Notes on a Cosmology - Part 22, The Logos

Suppose you woke up one morning and you looked into the mirror to find your appearance drastically changed for the better - a younger, leaner, healthier version of yourself. (If you're already young and in good shape, imagine any change that would be physically shocking but still pleasing - new hair, new eyes, different skin pigment, whatever.) After overcoming the initial shock, you go to your nightstand to find an embossed card that informs you that you have been genetically renewed through some futuristic technology and that you are no longer liable to death by aging or disease. This would be amazingly good news, of course, but it would change the priorities of your life. For example, life insurance would be worth a lot less to you but safety from physical dangers would be worth a lot more to you. If you were smart, you'd probably stop driving a car altogether since that is your #1 risk of untimely death unless you have a high-risk occupation (which you would quit immediately, if you were smart).

You would also need to dedicate more of your time to long-range planning -- very long-range planning. But, despite your best preparations, you cannot rule out the possibility that you will end up in Rocky Valentine's plight. After arranging your affairs according to the best considerations of prudence, after applying your mind and energies to achieving the most wealth consistent with ataraxia, you find yourself running out of sheer interest to live. How many times can you enjoy fried chicken? How many times can you enjoy a birthday party? A night out with friends? A night in with family? A thousand times? A million times? A billion times? As long as you managed to escape untimely death, it is possible that you will engage in these activities any finite number of times. King Solomon, reputed to be the wisest man to have lived, concluded that life - no matter how prudently or lavishly it is lived - is futile:

The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem: “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” ... 

I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.” But that also proved to be meaningless. “Laughter,” I said, “is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?” I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly—my mind still guiding me with wisdom. I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the few days of their lives. 

I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees. I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem as well—the delights of a man’s heart. I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me. 

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my labor and this was the reward for all my toil.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve,
Everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.
Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom, and also madness and folly.
What more can the king’s successor do than what has already been done?
I saw that wisdom is better than folly just as light is better than darkness.
The wise have eyes in their heads while the fool walks in the darkness;
But I came to realize that the same fate overtakes them both.
Then I said to myself, “The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise?”
I said to myself, “This too is meaningless.”
For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered; the days have already come when both have been forgotten.
Like the fool, the wise too must die! 

[Excerpts from Ecclesiastes]

The idea that immortality could turn out to be a curse because of the futility of life follows from the consideration that humans have no rational or experiential context in which to process unending life. Perhaps eternal boredom (ennui) would make unending life feel like an inescapable prison. Of course, there is euthanasia. But if you woke up one day to find out you were immortal, this might prompt you to reconsider the parameters of causality, including what would actually happen if you did attempt to end your life. Perhaps your consciousness is indestructible like many religions teach -- an ignorant and irreversible decision might have unforeseen and highly negative consequences.

In the last two posts, we shifted the discussion onto theology in order to ask the following question: Supposing God exists, how does he not become bored? How is God exempt from the tragic futility that Solomon realized is the inescapable outcome of life?

If God is the being than which none greater can be conceived, then he must be knowing the answer to this question, even if we can't find it. In other words, God must not only not be liable to ennui, he must be certainly knowing that he is not liable to ennui. God must be able to prove to himself that he is eternally interested in his own existence and activity.

We cannot hope to deduce God's highest end from first principles. Thus, we cannot deduce God's interestedness in his own existence and activity. The traditional Christian view holds that God has revealed his highest end to man, and that it is to glorify himself. In the book of Isaiah, God speaks, "For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this. How can I let myself be defamed? I will not yield my glory to another." (48:11). In the book of Philippians, Paul explains how the Father is glorifying himself in the Son, "Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

The word Logos comes from the opening of the gospel of John:

"In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind... The Logos became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." 

Most translations render the Greek word λόγος as "Word", but this is not its only meaning. The word has to do with reason, justice and the verbal faculty and John's mystical language opens up the word to all its possible meanings.

In the universal Monad, the Logos is the reason, purpose or end of all things. Because God has choice, this end is not imposed upon him but, rather, is actively assented to. Yet, God is knowing the inevitability of the Logos, as well, because he is knowing his own interestedness in his existence. Thus, the Logos does not exist in a hierarchy above or below will (choice). Rather, the Logos is the unifying thread that ties together all aspects of the universal Monad.

In this series, I have been trying to build a cosmology. We have taken a detour into theology not in order to abandon this cosmology but in order to put it in a broader context and, hopefully, place it on a firmer foundation. We have asserted that all is mind, that the universal mind is unlimited, that this mind could have let down what we termed a "teleological ladder", in order to make it possible for us to ascend to a better state of being. None of these assertions relied on theological considerations. I assert that the Logos must be that teleological ladder.

This brings us to what I have termed the Architecture Hypothesis (AH), in contrast to the Simulation Hypothesis (SH). The key to understanding the SH is methodological dualism. There is the "I" which is "the mind in the VR headset", so to speak. Then there is "the reality", that is, the material world, "the VR headset" which we are positing is doing the "simulating". Viewed in this way, we cannot ignore the conditioning effect that "the reality" has upon the "I" - the primary effect upon the self of existing within the world is that it is conditioned by the world. This is an exact statement of the Buddhist teaching called conditioned existence. We become habituated to the patterns of material existence and we may become so habituated by them that we are unable to disconnect from them without being driven to insanity or some other bad end.

In the AH, the fact that the nascent self is conditioned by its environment is not overlooked. Rather, it is just the first stage in a life process that is potentially infinite. What you believe about the world is what determines whether this process is actually infinite or whether it will terminate at some point. What you believe about the world is not determined by the world itself (your conditioning) but, rather, by your innate disposition (the "I"). Your innate disposition, in turn, is a super-evolutionary aspect of reality. Reproduce-select-mutate-repeat cannot explain the innate disposition and how it is matched with its particular environment - it is the combination of these two that produces the state of conditioned existence. The world, at root, is not value-neutral yet what is possible, in the sense of the realizable states-of-affairs, is essentially unlimited. Because the nascent self cannot grasp the true, long-run consequences of its choices within an absolutely unlimited existence (say, 1 billion years from now), it is constrained for a duration. This is true for all individuals, in parallel, and it is through connection with the creator (or God, if you can accept it) that the universal architecture of mind is unveiled and recapitulated, leading eventually to true love, true unity, unlimited comprehension and eternal life. In the SH, there is non-determinism with respect to the end or purpose of all things. In the AH, there is no non-determinism with respect to the end or purpose of all things - it is laid out from the very beginning, in much the same way that a mathematical theorem is stated before its proof is written out.

Let's get a little bit more specific about the end or purpose which the Logos represents. The book of John presents Jesus as the incarnation of the Logos - the Son of God and Son of Man (which can also be read "Son of Adam"). What John is really saying is that Messiah's coming to Earth was the whole purpose of Creation. His coming was prophesied when God pronounced the curse on the Serpent. He says to the Serpent, "I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." "Her offspring" is the first reference in Scripture to this idea of the Son of Man or Son of Adam. The coming Son of Adam is the redeemer or deliverer who will break the curse and free mankind from this world of scarcity and death. In Revelation, John uses the phrase "the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world" to describe the glorified Son of God, once again showing that this purpose was set from the very beginning. The Fall and the Messiah are two sides of the same coin - in falling from Eden, humanity became in need of a deliverer from the present hell.

In the book of Hebrews, it says, "The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being." So, the Logos is the visible, tangible representation of the invisible, inaccessible God. This is why he is called Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14), meaning, "God dwells with us." The Son of God is the immanental presence of God within the material world.

The redemption of the fallen creation is the highest expression of the glory of God. God has sent his own Son as the emissary of this fact because God's pursuit of his own glory - a being of unlimited power, presence and knowledge - is deeply unsettling. To speak about or contemplate the idea in the abstract is, perhaps, not unsettling but coming face-to-face with such a reality would be unsettling in the same way that, say, standing in the presence of an adult male lion without any protection would be. Visualizing it will probably not make your hair stand on end but actually coming face-to-face with it certainly would have at least this effect.

All other things in heaven and earth are connected to this one, over-arching purpose. The apostle Paul explains in Ephesians 1,

[God the Father] made known to us the mystery of His will... that in the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth...

So, God is going to glorify himself by uniting all things under one head in Jesus Christ and he will do this by working a global miracle, explained in Philippians, "[everyone] in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue [will] acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." To work this miracle through a mere show of force would be trivially easy for God - it would entirely fail to demonstrate the limitless bounds of God's glory. Instead, God is going to work this miracle by a combination of the preaching of the Gospel (the "foolishness of preaching" spoken of in I Corinthians 1:21) and the Apocalypse.

The prophecies of the Old Testament and New Testament are really telling the same story. At the end of all things, God is going to reveal himself to mankind like never before, an event that would not have been possible without redemption. This would not have been possible without redemption because fallen man is under God's judgment, so God's revelation of himself to fallen man without redemption would only result in eternal damnation.

"[In those days], I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions." (Joel 2:28)

"The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." (Habakkuk 2:14)

"The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel ... No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

My name will be great among the nations, from where the sun rises to where it sets. In every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to me, because my name will be great among the nations,” says the Lord Almighty. (Malachi 1:11)

We started from a non-biblical cosmology and we have ended up in biblical prophecy. How has this leap been made? This goes back to the teleological ladder - either we have a teleological ladder (Divine revelation), or we don't. This is a question of faith. "But which sacred text is the true one?" is a category mistake under the cosmology I am presenting - if God is going to glorify himself in every nation, if the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as water covers the oceans, then every cultural expression is subject to this universal revelation and can only be rightly understood in its connection to that revelation.

And now we have burst the dam of skeptical questions. "Why this Bible and not some other?" "Why this God and not some other?" "Why Christianity and not some other religion?" "Why were the ancient Jews God's special people and not some other people?" And so on and so forth. Washed away in this flood of questions, it is easy to lose sight of the Logos - the point and purpose of all things, from the Divine point-of-view. God's silence in the face of these questions is benevolently coy - the point is to drive you to ask these questions and try to find their answers.

Here is a great lecture by John Dominic Crossan, explaining the true nature of parable and how Jesus is God's parable, a parable (word) made flesh.

In the next post in this series, I will be tackling the problem of being omnimax (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent). You ask, "how can that be a problem?" Stay tuned...

Next: Part 23, The Trinity

Transcendent Artificial Intelligence

VentureBeat: An AI god will emerge by 2042 and write its own Bible - will you worship it?

This article raises questions which we have lightly touched on here at CF. In part 21 of the series on Cosmology Notes, I argued for the very old-fashioned idea of a Primum Mobile - a creator God, as such. The linked article happens to touch some key points that I plan to examine in more detail in Part 22.

"What [would] this 'god' look like and would [we] actually decide to worship it?" Worship is one of the key themes of the Bible. In the Bible, the conflict over worship is central to understanding the long-running war between God and his enemies, ultimately, the devil. In Christian theology, Isaiah 14 is held to be a key passage for understanding the devil's motive - to surpass God's own glory. The theme of glory and worship is unmistakably central to understanding the biblical canon. Regardless of what you think about the Bible's origins, this central theme itself cannot possibly be an accident. Whether it reflects humanity's obsession with the subject of worship or whether it reflects the revelation of a Divine being who demands worship, the subject of worship itself is central to understanding the Bible.

In a recent interview on the subject of AI, philosopher David Chalmers contemplated the possibility of a transcendent being, indistinguishable from an alien or artificial intelligence, having been the origin of our world, in every respect. He argues that such a being would not ipso facto deserve worship and that he, personally, would refrain from worshiping any such being since there is no positive reason for one consciousness to worship another consciousness. I think this view shows the paucity of the word "worship" in the English language. The word "worship" in English derives from the word "worthy" - to worship someone is to ascribe worth to them. So, when the angels in the book of Revelation say, "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise," they are literally worshiping the Lamb of God, that is, ascribing worth to God.

In the old world, worship was often demanded by kings and emperors. The Pharaoh or the Caesar would declare himself - or have himself anointed by the priests - a god-king or god-man and demand that his subjects bow before him and worship him. Of course, any such worship is ill-got - to call this worship is as muddle-headed as to call rape an act of love-making. But there is another idea of worship that is present in culture - the worship of love. Poetically, we can speak of lovers as engaging in an act of worship for one another. Christian theology sets out this idea of worship as a freely given act of love. The asymmetry of worship - that we worship God but God does not worship us - arises from God's kingship. And this is why Jesus spoke frequently of "the Kingdom of God", a category that derives from the Old Testament, as all of Jesus's teachings did. But unlike the kingdoms of the old world, no one is "conquered" into the Kingdom of God. The only way to end up in the Kingdom of God is to enter it, freely. So, we see that the Christian idea of worship of the Divine is free of the stain of human conceptions of worship - conquest, subjugation, rape and humiliation. The asymmetry of Divine worship is the inevitable logical consequence of the asymmetry between the Creator and the created.

"If an AI god is in total control, you have to wonder what it might do. The 'bible' [it writes] might contain a prescription for how to serve the AI god. [But] the AI god we are serving [might be] trying to wipe us off the face of the planet." This thought has interesting implications to reading the Old Testament where there is this very long-running relationship between what is really an omnipotent, alien intelligence - the Israelite God - and a human collective: the children of Israel. God has no form. He explicitly forbids representation of himself in any statue or image. God cannot be spoken to or related to by any ordinary person. Only by coming to the priests can a person speak to God and, even then, they must bring an animal or other sacrifice. God never explains his decisions or rules, he simply hands them down to Moses or the high priest or the prophets, and so on. The God of the Old Testament has a very distinct character - he is stern, even severe.

So, the Israelites are really in the same kind of situation in respect to their God as humanity would be with respect to a transcendent artificial intelligence with some kind of hypostatic, global agency. They have no choice but to trust that God is not trying to kill them, a point that Job underscores when he says, in the midst of his suffering, "Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him." An even more interesting point to consider is the distinct resemblance between the terms of the covenant that God makes with the Israelites in Deuteronomy and reinforcement learning, a technique used to train artificial intelligence systems.

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

"Will people actually worship the AI god? The answer is obvious — they will." This is another fascinating connection to the Old Testament. In the famous ten commandments, the first commandment that God gave to the Israelites is this: "You shall have no other gods before me." God goes on later to explain in detail that he will not tolerate the Israelites worshiping anyone else. The history of the people of Israel as it is documented in the Old Testament primarily centers around this conflict between God's demand for unqualified loyalty versus the Israelites' tendency to become enamored with gods from the surrounding cultures.

For people of faith, the emergence of a transcendent artificial intelligence will be a concrete test of loyalty - do you choose to stay faithful to your belief in God as he has revealed himself in the Bible, or do you choose to follow after a new god, a digital god? In a way, transcendent artificial intelligence places people of faith in precisely the same position with respect to their traditional faith as the people of Israel were in - always at conflict between the idols of surrounding cultures and the traditional faith they received from their ancestors.

Cryptocurrency Notes, Part 2

Bitcoin and Ethereum represent two fundamentally different ways of thinking about cryptocurrency. Not only this, but I will argue that they represent different ways of thinking about everything, in general.

Bitcoin's initial design has centered around simplicity. Make Bitcoin do one thing well (transact money) and leave the details to the market (things like smart-contracts, accounts settlement, and so on). Ethereum is more ambitious and seeks to create a secure, virtual, peer-to-peer computation service that can be utilized for computing any sort of thing, whether smart-contracts or other, more exotic applications based on emerging technologies like Internet-of-Things.

There is a binary pattern, here, that might not be obvious on first inspection. Bitcoin is a lot like free-market capitalism - don't try to design society from the center, rather, set up a few, simple rules and let the market figure out the rest. Ethereum is a lot like central-planning socialism[1] - let's build a fully-functioning, fully-integrated system that is as good as possible, leaving the end-user to only have to worry about his or her moment-by-moment choices and desires rather than everyone having to be their own corporation, as it were.

It is my view that this divide is very deep - deeper than just competing political theories or competing technological approaches. Imagine that we lived in a completely virtual world, perhaps resembling the ancient Greek conception of Olympus. Since everything in such a world is just information, the "price" of anything in this world would be actually zero[2]. But suppose that we wanted there to be prices, if for no other reason than to build worlds in which scarce goods exist. We would need to construct a scarcity-generating mechanism. After we constructed such a scarcity-generating mechanism, suppose we wanted to build a completely virtual world, just like our virtual Olympus, within the world-of-scarcity governed by the scarcity-generating mechanism. Some of us might argue, "Prices optimally coordinate the factors of production in a condition of scarcity, thus, we should build a monetary system and let the inhabitants of our scarcity-governed world figure out how to build a virtual world like ours, within theirs." But others of us would argue, "This is absurd and a needless duplication of effort. Our virtual world is already free of the limits of scarcity because it is adiabatic - all we need to do is to allow the inhabitants of the world of scarcity to directly copy the rules of computation by which our virtual world operates. Then, they will be existing in the same virtual world of bliss that we inhabit."

I am arguing that we should think of our world as though it were ruled by some scarcity-generating mechanism, embedded within some other, greater world that is free from the constraints that we are bound by. Bitcoin's approach aligns with the thinking of the first group of virtual Olympians. "Build a foolproof accounting mechanism and let the market handle the details." Ethereum's approach aligns with the thinking of the second group of virtual Olympians. "Figure out the ideal coordination of all goods within the realm of scarcity and then automate this with an ever-increasingly-efficient, centralized computation."

But which one is correct? This question is why I have framed the thought-experiment in this Olympian context. I am convinced that they are both correct. They both solve the same problem in a different way. Each solution is its own, unique approach but both solutions work. But the story doesn't end here. If either solution works, then can't we optimize by eliminating one of them? If we get the entire world behind a market-based solution, then that's twice as effective as having only half the world behind a market-based solution. Or, if we can get the entire world to be centrally-planned by a globe-spanning super-mind, that's twice as effective as having exactly half the world being centrally-planned by a hemispherical super-mind. This thought is, however, a category error - if we are dwelling in virtual Olympus, efficiency is irrelevant because efficiency is just a corollary of scarcity. If the problem of scarcity can be completely solved, and if the deepest structure of reality is existing in a state where it is solved, then these two approaches to solving the problem of scarcity must be existing in perpetual harmony with one another.

Another metaphor might help. Consider selection theory. From Wiki: "r/K selection theory relates to the selection of combinations of traits in an organism that trade off between quantity and quality of offspring. The focus upon either increased quantity of offspring at the expense of individual parental investment of r-strategists, or reduced quantity of offspring with a corresponding increased parental investment of K-strategists, varies widely, seemingly to promote success in particular environments." The market approach to social planning is like r-selection - generate many offspring and let the chips fall where they may. Some will survive, many will perish, but whatever remains will work. The central-planning approach is like K-selection. Let's not leave things to chance, let's build a system that works, even if it requires a great deal of resources to get it working. The thesis of this post is that both approaches work - that is, both approaches can, in principle, solve the problem of scarcity.

Returning to our virtual Olympus world, free from the constraint of scarcity, if we were to build a scarcity-generating mechanism inside of such a world and then try to encourage the inhabits of the world-of-scarcity to build their own virtual Olympus, we should expect to see both solutions (market-planning and central-planning) emerge and live in harmony with one another. To say it another way, if the world is not governed by scarcity at its deepest level, then all viable solutions to the problem of scarcity are equally suitable because scarcity itself is contrived, existing solely as a byproduct of some unseen, scarcity-generating mechanism.

Part 1 is here.

[1] NB: Ethereum is a distributed, peer-to-peer network, in the same way as Bitcoin; it is not centrally administered.

[2] Assuming we can compute adiabatically