On Delusion of a Post-Truth World
An illusion is simply a mismatch between how something appears to us and how it really is. Think of a mirage and a conspiracy theory. The former is an illusion. We think water is on the horizon when there is actually none. The latter is also an illusion. We think the moon landing was a fake when we have no idea so just make shit up. If we actually live as if it is true, it is a delusion. So what of ‘truth’?
Plato came up with an idea two and a half millennia ago that stuck with us ever since. In philosophy it’s called Platonic dualism. In actuality, it is called being right, as in being correct. He convinced everyone that knowledge comes from ‘Truth’ which is a perfect ideal arrived at under the pure shining light of reason. All we need for knowledge is to religiously follow the pure shining light of reason and we get to ‘Truth’, the realm of perfection of everything, but pretty much just perfect geometric forms.
Of course, you had to be a legitimate member of society to get to ‘Truth’ which was, you guessed it, well-to-do educated males. Truth, the end attained by a single-track mind linear logic obsession, was codified into the formative years of the western cultural tradition. The religiosity required was an opportunity too good to pass by. The opportunity to be right because one had ‘Truth’ on one’s side was taken up by a bunch of fanatics, sorry, ‘believers’, and adapted into Christianity while keeping the membership rules. Now we had ‘God’ as the fount of absolute truth, knowledge and rightness. The same external absolute perfect ideal, just wrapped in moralistic packaging only understandable by well-to-do educated males.
The fundamental mechanism of ‘truth’ was then, and is now, no more than correlation of experience of the world involving more than one person. It is not a complex thing to understand in spite of epistemology — five people are arguing vehemently over who is right about animals being dangerous don’t see the hungry lion stalking them. A short while later, the remaining four agree it is ‘true’ that animals are dangerous. To claim there is absolute universal truth is bullshit in that it is a claim made with no regard for the obvious ‘truth’ that we cannot truthfully say what is absolute and/or universal.
In other words, there has never been a ‘truth world’ in the sense that grounds the western cultural tradition. So, to believe and act as if there is a ‘post-truth’ world makes no sense. It is a delusion. We have always been making shit up to suit our particular personal desires, goals, objectives, angles, that range from the narcissistic to the altruistic. All that has happened now is that we’ve come up with technological means of turning the world and all in it, including humans, into a giant database to be crawled by machines controlled by a very very small number of narrow-visioned fanatics in the name of ‘the greater good’ largely driven by money and self-gratification.
On AI
Let us cut to the chase on this. It is an existential threat being foisted upon human societies by fanatics under the seemingly unquestionable claim ‘technological progress is good for humanity’. It is in effect a threat — any naysayers are depriving ‘humanity’ of a greater good — that imprisons society.
No matter how it is glossed up, how much lipstick in slathered over it, it is still a pig. A very large and extremely dangerous tusker sporting the lastest shade of ‘Greater Good Pink’. Yet, there are those, such as Avi Loeb, among others, who would have the world believe turning off an AI — which is nothing more than a very sophisticated computer program in a very sophisticated digital box — is tantamount to murdering a baby. We might wonder what the Christians who have been infiltrating the western political systems over the past decades will make of this? Once we start building a sophisticated computational system, we won’t be able to stop because it is the equivalent of killing an unborn human.
Yes, it is purposely hyperbolic to highlight the inherent absurdity. I’ve no doubt there are many theses that have been and can be written on this. But, to get to the bottom of the cause of the tribal war over this nonsensical idea we really only need to look at what is at the heart of ‘truth’ — us, humans, and some kind of strange inexplicable drive to not be wrong, to be right, to be the owner and guardian of ‘truth’. We only need to pull back the veil covering the ideas of copyright and citation and ask, “hello, is there anybody in here?”, to find the culprit.
So why dump, maybe unfairly, on AI and ‘true believers’? Well, this gets us to Nazis, or at least one, and a deeply prophetic insight of some seventy years ago.
On Nazis and Prophetic Insight
I’ll admit to being one of those kinds of people who think the world needs to know the astonishing, if long-existing, idea just discovered, whether the world wants to or not. This is very much the case from recently reading German philosopher and one-time Nazi, Martin Heidegger’s essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. Some in the environmental field, and certainly many in philosophy, will already know it. A bit of context is warranted for those who don’t.
To some, including a Jewish student of his, a well-known and respected political theorist, Hannah Arendt, Heidegger was a flawed genius. His philosophy of how we exist in the world as the kind of beings we are, known as hermeneutic phenomenology, turned on its head the Platonic idea of knowledge being some kind of ideal absolute truth illuminated into existence by the perfect shining light of pure reason. In a nutshell, to spend any time speculating about absolutes and transcendental stuff that cannot be known through the only means we have of being in and of the world, our conscious experience, is just, well, stupid. We are conscious beings that stand in relation to the world and all it in, just as we are necessarily of it. In other words, all we can say with any reasonable sense about what is ‘true’ is from within the perspective of embodied worldly beings enmeshed with each other in the world.
The problem for many was and is that he was a member of the Nazi Party from the late 1930s to the end of the war. To say his politics were and are on the nose is flippant understatement that makes light of the sheer repugnance of what happened. But, and this is the important bit, his politics can easily and plausibly be separated from his metaphysics — his thoughts on what it is to be, to exist, in a conceptual sense, as the kind of beings we are. It is important because if we ‘cancel’ him, we overlook the question of how it is a Nazi could have been so astonishingly prophetic about the existential dangers of technology that have led to very real existential threats we see happening and growing around us today.
Technology and Danger
Just after World War Two, Heidegger wrote about the extreme dangers of technology. In a nutshell, Heidegger thought technology as such, as a means to a human end, known as the instrumental view, was not intrinsically bad. After all, it had taken our primal ancestors from being entirely at the mercy of the world to being reasonably self-sufficient while nonetheless finding a kind of balance with the world. However, what was intrinsically bad was to believe this instrumental view is the nature of technology, the only way we can, and must, see technology. To do so is to delude ourselves. This is what we find in modern science and technology.
The nature of technology is not itself technological. What he means by this is that it is not an abstract idea of ‘tool’ as an object for a purpose that we put to use. This is ‘means-to-an-end’, the instrumental view. For Heidegger, the nature of technology is that it ‘enframes’ the world. It has a kind of causal agency in that it mediates and changes our view of what the world is, and how we relate to it. It is a frame of reference through which we conceive of the world and our relationship to it.
For instance, back in the day, a plough and a horse were a way to both feed the family and earn a living by helping to feed the village. Yes, it can be said to be a subsistence existence or, more romantically put, being a part of the world by taking only what was sufficient to live. Now, a ‘plough’ is an automated GPS-guided cultivating air-seeder that can plant a wheat crop over tens of thousands of acres stripped bare of nature for the purposes of making a profit out of mass producing food. This we call technological progress for the greater good of society.
What Heidegger pointed out just after World War Two was that it is the distinction between technology as such, and modern technology driven by science in particular, that entails a danger. The former conceives of the world as being the whole within which we are a part taking just enough. The latter allows us to conceive ourselves as standing alongside the world as a storehouse of resources for consumption, what Heidegger called ‘standing reserve’. It is this that he thought of as representing an extreme danger.
When we see the world as nothing but a standing resource to consume, we include all in the world in this. Unsurprisingly, this means us as well. Humans. To bring this all together, the mantra that tells us that scientific and technological progress are necessary for the ongoing evolution of human societies, for its greater good, also entails the inconvenient ‘truth’ that we are all counted as cannon fodder in the name of said greater good. Sadly for a very large number of us in the world today, we have been living exactly this through the advent, commercialisation, and embedment of digital systems in general, and AI in particular, to such a point as being now ‘too-big-to-fail’.
So when we talk about science and technology being the means by which we can seek ‘truth’ by ordering and measuring the world in a highly efficient systematic way, and put ‘Greater Good Pink’ lipstick on it, we suppose that each and everyone of us are mere guinea pigs waiting in standing reserve. It is deeply ironic that this danger, and the danger of consuming the only world that will sustain us, fail to have any effect on ‘progress’.
Denouement
The sheer profundity of Heidegger’s insight may well be matched by the sheer perplexity of how a Nazi was so profoundly insightful. But, we can speculate it is not so perplexing in light of a pragmatic understanding of how the repugnant National Socialist ideology was able to so efficiently murder so many people (think: ~4,250 per day over eleven years). This was something Heidegger watched at a distance yet with immediacy in real time just as many experienced the terrible reality. When technology is ‘just’ a means to an end, then it clearly doesn’t matter how repugnant or obscure the end, it takes on a momentum and life of its own. Unsurprisingly, Heidegger said something about this as well. He called it ‘destiny’, although not in a mystical sense. It can be best understood as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or in modern terms, ‘too-big-to-fail’. In other words, once something takes root in society, the ability to change it by that society becomes increasingly problematic to the point of letting time and happenstance take its course.
So, did Heidegger offer any solution to his dire prediction?
Yes.
What he said was that the solution is a ‘saving power’ that resides in the same place as the danger, the enframing power. The closer we get to realising the extreme danger the closer we get to the saving power. In other words, the more the existential threat is immanent, a clear and present danger to more people, the more the idea of ‘saving’ becomes possible, realisable. The reason why is obvious — the inertia against change is simply tossed aside by the sheer power of an aggregated primal urge to survive over a large number of people. An observation that can be drawn from Covid-19.
For Heidegger, the path that leads to the ‘saving power’ is art, and philosophy as questioning what it is to be the kinds be beings we are in the world is the light which illuminates this path. His ending thoughts were along the lines of hoping it never gets to the point of impending collapse. The implications are obviously significant. Anything less than a change to the hyper-consumption paradigm entailed by modern technology, science, and economics ordering the world as standing-reserve won’t be enough.
On Being Philosophical
As Noam Chomsky recently pointed out, it is fun to have an argument over who is ‘right’, but the reality of the world as it is is that the only issue left to rant about is the risks and benefits of AI. How to minimise the harm AI/AGI is already bringing, and will inevitably bring, to human societies while extracting the implied promise of the ‘greater good for all’. We might say the same about theoretical physicists and research into quantum theory. Think: Oppenheimer. The sad, repugnant fact is that to continue to research these kinds of technologies in the world as it is today is exactly the kind of thing a Nazi warned us about because of what he experienced. Only technology now is as magic compared to then.
What is so astonishing about Heidegger’s insight is how prophetic it was and is. But, maybe not? The sheer repugnance of what may have led to the insight, the efficient systematic murder of millions of humans who were seen as being expendable for a ‘greater good’ as repugnant as it was, as being standing reserve no matter what for, grounds the same paradox that led Hannah Arendt to observe equally profoundly during Eichmann’s war crimes trial how evil is not necessarily embodied but hides in plain sight. In doing so, Arendt was being philosophical.
So where does this bring us to? Well, in spite of Heidegger’s political affiliations which he only spoke of once after the war, leaving an unqualified expression of being troubled by something that was his greatest regret open to interpretation, his thoughts on how to get to some sense of ‘saving power’ still resonate. We get there not by ‘being right’, not by pissing out a boundary around ‘truth’ as if it is some kind of illuminated ground under the shining light of disembodied disengaged pure reason, but by humbly questioning and seeking. Not by seeing the world and all in it merely as humungabytes of data, as information, to be crawled over to fabricate ‘truth’ out of, but by questioning the bullshit that AI is ‘just a tool’ we can control. For Heidegger, ‘doing philosophy’ was about questioning our existence to a point of ‘being philosophical’, and, hopefully, the answers are sufficient cause to warrant change.
One way of viewing Heidegger’s philosophy is seemingly deeply ironic — from a spiritual angle that holds we are all a part of something much bigger than ourselves. We can construe his philosophy on being the kinds of beings we are in the kind of world that sustains us, and his concerns about seeing the world and all in it, including us, as mere standing reserve, as being thoroughly grounded in this sense. Things matter. The world matters. We matter. We have things that matter to us. And drawing this conclusion from his philosophy, we can say he unwittingly grounded the reason why AI is bullshit and ‘truth’ is not absolute, simply because neither have the capacity to care.
Yes, it’s rank romanticism and moralistic fallacy. Maybe if we cared a little more about understanding each other and the world as the kinds of beings we are in relation to the world that sustains us, if we tried just a tiny little bit more being philosophical about not needing to ‘be right’, if we spent a tiny little bit more time questioning life instead of unquestioningly performing it at speed just to stay on screen, things might change a little away from world + human = consumable resource for billionaire sociopaths and nationalistic military industrial complexes. We can laugh at this as being not how the world is, and there is much evidence for this even as all this is saying is that this is not how humans with power, wealth, and influence have enframed the world through science and technology, and ego. But, I suspect most anyone who has yet to have the innocence of youth stripped from them, and many who already have, including me, would see some sense in holding out hope nonetheless.
