Had some thoughts. I’ll start with the entropy thing.
Anything that happens in a physics complex enough to support life constitutes transitioning energy to entropy. ANYTHING. That process does not draw a distinction between living and non-living, between entropy-optimising agency and a beauty-optimising agency. If you look at life, and only see spending energy, then you know as little as it is possible to know about which part of the universe count as life, or how it will behave.
Humans do want to spend energy, but they don’t really care how fast it happens, or whether it ever concludes.
Humans really care about the things that happen along the way.
Some people seem to become nihilistic in the face of the inevitability of life’s eventual end. Because the end is going to be the same no matter what we do, they think, it doesn’t matter what happens along the way.
I’m of the belief that a healthy psyche tries to rescue its utility function. When our conception the substance of essential good seems to disappear from our improved worldmodel, when we find that the essential good thing we were optimising can’t really exist, we must have some method for locating the closest counterpart to that essence of good in our new, improved worldmodel. We must know what it means to continue. We must have a way of rescuing the utility function.
It sometimes seems as if Nick Land doesn’t have that.
A person finds out that the world is much worse and weirder than he thought. He repeats that kind of improvement several times (he’s uniquely good at it). He expects that it’s never going to end. He gets tired of burying stillborn ideals. Instead of developing a robust notion of good that can survive bad news and paradigm shifts, he cuts out his heart and stops having any notion of good at all. He’s safe now. Philosophy can’t hurt him any more.
That’s a cynical take. For the sake of balance: My distant steelman of Nick Land is that maybe he sees the role of philosophy as being to get us over as many future shocks as possible as quickly as possible to get us situated in the bad weird what will be, and only once we’re done with that can we start talking about what should be. Only then can we place a target that wont soon disappear. And the thing about that is it takes a long time, and we’re still not finished, so we still can’t start to Should.
I couldn’t yet disagree with that. I believe I’m fairly well situated in the world, perhaps my model wont shatter again, in any traumatic way, but it’s clear to me that my praxis is taking a while to catch up with my model.
We are still doing things that don’t make a lot of sense, in light of the weird, bad world. Perhaps we need to be a lot better at relinquishing the instrumental values we inherited from a culture adapted to a nicer world.
We could simulate a video-game physics where energy and entropy are not a concern, and populate it with players. Therefore, not every physics complex enough to support life has anything to do with energy and entropy.
Had some thoughts. I’ll start with the entropy thing.
Anything that happens in a physics complex enough to support life constitutes transitioning energy to entropy. ANYTHING. That process does not draw a distinction between living and non-living, between entropy-optimising agency and a beauty-optimising agency. If you look at life, and only see spending energy, then you know as little as it is possible to know about which part of the universe count as life, or how it will behave.
Humans do want to spend energy, but they don’t really care how fast it happens, or whether it ever concludes.
Humans really care about the things that happen along the way.
Some people seem to become nihilistic in the face of the inevitability of life’s eventual end. Because the end is going to be the same no matter what we do, they think, it doesn’t matter what happens along the way.
I’m of the belief that a healthy psyche tries to rescue its utility function. When our conception the substance of essential good seems to disappear from our improved worldmodel, when we find that the essential good thing we were optimising can’t really exist, we must have some method for locating the closest counterpart to that essence of good in our new, improved worldmodel. We must know what it means to continue. We must have a way of rescuing the utility function.
It sometimes seems as if Nick Land doesn’t have that.
A person finds out that the world is much worse and weirder than he thought. He repeats that kind of improvement several times (he’s uniquely good at it). He expects that it’s never going to end. He gets tired of burying stillborn ideals. Instead of developing a robust notion of good that can survive bad news and paradigm shifts, he cuts out his heart and stops having any notion of good at all. He’s safe now. Philosophy can’t hurt him any more.
That’s a cynical take. For the sake of balance: My distant steelman of Nick Land is that maybe he sees the role of philosophy as being to get us over as many future shocks as possible as quickly as possible to get us situated in the bad weird what will be, and only once we’re done with that can we start talking about what should be. Only then can we place a target that wont soon disappear. And the thing about that is it takes a long time, and we’re still not finished, so we still can’t start to Should.
I couldn’t yet disagree with that. I believe I’m fairly well situated in the world, perhaps my model wont shatter again, in any traumatic way, but it’s clear to me that my praxis is taking a while to catch up with my model.
We are still doing things that don’t make a lot of sense, in light of the weird, bad world. Perhaps we need to be a lot better at relinquishing the instrumental values we inherited from a culture adapted to a nicer world.
We could simulate a video-game physics where energy and entropy are not a concern, and populate it with players. Therefore, not every physics complex enough to support life has anything to do with energy and entropy.