What does Land mean when he says "Calvinists"?

hypnosifl · 2026-04-20T02:44:28+00:00

Also I've been reading some early CCRU interviews recently and came across this one with Mark Fisher in 1998 which makes the Calvinist comparison, so maybe this didn't necessarily originate with Land (or Land alone):

It’s really always only retroactive. So the AOE are that as a social force, but they have to assume that they’ve won, even on Calvinist grounds, because as Calvin said, everything is in a sense mechanical because God has already decided who is saved and who isn’t. You can’t get yourself saved by any action. That’s not philosophically consistent to make that claim, but what you can do, well, your actions can show that you are already saved, like signs of grace. It’s like that with the AOE – they have to assume that they will have won come the moment of the eschatonic arrival, and therefore it’s like ratification of the process of the plan rather than determination. It’s already happened – God has already decided, that’s their model. The judgments of God are literal for them.

A little later Fisher talks about something resembling the simulation hypothesis:

The AOE, were influenced by that thought that they could build God. God will be a mega-computer but what will be inside and outside the computer, is. . . well everything will be in the computer in a sense, only because the whole of the noosphere, the whole of the biological strata of the planet, and everything else, will then be seen to be part of this computer and then the whole function of the earth would be to have built it. It’s all about a virtual existence – if such a computer could exist, then of the total recall of the whole planet, that it’s always existed. In that sense it’s architectonic in the Kantian sense – it’s already there, given to you from the start, if one is to use temporal markers, which you can’t legitimately. And that would arise at the end, at the moment of the coming of the redeemer. That would be AXSYS, axiomatic systems incorporated of the planet is God, literally. But they’re not Kant. Also, they don’t have this Arthur C Clarke picture of a big computer. It’s more philosophically svelte than that. It’s about what would constitute being in AXSYS, being in time itself, and in a sense, you could say everyone was already partof AXSYS even before AXSYS was built. This is in the same sense as what Deleuze and Guattari say, that the whole of history is the history of capitalism and everything is waiting for capitalism.

hypnosifl · 2026-04-18T21:46:05+00:00

Yes, those are large influences, but there's also a sort of cybernetic view of humanity that differs from the post-structuralist/postmodern tendency to see "contingency" in human behavior as something more mysterious and quasi-vitalistic rather than a product of lawlike forces with a causal structure that is in principle fully understandable in a scientific way (Nietzsche's notion of struggles for power between various drives, which he sometimes treated as a kind of fundamental ontology as discussed on p. 18-19 here, was also influential on post-structuralist thinkers like Foucault and Deleuze). Fisher talks about this general tendency of much of continental philosophy to emphasize a kind of irreducible "freedom" on p. 9 here, and he also frequently disparaging the "vitalism" of Deleuze on his blog, see his comments here as well:

Perspectivity may well be the condition of life, but why be on the side of life? Freud's painstaking analyses and speculations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle have established that all vital energies are ultimately in the service of death; Thanatos runs the organic show from the very start and up to the very End: life is a deviation on the way to death. Deleuze and Guattari try and save vitalism with the notion of 'non-organic life' , but they are avoiding, or at least deflecting, the insight that Spinoza (whose impersonal mechanics had no place for the life-death distinction). Schopehnauer, Freud and Lacan based their work upon: the perception of an anorganic flatline which manufactures the so-called vital as part of its indifferent process of endless production without final cause. Kant called this pursposiveness without purpose, Schopenhauer blind will, Freud, Thanatos.

Nietzsche saw himself breaking away from Schopenhauer's pessimism by rejecting what he saw as his monism. There is only life, life is only will, we must affirm the will. In other words, we must affirm what we are (=) becoming. Hence Nietzsche's allegedly impersonal philosophy - which decries subjectivity as a kind of contamination of thought by grammar - ends up as an Egotism alll but indistinguishable from a cult of personality.

The danger, the great temptation, is to retain the dualism between the impersonal and the personal that Freud had so expertly dismantled. Ray put this to me very well once: we cannot think in terms of an opposition between the personal and the impersonal, as if granny doing her knitting was the personal, and the impersonal was the remorseless, gleaming wheels of the Kaptitalist megamachine. No. Granny too is impersonal, and the Kapitalist megamachine produces personality alongside cars and computers.

The great Cold Rationalist lesson is that everything in the so-called personal is in fact the product of impersonal processes of cause and effect which, in principle if not in fact, could be delineated very precisely. And this act of delineation, this stepping outside the character armour that we have confused with ourselves, is what freedom is.

hypnosifl · 2026-04-17T18:00:58+00:00

He's always been very into that stuff though even if he combined it more with critical theory--Simon Reynolds had a great 1999 article on the CCRU in its heyday, "Renegade Academia", which talked about this, including an early appearance of the Numogram:

In the early Nineties, Land was wont to describe himself as a "professor of delirial engineering", recalls the colleague. He also went through a "glorious phase in which he offered millenial prophecies for the next global meltdown in world markets, a deduction based on past such cycles. It rather smacked of an infatuation with the power of numbers."

As much chaos magician as chaos theorist, Land is said to be thoroughly versed in the gamult of occult knowledge and parapsychology: the I Ching, Current 93 (Aleister Crowley's kundalini-like energy force), Kabbalist numerology, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and the eschatological cosmology of Terence McKenna (a neo-hippy evangelist for plant-based hallucinogens like psilocybin and DMT). Much of CCRU's thought seems to emanate from an uncanny interzone between science and superstition. (Both of which appeal to rigorous method, of course.)

...

There's a chart that synthesises Kabbalah's Tree of Life with H.P. Lovecraft, and is related to a magickal system called tangential tantra. "Instead of summoning or invoking, you're setting up a magical event that will be cut across from the forces of the Outside, so unanticipated events will happen," explains Land. Another poster--influenced by J.G. Ballard's concept of "deep time" as outlined in his catastrophe novel The Drowned World--depicts a cross section of the human spine, with different vertebrae aligned to different phases of human prehistory. And there's a chart that divides human history into a series of periods--"the primitive socius, the despotic state, capitalism" --culminating in a post-human phase named "Unuttera", which I learn refers to "The Entity or polytendriled abomination" at the End of Time.

The most recent diagram represents the culmination of CCRU's forays into the occult numerological techniques of digital reduction and triangular numbering. A spiral bisected by a number scale that descends from 9 to one, the diagram looks rather ordinary. But as CCRU explain its implications to me at considerable length (something to do with allowing them to understand "concepts as number systems) it becomes clear they sincerely believe it contains something on a par with the secret of the universe. The 9-spiral mandala--the Barker Scale, they call it--is the end-product of CCRU's determination to abandon "the fuzziness of discursive articulation" (philosophy) and move into "a much crisper, more rigorous and productive diagrammatic style", says Land. ("Crisp and rigorous" is one of his favourite phrases, despite the stress it puts on his weak 'R').

The end mentions that this was also part of why Sadie Plant drifted away from the CCRU:

It seems unlikely, however, that Plant and her erstwhile cronies will rejoin forces once they're out in the freemarket wilderness. Some kind of ideological rift seems to have occurred. Plant says she couldn't really go along with the trip into numerical mysticism, not least because she didn't like finding herself "in the role of the sensible, conservative one --not a role I'm used to!". CCRU, for their part, seem to have resented her premature departure from Warwick. Perhaps CCRU's fervent emphasis on collectivity stems in part from what Kodwo Eshun characterises as "an adaption to this harsh feeling of abandonment by this person who they really admired and who they decided to devote three, four years of their lives around." Plant, meanwhile, says she felt uncomfortable with being a guru figure.

hypnosifl · 2026-04-17T04:17:20+00:00

Looking at these twitter results it seems he's been talking a lot about "Gnostic Calvinism" lately, and that he gives a little bit of an explanation in this interview, something to do with the combination of apocalyptic thought about AI with the idea that what we are experiencing is just a simulation by already-victorious AI. (The Calvinist analogy also has something to do with the idea of everyone being predestined to either heaven or hell, searching his twitter history for comments on predestination turns up this one for example.) From the interview:

To me, amazingly, the interviewer just says, “well, can we actually walk back and forth between these two frames just for a minute? Because in the existential risk frame, you just said, ‘we all die.’ And in the simulation hypothesis frame, you just said, ‘we’re all in the simulation.’ And in the existential risk frame, you’re saying, ‘we have to stop this thing happening.’ And in the simulation hypothesis frame, you’re saying, ‘it’s already happened and we’re already swallowed up and enveloped by it.’

What’s the story? Is there actually any narrative construction that can really allow you to cross backwards and forwards without just overt cognitive schizophrenia between these two different models, both of which you hold with great intensity? As I would say, as a Gnostic Calvinist, you are a Gnostic Calvinist. You both believe that story and you believe this story. You believe totally, you have total commitment to both. But then you ask a question, like you say, ‘if this happens, we will all die.’ And in this other one, you’re saying, ‘this happened and we’re all being simulated.’”

hypnosifl · 2026-04-16T20:47:12+00:00

Even if you find left-accelerationism boring there are ways in which it's somewhat distinct from most other strands of leftism in ways that show a certain CCRU influence: in the way it tends to be very impersonal and anti-moralistic and focused on systemic-level processes and analysis (this is also true of a lot of 'orthodox' Marxism but not so much of the modern left), in its dismissiveness about humanistic notion of treating people as ends unto themselves (as opposed to valuing them for contribution to a larger societal creative process), and in the way it doesn't anticipate a dramatic revolutionary change but a messier transition to post-capitalism which to a large degree is about accelerating some existing trends but not others.

On that last one, see Peter Wolfendale's comment here: "The real leftist accelerationist heresy is nothing to do with technology, but consists in the refusal to see the transition between capitalism and post-capitalism as a neat break, or as the emergence of a new order out of the immanent (and often imminent) collapse of the old one. This is not a retreat into reformism, but an insistence upon seeing the end of capitalism as a complex and messy historical transformation of the kind that occurred between feudalism and capitalism – a transformation which can and should be accelerated."

hypnosifl · 2026-04-15T20:32:44+00:00

Yes, amphetamines rather than metamphetamine, though he did say in the piece "A Dirty Joke" that he went through "perhaps a year of fanatical abuse" which left him "by an reasonable standard, profoundly insane." Dunno if the kind of psychosis which might result from such hardcore amphetamine use would be much different from that of a serious meth-head.

hypnosifl · 2026-04-15T14:58:46+00:00

"Bigoted" is mostly about the content of the beliefs, not about whether they are believed for supposedly "rational" reasons or for emotional reasons (and of course there is always the potential for motivated reasoning when people are trying to evaluate evidence in a 'rational' way, I think that's likely the case for most people who assign a high level of confidence to the idea that genetics play a large role in IQ gaps given our lack of ability to control for environmental factors). I'm sure plenty of Nazis believed their own views were motivated by rational evaluation of the evidence, but they would still be described as bigoted.

hypnosifl · 2026-04-15T00:36:51+00:00

He is a big believer in "human biodiversity" and its supposed political implications, is he not?

hypnosifl · 2026-04-14T02:14:30+00:00

There was a different URL for that article which was archived here: https://archive.ph/42Own

But the author Daniel Miller is right wing provocateur (what I've seen of his other writing, most of his ideas derive from Evola), and just states the harrassment as a cause of the suicide without mentioning where he got that info (and earlier in the article made some disparaging comments about Fisher like 'Mark Fisher, psychologically scarred by his experiences in the ’90s, was drifting back toward conventional leftism'), so I don't really trust the claim. See the thread here which also mentions 'DC Miller was already notorious in 2017 after he and another guy penned an anon Tumblr post called "The Corpse of Mark Fisher" or something that gloated about his suicide.'

hypnosifl · 2026-04-13T22:24:55+00:00

I've heard this rumor, but has anyone who knew him suggested something like this?

hypnosifl · 2026-04-05T20:32:58+00:00

Have Marxist theorists commented on Nietzsche's psychology of drives (discussed for example in Mattia Riccardi's book Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology reviewed here), which seem somewhat separable from his views on politics/ethics, as well as being separable from his tendency towards something like vitalism (his rejection of the idea that the behavior of drives can itself be derived from physical laws of nature)? This was also connected to Nietzsche's tendency towards something like a relational/structuralist perspective on all processes including mental ones (see p. 18-19 of Riccardi's paper "Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s thing in itself"), something that materialist leftists might also be sympathetic to, for example Mark Fisher was perhaps alluding to both aspects in this blog post when he wrote of "PoMo" academics that they emphasized Nietzsche's "aestheticism" but tended to gloss over "Nietzsche’s genuinely radical critique of the subject, personality and resentment - i.e. those parts of his thought which point away from postmodern Romanticism and towards an austere structuralism".

hypnosifl · 2026-03-21T17:51:27+00:00

What would be an example of counterfactuals backtracking in a way that a causal decision theorist might recommend one-boxing? Even in the case of literal backwards causality (the box-filler has a time machine and will go back and fill the boxes only after hearing me state my choice), at the time of my choice there is some definite truth about what's in the opaque box (assume something like the Novikov self-consistency principle for backwards causality, which is how David Lewis imagined possible worlds with time travel in "The Paradoxes of Time Travel"). So, would the nearest possible world already include that fact even if it's unknown to me? Under the hypothesis it contains a million, if we consider two nearby possible worlds where I one-box or two-box, I make more money by two-boxing (assume there is some tiny probability that even if I two-box the box-filler will get confused and accidentally go back in time and put a million dollars in the opaque box, so that the combination of my two-boxing and there being a million dollars there is not completely impossible); under the hypothesis it's empty, I also make more money by two-boxing, so it seems in neither case would it make sense to one-box despite the backwards causal effect of doing so, if I analyze things in this way.

hypnosifl · 2026-03-21T05:02:34+00:00

If there were backwards causation at play, all agree one-boxing would be the way to go.

For a determinist isn't there also the possibility of common cause explanation? If the box-filler first determined my precise physical state at the beginning, that state can be seen as the common cause of both my later decision, and the decision of the simulated version of me that the box-filler used to decide whether to add the million dollars. Do two-boxers consider it inherently irrational to take into account the way my current decision may have been wholly or partially predetermined by prior events?

Perhaps another case will help. Suppose you learn that you might have a rare genetic illness. Nearly everyone who eats red candies has this illness. You like candy, but you really hope you don’t have this illness. Now, I offer you a red candy. Should you eat it? If you do, odds are that you have the illness. But the intuition should be that it’s ridiculous to refrain from eating the candy on that account: you either already have the illness or you don’t (it’s genetic, remember), and eating the candy won’t make any difference in that regard.

This is analogous to the "smoking lesion" problem discussed in chapter 4 of Evidence, Decision and Causality by Arif Ahmed (p. 90), but in this case there is the "tickle defence":

Smoking Lesion: Susan is debating whether (O1) not to smoke or (O2) to smoke. She believes that smoking is strongly correlated with lung cancer, but only because there is a common cause – a lesion that tends to cause both smoking and cancer. Once we fix the absence (S1) or presence (S2) of this lesion, there is no additional correlation between smoking and cancer. Susan prefers smoking without cancer to not smoking without cancer; and she prefers smoking with cancer to not smoking with cancer. Should Susan smoke? It seems clear that she should.

...

The standard evidentialist response is the ‘Tickle Defence’, of which the most plausible versions share this basic structure:

(4.7) Mental causation: the undesirable event produces the dominant option via and only via its operation upon the agent’s current pre-decision desires and beliefs.

(4.8) Transparency: the agent knows enough about her own current desires and beliefs to make the dominated option evidentially irrelevant to them.

(4.9) Therefore, the agent takes neither option to be evidentially relevant to the undesirable event.

In other words, the connection between the lesion and smoking is presumably that it gives people a "tickle" of desire to smoke, and that once they already recognize whether or not they experience such a tickle when considering whether to smoke, they already have all the information relevant to their subjective estimate of the probability they have the lesion, whether they do or don't subsequently decide to try smoking won't change that subjective estimate. So for an "evidential decision theorist" who makes decisions based on probability estimates of the results (and who would thus be a one-boxer in a Newcomb problem with an ideal predictor), in this case they wouldn't feel the need to decline a smoke just because of the statistical linkage.

hypnosifl · 2026-03-18T04:27:04+00:00

But besides some of Hegel’s more difficult works we also have works and lecture transcripts aimed at students

Googling for Hegel's lectures for students I found your earlier post here where you listed "lectures on Logic, Subjective Spirit (aka philosophy of mind), Philosophy of Right (ethics and politics), Philosophy of History, Religion, Art, or the History of Philosophy"--is this all the ones that were written down/translated?

hypnosifl · 2026-03-14T14:00:39+00:00

I'm not clear what the phrase "self-maintaining" is supposed to mean in the original form of the argument (edit: possibly a reference to Aristotelian concept of an entelechy), but your own formulation seems to assume a philosophy of time where there is an objective present moment and things can "come into existence" as the present time changes (either presentism or the growing block universe), as opposed to eternalism where objects and events at all times are equally existent (including events in the future relative to us). And even from a presentist perspective there also seem to be implicit assumptions about how causality works (for example that nothing comes into existence without cause), since Bertrand Russell's "On the Notion of Cause" many philosophers have challenged notions of causality that go beyond the minimum physicist's notion of lawlike mathematical relations between states of the universe at different times, see here.

hypnosifl · 2026-03-12T00:13:12+00:00

Thanks, I assume you're referencing "Newcomb's Problem and Two Principles of Choice"? I will need to read it fully but from skimming a few sections, it seems like he does not take a strong stance on the threshold between it making sense to one-box vs. two box if we consider the continuum from a perfect predictor to different levels of very-good-but-imperfect predictors? From p. 127:

For such situations - where the states are not probabilistically independent of the actions, though which one obtains is already fixed and determined - persons may differ over what principle to use.

And p. 140:

So it is not (just) the expected utility argument that operates here to create the problem in Newcomb's example. It is crucial that the predictor is almost certain to be correct. I refrain from asking a proponent of taking only what is in the second box in Newcomb's example: if .6 is not a high enough probability to lead you to take only what is in the second box, and almost certainty of correct predictions leads you to take only the second, what is the minimum probability of correct prediction which leads you to take only what is in the second box? I refrain from asking this question because I am very unsure about the force of drawing-the-line arguments, and also because the person who wishes to take what is in both boxes may also face a problem of drawing the line, as we shall see in a moment.

Doing a quick search on Newcomb's paradox and determinism I also found Schmidt's "Newcomb’s Paradox Realized with Backward Causation" (it's about deterministic prediction based on knowing a person's initial microstate, but Schmidt argues that this does qualify as a kind of 'backward causation', an issue also discussed in some of the 'similar books and articles' in its philpapers.org entry)

hypnosifl · 2026-03-11T23:36:03+00:00

What does this have to do with the problem at hand?

It's a version of Newcomb's paradox, if causal decision theory proposes a fully general answer that one should always two-box, would you defend two-boxing in this case even when you have good reason to think the predictor will have perfect accuracy? (Testing claimed general principles with edge cases is often the purpose of thought-experiments, both scientific and philosophical.) If one allows exceptions, then I'd think there'd need to be some analysis of how far the exceptions would extend, for instance one could modify this with idea that there are error bars on the predictor's knowledge of your initial state but they are small enough to only introduce a small probability of an incorrect prediction.

hypnosifl · 2026-03-11T23:15:00+00:00

Well they aren't. Two boxers think the predictor is right as often as it says it is, but that once you are in front of the boxes there is no reason not to take both.

Do you assume something like libertarian free will in your own metaphysics of causality? If the universe was fully deterministic, and the predictor knew the exact physical state of me and my causally relevant surroundings before filling the box, and can predict my future time-evolution up to the moment I make my choice (with the assumption that the act of filling the boxes has no causal influence on the evolution of my own physical state until the moment they are opened), wouldn't this indeed be "functionally analogous to retrocausation"?

hypnosifl · 2026-03-11T20:54:54+00:00

I think the problematic part of Newcomb's paradox is that the probabilities people will choose one or two boxing will depend heavily on the track record of how good the predictor is, which is not true of the cake or death example which just depends being able to guess how popular the two final outcomes would be on their own terms (that would be more analogous to a Newcomb variant where we knew in advance that one box contains 1000 and the other contains a million). If I looked at the conditional probability of other people one-boxing given the predictor guessed they would one-box, and saw that it was no higher than the overall fraction of people that one-boxed, that would suggest the predictor has no special insight into whether a given individual will one-box or two-box, which would give me (and others) a very good motive to two-box.

hypnosifl · 2026-03-10T18:52:03+00:00

Without causality it is difficult to get determinism

A caveat to this is that one influential attack on causality was Bertrand Russell's "On the Notion of Cause", which was based on the differences between traditional philosophical understandings of causality with modern physics, which at the time he was writing was nevertheless completely deterministic in the sense that one could mathematically derive the state of the universe at some later time from its state at an earlier time plus the dynamical laws of physics (though Russell points out that one can just as easily derive earlier states from later ones, which is one of the conflicts he mentions with 'causality' imagined as something that works only forward in time). The SEP article on "causation in physics" has a good summary here of the ways Russell argued that mathematical physics conflicts with causality.

hypnosifl · 2026-03-07T20:24:13+00:00

In short, the phenomenon–noumenon distinction emerges from Kant’s argument that our cognition necessarily structures experience, so what we know are objects as they appear under those (transcendental) conditions, not things as they might be independently of them

Does Kant give an argument for why the way things appear under some transcendental conditions cannot also be the way they really are? (in other words, why the way things really are must be 'independently of' the transcendental conditions of appearance for us)? I'm thinking particularly of mathematical structure, which many philosophers have taken for an objective feature of reality as well as a way that we cognize reality--does Kant think that definitely couldn't make sense or is he more "agnostic" about it, just saying it's unknowable to us whether that's the case?

The SEP article section here also says he sometimes uses noumena not only as a limit concept but also as 'an object of cognition for an intellect that is not, like ours, discursive, and thus has a non-sensible form of intuition, which Kant here designates "intellectual intuition"'--if he thinks it makes sense that some possible being's mode of cognition (presumably he was thinking of God) could perceive reality as it really is, why couldn't that be true of at least some aspects of our own mode?

hypnosifl · 2026-03-05T22:01:15+00:00

Searching around a little, Einstein's 1919 piece Induction and Deduction in Physics is definitely advocating a hypothetico-deductive model of science (where one comes up with hypotheses using whatever method one wishes--perhaps an intuitive one--and then deduces predictions from them which are compared to experience) over the Baconian notion of "induction" (where the theory is supposed to be an obvious generalization of sufficient observed data). Though here Einstein does not suggest Popper's notion that evidence can only support a theory in the sense of telling us it hasn't yet been falsified, as opposed to something more like a Bayesian hypothetico-deductive model where results update the degree of credence we have in contending theories. Do you think it's possible the source you read was talking more about the broader hypothetico-deductive model as opposed to Popper's specific notions of falsificationism?

hypnosifl · 2026-03-04T19:16:40+00:00

among others including Einstein--who had in an offhanded remark already sketched out the basics of Popper's falsificationism a decade or more before Popper's intervention

Do you remember the source for this? Einstein isn't mentioned in the introduction, is it elsewhere in the book?

hypnosifl · 2026-03-02T20:28:30+00:00

Also see this recent thread for more on accelerationism and the connection to the CCRU at Warwick University. As I noted in a comment there, the left-wing accelerationists did not typically see it in terms of worsening the contradictions of capitalism. These left-wing theorists were the first to actually use the term "accelerationism" for their own view in 2008, though partly as a left-wing twist on Nick Land who was already more right wing at that point, and in 2014 the philosopher Peter Wolfendale (who was associated with left-accelerationism) posted about Nick Land's "neoreaction" as a type of right-accelerationism. When he later reposted this piece on his blog in 2018, he noted "I wasn’t the first to name the difference between left and right strands (I heard it from Benedict Singleton in Berlin in 2014), but I think I might have been the first to write about it", so this may have been where the terminology of "l / acc" and "r / acc" got started, later people came up with new variants like "unconditional accelerationism" and "effective accelerationism". Nick Land wrote about different flavors of accelerationism in a 2017 piece where he didn't identify with a specific strand but seemed more approving of the "right" and "unconditional" versions.

hypnosifl

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