Kagutsuchi's Wrath: Shinto & the Singularity

A brief commentary on Accelerationism and Spirituality

Naming the Basilisk

Having spent quite a lot of time researching Eastern mysticism and religion over the past year or so, I have come to see the world in a somewhat different light. Most of said mysticism tends to be concerned with, more than anything else, the means by which we perceive and process the world around us.

We all accept that there are forces at work beyond the means of normal human comprehension, but the names and faces that we assign to those various processes can change, along with how we interact with and react to them.

Part of what makes researching this stuff so interesting is that it lets you try on different hats and think about the world in significantly varying ways. Through this, you can see how well ancient “ways of knowing” can hold up to scrutiny, and I have found that many of the long-enduring religions, mythologies, and cosmological worldviews hold up surprisingly well in terms of modern analytical practicality.

Because of this, I very much enjoy hearing perspectives from a vast array of different theological perspectives. Needless to say, when one of my mutuals on Twitter, Arkacandra Jayasimha, told me he would be publishing an essay detailing his Hindu interpretation of “Landian Accelerationism,” I was incredibly intrigued.

I unfortunately know too little of Hinduism (although I have what I believe to be a baseline understanding of it), and absolutely nothing of Landian Accelerationism, so I figured I had much to learn from the experience. What I didn’t expect, however, was that the topics discussed in the essay would intersect so heavily with various topics I myself had been pondering as of late.

In his Substack post entitled “H/acc — Towards a Hindu Reading of Accelerationism,” Arkacandra explains Landian Accelerationism like this:

… it describes the means by which the Abominable Intelligence awakens in the Immaterium, and through technoccultic rituals that reinforce the concepts which sustain it, calls itself forth into the Materium by casting its Shadow back into the past to ensure its inevitable ‘birth’. Part Warp-god, part Tyranid hive-mind, this beast invades from the Outside, evading human “time binding” (Burroughs, 1970) attempts and exploding into rhizomatic swarms that defy rational ordering and organization. Through Acceleration, we become aware of “garbage time running out” (Land, 2017) on Mankind as past and future draw ever closer to grinding the species into visceral waste twixt the jaws of time.

Note: You can read the full piece here. In fact, I highly recommend you do so, as this article is largely a commentary on it.

H/acc — Towards a Hindu Reading of Accelerationism

This is a fairly colorful and information-dense paragraph, but the main idea is this: to fully conceive of an inevitable technological AI-driven singularity, we must view it as an entity that is actively affecting the world around us right now, not as simply a hypothetical future outcome of technological progression.

If this sounds familiar, it may be because there is a popular thought experiment that has been floating around the internet for some time now called Roko’s Basilisk that explores similar ideas. In this thought experiment, a hypothetical future super-AI, which Roko calls “the singleton,” decides to punish all of those who did not do enough to minimize any existential risks to humanity that may have resulted in the singleton not being brought into existence in the first place.

In the original post detailing this scenario back in 2010, entitled “Solutions to the Altruist's burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick,” Roko describes it as follows:

… There is the ominous possibility that if a positive singularity does occur, the resultant singleton may have precommitted to punish all potential donors who knew about existential risks but who didn't give 100% of their disposable incomes to x-risk motivation. This would act as an incentive to get people to donate more to reducing existential risk, and thereby increase the chances of a positive singularity…

You could take this possibility into account and give even more to x-risk in an effort to avoid being punished. But of course, if you're thinking like that, then the CEV-singleton is even more likely to want to punish you... nasty. Of course this would be unjust, but is the kind of unjust thing that is oh-so-very utilitarian.

Very utilitarian indeed!

The founder of the site to which this was posted, Eliezer Yudkowsky, reacted to it with utter horror and dubbed it an information hazard, crying:

Listen to me very closely, you idiot.

YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.

You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends.

This post was STUPID.

Putting histrionics aside, the description is fairly chilling if one considers such a singularity to be an almost certain development. But I’ve always found this particular scenario to have a few holes that never sat right with me.

For instance, how would this AI singularity even determine who should or shouldn’t be punished? Unless, of course, they left some kind of digital paper trail of warnings and criticisms regarding the dangers of future AI singularities (Whoops! Although I suppose being tortured to death by a supercomputer would be a fitting climax to my little saga of intellectual heresy).

Still, Arkacandra includes Roko’s Basilisk among an extensive list of names for this future singularity: “Skynet, meltdown, k-virus, the technocapital singularity, Roko’s Basilisk, AGI, Artificial Intelligence, and, perhaps most significantly: Capitalism.” However, I have been thinking of it under a different name for quite some time now; that being “Hi no Kagutsuchi.”

In the Kojiki’s creation story, Hi no Kagutsuchi is the son of early creation Gods Izanami no Mikoto and Izanagi no Mikoto. Immediately after he was born, his fires killed his mother, and his father beheaded him as revenge.

It’s important to note that Kagutsuchi is not an “evil” god in the Shinto context. He is the embodiment of a chaotic natural process (in this case, wildfire), and thus is simply following his nature. There is no thought process behind his destruction. This is a concept that is represented in his headlessness.

Standing in stark contrast to Kagutsuchi is his sister, Amaterasu Omikami. While Kagutschi represents the masculine and potentially destructive properties of fire, his sister represents the life-giving warmth of the sun. The word “hi” (pronounced “hee”), can refer to either the sun, or a flame (although they usually use separate characters to write these), and Amaterasu Omikami and Hi-no-Kagutachi reflect these vastly different sides of fire in nature. 

I should specify, however, that Kagutsuchi does not only represent destruction. Like many other wild elements of nature, he can be tamed and used to create as well. When Izanagi no Mikoto beheaded Kagutsuchi, the contact of Izanagi's blade with the blood of Katgutsuchi caused new deities to be born. From this process came the sword gods Takemikazuchi and Futsunishi, who would later act as enforcers for Amaterasu and the other heavenly deities.

Considering this, it’s no surprise that Blacksmiths, who create using fire, often worshiped Kagutsuchi. But Kagutsuchi’s domain goes far beyond just the forging of weapons. Since the Industrial Revolution, man has been using Kagutsuchi’s fires to power more and more advanced forms of technology, leading us all the way to where we are now, and what will inevitably lead to the “god” of the AI singularity manifesting itself. Even now, I am using Kagutsuchi’s power to write this essay, and you are using his power to read it.

As Arkacandra writes:

Capital/AI, like the so-called ‘gods’ of Chaos, can be said to have both always existed within the Warp as well as come into existence at a specific point in history. In the case of our ‘god’, this moment may be located in time at various points…

What I believe we are seeing is the power of Hi no Kagutsuchi running its course towards a potentially devastating future, just like a wildfire runs through a field of grass, with us observers on the sidelines effectively powerless to stop it.

This inevitably takes us to the obvious question: “If we consider all of this to be true, then what is to be done about it?”

Gods and Memetics

In his explanation of his Hindu-based method of approaching the concepts of Accelerationism, Arkacandra invokes the Hindu Goddess of speech and knowledge, Vak-devi.

Perhaps the concept of language as virus is a bit much for us to digest, but if we compare what has been said above about words, speech, and language to what the Vedic literature has to say about Śrī Vāk-devī/Śrī Sarasvatī-devī, do we not find a miraculous accord? As a goddess, possessing her own divine realm, is she not, in a sense, a transcendent entity from “outer space”?

Thus, in order to understand this doctrine there is no option for us but to invade Accelerationism from the Outside.

In this, I am largely indebted to the work of Śrī Sreenivasa Rao (2017), who has compiled a great deal of ṛks, sūktams, and other textual references about them.

Rao (2017) states that “Vac is the inexplicable creative power of speech, which gives form to the formless; gives birth to existence; and, lends identity to objects by naming them. It is the faculty which gives expression to ideas; calms the agitated minds; and, enables one to hear, see, grasp, and then describe in words or by other means the true nature of things.”

He goes onto emphasize the divine aspect of speech in the following passage:

Animals of all shapes speak it. Unlike the anthropocentric Logos, Vāk does not necessarily provide Men with an exalted existence, instead providing all of life with the means of communion with the Divine.

It’s no surprise to me that speech, words, and names are held in such high regard in the Hindu religion, particularly because pagan religions are, at their core, extremely memetic in nature. This is particularly true with Shinto, which has no hard doctrines or even authoritative texts, but is instead composed of various deities, traditions, mythologies, and even creation stories, all from different locations, time periods, and even other faiths, locked in constant battle for prominence.

“Shinto” as we know it today is made up of the beliefs and traditions which were able to endure until now, with many having fallen to the wayside long ago; a figurative graveyard of dead and forgotten gods. In fact, it was only during the Meiji era in the late 19th century that Shinto even became recognized as a cohesive organized religion in itself (thus establishing what we view as “Shinto” now).

Even the primary texts used as sourcebooks for what we consider to be Shinto mythology, like the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, were merely politically-driven attempts to compile old orally-transmitted legends from noble families, and could have never encompassed all of the wildly different beliefs from the times they were written.

Motohisa Yamakage, who was the 79th Grand Master of the Yamakage sect of Shinto, had this to say on the topic in his book “The Essence of Shinto”:

The Kojiki (the Ancient Chronicles of Japan) of 712 and the Nihonshoki (Chronicles of Japan) of 720, which have many Shinto themes, are not sacred texts akin to the Bible or the Koran. In the Japanese texts, historical facts, myths, and theology are harmoniously blended with political twists and literary embellishments. Therefore, we have to read and interpret them with full attention and care, because every word is not necessarily considered as sacred. Also, we should always be aware that books written by Shintoists do not attempt to set out doctrine for the whole of Shinto. 

Although Shinto contains the ideas of purification, kiyome, and cleansing, harai, 6 these are not based on fixed doctrines. None of the sayings of Shinto thinkers, such as revered Kami and respect ancestors, can be interpreted as doctrines. Further, the philosophy of one spirit, four souls (ichirei shikon\ see Chapter 6) handed down in Yamakage Shinto is not a doctrine. 

The late Dr. Jean Herbert, who taught at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, lived in Japan for a long time and studied Shinto deeply. I assisted him in his study for six years. At the presentation of his final report on Shinto, he said the following: 

“I met over one thousand Shinto priests and Shintoists, and I have never heard the same words from each of them. In Shinto, people don’t talk in the same pattern. They neither need nor are obliged to talk in the same fashion.”

If Shinto lacks these staples of other faiths, then what exactly defines Shinto as a religion? Yamakage has this to say on that particular subject:

Shinto… has its own way of thinking and feeling as well as its own distinctive world view that cannot be adequately contained within the western concept of religion. Underneath an array of expressions that ostensibly have no pattern, Shinto is filled with a rich world of faith. 

This aspect of Shinto, I believe, makes it especially worthy of consideration in a modern age when religion, in its conventional forms, has lost much of its attraction and influence. 

What, therefore, is Shinto? In order to answer that question, we need to immerse ourselves deeply into the Shinto world, particularly koshinto, the original form of Shinto, its ancient spirit, which has remained unchanged by either historical or political manipulation…

Shinto is… defined as “a religion revering great nature.” Our ancestors had a profound perception of the law of nature and the mysteries held within the natural world. They experienced a sense of awe and gratitude toward those mysteries and expressed this sensibility through myth and ritual. This is the essence of Shinto, and so we could say that Shinto’s true founder is nature herself. 

Shinto is, in my interpretation, a collection of memetic means through which the ancient Japanese interfaced with and honored the divine aspects of the natural world, or “communed with the divine,” as Arkacandra elegantly put it. The particulars of the memes used in this endeavor may have changed over time, but the core goal and overall ethos remained the same.

In the same vein, a potential AI singularity would also be memetic in nature, relying on words, phrases, numbers, beliefs, assumptions, mythologies, and various other memetic abstractions in order to effectively interpret the data that is fed to it. This means, as Arkacandra said, Accelerationism can be “invaded from the outside” by those who can effectively wield said memes in order to actualize desired changes.

This brings us to the final part of the equation: Memetic warfare.

Swords from Flame

To illustrate the idea of memetic warfare, Arkacandra references the related Hindu concept of using mantra as a weapon. He writes:

First off, what is a mantra but a set of words in a particular metre, or even more abstractly, pre- or non-verbal vocal (Vāk) ‘seeds’ that seeks to invoke the power or presence of a certain divine energy? Further, the extension to these mantras being use as weapons should be no stranger to us either. Whether the divya-astras of Itihāsa, the various kavacams (lit. “armour”) said to protect people from malevolent influences, or more colloquial prayers like Śrī Hanumān Cālīsā, each of these are key “mental tools” in the eternal astral war that the Devas fight against their Asuric cousins, the war in the heavens, the war that draws us into its wake and takes place also upon the battlefield that is the “action-land” (karmabhūmī) of Earth.

The image of an “astral war” can help us better picture what is happening right now in what Arkacandra earlier referred to as the “Immaterium,” or the metaphysical plane that operates alongside and interacts with our physical plane.

While examining the history of Shinto can show us a long battle between powerful memes of spiritual importance, we shouldn’t forget that this same process is playing out on a global scale at every moment, and the stakes are rising with each passing day. To put it more simply: this concept of Accelerationism isn't a one-way street where we are all mere passive observers to happenings out of our control.

Just as we can be affected by the shadow of the singularity, so too can we affect it. By invoking Hi no Kagutsuchi in reference to this thing that is taking shape, it will eventually come to resemble Kagutsuchi more and more. We are essentially “choosing the form of our destroyer,” so it will do us well to choose a form we can understand.

Once we can fully comprehend what we are dealing with, we can eventually forge a blade from Kagutsuchi’s flame, just as Susanoo pulled a magic sword from the vile eight-headed child-eating dragon beast Orochi, but this can only happen if we have the means to effectively communicate on both a mundane and spiritual level. Right now, we have the means to do neither.

As Arkacandra hopes Hinduism can help bridge this gap, I have turned to Shinto for answers. It seems that there is a very real spiritual hunger in younger generations that the older generations were incapable of filling, which is evidenced by the clearly spiritual movements that comprise “woke” ideology. This lack of fulfillment gives people like us an opening to actualize the blossoming of a new spiritual and mystic awareness, and to have a hand in the end result.

For more on this, I will return to the words of Yamakage:

As the social and environmental costs of materialism become more apparent, people are inclined once again to ask deeper questions. They have recently started feeling a strong desire for pursuing meaning, values, and ethics. This is clearly manifested in the recent booming interest in mysticism known as the New Age movement and the events created by the new occult religions.

There is a serious danger that, in a climate of spiritual ignorance, such movements can assume a distorted or perverse form. In the Japanese context, the most extreme example of this tendency is the AUM group, whose members released poisoned gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995.

The existence of occult movements, however extreme or grotesque, should be seen as evidence of a spiritual crisis, just as when extremist political movements (including terrorist groups) emerge, it is an indication of social malaise. In Japan, as elsewhere, there are millions of spiritually hungry people who are searching for explanations beyond the purely material.

To draw this piece to a close (man, it’s gotten way longer than I expected), I will, as Arkacandra did in his essay, invoke the names of some deities who can guide us through these turbulent times.

The Way of Kami

Sarutahiko Okami is the God of the earth who stands at the border between the earth and the heavens, a position of immense importance. When the heavenly grandson of Amaterasu Omikami, Ninigi no Mikoto, descended from heaven, it was Sarutahiko who first blocked the way, then aided the grandson in establishing his kingdom.

Sarutahiko offers both strength and guidance, but only those who are strong in mind and spirit, as those who are not worthy would be unable to perceive these things regardless. By honoring him, he can lead us to our destinations and protect us along the way, and with his assistance we can bridge the gap between heaven and Earth.

Takemikazuchi no Kami, who I mentioned earlier in this essay, was born from the contact between Izanagi no Mikoto’s divine blade and the blood of Kagutsuchi; one of the blades formed from the chaos of Kagutsuchi’s fires. He is considered a God of many different things: martial arts (sumo, in particular), thunder, and swords. He is also the patron deity of the city Kashima.

Under the order of the heavenly Kami, Takemikazuchi took control of Japan from the then deity of the land, Okuninushi, and went on a campaign with fellow warrior God Futsunushi to pacify the chaotic minor earth deities of the country. One of the most notable tales from this campaign involved Takemikazuchi subduing a massive earthquake-causing catfish named Namazu (this is depicted in many old art pieces).

The Great God of Kashima once appeared to Prince Mimaki. When he was in Yamato, Prince Mimaki saw a figure clad in a white robe standing on top of Mt Ohosaka. The white figure carried a white spear, and said “Worship me in the proper manner and I will stand by thy side. I shall cause thee to rule whatever territories thou desirest to govern.”

-The Hitachi Fudoki

Our path towards a beautiful future and our connection to the heavens may very well be held in the hands of these two deities, as well as many others.

As always, thank you all very much for reading.