philosophical cadence rhymes with investment themes but only in 3D
Combining Nietzsche and Heidegger with Cobb-Douglas
Intro Part 1: Quantification
How humans interact with the world creates the world. This is not a claim on anthropogenic climate change but it has a familiar tone that the virtual world of data is largely anthropogenic and anthropocentric. But perhaps soon, this may be no longer to be the case and that’s an okay thing but it can be very disquieting for many people. As more data is gathered by silicon-based structures, they are subsequently sorted and stored in silicon-based structures and often fetched by humans to carry out tasks. Today, increasingly, AI-automation can close the loop by not only querying and performing tasks but also cogitate, design and marry difficult concepts to simulate and explore new patterns of behavior which feeds-back into meaning.
Losing the crown of anthropogenic data supremacy will be a deep blow to humanity’s honorific nature that prioritizes credentials and planned hierarchy. However, it’s not going to be dramatic and traumatic as losing data-anthropocentrism. But that, in-itself, can also be a good thing and not as self-flagellating as depicted from a cultural war narrative. Yes, there will be elites and elites exist-to-dominate and elites will have access to super-power AI information tools to exert power and control on mere mortals. But they always have had that on a relative basis. It’s important to remember that similarly which is the case that elites exist-to-dominate, the plebs exist-to-serve. By crafting and re-shaping techno-optimism in this light, there’s a narrow window of ethical opportunity to bridge AI supremacy as a substitution of ideology and crafting a equitable and efficient outcome of humanity of hyper-abundance. But that also teeters on the edge between twin apocalypse: environmental, and zoo-simulation (we think we are in control but we are not").
I’m trying to be radical at synthesizing philosophy and economics in this analysis and I will use utility functions loosely to represent how ideologies affect efficient frontiers’ shapes/characteristics and morphology. This is all in the spirit of condensing heterogeneous insights into combat with one another in the same arena. In every arena, there are different rules and its up to the simulation to describe the event but it still requires an authorship of case study to tell an information-rich narrative to mold and fold neural patterns in a way that enhance creativity, nuance, self-reflection and sustainable betterment.
Intro Part 2: Qualification
The market is made up of different actors. You have your investors behind the curtains greedily tallying attendance, management on the pedestal gleaming in the light, towers of middlemen and vendors cheering and applauding the show, layers of employees wining and dining with customers or mopping up code, and finally another rendition of your show-of-the-week on Netflix.
It’s easy to feel like this daily charade is a bit meaningless. Most of us are just sitting at the cheap seats, sitting comfortably in body but in complete dis-repair in mind and soul. At what point is it wrong to calcify the breath-of-life’s energy as a class-struggle or another endlessly enthralling culture war?
The themes of this virtual theater punctuate our religious worship of materialism and abundance. This alludes back to the hierarchy described earlier in investors-management-employees-customer/code. In a world of 2%+ fed funds rate, this is the default pecking order where the will-to-be-done is Gatsbyism at its core. You have flawed humanity rise to the occasion of material ascent but that 1:1 spiritual rate no longer holds. This was what brought the age of Enlightenment to an end and sparked Romanticism in Europe. History created Kant from that ordeal because morality needed a software update. The transformation of a scarcity mindset to an abundance one gives rise to a new form of social conflict with environmentalism and sustainability expropriating the value of uninhabited future lives. Unlike the ancients, where scarcity dictated a simple model and a monotonic utility function of the present, our modern mindset is “at-scale” mature and steady state polytonic, wavy, cyclical, volatile, whatever you call it; its R0 is 3.0 creeping its way to 4.0.
Geophysics planetary analogy of rare local stability: a kink on the ceiling
Geophysics has this theory that Earth had once a fully molten core but after being consolidated and heavily pressurized by gravity, the pressures overcame melting temperatures solidifying an iron-inner core. It is this spin of ferro-magnetic metal that gives Earth a geomagnetic shield from solarwinds that grant this planet a semi-stable atmosphere of land-water-air temperature controlled “goldi-locks” zone.
Modernity and abundance are the molten and solid iron core in this analogy. Too much conversion into iron, and you end up with calcification of spin and your electromagnetic dynamo grinds to a halt. It’s useful to think that the molten outer core and mantle serves as lubricants that make a planet sustainably hold onto this very unlikely to occur planetary phenomenon. Despite all of the analysis of Mars, its lack of this self-contained geomagnetic sphere is what makes it particularly difficult to create human civilization up there because of a long-term permanent run-cost to simulate pseudo-earth-like conditions.
Going back in time where people were simpler and de-materialized at their core, the dual extremes of deeply reverential patterns to tradition were balanced by spiritual humility to the unknown and unknowable. There was this pre-enlightenment sentiment that piety, virtue and technical abilities were the ping-pong of inspiration and craft. Philosophy, particularly the modern and post-modern kind, reflects on this new pivot point that the Newtonian relationship broke and the uncharted territory is a frightening unconquerable deep dark wood masked with words like extinction, war, and replacement through AI. Nietzsche was brilliant not for his simple criticism of how things were meaningless. That was just the click-bait. He was wise by elevating the discussion much deeper by signaling that all of meaning ultimately boils down to ideology and the question is directed not in the sense of what is good vs. bad (beyond good and evil) but whether they are your own authentically or mimicried from others and nature.
This is an endless loop and the geo-meta-physical world we inhabit today. It’s one part stable, for the safety and abundance that it provides, but it’s also two parts unsettling, post-truth and apocalyptic. Have we already designed our paper-clip maximizer 7 decades ago mimicried 3 generations deep by social economy experts' technocratic and sincere GDP? Or is there a hidden techno-optimism to be gained from reconciling materialism with the elements of inclusive co-creation of self-inspiring individuals. How do we amplify the breath of life and overcome alienation and self-alienation?
Heidegger’s mistakened pessimism and a phenomenological mode of discovery “being-unto-death”
Heidegger’s being-unto-death is often depicted at first glance to be morbid and extreme. When continental european philosophers use jargon like the words being-unto-”x” they refer to a context-isolated experience of x and therefore you can examine subject and object relationships in the purest senses of rationality and sensibilities. When x is self, for instance, you can extrapolate vanity from that kind of discovery mode. Being-unto-death is often seen as confronting with your own mortality. Frightening to some, and a whole host of moral theories owe their inceptions at prohibiting murder of the wanton violence type. But the Heideggerian’s take on being-unto-death has a style to it with a pre-programmed back-catalogued data rationally informed by Nietzsche’s revelation of automated nihilistic descent. Namely, you are most truthful to yourself when you are confronted with your own mortality.
“Why are their beings at all instead of nothing”
- Martin Heidegger
In few words mostly of capturing the sensibilities, the heart of life is death because it’s the drive and dynamo towards death and permanent stagnation of non-meaning that gives life and meaning entropic uncertainties and probabilities to work with.
It’s a deeply dualistic form of introspection but most notably, it’s one that is and has been a deeply respected category of “elite” thought like Schumpeter’s creative destruction cycles of capitalism. In many ways, AI and machine learning plays to this principle in the most ruthless of terms. Every model that is created, it is risked into creation and cycled out to destruction, “not even to recycling” because it was statistically invalid and one out of hundreds of billions of models.
The excellence perceived in AI also comes from the dualistic practice of the opposite nature which is failure, experimentation and death of ideation. Contrastingly, the failure or dumbness of AI also may come from pompous human-dictation and supervision over-reach that plagues AI research with ethical quandries occupying talent and bandwidth. This isn’t to downplay the risks of AI apocalypse by any means. But it is not useful and absurd to think that the atom bomb could have been prevented if only we converted half our scientists to philosophers at the start of the war.
To the point of the discussion about utility function and the perceived pessimism, Heidegger’s contribution of being-unto-death phenomenological framework sets a new term for “how humans interact with the world determining the world” in a way that places life-and-death at the center of the extrapolated Turing Test for AI.
To be continued but here’s a sneak peak of what’s to come while i munch on some chips and listen to lofi while experimenting with chatGPT
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one of the most important conclusions I’ve made from my playground with this tool is that there is a deeply humanistic component to this AI beneath the surface.
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