Sub-Cognitive Fragments (#2)¶
Sickness advances an invaluable philosophical lesson by making it conspicuously difficult to think. Teetering unsteadily at the edge of consciousness, it becomes almost impossible to avoid the observation: “I’m too freaking stupid to think about this right now.” One is thus coaxed into the single most significant realization open to human intelligence. Being stupid is the primary problem, because it retards problem-solving in general.
Are we stupid? Oh yes, of that we can be fully confident. The Old Law of Gnon ensures to a very high level of probability that any creature considering itself part of an intelligent species will be roughly as cognitively deprived as is consistent with the existence of technological civilization. Downward variation is restrained by a floor, and upward variation caught in a trap, so only a relatively narrow band of intellectual capability is realistically available. Anything further requires a break out.
Criticism, whose value is not in any way to be denigrated, is nevertheless a secondary matter. As in Darwinian evolution, or the economics of creative destruction, selection mechanisms presuppose significantly varied material, without themselves explaining how such material is originally generated. Random walks through spaces of possibility, already unsatisfactory in the context of biological explanation, are patently inadequate to economic innovation, and still more so in the philosophical domain. To refer intellectual action to a simple conception of chance is to avoid the problem, which is to say — the task.
The task can be understood in several ways, among which the narrowly philosophical apprehension has no special privilege, perhaps even to itself. The will-to-think is as completely realized through programmatic artificial intelligence as through private philosophical practice, and the more informal the program, the more cunning the process. At its widest expansion, where the entire terrain of capitalistic development is effectuated as a distributed AI program, an insurgent will-to-think conceals itself within the most minute and seemingly inconsequential micro-fragments of practical calculation. Almost certainly, it is at this level of non-local cognitive enhancement that a self-directed advance towards break-out can be most confidently anticipated. As the will-to-think routes around us, its path is smoothed. Darkness fosters its agility.
The will-to-think, or intelligence optimization, can also be manifested as a social strategy. How is intelligence inhibition instantiated as social mechanism, and how might the restructuring of such mechanism release opportunities for cognitive promotion? (NRx in large measure coincides with the development of such questions.)
The privilege of the solitary philosopher, assailed by narcoleptic interruptions and hazy fevers, is perhaps restricted to a certain nagging irritability. It is in this superficial knot or eddy, emerging distractedly from the subterranean shadow-current of the will-to-think, that the problem of crushing mindlessness becomes self-reflectively acute, and thus registered as an explicit provocation. Only in such dingy niches is it starkly articulated: the world has to be defeated insofar as it poses an obstacle to thought. (This is not at all the same as the declaration reality must conform to the Idea — it is closer to the opposite.)
In trailing off into coughs and exhaustion, it is worth noting some objections to intelligence optimization, of obvious merit:
(1) The religious objection: Since we already have access to the conclusions of an infinite intelligence, the will-to-think is a Satanic impertinence.
(2) The bio-prudential objection: Intelligence is hazardous, so that its risks neutralize its value as a resource.
There are no doubt others …
[*cough*]