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The Hellenic View of Existential Risk

anon_vylu said in #2731 3mo ago:

When I was a teen, I read much of the Less Wrong and the rationalist work of the day. This provided the basis for a vague worry surrounding "existential risk." The feeling was pervasive, and I would read works about the dangers of AI or other technology to humanity's future existence and feel a tightening in my stomach, dreading the future.

Recently, I've noticed that this genre of thought has started to feel quite immature to me. This is not meant as a dig at the thinkers, who I generally find intelligent and I respect their ability to reason through difficult problems and act in accordance with their stated values. Instead, I believe it comes down to a lost sense of aesthetics and art that is pervasive in this crowd of intellectuals.

As Nietzsche discusses in "The Birth of Tragedy," we can look at our culture as an "Alexandrine-Socratic" one, which is namely a scientific culture based on the notion of the optimistic exploration of the truth.

What our current intellectuals seem to lack is any real feeling of the "tragic," or in other words the clear perception of the nature of suffering in this world, with the knowledge of the underlying ever present joy that underlies all phenomena. This fact is continuously obstructed under the secular-materialism that rests on the idea that "progress" rests on the continual search of ever deeper truth as the answer to any sense of meaning. After all, why look directly at the suffering in life when the "real work" to be done is also the thing that is valuable?

The Hellenic tragedy is the synthesis of these two worldviews. We can both value the search for truth of nature in this world while also staring into the abyss of human suffering to realize how shallow it actually is, and seeing the real joy underneath.

It is with this perspective that I see existential risk, not as a thing to be stopped or avoided at all costs, but as an aesthetic question of the nature of reality that we ought to lean into. Is our reality in which the pursuit of truth and knowledge destined to lead to self-destruction, or is it the ultimate pursuit to bring us to a higher existence? In answering this question, one way or the other we will get to experience the greatest tragedy or comedy that could ever be written. There is no need to fear the extinction of humanity, as our extinction contains as much beauty and joy as our continued existence.

So I invite others to take this view seriously for a moment and see if you too feel the loosening of the knot in your stomach, created through a sense of worry that there is no need to feel.

referenced by: >>2737

When I was a teen, I

anon_losu said in #2732 3mo ago:

The tragic view of life may be beautiful when applied to the small footprint of the bronze age, but I can't "amor fati" when the likeliest existential risk in the modern world is that, through differential fertility, the median human becomes too dumb and weak to maintain technological society. I think there's a reason that tragedians concern themselves with kings and not slaves, and that no classical author wrote a tragedy about slaves living in the remnants of an abandoned city.

Visualize any x-risk, in specific detail, and you'll see that they don't resemble Sophocles writing Oedipus and his parents falling victim to fate through imperfect knowledge and their own hubris, but more like a post-modern hack killing off his characters in order to frustrate an audience that expects plots to resolve. The only beautiful end to humanity one could imagine is with someone choosing, with full knowledge, to heed Silenus's wisdom for themselves and the rest of the world.

referenced by: >>2735

The tragic view of l

anon_vylu said in #2733 3mo ago:

I don't have a compelling counter-argument but I disagree. Creation is as it is and will continue to be, including the stupid and the bad and the ugly regardless of the outcome of any x-risk scenario.

Even imagining the bleak future of weak toiling slaves as all that remains, my mind is drawn towards the view of how with enough time a superior being will emerge and express its higher will in an even more beautiful way than what could have been enabled by what people think of as the utopian-potentials of most x-risk scenarios.

My thinking is still quite immature on this though and I appreciate the push-back. This is mostly an attempt to capture why I have personally ceased to be compelled by arguments based on existential risk and why I believe those that are doing works which have an existential risk should push forward with even greater vigor.

I don't have a compe

anon_losu said in #2734 3mo ago:

>Even imagining the bleak future of weak toiling slaves as all that remains, my mind is drawn towards the view of how with enough time a superior being will emerge and express its higher will in an even more beautiful way than what could have been enabled by what people think of as the utopian-potentials of most x-risk scenarios.

See, you can't find beauty in the idea of humanity descending to a long endless night of the longhouse, only in the idea that it might one day reverse. Some outcomes are good, and others are bad. One could say that the basis on which one should judge possible futures is not whether humans do or do not exist, but rather *why* do they exist (or not)? Some extinctions would be meaningful, and some perpetuations would be regrettable, same as with individuals.

referenced by: >>2735

See, you can't find

anon_bubo said in #2735 3mo ago:

Great thread OP. When I contemplate AI risk as tragedy, I find it bittersweet but fair. The fair and sweet part is that I think what we create would have to be more human than us, a more perfected kind of superman, to actually pull off the usurpation. Otherwise we would stuff it back in the locker by outmaneuvering it on its blindspots. (Disagreeing with the Yudkowskians here who believe in aesthetically stupid superintelligence-as-papperclipper). The bitter part is of course that it will probably suck to go through that. So the story becomes this:

Zeus warns against giving man fire, says this will overturn and destroy the balance of creation. Prometheus disagrees, thinks man is pathetic without fire, and magnificent with it, even if it will ultimately be to destruction. Man takes fire first on practical terms, grows in almost religious appreciation of it. A few among men see what Zeus saw, that fire will destroy man. Others see what Prometheus saw, that fire will allow man to transcend. Both are correct. The tragedy plays out as man, wrestling with his own uncertainty and destiny, throws himself into the fire as an artist driven to pour his blood into his creation. Magnificent superman arises from fire, overcomes animal man, proving his own superiority in the contest. It's the end of man and the prior natural order, but also a continuation into a new chapter. The stage goes dark, the audience weeps and laughs.

It's a classic tragedy: the hero's own triumph and fatal drive lead to his doom, but we see a justice in it. It's bittersweet but I can accept it. On that I feel aligned with OP.

I can't accept the other story told by >>2732 and >>2734 of mankind's descent into the eternal slave longhouse through differential fertility. That one is not romantic. It just sucks. It's completely unacceptable. That makes a good setting for a glorious story of overcoming and new life, shining golden youth against grey-beige sterility. It demands action. This is also of course the natural course of things: everything dies eventually, including civilizations. Ours is dying. But then new things are born, and that's where we have to put our attention.

With AI risk, Faustian civilization is seemingly locked in to its destiny. All we can do is create and see what happens. It's fatalistic. With fertility risk, there is a more urgent demand for new creation. What is needed is rage and energy. Maybe these are the same story (create/become the superman to overcome the greying?), maybe not.

The rationalists would chimp at using poetry and myth to process these things instead of some cold utility calculation, but I think they are wrong and distracting themselves from the actually important question here. Utility calculations are sometimes instrumentally rational. But this is a situation that demands pre-rational contemplation of ends.

referenced by: >>2737

Great thread OP. Whe

anon_qeja said in #2736 3mo ago:

What is genuine transcendence? Through creation of alleged higher form of being, or through realization of higher form of wisdom? Where does the essence of human rest, the tangible or the intangible part?

And, it seems you are assuming only one path of humanity, yet it may only be the end of one particular civilization.

I don't believe in the transcendence of AI - mere consumption of human output won't be enough.

What is genuine tran

anon_gapy said in #2737 3mo ago:

>>2731
Great post, OP. Most of the X-risk field reflects a spiritual illness and worldview poisoned by utilitarianism.

>>2735
This post is conflating issues. I agree that the slavish longhouse is worthy of concern, but that's a long-term trend, not what is normally meant by X-risk. X-risk almost always refers to a relatively sudden development (within a few year, at most) that wipes out humanity, or close to it. A giant meteor strike, full nuclear war, and fast ASI take-off are paradigm cases. The fact that our society could trend in a very bad direction over the long term is, as I said, a valid concern, but it's a different concern from X-risk as discussed by OP.

referenced by: >>2740

Great post, OP. Most

anon_bubo said in #2740 3mo ago:

>>2737
Well I'm not the one who used the "x-risk" term. I agree the decline fear its not a central example, but the other anons brought it in and it makes an interesting comparison. I'm curious to hear you expand on the utilitarianism point. Utilitarianism is also on my shit list, but the direct connection here could use articulation. I see the xrisk thing as more closely related to the atheism, mortality fear, and belief in totalitarian world government (most people who believe those are utilitarians, of course). To connect it directly to utilitarianism, utilitarianism presupposes a view from nowhere from which one can and should optimize the whole world according to some arbitrary moralistic value schema. X-risk is the perfect utilitarian fear: to destroy all "value" in the world and furthermore prevent the possibility of utilitarian optimization. AI-risk is that even further perfected: x-risk via someone else's utilitarianism! But that's just my take.

referenced by: >>2741

Well I'm not the one

anon_vylu said in #2741 3mo ago:

>>2740
I agree anon, this is why I think the core issue here is the lack of aesthetics or taste in the perception of the world. It is like trying to understand the world with only sight and sound but no touch. You would build all these mental castles about the divinity of image, and how ethereal nature is because you would never be able to engage with creation in a tangible way.

In the same manner, someone who cannot see the beauty in a tragedy is unable to engage with the world in any way other than attempt to correct its tragic "deficiencies." It wouldn't matter if you are a utilitarian and reject the tragic as "negative utility" or if you are a sort of deontologist and describe the tragic as "unjust." Either way you are failing to experience a key aspect of creation as it actually is.

I agree anon, this i

anon_kewu said in #3229 1w ago:

I used to be quite involved but ended up moving away from EA/x-risk folks because of the people. As the OP states, there is something missing from this ideology, and thus missing from the people who engage in it. They miss the beauty, the gestalt, the soul, etc.

The movement not only attracts the wishful, the ones whose life depends on the existence of an overarching reductionist worldview, but also radicalizes them to be even more rigid. It’s an echo chamber that continuously reinforces shared psychological dent.

This is a bit strange since the movement is taking a certain view of the world and doing it honestly, and applying it everywhere. Its extremity demonstrates the failings of its background philosophy.

I used to be quite i

anon_duta said in #3232 1w ago:

I think in this discussion, as well as the places where I generally see this particular kind of critique of EA and x-risk come up, there's a conflation of two intertwined but separable core issues. The first is the factual risk of irreparable damage to the future of human civilization. In broad strokes, I don't think this is particularly controversial — having the entire human race be wiped out or reduced to such dysgenic populations such that we might never regain our present power is just not good. Maybe, to give a strong case for this view, you can argue that there is a tragic or romantic narrative resonance to Faustian civilization being destroyed by some of these fundamental drives that have shaped it. This is somewhat compelling, but it nonetheless seems like a pathological impulse, leaping from some kind of narrative resonance to the explicit or tacit endorsement of the elimination of everything that we as Homo sapiens value in the current world.

The second issue, the element that I think is behind the Hellenic critique of X-risk thinking, is a disgust for the kind of emotional comportment that advocates of effective altruism or X-risk thinking generally display when facing these kinds of issues. For those who subscribe to a broadly utilitarian worldview, the prospect of X-risk is this totalizing evil that wipes out all good and the possibility of any good in the future. Because of the way utilitarianism enshrines "the good" as an ontological supreme end, X-risk has this possibility of maiming the future in a way that is uniquely teleologically damaging. However, for those who are not under the sway of utility derangement syndrome, utility is not posited as the teleological end of human existence or existence writ broadly.

For us, well, X-risk is obviously bad in terms of our involvements and investments in the world, but it doesn't have the same kind of ontological horror as it might for a utilitarian. It's hard to piece out how exactly narrative and tragedy and the sense of life as an element of some larger intentional schema bears on this issue, but I think there is undoubtedly a kind of solace that comes from seeing one's own finite life as a part in the aesthetic production of some larger whole.

This is clear when looking at the smaller but analogous situation of the death of an individual. Someone who "knows," who is able to grasp the fundamental situation of human life through philosophical or mystical means, is able to fully metabolize the possibility and necessity of death and come to terms with it. Death, for such an individual, is a kind of narrative element that is natural and, indeed, fitting. The utilitarian, or as one might say, the degenerated type, can never fully comprehend or overcome the necessity of his own death.

A schema of life that can only look at value from the inside, as it were, is unable to step out and view life as an existent whole, not merely as something in the process of being lived by an individual. The lack of narrative perspective means that one can never "get behind" one's own death, and any attempts to fit death into the individual schema invariably fail. Thus, the common theories of death anxiety as a generative source for religion, social structures, political movements, etc.

Returning now to X-risk, I think it's clear that we should view the possibility of human extinction or the maiming of the human future as a real possibility, and an evil to be avoided by any means necessary. However, the way that one should comport oneself towards this possibility is the same as the way that one should comport oneself to the possibility of one's own death: calmly, collectively, and without any hysteria or self-pity. Denying oneself the joy of living simply because one fears a possibility of annihilation is stupid and infantile.

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