"The pseuds’ll love it"
What happens to philosophical writing when it devolves into pure vibes?
I am realizing that each time I click on a link to Erik Hoel's substack, I am clicking further and further into a strange universe. I originally was interested in his (and collaborators who seem to be forgotten more and more) ideas on “effective information” and “causal emergence” several years ago when they were drifting around the internet — and being oversold in Quanta Magazine. Emergence is an interesting if ill-defined phenomenon that some (including Hoel) occasionally link to consciousness. Just a week earlier, I came across a new paper on emergence that seemed interesting — it was also citing papers Hoel co-authored. It also has an article in Quanta that oversells the paper which is mostly definitions1. That paper also has some strange affiliations for its authors.
It may just be that when you start talking about consciousness or emergence, you can’t help the twin gravitational pulls of strangeness and hand-waving. But it also has the feel of a larger pseudointellectual project funded by billionaires. But then, it also has the feel of a generation of people, many of whom have money or its backing, who grew up researching on the internet and formed their own pseudointellectual universe. They do not understand how to formulate an argument or support it. They do not anticipate the obvious objections to their claims — and mostly seem incurious about them. They incorrectly read other work — either blind to the Dunning-Kruger effect or because they haven’t actually learned reading comprehension despite projecting a non-trivial level of education. Quanta Magazine and TED seem at least adjacent — feeding a demand for ‘counterintuitive’ insights supported purely with vibes. To paraphrase John Lennon, the pseuds love it.
Hoel’s recent cavalcade of pseuds has some doozies. There’s the pro-natalist lady who says you should have kids out of ennui2. There’s the venture capitalist philosophizing [pdf] about Wittgenstein and Feynman with both the inelegance and overconfidence of the high school football quarterback in his first college seminar3. There’s a blog from someone who is almost certainly not Black that opens with a reference to the only quote from MLK non-Black people know and it goes just as predictably [not linking or delving further].
But the strangest part for me was Hoel saying this in reference to one of the pieces:
It reminded me of speculation in my novel, The Revelations, that the origin of consciousness was spurred by the invention of predation, and therefore has a similarly dark origin.
Excuse me? Did I miss something?
You see, I read his novel. It is hilarious. Like how The Room is hilarious. You should check out my review.
Anyway, I had to go back and search through my kindle copy of Hoel’s book. Sure enough, there are two references to predation that aren’t just metaphorical description. I guess they count as speculation if we define “speculation about X” as just saying “I wonder if X?” — a pretty low bar. To me, speculation is more substantial — a quick definition from Google (Oxford languages) is “forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence”. Lack of “firm evidence” implies the existence of some evidence. The definition also implies it’s more than just asking a question — some of the formation needs to be included.
I’d say my elsewhere interpretation of quantum mechanics rises to the level of speculation, but only in the blog posts about it (here, here). The evidence I present is circumstantial. There are holes in the argument. It is speculative. It is mentioned in my short story Wigner and I4 (and used as background), but would never say something “reminded me the speculation in my short story Wigner and I about the equivalence of quantum mechanics and special relativity”. I.e. this is not speculation:
“Did I ever tell you about my elsewhere interpretation of quantum mechanics?” Brian asked Geneviève. … [ ] … “Anyway, I worked it out and it seemed every one of the key quantum experiments required a path to cross through ‘elsewhere’ for the observer at some point. The accelerations even required the observer and a particle to be on opposite sides of a Rindler coordinate horizon.”
Sure, Hoel’s two references literally asking ‘was consciousness spurred by the invention of predation?’ in his novel meets a legalistic reading of the definition as conjectures without firm evidence; they’re conjectures without any evidence! This is Hoel’s first instance of speculation about predation:
Was [consciousness] brought about by predation, by the need for ambulation, avoidance, and planning on the millisecond time scale?
This is part of a section where the protagonist is just journaling5 and includes a list of additional speculations. I guess they all count! The other reference requires a bit of charity as it is not actually speculating that predation spurred consciousness, but rather just accompanied it:
[The protagonist] is thinking of the ethology of octopuses, that they and humans are the only kind of predator who arrange the bones of their prey in geometric patterns, the only hyperintelligent predators — maybe the first true intelligence that ever existed was in a carnivore playing with the bones of its food.
Isn’t this just lifted from the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey?
The bigger issue is that regardless of whether you think this technically rises to the level of speculation, it is also easily dismissed as stated. Predation is thought to go back almost as far as life itself — there are single cell organisms today that are predators and there is evidence of predator/prey “arms races” in multicellular life in the Cambrian period ~500 million years ago. It is true that predation is an evolutionary driver, and it is considered a likely driver of many different transitions from multicellularity to mobility. Unless you are saying consciousness is both far older and far more ubiquitous than we typically believe6, it just doesn’t make sense that the invention of predation would cause consciousness to arise in humans hundreds of millions if not billions of years later.
I seriously doubt predation in general was a driver for the development of consciousness in humans (and other apes) in terms of avoiding being prey (per the first of Hoel’s references in his book). Consciousness seems like a weird approach instead of e.g. running faster, and outsmarting7 predators requires a theory of mind of disparate creatures (say, giant boas versus lions) — not a theory of mind of your own species or the self. Generalized intelligence could help in an environment where there are multiple different kinds of predators with different strategies or with the development of your own defensive or evasive strategies. But its usefulness in acquiring food (e.g. identifying edible plants or the long term patterns of the seasons) seems far more substantial than evading predators. Predation may have contributed in some way to the development of consciousness (my own failure of imagination with regard to how is not evidence that it didn’t happen), but to reiterate the invention of predation was not a driver for consciousness.
Plus — why is it dark? Predation is a natural part of ecosystems. “Darkness” would come from where predation might interact with human morality. Our role as a predator may be fruitfully debated in terms of its morality versus being vegetarian or vegan — and if that is the context, then that makes sense. But the first reference in Hoel’s book could be read as consciousness aiding survival strategies for prey. I guess it’s just dark because there’s something trying to eat something else and one or more of those somethings is a human.
Something that would be dark would be if consciousness arose as a defense against widespread cannibalism in our ancestor species — somehow intelligent philosophical zombies are prone to being hunted and killed by other intelligent philosophical zombies and consciousness breaks that vicious cycle. Consciousness finally allowed humans to ask if what they were doing to each other was f$%&-ed up. But there is no evidence for widespread cannibalism in our ancestor species.
The article Hoel is referencing when he smarmily claims “yeah I thought of that already” is actually more plausible in the sense that it asks if human capabilities used in hunting (predation) might have supported greater intelligence8. But again, this is not the invention of predation. It would be related to the invention of human hunting and its associated technology — and that speculation is not supported by the text of Hoel’s book9.
But again, if it is hunting itself, why aren’t other pack hunters endowed with similar consciousness and intelligence? Tools seem like a differentiator10. Additionally, the development of the tools needed for human hunting presuppose a kind of already-existing intelligent planning faculty — i.e. causality goes the other way. As you can see, this is pretty much a mess — your stoned friend at an all night diner between mouthfuls of omelet asking “what if we’re conscious because we’re hunters”. You could imagine the tech bro at the next table jumping in and ‘just asking questions’ about whether that means men are more conscious than women since men11 did the coding hunting. Many of the links on Hoel’s blog feel like that. And that’s probably why they feel pseudointellectual. Their mission is not to illuminate or explore, but to advocate one worldview or attack another — or even just to fill your intellectual space with vibes like you fill your physical space with rustic boards painted with “live laugh love” that you ordered on Etsy.
As I mentioned in my review, I read The Revelations because I wanted to read some fiction that touched on consciousness as consciousness is related to the ideas I want to explore in my own sci fi novel in progress. I discovered part way through that Hoel’s book isn’t deeply tied to consciousness — you could almost exchange ‘theory of consciousness’ with ‘theory of everything’, ‘building a new weapon of mass destruction’, or ‘discovering aliens’ and remap the story to its new theme. And by theme, I mean like desktop theme — new wallpaper. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing — characters, style, and world building can elevate a book when the plot and theme aren’t enough. Neuromancer is basically a heist story, but becomes so much more from its wonderful writing. However the story of The Revelations is “unlikeable protagonist is an unappreciated genius in a field with big questions and social ramifications amid nefarious goings-on” and so suffers from the lack of integration with its themes.
I hope I won’t have the same issues. My book has in the background the question of whether computation, consciousness, and intelligence are the same thing and asks what happens as you take the infinite limits of each. Of course, it’s a fictional story so there’s an answer (they are distinct at finite levels, but are all part of the same ‘universality class’ so have the same limit, becoming a single concept) and the worldbuilding tries to examine the perturbations to humanity if we could manipulate the holographic bits that constitute our reality — an ultimate stage of information processing as an intelligent species. The worldbuilding is tied to the story through human concepts of trust (via encryption, secret plans, and social systems) and empathy (via consciousness) and the plot hinges on the break down and building up of each. It is my hope that the story then won’t be detached from the themes.
One fun detail of the universe is that the question of how consciousness arises isn’t answered … in-universe. The background is that it arises naturally in social species through empathy and enables teaching (my speculative content described here representing my ‘answer’ for the book), but this is just a speculative theory in the book (‘Social Prime Theory’). While consciousness — sapience — is associated with high levels of computation density that is a detectable quantity in-universe, you can only detect it once it has already developed. The only alternative would be finding and then just sitting around and watching billions of species throughout the universe hoping that one evolves consciousness. Needless to say, no one’s been funded for that science project — something that never changes.
Definitions can be good! Newton’s Laws are definitions! But the usefulness of a definition is entirely dependent on the usefulness of its products.
“I met strangers. I racked up frequent flyer miles. I went to far-flung locales. I ate supposedly fancy food. What then? After you’ve met all the people there are to meet, after you’ve eaten all the things there are to eat, after you’ve played in all the places there are to play? ... Restaurant food began to taste greasy to me. At some point, you hit diminishing marginal returns on the supposedly fun things you get to do as an adult.” So obviously she should have a kid because she definitely seems like the type of person who would never grow tired of that. You should have kids if you and (as applicable) your partner want to create an entirely new person that will have ambitions, desires, loves, dreams, triumphs, mistakes, etc entirely their own — their own life — full stop. That is the only criterion. Having a kid should not be performative. A kid is not your project. A kid can help you be a better person, but only because you can discover things about yourself during the process. If you have a kid to try to be a better person or just as a challenge, please consider therapy first regarding whatever deficiency you see in yourself.
He writes about a passage about a chair from The Feynman Lectures which he says “exhibits philosophical confusion specifically regarding the nature of objects …. Now, this statement of Feynman is not a statement of physics— it makes no reference to facts. Rather, Feynman is attempting to do philosophy [emphasis in the original] by asserting what it does and doesn’t make sense to say (about the chair, that is). In the process, Feynman is actually introducing a significant conceptual confusion, one which can be resolved using Wittgenstein’s method.” First off, deciding something from the opening pages of The Feynman Lectures requires a response a 10-page essay that brings in Wittgenstein is like calling on Darwin as a counterpoint the themes of the power of nature in Wind in the Willows. The Feynman Lectures are undergraduate lecture notes, not ER = EPR. However, the author also does not understand physics sufficiently to know that Feynman is making a statement of physics — Feynman is just wording it for undergraduates. In modern physics-speak we would say “a chair is not an eigenstate of mass; it is not a unitary irreducible representation of a symmetry; it is not a fundamental system; it is an effective description, an approximation”. The paragraph before, Feynman is saying F = m a is an approximation, an effective theory — it is on the surface an approximation to F = dp/dt. But it goes deeper — we have ⟨F⟩ = (d/dt) ⟨p⟩ where the angle brackets represent expectation values of quantum probabilities. The world we experience at the human scale is not fundamental, and due to the complexity of the calculations our effective descriptions of “chairs” or “thoughts” are only approximately describing a more fundamental reality that we (scientifically) are aware of. (side note 1: the subsequent quote from Wittgenstein is sophomoric; he’s writing in the 1930s so could be forgiven for not being up to date on physics but he just sounds like an idiot doing a conservative comedy routine “those crazy scientists are telling us solid objects aren’t solid”; side note 2: I’m sort of surprised this guy submitted this writing to Hoel as it makes me think he doesn’t understand Hoel’s work on effective information and causal emergence which is exactly the “approximation” Feynman is talking about)
I had forgotten I made a reference to Quanta magazine in the short story with a connotation similar to what I said about it here.
I haven’t looked around so maybe this already exists (and I will change it if someone has a better word for it), but I kind of want to play on the idea of an exposition dump and define the concept of the ego dump. There are four kinds of “info (i.e. exposition) dumps” identified here: backstory, worldbuilding, technical, emotional — but these are expositional (informational) in the sense that they are in service to the story. The ego dump is in service to the author and tends to be things like throwing in multiple ideas the author has or writing a passage that attempts to just explain the author’s thoughts about the meaning of their novel. While this passage in Hoel’s book could be seen as an exposition dump about the main character, the main character is a self-insert character (their name is literally an anagram of Erik with an additional ‘K’ — Keirk). Given Hoel’s previous work in neuroscience this is almost certainly his own voice trying tell us his book asks deep questions about the nature of consciousness.
There is a recent push out there to expand the application of the property of consciousness to other species. And I am also on the record speculating (ha!) that consciousness is probably more ubiquitous than is commonly believed — possibly to every social species with possibly only the exception of eusocial species.
Note we are operating in the frame where intelligence and consciousness are related or even commensurate things, something I personally disagree with, but per the quotes Hoel conflates.
The cited article is not making the causal argument as far as I can tell.
I didn’t just search ‘predation’, but similar words like ‘predator’ as well as various forms of ‘hunt’. I wanted to make sure that Hoel’s claim in the blog post wasn’t just a typo … “It reminded me of speculation in my novel, The Revelations, that the origin of consciousness was spurred by the invention of [human] predation [or hunting], and therefore has a similarly dark origin.” It is possible that this is what Hoel intended in both the book and the blog, but if it is then it suffers from a total lack of clarity.
And teaching how to make tools would definitely benefit from consciousness — that tool making culture evolved into consciousness, not “predation”.
Not actually universally true. And also not true for the coding joke that follows either.