It strikes me that the two stories from this post have a link. Banks' ship-minds are eminently rational, yet they have just enough quirks to have (mostly peaceful) disagreements. If I recall correctly, they are utilitarian, often directing the morally gray 'Special Circumstances' agents through grisly missions where the ends justify the means. Ship-minds are the benevolent caretakers of the humans in the Culture, but they occasionally convince adventurous people to take massive personal risks to further their grand civilizational plans.
As you say, the only forms of violence that can hurt now are the very large and very small scale. These too-online bombers see themselves as a sort of SC agent for their message-boards, who can be seen as the 'minds' calling the shots. In a corresponding manner, I think Elon sees himself as a sort of ship-mind: he is shepherding us into the better future he envisions for us, and deciding which precious cargo can be jettisoned to get us there faster. Picard, at least, would detach the civilians from the officers before making a risky charge.
If your goal is truly to get us into AI anarcho utopia, then be a bit more rational: you will certainly die before glimpsing anything remotely resembling Banks novels. We should focus less on the Culture and more on the primitive, flawed societies in his books, because they are much closer to what we are dealing with.
A great book on "Radical Utilitarianism" of a different strain is Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar. The title might make it sound like it's all about Peter Singer and Effective Altruism, and these concepts do get name-checked throughout the book, but it's mostly profiles of the lives of extreme altruists and how they arrived at their worldview.
Profiling these individuals back to back to back makes their similarities really clear: they all share a worldview that definitely matches your phrase "Radical Utilitarianism." Unlike the Silicon Valley effective altruists who basically see utilitarianism as one big linear optimization problem, these extreme altruists seemed to have over-developed skills of abstract thought. One example I still remember is that three different profiles mentioned the subjects stopped believing in God when they realized that so much of the world followed some other religion, and there was no reason to believe one was "correct" over the others.
I feel like EA zealots, the extremists described in your post, or these extreme altruists all think about the world in an abstract manner that's strange and off-putting to most people. The book does a great job of exploring worldview while profiling extremely interesting, and often admirable people. Abstract thought like this is more accessible than ever, and not just on forums.
I picked up the book because it inspired the "Bad Art Friend" situation several years ago, I definitely didn't think I'd be talking about it in contexts like this.
Oh, that's fascinating—I hadn't really thought of the connection but it seems totally right. "Overdeveloped abstract thinking" is a good way to put it, as maybe would be a failure to compartmentalize... an inability to prevent their own chains of abstract logic from conquering their entire being. One thing about the internet, too, as you suggest, is that it allows people who think in this kind of way to find each other, and exacerbate each other's out-of-control "rationalism."
Aren't The Culture books really about the Minds and all of their organic pets a/k/a "humans"? (I remember them being a couple of organie human like races whose genetic code was rewritten by the minds so they everyone could interbreed.)
In the use of weapons for example the main thing is about how to rescue a trapped baby Mind, since that was what was important.
The idea that its economic socialism and the moralism of intervention and all of that is superficial. There's no talk about augmenting people, or giving them new intelligences or whatever, all of that is relegated to the machines/Minds/AI or whatever. The world is filled with technological benevolent Gods where humans are domesticated.
Exactly. The humans of the Culture are living in a post-scarcity paradise created and maintained by their benevolent AI gods. It always struck me as much more prelapsarian than socialist or anarchic.
Culture humanoids are extremely augmented through genetic engineering and cybernetics, particularly if they’re Contact or Special Circumstances agents. In the era of the books, the fashion is a more “classical” balance. But that’s a cultural norm, not an imposition.
I’d say that Minds and humanoids in the Culture live in a moral symbiosis, driven by the desire to experience. It’s why they’re one of the oldest civilizations in the setting that haven’t mass-transcended. They’re still having fun.
'It would be wrong, given how isolated each of our examples was, and dissimilar the ultimate forms of their utilitarianism were, to think of this as a “movement” or even as a “philosophy”--it seems to me more to be a kind of pattern of thought, cultivated, exacerbated, and calcified online.'
I'll offer my two cents (I happen to be a clinical psychologist who worked for a number of years with violent offenders in prisons and psychiatric hospitals, as well as community mental health centers)-
Let's not be too quick to dismiss the possibility a person can be mentally ill, and severely mentally ill at that, and still express superficially coherent notions. That a person might be well read, and can recite philosophical sounding terms and elaborate concepts, does not preclude profound psychological disturbance, including elements of psychosis (e.g. delusions, paranoia and what is termed formal thought disorder).
Human beings are predisposed to constructing a consistent narrative of events, so we feel less at the mercy of inexplicable behavior and events. But we should not mistake that wish for things to fit into a comprehensible narrative for an accurate account.
However this person saw their actions, or anyone else seeks to make sense of them, they can simply be the result of psychopathology.
For sure, it’s overstating the role of philosophy to frame that as the driver rather than these folks having a screw loose, with the specific doctrine being incidental. I think a lot of people made a similar error with SBF. I saw a lot of takes about how utilitarianism caused him to do crimes, whereas imo it’s much more plausible he wanted to make money/gain status through crime and utilitarianism was primarily a cynical marketing ploy (iirc he admitted as such) and secondarily a tool of self-justification.
I’d also note that pretty much any political violence relies on consequentialist logic, but that kind of reasoning is far from unique to utilitarianism. Pretty much any philosophy a sufficient number of young men get into is eventually going to grow vigilantes.
Whether a philosophical framework, or more narrowly, an ideology, serves as a prompt to engage in violence depends (as I see it) entirely on something more fundamental, something that precedes the formation of a philosophy or ideology, and that is worldview.
If the person’s worldview permits violence in certain circumstances, allows them to see violence as warranted, then they can contemplate engaging in violence. I’m not saying this is always or inherently wrong, but I am saying the conceptual framing is subsequent to this, and serves simply as a system of justification for the acts of violence.
All political violence (by individuals, groups, nations), all police violence, is (or can be) presented as legitimate according to some system of justification.
The question, of course, is whether we accept or reject the premises of that system of justification, in which contexts, and so forth.
“ But in some ways this is probably what we should expect from acts of violence in the 21st century. The kinds of organized, militant, ideological groups that committed what might be called “terrorism” or “political violence” in the U.S. from the 1970s onwards have largely been dismantled or infiltrated by the security state.”
Great point imo. Whether or not the FBI can fairly apply the label “nihilistic violent extremist”, it strikes me as a pretty good label for the phenomenon. If you’re doing political violence solo, hard to feel like you’re accomplishing much unless it’s in support of something nihilistic.
Excellent post. I have been thinking something similar for a long time, but I was more focused on the role of Special Circumstances and violence in maintaining the Culture. (A place where Schmitt and Foucault meet?) I'm not sure it would bear close reading, but a reader can see many of the stories as a long validation of the "Good Guy With a Gun" theory. (I had also picked up on the anxieties about finding meaning in a post-scarcity world, but I mostly -- not entirely -- read those as earnest explorations from our limited viewpoints very much defined by scarcity mindsets.)
I tend to the thought that's it's doubtful that Musk or Bezos has actually read any of the Culture books. They're all very long. Can you imagine either one those guys sitting down and reading a 400-600 page book? It' seems much more likely they paid for a 10 slide PowerPoint presentation to be prepared. It would certainly explain why they would focus on the tech and not the economic or political themes of the stories.
How interesting that Western thinkers are considering various dystopian futures while China's course and progress towards dàtóng–a future that looks wildly utopian to us–is unchanged since Confucius plotted it and Mao reaffirmed it.
"Imagine the impact on European civilization of a series of Imperial dynasties maintaining the self-same style and significance from Caesar Augustus until the First World War. Now imagine such a civilization existing on the other side of the planet unaware of Greek philosophy, the alphabet, Roman governance, Christianity, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or democracy, but with its own, unique cultural and institutional correlates that exceeded all of them in intellectual subtlety and material success". Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations
Really enjoyed the bit on negative utilitarianism and would love to read even more of your thoughts on it.
I don't have a fully coherent thought here but I'm in the process of rereading Dosteovsky's Demons/The Devils/The Possessed and keep thinking of the philosophy of radical revolutionary action in Tsarist Russia and how it informs or contradicts our understanding of the efficacy of similar actions in the present day. I'm also thinking that I enjoy the hell out of a modern piece of fiction that delves into people who fall down these radicalisation pathways.
Worth pointing out that in its original form Nihilism as a philosophy had a kind of positive view of the future. The Russian peasants suicide bombing Tsarist officials weren’t doing so out of a pure urge for self-abnegation but a desire to utterly destroy existing *institutions* of human life so that we could create something new and radically free-er from the wreckage. In that sense the fertility clinic bombing could be seen as more authentically Nihilist with a capital N than others committing “nihilistic terrorism”.
The goofy thing about all the versions of scary utilitarianism floating around is that the numbers persist in all being made up. If you conclude, as other philosophers have, that the being alive has a slight positive valence, or maybe that utility doesn't work according to this basic integral, well, then all of this doesn't make any sense. It cuts the same way with the TESCREAL crew- if you sensibly conclude that the answer to 'how can I usher in a world of 10^43 blissful beings' is, 'meh, probably nothing,' then you're free to make normal-ass actual moral choices again.
Re: The Culture- it's true that there's a degree of technological determinism in the formula, but in later books we're also presented with the notion that there was some kind of negotiations or conferences that led to the birth of the Culture, and notably that there were technological and moral peers that said 'eh, no thanks', especially in light of the centering of the Minds in their cultural decision making (namely the Gzilt in the Hydrogen Sonata, who found other, more human-centric ways to nevertheless remain a comparable power).
I dunno, even if we can find a way for the kleptocrats to see themselves in the road to the Culture, there simply isn't any doubt that they are the people Special Circumstances would come for- and on the flip side, if by the end of even the first book you think all of this is an unalloyed case for the Culture-as-good-guys, well, then, you've missed the core point of at least four of the books.
Which is to say, techbros can't actually read for shit, it seems.
I love how the mentally ill population attempt to paint all 3 noteworthy "tech-giants" (I put tech giants in quotes due to the fact of their painfully obvious ties to Intel agencies long before acquiring their global billions) as edgy, 'alt-right' crypto-fasheez, when a year or two ago, 2/3 of these tech-spooks were actively running interference for the DNC/DC baby blood-drinkers cult; by willingly & deceitfully censoring anything critical of the zombie who barely occupied the presidency for the prior 4 year term. But if you a a k them now, they had no choice but to comply!! (Under threat of whatever blackmail their handlers had on them, videotaped @ Jeff and Jizz's island resort).
These tech-puppets for the ruling class , as well as lap dogs for the worst aspects of this mafioso ran government we're all now forced to endure. With all that said, ya gotta be pretty low in IQ points to STILL get whipped up by the divisive left/right paradigm like the author here. If Rachel maddow said it , you can bet your life savings that it came from the highest level of NSA DIA CIA FBI spook, but that's good enough for the author.
It strikes me that the two stories from this post have a link. Banks' ship-minds are eminently rational, yet they have just enough quirks to have (mostly peaceful) disagreements. If I recall correctly, they are utilitarian, often directing the morally gray 'Special Circumstances' agents through grisly missions where the ends justify the means. Ship-minds are the benevolent caretakers of the humans in the Culture, but they occasionally convince adventurous people to take massive personal risks to further their grand civilizational plans.
As you say, the only forms of violence that can hurt now are the very large and very small scale. These too-online bombers see themselves as a sort of SC agent for their message-boards, who can be seen as the 'minds' calling the shots. In a corresponding manner, I think Elon sees himself as a sort of ship-mind: he is shepherding us into the better future he envisions for us, and deciding which precious cargo can be jettisoned to get us there faster. Picard, at least, would detach the civilians from the officers before making a risky charge.
If your goal is truly to get us into AI anarcho utopia, then be a bit more rational: you will certainly die before glimpsing anything remotely resembling Banks novels. We should focus less on the Culture and more on the primitive, flawed societies in his books, because they are much closer to what we are dealing with.
!! LessWrong terrorists as Special Circumstances agents for message-board Minds is a really incredible image—thank you for making the connection
A great book on "Radical Utilitarianism" of a different strain is Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar. The title might make it sound like it's all about Peter Singer and Effective Altruism, and these concepts do get name-checked throughout the book, but it's mostly profiles of the lives of extreme altruists and how they arrived at their worldview.
Profiling these individuals back to back to back makes their similarities really clear: they all share a worldview that definitely matches your phrase "Radical Utilitarianism." Unlike the Silicon Valley effective altruists who basically see utilitarianism as one big linear optimization problem, these extreme altruists seemed to have over-developed skills of abstract thought. One example I still remember is that three different profiles mentioned the subjects stopped believing in God when they realized that so much of the world followed some other religion, and there was no reason to believe one was "correct" over the others.
I feel like EA zealots, the extremists described in your post, or these extreme altruists all think about the world in an abstract manner that's strange and off-putting to most people. The book does a great job of exploring worldview while profiling extremely interesting, and often admirable people. Abstract thought like this is more accessible than ever, and not just on forums.
I picked up the book because it inspired the "Bad Art Friend" situation several years ago, I definitely didn't think I'd be talking about it in contexts like this.
Oh, that's fascinating—I hadn't really thought of the connection but it seems totally right. "Overdeveloped abstract thinking" is a good way to put it, as maybe would be a failure to compartmentalize... an inability to prevent their own chains of abstract logic from conquering their entire being. One thing about the internet, too, as you suggest, is that it allows people who think in this kind of way to find each other, and exacerbate each other's out-of-control "rationalism."
Middle school must have been really fun for "Guy Bartkus."
Aren't The Culture books really about the Minds and all of their organic pets a/k/a "humans"? (I remember them being a couple of organie human like races whose genetic code was rewritten by the minds so they everyone could interbreed.)
In the use of weapons for example the main thing is about how to rescue a trapped baby Mind, since that was what was important.
The idea that its economic socialism and the moralism of intervention and all of that is superficial. There's no talk about augmenting people, or giving them new intelligences or whatever, all of that is relegated to the machines/Minds/AI or whatever. The world is filled with technological benevolent Gods where humans are domesticated.
Exactly. The humans of the Culture are living in a post-scarcity paradise created and maintained by their benevolent AI gods. It always struck me as much more prelapsarian than socialist or anarchic.
Culture humanoids are extremely augmented through genetic engineering and cybernetics, particularly if they’re Contact or Special Circumstances agents. In the era of the books, the fashion is a more “classical” balance. But that’s a cultural norm, not an imposition.
I’d say that Minds and humanoids in the Culture live in a moral symbiosis, driven by the desire to experience. It’s why they’re one of the oldest civilizations in the setting that haven’t mass-transcended. They’re still having fun.
'It would be wrong, given how isolated each of our examples was, and dissimilar the ultimate forms of their utilitarianism were, to think of this as a “movement” or even as a “philosophy”--it seems to me more to be a kind of pattern of thought, cultivated, exacerbated, and calcified online.'
I'll offer my two cents (I happen to be a clinical psychologist who worked for a number of years with violent offenders in prisons and psychiatric hospitals, as well as community mental health centers)-
Let's not be too quick to dismiss the possibility a person can be mentally ill, and severely mentally ill at that, and still express superficially coherent notions. That a person might be well read, and can recite philosophical sounding terms and elaborate concepts, does not preclude profound psychological disturbance, including elements of psychosis (e.g. delusions, paranoia and what is termed formal thought disorder).
Human beings are predisposed to constructing a consistent narrative of events, so we feel less at the mercy of inexplicable behavior and events. But we should not mistake that wish for things to fit into a comprehensible narrative for an accurate account.
However this person saw their actions, or anyone else seeks to make sense of them, they can simply be the result of psychopathology.
For sure, it’s overstating the role of philosophy to frame that as the driver rather than these folks having a screw loose, with the specific doctrine being incidental. I think a lot of people made a similar error with SBF. I saw a lot of takes about how utilitarianism caused him to do crimes, whereas imo it’s much more plausible he wanted to make money/gain status through crime and utilitarianism was primarily a cynical marketing ploy (iirc he admitted as such) and secondarily a tool of self-justification.
I’d also note that pretty much any political violence relies on consequentialist logic, but that kind of reasoning is far from unique to utilitarianism. Pretty much any philosophy a sufficient number of young men get into is eventually going to grow vigilantes.
Whether a philosophical framework, or more narrowly, an ideology, serves as a prompt to engage in violence depends (as I see it) entirely on something more fundamental, something that precedes the formation of a philosophy or ideology, and that is worldview.
If the person’s worldview permits violence in certain circumstances, allows them to see violence as warranted, then they can contemplate engaging in violence. I’m not saying this is always or inherently wrong, but I am saying the conceptual framing is subsequent to this, and serves simply as a system of justification for the acts of violence.
All political violence (by individuals, groups, nations), all police violence, is (or can be) presented as legitimate according to some system of justification.
The question, of course, is whether we accept or reject the premises of that system of justification, in which contexts, and so forth.
“ But in some ways this is probably what we should expect from acts of violence in the 21st century. The kinds of organized, militant, ideological groups that committed what might be called “terrorism” or “political violence” in the U.S. from the 1970s onwards have largely been dismantled or infiltrated by the security state.”
Great point imo. Whether or not the FBI can fairly apply the label “nihilistic violent extremist”, it strikes me as a pretty good label for the phenomenon. If you’re doing political violence solo, hard to feel like you’re accomplishing much unless it’s in support of something nihilistic.
Excellent post. I have been thinking something similar for a long time, but I was more focused on the role of Special Circumstances and violence in maintaining the Culture. (A place where Schmitt and Foucault meet?) I'm not sure it would bear close reading, but a reader can see many of the stories as a long validation of the "Good Guy With a Gun" theory. (I had also picked up on the anxieties about finding meaning in a post-scarcity world, but I mostly -- not entirely -- read those as earnest explorations from our limited viewpoints very much defined by scarcity mindsets.)
I tend to the thought that's it's doubtful that Musk or Bezos has actually read any of the Culture books. They're all very long. Can you imagine either one those guys sitting down and reading a 400-600 page book? It' seems much more likely they paid for a 10 slide PowerPoint presentation to be prepared. It would certainly explain why they would focus on the tech and not the economic or political themes of the stories.
How interesting that Western thinkers are considering various dystopian futures while China's course and progress towards dàtóng–a future that looks wildly utopian to us–is unchanged since Confucius plotted it and Mao reaffirmed it.
"Imagine the impact on European civilization of a series of Imperial dynasties maintaining the self-same style and significance from Caesar Augustus until the First World War. Now imagine such a civilization existing on the other side of the planet unaware of Greek philosophy, the alphabet, Roman governance, Christianity, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or democracy, but with its own, unique cultural and institutional correlates that exceeded all of them in intellectual subtlety and material success". Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations
Really enjoyed the bit on negative utilitarianism and would love to read even more of your thoughts on it.
I don't have a fully coherent thought here but I'm in the process of rereading Dosteovsky's Demons/The Devils/The Possessed and keep thinking of the philosophy of radical revolutionary action in Tsarist Russia and how it informs or contradicts our understanding of the efficacy of similar actions in the present day. I'm also thinking that I enjoy the hell out of a modern piece of fiction that delves into people who fall down these radicalisation pathways.
Worth pointing out that in its original form Nihilism as a philosophy had a kind of positive view of the future. The Russian peasants suicide bombing Tsarist officials weren’t doing so out of a pure urge for self-abnegation but a desire to utterly destroy existing *institutions* of human life so that we could create something new and radically free-er from the wreckage. In that sense the fertility clinic bombing could be seen as more authentically Nihilist with a capital N than others committing “nihilistic terrorism”.
They’re like philosophers without the love of thought. Just bros with takes.
The goofy thing about all the versions of scary utilitarianism floating around is that the numbers persist in all being made up. If you conclude, as other philosophers have, that the being alive has a slight positive valence, or maybe that utility doesn't work according to this basic integral, well, then all of this doesn't make any sense. It cuts the same way with the TESCREAL crew- if you sensibly conclude that the answer to 'how can I usher in a world of 10^43 blissful beings' is, 'meh, probably nothing,' then you're free to make normal-ass actual moral choices again.
Re: The Culture- it's true that there's a degree of technological determinism in the formula, but in later books we're also presented with the notion that there was some kind of negotiations or conferences that led to the birth of the Culture, and notably that there were technological and moral peers that said 'eh, no thanks', especially in light of the centering of the Minds in their cultural decision making (namely the Gzilt in the Hydrogen Sonata, who found other, more human-centric ways to nevertheless remain a comparable power).
I dunno, even if we can find a way for the kleptocrats to see themselves in the road to the Culture, there simply isn't any doubt that they are the people Special Circumstances would come for- and on the flip side, if by the end of even the first book you think all of this is an unalloyed case for the Culture-as-good-guys, well, then, you've missed the core point of at least four of the books.
Which is to say, techbros can't actually read for shit, it seems.
So efilism has nothing to do with championing NWA’s critically maligned second album?
I love how the mentally ill population attempt to paint all 3 noteworthy "tech-giants" (I put tech giants in quotes due to the fact of their painfully obvious ties to Intel agencies long before acquiring their global billions) as edgy, 'alt-right' crypto-fasheez, when a year or two ago, 2/3 of these tech-spooks were actively running interference for the DNC/DC baby blood-drinkers cult; by willingly & deceitfully censoring anything critical of the zombie who barely occupied the presidency for the prior 4 year term. But if you a a k them now, they had no choice but to comply!! (Under threat of whatever blackmail their handlers had on them, videotaped @ Jeff and Jizz's island resort).
These tech-puppets for the ruling class , as well as lap dogs for the worst aspects of this mafioso ran government we're all now forced to endure. With all that said, ya gotta be pretty low in IQ points to STILL get whipped up by the divisive left/right paradigm like the author here. If Rachel maddow said it , you can bet your life savings that it came from the highest level of NSA DIA CIA FBI spook, but that's good enough for the author.
Very good piece 👍