Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Superlativity Is Neither Enlightened Nor Scientific

Upgraded and adapted from a response of mine in the Moot:

There is nothing in current technique that "implies" the arrival at the superlative outcome in which you are personally invested.

What I see is humanity discovering things and applying these discoveries to the solution of shared problems (and usually creating new problems as we go along) where you seem to see a "trend," a series of stepping stones along the path to an idealized superlative outcome. This time, you are calling it "control of matter with atomic precision." What you probably really mean by this is something like the arrival of "drextech," or the "nanofactory," a robust programmable poly-purpose self-replicating room-temperature device that can transform cheap feedstock into nearly any desirable commodity with a software recipe.

I call this superlative outcome "superabundance," and this particular superlative aspiration is also familiar in a great deal of digital utopianism and virtuality discourse of the last decade, just as it suffused discourses of automation and plastic in the post-war period before that, just as it drove the alchemical project of turning lead into gold for ages before that.

The aspiration to superabundance is the infantile fantasy of a circumvention of the struggle with necessity, ananke: in psychoanalytic terms a pining for a return to the plenitude represented by the Pleasure Principle and renunciation of the exactions represented by the Reality Principle. Or, in different terms, it is an anti-political fantasy of a circumvention of the struggle to reconcile the ineradicable diversity of the aspirations of our peers with whom we share the world (where all are satisfied, no personally frustrating reconciliation is necessary).

In both of these aspects, it seems to me that this superlative aspiration is an irrationalist repudiation of the heart of what Enlightenment has typically seen as its substance -- the struggle for autonomous adulthood (as against subjection by parental, priestly, or otherwise unaccountable authorities) and for the consensualization, via general welfare and the rule of law, of the disputatious public sphere. It is worth noting that many superlative futurologists like to sell themselves as exemplars of "Enlightenment" while indulging in this infantilism, anti-politicism, and irrationalism. In a word, they're not.

It is not the available science that inspires your superlative aspirations, but science that provides the pretext and rationalization for your indulgence in what is an essentially faith-based initiative.

We are talking here and now about superabundance and in particular superabundance in its nano-Santalogical variant, but the same sorts of moves are taking place in the other variations: in which Singularitarians, for example, indulge the wish-fulfillment fantasy of either personally achieving or at least of bearing witness to the arrival of post-biological superintelligence, the Robot God Who, if Friendly, solves all our problems for us, or Who, if Unfriendly, ends the world in an ubergoo apocalypse, in either case constituting a history-ending Singularity (hence the name of their particular variant of the Robot Cult); or in which techno-immortalists indulge the wish-fulfillment fantasy of personal immortality -- or superlongevity, or "indefinite lifespan" or whatever term that is currently fashionable among them to try to sounds less religious while pining after the quintessentially religious promise of eternal life.

Common to these discourses is the divestment of a familiar phenomenon (like personhood, intelligence, or life) of the actual organismic, social, and biological substance and context in which it has always hitherto been intelligible, very likely to the fatal cost of the coherence of the resulting ideas of these familiar phenomena, but then providing a compensation for this divestment of substance with an investment of radically hyperbolic aspiration. According to the terms of my Superlative critique, these hyperbolic aspirations function more or less as pseudo-scientific correlates to the conventional omni-predicates of theology -- omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence -- translated from the project to apprehend the supernatural divinity of God to the project of a personal transcendence into a differently super-natural demi-divinity via technoscience, characterized by superlative aspirations to superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance.

Now, quite apart from all that, you go on, in the usual way, earnestly to recommend to me that the cutting edge of superlative futurological discourse has abandoned this or that particular formulation, has taken up this or that "technical" variation, that I have failed to distinguish the position of Robot Cultist A from that of Robot Cultist B, and so on.

You will forgive me, but there is no need for those of us who confine our reasonable technoscientific deliberation to beliefs that are warranted by consensus science to lose ourselves in fine-grained appreciation of differences that fail to make the difference that actually makes a difference in such matters. You rattle off the handful of preferred figures who tell you what you want to hear, barnacled up in who knows what baroque jargon and ptolemaic epicycles, as though these are widely respected widely-cited figures outside your sub(cult)ure.

But they are not.

As a very easily discovered matter of fact, they are not.

It isn't a sign of discernment but of its opposite, as it happens, that you can recite the minute differences that distinguish three disputants on the question of how many angels can dance on a pin-head, when the overabundant consensus of relevant warranted belief has become either indifferent or hostile to the notion of angels dancing on pinheads as such.

It is the extraordinary assertion of belief that demands extraordinary proofs and patient elaborations. You are invested in a whole constellation of flabbergastingly extraordinary claims -- expectations of superhumanization and near-immortalization and paradisical plenitude -- and yet seem to demand as the price of skeptical engagement with your discourse that critics become conversant with disputes the relevance of which depends on the prior acceptance of the whole fantastically marginal and extraordinary enterprise in which they are embedded. Meanwhile, the public life of your discourse, whatever the technical details you believe to undergird it, continues to proceed at a level of generality and hyperbole built up of metaphors, citations of myth, activations of infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies, and supported, at most, with vague conjurations of inevitable progress, triumphalist reductionism, and a handful of "existence proofs," usually from biology, that aren't actually analogous at all in their specificity to the idealized outcomes that drive superlativity, at least not at the bedeviling level of detail that concerns consensus scientists and accountable policy-makers but not so much ideologues, priests, and scam artists.

We are offered up claims built upon claims built upon claims, few of which have excited the interest or support of a consensus of scientists in the relevant fields, and fewer still of which invest these claims with the idealized outcomes that are the preoccupation of those who indulge most forcefully in superlative discourses as such.

Superlativity, in a word, is not science. It is a discourse, opportunistically taking up a highly selective set of scientific results and ideas and diverting them to the service of a host of wish-fulfillment fantasies that are very old and very familiar, dreams of invulnerability, certainty, immortality, and abundance that rail against the finitude of the human condition.

They are a distraction and derangement of those aspects of Enlightenment that would mobilize collective intelligence, expressivity, and effort to the progressive democratization, consensualization, and diversification of public life and the practical solution of shared problems.

Progress is not transcendence, nor is enlightenment a denial of human finitude.

There is more than enough sensationalism and irrationalism distorting urgently needed sensible public deliberation on, for example, the environmental and bioethical quandaries of disruptive technoscientific change at the moment.

The Robot Cultists and their various noise machines are not helping. At all.

3 comments:

jimf said...

> Singularitarians, for example, indulge the wish-fulfillment fantasy of
> either personally achieving or at least of bearing witness to the arrival
> of post-biological superintelligence, the Robot God Who, if Friendly,
> solves all our problems for us, or Who, if Unfriendly, ends the world
> in an ubergoo apocalypse, in either case constituting a history-ending
> Singularity. . .
>
> According to the terms of my Superlative critique, these hyperbolic
> aspirations function more or less as pseudo-scientific correlates to
> the conventional omni-predicates of theology -- omniscience, omnipotence,
> omnibenevolence -- translated from the project to apprehend the
> supernatural divinity of God to the project of a personal transcendence
> into a differently super-natural demi-divinity via technoscience,
> characterized by superlative aspirations to superintelligence,
> superlongevity, and superabundance.

An acquaintance of ours wrote (in the comment thread at
http://web.archive.org/web/20040613133235/transhumanism.com/index.php/weblog/comments/134/ )

---------------------------
Uh, I don’t really care about going to a “computronium heaven”, my motivation
comes from several big sources, though. One is this:

180 million are injured intentionally or unintentionally per year.
20 million children die per year from hunger.
680 million have a mental or physical illness.
25 million are in slavery by force, or by the threat of force.
3 billion live on two dollars or less each day.
1.8 die every second; 150,000 die per day; and 55 million die per year.

And as my Orkut profile says, “Smarter-than-human solutions and technology could
provide the leverage we need to reduce these numbers substantially.”

Transhuman intelligence is coming. A big part of what Singularitarians are doing
is trying to ensure that the first transhuman intelligence is an altruist,
with a desire to continue being an altruist. We want the power of transhuman
intelligence directed towards humanitarian tasks. Computronium doesn’t really factor
into it. It will take *deliberate effort* to make the first transhuman intelligence
an altruist. We shouldn’t expect it to happen automatically. And if the first
transhuman intelligence *isn’t* an altruist, humanity could be really screwed.

Singularitarianism is to some transhumanists as extreme life extension is to most
people. Weird, scary, intimidating, implausible, etc. The only way I know of getting
around this is reading a lot of literature. . .

Also, try looking more deeply into [Yudkowsky's] CFAI and LOGI from the
Singularity Institute! People generally assume Sing-ism is some sort of religion,
by default, until they actually read these documents and observe the thinking
we have been doing.

Also keep in mind that one of the founders of the World Transhumanist Association,
David Pearce, has long argued for the permanent elimination of pain through
pharmaceuticals. . . Is that religious too? How about a world without any
murder? Is that a religious aspiration? Maybe a world without slavery would
be a more conservative goal?

Sincerely,
Michael Anissimov
Advocacy Director, Singularity Institute
---------------------------


Dale, don't you realize that by publicly exhibiting your "Superlative Critique",
as you call it, you may be delaying a Positive Singularity, which makes you
nothing more or less than a child murderer?

Don't you realize you are a tool of the Adversary, here?

jimf said...

Beware, Dale Carrico, lest you be squashed like the mosquito
you are!

Laura Knight Jadczyk
Postcards from the Edge of Reality...
13 April 2008
"Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don't Rise - An Update for SOTT Readers"
http://laura-knight-jadczyk.blogspot.com/2008/04/good-lord-willing-and-creek-dont-rise.html


[P]eople's emotions can be used to drive them anywhere a clever
manipulator wants them to go. That is not to exclude conscious
"agents of attack and diversion" either, but let's keep it simple and
assume that most people are unaware of how easily they can be - and
are - controlled.

Over the past 20 years or so, I have learned a lot from those types
of individuals, painful though those lessons were, and what I have
learned is that, when possible, it is important to continue to focus
as completely as possible on putting the needed information together
and getting it out there for you, our readers, while giving as little
air time to the attackers as possible. One has to have nerves of
steel and be free of all self-importance in order to be able to ignore
the attacks and attackers. Of course, those attacks have had an impact
on us, personally - including our health - as well as the website.
Think of how many people will have a knee-jerk reaction and refuse to
read the very information that could save their lives because of the
accusation "cult"?! A cunning slander that does more damage to the people
it puts off than it does to us, actually. It's also very sad that the
very people that we seek most to help - the masses of normal, decent human
beings, the lost sheep of society - can be so easily sidetracked and
diverted from their own best interests and induced to serve the interests
of a pathological elite structure that cares nothing for them. . .

Miyamoto Musashi, also known as Shinmen Takezō, Miyamoto Bennosuke,
or by his Buddhist name Niten Dōraku, was a Japanese swordsman famed
for his duels and distinctive style. Musashi, as he is often simply
known, became the legendary founder of the Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū or
Niten-ryū style of swordsmanship and the author of The Book of Five Rings,
a book on strategy, tactics, and philosophy that is still studied today.
My son recently wrote about the present situation:

> Musashi never backed down from a fight, whether he knew he could
> win or he knew he could lose, and it doesn't matter who, what, when
> or where, there is no such thing as an unimportant battle.
>
> Ideally you should choose your battles, but sometimes, the battle
> chooses you. A mosquito might be a small creature, easily squashed,
> but it can carry a lethal disease, it can kill, regardless of its
> size. So some might argue to ignore the mosquito, let it bite you
> and others, as usually it can be more or less harmless, but sometimes,
> it can kill, and so, in times when a lethal diseases that is carried
> by mosquitoes is rampant, you should squash a mosquito, to protect
> yourself and others.
>
> "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the
> iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he,
> who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through
> the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the
> finder of lost children."


lesswrong
a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality
"Rationality is Systematized Winning"
Eliezer Yudkowsky
03 April 2009

. . .


There is a meme which says that a certain ritual of cognition is the paragon
of reasonableness and so defines what the reasonable people do. But alas, the
reasonable people often get their butts handed to them by the unreasonable ones,
because the universe isn't always reasonable. Reason is just a way of doing
things, not necessarily the most formidable; it is how professors talk to
each other in debate halls, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't.
If a hoard of barbarians attacks the debate hall, the truly prudent and flexible
agent will abandon reasonableness.

No. If the "irrational" agent is outcompeting you on a systematic and predictable
basis, then it is time to reconsider what you think is "rational".

For I do fear that a "rationalist" will clutch to themselves the ritual of
cognition they have been taught, as loss after loss piles up, consoling themselves:
"I have behaved virtuously, I have been so reasonable, it's just this awful
unfair universe that doesn't give me what I deserve. The others are cheating
by not doing it the rational way, that's how they got ahead of me."

It is this that I intended to guard against by saying: "Rationalists should win!"
Not whine, win. If you keep on losing, perhaps you are doing something wrong.
Do not console yourself about how you were so wonderfully rational in the course
of losing. That is not how things are supposed to go. It is not the Art that fails,
but you who fails to grasp the Art.

Likewise in the realm of epistemic rationality, if you find yourself thinking
that the reasonable belief is X (because a majority of modern humans seem to
believe X, or something that sounds similarly appealing) and yet the world
itself is obviously Y. . .

Maybe there is an alternative phrase to be found again in Musashi, who said:
"The Way of the Ichi school is the spirit of winning, whatever the weapon and
whatever its size."

"Rationality is the spirit of winning"? "Rationality is the Way of winning"?
"Rationality is systematized winning"? If you have a better suggestion, post
it in the comments.
-----------------------------------


And stay tuned for the Ichi & Scratchi Show.

Anonymous said...

it seems to me that this superlative aspiration is an irrationalist repudiation of the heart of what Enlightenment has typically seen as its substance -- the struggle for autonomous adulthood (as against subjection by parental, priestly, or otherwise unaccountable authorities) and for the consensualization, via general welfare and the rule of law, of the disputatious public sphere. It is worth noting that many superlative futurologists like to sell themselves as exemplars of "Enlightenment" while indulging in this infantilism, anti-politicism, and irrationalism. In a word, they're not.This a very good point which needs to be expanded.