And Yet It Moves
(Preview pic is literally just clickbait)
Prefatory
The World Riddle is like an artichoke: every leaf that I peel away reveals two more; yet, as they are peeled away, leaves that seemed entirely unrelated end up meeting at common origins. What lies near the center of the riddle can’t simply be described, for clear writing is insufficient to transfer the entire conceptive apparatus through which the answer must be apprehended — the clearest program in the world will, to someone who understands neither conditionals nor loops, instill at best a false sense of understanding. The concepts have to be developed in stages, each one being falsified and superseded by the next — and anyone who wishes to follow along really does have to put in the work to follow along.
That the truth is powerful here is of no doubt: as mentioned previously, we may delineate methods by which humans can self-modify to become superintelligent — at which point aligned AGI is only a matter of time. Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, we must first dig ourselves out of some of the basic pitfalls that humans who think they want to understand anything rapidly and invariably fall into — whence this essay, the first in a (theoretical) multi-part series.
My goal here is to sort of… pop your bubble, in order to show you a disturbing quality of human reason: the essentially phatic role it is pressed into almost all the time. It goes on everywhere all the time around and within you. I’m not immune either — my mind has been thoroughly wrecked in the same way, but I can generally recognize and account for the effect that this has on my cognition.
There is a Game that people constantly play with one another because they are designed to play it; it is not something that you can see if you are well-adjusted, because seeing The Game makes you think about it, and this makes most people far worse at it. But if you stand far away from society and look inwards towards the formal shape of your motivations, search with a spiteful eye for the patterns within the dynamics guiding your thoughts towards the same pathetic social ends, you may start to see it. People start to play The Game the moment they are introduced to other people, and they do not stop.
Sometimes one of them sees it, and thinks that this puts them above it. This is wrong: do not ever think that just because you have seen The Game, you have thereby stopped playing it. You’d just be playing it even harder — you’d think yourself superior those who have not seen it, looking on from above at the sorry rat race below, and in your attempt to assert as much to these sorry rats you race against them even as you insist you are not racing. Humans cannot stop playing The Game. Whenever we try to paralyze it with “civilization”, whether through formalisms or good faith pacts, it naturally re-establishes itself.
Human mentation devotes itself almost entirely to playing The Game. In particular, the faculties of reasoning and self-conception are not the “paintbrushes” they seem to be to consciousness, tools to freely pick up and use; rather, consciousness follows their Game-oriented leads, convincing itself that this is what it wanted to do. There is appearing to be moral, and then there is actually brying to be moral; there is appearing to understand reality, and then there is actually trying to understand reality. In both cases humans reliably choose the former over the latter, and consciousness, being a method actor, truly convinces itself of whatever false appearances the brain thinks are useful to attain status and power, making us believe we have picked the latter and succeeded at it. Let’s look at how this plays out.
Make sure to press the buttons, by the way:
I. How To Reject Anything
Imagine an era in which biology had not yet come into existence as a field, its objects of study instead falling under the ambit of “natural philosophy”. There are inevitably lots of mysterious ontological differences between their craft and ours, yet they stick fervently to their conceptualization of phenomena. Lacking any notion of genetics, for instance, they instead argue about the number of vital forces shaping descendants into the form of their ancestors.
If you reject this line of inquiry, do you then propose that there are no vital forces? Ridiculous! For you can see the similarity growing over the course of development as the canvas is painted — this fetus develops a skin color resembling its mother, the father’s stature is molded — and after birth the process continues, the child tending to break along the parents’ lines in health and temperament. Even without Occam’s razor, any theory of inheritance based on some shuffling of “alleles” must be dismissed solely on its inability to code for the fine timing and subtle traits displayed by actual inheritance. The simple and elegant solution is given by the aetheric transmission of vital form.
Lacking any notion of germ theory, they argue over what particular cultural practices caused the last major plague to strike where it did.
If you reject this line of inquiry, the burden of proof is on you to prove that there is not a single cultural practice which affects the development of malaise! It is a foolish and impossible endeavor, for so many clearly do! Such talk of malady being transmitted through mysterious organisms which you cannot even show to us is at best irrelevant and at worst an obstacle to useful research through we prevent people from dying. Steady your sinful voice, then, and perhaps take a moment to read the literature before you pipe up again.
Now, you come into this field as an outsider, with the strange idea that perhaps traits within a population of animals tend to be reinforced insofar as they contribute to an animal’s ability to successfully reproduce. Obviously there are a bunch of subtle details to consider, loopholes made possible by the simplicity of this one description, but with those aside you feel like this idea is basically too tautologous to be wrong, and yet is both novel and massively important for natural philosophy. You don’t exactly know how to prove this — it certainly puts a lot of things into place, like the strange way in which some animals seem to have such precisely predetermined strategies for living in their environments
.So you start discussing your idea, under the reasonable illusion that — it’s not quite that the best ideas should win — human intellectual discovery is never really about individual ideas proffered by individual people, or even individual theories or paradigms, even if those tend to be its most visible outputs. Rather, the illusion is something like this:
“We Want to Know”
We ought to expect thinkers to take thinking itself seriously, to attempt to do it carefully and build it up for its own sake, with neither your ego nor mine tangling itself in the process. Intelligent people, seriously dedicated to finding the truth, ought to carefully interrogate mental models in their capacity as models so as to understand what progress should look like at all; they ought to share their conceptive models of the world with one another, hoping that they may find new ways of looking at the world.
We ought to do our very best to work together, because the goal of finding the truth behind ordinary phenomena is by default a cooperative one: what is true about my world is true about yours, since they’re the same world
.Because the human intellectual project seems to flourish when we come together and share our ways of looking at the world with one another, so as to one day build a way of looking at it correctly — this is in any case what underlies theories and paradigms and what makes experiments proposable and interpretable — those who conduct it ought to be playing an intellectual co-op game; when confronted with new ideas they ought to ask
What new ways of looking at the world can we get out of this idea? What is the largest extent to which we can point this idea towards the ideal of intellectual development, with flourishing? What can we make of it?
They ought not to ask, at least not yet,
What is it that makes this idea wrong? What is the smallest amount of thinking with which I can demonstrate it to be broken, or otherwise dismiss it? How can I destroy it?
Shapes of Mind
But, you may cry out at the above, what about security mindset and epistemic rigor? Do these virtues not compel us to ask why this or that idea is wrong before anything else? No — not before anything else. This is not about the hypothetico-deductive method, it is not about experimental design, it is not about theory formulation. It is about digestion, the process that happens beforehand in which conceptual models, which, again, subtend hypothesis formation and experiment design, are built.
Certainly, if you’ve gotten to the point where you need to formulate an actual experiment to test an idea, it makes sense to attack it, to think over its possible internal incoherences as might render an experiment uncreatable or at least illegible, to think about any and all possible failure modes, and so on — but if you have not conceptually digested the idea, then, when any experiment you attempt to base on it yields a result (positive or negative, doesn’t matter), what will you have learned? Where do you go from there? You will have learned nothing, and your movement ‘forwards’ will propel you in a random walk, moving towards the truth merely by accident if at all. If you thought the idea through beforehand and absorbed what parts of it were new and worthwhile into your conceptual model of the world — and these are not techniques carried out through experimentation, but through shaping the mind — then, if the idea fails experiment, you will not only have gained skill at thinking in the most general sense, but will have gained knowledge as to what broader conceptual schemas indicate trouble; if the idea holds, you will have a deeper picture of the truth of the world rather than a set of data points you can only misinterpret.
Had special relativity failed experiment, it would have still been a monumental success for showing us a massive blind spot in our native thinking about simultaneity; simply assuming that everything’s fine there because special relativity failed would obviously be idiotic (you’d need to positively show that our native thinking about simultaneity matches up to reality when using measuring sticks on the scale of light speed). The point is that special relativity would’ve shown us that blind spot regardless of whether it passed or failed experiment — this demonstration occurs at the level of shapes of mind before material facts — and so even if we did hypothetically find special relativity to be wrong, it would still benefit us greatly to ask what new ways of looking at the world we can get out of it regardless of experiment
.Gameplay
Excited by your illusion, you venture out to discuss the ideas you’ve developed. And at this point you can’t ask for much more than that — to hammer out the concept. For, regardless of whether this particular idea is right or not, the concept of heritable forms selecting for their own relative proliferation is clearly a very powerful one that the wider community could use!
Are you greeted, then, with the kind of curiosity such a concept deserves? No. What you are greeted with is a bureaucracy of barnacles each one of which will carefully stay in place, building a shell of methods to avoid having to actually think. You have no proof, so I have no reason to believe you, and therefore do not change my model of the world.
Anyone can propose a wild theory without proof. You cannot actually show examples of concrete examples of “evolution” without putting together random assortments of animals like a haruspex reading the fate of Rome from a sheep’s spilled guts — it’s always just more conceptual explanations, more rhetoric — and you can’t actually give any concrete predictions either, nothing that we can actually go out and test, only “expect to see” as more fossils are discovered over the course of centuries, or if we were to wait for millions of years taking careful records of finch beaks; fine, then! let future civilizations believe your theory eons from now! But right now, I see no reason not to toss your proposal in the garbage.
Or else your proof is flawed or insufficient in this or that way, so I have no reason to believe you, and therefore do not change my model of the world!
You’ve claimed that nothing about life makes sense except in the light of your particular theory [c.f.] — but any theory that explains everything really explains nothing, for no man can read the mind of the Creator of all life! Content yourself thereby with what meager understandings of life Man may aspire to! In the trash this goes, then, and expect any further submissions to follow it posthaste.
(Do you see where the everything-nothing argument falls? It's not in the invocation of religion-- I'll put the answer in this footnote
).Or else you seem unfamiliar with the literature, so [make something up], and I therefore do not change my model of the world; or else there must be some other trope I can use pull out to reject you, something I can use to avoid having to honestly consider the extent to which this claim might actually apply to the real world, let alone the extent to which I can break it down in order to find what patterns of thought in it are new and interesting to me, how I might interpret it in order to think better about the world!
You bring an argument to me, the great rhetorician? Behold my power: Occamsrazor! [Your idea is not immediately recreatable within my own conceptual ontology, and I may not have the cognitive capacity to consider different ontologies or at least to juggle more than a few moving parts at once]. Burdenofproof! [I cannot be sufficiently interested in your idea, or find thinking about it too difficult, that I would actually bother thinking about it by and for myself]. Unfalsifiable! [I refuse to investigate scientific thought deeply enough to understand its contingent relation to experiment, and am in any case not going to bother trying to be creative in the few seconds I spend thinking about how I might test this idea]. Unorrrrriginal! [Your idea vaguely pattern-matched something I read once, and I’m going to use that topic as the sole conceptual lens through which I view the idea by comparing it to things I am comfortable with].
The actual truth could not matter less. Dedicated players of The Game do not want to know about the world, they want to roleplay wanting to know about the world—consciousness, method actor that it is, will move towards this end by implanting the belief “I want to know about the world” in oneself and taking actions that preserve that aspect of one’s self-concept. So they act out the images which are fashionable for such roleplaying, trying to outdo one another in this Game — trying to appear interesting and sophisticated, trying to adopt the popular lingo, trying to relate their beliefs to anything and everything, trying to have a spicy opinion on whatever presents itself to them as possibly having a problem maybe??, and so on. They are locked in a state of hypnotic illucidity almost universal among humanity, but which is at least tempered in most disciplines by virtue of having some external reality to hook on to — in this regard, even sociology has the actuality of societal phenomena. Yet philosophy has no such firm basis, for it conceptually encompasses its relation to everything that could be such a basis — any breakdown of a philosophical concept is again philosophical, if not materially then at least formally
.II. Eppur Si Muove
When the Church forced Galileo to recant his heliocentric model of the solar system, they almost certainly didn’t think they were preventing the actual solar system from becoming heliocentric; they would’ve reaffirmed their faith in the geocentric model in themselves and with one another, thinking “I believe it is geocentric because it is geocentric”. But we naively generalize this line of thought as “if I believe that X, then it is because X holds, is a fact of the world, that I believe it”; it still needs to be burned into our brains that the world comes before any belief or statement about it, yet does not immediately condition such beliefs or statements. If I believe that the solar system is geocentric, then, it is not because the solar system is geocentric; whether it is or is not comes before, and does not immediately condition, my belief. It is, in fact, heliocentric, and when Galileo is forced to say that it is not heliocentric, the reality of this remains unperturbed. You can say or believe anything you want, and yet the Earth will continue to revolve around the sun; you can have the heliocentric heresiarch recant as forcefully as you want, and yet it moves.
Kernel Routines
This may seem obvious to you. But until you have burned into your mind just how incredibly outside the world is, you will keep making the same mistakes over and over. It’s obvious to me that the product of two numbers divisible by three will be divisible by nine, but if I try to do it mentally, I may say that the product of 183 (obviously (60+1)x3) and 264 (obviously (90-2)x3) is 47712 , violating this rule
. Everything here is obvious to me, but since it has not been actively burned into my mind (why would such an arbitrary rule have been?), I will not instinctively think about this heuristic, meaning that its obviousness will have no effect on me.A more salient example of a schema we only partially burn into our minds is that of object permanence. Many people close their eyes when they know they’re about to see something scary, see something terrible, or see someone get hurt — even if I’m watching a slapstick comedy movie, and it’s obvious that the injuries are faked, there’s still a good chance I’ll flinch away with one or both eyes closed when the lead actor lands a three story fall by catching a metal rail between his legs. People also stuff things they don’t want to deal with in various places where they won’t be seen — dirty clothes under the bed, for instance. If we did not all share some version of the common bug underlying these behaviors, someone who exhibited them in isolation would not be seen as merely sensitive or irresponsible, but as suffering from severe mental illness. We tend to ignore the fact that the world is outside of us, independent of us, and does not change solely due to our perception of it.
To help you, here’s a more ‘surprising’ consequence, and a test of sorts — it is surprising if you have not internalized the world’s outsideness, but immediately obvious if you have — the very mention of a “burden of proof” indicates that something has gone critically wrong in a discussion, for the very concept as commonly deployed is incoherent. See if you can guess why before I explain it.
Burdens of Proof
Suppose I come up with my own interesting hypothesis which conflicts with your own slightly more established proposition; sure, the burden of proof is on me. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, are you then free to ignore the hypothesis and go on believing in your own theory? “Shame about the bus, but now nobody’s carrying the burden — why bother anymore?” Reality simply is what it is. It does not delegate “burdens of proof” to its investigators; we delegate these to each other, as a sort of epistemic labor law, but this does not affect the relation of any hypothesis to reality.
What is it that’s gone critically wrong? Let’s point directly at it:
[…] Suppose I come up with my own interesting hypothesis which conflicts with your own slightly more established proposition […]
There is no “my own hypothesis”, nor is there a “your own proposition”. There are only statements which we take to concern the way the world might be. At the raw and useless subjective level, yes, all statements are my own, for this person is the only one that interprets them for this person, but insofar as we assume they are of the right form to apply to the world, are of the right form to hook onto the objective truth of the world, no statements are my own, for what would it even mean for me to “own” a possible fact about the world?
When someone says “this is my hypothesis”, the most they can be taken to mean is that they are the person responsible for crafting this statement and introducing it to some community of thinkers; and they have to let go!, anything possibly concerning actual reality is not theirs to hang on to as though they could through their will determine what was true or false!, but they generally continue to stick on to the hypothesis. The ego is sticky; it attaches to things and refuses to let go, and “this is my [introduced, developed] hypothesis” quickly becomes “this is my [defended, identified-with] hypothesis”. Thus do we take sides, and, sensing an attack on our own side, counterattack with the fictional idea of a “burden of proof”.
It’s Just Probability, Probably
If I release myself from ego-attachment to any particular statements, the notion of a burden of proof simply dissolves. I have judgements and reasonings concerning many hypotheses, and let’s suppose there’s one clearly in the running; should I argue for its being clearly in the running, only to be confronted by a stranger who says that no, this new hypothesis totally dominates it, I would indeed ask them why, but primarily because I suppose as a matter of communicative normality that this person does indeed have arguments to make and wants to make them, and because asking is so easy. If they were hit by a bus right after presenting their theory to me (we’re discussing this while walking into traffic), well, I’d just have one new hypothesis in mind; and, depending on how unusual an event this was, how high a probability standard Bayesian reasoning assigns to the stranger’s having anything important to say, I should like to, at least internally, not dismiss this hypothesis right off the bat. If it is wrong, it is wrong for reasons I should at least attempt to discern for myself. I should do the same even if the stranger dodged the bus but proceeded to poorly garble words at me in an attempt at providing evidence (for people just kinda do that even if they’re talking about true things, so that P(true | garbled) isn’t that much lower than P(true)).
Taking Russell's teapot as a second example: If someone claimed to me that there existed a Russell-type teapot, too small to detect with modern instruments and orbiting the sun with radius somewhere between that of Earth and Mars, but presented no proof of this, I don’t need anything more than simple probabilistic reasoning to dismiss the idea: what is the probability that a teapot somehow appears in such a spot — whether placed there or whether simply materialized — and that this is kept a secret from the general public but for whatever reason told to me in particular? It's incredibly small (but not zero
) compared to the chance that someone is trying to screw with me. Or, to put it another way, conditioning on someone having made that claim to me, the posterior probability of their lying is orders of magnitude greater than that of their telling the truth.One could extract something like a burden of proof from this situation — the person who has told me this claim presumably wants me to believe it, and if they are not lying presumably has evidence informing their belief, and they ought to, if they are to acquire their goal, give me the evidence I would not find (or in this case even bother looking for) otherwise — but such a burden is only epiphenomenal, and a distraction from actual inference. The notion is useful for studying formalized multi-agent-low-epistemic-trust settings, but not from the perspective of any given individual simply looking to figure out what’s true.
Addendum
The establishment of philosophy as an academic discipline is one of the worst mistakes in human history. You know that glazed look people get in their eyes when they find themselves listening to mathematics? — the look that says “ugh, it’s math”, and which lets you know they’re just not going to actively engage? My field is mathematics, so I know and hate it very well; with the establishment of philosophy, questions of meaning, sentience, and morality elicit attitudes of “ugh, it’s philosophy”.
Such questions exist independently of our calling them “philosophy”. Their relevance and importance do not lessen because of that choice; neither do their answers change. People merely conceptualize them differently, treating of them in disastrous ways as a consequence. On the layman’s end, this manifests in people merely rolling their eyes when the intuitive, simple answers they generate at random are questioned. On the “philosopher’s” end, this manifests in having your positions on philosophical problems, having your beliefs, your “schools”. It’s not as though philosophers adopt schools and answers in search of the truth, for truth does not restrict itself to the arbitrary historical delineations we call schools and answers; they merely pick that which accords with their intuition, their emotion, their culture and their academic upbringing. We’ve turned over humanity’s most important questions to a clique of hollow careerists.
So long as philosophers keep playing their Game, they will never see the truth — because the truth is not something that can be confined to this or that particular Game, that cannot be seen within any such lens. It is immanent, in the world, here with us; lenses can only distort it. You breathe it in and out when you’re on your daily commute to work, when you’re lifting weights, when you’re cooking eggs, when you’re huffing paint — truth permeates all of these moments equally, and could be seen in any one of them if you would just open your eyes and look at the common conceptive structures underpinning experience throughout the entirety of your waking life.
It’s a general pattern: this particular species of animal survives off of the nectar of this particular kind of oddly shaped flower which exists in the same environment, and in fact has a tongue which is just as oddly shaped in order to acquire that nectar. That the animal’s habitat distribution overlaps with the flower’s isn’t surprising, just anthropically expected, but the peculiarity of fit — which becomes that much more amazing when you look at the absurd fit of some parasite lifecycles — is far less surprising when you look at it as developing step by step. Perhaps a species of snail parasites with simpler lifecycles struggles to keep up with some ecological change affecting snail… feeding patterns or whatever, leaving behind only those so formed as to accidentally use ants as a backup reservoir — but accidental survival is survival, the form that allows for it is passed on to the exclusion of all the forms that don’t, and the species suddenly appears to have gained an extra step in lifecycle complexity. It’s a just-so story, obviously, but the point is not the single story, it is the existence of an entire world of possible stories.
I know some people will respond to this with something like “it is true that I am in this room and you are not” or "what about the internal world”, attempting to win points. They are playing a game. There is an obvious set of responses to this (demarcating kinds of truth, or reasoning on the formal rather than material level) — but they simply do not make these obvious responses because they are playing a game in which there is no reason to play the opposing side’s move; the revealed preference, or subconscious drive, in not continuing the obvious line of reasoning is that of social ‘victory’ over right thinking.
“But special relativity isn’t wrong, so it’s incoherent to think of a world where it is!” — this sort of rejection of counterfactual reasoning is a common pastime of those who merely pick up rhetorical tricks without studying when they can be validly used. Counterfactual reasoning is the method by which we examine the very systems of causality behind our understanding of the world. How does your knowing it (let’s generously presume that you do) influence your model of conceptual cognition? If it actually does, you’re either deeply confused or decades ahead of modern science. Otherwise, there can be no extra contradiction introduced to your model by assuming the falsity of special relativity; the counterfactual can only serve as a useful tool to dissect conceptual cognition formally.
This is a mangled application of Yudkowsky’s line “a theory that can explain everything explains nothing at all”. He gets this one right, noting that evolution can’t explain everything — we just don’t see in nature the things that it could never explain.
There’s a curious phenomenon — take a Wikipedia article, click on the first internal link in the main text to get to another article, click on the first internal link there, and so on — for the overwhelming majority of starting points, you’ll almost always end up at the article on Philosophy. But this is merely a side-effect of the point I’m making, which is deeper.
First, if you want to say that “philosophy ought to happen in this way” or “productive [philosophical] claims satisfy these desiderata” or “this is how valid [philosophical] reasoning is to be done”, such claims again fall under philosophy; this points to its unboundedness in scope, its being a sort of “catch-all” for the classification of abstract arguments and investigations.
Second, if you want to say that some facet of the natural world implies some things for, say, psychology, you can just point to neuroscience materially, but the formal nature of this influence will be a philosophical matter (see for instance the notion of multiple realizability). Now if you want to say that some facet of the natural world implies some things for philosophy rather than psychology, then, regardless of the material nature, the formal nature will again be philosophical. In this way, it eats anything that one attempts to relate to it.
It’s very easy to check divisibility of the multiplicands: for me, the factorization 183 = 61 x 3 presents itself immediately (in under a fifth of a second; the thoughts seem to be consecutive), and 264 = 88 x 3 is reached in perhaps half a second (as 270 - 6). The non-divisibility of 47712 by 9 comes from the digit sum rule (any multiple of 9 has a digit sum which is a multiple of 9, a fact which may not be that obvious, but the fact that I know it by heart makes the non-divisibility obvious to me). The error is also a realistic one: I’m not good at mentally multiplying three digit numbers because I try to stuff everything in my working memory, and it’s easy for me to, after expanding each of 183 x 200 = 36600, 183 x 60 = 10980, and 183 x 4 = 732, sum up 36000 + 10980 + 732 = 36000 + (11000 - 20) + 732 = 47000 + 712 = 47712, having dropped the extra 600 in 36600 due to a sort of “memory pressure”.
Hohmann transfer from an Earth orbit to an orbit halfway between Earth and Mars demands a delta-v of 2.8 km/s; the Tsiolkovsky equation implies that a solid fuel booster with effective exhaust velocity ~3 km/s would need 1.52x the mass of a payload in fuel to give it this delta-v. So if the (highly force and heat-resistant) teapot weighs half a pound (call it a quarter kg), it seems a tiny, sub-kilogram teapot-fuel apparatus launched from outside Earth’s gravity well, say from one of the probe-containing rockets NASA’s sent to Mars, successfully boost it into a Russellian orbit. Of course we’d have to add on a lot of guidance and equipment to control the burn, and add 1.5x the weight of that in rocket fuel as well, but the calculations, if I got them anywhere near correct, indicate that at this scale it doesn’t really matter. So it seems perfectly plausible that a Russell-type teapot could exist.