Certainty

Image by Victoria from Pixabay

I struggle to strike a balance between certainty and circumspection. Our culture has a tendency to favor certainty, while one of my favorite and frequent fall-backs—seldom wrong—is: “we don’t know.” Certainty is often the hobgoblin of decontextualized, rigid, (only) logical thinking: an artificial by-product of incomplete mental models. That said, I feel that I can do more than throw up my hands on every issue. I can be fairly certain that I will never perform a standing jump to the moon or breathe underwater (without apparatus) like I often do in dreams.

Thus, I write this post in full appreciation of the red flag around certainty. Yet, in full consideration, I can indeed identify some elements of reality about which I can be fairly certain—to a reasonable degree. At the very least, these things would appear to be consistent with a robust account of how the world appears to work.

I’ll skip an exhaustive list of certainties, and stick with points that have some bearing on the meta-crisis of modernity.  But for illustration that certainty is not misplaced, I think most would agree that we can function under certainty that in the next billion years, say, gravity won’t turn off; the sun will continue to shine; Earth will keep rotating to produce the familiar day/night pattern; if I pound my fist on the table my hand won’t sail through it, etc.  We are justified in “taking these to the bank.”  The items below are not all as completely iron-clad, but are helpful in forming a basis.  I have asked myself for each one: “could I be convinced otherwise?”  Generally the answer is “yes, I suppose,” to varying degrees, but some would be a tough pull, requiring solid evidence.  Most of the content is a repackaging of points I have expressed before, but I hope in a useful, consolidated form.

So let’s get to it: here are things I am reasonably (functionally) certain about:

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The Big Question

A short story of fiction by Tom Murphy

Almost any nerd worth their salt has read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, relishing its innovative and unpredictable humor.

So it was with Adam Lundquist and Alex Ford: top-level coworkers at the Institute for the Future of Artificial Intelligence Learning, who—besides being project leaders—were widely regarded as the principal talent behind an exciting new AI platform on the verge of becoming operational.

Because they were fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, and because it was not hard to see a parallel between their creation and that of Deep Thought—the supercomputer from the book designed to answer, once and for all, The Big Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything—it was perhaps inevitable that they began playfully referring to each other as Lunkwill and Fook after their analogs in the story. The close alignment to their real names only reinforced for them a sense of destiny. Ford even toyed with legally changing her name to Fook, but dropped it in light of the headaches such a move would bring to her life. Plus, it would only be epic if Lundquist changed his name as well, but he wasn’t having any of it.

Nerds gotta nerd. But silliness aside, what these two and their team created was indeed extraordinary. Inspired by insights from neuroscience, and having acquired an industry-shattering awareness of the different configurations of left and right hemispheres in animal brains, they managed to break free of traditional architectures that strictly focused on algorithmic, exact, logical methods characteristic of all previous efforts in computing—which had only doubled-, tripled- and millioned-down on left-hemisphere cognitive habits. Such strategies were fine in narrow domains like chess and language construction, where a finite space of rules and limited contextual complexity allowed complete mastery and tidy solutions to problems. But these approaches were dead-ends in terms of tackling the really thorny, more open-ended problems pertinent to human life on Earth.

In this new effort, what was truly remarkable and inspired was the admission by the designers that they themselves had no real mastery over cognition and deep thinking. Therefore, they fashioned a machine that could design elements of its own architecture, engaging in a process similar to the one employed by evolution in building our own brain machines. It might seem rude or pejorative to slap the “machine” label on our amazing brains, but that’s only because the artificial, technological machines we have built tend to be pathetically simple compared to what evolution can produce after billions of years of proven functionality and honing. Yet, our brains and bodies—and microbes for that matter—are still physical machines in a strict sense, just far too complex for us to comprehend or design—putting our puny and fragile non-living machines to shame (not a one will last millions of years like a species can).

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MM #18: What Can I Do?

This is the final installment in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. We have arrived at the part where people say: “yeah, but what can I do?” I hope that I can offer solid suggestions that are more satisfying than frustrating. But I’m just winging it, here. Shutting down modernity is not something any of us have experience doing, so we’ll all have to wing it.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 4625

MM #17: Being Human

This is the seventeenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. Here, I attempt to paint a picture of how we might think of ourselves as humans on this planet, as integral members of the community of life. If we’re good, evolution might keep us for a while—along with lots of friends currently in deep trouble.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 1875

MM #16: Recap and Mythology

This is the sixteenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This installment tries to round up perspectives developed so far, and throws in a bit of mythology at the end.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 1795

MM #15: What Now?

This is the fifteenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. Having received a metastatic cancer diagnosis, how do we react to the news? What emotions and responses are appropriate or productive?

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 2531

MM #14: Cancer Diagnosis

This is the fourteenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. We have arrived at the episode whose concept inspired the name of the series. Though no metaphor can perfectly capture a complex reality, by comparing modernity to metastatic cancer I hope to provide a useful framework that counters the usual modernity-boosting narratives we swim within.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 2565

MM #13: A Species out of Context

This is the thirteenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode unpacks the great Wes Jackson aphorism that modern humans are a species out of context. Well, what’s the right context, and how are we out of it?

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 1816

MM #12: Human Supremacy

This is the twelfth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode confronts the thorny topic of human supremacy. My intention is not to rile folks up, but some of that may be unavoidable. It’s something we must face to understand modernity.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 3043

MM #11: Renewable Salvation?

This is the eleventh of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode looks at various reasons why renewable energy and recycling are not our way out of the predicament modernity has set out for us. It’s just a doubling-down that can’t really work anyway.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 5731