Messages to the Future: The Present

Episode transcript: https://www.preeya.rocks/podcast/messages-to-the-future-the-present

In which I make the case that even our rudimentary understanding of psychohistory compels us to stand with Ukraine and for social justice everywhere.

Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to Thought Squared. I'm your host, Preeya. 

I hope you weren't too freaked out by the last episode. I'll admit, if I heard one of my friends say, “I think I’m going known as a prophet in the future because I understand humanity enough to start a fake religion that is also psychohistory,” I would have some questions for them re: substances they may or may not have ingested. And I freely admit that my own answers to such questions are pretty similar to what you'd expect. In fact, if you can picture the kind of friend who you'd hear this from and nod along without really believing them but also without worrying too much, that's basically me: equal parts compulsive overachiever, stoner weirdo, and self-aware basic bitch who’s just after a weird thrill. Which is to say, while l am convinced enough of what I think that I'm willing to say it in semi-public, I’m also saying it because I want to be told I'm wrong, or at least, update my own reaction to these ideas to be that of the general public. Basically, please think of this whole project as trying to unify science with religion, and each of these episodes as miniature theory papers that I'm trying to get peer-reviewed by everyone on Earth.  

Last episode I said I was hoping tor a two-week cadence on these short updates, and that was three weeks ago, probably four by the time I upload this. I am working towards a two week cadence but it will probably take me a while to get there. Yes, I'm also STILL working on the long form Midnight Mass episode. Mostly what's distracted me is that invasion we’re all hoping turns into a Russian revolution and not World War 3. It took me a while to internalize just how much this event, which for the record is currently known as Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine — and here I’m leaving a space for future consumers or annotators or editors to, mentally or in metadata or in text, keep this updated to your current popular understanding of this event, calendrical system, etc— this event, though seemingly unrelated to my weird stoner ramblings, is in fact of central importance by my own conception of morality, if I really do believe my own principles. Which are, to recap:

I am doing performance art that I hope will turn into the science of psychohistory and a guiding philosophy for all, via the mechanism of the collective reaction of all current and future humanlike sentience to this podcast and all cognitive constructs it ever directly or indirectly contributes to. Here I’m defining humanlike sentience via an extension of the Turing test, that is, any awareness of any form that is possible to be communicated with, and I'm defining communication maximally inclusively, such that it is indistinguishable from communicating with a human. Which I am proposing is exactly the same as human beings ever, now or in the future, being able to fully translate this sentence to that awareness. 

To put it another way, if you think of most human philosophies as a regular beam of light, which illuminates the path forward for a short time before diffusing into normal human power structures, then what I am trying to create is a laser. Now, the word "laser" is technically an acronym. It stands for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." That is, lasers involve some physical substance which has been set up such that, if it's hit by a photon of the right wavelength, the first atom that photon hits emits another photon with exactly the same energy going in exactly the same direction, which then hits another atom and stimulates another photon emission, and on and on in a chain reaction, which results in an organized and coherent light beam that, together, travels much farther than an ordinary beam. My thesis is that it should be possible to enact this process in a sociocognitive sense. That is, if we take the collective cognition of human society as our substrate, it should be possible to figure out the right philosophy to act as the first photon, which interacts with human cognition in such a way that, over time, it self-coheres into a stabilizer that steers humanlike sentients away from, well, the way the world is right now. Here is my very first guess at the right popular understanding to spark this outcome in the future. Because I am incredibly extra, I can only express this pseudoreligiously. Here goes.

 We are all gods. NOT in the sense of being morally perfect, I want to be very clear about that. We are all gods because we, humans, constructed gods, and religions, and stories, and in every meaningful sense of the word, ourselves, to deal with the fact of ourselves. That is, I think the subjective cognitive experience that defines humanlike sentience is the ability and desire for an awareness to imagine what it would be like to be more than itself, SO WELL, that any reproductively viable group of such awarenesses will, over evolutionary time, achieve larger and larger levels of control over the physical world without bound. Which means, and this is is where I circle back to the invasion of Ukraine as the latest manifestation of the global social crisis, there comes a point where the literal only impediment to the long-term survival of humanlike sentience or humans is us, ourselves. That’s the point we hit eighty years ago with the development of nuclear weapons, and are hitting again today with climate change and various pushes for genocide. The part that I’m adding is that technological advancements since then, particularly the Internet and social media, have provided us with the tools by which literally any individual person could, even by accident, create or contribute to a cascade of social effects that leads to these negative-infinity outcomes. This is the purely objective sense in which we all, technically, have godlike power.

The problem, of course, is that that power mostly  takes the most inconvenient form possible, which is pure moral responsibility. After all, we are also limited and flawed humans, with bills to pay and TV shows to binge, and in the US, the center-left majority that has consistently supported major social reform for decades has been dismissed and erased for so long that it’s starting to feel like a hostage situation. We are simultaneously empowered and powerless. Of course our actions affect the world around us to some extent, but gaming all of that out with godlike responsibility attached — how is anyone supposed to live their entire life like that, let alone enjoy it? How do you even approach that question? 

As current events are making painstakingly clear, we must radically reorganize humanity’s approach to ourselves around this tension between individual limitations and collective power. Which, again, is not a new observation. We’ve all been asking ourselves for years why that keeps not happening, we all know the major official and systemic reasons. Somehow all of us knowing them has only made everyone dig in deeper, and that's where we're stuck, trying to figure out how we’ve so thoroughly squandered ourselves.

The proposal that I feel compelled to make now, by the principles of trying to create a philosophy that coheres humanity towards good progress rather than bad, is simple. Every human population, and indeed every human being, has malicious and selfish elements. As ideologies, they are kept suppressed to the extent that a critical mass of cognition, at either the population or individual level, can both assign them the correct level of harm and internally restructure itself to make itself less likely to take any action leading to that harm. In plainer language, we avoid nuclear war not only by knowing how bad it is, but by restructuring society to reduce the conditions that lead to nuclear war. And as a quick reading of history and the past few years tells us, the number one social condition that leads to nuclear war is authoritarianism. Nazis, fascists, dictators, all power-first ideologies that support them such as white supremacy, and everything that leads to those ideologies are existential threats via the exact mechanism we are seeing right now, a single aging dictator with gigantic nuclear capabilities and the ruthlessness to commit war crime after war crime. Therefore, the collective ability of the free world to not only win this war, but to prevent humanity from getting into this situation ever again, depends on average people stepping up and taking the lead in thinking through the practical complexities of abandoning those ideologies at scale.

Here's a concrete example. President Zelensky has been giving speech after speech emphasizing the moral atrocities of the Russian army in Ukraine, and he has been moving mountains for his people as a result. Although I'm sure it doesn't feel this way to him, I don't think anyone in the world could have done better given the profound depth of the global social crisis that currently controls literally everything. In a very real sense, I think of this as a wave, a sort of sociocognitive pressure wave that is created over generational time by the constant interaction of humanity with itself, and which currently has a time-wavelength of 80 years. That is, the high-pressure wavefront, which is the part we're living through right now, corresponds to the 80-year American cycle of Revolutionary War, Civil War, the first world wars, and now this war. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean all the times in between have been any less turbulent -- just that it's not a surprise that war that has the potential to shake up our entire global order is happening right now. This generational cycle is increasingly coming to define the American cultural empire, or what some call just the West even though we live on a sphere. 

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, right, President Zelensky has done an incredible job, and of course it is all of our responsibilities to help ensure that Ukrainians get their country back and get justice. The problem that I see coming is that, while Zelensky's constant dismissal of the needs of the average Russian certainly makes sense and is justified, I'm not sure that it's helpful. First of all, the Internet means this war is being very consciously fought as a war of public opinion, which we've already seen can have results like ordinary Russian and Belorussian soldiers sabotaging their own equipment or turning themselves in. Videos like Arnold Schwarzenegger's are, in my opinion, the best way to fight that war, and they rely on not dismissing the average Russian. And we need that because of the second reason, which is that, as President Zelensky himself always points out, this is primarily a war about ideas, specifically, the idea of progressive and inclusive democracy vs the idea of ethnofascist authoritarianism. So, the more we allow ourselves to slip into any ideas that lead to authoritarianism, like the idea that average people of different countries are fundamentally different from each other, the more we needlessly give up the moral ground that our side depends on, thus prolonging this war and increasing suffering for everyone. And, because the Internet means we all technically have godlike power, this is a question we must all try to think through in a way that gets socialized up to our leaders, even if we're just average nobodies. The only unacceptable answer is that it’s too hard to do so, because that kind of denial and willful ignorance is what makes nuclear war and protracted genocide more likely. Conversely, the more we commit ourselves to doing the complex cognitive work of fully embracing our ideals, the more likely it becomes that the Russians overthrow Putin. With the US and NATO paralyzed, this moral narrative strategy is what’s most likely to keep nukes off the table, which makes it everyone’s job to contribute to. 

Another example is the raft of anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion laws sweeping the US. These laws and sentiments must be opposed no matter what on the basis of personal dignity for all. They must also be opposed because, as history shows us, these ideologies gaining traction is a direct precursor to genocide — something we must take seriously to the extent that even those who feel overwhelmed by thinking about it must reorient themselves around getting through that overwhelm. Because you know who’s really anti-LGBTQ and pro-traditional values? Putin and his entire administration. The more we lean into that kind of conservatism ourselves, the less difference there is between us and fascist Russia, the more likely it is that nuclear war happens.

The other major parts of the moral narrative stack are real COVID mitigation measures, real climate change measures, more economic stimulus, more support for labor and unions, and major anti-racist measures, including, yes, abolishing ICE and ending the border camps, defunding the police, paying reparations, and land back to Native Americans. Because, again, each of these would be a major moral narrative win for the West, thus directly increasing our ability to win this war with a minimum of suffering, which will act as a multiplier on our ability to control the post-war world. So all efforts that go towards promoting social justice and equity are part of the larger war effort as well. 

However, I want to be clear that we cannot simply limit ourselves to halfheartedly implementing certain policies and then deciding that’s enough. That approach is how we lose. We must commit to the infinite loop of being willing to think through our ideals enough to know exactly when to passionately defend vs thoughtfully update. The only way we do that is by full-on embracing the complexity of the challenge, especially when it requires us to stand in solidarity with the marginalized and vulnerable, continuously throwing ourselves at the question of improving society in a way that collectively generates concrete and accessible examples of how others can think through new situations on their own, so that others can think through on their own, etc. We are all gods, but we must all become prophets, by socially elevating the ability to understand the right vs wrong actions down to the tiniest grain of nuance, which, because we are limited and flawed humans, necessarily translates into setting up a social system that outputs something close to the right answer by taking everyone and everything into account. That's the only way to robustly resist the urge to scream “Fuck the world, just violently simplify,” as Russia has been doing for years. And I want to be clear here that I don’t mean the tiniest grain of nuance in the sense of restricting joy, but rather the opposite. Since we cannot get through the storm already hitting us without some sources of joy, we must be ready to express and play with it with the confidence that we know exactly where the line really is, and since that can be so situationally dependent, we must always be willing to run towards that complexity so as to continuously generate new ways to approach it.  Whichever side best achieves this, and I'm including popular accessibility in that, will win this war and control the next worldwide generational cycle. Indeed, I started the Messages to the Future episodes specifically to contribute to humanity’s ability to understand and implement this strategy by trying to build psychohistory out of subjective cognitive experience, and that’s why this war has raised the moral stakes for me, and everyone, so significantly.

That’s all for now. Thanks for listening, thinkers and squares. See you in two weeks. Remember, if you would rather read this content, you can always find episode transcripts at preeya.rocks/thought-squared, with a dash. [Repeat]

[Over music] Oh btw, this song is Next Ones, by Roa. It’s pretty great, right?