Tag: Guide for the perplexed

The Threat of Singularity and the Promise of Perennial Philosophy

As I have aged. the pace of technology has surely surpassed my interest in “keeping up.”  I have been intrigued, however, by the notion of the singularity, which is defined in many ways, but often as “a hypothetical point in time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.” Technology already feels “uncontrollable.”  It forces me to deal with chatbots and answer yes/no questions.  It fights to supplant me.   Even as I write this. Microsoft is pestering me to let its AI “Copilot” help me; it wants to co-opt my place at the keyboard, convinced (and trying to convince me) that it can do whatever it is better than I can.  What AI fails to recognize that it is the doing that matters, not a uniformly “perfect” product.

As I was thinking about this, I was strangely reminded of Aldous Huxley and his “perennial philosophy,” which represents a different kind of quest for doing things in the best way, for improving ourselves, or – more specifically – for living life well.  Seekers for the perennial philosophy pursued ageless universal truths, laws, dharmas, which might enable mankind, individually and communally, to reach their utmost potential.  There was no place in this philosophy for technology or even much science.  It had more to do with getting to know the nature of the kind of beasts we are, the kind of world we live in, and how the two interrelate.  “Know thyself,” said Socrates. 

Huxley’s book was a bestseller in 1945, as shocked and tired people were emerging from the nightmare of WWII.  Reviews were good, with the New York Times noting: “Perhaps Mr. Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy has, at this time, written the most needed book in the world.”  Perhaps, after Hiroshima and the gas chambers, no one was looking to technology to solve our problems.  In the last 70 years things have changed; we have become beguiled by technology.  As Wordsworth predicted, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, / Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”  Indeed.  Our hearts, our minds, and maybe our souls.  We are apparently far more interested in knowing what machines can do for us than knowing ourselves.  Why? It’s easier.

The machines enticed us, seduced us, slowly. Old folks are very much aware of this. When I was a child, technology (in the guise of Western Auto) gave us a big TV with a tiny screen and one to three channels.  It stood in the heart of the house, and we watched it together.  Step by step, it led us to the internet and streaming, and now watching anything is seldom a communal experience.  In my youth, technology gave us one telephone in the center of the house, so that communications were communal (hard on teen-age girls). Now cell phones are stopping any sort of real face-to-face communication.  The internet has made information easier to find, but harder to verify; common wisdom is no longer looked for or found. No wonder they call it the singularity; in wisdom, as in most things these days, we are “bowling alone.”

I think that Huxley’s perennial philosophy is probably the opposite of singularity; it assumes that the answers lie in the truths of the past and not the unknowns of the future, that we can both formulate the questions and find the answers without mechanical help.  The singularity assumes that machines will find the answers, machines which will soon be smarter than us, and that is a scary thought – unless you think that we will always be in control.  Have we ever been in control?  Did we consciously end up with children in their bedrooms sending pictures to strangers and old folks entranced by online “friends” who are trying to scam them?

Literature has long worried over the ascendency of technology.  RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was written by Karel Capek in 1920.  The play warned us not to turn our back on a robot.  Arthur Clark wrote the novel and screenplay for 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968, based on stories he started in 1948.  HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) was definitely the enemy by the end.  Technology was much cruder in those days, but people were already concerned. As creatures being slowly ingested by technology, we seem to be less worried now than we were then.  It would seem that HAL has made us fat and happy.  And what is the alternative?  A recent bill putting limits on AI development in California was vetoed by the governor after Silicon Valley got incensed.  There is no hope for such legislation on the federal level. 

The perennial philosophy was defined by Aldous Huxley and others as “a school of thought in philosophy and spirituality which posits that the recurrence of common themes across world religions illuminates universal truths about the nature of reality, humanity, ethics, and consciousness.”  In other words, a search for a commonality in proven human thought, faith, and ethics which could give us clues on the way to live better individually or communally.  But no one thought we could outsource that search, or google it, or that the answer would be a complex algorithm.

Computers are yes/no machines.  In the words of E. F. Schumacher, the real questions of life are divergent rather than convergent problems. Designing a diesel engine is a convergent problem; scientists can work on it and eventually arrive at an answer. AI could do this. How to use such an engine for the benefit of society (i.e., transportation of goods vs. preservation of the environment) is a divergent problem.  Adolescents often think all problems are convergent and often think they know the solutions.  Most old people know that the important questions are divergent and can (and should) be grappled with, but cannot be “solved.” Schumacher reminds us that, again, it is the doing that matters: “Divergent problems, as it were, force us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves.” 

I appreciate the good that technology has done for us – many of us, including myself, would not still be here without advances in medicine, education, transportation.  But let’s not give away our hearts (“a sordid boon”) – or our lives.  Science may have given us increased longevity, but, as Mary Oliver asks, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”  Show me the answer to that question in an algorithm.

What Old Folks Know About Miracles and Limits – “Speak Yet Again”

Do old folks have any wisdom to share? In King Lear, the Fool scolds Lear: “Thou shouldst not have been old before thou hadst been wise.” (I, v,28) Are we wise? It occurs to me lately that we are wise about two especially important things.

I have been reading Wendell Berry’s book, Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition. Berry actually starts the book with this line that Edgar speaks to his father (Gloucester) after the blind old man, intent on suicide, has been tricked into thinking he has jumped off a cliff and survived: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.” (IV, vi,55) Thy life’s a miracle. This is the first thing old folks know. Review your life and think about how it all could have gone differently – and more wrongly. Think about near-death experiences and medical procedures that saved or prolonged your life. Think about how lucky you were to have parents or caregivers who nurtured you until you could stand on your own two feet. Our old lives are miracles.

The other way that we know the miraculousness of life is through all that science has learned about the big bang, evolution, DNA, chance. Do you know that if the rate of expansion of the universe was different by even an iota, life on earth would not be possible? The multitude of variations and mutations that life had to go through to make us human? The number of sperm that were competing to be the person you became? Miraculous. Old people know this. “Thy life’s a miracle.” Truly, it is. In his old age, Henry Miller said: “The worst is not death, but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.”

The subtitle of Wendell Berry’s book is “An Essay against Modern Superstition.” For Berry, the “modern superstition” is that science can eventually know everything and everything can be dissected into… data and facts, I guess. It is a resistance to limits and promotes a world view that puts all faith in progress and assumes we can, eventually, understand and control almost everything. Berry says “the mystery surrounding our life is not significantly reducible. And so the question of how to act in ignorance is paramount.” This is the other thing we know.  Old people know there are limits to knowledge. We have learned this the hard way by making mistakes when we thought we had all the answers. And if we didn’t know this before, Covid-19 might have taught us a thing or two.

Old people know that not everything that can be defined as a “problem” with a definitive solution. I think of Schumacher’s differentiation between convergent and divergent problems in his Guide for the Perplexed. How to build a diesel engine is a convergent problem; scientists can work on it and come up with an answer. How to use such an engine for the benefit of society (i.e. transportation of goods vs. preservation of the environment?) is a divergent problem. Adolescents often think all problems are convergent and often think they know the solutions. Most old people know that the important questions are divergent and can (and should) be grappled with, but cannot be “solved.”

To summarize, I would posit that there are (at least) two things that old people know: 1) life is miraculous, and 2) there are limits on everything. And these two things are related. Every one of us has come up on limits again and again in our lives, and as we face old age and death, we are coming up on the biggest limit of them all. Yet, all of us have an increasing awareness of the miraculousness that we are here at all. No matter how many scientific books I read that try to scare me with their tales of how brief the existence of the earth will be, these cosmologists mostly just convince me of the miracle that I am here at all to experience it and appreciate it. (You might read Robert Frost’s “Desert Places” or “The Star-Splitter” in this regard.)

And there is another analogy one might make.

There are some Buddhist scholars (David Loy), Christian theologians (Thomas Berry) and renegade cosmologists (Brian Swimme) who muse that perhaps the universe has evolved humans to order to have a way for the cosmos to appreciate its own existence. This is a nice story. It could also be the story we tell about the old. From the far end of our existence, we can appreciate life in ways that young people cannot. We have come to appreciate life and all that it involves. We recognize the limits and respect them. And we acknowledge the miracle of it all and are in awe.

I recommend that you re-read King Lear and think about limits and miracles. To encourage yourself or for a way for thinking about the play later, you can read my piece “Lear at Great Books.”