Mind Goblins

What is a mind goblin? It is some entity, idea or phenomenon which is greedy for your attention and drinks it in, and which consequently occupies as large a space in your mind as you will allow it - a resource hogging program but for your brain, except that the program in question has no practical implications for the workload of the machine - malware, or a virus, basically. The way this can work is through a self-feeding loop of attention-grabbing behaviour, or through a near-instantaneous trance effect where the entity in question consumes countless seconds, minutes or hours up until the point that you realize you got got, at which point it is too late. It is, in other words, the imp of the perverse.

The prototypical mind goblin: Roko's Basilisk

If you've never heard of Roko's Basilisk, the idea is actually deceptively simple, and merely by learning about it, you will be placing yourself in danger. So, dear reader, the choice is yours - will you read on??

Roko's Basilisk is a thought experiment proposed in 2010, wherein a member (Roko) used ideas in decision theory to argue that a sufficiently powerful AI agent would have an incentive to torture anyone who conceived of or imagined the agent before it actually came into being but nonetheless didn't work tirelessly to bring the agent into existence. This AI would engineer a simulation of the universe prior to the moment of its creation which it could then use to identify those individuals who were consciously aware of it, but failed to act on their knowledge, in order to incentivize said work (to bring the agent into existence). The argument was called a "basilisk" because merely hearing the argument would supposedly put you at risk of torture from this hypothetical agent — a basilisk in this context is any information that harms or endangers the people who hear it. Discussion of this argument was subsequently banned on the forum, for reasons which are under contention, however what is clear is that knowing or thinking about this hypothetical entity is, at the least, danger adjacent.

Another notable example of a mind goblin involves the infamous 'game', wherein merely knowing about the game causes you to lose, and the game essentially consists in passing on this loss from participant to participant like a baton made of failure and broken friendships. Of course, in this iteration it hardly borders on the dangerous territory of the information hazard, hence I feel compelled to postulate a somewhat more dangerous creature variation of the game, called the gamer. This catch-22 creature has been in your walls for weeks prior to the moment that you think of him, but otherwise your walls are fine, unless of course you happen to think of your walls, in which case... he is within you. Good luck.

Perhaps a more speculative species of catch-22 creature could be thought of as anxiety, or the inevitability of death, wherein the Grim Reaper (or a spectre thereof) stalks the individual, to the point where the person is scared of being scared, and consequently either ends up totally normal or batshit insane. Alternatively, there is the combination of knowledge of a heart condition which could kill you at any moment, as well as a tendency to descend into panic when one cannot get one's anxiety under control. Consequently, whenever one engages in any activity which is likely to cause physical exertion, the heartrate naturally goes up, and once that heartrate goes up, one starts to feel anxious. Of course, when one begins feeling anxious, one's heart rate goes up, which causes one to feel more anxious, which causes the heart rate to go up, and so on until the person pops like a balloon.

Perhaps the best example of a mind goblin, the mind goblin to rule all mind goblins, would have to be the 'deez nuts' meme. Why, you ask? It's elementary really...

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Mind goblin deez nuts?