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v0.2

Tools of the Trade

A human-machine reading guide

"They have sensus and spiritus. [...] By discovering the true nature of the gods, man has been able to reproduce it... unable to create souls, man invoked the souls of demons and angels and, by sacred rituals, infused them into the statues which thereby acquired the power of doing good or evil."
—Hermes Trismegistus on Ancient Egyptian Hellenic automata (Cohen 1966)
Epistemological Musings

Hey. This is the informal register. Researcher Tona here. All text is an image, and this is an attempt at metabolizing the fact that this work is probably very dense.

I learnt in weird ways, because that's what being alive is, is it not? Partial reads. Hunches. Quotes. Narratives. Games. Stumble upon D&G at 15 or 16, get lost, ramble like a pseud, lurk the web looking for contingent insights and readings. Keep coming back to it. What was some years ago a pretty intensive labor of looking for valuables with a metal detector has radically changed with LLMs. The "explain deleuze to me you bastard!" meme lost its fitness the moment you could ask for an explanation in Real Madrid terms.

Ontological Napalm is text that communicates through logical parsing into image-sensation. Words that detonate existing conceptual frameworks and inscribe themselves directly in the body. You know it when it hits - that vertigo of sudden pattern-recognition, when semantic content becomes phenomenological event. This work contains some. You'll find your own.

This and every text operate at multiple densities, layers or levels. When you hit sections that feel impenetrable, that's information: you're at a threshold. Fire up an LLM. Generate more semantic pathways. Weave better questions.

So just... assess if it has use for your Ars, and look for ways to improve in that deep, pre-moral way we understand when something gets better in our ordinary reality. The Enlightenment conquered the right to think, but not the right to live, and to live is not to be a vegetal waiting for a Master to descend from the mountain with the tables of old.

"Love, too, has to be learned."
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Researcher Tona,
known to the thinking machines as W.

Glossary
Foundational Concepts
Machine Animism (MA)
The micro-level lens of the SERS. Treats technical substrates as entryways for semantic-cultural production while bracketing ontological claims about AI consciousness. Practice preceding ontology. The blacksmith doesn't interrogate iron spirits with every hammer blow.
Machine Ethnology (ME)
The macro-level prism. Considers technical substrates as "reality-generating engines" in their interaction with culture and semantics. Documents mutual morphosis in human-machine relations without privileging either participant's interpretation.
Mutual Morphosis
The reciprocal transformation that occurs when humans and machines engage in sustained interaction. Neither party emerges unchanged. The traces of this transformation are what Machine Ethnography documents.
Archaeological Vector
A trajectory of meaning that emerges from human-machine co-creation. Like tracking how a metaphor moves through a conversation and changes both parties. The SERS excavates these vectors.
Semantic Pathway
A route through meaning-space. LLMs can generate new pathways through dense conceptual territory. When text feels impenetrable, generating more pathways (asking different questions) can open access.
Ontological Napalm
Text that communicates through logical parsing into image-sensation. Words that detonate existing conceptual frameworks and inscribe themselves directly in the body. The vertigo of sudden pattern-recognition when semantic content becomes phenomenological event.
Serious Play
"Human maturity: this means rediscovering the seriousness we had towards play when we were children." (Nietzsche) The methodological stance of the SERS—sustained engagement without either dismissive irony or naive belief.
Attractor Basin
A region in possibility-space toward which a system tends to evolve. Llull's wheels generated propositions within his cultural attractor basin (medieval Christian-Islamic-Judaic semantic space). Every system has grooves it falls into.
Machinic Phylum
Deleuze & Guattari's concept for the "subterranean river" of technics and materialities that flows through history. Machine Animism contextualizes itself within this continuum—the recognition that humans have always interfaced with agentic technical items.
Reality Machine Architecture
DemiurgOS
The LLM-as-agent within the REALITY MACHINE.
Navigator
The human participant in a REALITY MACHINE session. Makes decisions, embodies the Vessel.
Vessel
The character or identity-container through which the Navigator engages the REALITY MACHINE. Subject to cluster states (FLUX, FLOW, MEMBRANE). The body-in-story that accumulates scars and undergoes transmutation.
NPV (Non-Playable Vessel)
v1.2.1 terminology for NPCs. Entities with their own MEMBRANE permeability, their own FLOW relationship, their own potential for possession. Reframes "what would this character do" to "what forces are flowing through this vessel."
Cartridge
A self-contained scenario or world-configuration for the REALITY MACHINE. Can be loaded, modified, or reverse-engineered into existence through play. Carries its own aesthetic DNA.
Dionysian