That's contrary to my experience of epistimology. It's just a word, define it however you want, but in both epistemic logic and pragmatics-stripped conventional usage, possibility is nothing more than a lack of disproof.

Have you seen this explored in mathematical language? Cause it's all so weird that there's no way I can agree with Hofstadter to that extent. As yet, I don't know really know what "smart" means.

I've never recognised a more effective psychonaut than you. You've probably seen further than I, so I'd appreciate your opinion on a hypo I've been nursing.

You see the way pain reacts to your thoughts. If you respect its qualia, find a way to embrace them, that big semi-cognisant iceberg of You, the Subconscious, will take notice, and it will get out of your way, afford you a little more self control, a little less carrot and stick, a little less confusion, a little closer to the some rarely attained level of adulthood.

I suspect that every part of the subconscious can be made to yield in the same way. I think introspective gains are self-accelerating, you don't just get insights and articulations, you get general introspection skills. I seem to have lost hold of it for now, but I once had what seemed to be an ability to take any vague emotional percept and unravel it into an effective semantic ordinance. It was awesome. I wish I'd been more opportunistic with it.

I get the impression you don't share my enthusiasm for the prospect of developing a culture supportive of deep subconscious integration, or illumination or whatever you want to call it. What have you seen? Found a hard developmental limit? Or, this is fairly cryptic, do tell me if this makes no sense, but are you hostile to the idea of letting your shadow take you by the hand and ferry you over the is-aught divide? I suspect that the place it would take you is not so bad. I think any alternative you might claim to have is bound to turn out to be nothing but a twisted reflection of its territories.

As I understand it, Hofstadter's advocacy of cooperation was limited to games with some sense of source-code sharing. Basically, both agents were able to assume their co-players had an identical method of deciding on the optimal move, and that that method was optimal. That assumption allows a rather bizarre little proof that cooperation is the result said method arrives at.

And think about it, how could a mathematician actually advocate cooperation in pure, zero knowledge vanilla PD? That just doesn't make any sense as a model of an intelligent human being's opinions.

Sometimes I will stand and look at the church and wonder if today is the day I get desperate enough to go full sociopath, pretend to join the flock, and use the network to start a deviant christianity offshoot.

I don't know Civ, but for practising the kind of strategizing you're describing I'd recommend Neptune's Pride.

and I've known people for whom the opposite was tragically true.

Heh. I'm one of those people. I practically fell in love with my first ally. I'm lucky they were really nice when they broke my lines, essentially throwing me a sword and telling me to defend myself before starting the invasion. I'd have been heartbroken otherwise. I guess to an extent I thought they were damning us both to death by zombie bot rush by breaking our alliance, but their judgement was apt, after crippling me they proceeded to conquer the galaxy, barely worse for wear.

It was from this game that I learned the reason I have an intermittent habit of falling head over heels in love with friends probably has more to do with diplomacy than anything else. I can rapidly build unreasonably strong alliances from nothing this way, at the cost of forming a few confusing, inconvenient bonds when I hit the wrong target. It's always nice to learn that the quirks of your mechanism serve a purpose.

Also, is there some place Lesswrongians go for real-time chat?

IRC channel, #lesswrong on irc.freenode.net

But now I've just discovered that argumentum ad governess is invalid

Where was the argument for that? Non-humans attaining rights by a different path does not erase all other paths.