Singularity Note:
The End of Philosophy
22 December 2014
Friday had its sunny moments. None since.
It’s rare that I read something and then wish I hadn’t. But that’s getting it wrong. I don’t actually wish that I hadn’t read Sam Frank’s piece in the current Harper’s. On the cover, it’s billed as “Power and Paranoia in Silicon Valley.” The proper title appears to be “Come With Us If You Want To Live.” Frank’s subject is a menagerie of dislocated visionaries. Perhaps it would be better to say they’re visionaries of dislocation. Some are preoccupied with “the Singularity,” which will occur when human and machine minds meld, and with preventing “bad AI” from running loose and destroying humanity. Some, like eschatologist Michael Vassar (what we used to call a kook), are watching multiple countdowns — to environmental catastrophe, to the encroachment of various “memeplexes.” They all not only hate politics but contrive to write it out of their visions. They appear to believe that politics can be made to Go Away. Where do they get that idea?
Michael Vassar puts his finger on something: “It is unfortunate that we are in a situation where our cultural heritage is possessed only by people who are extremely unappealing to most of the population.” Although “cultural heritage” seems to be the last thing that Frank’s interlocutors possess.
Geoff Anders, the founder of Leverage Research, a “meta-level nonprofit” funded by [Peter] Thiel, taught a class on goal factoring, a process of introspection that, after many tens of hours, maps out every one of your goals down to root-level motivations — the unchangeable “intrinsic goods,” around which you can rebuild your life. Goal factoring is an application of Connection Theory, Anders’s model of human psychology, which he developed as a Rutgers philosophy student disserting on Descartes, and Connection Theory is just the start of a universal renovation. Leverage Research has a master plan that, in the most recent public version, consists of nearly 300 steps. It begins from first principles and scales up from there. “Initiate a philosophical investigation of philosophical method”; “Discover a sufficiently good philosophical method”; have 2,000-plus “actively and stably benevolent people successfully seek enough power to be able to stably guide the world”; “People achieve their dultimate goals as far as possible without harming others”; “We have an optimal world”; “Done.”
How much of this “master plan” has actually yielded practicable measures is so unclear that it seems to be unimportant: what’s important is to have a vision. A good vision is a successful grant proposal.
Bear in mind that Peter Thiel is outspoken in his belief that freedom and democracy are incompatible.
Another story that I read over the weekend had a very different effect. Ginia Bellafante wrote a profile of Eduardo Vianna, a professor at LaGuardia Community College whose “constructivist” methods engage students who enter the classroom without the intellectual equipment that Ivy League colleges can take completely for granted. A heartwarming story — I can’t seem to find it online. But there was one line that would come back to me later, when I read Sam Frank’s piece.
But another [student], who had been fidgety and distracted much of the time, completed the course announcing that she saw no need for an understanding of history.
In the context, one might attribute this blinkered view to an underprivileged background, but it is implicit in almost every remark that Sam Frank quotes.
***
History: one damned thing after another. That’s what history seems like when you’re studying for a test.
History: the never-ending story. That’s what history seems like when the variety of human experience comes alive. In one sense, history ends now, at the moment of telling. But that moment never actually stops; it continues with every breath we draw. History is never-ending in a different sense as well. It is a story made up of countless stories, and few of these stories make a smooth fit in the overall picture. There is much that we don’t know and probably never will know. But we are always learning how to fit the stories better, and how to bring what appear to be very different stories closer together. In my lifetime, the scope of history has broadened immeasurably. It was still pretty much a tale of war and politics when I was a boy. I was reminded of that the other day, when I was shelving not one but two books that recount the history of restaurants. Restaurants! Nothing is too trivial for history nowadays.
History is nothing less than the story of human life on this planet, as accurately as we can tell it. Like Sam Frank’s report, it is full of visions. But it also tells us where, if anywhere, those visions actually led people. When we read history, we’re thinking, What were they thinking? We might, too, be thinking We have an optimal world. Done. We might be thinking that Done is a possibility. That would be a mistake. History tells us, at great length, that so long as humanity is muddling along at all, Done is not on the menu.
Why would anyone want to be Done? For the same reason that philosophers hate history; for the same reason that many men prefer to break work down into tasks that can be completed. There is a longing — I doubt that it is inborn, but it is certainly culturally conditioned — to live now, and for now to be the best possible now. Not tomorrow, not next week, and absolutely not last year. Everything that does not exist now is irrelevant, and everything that exists now is to be understood as if it existed now only. Begin from first principles and scale up from there. History has a nasty way of obliterating first principles, because, in history, everything has antecedents. Similarly, there is no now in history. There is only the latest. And the latest cannot be understood in isolation — in isolation, that is, from all previous nows.
There is a longing for timelessness that makes history laugh. This longing has given us the body of speculations that, in the West, we call Philosophy, with a capital P, to distinguish it from less logically rigorous schools of wisdom that flourish wherever understanding human beings is more highly esteemed than creating the best model of how things work. After a great deal of contention, volcanic outpourings of hot air, and intellectual purging, Philosophy gave us Science, which does infer timeless principles from phenomena. From most phenomena, but not, as of yet, from the phenomena of human interaction. Philosophy and Science have nothing to tell us about human interaction beyond wishful thinking.
Politics — political activity — is merely a concentrated occurrence of significant things. There are no rules; it is not a game. Anything can happen. In moments of political crisis, there are so many nows that they cancel each other out. There is only watching, with bated breath, for what’s next.
This holiday season — I’ll be contributing to one baggy entry for the next two weeks — I intend to meditate on the unpopularity, if that’s what it is, of history. Pascal’s pensée comes to mind, the one that attributes all the miseries of human life to man’s inability to sit still in a room. I’d like to amend it: all the miseries in human affairs owe to man’s disinclination to sit still and learn history. Which surprises me, because I find history to be never-endingly interesting. And one of the most interesting things that history has to tell us is that nothing is quite so ruinous as the belief that history has come to an end, that men are capable of making a new beginning. There can be no new beginnings with the same old human beings. Which may be why history associates “new beginnings” with bloodshed.
The end of philosophy is the beginning of history.