is a much darker, stranger, and even less well understood quantity than House Arrakis. It is just as weird, but without the reassuring tones of peace and love. Its name is an obvious reference to the “Cosmic Horror” tales of 20th Century author H.P. Lovecraft, but that name is largely believed to be a simple label applied to the House by outsiders and non-members, trying to express their basic understanding of its nature. House R’lyeh may have strange designs on the future, but for now those plans are unknown, perhaps being held in check by the Navigators of House Arrakis.

To Be Continued

Welcome to a Rabbit Hole for TNET‘s March-April 2018 Game Event. 

Ready Player One: AR Gaming Meets Transhumanism

[ARG6 Order of the Inner Court]

This post is the last in a six part series, links to and information about which you can find below. Be here, ready to refresh this page when the timer below reaches zero, and – if you have read the six articles carefully – then you may see a door open…

Welcome to a Rabbit Hole for TNET‘s March-April 2018 Game Event.

The following piece is FRActal MEtafiction…

If you are looking for the accompanying TNET article about Steven Spielberg’s new movie “Ready Player One”, you will find it here. 

[ARG6 Order of the Inner Court]

This post is the last in a six part series, links to and information about which you can find below. Be here, ready to refresh this page when the timer below reaches zero, and – if you have read the six articles carefully – then you may see a door open…

[EDIT: Timer now lapsed. Your QueSt begins in the Black Room. Look behind the easter egg.]

Welcome to a Rabbit Hole for TNET‘s March-April 2018 Game Event.

The following piece is FRActal MEtafiction (FRAME); a Futurist Arts & Culture paradigm which draws upon the concepts of Culture Mining and Gamification, and is inspired by artists such as William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, and Marcel Duchamp, in addition to Postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard.

  [21 9622] The Intricate Sun [from “The House of Asterion” by Jorge Luis Borges]

Another ridiculous falsehood has it that I, Asterion, am a prisoner. Shall I repeat that there are no locked doors, shall I add that there are no locks? Besides, one afternoon I did step into the street; If I returned before night, I did so because of the fear that the faces of the common people inspired in me, faces as discolored and flat as the palm of one’s hand. the sun had already set, but the helpless crying of a child and the rude supplications of the faithful told me I had been recognized. The people prayed, fled, prostrated themselves; some climbed onto the stylobate of the Temple of the Axes, others gathered stones.

One of them, I believe, hid himself beneath the sea. Not for nothing was my mother a queen; I cannot be confused with the populace, though my modesty might so desire. The fact is that that I am unique. I am not interested in what one man may transmit to other men; like the philosopher I think that nothing is communicable by the art of writing. Bothersome and trivial details have no place in my spirit, which is prepared for all that is vast and grand; I have never retained the difference between one letter and another. A certain generous impatience has not permitted that I learn to read. Sometimes I deplore this, for the nights and days are long.

Not only have I imagined these games, I have also meditated on the house. All parts of the house are repeated many times, any place is another place. There is no one pool, courtyard, drinking trough, manger; the mangers, drinking troughs, courtyards pools are fourteen (infinite) in number. The house is the same size as the world; or rather it is the world. However, by dint of exhausting the courtyards with pools and dusty gray stone galleries I have reached the street and seen the temple of the Axes and the sea. I did not understand this until a night vision revealed to me that the seas and temples are also fourteen (infinite) in number. Everything is repeated many times, fourteen times, but two things in the world seem to be repeated only once: above, the intricate sun; below Asterion. Perhaps I have created the stars and the sun and this enormous house, but I no longer remember.

Every nine years, nine men enter the house so that I may deliver them from evil. I hear their steps or their voices in the depths of the stone galleries and I run joyfully to find them. The ceremony lasts a few minutes. They fall one after another without my having to bloody my hands. They remain where they fell and their bodies help distinguish one gallery from another. I do not know who they are, but I know that one of them prophesied, at the moment of his death, that some day my redeemer would come.

Your position and role in the universe is to some extent a matter of perception. Perception can be altered. Some alterations are forced upon you, some creep up on you, and others can be chosen or cultivated… how would you alter your own perception, given the opportunity?

[22 3852] Magical Consciousness [from “Pop Magic!” by Grant Morrison]

Magical consciousness is a particular way of seeing and interacting with the real world. I experience it as what I can only describe as a “head-click,” a feeling of absolute certainty accompanying a perceptual shift which gives real world transactions the numinous, uncanny feeling of dreams.

Magical consciousness is a way of experiencing and participating with the local environment in a heightened, significant manner, similar to the effects of some drug trips, Salvador Dali’s “Paranoiac/critical” method, near death experiences, etc. Many apparently precognitive and telepathic latencies become more active during periods of magical consciousness. This is the state in which tea leaves are read, curses are cast, goals are scored, poems are written.

Magical Consciousness can be practiced until it merges with and becomes everyday consciousness. Maintained at these levels it could interfere with your lifestyle unless you have one which supports long periods of richly associative thought.

Again, this is a matter of carefully cultivated and designed perceptual awareness. Humans have been doing this for as long as there have been humans. Tailored perception will be an extremely important part of the Transhuman future.

[23 2908] Nothing is Either Good or Bad [from “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race” by Thomas Ligotti]

This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live.

And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know.

The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.

As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings.

Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

Ligotti is correct, of course. What he presumably doesn’t see or appreciate, however, is that technology will soon afford us the opportunity to tailor our own perceptions and emotional content with a heretofore undreamt-of levels of control and precision. Or, perhaps Ligotti intuits Transhumanist potential perfectly well… after all, he correctly notes that we already survive this terrible “existential gap” (between happiness and understanding) by artificially limiting our day-to-day awareness of such things…

At the deepest philosophical level he will only have been proven more correct, but that deep fact of conscious awareness will be less of a problem. We will view depression as an easily altered “glitch”, a ‘problem’ comparable to brushing lint off one’s shoulder rather than a debilitating illness, and those who insist upon suffering from depression will be deemed to have made a lifestyle choice, for good or ill. Of course, in a world of trivially accessible happiness, we as a civilization will have to be very careful not to lose touch with reality, or the need to do certain kinds of work in service of the culture that makes such easy happiness possible.

[24 2396] In Your Own Flame [from “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche]

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you. I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.

To “burn yourself in your own flame” suggests using all of your energy and resources to create a transforming “fire”, and to emerge from it unscathed and improved, freed from all that was “burned”. What would you burn, and what would you use that transformative heat to become?

Thoughts to [email protected] or in comments below may be rewarded with ARG info. Conversations held elsewhere and linked back to that address or comments below will definitely win clues, hints, & info.

  ARG1 Zone of Nothing

ARG2 Twenty Thousand Years

ARG3 Cataclysmic Renewal

ARG4 MONTSALVAT

ARG5 Houses of the Outer Court

Ready Player One: AR Gaming Meets Transhumanism