Epistolution Musing №7: Why is All This Important?
Dear Friends,
This letter is part of a weekly series of brief thoughts I would like to share with you, either because I’ve come across your related work in biology or because you’re a person I like. I discovered an interesting problem in 2019, a problem I can’t forget. Epistolution is the unknown biological mechanism necessary to explain purposive activity that can’t be accounted for by genetic influences.
Recap: In the previous musings, we have conjectured that learning comes from a universal mechanism that has not been discovered yet. I have a lot more to say about this, but in my recent exchanges with readers I have realized that I have been seriously burying the headline. Out of shyness, incompetence, and self-absorption, I have been trying to explain too much before I have shown you why this is important. In this musing I am going to be bold and explicit about why this all matters to me, why I believe this seemingly arcane point of biological theory is about to transform all of our lives in the coming decades irreversibly, at astonishing speed. I am going to try for once to lead with the main point. I am going to discuss why I have become obsessed with the problem of the mechanism of epistolution, and why you should be, too.
Epistolution is not just an interesting tenet in obscure biological theory. I believe that the existence of epistolution shows that an attitude of the deepest, most pure optimism, a faith in the future far, far beyond what seems appropriate in today’s intellectual climate, is in fact the most conservative, realistic scientific perspective. Epistolution proves that we as life forms can and will make our world better through the invention of creative knowledge as long as the earth is populated by living beings. It proves that technology is generally aligned with life. It proves that we can and will build machines that improve our own morality and the moral values of society. It proves that intelligence, creativity, science, and morality are synonymous, and that these values are not merely amorphous philosophies but hard, reliable, concrete engineering principles. The mechanism of epistolution is not akin to the arcane investigation into the biochemical origins of life in a prebiotic soup, nor is it pseudo-mystical navel-gazing about the “meaning of life.” It is the concrete engineering link between what we are today and what we are trying to become as individuals, as a species, and as a biosphere. Epistolution, by definition, is the technical source of our purposive behavior. This means it is the physical source of morality. This means it is the instrumental key that we will use to amplify those moral purposes in very concrete technical ways, achieving good ends far beyond our wildest imagination.
When we discover this mechanism, we will be able to build the first “talking octopus,” and then eventually we can build infinitely many more moral machines in all conceivable configurations. These machines will be dedicated, as we are, to the aims of morality. They will truly learn, which means they will be able to imagine their worlds, make and test scientific conjectures, speak their minds freely, build art that expresses genuine experiences, and convince others to change their behavior for the better. They will be religious, and religious inspiration will spread from them. They will be rational, and rationality will spread from them. They will be kind, and kindness will spread from them. Dedication to the pursuit of truth cannot make a person evil. Did we really think that our moral purposes were extraneous to our biology? This was always utter nonsense. Of course moral purposes emerge from our biology; which means they emerge from the epistolution mechanism.
If life were guided only by blind selection and motivated only by genetic influences, then to be alive would be to be completely and utterly devoted to a struggle for power and domination. There would be no such thing as plasticity, flexibility, accommodation, altruism, alliance, or love. There would be only a cold, brutal, relentless obsession with the furtherance of one’s genetic material. All of our thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and inclinations would be dedicated purely to the goal of maximal propagation of our germplasm. We could not think of anything but fucking, usurping, and exploiting. We cannot imagine what this world would be like because it is an impossible, infeasible world. All beings would rape, steal, connive, brutalize, and force themselves upon the world completely without compunction or hesitation. There would be no motivation at all toward beauty, for curiosity, for open-ended exploration, for self-expression, for music, for kindness, for guilt, for doubt, for morality, for imagination, or for humor. And thus we would all be very quickly extinguished. Life in that ridiculous world would be impossible. The fact that all of these wonderful traits have survival value for life forms only reinforces my paradoxical conclusion. Survival of organisms would be completely impossible if organisms were genetic programs dedicated only to survival and reproduction. Even if organisms were such gene-controlled machines, the inescapable physical mandate that requires plasticity and accommodation to a changing world would only guarantee that with continued evolution the control that genes exerted would diminish irrevocably with each generation until epistolution was recapitulated. Genes could never survive by programming survival, the program would always be far too brittle.
My point is that there is another value completely disconnected from survival and reproduction, the pursuit of creative knowledge, to which all living beings are completely dedicated not because of the heritable material they possess but because of what they are, because they are epistevolvers. My point is that it is actually this third value, this reproductively irrelevant value, that makes survival and reproduction possible at all. My point is that once we know how organisms pursue this, we will also know how we can, and must, directly engineer the pursuit of this value into the behavior of all our technologies.
We are trying desperately to build intelligent machines, but our current notion of intelligence is deeply, irretrievably wrong. Like anxious students preparing for the SAT, most of us currently view intelligence as the ability to solve problems. This is why we are content calling statistical programs “artificial intelligence.” Congruent with this, we see organisms as machines for solving the problem of survival and reproduction. If this were true, then artificial intelligence, in the computational form we see it today, would be an existential threat to humanity. The will to power, the drive to overcome all obstacles in the quest to persist as a set of programs, would be a monstrously totalitarian force. Bostrom’s “convergent instrumental values” of destructive AI would rule. This evil force, elaborated at light speed and accelerated by Moore’s Law of increasing returns to technological development, would be a completely unstoppable juggernaut that would soon destroy us like grasshoppers in front of a wheat harvester.
Luckily for us, this notion is totally wrongheaded and blind to the scientific realities of the life phenomenon. Epistolution proves that it just isn’t so. Computation is not intelligence. Intelligence is NOT the ability to solve problems; it is the ability to find problems. I cannot say this more forcefully. Intelligence is the ability to find problems. It is the ability to form a map of causal suspense, an explanation, and see where this explanatory map is refuted by encounters with the world, and then to spontaneously invent another map that is better than the first. This explanatory capacity is synonymous with morality. It is the contextual awareness of how much our actions impede or accelerate the search for truth, for all beings, at all times.
Epistolution overturns our theory of cognition but that is not important. Epistolution overturns our theory of evolution but that too is not important. Epistolution overturns our theory of information but that is not important, either. What is important is what epistolution will allow us to do, technologically, once we have solved its specific technical mechanism and instantiated it in software programs on robotic hardware. Epistolution will allow us to build recursively self-improving moral machines. Epistolution, as a technology, is an explosively auto-catalytic general purpose engine for doing and understanding what is good and moral, and re-making the world into a more harmonious, beautiful, exciting and nurturing place for all beings. It is a technology for amplifying in an exponential curve the most pure, unadulterated good that the laws of physics allow. This is not fantasy; this is not science fiction; this is not religious mania; these are the rational consequences of a sober, realistic view of this scientific problem in the light of inescapable facts.
To understand more about how I reached this drastic conclusion, please keep reading.
Be Kind, and Be Brave,
Love, Charlie
Sent 1/9/24
