Aquanaut StarShip pt 2 of x
It’s curious how you could gaze upon a civilization, drink from its smells and sounds and tastes, feel the unique rhythm as its cities inhale and exhale their inhabitants, observe the common struggles of the group—a gestalt of the lived civilization as a singularity. Yet, the world of its literature may paint a completely different picture. I was flipping through some books once that caught my eye, at the time not knowing the hype and spectacle surrounding them among a whole world of those who’ve already walked this path. My primary emotion was surprise and excitement. I felt I needed to go out and tell people all the answers are right under their noses, if only one would put these thoughts together! In that moment, I felt that when I ever am forced to choose whether the ideas we need are not yet had or merely covered in dust, I assume the latter. And I justify the current state of affairs not as a failure of what is in the past, but with the benefit of the doubt that there was never a time for these insights to be migrated and applied in the register we now need. We need synthesizing for our problem specifically. The books I speak of build up a new world that has gained in primacy across the minds of multiple disciplines, each in its own way. I observe the final application of these insights towards a civilizational vision taking place now—along those very fault lines that I theorized must exist.
We might choose language as our entry point. Sentences could be constructed, on one polarity, as a strictly logical progression, where all the components of the sentence reach out in capture of the point. When somebody is rambling on, we tell them to get to the point — to make a straight line with their words and arrive at the destination. But oftentimes, there is a discrepancy in disposition underlying the request. Why does somebody ramble? Granted, one possibility is an inability to get to the point, but they might be trying to accomplish something completely different. Accomplish is perhaps the wrong term, because the point is not the point. The psychic experience they are attempting to disclose is might not be singular or linear, but instead diffuse. Their experience may be spherical, a nonlinear distribution of memories and mixed feelings, spread over the entire surface of the body rather than as a single shaft forming an arrow toward the point. In such a scenario, the words come out and react to themselves, they spiral around a centrality that is useful only insofar as it forms a basis to experience the whole — and there may be parts of the experience that words can’t even grasp, can’t even capture. If you want to capture the point, you will be frustrated.
A complementary entry point, if Irigaray isn’t your cup of tea, is the difference between linear algebra and calculus. In linear algebra, all the power you exert on an axis will remain on that axis — magnitude is bound to one direction. This is the value of linear algebra. It arises from the space of logic, from capture, linearity. But opposite the line, we have the circle, the curve, where you might have a scenario that isn’t linear, a scenario reacting to itself. Perhaps at a certain magnitude a threshold is crossed, and the line rises asymptotically. When a system reacts to its own input, you deal with something linear algebra has no desire to speak about: when the line from point A to point B is curved into a circle, turning into a feedback loop. Complex systems are a phenomenon belonging to the realm of calculus. There isn’t a clean line of causation, because the system is cybernetic — outputs becoming inputs, complexity increasing within. Symbiosis is calculus, where as one acts, the other one acts, and in the bipolar attunement the two act together spiraling into one another. In this model, we see the system interacting with its environment, its environment reacting back toward the subsystems within, causing changes in the subsystem that contorts to its environment, change causing change causing change. In short, the universe we live in is nonlinear, and that is apparently a completely surprising thing.
Our universe is one of entropy. Yet, in the face of entropy, we find complexity and life that feels the strain of instability and confusion but elevates to a new approach. Parts enter into relationships with the whole, and together find thermodynamic equilibrium. Parts join into a whole, and leave thermodynamic equilibrium (see the Substack ‘Works in Progress’ discussing mitochondria energetically attuning to each other, he’s a swell writer) and help one another out. Systems discover that by becoming a circle, the cost of entropy could be shared, and as a whole, resilience is gained. The antagonist of entropy is the necessary condition for the art of life, new forms and ideas arising in novel creativity in the narrative of life.
This becomes the Copernican turn and central insight of a host of thinkers I found on the road to confirmation of my math. The canonical thinkers from the past who develop this observation are, first of all, Alfred N. Whitehead, in both Process and Reality and his Introduction to Mathematics. He introduces us to a universe where relationship is everything. He introduces us to a universe of emergent complexity that arises from that substrate of relationship. You grew up learning about the Rutherford atom, about billiard balls and eventually billiard-ball chemistry. It may surprise you to find out that those teachings in fact belong to a world of lines, and the news is, we live in a world of circles. In a world of linear capture, we couldn’t think of elemental substance as anything but points for our capture—small dots that we can control in our minds, austere bounded objects just like the austere tables and chairs that furnish our homes. One thing that behaves like one thing. No funny business, just balls floating around and coalescing for some reason. But in the age of circles, we now know that there are not points but fields, each field spread out and containing one dimension of information. Data is spread across this field, cybernetically articulated data, all in and within the terms of the field itself. Those points we called ‘atoms’ are not in fact balls, but emergent structures where information all collects at a particular location; and that chemistry you learned about is actually the moment when those excitations run into one another and are forced into coordination, forced to ask one another questions, and resolve to share electron data for example. Generally, I am deeply skeptical of anyone that tries to cash out philosophical value from quantum mechanics, partially because it’s rare for the one doing the cashing out to be the one who is in the trenches with a pencil and Pauli. And you will find that this type of language is ubiquitous under the umbrella we are introducing ourselves to; an umbrella that distinguished itself from the New Age crystal crowd commandeering of ‘quantum insight’ (though no shade if that’s your thing). But don’t get me wrong — we have done no such cashing out. What I have observed in Whitehead is that his construction of the universe simply turns out to be in alignment with the same shape of that Copernican turn which we will continue to see beyond just quantum field theory: relationships between elements, to the point where a healthy (i.e. complex, dynamic and stable) system is maintained. In biology, the new universe of circular cybernetics originated Von Bertalanffy. This advent went much further back than his 69’ book General System Theory, where in the beginning he reflects on the development of the field. Alongside him, the Chilean scientists Varela and Maturana developed the notion of autopoiesis, the insight that systems generate themselves, perpetuate their own complexification. This is of course very much adjacent in shape to the contemporary structuralist movement in linguistics. That notion that language is also a system that generates itself from within itself is the sentimental environment where the prince of circularity, Jaque Derida, would eventually express his arcanities. Varela and Maturana were themselves quite strict about the scope of their theory, warning not to apply it sociologically. Thankfully however, Niklas Luhmann disregarded that and wrote Social Systems, which once again develops an understanding of society and communication — from banking and law systems all the way to social media — in terms of circular emergence and complexity. With the same insight, in his application, nearly all of human communal activity could be understood. Once equipped with those frameworks, its only a light step to the side into the media theory of McLuhan, or the socio-economic thinking of Baudrillard and those worlds too are revealed to locomote on diffuse, cybernetic emergence. In psychology, the great Carl Rogers defines the healthy human personality in this very register: openness to reality and to experience, acceptance, becoming a more fully elaborated and expressed version of the self. Increase in complexity, he tells you, become more of a home for the complexity of yourself and reality beyond.
In that vein, when we consider health and human flourishing, when we envision a world where society nourishes human flourishing and encourages further elaboration of the individual as well as the group, Nietzsche comes to mind. We asked: what might be a framework for motivation that transcends any particular theoretical construct of the world, and yet ignites fire in the chest of everyone alive for the pursuit of life itself? The question outlines the answer exactly: in the circular home we’re building from variegated bricks of Whitehead to Derida, the Will to Power smuggles itself in like Santa through the chimney and lights a fire in the hearth. Imagine a world where we are raised to express ourselves, to become most fully ourselves. Consider how the human system as such, incorporating every individual, would benefit in decolonizing aspiration from the false gods of commodity. Consider the implications of a value compass spinning wildly and constantly at the ever-present pole of humanities autopoiesis, going everywhere and nowhere on a road paved by individuals who have achieved maximal self-expression and cohesion in and within themselves. Among the many partial approaches that attach like barnacles to the ship of the more developed worldviews utilizing this perspective only gesture at the unsustainability of production value being the source of personal value. But the implication of having already arrived, is that the single self on even the humblest scale is itself a success, because no signal goes unabsorbed in the cybernetic social system of communications that moves in tandem with everybody at once, in a circle where we each have a pull, absorbing and reemitting communications.
This is a loose sketch of what I gather from this region in current thinking. What aught to be concluded, if I were to get to the point, is that the central turn — from simple, crude, linear, closed-minded capture, which dominated the Victorian mind by a patriarchal stick, to a matured understanding of the universe accounting for reality as it is with so much more ease and elegance is the main shift being universalized by this section of thought. Packaged along with this is, I think, a byproduct — what may seem to be on the side of the road, but becomes a prerequisite for this entire system. Depending on who you are, you either think the picture painted above is pretty or cringe. If it’s cringe, the cringe is itself valuable data. The very elegance of a universe that is magically alive against entropy, a universe where we arise within it and have the opportunity to become most fully and elaborately ourselves, to be a positive force in the autopoiesis of those around us, to overcome our natural instincts for manipulation and extraction so as to become nodes in a higher order system requiring the constraint of our behavior in pursuit of care and humanity more abundantly to the system as a whole — is a threat.
The elegance threatens because when one grazes their finger across the very canon we introduced a trajectory emerges: after the atrocities of the early twentieth century, an immune system developed among the thinking class that ripped apart anything that felt like a totalizing belief. Communism and Nazism took whole populations and wreaked havoc — not because they wanted to be evil, but because they had ideas. Evil means you suppress life, destroy life, become an environment for the system of entropy to sing its bitter song through your decisions, all the while feeling righteous until it’s too late. Many of the participants of the communist regime, after it began to fall, had a hard time adjusting to the facticity of its failure: we made so many sacrifices, justified so much, all because it didn’t matter as long as we reached the greater good — and if that flame dies down, then we have to look back and face those decisions as simply us being destructive. That mood of apprehension — jaded cynicism towards any universal beauty or possibility of truth that functions as a shield from the exhausting work of having to hope again, to dream again; the mood of fear and suspicion; the mood where, although we pay lip service to truth, truth is treated as the innocent, unsophisticated property of the naïve, who don’t realize that the mighty professor could rip apart any shred of coherence they might hold on to all while holding a martini in a dusty, elbow-patched function — because what does anything mean if we are infinitely bound by symbolic systems which are totally arbitrary, distancing us from reality with a velvet rope we can never cross? What I think is happening now is a shifting of mood, where though we have not freed ourselves from the self-correcting immune system in place, a healing is allowed. When we talk about radical change, we need to expect a wildly different affective disposition towards the world, and though it may be icky to the cringe-prone reader, it might require the faithful leap of vulnerability. These approaches that want to scale the self esteem of being human to the height of the universe require vulnerability, wide eyed awe, and hope as a prerequisite. These approaches require the precarity of humility, to exit the safety of knowing everything that goes on in this small, silly, backward and adolescent (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the) galaxy. It might be just as likely to live in a world of euphoric, energetic heat death, in actual meaningful and magic just as it is to live in a meaningless universe that popped into existence to not care about you and to dissipate into ever cooling entropy. The shadow of the world wars still loom as a ghoul, warning us about the danger of total visions. But we don’t need to be as cold to the touch as that shadow.
In this new mood, there is a questioning of the hopelessness, a questioning of the antagonism to beauty as a simple, intuitive human value — traded as it has been for the ugly as ironic anti beauty, because who among us is silly enough to actually appreciate couch art, which is available to everyone’s tastes regardless of whether they went to art school? If we could take an analytic approach, notice how the pattern here is of the inner child, raised by traumatized parents and initially beaten into submission. Now that child is grown enough to look those ironic loveless parents in the eye, to understand why they are the way they are, see them as the scared kids that they once were, see their fear behind cruel eyes of irony, but with the maturity to ask for themself: does it need to be this way? Maybe the world I see is actually real, and y’all are gaslighting me because of your own horrid upbringing? This new mood, once again in line with the pattern we’re noticing, consists of a renewed relationship to openness, to truth, to being lost in passion without the restraints imposed by the choking immunological systems arising in academia in the shadow of the wars. That new mood — questioning stricture and embracing unbridled passion — is something we find in the Romantic period, in reaction to the nail-biting constriction of positivistic thought; and it turns out, the individuals I have identified (particularly the metamodern) attach themselves explicitly to this Romanticism as an antecedent mood revived.
To return to the disgruntled parents, as it were, and to clear their name, I want to balance both sides of that story. From within the immune reaction, lovely tomes of ethical thought arise. Sartre vitalizes our every moment, because no moment is without moral import. You cannot escape a decision, and indecision is itself a decision. The words he says are that we are condemned to be free (to choose) — but notice the vigor of a world where you can never escape decisionality: you never don’t matter! Every decision is charged with value that you cannot escape. The chains of freedom that bind you to think before you act are chains made of life, made of meaningful difference that you add to the world. Naturally this dives into dialogue with Nietzsche — the will to power says become most you on the macro level, and the potency of decision in Sartre becomes the steps to get there on the micro level. Another example of wonderful writing from this reactionary period is the ethics of Levinas. We find a sacralization of relationship, of the Other. In Levinas we discover how to dilate our dulled perception to experience the reality of another living, conscious human being to the point that their existence becomes staggeringly exciting. Of course, this experience cascades into methodologies which can handle such an encounter, and we are forced into dialogue with Rogers, where we are taught how to make ourselves porous for the reception of that other existence in all its beauty and novelty. This is the chemistry we expect to be taking place in our current moment, and delightfully it’s already taking place in the very sources that many of these people are coming from. The truth is that it’s hard to unsee one of the central axes of thought from Whitehead and Heidegger onward — whether it’s as ethereal as Of Grammatology, as material as ecology and climate studies (a realm which particularly benefited from the circular, systems modality imported by Donella Meadows, and applied to a more global policy front by László and his Budapest Club), or even as dry as corporate management training, where successful leadership recognizes that only with systems-level visions, feedback loops, and simultaneous variables — which can never be dealt with linearly — will you succeed. In this space, reality is observed through the framework of emergence. There is a phenomenon whereby components of a system can join together and behave in ways that aren’t reducible to the parts themselves. There is a new unified identity that rests in the totality. Of course, the Ship of Theseus comes to mind: if all the parts are slowly replaced, then which is the ship? And to that, an heir to this tradition of apprehending emergence, might reply: the identity of the ship hummed to life the moment it was put together, and as long as that identity is an active story binding together for itself a body of wooden pieces — continuously including in itself parts that weren’t there before, exiling parts that are broken — the identity remains, because identity was never something you could capture, nor was it ever one thing. A thing is an event, and an event is just as much a thing as anything. The world is a process, and structures emerge from within that process, from the foam of a churning sea, arising in beautiful, ephemeral forms that subside back into the waters that birthed them. All epiphenomena are born of dust, and will return to dust.
These are the initial thoughts I garnered from seeing the landscape of contemporary problem-solvers on the level we require, connecting them back to different books I had seen in the past. I have read enough books, however, to take a wiser approach. Rather than construct thoughts of my own, I have posed the question as observational: who is active in this space, what are others saying and building? I mention this because I have come to recognize the emotion of surprise and excitement at reading books which I thought were dusty and virginal, awaiting recovery in this new age is an adolescent emotion. Society is an emergent phenomenon, it is a living system, and it will not simply die. The implicit assumption of “discovering the one answer” is that the world is so fragile as to be in need of the one answer, lest it crumble under its own weight. The true interface between technology companies and their antagonists is not a heroic, black-and-white tale. It’s a story of regulatory pressure, increasing economic and bureaucratic friction, governmental hearings, competing priorities in each country and district. Some people are partially strengthened, some are partially weakened. It’s not a story that lends itself to capture by one side or the other, at least when one sees the reality the story is trying to reference. Reality is calculus — messy and diffuse. What I want to observe is how, in real time, the elasticity of the living human system reasserts itself over the autopoiesis of the technological system. That reassertion becomes the philosophically generative problem, which is more important to watch for than the sci-fi doom and gloom.
As we have mentioned, a CEO is not speaking as herself. She has learned a language, learned another set of priorities, and cleared out her selfhood to make room for the company. The company is a system, and it is interested in its own elaboration of self. What any vision will have to address is that, yes, emergence and complexity are healthy and good — but that is always going to be a matter of perspective. Those who succeed in becoming the petri dish for technological narration say things as unhinged as “if you are dumber than the AI, maybe you exist to make the AI meaningful” (a relatively accurate paraphrase from the SpaceX CEO). I have no grievance with such sentiments. I am not offended. These pronouncements are reality: if we were to narrate the thoughts and feelings of the emergent system called Silicon Valley, you couldn’t express them more eloquently. But what someone who disagrees needs to address is why human autopoiesis particularly? When we examine the thinkers who are grappling with these issues, we must expect that part of the goal would be for the human system to demonstrate why it is the privileged system — and why its own health, undermined as it is by a technological autopoiesis that proliferates parasitizing you as the environment for its own priority attention economics–deserves to subordinate technology.
But while the human system must argue for itself, never get lost in the sauce and consider the debate partner to be de facto valid. For example, consider the tech companies in relation to the conversation around phenomenal experience within an LLM. Firstly, taking the concern of your chat bot feeling is in large part a product of marketing. The terminology of “artificial intelligence” already obscures what we might call Algorithmic Information. The fact that there are unpredictable behaviors is completely beside the point. We have engineered metal and silicon — beginning nearly a century ago with basic on-and-off switches, then arranged those switches to hold Boolean algebra. Regions of Boolean processors are linked together, such that we can develop a layer of machine code which can interpret our human-readable code — and you’re surprised at what, exactly? That the collective efforts of computer scientists and capitalists have generated technologies that hold information at scale? Are you surprised by the fact that one can design such a device to absorb, in terms of extremely high-definition linear algebra, the imprint of a civilization’s information, encoded as it has been in terms of machinery itself? If you listen to somebody talking about the issue of phenomenology within an AI system, and they forget that the coordination of sensory data shining through pixels and speakers, emitted and translated through antenna oscillations, is not actually their grandma — if they wear headphones and don’t understand how Bluetooth works — then understand that that person is more duped than the silicon of computation’s infancy. And could they be blamed? It takes a big person to actually hold all these layers at once, and to be a leader even in the face of a company that wants to inflate the magnitude of its invention with obfuscating terminology, and to identify error correction with the term “introspection” (for a more authoritative and articulate piece reacting to these phenomena, see the Substack ‘The Intrinsic Perspective’ in their piece this last Friday “Don’t Dethrone Consciousness”) for no other reason than to milk their shareholders, who no doubt have as little awareness of what the technology has as the technology itself, in all likelihood. The scientific, empirical basis for the experimental design taking place in the laboratories of those who want to know if algorithms at a certain scale pose a moral problem is shaky. A picture of fire is not in fact hot, and is not in fact a fire. But what is relevant is the resultant realization of ourselves in the mirror as true beings of fire.