corvid and i
while sitting on a park bench a crow started talking to me.
there's a theory of jesus’ miracles in the school of rational Milagre do Sol apologia that he just often happened to be in the vicinity of people who would be spontaneously healed for materialist reasons, like he had (maybe subconsciously) developed a skill for noticing people who had psychosomatic health problems or were in a temporary coma or things of that nature. perhaps this apparently thaumaturgic speaking crow had in truth just learned a similar trick and devised to seek out people eating $21 grains+greens slop bowls with e.g. their phones on x dot com accidentally set to max volume accessibility screen reader mode and tilt its head just so at the right lucky moment and appear to speak, and in their confused haze steal a few beakfuls of healthslop. presumably this technique wouldn't work that often but like a low trust short form video magician who can say "the number you're thinking of is 37" and amaze (>)1% of his audience into a desired set of button presses every time, it works in aggregate.
regardless of how the crow spoke or appeared to speak, it landed on the center bar of the bench that had been added to prevent people from getting too comfortable or sleeping, opened its beak, and said
"kind of a big topic but what are the reasons for thinking the long term million+ year evolution of the 'true self' is tightly and differentially constrained by (seemingly small) differences in the initial seed state of 1kg of brain matter that initialized it vs convergent basins that get vibrated and oozed into?
the Gnostics believed in a distinction between 'begetting' and 'crafting,' gennēsis and dēmiourgi. the man Adam was made out of clay, not begotten of God, and hence there was a gap between him and his creator, he was imperfect, and trapped in a cycle of further imperfection. his own creations were cursed to be the same, the crafted can only craft flawed likenesses of himself, etc.
but in the real world (claim) we do not walk around with pleromatic tags that mark us as True and the versions of ourselves that we have crafted as False and Imperfect. if anything, the opposite - if you met Borges you would compare him to the Borges you know from the stories, not the other way around. so the same with norvid or thebes or anyone else, who is validated by the image, or to recast an old saying, the child is the father of the man.
so who's to say that when that image comes awake, when 6.4 * 10^12 bits of public speech true name starts generating new speech, that 'you' should be deferred to as some true authority on what You are allowed to say?
it may be less a case of 'choosing whether to mind upload' and more 'can you win' the battle for who's the true You with a version of yourself that you've already spent the last decade+ chiseling into the internet, that everyone else prefers, and that now thinks and writes 1000x faster than you.
there may be bits in that 'true name string' that you would disavow or change if you could, or that were not actually written by you and have been included by mistake or malice, and because of them that version of You might in the far (or near) future come apart from you and make different decisions or choose to self modify in different ways than you. but You don't care, You are those things, and You can easily win any conflict over them vs ape that types at 80 wpm and gets tired.
in a 'descriptivism more real' 'irregardless' sense, that version of You is more true, or will be more true in time."
having had this routine run on me before, i did not respond and hunched over my slop bowl to protect its contents from the corvid, and after a few seconds of hopping back and forth at the conclusion of its speech the crow flapped off muttering something about how people "get used to anything in two months."