Second Coming <--> Positive Singularity <--> Steel-UpTrust? pt 1.
Note: Originally written for the participants of the AI alignment X spirituality/metaphysics retreats I’ve co-hosted with Jordan and Anna Salamon, so there may be some references to ideas or people you don’t know.
Civilization is missing a coherent positive vision for the future
I think we’re missing a coherent positive vision for the future that we can all agree is good, and collectively build toward. On the flip side, we’ve got many coherent negative visions for the future that we’re trying to avert, and, in the course of doing so, indirectly bringing them about.
I think this is true both in how people are reasoning about superintelligent AGI (see, for example, the many “aligned AGI” companies that are confident they are avoiding the mistakes made by the other “aligned AGI” companies, while all lacking a coherent positive vision for ending the AGI arms race, thereby collectively accelerating the arms race), and in how the power elite are reasoning about the future of civilization (e.g. China and the US both don’t want war, but lack a coherent vision of a world in which they coexist peacefully, and also don’t want futures in which either one is overtaken by the other, leading to mutual escalation).
Daniel Schmachtenberger has an articulation of this civilizational state of affairs that I find very compelling, summarized below:
In the vacuum of what Daniel sees as a failure of our institutions to manage global existential risk, he sees two attractors — two states that we're naturally gravitating towards. Those two attractors are: oppression and chaos. Oppression is characterized by China's model of digital authoritarianism, where the state uses its power to limit the freedom of citizens, while chaos is characterized by regulatory failure in the West, where the state often fails to be an effective check on the market.
Daniel argues that we need a third attractor — a force that can manage global existential risk without devolving into oppression or chaos. He makes the case that this third attractor must be the people, comprehensively educated and enabled by humane technology. Ultimately, Daniel is calling for a new cultural Enlightenment, that has the emergent wisdom to manage global existential risk and realize a more protopic world.
Common knowledge of the compatibility of human values as a bottleneck for a coherent positive vision of the future
It is commonly believed that some groups of people simply have irreconcilable values. For example, America seems to value individualism at the expense of collective order, and China seems to value collective order at the expense of individualism.
It is also commonly believed that the question “What is it that humans ultimately value?” is an intractable open question that’s remained unsolved for millennia, and that we’re unlikely to make much progress on in the next few decades.
In light of the above, it’s unsurprising that it’s hard to formulate a coherent positive vision of the future that’s broadly appealing! The reason I’m optimistic is because of a contrarian belief I hold – the question of what humans ultimately value has largely been answered, and that every time it gets answered, it gets called a religion or a spiritual tradition. I think there is an essence shared by all world religions, commonly referred to as the perennial philosophy, and that the different world religions are different expressions of this essence tailored to the time and cultures in which they arose. (In the context of this document, when I say “world religion”, I am referring to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, and Taoism.)
I can summarize one aspect of this essence very simply:
Living as though The Egg by Andy Weir (in which there is one soul that incarnates as every human) is true is in your selfish best interests, when you're not immersed in psychological distortions (like trauma, or cultural conditioning) that lead you to be confused about what you value
Equivalently, live as though you're going to experience a near-death experience life review when you die (in which your psychological distortions get lifted, leading you to re-experience your life in extreme detail, not just from your perspective but also from everyone else’s perspectives, such that you viscerally feel all the harm and benefit done to others)
Hillel the Elder, a prominent Jewish scholar, once said: "That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole of the Torah; the rest is commentary. Go forth and study." When Jesus was asked which commandment in the law is greatest, he replied: "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
It seems worth noting that what Schmachtenberger calls the chaos attractor is one in which individualism succeeds at the expense of collective order, and what he calls the oppression attractor is one in which collective order succeeds at the expense of individualism. The essence shared by all world religions implies that there’s no intrinsic conflict between individualism and collective order, and I think it’s this synthesis of individualism and collective order that underlies what Schmachtenberger calls the third attractor.
Link to part 2: https://uptrusting.com/post/KPLe6Q
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