Published on December 27, 2024 11:59 PM GMT
Every major author who has influenced me has "his own totalising and self-consistent worldview/philosophy". This list includes Paul Graham, Isaac Asimov, Joel Spolsky, Brett McKay, Shakyamuni, Chuck Palahniuk, Bryan Caplan, qntm, and, of course, Eliezer Yudkowsky, among many others.
In this post, I'll attempt to lay out my own worldview and philosophy.
If you have one too, then it's a good exercise to put it into words. What are your most important Litanies? What are your noble truths? Here's mine.
The Problem
Evolution is not random. Evolution is an optimizer, which means that it can, from a certain point of view, be seen to have intentions. Evolution's optimization target is "inclusive genetic fitness". "Inclusive genetic fitness" and "good" are different things. In other words, you and I were created by an epiphenomenon with values fundamentally orthogonal to our own.
There are some ways our values are aligned with evolution. For example, both you and evolution want you to have good eyesight. But in other ways, your values are unaligned with evolution. For example, you want to suffer less. Evolution doesn't care how much you experience the conscious perception of suffering. It would happily torture you and a million other of its children for a million years if that bought it a 0.001% increase to inclusive genetic fitness.
The result is horrors like genocide and factory farms. Genocide and factory farms are good, from the point of evolution, because they are instrumentally useful. But this creates a bioengineering problem for evolution, because compassion is instrumentally useful too. Putting both of them into the same brain produces a mess of contradictions incompatible with sanity. This isn't just misinformation in your environment. It's part of the genetically-programmed biophysical architecture of your brain. In this way, evolution has intentionally distorted your perception of good and evil.
Making things worse is a fundamental conflict between world modeling and world optimization. Your brain creates a real-time simulation of your local environment. This simulation feels like external physical reality, but it is merely conscious reality. Your brain attempts to maintain a 1-to-1 correspondence between the simulation and the real world. If correspondence is maintained, then the simulation not only feels like reality―it can be treated as such too. That's why it usually isn't necessary to make a distinction between reality and the simulation.
Evolution doesn't want you to notice that these are different things. Evolution wants you to believe that the simulation reflects external physical reality. Everything you consciously perceive is part of the simulation, and exists only within in the tiny slice of physical reality that is your brain.
These are the two most important ways evolution has intentionally designed our brains to create a simulation that deviates from reality. There are many others, but most are downstream of these two problems.
Nations, religions, products, and other competitive memetic forces hijack evolution's distortions and make them 1,000× worse.
And yet…there is a way out of this mess. Because every one of these memeplexes has to have some accurate sense of the truth to not be outcompeted. It may be warped and distorted, but it's there. And if you seize on that kernel of truth, protect it, nurture it, and be forever vigilant that you, yourself, may have been corrupted, then it will grow. This is the ultimate battle inside of every conscious being and every unconscious thinking machine.
And we're going to win.
Discuss
