CWB's scratchpad

[Civil War Bugle]

In late 2026, an individual who went by the name of Psmith made an unusual series of posts on the internet, in which he claimed to be in possession of a black box which could produce any life form desired, according to any arbitrary parameters provided to the black box, subject to the sole constraint that the life form must be physically possible and be capable of being emitted from the chute located on one side of the black box. Psmith claimed the black box was perfectly safe because it only obeyed his orders, was capable of conversing with him to discuss possible drawbacks to the orders he gave it, and was a very smart box with a highly refined ethical sensibility.

Naturally, many people were suspicious, while many other people saw the potential advantages of such an object. While Psmith did not let people come close enough to the box to touch it, he did often let them into the same room as the box, and it certainly did produce some interesting life forms.

Meanwhile, another individual, David McIntosh, was in the process of emerging from an intense religious experiences and wanted to share his wisdom with such people as would form part of the Elect. McIntosh had no interest in living on the same planet as the black box, and saw the obvious solution: have the black box create an O'Neil Cylinder for him and any followers he may gain. Therefore, he approached Psmith and made some inquiries, and Psmith provided him with a small lumpish mass which he said was biologically designed to develop, over the course of a few months, into a cylinder which would serve McIntosh's purposes and be capable of floating away into outer space once McIntosh was good and ready. McIntosh immediately began his preparations, proselytizing on behalf of his new religious views, which included a vigorous distrust for the state of the Earth as we currently see it and a strong desire to speak a new, holy, language unrelated to any of those languages currently spoken on our planet.

This thread will contain information produced by my crack team of academics on the language spoken by McIntosh's followers and whatever else they may manage to learn over the course of their learned studies. Posting may be irregular based on how quickly the crack team of academics can churn out their material.

[/ˌnɐ.ˈɾɛn.dɚ.ˌduːd/]

suffice it to say that I'm already intrigued.

[Civil War Bugle]

suffice it to say that I'm already intrigued.

Glad to hear it; hopefully future developments will live up to your expectations!

[Civil War Bugle]

What would draw people to a new religion? I expect most of you can form your own opinions on that topic, so I'll move on: what were the actual details of the new religion proposed by McIntosh? This will be a brief overview, largely consisting of background to contextualize why McIntosh was interested in moving into outer space.

The Root

McIntosh had been a Carl Sagan fan and a life-long skeptic for much of his life. This began to change one morning when, at the boundary between sleep and wakefulness, he found himself unable to move, as he felt the presence of something just out of sight. He described later that he could feel panic approaching, when the unearthly presence came into his vision, in the form of a sphere of zeroes. He felt that he recognized this as a sequence from deep into the areas far beyond the decimal point in the number pi, broadly as described towards the end of the Sagan novel Contact. Clearly, thought McIntosh, this must be a sign.

As he viewed the sphere, even stronger emotions than panic overcame him; he found it difficult to describe the emotions later, but came away with the conclusion that although God or deities may not exist in a strict sense, the absolute nullity represented by zero was the base of all existence, such that it effectively was the overarching absolute Principle which most western religions consider to inhere in God. McIntosh denied that his underlying unity was any sort of Form like those present in neoplatonism, but this is largely semantic. McIntosh concluded, after some thought, that contrasting the basic fundamental nature of nonexistence represented by zero with the fact that we all can sense things meant that binary arithmetic was the way to understand existence, especially if you used binary arithmetic to operate with geometric shapes in some way. There must be a series of spheres, he reasoned, with 0 underlying them, 1 (representing existence) at the center, and infinite circles represented by pi, surrounding the 1 at the center.

If 0 and 1 were at the center, it occurred to McIntosh that they could be analogous to the root in a unix system. Accordingly, there must be some series of words which one could say to the root, in order for the root to act on one's behalf... commanding the universe, in the same way that one can open a terminal and command the computer system. It became a goal of McIntosh's to develop the language which would most truly unify humankind with the root system, allowing us to live in complete harmony with the spheres and with the unity of zero. His preliminary work in this area showed him that an intuitive approach was best... systematizing the language could come later, if necessary, and he knew that any linguistic structure which did not accord with what he felt during his intense religious experience that one morning could not truly be the most fit linguistic structure for his holy language.

He also knew that remaining on earth, with its excellent climate for life and other such temptations, was not the best avenue forward. Space offered the best avenue for communing with nothingness - looking out at the blackness of the void would let him and any followers he gained to see exactly the nothingness at the bottom of Existence. He also worried that this new machine publicized by Psmith might be an issue... it was probably introduced by someone less than benevolent, but he could use his spiritual power to put the machine to a higher use. And so he approached Psmith, as one does...

[rotting bones]

Interesting. Things this reminded me of:

1. The Atheist Platonism guy (Eric Charles Steinhart?) talked about atheists who have had a spiritual experience in which they realized there is no God. Sadly, it looks like the video I posted in Ephemera has become private.

2. There is apparently a magick system called technomancy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5mhpsEhsjs

[Travis B.]

Interesting. Things this reminded me of:

1. The Atheist Platonism guy (Eric Charles Steinhart?) talked about atheists who have had a spiritual experience in which they realized there is no God. Sadly, it looks like the video I posted in Ephemera has become private.

My own atheism is not rooted in any spiritual experiences, but rather in that I have gone my whole life without seeing any positive evidence of any God or Gods to believe in. While I accept that there could be a God or Gods, to me they would have to be such that they could not be disproven, and I refuse to believe in something about the natural world that is not falsifiable.

[Raphael]

Interesting. Things this reminded me of:

1. The Atheist Platonism guy (Eric Charles Steinhart?) talked about atheists who have had a spiritual experience in which they realized there is no God. Sadly, it looks like the video I posted in Ephemera has become private.

My own atheism is not rooted in any spiritual experiences, but rather in that I have gone my whole life without seeing any positive evidence of any God or Gods to believe in. While I accept that there could be a God or Gods, to me they would have to be such that they could not be disproven, and I refuse to believe in something about the natural world that is not falsifiable.

I don't think rotting bones was saying that those spiritual experiences are how it worked out for every atheist.

[Travis B.]

Interesting. Things this reminded me of:

1. The Atheist Platonism guy (Eric Charles Steinhart?) talked about atheists who have had a spiritual experience in which they realized there is no God. Sadly, it looks like the video I posted in Ephemera has become private.

My own atheism is not rooted in any spiritual experiences, but rather in that I have gone my whole life without seeing any positive evidence of any God or Gods to believe in. While I accept that there could be a God or Gods, to me they would have to be such that they could not be disproven, and I refuse to believe in something about the natural world that is not falsifiable.

I don't think rotting bones was saying that those spiritual experiences are how it worked out for every atheist.

I never said rotting bones was saying that. I was just stating in my own case I never had an 'atheist spiritual experience'.

[Civil War Bugle]

I was not originally familiar with that youtuber, so it's an interesting coincidence. I originally was thinking of Spinoza and of stuff I've read about Ismailism's neoplatonic influences, and decided to concoct something from there.

Turning aside from McIntosh's activities in space for a moment, let us look at the language which he was developing. He was not a linguistic expert but had perused online resources, and so proceeded partly in reliance on what he had read, and partly in reliance on his aesthetic sensibilities, the fundamental purposes of the language, and so on.

He felt that the language needed to be an agglutinative language, to resemble what he thought he knew about commands and flags in computer command prompts. (We should perhaps note that McIntosh's day job, prior to his revelations, was in an area unrelated to either linguistics or computers, and so he had some level of knowledge about them but was not an expert.) He also knew he had to start with a phonology of some kind, so he designed something which he found easy to pronounce and which he felt had a deep, spiritual resonance which was consistent with what he had felt in his moment of insight.

The phoneme inventory was as follows:
p t k b d g ɾ l s z f v a ɛ i o u McIntosh intended the vowels to be the five pure vowels most resembling what he considered to be the purity of the individual letters of the alphabet. In practice, due to interference from his native English, the stops tended to have aspiration in the same pattern as English. a generally became ɔ between stops, and i often became I between two consonants.
The basic syllabic patterns were V, CV, and CVC.