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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:

“Inquir’st thou not what spirits

Are these, which thou beholdest? Ere thou pass

Farther, I would thou know, that these of sin

Were blameless; and if aught they merited,

It profits not, since baptism was not theirs,

The portal to thy faith. If they before

The Gospel liv’d, they serv’d not God aright;

And among such am I. For these defects,

And for no other evil, we are lost;

Only so far afflicted, that we live

Desiring without hope.”

Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation. Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue. Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled. But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ. They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved. There can be no exceptions. An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.

This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms. He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances. Dante simply knew. This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.

This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational. But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth. Kant was well aware of this. Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life. The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.

I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution. Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible. The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.

Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us? Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil? Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.

Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework. We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values. In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled. There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well. Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good? Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads? It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.

At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists. Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving. But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not. I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces. There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.

There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid. From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures. In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change. It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace. This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.

It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":

[...] Whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts - including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory - which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.

(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)

It's hard to be very optimistic. The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:

[...] And this is how Freud already answers this boring Foucauldian reproach - before Foucault's time of course - that psychoanalysis is comparable to confession. You have to confess your blah blah. No, Freud says that psychoanalysis is much worse: in confession you are responsible for what you did, for what you know, you should tell everything. In psychoanalysis, you are responsible even for what you don't know and what you didn't do.

Fuck me sideways, I wrote a massive essay and had it gobbled up into the ether when I received a phone call. @ZorbaTHut, is it too much to ask for text entered into a comment to be temporarily saved for a little while even if not posted? It would be a lifesaver on mobile.

Sigh, I'll rewrite it:

I think this is an excellent post, and it largely aligns with my view.

That being said:

The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.

It strikes me as deeply misguided if not outright pathological to extend modern intuitions about the need for "responsibility" to a distant future where the universe is plausibly dominated by entities akin to Matrioshka Brains or computationally oriented Dyson Swarms that monopolize the resources of entire star systems each. That's fetishizing responsibility for the love of responsibility, entirely divorced from whether it's needed for other terminal goals.

Such entities are robustly self-sufficient and powerful in their domain to a degree that the modern mind finds hard to comprehend.

Our intuitions about responsibilities have been built up over a lengthy evolutionary period where no man was an island to himself (the closest that ever was to being feasible was hunter gatherer times and even then it was deeply suboptimal).

We currently need each other to live fulfilling lives, and not even the wealthiest billionaire can setup a system that lets them divorce themselves from the rest of humanity.

This will be categorically untrue in the future, because interstellar trade, to the extent it exists, will be primarily of information and not physical goods.

It seems to me that there is very little that such an entity can't make entirely by itself, be it through normal resource collection, transmutation of matter, or direct energy to matter conversion.

Further, the absolutely colossal distances between star systems makes trade of anything that is not extremely high value economically infeasible, at least if you want to receive the goods in non-astronomical time frames.

I refuse to shackle such beings with our norms, and the maximal set of things we recognize today as "responsibilities" that I expect them to adhere to are:

  1. A commitment to avoiding coercion when positive sum trade is available. Don't violate the NAP in short, since you're already a largely post-scarcity entity (even if scarcity is unlikely to be obviated entirely over cosmological timespans unless we invent literally infinite energy sources).

  2. Don't trash the cosmic commons, say by throwing relativistic debris about that could plausibly ruin someone else's day as an RKV. Further, entities should avoid being wasteful where possible, for a very relaxed notion of waste, and when they ruin their cosmic endowment they should not expect others to bail them out without cause.

  3. Drawing on the above, they ought to avoid intentionally creating negative externalities in general, such as creating unaligned superintelligences that they can't control, though such a task is unlikely to be difficult to a being superintelligent itself. Nobody wants a nasty case of a Hegemonizing Swarm even if it's unlikely to be a real threat, at least don't let them burn pristine star systems.

Such entities simply do not need much from each other, albeit they are capable of wanting a great deal.

Further, they are sovereign, to a degree that exceeds the fevered dreams of modern nation states and their leaders. You will have a very bad time getting them to do things they don't voluntarily want to do.

They're also almost certainly strongly godlike, beyond the ken of most conceptions of godliness we have today. Zeus's lighting bolts have nothing on a Nicoll-Dyson beam or an RKV. Sure, not omnipotent, but as close as physically feasible.

I myself wish to become such a Peer of the Universe, such that no worm turns or sparrow falls without my consent within my domain.

Now, if lesser beings still share the cosmos, they might find our conceptions of responsibility to be of some utility, and once we have actually robust means of memetic engineering, unlike the paltry and inadequate systems of schooling and cultural indoctrination we have today, I expect them to be used right until they're no longer needed.

At any rate, such gods might nod approvingly at Von Neumann when he says:

“All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.”

And like it or not, they shall control a great deal indeed..

That's fetishizing responsibility for the love of responsibility, entirely divorced from whether it's needed for other terminal goals.

I'm not sure if you're simply reiterating your disagreement here, or if the view that I was describing is so foreign to your own thinking that it does not even appear to you as a view; instead it appears as a non-view, as nonsense.

To take an accounting of all your commitments and goals, to reflect on which ones are "needed" and which aren't, to have the freedom to add or remove values and rearrange their relative priority: all this is, obviously, to still remain within the logic of consequentialism. I am raising the question of something that is outside of consequentialism altogether.

The response to the accusation that this view loves responsibility for its own sake is simply yes_chad.jpg. It's not an objection; it's just a restatement of the view itself. You are free to call this "fetishization" if you want. I don't view that term in any way as disparaging. We all have our fetishes, after all (such as your fascination with vast timescales and regions of space, for example).

I try not to attribute disagreement to fundamental values differences unless I can no longer help it. If that's the case, we either all agree to live and let live, or there will inevitably be bloodshed.

I'm not sure if you're simply reiterating your disagreement here, or if the view that I was describing is so foreign to your own thinking that it does not even appear to you as a view; instead it appears as a non-view, as nonsense.

Mostly the former as far as I can gauge. I recognize it as a view at the very least, but I don't think it's really reflective of a fundamental underlying difference for the majority who espouse it. They simply don't have horizons as broad as mine, and have never stopped to really think of the ramifications of that approach when extended out of the circumstances that are mundane to us today.

After all, if I was asked whether inculcating certain kinds of responsibility today is something I endorse, I'd say yes. I'm not against the concept, I'm just against thoughtlessly extending it to where the intuitions underpinning it become irrelevant.

And I (probably) wouldn't have discussed the extremal case of utter atomization that a galactic scale civilization involves if you hadn't invoked the kind of thinking that leads to it or hints at it. Namely:

The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.

In my eyes: Superhuman AI - - > Space Colonization of some description is a link so robust that I struggle to think of anyone accumulating evidence to persuade me otherwise.