Enlightenment How - Omens of The Semantic Apocalypse - Three Pound Brain

3/28/2018 Enlightenment How?
Omens of the Semantic Apocalypse | Three Pound Brain
Three Pound Brain
No bells, just whistling in the dark…
Enlightenment How? Omens of the Semantic Apocalypse
by rsbakker
(h ps://rsbakker.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/enlightenment-now.jpg)
“In those days the world teemed, the people multiplied, the world bellowed like a wild bull, and the great god
was aroused by the clamor. Enlil heard the clamor and he said to the gods in council, “The uproar of mankind is
intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel.” So the gods agreed to exterminate mankind.”
–The Epic of Gilgamesh
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3/28/2018 Enlightenment How? Omens of the Semantic Apocalypse | Three Pound Brain
We know that human cognition is largely heuristic, and as such dependent upon cognitive ecologies. We
know that the technological transformation of those ecologies generates what Pinker calls ‘bugs,’
heuristic miscues due to deformations in ancestral correlative backgrounds. In ancestral times, our
exposure to threat-cuing stimuli possessed a reliable relationship to actual threats. Not so now thanks to
things like the nightly news, generating (via, Pinker suggests, the availability heuristic (42)) exaggerated
estimations of threat.
The toll of scientific progress, in other words, is cognitive ecological degradation. So far that degradation
has left the problem-solving capacities of intentional cognition largely intact: the very complexity of the
systems requiring intentional cognition has hitherto rendered cognition largely impervious to scientific
renovation. Throughout the course of revolutionizing our environments, we have remained a blind-spot,
the last corner of nature where traditional speculation dares contradict the determinations of science.
This is changing.
We see animals in charcoal across cave walls so easily because our visual systems leap to conclusions on
the basis of so li le information. The problem is that ‘so li le information’ also means so easily reproduced.
The world is presently engaged in a mammoth industrial research program bent on hacking every
cue-based cognitive reflex we possess. More and more, the systems we evolved to solve our fellow
human travelers will be contending with artificial intelligences dedicated to commercial exploitation.
‘Deep information,’ meanwhile, is already swamping the legal system, even further problematizing the
folk conceptual (shallow information) staples that ground the system’s self-understanding. Creeping
medicalization continues unabated, slowly scaling back warrant for things like character judgment in
countless different professional contexts.
Now that the sciences are colonizing the complexities of experience and cognition, we can see the first
clear-cut omens of the semantic apocalypse.
Crash Space
He assiduously avoids the topic in Enlightenment Now, but in The Blank Slate, Pinker devotes several
pages to deflating the arch-incompatibility between natural and intentional modes of cognition, the
problem of free will:
“But how can we have both explanation, with its requirement of lawful causation, and responsibility, with its
requirement of free choice? To have them both we don’t need to resolve the ancient and perhaps irresolvable
antinomy between free will and determinism. We have only to think clearly about what we want the notion of
responsibility to achieve.” 180
He admits there’s no ge ing past the ‘conflict of intuitions’ underwriting the debate. Since he doesn’t
know what intentional and natural cognition amount to, he doesn’t understand their incompatibility,
and so proposes we simply side-step the problem altogether by redefining ‘responsibility’ to mean what
we need it to mean—the same kind of pragmatic redefinition proposed by Denne . He then proceeds to
adduce examples of ‘clear thinking’ by providing guesses regarding ‘holding responsible’ as deterrence,
which is more scientifically tractable. “I don’t claim to have solved the problem of free will, only to show
that we don’t need to solve it to preserve personal responsibility in the face of an increasing
understanding of the causes of behaviour” (185).
Here we can see how profoundly Pinker (as opposed to Nie sche and Adorno) misunderstands the
profundity of Enlightenment disenchantment. The problem isn’t that one can’t cook up alternate
definitions of ‘responsibility,’ the problem is that anyone can, endlessly. ‘Clear thinking’ is as liable to
serve Pinker as well as ‘clear and distinct ideas’ served Descartes, which is to say, as more grease for the
speculative mill. No ma er how compelling your particular instrumentalization of ‘responsibility’
seems, it remains every bit as theoretically underdetermined as any other formulation.
There’s a reason such exercises in pragmatic redefinition stall in the speculative ether. Intentional and
mechanical cognitive systems are not optional components of human cognition, nor are the intuitions we
are inclined to report. Moreover, as we saw in the previous post
(h ps://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/03/20/enlightenment-how-pinkers-tutelary-natures/), intentional
cognition generates reliable predictions of system behaviour absent access to the actual sources of that
behaviour. Intentional cognition is source-insensitive. Natural cognition, on the other hand, is source
sensitive: it generates predictions of system behaviour via access to the actual sources of that behaviour.
Small wonder, then, that our folk intentional intuitions regularly find themselves scu led by scientific
explanation. ‘Free will,’ on this account, is ancestral lemonade, a way to make the best out of
metacognitive lemons, namely, our blindness to the sources of our thought and decisions. To the degree
it relies upon ancestrally available (shallow) saliencies, any causal (deep) account of those sources is
bound to ‘crash’ our intuitions regarding free will. The free will debate that Pinker hopes to evade with
speculation can be seen as a kind of crash space (h ps://www.academia.edu/19469409/Crash_Space), the point
where the availability of deep information generates incompatible causal intuitions and intentional
intuitions.
The confusion here isn’t (as Pinker thinks) ‘merely conceptual’; it’s a bona fide, material consequence of
the Enlightenment, a cognitive version of a visual illusion. Too much information of the wrong kind
crashes our radically heuristic modes of cognizing decisions. Stipulating definitions, not surprisingly,
solves nothing insofar as it papers over the underlying problem—this is why it merely adds to the
literature. Responsibility-talk cues the application of intentional cognitive modes; it’s the
incommensurability of these modes with causal cognition that’s the problem, not our lexicons.
Cognitive Information
Consider the laziness of certain children. Should teachers be allowed to hold students responsible for
their academic performance? As the list of learning disabilities grows, incompetence becomes less a
ma er of ‘character’ and more a ma er of ‘malfunction’ and providing compensatory environments.
Given that all failures of competence redound on cognitive infelicities of some kind, and given that each
and every one of these infelicities can and will be isolated and explained, should we ban character
judgments altogether? Should we regard exhortations to ‘take responsibility’ as forms of subtle
discrimination, given that executive functioning varies from student to student? Is treating children like
(sacred) machinery the only ‘moral’ thing to do?
So far at least. Causal explanations of behaviour cue intentional exemptions: our ancestral thresholds for
exempting behaviour from moral cognition served larger, ancestral social equilibria. Every etiological
discovery cues that exemption in an evolutionarily unprecedented manner, resulting in what Denne
calls “creeping exculpation,” the gradual expansion of morally exempt behaviours. Once a learning
impediment has been discovered, it ‘just is’ immoral to hold those afflicted responsible for their
incompetence. (If you’re anything like me, simply expressing the problem in these terms rankles!) Our
ancestors, resorting to systems adapted to resolving social problems given only the merest information,
had no problem calling children lazy, stupid, or malicious. Were they being witlessly cruel doing so?
Well, it certainly feels like it. Are we more enlightened, more moral, for recognizing the limits of that
system, and curtailing the context of application? Well, it certainly feels like it. But then how do we justify
our remaining moral cognitive applications? Should we avoid passing moral judgment on learners
altogether? It’s beginning to feel like it. Is this itself moral?
This is theoretical crash space, plain and simple. Staking out an argumentative position in this space is
entirely possible—but doing so merely exemplifies, as opposed to solves, the dilemma. We’re
conscripting heuristic systems adapted to shallow cognitive ecologies to solve questions involving the
impact of information they evolved to ignore. We can no more resolve our intuitions regarding these issues
than we can stop Necker Cubes from spoofing visual cognition.
The point here isn’t that gerrymandered solutions aren’t possible, it’s that gerrymandered solutions are
the only solutions possible. Pinker’s own ‘solution’ to the debate (see also, How the Mind Works, 54-55) can
be seen as a symptom of the underlying intractability, the straits we find ourselves in. We can stipulate,
enforce solutions that appease this or that interpretation of this or that displaced intuition: teachers who
berate students for their laziness and stupidity are not long for their profession—at least not anymore.
As etiologies of cognition continue to accumulate, as more and more deep information permeates our
moral ecologies, the need to revise our stipulations, to engineer them to discharge this or that heuristic
function, will continue to grow. Free will is not, as Pinker thinks, “an idealization of human beings that
makes the ethics game playable” (HMW 55), it is (as Bruce Waller puts it
(h ps://mitpress.mit.edu/books/stubborn-system-moral-responsibility)) stubborn, a cognitive reflex
belonging to a system of cognitive reflexes belonging to intentional cognition more generally. Foot-
stomping does not change how those reflexes are cued in situ. The free-will crash space will continue to
expand, no ma er how stubbornly Pinker insists on this or that redefinition of this or that term.
We’re not talking about a fall from any ‘heuristic Eden,’ here, an ancestral ‘golden age’ where our
instincts were perfectly aligned with our circumstances—the sheer granularity of moral cognition, not to
mention the confabulatory nature of moral rationalization, suggests that it has always slogged through
interpretative mire. What we’re talking about, rather, is the degree that moral cognition turns on
neglecting certain kinds of natural information. Or conversely, the degree to which deep natural
information regarding our cognitive capacities displaces and/or crashes once straightforward moral
intuitions, like the laziness of certain children.
Or the need to punish murderers…
Two centuries ago a murderer suffering irregular sleep characterized by vocalizations and sometimes
violent actions while dreaming would have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Now, however,
such a murderer would be diagnosed as suffering an episode of ‘homicidal somnambulism,’ and could
very likely go free (h ps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7939126). Mammalian brains do not fall
asleep or awaken all at once (h ps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621793/). For some yet-
to-be-determined reason, the brains of certain individuals (mostly men older than 50), suffer a form of
partial arousal causing them to act out their dreams.
More and more, neuroscience is making an impact in American courtrooms. Nita Farahany (2016
(h ps://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/2/3/485/1918085)) has found that between 2005 and 2012 the
number of judicial opinions referencing neuroscientific evidence has more than doubled. She also found
a clear correlation between the use of such evidence and less punitive outcomes—especially when it
came to sentencing. Observers in the burgeoning ‘neurolaw’ field think that for be er or worse,
neuroscience is firmly entrenched in the criminal justice system, and bound to become ever more
ubiquitous (h ps://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/neurolaw-brain-scans-court/471615/).
Not only are responsibility assessments being weakened as neuroscientific information accumulates,
social risk assessments are being strengthened (Gkotsi and Gasser 2016
(h ps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27209602)). So-called ‘neuroprediction’ is beginning to
revolutionize forensic psychology. Studies suggest that inmates with lower levels of anterior cingulate
activity are approximately twice as likely to reoffend as those relatively higher levels of activity (Aharoni
et al 2013 (h p://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/6223)). Measurements of ‘early sensory gating’
(a entional filtering) predict the likelihood that individuals suffering addictions will abandon cognitive
behavioural treatment programs (Steele et al 2014 (h ps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24238783)).
Reduced gray ma er volumes in the medial and temporal lobes identify youth prone to commit violent
crimes (Cope et al 2014 (h ps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24936430)). ‘Enlightened’ metrics
assessing recidivism risks already exist within disciplines such as forensic psychiatry, of course, but “the
brain has the most proximal influence on behavior” (Gaudet et al 2016
(h ps://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2862083)). Few scientific domains illustrate the
problems secondary to deep environmental information than the issue of recidivism. Given the high
social cost of criminality, the ability to predict ‘at risk’ individuals before any crime is commi ed is sure
to pay handsome preventative dividends. But what are we to make of justice systems that parole
offenders possessing one set of ‘happy’ neurological factors early, while leaving others possessing an
‘unhappy’ set to serve out their entire sentence?
Nothing, I think, captures the crash of ancestral moral intuitions in modern, technological contexts quite
so dramatically as forensic danger assessments. Consider, for instance, the way deep information in this
context has the inverse effect of deep information in the classroom. Since punishment is indexed to
responsibility, we generally presume those bearing less responsibility deserve less punishment. Here,
however, it’s those bearing the least responsibility, those possessing ‘social learning disabilities,’ who
ultimately serve the longest. The very deficits that mitigate responsibility before conviction actually
aggravate punishment subsequent conviction.
The problem is fundamentally cognitive, and not legal, in nature. As countless bureaucratic horrors
make plain, procedural decision-making need not report as morally rational. We would be mad, on the
one hand, to overlook any available etiology in our original assessment of responsibility. We would be
mad, on the other hand, to overlook any available etiology in our subsequent determination of
punishment. Ergo, less responsibility often means more punishment.
Crash.
The point, once again, is to describe the structure and dynamics of our collective sociocognitive dilemma
in the age of deep environmental information, not to eulogize ancestral cognitive ecologies. The more we
disenchant ourselves, the more evolutionarily unprecedented information we have available, the more
problematic our folk determinations become. Demonstrating this point demonstrates the futility of
pragmatic redefinition: no ma er how Pinker or Denne (or anyone else) rationalizes a given,
scientifically-informed definition of moral terms, it will provide no more than grist for speculative
disputation. We can adopt any legal or scientific operationalization we want (see Parmigiani et al 2017
(h p://www.rivistadipsichiatria.it/r.php?
v=2631&a=27049&l=330151&f=allegati/02631_2017_01/fulltext/02-Parmigiani%209-15.pdf)); so long as
responsibility talk cues moral cognitive determinations, however, we will find ourselves stranded with
intuitions we cannot reconcile.
Considered in the context of politics and the ‘culture wars,’ the potentially disastrous consequences of
these kinds of trends become clear. One need only think of the oxymoronic notion of ‘commonsense’
criminology, which amounts to imposing moral determinations geared to shallow cognitive ecologies
upon criminal contexts now possessing numerous deep information a enuations. Those who, for
whatever reason, escaped the education system with something resembling an ancestral ‘neglect
structure’ intact, those who have no patience for pragmatic redefinitions or technical stipulations will
find appeals to folk intuitions every bit as convincing as those presiding over the Salem witch trials in
1692. Those caught up in deep information environments, on the other hand, will be ever more inclined
to see those intuitions as anachronistic, inhumane, immoral—unenlightened.
Given the relation between education and information access and processing capacity, we can expect
that education will increasingly divide moral a itudes. Likewise, we should expect a growing
sociocognitive disconnect between expert and non-expert moral determinations. And given cognitive
technologies like the internet, we should expect this dysfunction to become even more profound still.
Cognitive Technology
Given the power of technology to cue intergroup identifications, the internet was—and continues to be—
hailed as a means of bringing humanity together, a way of enacting the universalistic aspirations of
humanism. My own position—one foot in academe, another foot in consumer culture—afforded me a far
different perspective. Unlike academics, genre writers rub shoulders with all walks, and often find
themselves debating outrageously chauvinistic views. I realized quite quickly that the internet had
rendered rationalizations instantly available, that it amounted to pouring marbles across the floor of
ancestral social dynamics. The cost of confirmation had plummeted to zero. Prior to the internet, we had
to test our more extreme chauvinisms against whomever happened to be available—which is to say,
people who would be inclined to disagree. We had to work to indulge our stone-age weaknesses in post-
war 20th century Western cognitive ecologies. No more. Add to this phenomena such as online
disinhibition effect (h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect), as well as the sudden
visibility of ingroup, intellectual piety, and the growing extremity of counter-identification
(h ps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170425140213.htm) struck me as inevitable. The internet
was dividing us into teams. In such an age, I realized, the only socially redemptive art was art that cut
against this tendency (h ps://rsbakker.wordpress.com/essay-archive/the-future-of-literature-in-the-age-
of-information/), art that genuinely spanned ingroup boundaries. Literature, as traditionally understood,
had become a paradigmatic expression of the tribalism presently engulfing us now. Epic fantasy, on the
other hand, still possessed the relevance required to inspire book burnings
(h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_debates_over_the_Harry_Po er_series) in the West.
(The past decade has ‘rewarded’ my turn-of-the-millennium fears—though in some surprising ways.
The greatest a itudinal shift in America, for instance, has been progressive: it has been liberals, and not
conservatives, who have most radically changed their views (h p://www.people-
press.org/2017/10/05/the-partisan-divide-on-political-values-grows-even-wider/). The rise of reactionary
sentiment and populism is presently rewriting European politics—and the age of Trump has all but
overthrown the progressive political agenda in the US. But the role of the internet and social media in
these phenomena remains a hotly contested one
(h p://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/09/18/1706588114).)
The earlier promoters of the internet had banked on the notional availability of intergroup information
to ‘bring the world closer together,’ not realizing the heuristic reliance of human cognition on differential
information access. Ancestrally, communicating ingroup reliability trumped communicating
environmental accuracy, stranding us with what Pinker (following Kahan 2011
(h ps://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/296-kahan-tragedy-of-the-riskperception1pdf)) calls the ‘tragedy
of the belief commons’ (Enlightenment Now, 358), the individual rationality of believing collectively
irrational claims—such as, for instance, the belief that global warming is a liberal myth. Once falsehoods
become entangled with identity claims, they become the yardstick of true and false, thus generating the
terrifying spectacle we now witness on the evening news.
The provision of ancestrally unavailable social information is one thing, so long as it is curated—
censored, in effect—as it was in the mass media age of my childhood. Confirmation biases have to swim
upstream in such cognitive ecologies. Rendering all ancestrally unavailable social information available,
on the other hand, allows us to indulge our biases, to see only what we want to see, to hear only what we
want to hear. Where ancestrally, we had to risk criticism to secure praise, no such risks need be incurred
now. And no surprise, we find ourselves sliding back into the tribalistic mire, arguing absurdities
haunted—tainted—by the death of millions.
Jonathan Albright, the research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, has found
that the ‘fake news’ phenomenon, as the product of a self-reinforcing technical ecosystem, has actually
grown worse since the 2016 election. “Our technological and communication infrastructure, the ways we
experience reality, the ways we get news, are literally disintegrating,” he recently confessed in a
NiemanLab interview (h p://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/news-in-a-disintegrating-reality-tows-
jonathan-albright-on-what-to-do-as-things-crash-around-us/). “It’s the biggest problem ever, in my
opinion, especially for American culture.” As Alexis Madrigal writes
(h ps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/) in The Atlantic,
“the very roots of the electoral system—the news people see, the events they think happened, the
information they digest—had been destabilized.”
The individual cost of fantasy continues to shrink, even as the collective cost of deception continues to
grow. The ecologies once securing the reliability of our epistemic determinations, the invariants that our
ancestors took for granted, are being levelled. Our ancestral world was one where seeking risked
aversion, a world where praise and condemnation alike had to brave condemnation, where lazy
judgments were punished rather than rewarded. Our ancestral world was one where geography and the
scarcity of resources forced permissives and authoritarians to intermingle, compromise, and cooperate.
That world is gone (h ps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160708123625.htm), leaving the old
equilibria to unwind in confusion, a growing social crash space.
And this is only the beginning of the cognitive technological age. As Tristan Harris points out
(h p://www.tristanharris.com/essays/), social media platforms, given their commercial imperatives,
cannot but engineer online ecologies designed to exploit the heuristic limits of human cognition. He
writes:
“I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges,
vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even
realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s bu ons, you can play them like a piano.”
More and more of what we encounter online is dedicated to various forms of exogenous a ention
capture, maximizing the time we spend on the platform, so maximizing our exposure not just to
advertising, but to hidden metrics, algorithms designed to assess everything from our likes to our
emotional well-being. As with instances of ‘forcing’ in the performance of magic tricks, the fact of
manipulation escapes our a ention altogether, so we always presume we could have done otherwise—
we always presume ourselves ‘free’ (whatever this means). We exhibit what Clifford Nass, a pioneer in
human-computer interaction, calls ‘mindlessness (h p://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?
doi=10.1.1.87.2456&rep=rep1&type=pdf),’ the blind reliance on automatic scripts. To the degree that
social media platforms profit from engaging your a ention, they profit from hacking your ancestral
cognitive vulnerabilities, exploiting our shared neglect structure. They profit, in other words, from
transforming crash spaces into cheat spaces.
With AI, we are set to flood human cognitive ecologies with systems designed to actively game the
heuristic nature of human social cognition, cuing automatic responses based on boggling amounts of
data and the capacity to predict our decisions be er than our intimates
(h p://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036), and soon, be er than we can ourselves. And yet, as the
authors of the 2017 AI Index report (h p://cdn.aiindex.org/2017-report.pdf) state, “we are essentially
“flying blind” in our conversations and decision-making related to AI.” A blindness we’re largely blind
to. Pinker spends ample time domesticating the bogeyman of superintelligent AI (296-298) but he
completely neglects this far more immediate and retail dimension of our cognitive technological
dilemma.
Consider the way humans endure as much as need (h ps://www.chrc-

ccdp.gc.ca/sites/default/files/cat_cct-eng.pdf) one another: the problem is that the cues signaling social
punishment and reward are easy to trigger out of school
(h ps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17588928.2010.515020). We’ve already crossed the borne
where ‘improving the user experience’ entails substituting
(h ps://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/chinese-man-marries-robot-built-himself) artificial for
natural social feedback. Notice the plethora of nonthreatening female voices
(h ps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/why-do-so-many-digital-assistants-have-
feminine-names/475884/) at all? The promise of AI is the promise of countless artificial friends, voices that
will ‘understand’ your plight, your grievances, in some respects be er than you do yourself. The
problem, of course, is that they’re artificial, which is to say, not your friend at all.
Humans deceive and manipulate one another all the time, of course. And false AI friends don’t rule out
true AI defenders. But the former merely describes the ancestral environments shaping our basic
heuristic tool box. And the la er simply concedes the fundamental loss of those cognitive ecologies. The
more prosthetics we enlist, the more we complicate our ecology, the more mediated our determinations
become, the less efficacious our ancestral intuitions become. The more we will be told to trust to
gerrymandered stipulations.
Corporate simulacra are set to deluge our homes, each bent on cuing trust. We’ve already seen how the
hypersensitivity of intentional cognition renders us liable to hallucinate minds where none exist. The
environmental ubiquity of AI amounts to the environmental ubiquity of systems designed to exploit
granular sociocognitive systems tuned to solve humans. The AI revolution amounts to saturating human
cognitive ecology with invasive species, billions of evolutionarily unprecedented systems, all of them
camouflaged and carnivorous. It represents—obviously, I think—the single greatest cognitive ecological
challenge we have ever faced.
What does ‘human flourishing’ mean in such cognitive ecologies? What can it mean? Pinker doesn’t
know. Nobody does. He can only speculate in an age when the gobsmacking power of science has
revealed his guesswork for what it is. This was why Adorno referred to the possibility of knowing the
good as the ‘Messianic moment.’ Until that moment comes, until we find a form of rationality that
doesn’t collapse into instrumentalism, we have only toothless guesses, allowing the pointless
optimization of appetite to command all. It doesn’t ma er whether you call it the will to power or
identity thinking or negentropy or selfish genes or what have you, the process is blind and it lies entirely
outside good and evil. We’re just along for the ride.
Semantic Apocalypse
Human cognition is not ontologically distinct. Like all biological systems, it possesses its own ecology,
its own environmental conditions. And just as scientific progress has brought about the crash of
countless ecosystems across this planet, it is poised to precipitate the crash of our shared cognitive ecology
as well, the collapse of our ability to trust and believe, let alone to choose or take responsibility. Once
every suboptimal behaviour has an etiology, what then? Once everyone us has artificial friends, heaping
us with praise, priming our insecurities, doing everything they can to prevent non-commercial—
ancestral— engagements, what then?
‘Semantic apocalypse’ is the dramatic term I coined to capture this process in my 2008 novel, Neuropath.
Terminology aside, the crashing of ancestral (shallow information) cognitive ecologies is entirely of a
piece with the Anthropocene, yet one more way that science and technology are disrupting the biology
of our planet. This is a worst-case scenario, make no mistake. I’ll be damned if I see any way out of it.
Humans cognize themselves and one another via systems that take as much for granted as they possibly
can. This is a fact. Given this, it is not only possible, but exceedingly probable, that we would find
squaring our intuitive self-understanding with our scientific understanding impossible. Why should we
evolve the extravagant capacity to intuit our nature beyond the demands of ancestral life? The shallow
cognitive ecology arising out of those demands constitutes our baseline self-understanding, one that
bears the imprimatur of evolutionary contingency at every turn. There’s no replacing this system short
replacing our humanity.
Thus the ‘worst’ in ‘worst case scenario.’
There will be a great deal of hand-wringing in the years to come. Numberless intentionalists with
countless competing rationalizations will continue to apologize (and apologize) while the science trundles
on, crashing this bit of traditional self-understanding and that, continually eroding the pilings
supporting the whole. The pieties of humanism will be extolled and defended with increasing
desperation, whole societies will scramble, while hidden behind the endless assertions of autonomy,
beneath the thundering bleachers, our fundamentals will be laid bare and traded for lucre.
PUBLISHED: March 27, 2018 (2018-03-27T13:57:22+0000)Advertisements
FILED UNDER: LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS

TAGS: AI : Enlightenment : Intentionalism : neuroscience : Nihilism : Semantic Apocalypse
9 Comments to “Enlightenment How? Omens of the

Semantic Apocalypse”
Jeroen Admiraal says:

March 27, 2018 at 3:18 pm

So, basically the natural universe is at the mercy of an out-of-control process of reengineering reality
to cheat or pander to human cognition.
About free will.. I’ve been thinking about that and its connection with the idea of choice. It seems to
me that we have evolved into apes with ridiculously large brains, because large brains give us more
potential behaviors, or more ways the solve the environment, so that more options open up for us to
deal with our environment. Large brains give more perspective.
So it seems to me that nature itself shows that in its selection for large brains that opening up the
metaphysical space for making choices gives an evolutionary advantage. And that therefore a large
brain is proof from nature that such a thing as making choices exists. If so, does free will then also
exist? The two concepts are often confused. Or does a large brain simply generate more pathways for
potential deterministic processes, and is this a natural delineation of making choices? Could we then
augment our ability to make choices and so expand our intuitively felt free will?
REPLY
Michael Murden says:
March 27, 2018 at 3:35 pm
Are you suggesting that the evolution of large brains proves the existence of free will?
REPLY
Jeroen Admiraal says:
March 27, 2018 at 3:50 pm
No, I wouldn’t dare. But it might prove the existence of choice.
rsbakker says:
March 27, 2018 at 4:13 pm
This is basically Denne ’s argument in Freedom Evolves, where he advocates understanding free-
will in terms of evolved versatility. But the problem, again, isn’t that we can’t reinterpret our folk
idioms, only that we can’t do so in any decisive way, and so either end up with bald stipulation
or more interminable disputation–while our intuitions trip us up more and more. Denne (citing
Wegner) admits that our ‘intuitively felt free will’ is illusory, but he’s loathe to adduce the
problems arising out of this. So he would say that the discourse built around ‘choice talk’ can be
preserved (given his pragmatic rationalizations) while recognizing that our metacognitive
deliverances are fundamentally deceptive. This strikes me as a good way to keep philosophers
employed, but li le else.
REPLY
Michael Murden says:
March 27, 2018 at 3:52 pm
Bakkerian Jihad… From my comments on the previous post, I think soft totalitarianism makes a lot
of sense as a politics that pays lip service to but does not actually depend on the illusions of free will
and moral responsibility. Of course if there is hope it’s the hope that machine intelligence will create
sufficient wealth to eliminate the need for politics and morality, which are both ultimately ways to
allocate scarce resources. On the other hand greed has been such a successful evolutionary strategy
for so long that possibly no amount of wealth will be enough to seem like enough.
REPLY
John Robie says:
March 27, 2018 at 5:39 pm

The chimeric corporate machinery engineering all this has a fundamental problem – how to find and
recruit the small percentage of humans who can master the symbolic complexities needed to
implement the “program.” I think that’s why Zuckerberg offered to provide rural India with free
internet access. What be er way to discover and capture the genetic Jewels in the Crown than by
monitoring the activities of all those Indian villagers?
Point being, the “machine” isn’t just silicon. It requires the intellectual and creative efforts of a large
contingent of highly gifted, trained, educated and motivated humans. That’s not liable to change
anytime soon. It may be an Achilles heel. Not sure about that.
If you’ve ever toured a silicon fab house producing 14 nm AMD chips you’ll come away wondering
just how sustainable such a technology can be.
I suspect the gods of entropy will destroy this Golem and we’ll end up be er off that natural selection
has provided us with brains that exploit “shallow ecologies” – or more simply put, the challenges of
tribal life in natural environments. Cause that’s how we’ll be living after all this comes crashing
down.
REPLY
infinitographies says:
March 27, 2018 at 6:16 pm
First of all, great and very engaging post, as always. This series on Pinker has all of us hooked. Just
one idea that popped into my head.
“it is not only possible, but exceedingly probable, that we would find squaring our intuitive self-
understanding with our scientific understanding impossible.” Isn’t this what mathematics has been
doing at least since a hundred of years ago, maybe even earlier? Increasingly divorced from our
capacity to intuit what is going on? The very first bifurcation from intentional understanding? In a
word, hasn’t mathematics been the locus of crash space all along –– only that we didn’t realize? It
looks like the affiliation of AI, neuroscientific models, computation… with mathematical models
might be pointing this way. In any case, I’m just wondering what relation you think mathematics –
maybe even physics? – might have with crash space and its role in the semantic apocalypse.
REPLY
John Robie says:
March 27, 2018 at 6:36 pm
Damn that Pythagoras!
REPLY
rsbakker says:
March 27, 2018 at 9:50 pm
Thank you infinitographies. I see mathematics as an ‘arch-heuristic,’ a kind of quantitative
determinacy box, a way to purge ecology and so track systematicities ad infinitum. Perfect
prediction of absolutely unprecedented deliberation (explaining the ‘scandal of deduction’). This
second-order account, however, exemplifies the crash space intrinsic to our a empts to determine
the nature of mathematics via reflection. In this second order sense, it’s been a crash space since
Pythagoras. Is it this second order sense you have in mind?
REPLY
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3/28/2018 Enlightenment How?

Omens of the Semantic Apocalypse | Three Pound Brain

Three Pound Brain

No bells, just whistling in the dark…

Enlightenment How? Omens of the Semantic Apocalypse

Or the need to punish murderers…

Consider the way humans endure as much as need (h ps://www.chrc-

Thus the ‘worst’ in ‘worst case scenario.’

PUBLISHED: March 27, 2018 (2018-03-27T13:57:22+0000)Advertisements

FILED UNDER: LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS

9 Comments to “Enlightenment How? Omens of the

Jeroen Admiraal says:

March 27, 2018 at 3:18 pm

March 27, 2018 at 5:39 pm

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