The third in my series of essays on the collapse of meaning. First here. Second here.
Nietzsche: God is Dead.
AI: Science is Dead.
I don’t suffer from intellectual vertigo. The world changes, sometimes rapidly, but I have ridden the wave to whatever comes next. I fancy myself knowing the difference between fad and substance: the science of meditation is a fad, the science of consciousness has substance. So why is it that I have been finding myself disoriented the last few months, as if the ground beneath my feet has turned to quicksand?
The immediate reason, of course, is AI, but the machine god is a symptom of the collapse of meaning, not its underlying cause. What is this ‘collapse of meaning’? What can we do about it and how?
The answer, my friend, lies in the Axial Age.
No, not really; but better questions lie awaiting in the Axial Age. Quick review in case you haven’t heard the term ‘Axial Age.’ Karl Jaspers coined the term to mark that strange, fertile pivot between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, when across Eurasia - in Greece, Israel, Persia, India, and China - human consciousness seemed to reinvent its orientation to life, the universe and everything else without centralized coordination.
Out went the old, immersive cosmos of local spirits, sacrificial propitiation, and tribal myth. In came the universalizing leap: the Hebrew prophets, Socrates, Zoroaster, the Upanisadic sages, the Buddha, Confucius, and Laozi. For the first time, human beings stood back from the world to judge it against an ideal horizon. We invented the tension between the mundane and the transcendent, the empirical fact and the ethical norm, the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. We invented the individual moral agent, the universal truth, and the search for an ultimate ground, be it Brahman, the Dao, the Logos, or God.
The Axial house has stood for two and a half millennia. Secular modernity, the Enlightenment, and even modern science did not erase its foundations; the house still stands, but with its interior rearranged, swapping out divine revelation for natural law, salvation for progress. While I am no historian, it looks like the Axial world co-evolved with the various technologies of inscription, writing in particular, with every leap - such as print - resulting in massive rearrangements of the furniture.
Computation is a new kind of new: it doesn’t restrict itself to inscribing; it can also manipulate. If writing in its various avatars is a symbolic technology, ways of pointing at the world, then computation, IMHO, is a whole new technology, one that points and pushes at once. It’s more than a leap. And as a result:
The Axial house has collapsed, at least for me.
IMHO, what we are witnessing is not a rearrangement of the contents of the Axial container. It is the exhaustion of the container itself: the end of an epoch that gave birth to the very idea of human-centered reason and the inscriptional mechanisms through which that human-centered reason was stabilized and replicated across space and time (and I am aware of the irony of using inscriptions to describe the end of inscriptions…ah well…). The age we are entering expands the human-centered world in at least two directions:
Expanding our sense of ‘we’ to include non-human creatures and their wisdom, as well as the inanimate world, at least to the extent of the earth’s geochemical processes, if not further out into the solar system and beyond.
Expanding our tools for thought to include not just dead tree recordings (i.e., pen on paper), but also forms of knowledge that change and move on their own, i.e., AI.
These are just the forms of expansion I am grappling with; who knows what else remains to be discovered? What is coming isn’t a new Axial Age, but something else altogether.
The Gods can’t Save us
Martin Heidegger was a great philosopher. He was also a Nazi. Towards the end of his life, Heidegger gave a wide ranging interview to Der Spiegel. It’s main purpose was to rehabilitate his reputation, but in the process of doing so, he also shared his concerns about the technical world we inhabit.
I read that interview not too long ago, and am reminded about it daily, as one theorem after another tumbles to the new machine god. But first a a little bit of gossip about the interview itself. Heidegger insisted that the transcript should not be published while he was alive; he died in late May 1976, and Der Spiegel ran the text within days under the now-famous headline, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten” - “Only a god can save us.”)
To which I might respond, as Stalin did to the Pope: how much compute has your God?
Heidegger’s command over the cunning of reason comes through many a time in the interview, but nowhere more so than in his pivot toward the planetary scale: modern technology (die Technik). For Heidegger, the catastrophe of the mid-twentieth century was not a local German aberration, but the violent symptom of an ontological uprooting. Americanism, Soviet Communism, European Fascism - these were merely the provincial dialects of a single global machine. Or to use his own language, Nazism was a regional ontology, while the fundamental ontology remains obscured: the ontology of the machine.
Modern technology is not an instrument human beings hold in their hands and command; it is an overarching framework, an enframing that converts nature, human life, and thought itself into standing reserve, mere functional inputs for continuous planetary mobilization. The human subject has ceased to be the master of the machine; the machine has colonized the horizon of what can appear as real.
Did we ever think we would master this machine? Was it always a tragedy in waiting?
Only a god can save us. I don’t think so. There’s no God. But there’s Cybernetics. Heidegger himself says:
Heidegger: Philosophy [today] dissolves into individual sciences: psychology, logic, political science.
Spiegel: And what now takes the place of philosophy?
Heidegger: Cybernetics.
I don’t think he was being hopeful, but I have a better impression of the Cybernetic impulse than Heidegger did. Heidegger identifies the need for a discipline that coordinates between the sciences that have dissolved into specializations. If anything the dissolution is even more extreme today, and in that sense, there’s an even more urgent need for a new general science of connection and coordination between the sciences, replacing metaphysics.
That general science isn't Cybernetics, but it's the closest we have right now.
That general science has been my project ever since I left mathematics (after rejecting my youthful romantic hope that mathematics was that most general science). Twenty Five years of meandering through Indian Philosophy, Complex Systems, Embodied Cognition etc have now hit the hard rock of AI. I was two decades too early when I left the union of theorem provers. Two subsequent developments:
the extreme atomization of science of which generative AI is both the symptom and cause
the flood of theorems and the possibility of complete automation of knowledge work
These developments reveal the end state of the regime, with the machine god clear in outline if not in detail.
One last speculation: the Axial age started with the revelation of Gods in the past, in history, but it’s ending with the revelation of the Machine in the future. Divinity in transcendental form and divinity in mechanical form are the bookends of time, one running forward from the past to the future, and the other running backward from the future to the past.
so what is to be done?
