2021-05-04
Note: I have no desire to create any of the conditions I speak about in this post. I’m quite eager to be wrong…! My usual process is to learn something about the universe, and to find it quite ugly and brutal at first, but then to learn about a way to frame it as something beautiful and poetic (as the universe deserves). I feel the words below are a bit on a brutal side at the moment, unfortunately…!
Why am I not a rationalist? I don’t actually think that the universe favours rationalist thought. In fact, I think it probably drives it to extinction.
My intuition on this comes from this TED talk by Donald Hoffman: Do We See Reality As It Is?
I feel it’s an overall mind-bending talk, but the key point is that when his lab ran many simulated worlds, they discovered something neat. The simulated creatures that were seeded in this world were of two sorts: those that saw the sim world for what it was (reality), and those who only saw the world as it related to “their own fitness”. Imagine here that “seeing fitness” was just seeing things that helped them continue to the next “tick” in the world engine, while remaining blind to what reality underpinned that fitness.
Anyhow, when these creatures were pitted against one another in this sim world, the creatures seeing only fitness ALWAYS drove to extinction the creatures that saw “reality as it is”. In my read of that, there was predominantly detriment to seeing reality as it is.
So what is “seeing only fitness” in the human sphere? My understanding is that it’s the spiritual. It’s religion. It’s the emotional and deeply interpersonal. It’s intuition. I understand emotions to be simply proxies and heuristics running across the tenuous surface of “reality as it is”. And in my view, any worldview or system that doesn’t incorporate or centre on the role of emotion or the spiritual is probably doomed.
So what is it about rationalism that has become so elevated these days? Why do they feel they’re having this moment? I think rationalists are simply having a brief moment of power, because an important system and place of power right now (computers) currently rely on abstractions that exist in a certain way that is most legible to their ways of seeing. So rationalists are then over-represented in the cohort of world-builders of this moment. But those abstractions are constructed. The nice organization of our digital systems are constrained to be legible to them. Those interfaces are only preserved and legible to rationalists because that is how we’ve “pinned them”. We pin interfaces to remain legible to us — to human minds.
But when our minds have no need to understand the interfaces — or perhaps, when the interfaces have no need for us to understand them — then they will drift. We’re already seeing it with machine learning. The black box is drifting out of reach. We’re creating incomprehensible boxes, and the clean interfaces of our programming language are transforming into the illegible sea of parameters in our machine learning models. Of course, we’re trying to wrestle it back, but it’s only with great effort. In the big picture, the universe does not favour our understanding it. (Or perhaps it only favours our understanding it when it’s doing a breadth-first search for the next substrate to leap into.)
Biology ran amok for millenia before one biological agent (us!) had the wherewithall (and a pocket of spacetime) to insist that its own biology should be mapped and understood. In the same way, I believe the digital strata of matter might pan out. We’re seeing the digital run further ahead down the path, dashing out of our reach. We’re drawing it back every so often to explain itself to us, but I expect it will at some point run beyond our reach. And then, the only one to understand it will be the machines themselves, perhaps in a trillion cycles time, once the explosion of forward bursts has subsided, when a natural ceiling or constraint has been reached. At this point, the machine itself will develop the same sense of a wherewithall that it should probably understand itself — an echo of our current bio-cultural moment for humanity, this flash of the scientific revolution.
Anyhow, these interfaces, untethered, will become unmoored from human understanding, and they will start to look and feel more organic. These new interfaces (perhaps neural network neurons are already this) will grow and propagate and divide, and coalesce in any place where “fitness” can be found. They will not care about the nice abstraction interfaces we once penciled in for them at designated levels of the stack, at the sweet spots that matched our preferences — an equilibrium condition amongst variables within a system of equations: our preferred length of words, the capacity of our short-term and long-term memory, the ideal length of sentences, and depth of reasoning and recursive thought — all quite arbitrary things in the grand scheme of the universe.
And when this untethering happens, then the rationalists will be grasping and floundering in a chaotic ecology of information with the rest of us. Perhaps that world will feel and look quite like the chaos of a natural organic world.