Tying it together

Part 6 of Valentine's Logos

Photo by Max Saeling on Unsplash

(This is part 6 of the series Valentine’s Logos, originally written in 2024. This part was meant to wrap up the whole thing by naming what to do with the rest of the theory described earlier. It ended up being more like a general sketch of what would need to be figured out, with my fragmented guesses about how to start.

You might be able to make sense of what I’m saying in this post without having read the others in this series. But it does lean pretty heavily on knowing precisely what I mean in a number of places. Give reading this part first a go if you like, and maybe follow the links to read the relevant sections from earlier parts. But if you find the whole thing confusing, consider starting from the beginning.)

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What now?

My hope is that others can read what I’ve written, and we can think together, and build wholesome systems. That what’s relevant of what I’ve said can get translated into other frameworks, and that I can learn what’s off in ways that matter.

So in that sense, there isn’t a lot more to say.

But I notice that in spelling all out what I have in this series so far, I haven’t outlined anything that really looks like a plan. Even if I’d made no meaningful errors and a reader were quite compelled by what I’ve said, it might not be immediately obvious what to do. Or even what to look for.

So I want to say a few things in this spirit.

I want to be clear that I don’t have a complete picture for any of this. I just have enough puzzle pieces that I can just make out an outline of a vision. So please take most things after this point as me spitballing.

Pieces of a sane culture

First I want to give snapshots of the goal. Just a few images of where I think we want to end up.

The rough overall idea here is that all deep laws scale: the principles of thermodynamics that govern the glow of galaxies apply to your refrigerator too. So when we look at how deep laws apply to making individual minds more sane & kind, those should apply to the collective mind of humanity when viewed as a single entity.

The analogy won’t be perfect due to emergence. Thinking this way will generate errors that’ll sometimes become obvious only in retrospect. But even so, we can still make some okay initial guesses. And there are still certain things we really can know about larger structures we’ve never seen before — just like we can know that no galaxy can function as a perpetual motion machine even if we don’t otherwise know how it glows the way it does.

For a culture to be reliably sane and kind, it needs to fall into an evolutionary attractor. Which is to say, if some memetic structure were to arise that would be toxic to the whole system, the system needs an effective way of dealing with the invasive mutation. And yet, its method of doing so has to account for the paradox of wisdom: some deeply valuable mutations might be extremely disruptive and might initially read as toxic.

I think this means that such a culture (or individual mind!) needs to be both grounded in gnosis and highly dynamic. As little attachment to any given outcome or claim as possible, but a complete unwillingness to sacrifice sanity to solve any given problem. Total confidence and humility.

So with that frame as context, here are a few pieces I currently imagine:

• Widespread memetic literacy. Our civilization currently depends on nearly everyone being able to read and write. I think we need a similar shift where nearly everyone can see memes and has some basic familiarity with how they work — how they show up in human minds, how they coordinate groups, how they replicate, common deception tactics, etc. And this needs to be a capacity rather than merely a mental theory, just as the skill of reading is more than a widespread intellectual idea.

• Clear distinction between what can be chosen vs. how systems work. Right now it’s common for people to say stuff like “We need to elect this person!” or “We should switch to renewable energy sources!” This ignores how choice works and adds anti-gnostic pressure. On scales larger than individuals can choose what to do, the focus would be on making the picture clear rather than on giving instructions. Calls to action would be tuned to what people can actually choose to do. This results in pressure to make instructions and guidelines pragmatically useful in general.

• Active orientation to adaptive entropy. Or a “problems first” culture. The best solutions just happen when the problem is clear enough and clearly connected to what individuals can choose to do. Solutions that fall short of this (usually meaning they get forced) nearly always create more problems and often aren’t real solutions anyway. A sane civilization would recognize this, prioritize good solutions over quick ones whenever possible, and very consciously and explicitly don the costs of quick solutions when they really do seem necessary to force — with hesitation (because of the memetic illusions this creates room for) and with full and sincere intention to pay off the shared technical debt ASAP.

• Collective prayer. When faced with meaningful problems that we don’t yet have solutions for, I think the collectively sane & kind response is to pause. This is a direct counter to the tendency to go “We need a solution, and here’s something that might be a solution, so we have to implement this solution — and if you don’t agree, you’re getting in the way of what matters and are part of the problem!” I think a sane & kind culture would be willing to stay with the heartbreak of something dearly mattering and our not yet knowing what to do about it. The aim being to stay collectively in touch with what really matters throughout the effort to solve the problem together.

• Clusters of non-naïve trust. In practice, we just can’t have a global culture where nearly everyone is savvy to all the relevant worldwide systems. In practice we’ll have de facto experts who are engaged in large-scale conversations with each other (e.g. over Twitter). If the trust non-experts have in such people is based purely on respect for authority, the culture becomes vulnerable to persuasion and memetic hacking.¹ Non-experts need to generally care about this, and seek hard-to-hack ways of testing whether a given expert’s models & calls to action in their domain are worth listening to. In the absence of that, there needs to be a big cloud of “Maybe” around their claims, and some extra vigilance around whether any known memetic hacks seem to be coming through them.

• Active resolution of anti-gnosis. Currently I imagine this will involve a lot of support for developing well-regulated nervous systems and for healthy child-rearing. Sometimes (especially in the transition to a wholesome culture) this might also require simply giving some people access to resources that free them. We’re already doing some things like this, like creating women’s shelters and welfare programs. But as far as I know these are mostly focused on getting people out of “bad situations” rather than on freeing them up to see their situation clearly and own their power. The latter matters vastly more at a systemic level (and thus in the long term) than does rescuing people — especially if the type of rescuing being done results in greater dependence.

• Skillful interaction with insane & unkind cultures. I sometimes tag this as “ready for war”. If some ideology like Communism creates armies and starts taking over areas by force, a sane & kind culture needs to be skillful at protecting itself. At the same time, this reasoning can become something unwholesome memes rely on: make things seem dire to keep demanding immediate action and incurring adaptive entropy. It’s quite unclear to me what really resolving this looks like in practice though. My best guesses right now are (a) wholesome systems are vastly more efficient and might have functionally more resources; (b) wholesome systems might synergize with each other to make something big enough to katamari the unwholesome ones; (c) it’s actually in the unwholesome systems’ interest to bring their desires to the table to be integrated, and so the problem might often be about finding effective communication means rather than about collisions of power; and (d) such cancerous ideologies are less likely to evolve if everyone is extremely well-defended (since that would make effective assault an out-of-range mutation relative to just sincerely trying to get along).

• Ways for each person to get what they need without compromising their soul. This is necessary… and it’s even more pie-in-the-sky than wholesome culture being skilled at war. I don’t know what this looks like in much detail. So I’m mostly just naming a condition that needs to be magically met somehow. People having to do things they don’t want to do in order to get their needs met has to be viewed as a collective problem that demands a solution. Likewise if some people can more easily meet their needs by stepping outside of or breaking the system than by working within it in good faith. Ultimately there must be a way each and every person can be fulfilled by engaging with society in supportive ways. And the social contract that has them engaging this way has to be one that, if they could fully understand what that contract would entail prior to their “signing” it, they would happily choose to “sign”. (Bearing in mind that this kind of informed consent might not be possible — but retroactively informed consent is still something I believe a healthy memetic ecosystem would deeply care about!)

I don’t see how this can be a complete list. If it is, I definitely don’t see even a good plausibility argument. Instead I view this as part of a trick I learned in my math training: to find a solution, you can start by defining likely properties of that solution and sort of working backwards. Even if you’re wrong, the process tends to clarify in what ways.

And hopefully this offers a plausible enough outline that you can feel where I’m pointing.

How we might get there

I’m missing a lot of detail about how to get from here to there. I could really use help here, even if just to get clarity about the nature of the puzzle.

One blessing is, because the principles I’m working with here mostly scale very well, they should apply to small groups and to individuals. So we can actually do experiments, and try to build small communities that have this kind of lucidity, and try to become more sane & kind individuals. And in theory, all of that can feed into something much more widespread.

My guess (or maybe hope?) is that what I’m gesturing at in this document is a kind of attractor. As individuals and small groups get past some kind of tipping point — loosely from “Game A” to “Game B” — that should make the transition easier for memetically adjacent ecosystems to reach. As long as what we’re focused on is grounded in doing real good and prioritizing clarity over “winning”, the attractor should result in a consent-based viral spread everywhere.

If this isn’t correct, then getting clarity about why should help correct the vision. It’s plausible that there’s no “there” to get to at all, for instance, which would change something about what we might even want to try to do.

But I bet there’s something. It seems utterly implausible to me that there isn’t some better way to do large-scale human culture than this one.

And at the same time, it strikes me as extremely important that we also notice the skulls. E.g., Communism is famously an attempt to create a better culture according to some compelling ideas, and it never actually works. It usually results in conditions quite a bit worse on net than the ones they were “fixing”.²

So with all that said… what might we do?

Here’s my guesswork right now:

A first pass would be to take the vision of a sane culture I outlined earlier and just scale it down to the individual. Notice how it applies to your mind as a memetic ecosystem (“culture”). How can you actively seek to resolve anti-gnosis? How do you get clear about what you can and can’t choose? Etc.

For instance, where are you inclined to force an outcome you have in mind on yourself? The usual tangle stack I notice there is Original Spin mislabeling a discomfort, which some habits are trying to resolve in a shortsighted way. If you get the gist of the necessity argument behind why it’s usually better to focus on naming problems rather than forcing solutions, you can trace that proof in contact with the specific example you’re struggling with. Then you should see some combo of (a) understanding the proof better and (b) finding a pathway to releasing the tension (maybe by taking action, maybe by changing your goal, maybe by some third more clever thing).

And if you understand why all these tools should pass self-reference checks, you might see the value of applying this “problems first” approach to applying the “problems first” approach. If you trace the proof there, you can (for instance) release any inclination to make yourself let go of certain conclusions you really want. The self-referential proof-tracing can clarify what the spirit behind the approach needs to be for it to be viable to you.

If I could pick just one practice/tool that someone gets from this document, it would be taking mind as object.³ It’s a surprisingly potent tool. I think that plus a mental understanding of what I’ve been saying throughout this document could go quite far.

Mythically speaking, if you can get your mind past the tipping point such that it falls toward the attractor (that I think/hope is there!),⁴ then you should find your whole system rearranging so that Elua can more & more clearly speak to and through you — with total consent and clarity about what’s going on! And the more of us that can lend the full force of our minds to this pro-human meta-meme, the more intelligent it can become, and the more easily it should spread.⁵

I think there’s a lot of work to be done fleshing out the details here. There’s also a lot of cultural work & experimentation: we don’t yet know what emergent factors to account for to let groups have gnosis or to avoid reinforcing anti-gnosis.

A thing I think could help is some list of unsolved problems that, if solved, might result in a global solution implementing itself at scale. If I wanted to make this document even longer 😅 I might try my hand at a draft here. But this is also a very fitting project for us all to work on together.

This format needs adjustment

As a closing note, I want to highlight that this document doesn’t pass its own self-reference check. 😱

It fails on two levels:

• As viable memes go, the core idea in this document isn’t nearly pithy or clear enough to spread. It’s similar to literacy, which spread when it was needed. But literacy is quite a bit easier to describe in a single (spoken) sentence. I don’t yet have a single sentence that wraps the core insight I’m pointing at in this document, even as a summary for someone who already gets it.

• If I were really skilled, this whole thing would be a series of questions or problem statements instead of explanations. Explanations are just easier to write and don’t require so much specialized teaching skill. It would have taken much longer to write a good “Look here, what do you see?” version that would have guided readers to see for themselves what I’m talking about. That said, such a presentation is mostly just better in terms of the very ideas being expressed!

To paraphrase the famous quote of messy origins: I wrote this version because I have not yet had the time to write a shorter one.

Not to say that long explanations are bad. Even here!

But when it comes to suggesting a shift in our way of being, I think giving careful attention to clarity and transparency matters.

1. This happened with science as a social institution for instance. Culture gave scientists an aura of authority in the 20th century. Then corporations used that aura for propaganda.

2. This is one reason I think it’s extremely important to get clear on the difference between plausibility and necessity. Thermodynamics says you might be able to build a steam engine but you definitely can’t build a perpetual motion machine. Communism was a bunch of plausibility arguments that inspired a bunch of forced solutions. Force that aligns a relatively dumb system with a deep law might, on net, reduce adaptive entropy. But force that tries to align a system with a plausible story is almost guaranteed to turn out worse than doing nothing.

3. Modern footnote: My opinion has quite changed on this detail. Overall the main effect I’d hope a reader gets from this series is, they more often notice the forces I’m talking about inside their own psyches, in real time, in first person. That’s not something for a reader to do; it’s just an effect I would hope for. The main practice would be: notice when you’re doing something (or are about to do something, or just did something) that you can tell is shy of your best wisdom in some specific way, and then consider tracing the proof of your wisdom, but tuned to the particular situation in question. You might know that talking down to your partner isn’t what you want but find yourself doing it anyway, so you both (a) take seriously what about talking down to them seemed sensible to some part of you, and also (b) trace the proof you have for why you shouldn’t in that particular case. Either your proof will change (maybe you do best get what you want by talking down to your partner here), or you’ll find the behavior naturally dissolving (you just remember the proof a bit better each time and find yourself doing something else). No need to try to change your behavior or your thinking: you’ll just more clearly see what makes sense given what you care about, and the internal contradiction will dissolve. Or, you’ll discover that the contradiction itself is important, probably because of social anti-gnosis, at which point you’ll need other techniques. But the upshot is, the one single practice I’d hope folk take from this series is simply tracing their proofs in cases where they notice themselves ignoring them.

4. I suspect that this attractor is why Buddhism talks about “stream entry”. One might reasonably wonder if this means that the whole approach is too weak. After all, Buddhism has had a few thousand years to spread, and it hasn’t solved the global problem yet. I think/hope that we’re in a different position now because we now understand some things about memetics, evolution, and deep laws that… well, someone will argue Buddhism understood those too, but if so it’s not in a widely legible way.

5. In some sense I’m talking about building a Friendly “artificial” intelligence, but implemented on humans and in a way that makes it made of “Friendliness”.