"In the hyperstitional model Kaye outlined, fiction is not opposed to the real. Rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions—consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, affective and behavioral responses." - Pdf

The Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit, founded by Nick Land, was a group of social theorists and philosophers at the University of Warwick who wrote about the internet, society, and culture. I understand that LessWrongers are generally ontologically skeptical of these two groups, but Land and Ccru's ideas are the important thing here.

It's shocking to me how familiar Ccru ideas feel to LessWrongism, as well as many in the Rationalist-adjacent community. In general, it feels like Ccru/Land and LessWrong/Rationalism are social-science and natural-science coded reactions to the same underlying change-in-conditions in life. 1a3orn says:

I might cite Land's predicting the triumph of connectionism over formalism in 1994 as a random piece of evidence for this. Land's writings about AI read as prophetic: artificial intelligence "breaks out nonlocally across intelligenic networks that are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory dependency and behavioural predictability. No one knows what to expect."

Pulling out the main point of the story, "Lemurian Time War" is the syringe or genesis of a specific infectious thought^[1]: that rather than reality generating concepts (representationalism), or humans generating concepts through which we view reality (idealism), what Gilles Deleuze calls the virtual (ideas, relations) is actually real: one plane or modality of reality that interplays with what he calls the actual (everything else).^[2]The story argues this point pretty cleverly; they satirize the opppsite position, that "the set of all ideas" and "everything else" do not interact, as a short step away from a purely virtual universe entirely mediated by discourse (all words) with no "real content" behind it.

The story itself is a a pseudo-historical account of Burroughs discovering, in an occult library in 1958, a manuscript of a text he will write in 1987, transcribed by an 18th-century pirate who used it as his guide. The best way to argue for something is by doing it, and Ccru do this here by writing such a piece of self-fulfilling fiction, demonstrating each of the arguments/ideas they pose.

Ccru is no L...

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