08. Third Quarter Comeback
Good morning. The moon has entered its third quarter, after mysteriously skipping its first quarter.
Unlearning Procrastination
I'm learning from this practice of committing to an arbitrary deadline and noticing how I respond to it. I missed the April 15 First Quarter edition for no particular reason except I didn't have anything I needed to say and I also felt that the previous two installments had the same underlying ‘not much to say’ story, just expressed from different angles.
I also continue to have a backlog of un-replied replies from friends who have replied to earlier newsletters to say hello, and in the past moon cycle I have been thinking I should reply to those folks before I sent a new newsletter. In thinking that, I noticed a procrastinatory cycle I could break: Don't forsake commitments to yourself, especially not if you are forsaking them in the name of implied commitments that you haven't actually committed to!
And anyway, I have been enjoying some thoughts I would love to share.
God, Human, Animal, Machine
The latest of Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us podcast is an interview with Meghan O’Gieblyn about the parallels between contemporary billionaires’ pipe-dream philosophy of technological “transhumanism” and Christian narratives of resurrection. This analysis is also a major part of O’Gieblyn's book God, Human, Animal, Machine which I can say, now that I’m halfway through listening to it, really delivers. O’Gieblyn's bona fides is that she was raised a fundamentalist Christian, went to Moody Bible College (yay Chicago) and then lost her faith and got into Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. She wrote in an early n+1 essay about this period:
More than the death of God, I was mourning the dissolution of this [dispensationalist] teleological narrative, which envisioned all of history as an arc bending assuredly toward a moment of final redemption.
Then comes along Kurzweil's concept of the Singularity:
when computing power reaches an “intelligence explosion”... according to transhumanists such as Kurzweil, people who are merged with this technology will undergo a radical transformation. They will become posthuman: immortal, limitless, changed beyond recognition... [Or] perhaps the Apostle Paul put it more poetically: “We will not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”
There is a running joke about visionary techbros reinventing trains and city buses. O’Gieblyn offers us the insight that the Singularity, or Elon Musk’s endgame with the Neuralink brain-computer interface is just trying to reinvent the Rapture. O’Gieblyn is not the first to draw these parallels, but God, Human, Animal, Machine covers a lot more ground than just this point.
O’Gieblyn’s also: calls out the phenomenon of multiple male neuroscientists arguing against the existence of free will, citing their experience of leaving their wives as an example; flirts with panpsychism; reopens philosophical territory that has been claimed by science; and has many lines as good as this quote (or maybe paraphrase, hard to be sure in audio version) from Philip Goff
Centuries of reductive materialism have convinced us that consciousness is some great mystery, but in truth, nothing is more familiar to us. What is mysterious is reality, and our knowledge of consciousness is one of the best clues we have for working out what that mysterious thing is like.
The book has unexpected intersections with a newsletter post by a Grammarly recruiter I’ve been talking to, about “why disruption doesn’t care about sentience or free will”. The LLM-skeptical (myself included) often remind people that, despite the convincing façade of fluent language, you are not engaging with sentient or volitional consciousness when you chat with a GPT. O’Gieblyn draws from to Max Weber and traditional Japanese animism (cf Hari-Kuyō, the funereal festival for broken sewing needles) in inviting us to look more closely at our disenchanted, culturally-received hierarchies of consciousness and ensoulment. Alex Libre’s post argues that if an AI system is deemed to do competent work and has an impact on the world, its sentience is immaterial (and we ought to channel its disruptive potential into beneficial uses). Both are nudging me to think again about how I might participate in the unfolding of this social and technological moment.
Various open tabs I haven't read yet
- We Need To Rewild the Internet
- They Are Insecure for a Reason “One of the less-amusing ironies of the violent institutional response to the nonviolent protest movement on campuses across the country is that the goals of the people protesting are much easier to understand than those of the variously curdled elites dispatching uniformed violence workers against them.”
- The Moral Case for Letting Trans Kids Change Their Bodies
- Black Student Debt Hub: my friend Tev'n did the data visualizations for this.
- How landscapes shape species: Grizzly bears’ DNA aligns with indigenous language families
Unlearning Silence
(That's the title of a book I recently added to my library holds, a skill I could definitely use in some contexts. Though there’s another book that says that silence is a source of power, "so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,")
I'll have you know I have now responded to all but one of my backlogged replies. Partly this is due to a cancelled meeting opening up two hours in my calendar. Partly this is due to the life-changing magic of sitting down and doing the thing. That last one just deserves more attention than I wish to give it before I get this email scheduled.
That's all for now. Next installment: May 15, 4:48am Pacific. Ish.
Love,
Orión