michael-dean-k/

In addition to building a "classical" syllabus that I read, I figure my audio diet should be of a different nature, one that's as modern as possible. I'm going with the Moonshots podcast, with Peter Diamandis. This group of guys are probably more anchored in the future than anyone else I've found. It feels adjacent to the All In podcast format, but less business-focused, and more centered on futurism. There is a certainty among them that we are in the singularity, accelerating to a techno-optimist future, which is antithetical to the Neo-Romantic essayists (it is rare to find an essayist who is both a humanist and a technologist).

I do have to be skeptical of their worldview, however, for they are schmoozing among the elites building this stuff, and so they're likely to have a rosy-eyed view on how this might all fare well for millionaires, without realistically focusing on or caring about how it effects the daily lives. They do seem to harbor a certain fetishism about technology and progress, and a boyish fascination with going to space and uploading our consciousness, for maybe the simple fact that it's a science fiction dream beyond our current life. There's a Faustian sin in summoning the future for future's sake.

They also very openly want to live enough to live forever; if they can survive another 15-years, they are rich enough to have access to anti-aging technology. The whole premise of technologically cheating death is also a philosophy that feels disconnected from our history. But I wonder if you could make the claim that Montaigne didn't have the luxury of philosophizing about life extension. If we make shape our philosophies to justify our situation, then is our whole canon on "the importance of dying" only stemming from pains and fears of a low-tech society? I guess, intuitively, from a child's perspective, the idea of not wanting to die is a natural one, and to embrace it is the wisdom of an adult, but I suppose we're nearing a flood of new cultural debates stemming from a new reality where the immortality choice isn't theoretical, but real, which changes the whole calculus.

So the point of listening to a group like this that is openly "transhumanist" is to model the future, hear them out, but then take it one step further, and truly consider the moral and ethical implications of where all this is heading.

Anti-AI sentiment is escalating: the Pause AI movement, state-level data center bans, molotov cocktails at Sam Altman's house, artists going to dumb phones, witch hunts for AI prose. Protesting and boycotting AI, at a personal level, is the exact wrong approach. It misunderstands the Luddites. They were not against the machines in principle, they were against the factory owners not sharing the profits of the factory. This is possibly about to play out a grand scale: AI and robotics labs could capture nearly all economic value, and there will be a plea to nationalize these companies and redistribute the profits.

While the scope and effects here are way bigger, the workers of the Industrial Revolution were far more disempowered. You couldn't "just do things." You could operate someone else's machine, but you couldn't just spin up a competing factory; that required land, resources, labor, none of which you had. There was just a certain amount of capital needed to compete, and it wasn't possible. Workers were limited to being workers, so they had no choice but to revolt with violence.

The difference today is that the worker and artist suddenly have access to build-your-own-factory tooling. A single person for $100/month can compete with companies valued in the millions and billions. It's asymmetric labor. Regular people can build civilization scale infrastructure, distribution labels, social media engines, software, etc. Never before has there been a democratic opportunity for people to self-organize into their own collectives, tribes, governments, and whatnot.

At least to me, this kind of optimism—principled, delirious, ambitious, but still careful and skeptical—is better than the cynicism of the "resist" factions. There is nothing you or your circles gain by putting your head in the sand; it brings a distanced, crabby, virtue-signaled posture that does nothing to change the actual situation. You gain nothing by staying on the ChatGPT free plan on default settings and complaining no how it's an ineffective, incapable, sycophant. It requires an ounce of nuance, to be critical of how the labs act, but to then use that lab's best tools towards your own sovereignty and vision.

I think what I'm trying to get at here is that the Luddites of the 21st-century will not be reverting back to typewriters and flip phones, they will be wielding AI tools in ways to foster human connection, and the kind of pro-human cultural that the Internet originally promised, but was never realized under capitalism.

When we say we "distrust institutions," we're pointing at the wrong thing; it's the institutes that are withering. We use these words interchangeably, but I think the separation clarifies.

An "institution" is an abstract, permanent, inter-generational primitive—like education, marriage, the free press, the essay—while an "institute" is a concrete embodiment that serves it. Think of an institution as a societal organ. Think of institutes as the specialized tissue that keep the organ functioning and regenerating.

As generations turn, new sets of people are handed down the great responsibility to protect and evolve institutes through the storms of time and technology. Without upgrading our institutes, society goes through slow-motion organ failure, with phantom pains and spiritual malaise that can't be traced back to the source. Schools still look like schools, but everyone is cheating through a Homework Apocalypse, and suddenly we have all sorts of cultural cancers that seem inevitable. Institutes are the civic building blocks of a sane society, and yet we glorify unicorns who create "value" but feel no responsibility for their dying elders.

Institutes operate through the inverse of market logic. Where startups are designed to accrue all of the upside, an institute is sacrificial, designed so society gets the upside, even at its own peril. Of course they swim in the same water, but institutes swim differently: they have opposite answers to questions on how to steer, what to make, where to focus, who to include, and when to stop. An attempt at some principles:

• mission-driven, not market-driven;
• timeless contributions, not self-serving content;
• involved in ecosystem building, not niche extraction;
• active members, not passive users;
• century-long legacy, not liquidity through an exit.

Usually an institute comes from patronage: you can’t resist market currents unless you’re supported by endowments, donations, foundations, tuitions, grants, and such things. You can’t start an institute in your garage, but now with AI and the collapse of cost, I suppose you could try. So many of the one-person AI company fantasies are about a single founder reaching a billion-dollar valuation, which is the cheapest form of ambition there is; the better question is around the scale and spirit of cultural impact achievable by a one-person micro-institute.

The full-stack of religion: cosmology > scripture > practice > ethics > liturgy. We have a metaphysical impulse to make sense of our reality, and in a moment of “gnosis” someone writes it down, and then builds a series of personal practices around it, which starts to answer the question of how to live, and these ethics are legible to others who then may join in their liturgies through a church. This captures the process from which metaphysical musings conglomerate into an institution.

Note: theology is nested within cosmology, as it’s a common experience to feel the presence of an anthropomorphic Creator, but you can also have models of your reality that are non-theistic.

Where atheists go wrong is that they challenge the cosmology, but then throw out the entire branch (no scripture, no practice, no liturgy), and assume individualist secular ethics don’t require the entire stack. Modern spirituality is possibly worse, because they also throw out the entire religious stack, but the ethics they vaguely aspire to are less rigorous than even an atheist.

Where I stand: that the architecture of religion is extremely important—we need religious institutions—but our existing religion have been faulty in their conception, and have been “captured.” The overall challenge in being a heretic, in a religiously-inspired eccentric lonewolf kind of way, is that it’s very hard to concretize your own musings into liturgy. It is an isolating thing. Unless, I suppose, your system works, to a degree that your ethics are so unique or so marveled at, or, you are just a good marketer of your own scripture, that you can get maybe 100 people to “follow” you, but at that point, what you really have is a small cult, and that’s a dangerous thing too.

And so the solution, I think, is to not actually invent some New Age religion, but to create new sects of existing religions, making them more participatory higher up in the stack. To me, this is about understanding the elements of, say, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and reworking them, recombining them, and then experimenting on the resulting scriptures, practices, and ethics, in an almost scientific way, and you’ll learn the flaws in your original conceptions, and then you have to return to the source and try again, over and over, slowly accumulating your own personal relationship to a larger, shared, historical universe, and of course any orthodox Christian, and probably most Catholics too, are very much against this.

I’m talking about questioning the root level assumptions, as in, maybe Christ did not literally resurrect, and maybe God is not a conscious agent that listens to us, and maybe there is no eternal Heaven, however, maybe Christ is a mythical embodiment of the supreme ethics we should all be living, and so what if there were a sect that very rigorously tries to live as Christ, while acknowledging he does not need to be anything beyond a historical-literary figure?

When someone is squeamish about this, it seems to me there’s a great deal of fear in the resistance, a fear that was dispelled, because a supernatural Christ is the answer to that painful and existential void of what happens after death, and I just wonder if there’s room for a rich, religious life, filled with agapic love and community service, that doesn’t require infinite existence in a Kingdom of souls.

In fact, the indefinite preservation of ego beyond death might be one of the most unChristly things I can conceive. To die for good means real stakes exist. Is not the Christ who permanently dies and still chooses love anyway far more radical? More selfless? Does the resurrection not cheapen the sacrifice? Is the crucifixion without the resurrection not the braver story? (If it turns out that Christ was actually modeled off of Jesua, the righteous leader of the Essene cult that was crucified along with all the men in their group in 83 BC, and they passively accepted it, then that may be the true and ultimate crucifixion.)

Personally I think it’s more romantic to dissolve my architecture of self back into the dirt, knowing I will become fertilizer to feed bugs, and then in 10s of millions of years, all my energy will be reincarnated into the matter that makes some other unknowable being, whether fauna or mammal ... And FWIW, I am by no means anti-supernatural. I am enamored by hallucinations and dreams, and equal part terrified. I think there is an afterlife, a 3-minute DMT-odyssey that feels like 300 years, equal parts heaven and hell, built into human biology (so long as you don’t disintegrate via nuclear annihilation), but I share this I suppose to show I’m not a square Cartesian. Or maybe, in some ways, if you follow rationality far enough, it eventually becomes inconceivable and super-natural. I think there's a big difference between a rationalist who poo-poos anything but known science, and a rationalist who uses reason to plunge into the numinous (ie: Pythagoras, the alchemists, Jung, etc.). Whether “hallucinations” are actually part of a materialist reality or an “antenna” matter less to me than the idea that non-rational states of consciousness are on par, if not more important to waking states …

Again, all this to say, these are the proto-musings of a Heretic. I do believe I’ve told Taylor once that I have a budding and embarrassing dream to start a new sect of Christianity. On reflecting on it more, it's also a dangerous position to take, more of a threat than an atheist or an outsider, for a non-believer is deemed a fool, but one who reinterprets the same source material is a deranged competitor.

On my walk this morning, I had a few strange ideas, building off the white hole / black hole thing, but also around what “God” is. The universe is a chaos engine. A blackhole sucks in a particular profile of material, and it shoots it out the other end, through a “big bang.” It is mostly noise, collision, non-sense, or nothing, but a separate system is harmonizing, filtering, grouping, cohering, ascending. You might call this “God” or “intelligent design.” (Excuse me for all this imprecise folk science; perhaps one day I will properly research this and upgrade my terminology).

An important caveat is that God is not an architect, not a designer, drawing floor plans, or even a “plan” for everyone or anyone’s life. God is an emergent intelligence. From chaotic explosions, God is the unbelievability that 2 of 2 trillion things can combine or cohere, and then sustain on, and continue moving up the abstraction ladder. The fact that anything can cohere at all is a miracle, and the degree that it can move up the chain is even more so miraculous.

I think this model helps explain “why is there evil the world?” Why floods and bombs? It’s because God is not as all-controlling as we think; he spawns reality as we know it, but does not tinker or micromanage. In no way is God conscious. In some way God is the pairing of things to generate life, and so in a very literal sense, I get now the phrase, “God is Love.”

Love is the fusion of two things that produces a third thing, and that goes to parenting, art, or whatever. Worth noting that love is not absolute. There may be loveless universes, ones that never cohere, that are just noise and nothingness for trillions of years. There could also be universes with far more love.

(...A sublime lens to see your surroundings on a walk is to realize that everything around, your whole world, the history of your society, and all possible realities on Earth, are all within a single sliver of what is possible in the physical engine of the Universe...)

Now, another extension of this thought is that human beings are at a certain level up the chain of the system that they have become “like Gods” or “in the image of God” which means that they’re able to both generate a lot of noise, and also cohere into even higher and higher things; arguable the human is the next link in God’s chain, and we are not the end state (there is no end state!) but our ability to make coherent things is a continuation of God’s process. This means technology isn’t evil, but Godly, but of course, most harmony decays and wobbles, which is what is happening.

I wonder if there’s even a limit to the advances of God into harmony and complexity in the material world, and the task has now been handed over to humans, who can make things beyond the complexities of atoms and galaxies. In that sense, God has made a population of Gods. And somewhere along the line, Christ comes in.

Christ, not as the literal embodiment in Christianity, but more like the logos imbued within the the "sons of God." If our father is a human, then we as his child is human too; so if God is our father, are we not Gods ourselves? But to be Christ-like is different, because God has no morality. In some way, God is unconscious, just an intelligence engine, trying to bring harmony, and to escalate matter to higher levels. God’s counter force has to spray and pray for the hope that God can find some unlikely combination. Christ however, attempts to limit generation, be more intentful with it, and to aim it towards good. Christ is an attempt to steer the self, the other, society, towards higher levels of harmony.

Emerson said a divine intelligence with a simple cause leads to endless variety. We are, rightly so, locked into humanism, but you also can’t assume that man is the ideal end form of this process. For all we known mankind could be relative devils—violent ants, with only a few angels among us—compared to other potential species from past or future in the unknown nooks of spacetime. We could be the necessary chaff, an evolutionary dead end, that’s iterated through in order to let a truly divine species emerge. I’m not implying this in a post-human sense; in fact, the very possibility of man evolving into a mechanical shell of itself could be the proof that we are not a stable species. Dark, but I do mean this all in a positive, hermetic sense, that we come from a cosmic engine that makes mountains, mice, humans, and psychologies unimaginable, which is our role to evolve into.