Machine Metaphysics and the Cult of Techno-Transcendentalism

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Digital Sublime

Notes

Bach places his argument within the traditional Christian framework of the seven cardinal virtues (as formulated by Aquinas). He explains that the Christian virtues are a tried and true model for organizing human society in the presence of some vastly superior entity. That's why we can transfer this ethical framework straight from the context of a god-fearing premodern society to a future of living under our new digital overlords.

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Bach thinks that humanity has evolved for "dealing with entropy," "not to serve Gaia." In other words, the omega point of human evolution is, apparently, "to burn oil," which is a good thing because it "reactivates the fossilized fuel" and "puts it back into the atmosphere so new organisms can be created."

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how little do our individual lives matter in light of this grand vision for a posthuman future? Like a true transhumanist, Bach believes this future to lie in machine intelligence, not only superior to ours but also lifted from the weaknesses of the flesh. Humanity will be obsolete. And we'll be all the better for our demise: our true destiny lies in creating a realm of disembodied ethereal superintelligence.

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the belief in the inevitable superiority of machines is rooted in a metaphysical view of the whole world as a machine. More specifically, it is grounded in an extreme version of a view called computationalism, the idea that not only the human mind, but every physical process that exists in the universe can be considered a form of computation. In other words, what computers do and what we do when we think are exactly the same kind of process. Obviously. This computational worldview is firghteningly common and fashionable these days. It has become so commonplace that it is rarely questioned anymore, even though it is mere speculation, purely metaphysical, and not based on any empirical evidence.

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even our interactions with the actual world may be the result of some gigantic computer simulation.

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There are a number of obvious problems with this view. For starters, we may wonder what exactly the point is.

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by definition, the simulator is a supernatural entity,

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the simulation hypothesis is classic transcendental theism — religion through the backdoor.

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What Chalmers doesn't see (but what seems important to me somehow) is that there is a pretty straightforward and foolproof way to distinguish virtual and physical reality: physical reality will kill you if you ignore it for long enough.

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No consciousness or general intelligence will spring from an algorithm any time soon. In fact, it will very probably never happen. But losing our freedom to a small elite of tech overlords, that is a real and plausible scenario. And it may happen very soon.

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Here are a few basic things a human (or even a bacterium) can do, which AI algorithms cannot (and probably never will):

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The bottom line is: thinking is not just "optimizing hard" and producing "complicated outputs." It is a qualitatively different process than algorithmic computation. To know is to live. As Alison Gopnik has correctly pointed out, categories such as "intelligence," "agency," and "thinking" do not even apply to algorithmic AI, which is just fancy high-dimensional statistical inference. No agency will ever spring from it, and without agency no true thinking, general intelligence, or consciousness.

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Artificial intelligence is a complete misnomer. The field should be called algorithmic mimicry: the increasingly convincing appearance of intelligent behavior.

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If you do not want the world to be turned into paperclips, pull the damn plug out of the paperclip maker. AI is not alive. It is a machine. You cannot kill it, but you can easily shut it off. Alignment achieved. Voilà!

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I think that the popularity of the whole techno-transcendental narrative springs from two main sources. First, a deep craving — in these times of profound meaning crisis — for a positive mythological vision, for transformative stories of salvation.

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the acceptance of such techno-utopian fairy tales also depends on a deeper metaphysical confusion about reality that characterizes the entire age of modernity: it is the mistaken, but highly entrenched idea, that everything — the whole world and all the living and non-living things within it — is some kind of manipulable mechanism.

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"there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination."

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the most fundamental assumption on which the whole techno-transcendentalist creed rests: every physical process in the universe must be computable.

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this physical version of the Church- Turing thesis does not logically follow from the original. Instead, it is intended to be an empirical hypothesis, testable by scientific experimentation. And here comes the surprising twist: there is no evidence at all that the Church-Turing-Deutsch conjecture applies. Not one jot. It is mere speculation

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not every physical process is computable or, indeed, no physical processes can be precisely captured by simulation on a Turing machine. For instance, neither the laws of classical physics nor those of general relativity are entirely computable (since they contain noncomputable real numbers and infinities). Quantum mechanics introduces its own difficulties in the form of the uncertainty principle and its resulting quantum indeterminacy. The theory of measurement imposes its own (very different) limitations.

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Robert Rosen's conjecture that living systems (and all those systems that contain them, such as ecologies and societies) cannot be captured completely by algorithmic simulation.

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With the assumption that everything is computation falls the assumption that algorithmic simulation corresponds to real cognition in living beings in any meaningful way. It is not at all evident that machines can "think" the way humans do. Why should thinking and computing be equivalent?

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brains can do many more things, and they certainly have not evolved to be computers. Not at all. Instead, they are organs adapted to help animals better solve the problem of relevance in their complex and inscrutable environment (something algorithms famously cannot do, and probably never will).

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techno-transcendentalist ideology is not just a modern mythological narrative, but also a useful tool to serve the purpose of bringing about libertarian neufeudalism.

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The technological singularity is not coming. Virtual heaven is not going to open its gates to us any time soon. Instead, the neo-religious template of techno-transcendentalism is a tried and true method from premodern times to keep the serfs in line with threats of the apocalypse and promises of eternal bliss. Stick and carrot.

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The central delusion they all share is the following: both believers and cynics think that the world is a machine. Worse, it is their plaything — controllable, predictable, programmable. And they all want to be in charge

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All this is wrapped up in longermist philosophy: it's ok if you suffer and die, if we all go exstinct even, as long as the far-future dream of galactic conquest and eternal bliss in simulation is on course, or at least intact. That is humanity's long-term destiny.

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We cannot have fake people, and to build algorithmic mimicry that impersonates existing or non- existing persons needs to be made illegal, as soon as we can.

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