This is Fucking Serious.

The human brain is a marvel of biological machinery. It is the most complex object in the universe, known to us. Despite what recent advances in artificial intelligence may lead some people to believe, the mechanics of how our conscious mind works, remains a complete mystery to science. Now, I believe as a philosophical naturalist, that understanding consciousness is within the grasps of science. At least, in principle. But could we ever understand our own consciousness, even if we had all of the equations, describing the mechanical laws of how it all worked in front of us?

Well, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-4’s model which powers ChatGPT, give us some reasonable clues as to our own capacity to truly understand ourselves, at least in a way that truly conveys intuitive understanding of the whole. What I’m talking about is the current gap of understanding of how these LLMs actually work. While we have incredibly precise understanding of the constituent parts of the model, it is the emergent properties which remain somewhat opaque to our intuitive understanding of the world.

I suspect that even once we’ve fully figured out exactly what is going on inside LLMs in precise terms, that we still won’t quite understand it. At least, not in our conscious space. The distance between our brain’s ability to reason about the world around it, and the sheer complexity that makes up conscious thought will push beyond our own limitations. But most of us don’t want to accept this. We are taken by our ego, and our confidence in our ability to understand make sense of the world. But in this domain, we humans, suffer deep limitations.

Now, I don’t want the tone of this to come off as misanthropic. Because I love humanity and I love the sense of awe that my mere existence visits upon me every time I think about it. But one central aspect of my own personal journey, with myself of late, is a profound acceptance of my own limitations. Because my limitations are there. They’re real, and without them, I wouldn’t be me. And as it is for all of us. We have limitations. Beautiful limitations.

The signs we are pushing our brains over a cliff is all around us. Our increasing incapacity to even agree on a common reference frame for what is true or not true about basic news events happening in real-time, at a time of hyper-connected, information rich culture, is deeply troubling. The other sign that I think might be cause for something more akin to alarm for our collective social psychology is how our sense of time, and relative importance of events has become wildly distorted. People joke about how in today’s world, we can’t even remember what happened two weeks ago. In fact, just two weeks after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, people were remarking that they’d forgotten it had even happened. A phenomenon that I’m sure most, if not all, readers today have experienced.

We joke about it. About how funny it is, that our collective social consciousness can’t even keep track of one moment to another. But what if this isn’t funny at all? What if this is a canary in the coal mine for our own human limitations. Because, I might add there is absolutely nothing funny about forgetting that there was an assassination attempt on a former President, who tried to illegally steal the last election, and may very well win this one. There’s nothing funny about the deeply serious and dangerous things happening around the world, that we are collectively struggling to organize our civilization and cultures around. It’s not like the stakes are staying the same. In fact, the stakes are rapidly rising, and reaching far into existential territory. Nuclear war, climate change, artificial intelligence, synthetic biological super weapons, democratic collapse, etc. These are all deeply serious problems that all demand our deeply serious attention if we are at all invested in our own, let alone, our children’s future.

Now I won’t hide my biases here about it. But I am damned sure that Donald Trump and others like him are not our answers here. They can’t be. Because they are out for themselves, in a world of anti-social self-actualization. These people are chasing the dopamine rush that their narcissistic pursuits reward them with, while bathing in the luxuries that other’s intellectual pursuits deserve the credit for, while they hunt down and discredit those intellectuals. The Politics of Me has very little use for those of us preoccupied with the questions around the Politics of Us. It is not a constructive element in our society. It is extractive. Not generative.

It’s hard to even have these conversations when we are not aware of our own limitations. When we’re completely incapable of the nuance and modesty that these moments demand of us. No matter what anybody tells you: the answers to most of these problems are not simple. The causes are not always clear. Joe Biden didn’t cause inflation. Donald Trump didn’t keep inflation low. That’s not how any of this actually works. Most of the inflationary effects of the COVID-era stimulus were completely locked in by Biden’s inauguration. We have absolutely no reason to believe whatsoever that Trump would have been more proactive here, had he been re-elected president. In fact, considering he has consistently objected to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, and giving the President direct control of rate-setting, we have every reason to believe that the inflation situation would have been worse under Trump. And if that’s making you laugh, then I might suggest you’re not slowing down and thinking very carefully about it.

If you’re laughing at the suggestion that Trump would have been worse on inflation, then I think you are unaware of your own limitations of how you understand the world. Because there isn’t a reasonable argument to be made that he would have. Pointing to 2019, and saying “well how do you explain low inflation in 2019?” is a profoundly stupid question. Inflation wasn’t high in 2016 in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, either. Suggesting that Trump managed inflation well is to suggest he somehow even had a set of policies that were well-suited to keeping inflation low. But the massive increase in deficit spending under his administration, reaching levels close to that seen during the 2008 Financial Crisis, during a time of healthy economic expansion, is not what any reasonable person could say looks like good policy for managing inflation. This kind of policy arrangement is practically guaranteeing higher future inflation, by definition! The fact it doesn’t happen right away doesn’t say anything. The problems can be kicked down the road for years or even decades — if you have the demographics to support it. But the notion we would have had the 2019 Economy in 2021 had Trump been president, is just about the most unsupportable and intellectually bankrupt notion that one can make, if you actually take any amount of time to try and understand how any of this works. But because of our limitations, not all of us have the time, energy or wherewithal to even try to understand these deeply serious issues with the attention they deserve. So we substitute in explanations like: the economy was good in 2019 when Trump was president, so his economic policies must be good, and if we had those policies again it can be like 2019 again. This is compelling heuristic I suppose, if you have no time to develop a more refined one. But I can guarantee you, it’s about as unsophisticated and stupid as it gets in understanding economics and politics. Trump actually knows this, and his huckster instinct is to flood you with so much bullshit, that this is all you have to work with, and you’ll let him come in and rape and pillage your country. Because you’re just a mark to him.

If you are actually gullible enough to believe that Kamala Harris is a mortal threat to American capitalism, freedom of speech and democracy, as this rising fascist cabal of political power out of Silicon Valley is trying so desperately hard to convince you of, then there’s probably not much I’m going to be able to do here to convince you otherwise. But for the rest of you, who come at this from a somewhat less insular perspective, let me warn you of something: it is these people who are out for your freedom of speech and your democracy. They are literally wolves circling what they think is a dying carcass of the American political order. They have been convinced by the dark thinking of Curtis Yarvin and other post-libertarian thinkers about the need for something akin to a monarchy. These people are deeply fucking dangerous. They have way too much power and way too much money.

The government’s job is to protect property rights, yes. But only within the trust of the social contract. If you break that trust and use your economic power to step outside the boundaries of law, or make an end-run around the proper authority of the state to protect the common interest, then the government is able to adjust its defense of your property rights appropriately. Libertarians and Silicon Valley techno-libertarians hate this. They insist that property rights should be inviolable, and actually precede law. And while there are many honest libertarian thinkers, what these people — from Elon Musk, to Marc Andreessen, Keith Rabois, and others — are fighting for is merely the capacity of these people to seize political power for their own ends. They believe they can run the world better, and they are prepared to do what it takes to remove their obstacles to obtaining that power. But understand, that they are driven not by a sense of your freedom, but their own. To use their vast resources of money and wealth, as they see fit, free from any democratic accountability. Let alone to regulators of the administrative state they are seeking to dismantle, but to Congress or any of the machinery of government to restrain them. They are, in fact, 21st century fascists. Propelled by their egos of their impressive economic and technological successes, they have fallen headfirst into a dark Nietzschean, will to power frame, that if not confronted, would sunset our entire experiment in self-government.

If you can’t see what is right in front of your face, then I’m afraid to say that you are deeply unaware of your own limitations.

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