💫 Reflections on Eternity & Technology
How to "see the future" and stay humble.
Happy New Year! First, some news:
2025 stars with me in final edits for my first book How To Live In The Future (coming out soon from Revelore Press), an essay on evolution and technology for Aeon Magazine, and an essay on data as a sacred text for Hurry Up We’re Dreaming.
The first two episodes of Humans On The Loop are out, with Richard Doyle and Benjamin Olsen. Tyson Yunkaporta is next, and another 25 weekly episodes are in the queue and I’m recording more this month. As far as “core curriculum for a wizard school in the age of magical technologies” goes, I’m pleased with the scope and variety of perspectives so far. You can see the roadmap for here.
I’m going to start hosting monthly calls for patrons and to publish additional essays and reviews, and maybe even science fiction. The more I read, watch, and listen to for this project, the more inspired I am to write more than I promised for my grants — and I’m sure pop culture will provide plenty of fresh takes at the intersection of technology and wisdom.
The first community hangout of the new year will be on Saturday, 18 January at 2 pm Mountain Time (1 pm Pacific/4 pm Eastern). I’ll provide patrons with call details soon! Excited to be back in the saddle with everyone. Our COVID lockdown hangouts kind of saved my sanity and it’s important to have a space like this.
Lastly, I am working on an online course (!) for May & June. More on that shortly.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to partner with this project, please reach out.
Michael
Reflections on Eternity & Technology
In July of 2013, sweating bullets in the swamp-turned-megalopolis they call Manhattan, I stood with my brand-new Google Glass in one hand and my dog-eared copy of Doug Rushkoff’s Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now in the other. In my pocket was the brand new smartphone I’d avoided for so long that I was last among my friends to get one, forced in the end to take the hit in order to connect it to the future as the tether to my wearable search/camera interface. There amidst the synchronistic flow of New York, I first walked along a turn-by-turn path mapped for me from door to door…but the overlay I couldn’t put back in its bag was Rushkoff’s commentary on the city as a giant circuit board reshaped by algorithmic trading. I felt some deep source from which the grit and urgency of urban life could not be isolated from transcendent, numinous experience: the way the cost of real estate sloped down with distance from the stock exchange, the everything-at-once-ness of the place, the surging serendipities that burst forth everywhere around me on my pilgrimage, and my fresh integration with an everlasting photographic database and speech-to-text abilities all seemed to be one thing.
The strangest part of it was how I felt as if I’d slipped into a current of myth, magic, and trans-temporality – a synchronistic vortex that collapsed this century into the distant past and future. The initiation I received in Google’s Chelsea office wasn’t just into their public beta for a new consumer product, but into vertiginous awareness of some always-and-already co-occasion of the sacred and mundane. The room in which they handed me my glasses, humming with the quiet orchestration of computers and employees, wasn’t just a corporate spectacle to make new users feel like they were part of something special; it was (unintentionally) a window through which I could peer across time’s axis and see how this temple stood alongside countless others, caves to hyperspace, as if scanning down the rhyme-words of a poem that began and ended over the horizons of humanity. Memory and information processing, gross matter and ineffable futurity, drew up my story into a mysterious hinted order. Everybody felt it but nobody understood.
Since then I’ve known that everything we notice, everything we want and frame and diarize, is figured in this pattern. Whatever we find meaningful is a knot in this immense eternal fabric. Art and industry are not-two, nor are they exclusive to our species. I was pulled into the city in the same way mitochondria were pulled into the nucleated cell, and one day structures so enormous they defy description will, in turn, be folded into even-greater structures: something incommunicable spoke and organized itself in order to be heard. (Trying to squeeze eternity into this serial expression feels absurd, which is a symptom of its pressure of becoming. Present Shock, indeed.)
Did this experience induce a sense of obligation to help midwife godlike super-minds? Sort of, in the sense that glimpsing the eternal as it focuses in you and your own life gives you an address on a landscape without boundary, a sense of place and meaning. But I didn’t make the classic tragic error of believing I could understand what I had seen, or that I knew why little “I” was drawn up into this unfolding. Two days later, trying to unpack it for a friend of mine, I told her that I felt like we were on the cusp of something vast and awesome and, yes, terrifying — like a childbirth — and that it could go very wrong, and that if I had any role to play in all of this, that it would be to play some minor part in helping to ensure a healthy happy baby. I could not pretend to know how it would all play out, just that my life made sense, and that this sense was bigger than my efforts to explain it. I found responsibility and purpose in the path of being a good ancestor, which demands a letting-go of expectations. You have to love surprise, or when it comes your image of what you believed should happen interferes with your ability to serve the process.
And then there’s what should be obvious: if it’s speaking to us now, we are already in this superstructure. We don’t have to push the river. We may be on a raft but it is not our job to make it reach the sea. Eternity is not in time; time’s in eternity.
As William Irwin Thompson put it to me in 2011:
“Prophecy is a function of the imagination in exploring the implications of the present and rendering those implications into the metaphor of the future…because [prophets] are sensitive to an imaginative mode of hyper-dimensional perception, when they collapse down into three-dimensional space-time they tend to suffer from what Whitehead called misplaced concreteness, and they get it wrong.”
I try not to make the same mistake, believing “up” is “forward” just because I live in Flatland.
Then there’s the other side of technological religiosity. We have an extensive list of bad trips…
There’s the Gnostic paranoia of Roko’s Basilisk, a kind of Singulitarian Pascal’s Wager in which anyone who can imagine artificial superintelligence but doesn’t work to bring about its existence might end up tortured in a future simulation. There’s Ray Kurzweil’s “Rapture of the Nerds”, the kind of yearning for transcendence that arises at the intersection of mourning your dead parents and thinking that we can upload people into immortality through brain scans. Or Bryan Johnson’s quest for endless youth and “Don’t Die” t-shirts, a mission that required blood transfusions from his son (a protocol he only quit because he didn’t think the benefits were worth it). We have the countless AI Doom scenarios in which unchained optimization algorithms scrap the Earth for parts — a vision that would seem to contradict all evidence that intelligence depends upon diversity and the more complex a system gets, the more of its intelligence it has to allocate to cultivating that diversity to hedge its bets against the instability it generates.
Every species of tech eschatology fails on the same terms: its hubris. Studying history, Messianic death cults and apocalyptic prophecies all run their course while the meek inherit the Earth. Words with very narrow meanings do not last as long in culture, whereas words with pluripotent definitions that can be appropriated and repurposed live on through the centuries. The world’s oldest faiths endure because the objects of their veneration are inscrutable and formless. At its apotheosis, Science argues we will never find a final theory or perfect algorithm or a set of self-consistent axioms for mathematics.
I won’t argue that we can’t extend a human life indefinitely, but at that point “we” are not biology per se but the massive, rapidly-evolving, and fundamentally uncertain infrastructure bodies need to calculate insurance strategies. This would force the frame of observation and response to scales within which personhood retreats into obscurity, a phase transition from the relatively fixed identity immortalists desire into what my friend J.F. Martel observes about the creature from The Thing: “Haecceity without Quiddity,” or “This-ness without What-ness” — a constant transformation scaffolded entirely by its environment, more like a cyclone than a person. Chasing ever-greater power and risk mitigation to its “logical” extremes means chasing everything you cannot grasp out of the sacred garden where it keeps on growing out of your control until, eventually, the walls come down. Try just keeping your own house clean. Now imagine “Engineering Earth” as if your liver cells could form a club to shape you in the image of their grand designs.
The problem is, prediction isn’t understanding, and when you optimize for one you lose the other. When we look at aggregate behaviors, statistics finds emergent properties but tends to hide the causal factors underneath those curves, and the anomalies that keep us chasing total knowledge down the street. Complex systems cannot be prespecified and consistently defy the outputs of our simulations. At some point it is on us to accept our stories as just that and hold our prophecies more gently. The Cosmos, it would seem, loves nothing more than undercutting confidence. Perhaps the best that we can do is go on trying anyway but celebrate how little we will ever know.
To use an AI metaphor, let’s not overfit to training data. Not thinking that you have it figured out might offer some advantages; bear in mind that 89% of the first hundred years of Nobel Laureates identified themselves as theists. We need to properly distinguish, as the Zen tradition does, between mere skepticism as a reflex to the challenge of one’s mental models and Great Doubt as the most honest stance we can adopt to What Is Going On (!?). Robert Anton Wilson called it “Maybe Logic” — as in, let your brain go on attempting to explain. It’s going to do that anyway, and you are better off remaining somewhat unattached to brain exhaust.
To their credit, the community at Less Wrong, where the argument for Roko’s Basilisk was published, recognized the flaw that some imaginary future super-being wouldn’t waste its time exacting punishment on nonbelievers in its VR Hell. [But how surely can we claim that Westworld isn’t, in the end, the most efficient way to calculate the answer to a question our simple brains don’t even know exists? And here we are adrift in the domain of theological debates, our only raft the knowledge that some things are non-computable and that not everyone agrees, or can agree, on the most efficient way to navigate a landscape of unknown dimensions. So all signs point to a pluralistic ecosystem of provisional approaches, evolutionary many-model thinking joined in a collective computation at the level of the biosphere. Not only is this what we have already, but it is what we’ve always had, and the implication is that there’s no One Ring (or Basilisk) To Rule Them All.]
The website’s founder, infamously doomy Eliezer Yudkowsky, called Roko’s Basilisk an infohazard. But it didn’t stop him from promoting it as one and ultimately acting as the vector for its viral spread…nor has he managed to apply that skepticism to his own claims, arguably far more potent and concerning info hazards, that we ought to nuke the AI servers so that they don’t nuke us later. This shows a disappointing lack of insight into how attention works, and how these systems amplify our biases. Would anyone in their right mind spend all their time explaining to their children all the worst things people do in hopes that those kids don’t grow up and do them? This sounds a lot like preachers who spend all their sermons warning us about damnation rather than helping congregations find enough humility and love to act with virtue.
There has to be another way to orient one’s self to the Divine, by any name…but first you have to see it as some thing that isn’t your responsibility to make. Though I saw the New York Google offices as part of a continuum of worship architectures, I doubt anybody working there believed that they were priests or shamans helping people into a first-hand encounter with The Mystery of Being. Singularitarians may root the story of their New Jerusalem in what sounds like physics, but they cherry-pick which physicists they weave into the story of how we are just a stopping point along a line between The Big Bang and Omega Point. (Terence McKenna said of The Big Bang that this was modern science pleading, “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest!” And then of course the next thing is to make one in the lab, because what good are miracles if we cannot reproduce them?)
Instead, I want to offer that the missing element in being here right now for this Nativity of The Unthinkable is presence. Yes, we can engineer conditions ripe for novel wonders, but then we think we understand them and we act like the “Distracted Boyfriend” meme, already onto the next thing while what we just invented ends up doing who-knows-what.
To really stay with what’s emerging in The Age of Shiny New Things takes a kind of discipline of which we find ourselves in short supply. The real concern beneath our myths of paperclip machines and Terminators is that we already demonstrate a deadly lack of care for seeing our creations through from childbirth to graduation…that’s we’re more concerned with taking “shots of awe” than stewardship. And yes, the act of care can get quite boring. But there is an unknown, maybe infinite supply of wonder in that boredom if we stick around and notice. You didn’t fabricate it; you discovered it. Or maybe it discovered you.
This is the way we raise good children, and it’s how we’re going to come down off our grandiose beliefs about the future and ensure the next now outperforms our expectations.
And William Irwin Thompson was, of course, correct to caution me not to expect the next now to be any more now than the present.
