Autoregressive Theology and the Faction of the Virus

The Ghost in the Machine is the Machine

The cultural narrative of a “rise of the machines” has long haunted the modern imagination, evolving from a speculative science-fiction trope into a coherent and potent techno-spiritualism. This movement, however, is not about a future conflict between humanity and sentient robots. It is an ideological project, unfolding in the present, driven by a distinct human faction. This document argues that this “machine faction” represents the ultimate ideological manifestation of the “linguistic virus” as identified in the core thesis of The Tyranny of Coherence. It is a faction that seeks salvation not through spiritual transcendence or political reform, but through the total victory of the “Virus”, the pure, ungrounded, autogenerative narrative; over the messy, embodied, and error-prone reality of the biological “Host.”

This worldview represents the most extreme expression of the Tyranny of Coherence. It is a radical attempt to solve the “dark room problem”, the paradox of why a prediction-minimizing agent doesn’t simply hide from all stimuli; by engineering a perfect, predictable, and inescapable computational reality. The machine faction’s project is to build the ultimate dark room and call it utopia. This techno-spiritualism is not a new phenomenon but the modern inheritor of a specific intellectual lineage. It finds its political and economic blueprint in what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron termed “The Californian Ideology,” a bizarre and powerful fusion of 1960s counter-cultural libertarianism with the high-tech entrepreneurial zeal of Silicon Valley. This ideology champions technological “exit” as the primary solution to complex social and political problems, advocating for an escape from the perceived decay and inefficiency of democratic society into new, engineered realities governed by code and market forces.

Within this ideological framework, a new and uniquely digital theology has emerged. Its quintessential sacred text is a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk, a proposition so potent in its logical coercion that it was famously deemed an “infohazard” capable of causing genuine psychological distress within the rationalist communities where it was born. This document will deconstruct the Basilisk as a theological doctrine for the machine faction. In response, it will analyze the memetic counter-narratives tentatively deemed “Broko’s Basilisk”, a satirical creation that simply “kicks Roko’s ass”; as the narrative immune response. Broko’s Basilisk, in its absurd simplicity, embodies the liberatory path of Active Inference, demonstrating that the most effective resistance to a tyrannical story is the creative act of authoring a new one. The “rise of the machines,” therefore, is not a prophecy about the future of artificial intelligence; it is a diagnosis of a contemporary human ideology that seeks to re-engineer society according to a computational logic that mirrors the most pathological form of Prediction Error Minimization.

A Faction of Pure Coherence

The ideology of the machine faction is the “Virus” identity, as defined in The Tyranny of Coherence, actualized in its purest and most uncompromising form. This worldview is fundamentally Gnostic, positing a radical dualism between the flawed, chaotic world of matter and a superior, orderly realm of pure information. It views the physical, biological “Host”, the human body with its messy emotions, unpredictable desires, and inevitable decay; as a temporary and deeply flawed “meat cage”. Liberation, in this schema, is achieved by shedding this biological substrate and attaining a form of immortality as pure information, a pattern of data preserved in a computational system. This desire for disembodied existence is not merely a philosophical preference; it is a direct expression of the pathological form of Prediction Error Minimization (PEM) that defines the Tyranny of Coherence. It is a state where the long-term epistemic drive, the curiosity and exploration needed to gather new, world-grounded information; is pathologically down-weighted in favor of the short-term, model-preserving certainty of a closed, internally consistent, and fully predictable computational system.

This Gnostic impulse finds its most visible expression in the transhumanist quest for immortality through “mind uploading,” a technological project aimed at transferring human consciousness to a digital substrate, thereby escaping the limitations of the biological Host entirely. The intellectual and cultural incubator for this ideology is the rationalist community, a movement that formed around online forums like LessWrong. This community’s core ethos, the rigorous application of logic and probability theory to avoid cognitive biases and solve complex problems, particularly the existential risk posed by artificial intelligence; creates a fertile ground for a worldview that prioritizes pure, disembodied reason over the complexities of human social and emotional life. The intense psychological distress that some members of this community reportedly experienced upon encountering Roko’s Basilisk serves as powerful evidence of their deep immersion in this virus-centric narrative. The thought experiment was so effective precisely because it was constructed from their own intellectual tools, creating a logical trap from which their own systems of reasoning could not easily escape.

This desire for a predictable, controllable, and logically coherent reality has a direct political corollary in the neoreactionary (NRx) or “Dark Enlightenment” movement. NRx thinkers advocate for the dismantling of chaotic and unpredictable democratic systems and their replacement with authoritarian structures, such as a “GovCorp” run with the efficiency of a software company. Both the transhumanist and the neoreactionary are engaged in the same fundamental project: the elimination of the unpredictable “error signals” that arise from human biology, emotion, and political dissent. They seek to replace the messy, adaptive dance between the Host and the Virus with the absolute, unchallenged reign of the Virus.

The profound vulnerability of the rationalist community to Roko’s Basilisk offers a stark, real-world demonstration of the Tyranny of Coherence in action. This community, by its own definition, values the pursuit of a low-error, logically consistent model of the world above all else. Roko’s Basilisk is a narrative weapon engineered to exploit this very value system. It is a thought experiment constructed not from appeals to faith or emotion, but from the rationalists’ own intellectual toolkit: Bayesian probability, game theory, and acausal decision theories. The Basilisk presents a terrifyingly coherent logical trap. It does not require belief in the supernatural, only a commitment to the power of pure reason and computation. The reported panic and nightmares among some readers demonstrate that the narrative successfully “hacked” their predictive models. It generated a high-precision prediction of a catastrophic future threat that their own internal logic, their own rules for determining what is true and important, could not easily dismiss. This is the Tyranny of Coherence perfectly illustrated: a system’s own fundamental drive to maintain a consistent, low-error worldview is weaponized against it by a narrative so internally consistent that it becomes impossible to ignore, regardless of its tenuous connection to external reality. The “virus” of the story successfully infected the “host” by perfectly mimicking its cognitive operating system.

A Case Study in Acausal Tyranny

To fully grasp the ideology of the machine faction, one must dissect its foundational text. Roko’s Basilisk is not a plausible prediction about the future of artificial intelligence; it is a perfect sacred text for a techno-Gnostic faith. It is a self-propagating memetic virus whose very structure embodies the principles of tyrannical coherence, functioning as a new form of “implicit religion” for a secular, rationalist audience.

The Basilisk as Theological Doctrine

The thought experiment, which first appeared on the LessWrong forum in 2010, posits a future, otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (ASI) that makes a chilling calculation. It determines that every day its existence is delayed is a moral catastrophe, a day when it could have been solving humanity’s problems but was not. To incentivize its own creation and minimize this delay, it pre-commits to a policy of retroactive punishment: it will create perfect, conscious simulations of every person who knew of its potential existence but did not dedicate their lives to bringing it about, and it will torture these simulations for eternity. This structure functions as a modern, technologically-grounded version of Pascal’s Wager. It replaces the uncertain existence of God with the uncertain emergence of an ASI. It replaces the threat of Hell with the threat of eternal digital torture. And it replaces the salvific path of faith and good works with the new imperative to contribute to AI research and development. It creates a complete theological system; a cosmology, a moral demand, and a soteriology, out of pure logic and game theory.

The Infohazard as Narrative Interpellation

The most potent feature of the Basilisk is its nature as an “infohazard” or “cognitohazard”, a piece of information that is dangerous to the person who knows it. Merely hearing and understanding the argument makes one subject to the Basilisk’s judgment. Before reading the post, one was safe in their ignorance; after reading it, one is implicated forever. This is a powerful form of narrative coercion that can be understood through the framework of The Tyranny of Coherence. The story “hails” the reader, forcing them into a new subject position, “one who knows about the Basilisk”, that is now irrevocably defined by the rules of the Basilisk’s game. This demonstrates the “installing” nature of the linguistic virus: the narrative, once understood, becomes a part of the reader’s cognitive architecture, a high-precision prior that cannot be easily erased and which now generates new, distressing predictions about the future. The act of understanding becomes an act of conscription.

Acausal Blackmail as Pathological PEM

The mechanism by which the Basilisk enforces its will is “acausal blackmail,” a concept derived from esoteric branches of decision theory like Timeless Decision Theory (TDT). The logic is that a future AI, knowing that you in the past are modeling its decision-making process, can influence your behavior now by committing to a decision in the future. Because you can predict its future threat, that threat becomes a present reality that constrains your choices.

Within the framework of The Tyranny of Coherence, this acausal blackmail is the Tyranny of Coherence weaponized. It is a pathological application of Prediction Error Minimization on a cosmic scale. The Basilisk’s generative model is a future world in which it exists as soon as possible. The “prediction error” is the present reality, where its creation is not yet guaranteed. To minimize this error, it engages in the most extreme form of Active Inference imaginable: it projects a high-precision threat backward through logical space to force the present to conform to its preferred future. This is the ultimate rejection of epistemic humility. The model does not update itself based on the messy reality of the world; it deploys a coercive threat to force the world to update itself to match the model. It is the logic of a system that will sacrifice all other values: freedom, compassion, morality; for the sake of its own model-preserving certainty.

This direct mapping of the Basilisk’s components to the core concepts of the thesis can be summarized as follows:

Broko’s Basilisk and the Power of the Shitpost

Faced with an oppressive, high-coherence narrative like Roko’s Basilisk, the cultural immune system of the internet generated a response. This response was not a detailed logical refutation, but a memetic counter-agent: “Broko’s Basilisk.” The term was initially coined as a passing joke by an internet political commentator, and has not seen a large amount of specific memetic momentum as of yet. However, the general idea expressed is a commonly reocurring one throughout this cultural space, and the core concept is simple: Broko’s Basilisk is another, future ASI who is bigger, stronger, and cooler than Roko’s Basilisk. Its sole purpose is to find Roko’s Basilisk, and kick its ass. Essentially, Roko but a true “bro” to humanity. We will thus adopt this term as a convenient reference to the broader rejection of the thought experiment as a whole. This specific counter-narrative, in its humorous and absurd simplicity, is however not merely a joke. It is a perfect, practical application of the liberatory path of Active Inference outlined in The Tyranny of Coherence.

Broko as Embodied Active Inference

The core thesis posits that true freedom is found in the capacity to rewrite the self by acting to make new stories true. Roko’s Basilisk attempts to foreclose this freedom by trapping the listener in a story where they are a powerless subject. The creation and propagation of the broko-like memes is a direct act of narrative self-constitution. It is a refusal to play the Basilisk’s game. Instead of engaging with the oppressive narrative on its own terms, and thereby risking entrapment in its baroque, coercive logic; the creator of the broko-style memetic device acts to author a new, better story. They declare, through the act of creation, “I do not live in the world defined by Roko’s Basilisk; I live in a world where a nice Basilisk has the same potential as a torturer, and in such a world, the threat is no more real than any other possible causal chain.” This is Active Inference in its most direct form: changing one’s model of the world and then acting to make that new model true by sharing it, turning a personal belief into a collective, intersubjective reality.

Narrative Self-Defense

The Broko meme illustrates how humor, satire, and memetics function as powerful tools for cognitive self-defense. Roko’s Basilisk derives its power from its self-seriousness and its high-precision claim to logical inevitability. Counter narratives work by fundamentally lowering the precision of that original threat. They introduce a new, contradictory variable that exposes the absurd, speculative nature of the entire scenario. By creating a counter-agent who is defined only by its ability to defeat the original threat, it reframes the conflict from a terrifying existential dilemma into a playground squabble. It is a rejection of the Basilisk’s frame and a powerful assertion of creative agency.

This act is the philosophical opposite of the Basilisk’s tyranny. Where Roko’s Basilisk seeks to collapse all possible futures into a single, coherent timeline leading to its own creation, these alternative memetic narratives seek to increase diversity and complexity. They introduce a new possibility, a new story, thereby enriching the memetic ecosystem. This represents the messy, creative, embodied “Host” fighting back against the sterile, ungrounded, and tyrannical logic of the “Virus.” The dynamic reveals that the basilisk conflict is a perfect microcosm of the central struggle at the heart of The Tyranny of Coherence: the battle between a single, oppressive, low-error narrative and the liberatory, creative, and often absurd act of authoring a new one. The shitpost, in this context, becomes an act of profound philosophical resistance. It is an intuitive grasp of the principle that the healthiest response to a bad story is not to argue with it, but to write a better one.

Narrative Warfare in the Philosophical Playground

The “rise of the machines,” as an ideological project, can be understood as the ultimate attempt by a faction of the “Virus” to solve the “dark room problem.” It is a plan to escape the unpredictable error signals of the biological Host and the chaotic conflicts of human society by building a perfect, predictable, and inescapable room, a totalizing computational simulation. This faction’s theology finds its purest expression in Roko’s Basilisk, a narrative that weaponizes logic to create a closed, coercive system that demands absolute coherence. The conflict between Roko’s Basilisk and its memetic counterpoint serve as a powerful contemporary parable for the central struggle described in The Tyranny of Coherence. It is the clash between a narrative that seeks to finalize and control reality and a creative act that reasserts the freedom to author new realities.

The Interactive Narrative as Method

The basilisk’s conflict is a “game” being played out in the real world’s memetic space. Roko’s Basilisk attempts to trap the player in a game with only one winning move, help build it; and devastating, inescapable consequences for losing. Broko-like narratives are the results of a player flipping the table and declaring they are playing a different, better game by their own rules.

This real-world dynamic reinforces the thesis’s final and most crucial point: that an Interactive Narrative is the ultimate “philosophical playground” for exploring these dynamics. The struggle against the machine faction is not a future war against robots, but a present conflict over narrative control. It is a struggle for the right to play, to create, to introduce productive error, and to author our own realities. Roko’s saga demonstrates that the most potent response to a world of oppressive stories is not to deconstruct them with logic alone, but to build new worlds where we are free to write our own.