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points by peri-cl 18 hours ago | 0 comments

If this is authentic, I am a duck.

You'd have to be exceedingly open-minded to imagine a very remote, isolated peoples speaking in a semiotic flavor indistinguishable from your own Bay Area tech geek. Using metaphors like "quantum vacuum" and "mathematically incompatible theories of reality".

The source (a commercial website for a resort hotel, if you click around) doesn't pass the minimal trustworthiness bar, in this era of ubiquitous fake AI writing.

[–] barrkel 16 hours ago

It names Mamo Vangelio Moscote Alberto and Saka Rosa Mamatacán Sauna; they are also identified in a predating cultural document; https://static1.squarespace.com/static/661d435c11d79f60042ba...

There's a separate account that describes it as the result of four days of consultation: https://www.wildsidejourneys.com/post/a-message-from-the-eld...

Obviously it has been written in collaboration with someone with good knowledge of AI, but it's written to that audience, so why wouldn't they collaborate?

It would be a worse kind of cultural imperialism to deny these people the right to say something by criticizing how they say it.

[–] Gualdrapo 18 hours ago

Some Kogi people have formal eastern education and go to universities, so they are not "isolated" as the strawman you're trying to put in there. I used to saw some of their people when I was at uni at Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota.

[–] PaulHoule 17 hours ago

In the big picture I see very similar thinking from this guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mart%C3%ADn_Prechtel

who I think is one of the most legit teachers of indigenous American traditions that there is [1] In particular his view of human incubation, training and development is represented there.

[1] ... and global folk religion for that matter; his description of rituals for the dead and the community impact of not doing them in The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise are so similar to the situation in China described in A Time of Lost Gods where mediums in a small village are struggling with the aftermath of building a gas station on top of a mass grave

[–] Akuehne 18 hours ago

So the very thing that is supposed to give their opinions any weight, isn't really true.

[–] nstents 17 hours ago

That's quite the box they're put into; they're either completely ignorant of the outside world, or they're completely infected by it. Perhaps there's a middle ground.

[–] harimau777 17 hours ago

The thing that is supposed to give their opinions weight is the insights provided by their traditional knowledge and lived experiences. That doesn't require them to lack conventional (for lack of a better word) knowledge or to be isolated.

[–] ChickeNES 17 hours ago

And why does traditional knowledge have any weight whatsoever? Sounds like another form of religious claptrap to me.

[–] mindslight 17 hours ago

As an atheist, "religious claptrap" tends to contain more wisdom than average. Not inherently, but rather simply because reverence allows it to endure while more direct wisdom is readily thrown away for the sake of expedience. I think this is like one of the main themes of the piece itself.

All of the simplistic rejections in this thread, people looking to quickly assuage their cognitive dissonance rather than doing ten minutes of work holding conflicting thoughts in their head, make me think we are truly damned.

[–] harimau777 17 hours ago

Can you explain why you think that it shouldn't have weight?

[–] throwaway27448 17 hours ago

Ignorance of a topic does not imply its invalidity

[–] txrx0000 4 hours ago

Because religions don't survive unless they describe the world as we see it at least somewhat accurately, albeit at a high abstraction level. They're blurry but often not wrong.

I think the observations and criticisms in this article are pretty good, regardless of who wrote it. We desperately need to figure out what consciousness as we know it, is. It's possible that computers running the right program can possess human-like consciousness, but it would be a shame if we pass the torch to AIs without checking first and it turns out that they're unconscious matter. It would also be a shame if we attempt to enslave a new conscious species.

To echo another idea in the article, our incomplete understanding of consciousness/observation is probably why we don't have a unified description of physics. These are just rough intuitions, but I've written about these and related ideas in more detail in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49736149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49472348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50034305

The part near the end about harmonic coexistence can perhaps be modernized/translated to mean game theory with observer-dependent values/payoffs, which is something I've been thinking about recently, and we need to figure this out quite soon in order to prevent an inescapable race to the bottom. For the first time in history, one can expand one's own intelligence at will. The observable future may be short and boring if we don't find a new way to cooperate/coexist with one another in symbiosis. We may get stuck in a race to increase one's own compute capacity indefinitely to keep up with eachother in adversarial games, or perhaps be forced to merge with one another to form a giant organism, or perhaps spread out at near light speed, or just die. Many people who are leading the charge in AI and technology development are philosophically bankrupt to the point of denying their own consciousness, so it is accurate to say that we are an unconscious people. There are bright exceptions like Elon Musk, but even he does not understand what the question means when he asks "what is truth?" or "what is the meaning of life?", and it would serve him well to pause for a second to look inward and define what he means by each word of the query instead of assuming that expanding out into the universe will automatically yield an ultimate answer.

[–] tikimcfee 18 hours ago

What are you talking about? How is them attending university in any way unweighting this writing? Did you actually read it word for word? Slowly? Intentionally? Without a thought in your head afore that it was bunk, foolish, or simply not worth your time? I don't think you did. Or if you think you did, maybe you need to try to do it again, because saying this I don't think means you at least have actually digested the words, and could actually see a place on this planet where someone can have a deep and profound way of seeing and talking about the world in a way that is completely contrary to you and also be "classically educated".

[–] HelloMcFly 17 hours ago

The only thing that gives their opinions any weight is a lack of a formal western education? Do you have any idea how awful that sounds? Surely the point you are trying to make is more nuanced than that.

[–] andreisag 17 hours ago

Not affiliated with that site, it's just where I came across it. An earlier source is this PDF from Movilizatorio (a well established Colombian non-profit), dated September: https://movilizatorio.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Gonawin...

[–] tikimcfee 17 hours ago

We should find a way to attribute it to that source, perhaps, if it is less related to the source page that this particular link is pointing to.

[–] convict 18 hours ago

They are selling a $4,444 5 day music production retreat: https://sonidoselva.com/5-day-production-retreat

[–] nstents 17 hours ago

I think that's an easy conclusion to come to, but the top level page of the site seems to push a different conclusion: "...On this path, we recognize and honor the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta — the Kogui, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankuamo — as ancestral guardians of the territory and living source of the wisdom that inspires and underpins our work."

[–] analognoise 17 hours ago

You’d have to be very naive to think the “thing” they were pushing was the “recognition and honor of the indigenous people” and NOT the $4500 music production retreat.

[–] nstents 16 hours ago

I meant to be saying that the Kogui were not the ones pushing the music production retreat, but it was a third party, the creators of the site, doing so.

My apologies for having allowed a different interpretation in my previous comment.

[–] analognoise 15 hours ago

Nah my bad, I should have considered that as a possible interpretation and I failed to. Have an excellent day!

[–] PaulHoule 17 hours ago

So? Lots of organizations do retreats with a similar cost, though certainly that kind of pricing put events out of reach of most people.

At the top page of that site I saw a lot of pictures which reminded me a little of the "Witch Camp" gatherings that the Reclaiming movement puts on which are an education in ritual that costs a fraction of what the above organization charges but these are non-profit gatherings run by very lefty people.

[–] ChickeNES 16 hours ago

It’s kinda amazing how many different variants of the Ancient Aliens scam exist.

[–] PaulHoule 16 hours ago

Well, when I do see Mormon missionaries coming I do tell them my story about how "After Quetzalcōātl came to teach Americans how to grow corn he went to teach people in the Middle East about spirituality" and that "He's really a dinosaur, and that impact 66 million years ago was no accident but an engineered collision of a space colony off the Yucatan peninsula (like what happens in Gundam!), the remaining dinosaurs live in large space habitats out in the Oort Cloud."

That is a joke of course and is much as humor is a part of my practice [1] I don't believe or or expect anyone else to believe it.

Overall I believe in ritual as a technology, that the things people say about religion are fiction but the the things they do are real. I led a small group of students to what I realized later was the highest spot on our campus and we did a simple ritual and experienced immense joy in simply pulling something off in a group and more later when it primed me to see something really sacred in watching the moon rise over an unspeakably profane commercial strip.

My green witch wife would totally say witchcraft is about manifesting your dreams and to me the esbat rituals for the new and full moon are about making and keeping commitments, Steven Covey kind of stuff, really applied psychology. [2]

[1] ... introducing a crude hammer as "a ritual tool my wife gave me on condition that we can only call it 'the hammer of whammer', my wife says that ritual tools gain powers through being used and... this has been used, it has a legendary origin story which I've been sworn to secrecy about"

[2] ... and those of you who say I digress too much are wrong this time, modern pagan practices are very much modeled after the nearly universal practices that your (more or less distant) ancestors practiced in their village before the Empire [3] showed up with its soldiers and scribes

[3] ... the Romans, the Shang, the British, the contemporary world system, what they have in common is that they send in stormtroopers and blow up your planet if you try to resist

[–] flir 17 hours ago

There's a reference to the paperclip maximiser near the end.

I have no idea about its authenticity or otherwise, but it is an interesting read. Simple words, dense ideas.

[–] prodigycorp 17 hours ago

the conflict of quantum mechanics vs general relativity is well within the realm of pop science and most assuredly within the grasp of anyone who read a book.

[–] p-e-w 18 hours ago

Tribal membership today is often a formal status first and foremost. It’s quite possible that the authors spend their whole day on their smartphones. They almost certainly don’t live like the ancestors they invoke in this message.

[–] harimau777 17 hours ago

Do you have any evidence that they spend their whole day on their smartphones? It's also not clear to me that they claim to live exactly like their ancestors. They just claim to have knowledge that was refined and passed on to them by their ancestors.

[–] harpiaharpyja 17 hours ago

Or you know, you can read it and then evaluate your sense of what it's worth based on the actual content.

[–] xyos 17 hours ago

The original source, not that site:

https://movilizatorio.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Gonawin...

I'm Colombian, and at university I studied with people from some of these communities. They're not as isolated as you might think. Many of their leaders are educated and bilingual, and they work with scientists, NGOs and policy makers. Their messages often reach us through translators and allies, so the wording can sound familiar. The ideas are still their own.

Assuming they can't talk about reality in sophisticated terms is the same bias they've dealt with for centuries, and it's part of what they're pushing back on. (Calling them Savages)