Prometheus
There are many ways to describe the major patterns of human history. We’ll use a number of them in this book. They are all guilty of oversimplifying matters in order to highlight specific facets of our rich and complex past. We shall adopt them cautiously to orient ourselves, but always aware of their various shortcomings. We’ve already encountered one such pattern, a major turning point — or kairos — in humanity’s view of the world: the beginning of the age of machines during the scientific revolution.
Let us now focus on the practical consequences of that conceptual turning point. Prominent among its many large-scale effects was an unprecedented acceleration of technological evolution. Between the first signs of technology, the first flintstone tools appearing about 3 million years ago, and the intricate clockworks of the late 16th century, lies a long period of slow and steady technological advance. Humanity went from stone-based tools, to the ages of bronze and iron. Along the way, we tamed several species of wild beasts to provide work and food for us, invented the wheel and the plough, started to perform art, dreamt up all kinds of deities, learned how to read and write using alphabets based on abstract letters, came up with the decimal system and, as soon as we could properly count, started to keep track of each other’s debt with money. Some of these inventions were truly momentous, leading to considerable population growth, radical changes in warfare, and ever larger and more intricate forms of socio-political organisation — from band or tribe to city state to empire. But all of this happened at what seems like a sluggish pace to us today. For most of our history, we rarely had to radically adjust our lifestyles to novel circumstances, certainly not within a single generation’s lifetime.
This situation has changed completely since the scientific revolution — the onset of modernity — which brought about a tight interplay between technological innovation and the evolution of scientific knowledge. And from the very beginning, the influence went both ways. Not only did science inspire new technology, but it was the metaphor of the clockwork that enabled the development of mechanical philosophy in the first place. The constant back-and-forth between science and technology is reflected in Gaston Bachelard’s concept of technoscience, a term later popularised by Bruno Latour in his book “Science in Action.” The synergies it unleashed greatly quickened the pace of progress. But not only that. The breakneck speed of technoscientific evolution fundamentally changes what it means to be human. Latour used a framework called actor-network theory (which we will cover in some more detail later on) to show how we cede our human agency to new technologies. Even earlier, Marshall McLuhan had made a parallel argument in his “Understanding Media,” observing that “every media extension of man is an amputation.” This loss of human agency is now taking centre stage in the current metacrisis.
To understand why, we need to have a closer look at the kind of progress that has occurred in technoscience over the past few hundred years. For this purpose, it is useful to subdivide the modern age into four successive technological revolutions.
The first is the industrial revolution with its steam engines, textile manufacturing, and heavy industry, starting in the late 18th century. It completely overturned the predominantly agricultural lifestyle of the previous 10,000 years or so. The second is the technological revolution, which took place mainly in the second half of the 19th century and lasted up to the start of World War I in 1914. No less radical than the first, this revolution brought us increased interconnection through railroad and telegraph networks, increased power through electricity, and increased efficiency through the modern production line, which paved the road for our car-centred society of today. Both of these revolutions massively boosted human physical capabilities, like producing food and clothes, displacing heavy stuff, or moving more rapidly and over longer distances than ever before.
The third revolution is the digital revolution, which predominantly happened in the second half of the 20th century. It delivered the digital computer, the internet, and the smartphone. In contrast to the first two revolutions, these technologies expand our cognitive capabilities, enabling us to perform faster calculations, to come up with more intricate planning, to optimise the design of our technology, and to analyse far larger amounts of data than ever before. This revolution is now transitioning into what some people have termed the fourth industrial revolution. Its technologies — artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotech, genome editing tools, and unprecedented means of social engineering — will not only have global consequences that are utterly unpredictable (and potentially devastating), but are also radically blurring what is natural and what is not, what is human and what is not, what is real and what is not.
Each of these revolutions massively changed the way we behave and interact with each other — each removing us further from our ancestral, interconnected, and sustainable natural rhythms, communities, and ways of life. This is Entzauberung, or disenchantment, to use the ambivalent term that Max Weber borrowed from Friedrich Schiller. More specifically, each of these revolutions made us delegate more of our human agency to machines — from subsistence farming and self-propelled movement, to rote calculations and planning tasks, to algorithms that now make important decisions in our stead and produce “art” that mimics human creativity. Each revolution made us more dependent on our technology, our bureaucracy, and our increasingly entangled networks of extended and convoluted supply chains. Our existence is growing ever more complex and incomprehensible.
At the same time, each revolution brought with it new forms of media and communication — each less personal and less cognitively demanding than the last. We have gone from Gutenberg’s printing press to TikTok, from the free flow of ideas to getting ourselves lost in an algorithmic attention grab, in just a few hundred years. The speed of change is mind-boggling, and it is growing faster by the day. It is fueled by a mania to optimise everything. To an increasing number of people it all feels a bit overwhelming. And it does not exactly seem to be going in the right direction at the moment.
With the fourth industrial revolution, we have arrived at a point where this ever-accelerating dynamic of technoscientific evolution directly threatens our very identity as human beings, the fabric of our social relations, and our connectedness to physical realities such as material and energetic limits to growth. Through our succession of technological revolutions — enabled by a concomitant overabundance of agricultural produce, mineral resources, and fossil energy (the carbon blip mentioned earlier) — we have manoeuvred ourselves into a position where we consider ourselves free of any societal or energetic constraints, true masters of the universe, accountable to nothing and no one. This forth one is a terrifyingly Promethean revolution.
We have stolen the fire from the gods. We are thinking of taking the future evolution of our bodies and our consciousness into our own hands. We are pushing the boundaries of what is technologically possible. We think we are about to build machines that are more powerful than us. We hope to live on in those machines, as uploaded consciousnesses, in perfect symbiosis. Or maybe they are our legacy. Bringing greater powers into being is our purpose. Or so the beguiling salvation narrative of endless progress goes.
Yet, what the ancient myth of Prometheus is actually telling us is that we’ll find ourselves tied to a rock, alone, an eagle eating our liver. However we interpret that, the point is: by stealing the fire of the gods, we are losing our humanity. We are going too far. This is hubris. And we will pay for it. Separated from our true nature, we are condemned to eternal suffering, not eternal bliss. There is no happy ending to this story.
Today, we moderns may see the story of Prometheus in a different light. He is the true hero of our present age, and the gods seem like a bunch of cruel and backwards tribal overlords who want to keep humanity in its miserable place. Their time has come and gone. Our scientific and technological revolutions have given us superhuman powers, both physical and cognitive. What we need is a better narrative for Prometheus. One that does not pin him to his rock. How to avoid such dire destiny for modernity? How to use that divine fire wisely? These are the questions of our age. We have deconstructed the ancient narrative, but there is nothing else to take its place. Yet, we cannot give that fire back. What are we to do?
There are many ways to describe the major patterns of human history. We’ll use a number of them in this book. They are all guilty of oversimplifying matters in order to highlight specific facets of our rich and complex past. We shall adopt them cautiously to orient ourselves, but always aware of their various shortcomings. We’ve already encountered one such pattern, a major turning point — or kairos — in humanity’s view of the world: the beginning of the age of machines during the scientific revolution.
Let us now focus on the practical consequences of that conceptual turning point. Prominent among its many large-scale effects was an unprecedented acceleration of technological evolution. Between the first signs of technology, the first flintstone tools appearing about 3 million years ago, and the intricate clockworks of the late 16th century, lies a long period of slow and steady technological advance. Humanity went from stone-based tools, to the ages of bronze and iron. Along the way, we tamed several species of wild beasts to provide work and food for us, invented the wheel and the plough, started to perform art, dreamt up all kinds of deities, learned how to read and write using alphabets based on abstract letters, came up with the decimal system and, as soon as we could properly count, started to keep track of each other’s debt with money. Some of these inventions were truly momentous, leading to considerable population growth, radical changes in warfare, and ever larger and more intricate forms of socio-political organisation — from band or tribe to city state to empire. But all of this happened at what seems like a sluggish pace to us today. For most of our history, we rarely had to radically adjust our lifestyles to novel circumstances, certainly not within a single generation’s lifetime.
This situation has changed completely since the scientific revolution — the onset of modernity — which brought about a tight interplay between technological innovation and the evolution of scientific knowledge. And from the very beginning, the influence went both ways. Not only did science inspire new technology, but it was the metaphor of the clockwork that enabled the development of mechanical philosophy in the first place. The constant back-and-forth between science and technology is reflected in Gaston Bachelard’s concept of technoscience, a term later popularised by Bruno Latour in his book “Science in Action.” The synergies it unleashed greatly quickened the pace of progress. But not only that. The breakneck speed of technoscientific evolution fundamentally changes what it means to be human. Latour used a framework called actor-network theory (which we will cover in some more detail later on) to show how we cede our human agency to new technologies. Even earlier, Marshall McLuhan had made a parallel argument in his “Understanding Media,” observing that “every media extension of man is an amputation.” This loss of human agency is now taking centre stage in the current metacrisis.
To understand why, we need to have a closer look at the kind of progress that has occurred in technoscience over the past few hundred years. For this purpose, it is useful to subdivide the modern age into four successive technological revolutions.
The first is the industrial revolution with its steam engines, textile manufacturing, and heavy industry, starting in the late 18th century. It completely overturned the predominantly agricultural lifestyle of the previous 10,000 years or so. The second is the technological revolution, which took place mainly in the second half of the 19th century and lasted up to the start of World War I in 1914. No less radical than the first, this revolution brought us increased interconnection through railroad and telegraph networks, increased power through electricity, and increased efficiency through the modern production line, which paved the road for our car-centred society of today. Both of these revolutions massively boosted human physical capabilities, like producing food and clothes, displacing heavy stuff, or moving more rapidly and over longer distances than ever before.
The third revolution is the digital revolution, which predominantly happened in the second half of the 20th century. It delivered the digital computer, the internet, and the smartphone. In contrast to the first two revolutions, these technologies expand our cognitive capabilities, enabling us to perform faster calculations, to come up with more intricate planning, to optimise the design of our technology, and to analyse far larger amounts of data than ever before. This revolution is now transitioning into what some people have termed the fourth industrial revolution. Its technologies — artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotech, genome editing tools, and unprecedented means of social engineering — will not only have global consequences that are utterly unpredictable (and potentially devastating), but are also radically blurring what is natural and what is not, what is human and what is not, what is real and what is not.
Each of these revolutions massively changed the way we behave and interact with each other — each removing us further from our ancestral, interconnected, and sustainable natural rhythms, communities, and ways of life. This is Entzauberung, or disenchantment, to use the ambivalent term that Max Weber borrowed from Friedrich Schiller. More specifically, each of these revolutions made us delegate more of our human agency to machines — from subsistence farming and self-propelled movement, to rote calculations and planning tasks, to algorithms that now make important decisions in our stead and produce “art” that mimics human creativity. Each revolution made us more dependent on our technology, our bureaucracy, and our increasingly entangled networks of extended and convoluted supply chains. Our existence is growing ever more complex and incomprehensible.
At the same time, each revolution brought with it new forms of media and communication — each less personal and less cognitively demanding than the last. We have gone from Gutenberg’s printing press to TikTok, from the free flow of ideas to getting ourselves lost in an algorithmic attention grab, in just a few hundred years. The speed of change is mind-boggling, and it is growing faster by the day. It is fueled by a mania to optimise everything. To an increasing number of people it all feels a bit overwhelming. And it does not exactly seem to be going in the right direction at the moment.
With the fourth industrial revolution, we have arrived at a point where this ever-accelerating dynamic of technoscientific evolution directly threatens our very identity as human beings, the fabric of our social relations, and our connectedness to physical realities such as material and energetic limits to growth. Through our succession of technological revolutions — enabled by a concomitant overabundance of agricultural produce, mineral resources, and fossil energy (the carbon blip mentioned earlier) — we have manoeuvred ourselves into a position where we consider ourselves free of any societal or energetic constraints, true masters of the universe, accountable to nothing and no one. This forth one is a terrifyingly Promethean revolution.
We have stolen the fire from the gods. We are thinking of taking the future evolution of our bodies and our consciousness into our own hands. We are pushing the boundaries of what is technologically possible. We think we are about to build machines that are more powerful than us. We hope to live on in those machines, as uploaded consciousnesses, in perfect symbiosis. Or maybe they are our legacy. Bringing greater powers into being is our purpose. Or so the beguiling salvation narrative of endless progress goes.
Yet, what the ancient myth of Prometheus is actually telling us is that we’ll find ourselves tied to a rock, alone, an eagle eating our liver. However we interpret that, the point is: by stealing the fire of the gods, we are losing our humanity. We are going too far. This is hubris. And we will pay for it. Separated from our true nature, we are condemned to eternal suffering, not eternal bliss. There is no happy ending to this story.
Today, we moderns may see the story of Prometheus in a different light. He is the true hero of our present age, and the gods seem like a bunch of cruel and backwards tribal overlords who want to keep humanity in its miserable place. Their time has come and gone. Our scientific and technological revolutions have given us superhuman powers, both physical and cognitive. What we need is a better narrative for Prometheus. One that does not pin him to his rock. How to avoid such dire destiny for modernity? How to use that divine fire wisely? These are the questions of our age. We have deconstructed the ancient narrative, but there is nothing else to take its place. Yet, we cannot give that fire back. What are we to do?
Meditation
Every time our narrative changes as completely as it is changing right now, every time our worldview is radically overturned, we must carefully reassess what we know about the world. We must take inventory, sort out the wheat from the chaff, must find a new footing, ground ourselves in reality again.
And from that, we must construct a new narrative. This is precisely what Decartes did at the onset of modernity with his "Meditations." He arrived at his cogito by systematically applying the method of radical doubt. While meditating (for six days, apparently) he discards everything he can possibly distrust. His journey is tortuous and unsettling. He doubts whether or not he is dreaming. He questions the existence of all external reality, distrusts the existence of each and every empirical fact. There is even a malevolent god, an evil genius (now called Descartes’ demon), who takes pleasure in systematically deceiving poor René while he is meditating his way to the ultimate and indisputable fount of all knowledge: his declaration that he cannot deny the existence of his own mind — “I think, therefore I am."
What Descartes did was incredibly powerful and original, especially considering the philosophical practices and theories of his time. And it was utterly brilliant. It is still a powerful exercise to perform with students today, a pretty visceral experience (as far as philosophy goes). And we are at a point in history again, where we need this kind of radical reassessment. But let’s not do it exactly the way Descartes did it, shall we? After all, his meditations are the very source of so many of our troubles today.
What exactly went wrong? And what can we do better? Let us put it this way: discarding the whole of external reality (unavoidable given his method of doubt) probably wasn’t the best of Descartes’ moves. It led him to a radical mind-body dualism — the mental res cogitans strictly separated from the material res extensa. In a way, this is the primordial software-hardware distinction. We’ll come back to that later. For now, let’s just say that it had a tremendously bad influence on Western philosophy. It is really hard to overstate this. Cartesian dualism is at the very root of our current disconnection from reality.
And it is also to blame for why so many of us now think the world is a machine. You see, Descartes had a pretty serious problem: what he actually wanted to achieve was firm knowledge about the world, but all he got from his meditations was a kind of solipsism about his own mind. All he could be sure of was his own existence. This is where Descartes invokes the authority of god, as you do in the 17th century. We would frown upon this today, but it works for him: in order to have certain knowledge about the world (and for the world to be real in the first place), Descartes only needs to believe that there is a benevolent deity out there that does not deceive him. This is not hard, since pretty much everybody believes this at the time. Problem solved.
The fact that the world is made by a benevolent and omnipotent god, and we are also made by that god, means that we must be able to make sense of the world. The world must be perfect and we must be part of that perfection. This is exactly the reason why Descartes came to consider the world a machine, our bodies a machine: a clockwork was the most complicated and precise mechanism he could imagine, the best approximation to divine perfection. Too few people remember this today, but the idea that the world is a machine, that our bodies are machines, comes straight from Descartes’ piety. It is a religious credo, not a rationalist’s evidence-based insight. And that is what it remains today: nothing but an unsupported metaphysical dogma. Tell that to a contemporary mechanicist: their worldview is based on nothing but magic! They’ll be outraged, incredulous. They’ll hate you for it. But it’s true.
So, here we are: we need a kind of Cartesian meditation for our time. Caught in a whirlwind of profound societal and technoscientific change, we are rapidly losing our grip on reality. We urgently need to reassess our knowledge of the world to ground ourselves again. But we cannot go Descartes’ way. We cannot repeat his mistakes. That’s exactly the point: we want to use the kind of reassessment he performed to move away from the Cartesian worldview. An anti-Cartesian Cartesian mediation, if you will. We know, it’s a bit confusing.
Here are our main challenges: How can we avoid falling into Descartes’ solipsistic trap? How can we avert appealing to supernatural entities? How can we evade the machine metaphor? How can we have trustworthy embodied knowledge for limited beings in a world that is not a machine? What can such knowledge be based on and what does it look like?
To us, the answer to the last couple of questions comes naturally: for our own meditation, we will make use of naturalistic philosophy instead of Descartes’ version of the method of radical doubt. Instead of discarding everything we know, naturalism posits that we should definitely consider the best empirical knowledge currently available to come up with our theory of knowledge. Yes, it’s a form of circular reasoning, because our empirical research will then depend on the theory of knowledge we’ve established, and so on. But this is not vicious circularity: it’s not a bug, but a feature of our whole philosophy. In our view, knowledge is not fixed, not set in stone. Instead, our approach is fundamentally processual: what we know is allowed to evolve together with ourselves and our circumstances. We'll have much more to say about that in the next section.
We are pragmatic, pretty convinced that no certain or complete knowledge is possible for limited beings. And that’s ok. Remember: Laplace’s demon is dead, and it’s us who have slain it. What we strive for is the best possible knowledge of the world in the context of our place and time. Our philosophy is meliorative, not foundational. What we want is not eternal Truth, with that capital ‘T’. Instead, we aim for insight that dynamically improves and adapts as we keep on struggling to get a better grip on reality.
We could discuss the soundness of what we are doing here until the cows come home. We could debate whether there really is a naturalistic and realist grounding of knowledge. We have no failsafe argument, no logical proof for it. Maybe science is just problem-solving? It works, bitches! And that is all there is to it. Or maybe there is no grounding at all? It’s just social discourse and power struggle all the way down. Western colonial hegemony, man. The patriarchy. Be that as it may, chances are we would never come to an agreement. That’s philosophy for you. So let’s not go down that way. These kinds of discussions tend to get caught in rhetoric and definitional circles after a while.
To be more productive, we’ll just go ahead and actually perform the kind of naturalistic meditation we like. Our aim is not to formulate the one true system of the world, since we are fairly sure that such a thing does not exist. Instead, we are here to demonstrate what kind of perspective on the world we can build from our mediation. We hope to show that our perspective is interesting, thought-provoking, that reading this book is worth your time. You can then decide for yourself whether you share some of our views, whether you agree with some of our arguments, or whether you want to do a different mediation altogether. It’s totally fine if you want to go your own way. In fact, we strongly encourage you to do it.
There are many paths that are valid, and there are many that are less so. Some of these mediations are wise and thoughtful, some of them will turn out to be foolish and deluded. Time will tell. The main thing for now is that you actually do the mediation, that you reassess your relation to the world. And also: don’t assume your way is the only way. Our kind of naturalist perspectivism means that everybody needs a slightly different mediation. These will not be arbitrary. We may all be different, but we are also all human. It will be interesting to see where the differences and the commonalities lie.
Every time our narrative changes as completely as it is changing right now, every time our worldview is radically overturned, we must carefully reassess what we know about the world. We must take inventory, sort out the wheat from the chaff, must find a new footing, ground ourselves in reality again.
And from that, we must construct a new narrative. This is precisely what Decartes did at the onset of modernity with his "Meditations." He arrived at his cogito by systematically applying the method of radical doubt. While meditating (for six days, apparently) he discards everything he can possibly distrust. His journey is tortuous and unsettling. He doubts whether or not he is dreaming. He questions the existence of all external reality, distrusts the existence of each and every empirical fact. There is even a malevolent god, an evil genius (now called Descartes’ demon), who takes pleasure in systematically deceiving poor René while he is meditating his way to the ultimate and indisputable fount of all knowledge: his declaration that he cannot deny the existence of his own mind — “I think, therefore I am."
What Descartes did was incredibly powerful and original, especially considering the philosophical practices and theories of his time. And it was utterly brilliant. It is still a powerful exercise to perform with students today, a pretty visceral experience (as far as philosophy goes). And we are at a point in history again, where we need this kind of radical reassessment. But let’s not do it exactly the way Descartes did it, shall we? After all, his meditations are the very source of so many of our troubles today.
What exactly went wrong? And what can we do better? Let us put it this way: discarding the whole of external reality (unavoidable given his method of doubt) probably wasn’t the best of Descartes’ moves. It led him to a radical mind-body dualism — the mental res cogitans strictly separated from the material res extensa. In a way, this is the primordial software-hardware distinction. We’ll come back to that later. For now, let’s just say that it had a tremendously bad influence on Western philosophy. It is really hard to overstate this. Cartesian dualism is at the very root of our current disconnection from reality.
And it is also to blame for why so many of us now think the world is a machine. You see, Descartes had a pretty serious problem: what he actually wanted to achieve was firm knowledge about the world, but all he got from his meditations was a kind of solipsism about his own mind. All he could be sure of was his own existence. This is where Descartes invokes the authority of god, as you do in the 17th century. We would frown upon this today, but it works for him: in order to have certain knowledge about the world (and for the world to be real in the first place), Descartes only needs to believe that there is a benevolent deity out there that does not deceive him. This is not hard, since pretty much everybody believes this at the time. Problem solved.
The fact that the world is made by a benevolent and omnipotent god, and we are also made by that god, means that we must be able to make sense of the world. The world must be perfect and we must be part of that perfection. This is exactly the reason why Descartes came to consider the world a machine, our bodies a machine: a clockwork was the most complicated and precise mechanism he could imagine, the best approximation to divine perfection. Too few people remember this today, but the idea that the world is a machine, that our bodies are machines, comes straight from Descartes’ piety. It is a religious credo, not a rationalist’s evidence-based insight. And that is what it remains today: nothing but an unsupported metaphysical dogma. Tell that to a contemporary mechanicist: their worldview is based on nothing but magic! They’ll be outraged, incredulous. They’ll hate you for it. But it’s true.
So, here we are: we need a kind of Cartesian meditation for our time. Caught in a whirlwind of profound societal and technoscientific change, we are rapidly losing our grip on reality. We urgently need to reassess our knowledge of the world to ground ourselves again. But we cannot go Descartes’ way. We cannot repeat his mistakes. That’s exactly the point: we want to use the kind of reassessment he performed to move away from the Cartesian worldview. An anti-Cartesian Cartesian mediation, if you will. We know, it’s a bit confusing.
Here are our main challenges: How can we avoid falling into Descartes’ solipsistic trap? How can we avert appealing to supernatural entities? How can we evade the machine metaphor? How can we have trustworthy embodied knowledge for limited beings in a world that is not a machine? What can such knowledge be based on and what does it look like?
To us, the answer to the last couple of questions comes naturally: for our own meditation, we will make use of naturalistic philosophy instead of Descartes’ version of the method of radical doubt. Instead of discarding everything we know, naturalism posits that we should definitely consider the best empirical knowledge currently available to come up with our theory of knowledge. Yes, it’s a form of circular reasoning, because our empirical research will then depend on the theory of knowledge we’ve established, and so on. But this is not vicious circularity: it’s not a bug, but a feature of our whole philosophy. In our view, knowledge is not fixed, not set in stone. Instead, our approach is fundamentally processual: what we know is allowed to evolve together with ourselves and our circumstances. We'll have much more to say about that in the next section.
We are pragmatic, pretty convinced that no certain or complete knowledge is possible for limited beings. And that’s ok. Remember: Laplace’s demon is dead, and it’s us who have slain it. What we strive for is the best possible knowledge of the world in the context of our place and time. Our philosophy is meliorative, not foundational. What we want is not eternal Truth, with that capital ‘T’. Instead, we aim for insight that dynamically improves and adapts as we keep on struggling to get a better grip on reality.
We could discuss the soundness of what we are doing here until the cows come home. We could debate whether there really is a naturalistic and realist grounding of knowledge. We have no failsafe argument, no logical proof for it. Maybe science is just problem-solving? It works, bitches! And that is all there is to it. Or maybe there is no grounding at all? It’s just social discourse and power struggle all the way down. Western colonial hegemony, man. The patriarchy. Be that as it may, chances are we would never come to an agreement. That’s philosophy for you. So let’s not go down that way. These kinds of discussions tend to get caught in rhetoric and definitional circles after a while.
To be more productive, we’ll just go ahead and actually perform the kind of naturalistic meditation we like. Our aim is not to formulate the one true system of the world, since we are fairly sure that such a thing does not exist. Instead, we are here to demonstrate what kind of perspective on the world we can build from our mediation. We hope to show that our perspective is interesting, thought-provoking, that reading this book is worth your time. You can then decide for yourself whether you share some of our views, whether you agree with some of our arguments, or whether you want to do a different mediation altogether. It’s totally fine if you want to go your own way. In fact, we strongly encourage you to do it.
There are many paths that are valid, and there are many that are less so. Some of these mediations are wise and thoughtful, some of them will turn out to be foolish and deluded. Time will tell. The main thing for now is that you actually do the mediation, that you reassess your relation to the world. And also: don’t assume your way is the only way. Our kind of naturalist perspectivism means that everybody needs a slightly different mediation. These will not be arbitrary. We may all be different, but we are also all human. It will be interesting to see where the differences and the commonalities lie.
Large
Where do we start our mediation? Like Descartes, our initial focus will lie on the thinker, or knower. But before we begin, we must zoom out to say a few words about the structure of this book. We will make a number of assumptions in the argument that is about to follow which will seem insufficiently explained or justified. When making these assumptions, we refer to later chapters in the book that will provide a detailed account of how they come about.
In other words, we begin by building a theory of knowledge which grounds our perspective on the world. This perspective supports an argument whose conclusions, in turn, will be used to justify our theory of knowledge. Like anything in the living world, this book and the story it tells isn’t linear. Instead, it starts where it ends. Mechanicism is no better, by the way: it started as a speculative idea (derived from religion, as we have just seen) to produce a large amount of empirical evidence that was then used to retroactively rationalise its philosophical underpinnings.
For the machine view, this kind of circularity poses a problem, since it does not conform to its own standards of reasoning. Our situation is different: the self-referential closure of our book mirrors the hierarchical circularity that lies at the very heart of living matter. It is the same hierarchical circularity that characterises the evolutionary theory of knowledge we have just outlined. The medium is the message. This makes sense: closure is our central theme. It is everywhere in the living world. The main problem with the machine view is precisely that it neglects and misunderstands this fundamental principle. It expelled it from its mathematical and empirical frameworks. It simply declared it illegal in any form, and all this purely for the sake of convenience — to avoid a number of vexing paradoxes. This is why the machine view is insufficient: the secret trick we’ll be applying is that we must embrace these paradoxes, not avoid them, if we are to understand the nature of life, the universe, and everything.
This may seem irregular, even illogical, and more than a little unsettling for someone with a mechanicist worldview. The self-referentiality of our argument appears to beg the question, to represent a kind of vicious circular reasoning, to manifest a chicken-and-egg dynamic. But that is not so. Apart from the fact that the egg definitely predates the chicken (end of discussion!), our approach is not viciously circular, but simply the first turn of an ascending spiral: it represents a kind of dialectic, where each strand of our argumentation supports and “elevates” the other. This results in exactly the kind of constructive and adaptive evolutionary dynamic we want for our approach. Bear with us. We’ll return to talk about the circuitous structure of our argument, and it will all make sense in the end. We promise.
In the meantime, let us finally return to Descartes’ knower. What does it mean to say “I think, therefore I am?” Who or what is the “I” in “I think?” As mentioned above, Descartes assigns the “I” to a mental realm, which is exclusively human (no other organisms have it) and entirely separate from the physical world. We certainly do not want to go that way. We are monists in this sense: there is nothing but this world, which contains both objective and subjective phenomena. And we would not want to be seen anywhere near someone who believes that animals are machines.
Let us then assume, for now, that a knower must be a living being, an organism, which we define as some living system that is an individual. We’ll later return to the question whether non-living entities, such as Laplacean demons or machines (especially algorithms), can be knowers. (Hint: our answer is “no.”)
Let us also be more inclusive (and less human-centric) than Descartes and replace “thinking” with “experiencing.” “I experience, therefore I am.” This means that “I” is a subject with interiority of some kind, capable of having a point of view. In the words of Thomas Nagel: there is something it is like to be me. This is a necessary precondition for asking “how do I get to know the world?” It applies to any kind of organism, not just conscious human beings (like Descartes), or animals with a nervous system.
For lack of better words, we’ll use the phrase “to get to know the world” in a very broad sense here, meaning “to obtain and maintain a grip on your particular reality.” A well-adapted bacterium “knows its world” in a way that is admittedly much simpler yet still deeply related to the way humans or even an alien race with unimaginably superior intelligence would “know the world.” The whole rest of this book will carefully establish what it means to be a biological experiencer without breaking any laws of physics or requiring a separate subjective realm. So don’t worry about it too much at this point.
As the next step in our meditation, let us state that all living beings are limited beings. This is really difficult to doubt based on what we know about life and the universe today, and there is no counterexample to this claim that we know or could think of. In order to keep themselves alive, organisms must be thermodynamically open systems, constantly exchanging matter and energy with an environment. This means they must be set apart, while still intimately intermingled with their surroundings.
All organisms are bounded. They are born and they die (even if some may live for a very long time, or may be “immortal” like this cute little jellyfish whose lineage is nevertheless fated to perish eventually). Moreover, they occupy a specific location in space, even though spatial boundaries must be permeable, can be fuzzy, and may change location over time. Finally, and most importantly, living beings are strictly delimited in terms of their organisation: they have a finite set of components that contribute to their own continued existence through collective self-manufacture. Even if this is often difficult in practice, we can unambiguously identify what is an active part of a living process, and what is not.
The boundedness of living beings means that they only ever occupy a fraction of their world. If there is no environment, there is no organism. In fact, once we acknowledge how vast and how old the universe is, this fraction is likely to be tiny (almost infinitesimal) for most living beings. Life as we know it is vanishingly small, no matter whether you are a microorganism, a giant sequoia, or an enormous black cloud of interstellar gas that achieved consciousness somehow.
In addition, and this is evident, each and every living being has a specific history. Indeed, we will argue later that a living being is defined by its history. It travels on a particular trajectory through time. This defines and constrains its experience. On its temporal journey, it has to constantly adapt to its environment (or else adapt the environment to itself). Every living being has specific ways to perceive, and specific ways to act, which both frame its relations with the world and the kind of problems it will encounter. This necessarily puts restrictions on what and how it can know. Being limited means limited knowledge.
Finally, and we all know this, being alive means constant drudgery. As we will outline later, living beings are systems that can only exist far from thermodynamic equilibrium. They must expend physical work, must constantly invest effort in themselves, to remain that way. Hans Jonas, in his “Phenomenon of Life,” called this our thermodynamic predicament. The life of every organism is precarious: we struggle, we suffer, and then we die when we run out of energy for the work required to keep ourselves alive. This precariousness, this impermanence, is the reason why we have a desire to know the world. Without mortality, without suffering, no strive for meaning.
We need to make sense of our world, to adapt and to continue living. It’s our basic purpose, our fundamental nature. An organism that knows nothing about its environment is like a fish out of water. It will not survive, will not evolve. In stark contrast, a truly unlimited and immortal being (like the Laplacean demon) can have no such desire: it always already knows everything there is to know.
So much about the knower. It is alive. It is limited. It is fragile. But what about this world it is part of? What can we say about that? The good news is: we can say far more about it than Descartes thought he could, without invoking any supernatural powers. This is because the nature of the knower tells us quite a lot about the nature of its world. The two are not separated, like in Descartes’ dualistic view. As we have seen, being open systems, organisms are intricately intermingled with their environments.
In particular, there is one thing we can say with high confidence about the world of any living being: it is a large world, a concept that goes back to Leonard Savage and his 1954 “Foundations of Statistics.”
What makes this world large is not its vast extension in space and time, nor the organism being tiny compared to it. Instead, what makes it large is the fact that most of its contents are not precisely defined or, indeed, not precisely definable. A large world can be a confusing place. In such a world, it is not immediately clear what is relevant for solving a problem (for “making a decision” in Savage’s original words), and what is not. A large world is overflowing with potential meaning, yet the cues we need to make sense of it tend to be hard to come by. Clear and obvious signals are disturbingly rare. And even if we manage to identify what is relevant, what properly pertains to our situation, the information we end up with is often fragmentary, ambiguous, or outright misleading. Life can be frustrating that way.
As Kyle Stanford puts it, our large world far exceeds our grasp. This seems like bad news. We live in a world that is unfathomable. No limited being can come to know its world in its entirety. In fact, we already said in the last chapter that we don’t have the faintest clue what “knowing the world in its entirety” could possibly mean. We cannot even comprehend how large our world really is. If we presume that reality may be inexhaustibly fine-grained, or that there may be infinitely many ways to subdivide it (and who knows whether this is true or not), then the number of cues that are potentially relevant could have no limit. Be that as it may, our space of possibilities is inexhaustible for sure. It makes you dizzy just to think about it.
The thought of how little we can know is utterly terrifying to us human beings. In our more vulnerable moments, the world appears creepy, cold, and cruel. It is uncaring and indifferent to our needs, desires, and hopes. Our large world makes us feel small and insignificant. This is the essence of the human condition: we are condemned to realise just how little we know. It opens the door to wishful thinking. The myth that the world was custom-made for us, as religious dogmas maintain, and the myth that the world is small and controllable, as mechanicism seems to imply, are popular for exactly this reason.
Where do we start our mediation? Like Descartes, our initial focus will lie on the thinker, or knower. But before we begin, we must zoom out to say a few words about the structure of this book. We will make a number of assumptions in the argument that is about to follow which will seem insufficiently explained or justified. When making these assumptions, we refer to later chapters in the book that will provide a detailed account of how they come about.
In other words, we begin by building a theory of knowledge which grounds our perspective on the world. This perspective supports an argument whose conclusions, in turn, will be used to justify our theory of knowledge. Like anything in the living world, this book and the story it tells isn’t linear. Instead, it starts where it ends. Mechanicism is no better, by the way: it started as a speculative idea (derived from religion, as we have just seen) to produce a large amount of empirical evidence that was then used to retroactively rationalise its philosophical underpinnings.
For the machine view, this kind of circularity poses a problem, since it does not conform to its own standards of reasoning. Our situation is different: the self-referential closure of our book mirrors the hierarchical circularity that lies at the very heart of living matter. It is the same hierarchical circularity that characterises the evolutionary theory of knowledge we have just outlined. The medium is the message. This makes sense: closure is our central theme. It is everywhere in the living world. The main problem with the machine view is precisely that it neglects and misunderstands this fundamental principle. It expelled it from its mathematical and empirical frameworks. It simply declared it illegal in any form, and all this purely for the sake of convenience — to avoid a number of vexing paradoxes. This is why the machine view is insufficient: the secret trick we’ll be applying is that we must embrace these paradoxes, not avoid them, if we are to understand the nature of life, the universe, and everything.
This may seem irregular, even illogical, and more than a little unsettling for someone with a mechanicist worldview. The self-referentiality of our argument appears to beg the question, to represent a kind of vicious circular reasoning, to manifest a chicken-and-egg dynamic. But that is not so. Apart from the fact that the egg definitely predates the chicken (end of discussion!), our approach is not viciously circular, but simply the first turn of an ascending spiral: it represents a kind of dialectic, where each strand of our argumentation supports and “elevates” the other. This results in exactly the kind of constructive and adaptive evolutionary dynamic we want for our approach. Bear with us. We’ll return to talk about the circuitous structure of our argument, and it will all make sense in the end. We promise.
In the meantime, let us finally return to Descartes’ knower. What does it mean to say “I think, therefore I am?” Who or what is the “I” in “I think?” As mentioned above, Descartes assigns the “I” to a mental realm, which is exclusively human (no other organisms have it) and entirely separate from the physical world. We certainly do not want to go that way. We are monists in this sense: there is nothing but this world, which contains both objective and subjective phenomena. And we would not want to be seen anywhere near someone who believes that animals are machines.
Let us then assume, for now, that a knower must be a living being, an organism, which we define as some living system that is an individual. We’ll later return to the question whether non-living entities, such as Laplacean demons or machines (especially algorithms), can be knowers. (Hint: our answer is “no.”)
Let us also be more inclusive (and less human-centric) than Descartes and replace “thinking” with “experiencing.” “I experience, therefore I am.” This means that “I” is a subject with interiority of some kind, capable of having a point of view. In the words of Thomas Nagel: there is something it is like to be me. This is a necessary precondition for asking “how do I get to know the world?” It applies to any kind of organism, not just conscious human beings (like Descartes), or animals with a nervous system.
For lack of better words, we’ll use the phrase “to get to know the world” in a very broad sense here, meaning “to obtain and maintain a grip on your particular reality.” A well-adapted bacterium “knows its world” in a way that is admittedly much simpler yet still deeply related to the way humans or even an alien race with unimaginably superior intelligence would “know the world.” The whole rest of this book will carefully establish what it means to be a biological experiencer without breaking any laws of physics or requiring a separate subjective realm. So don’t worry about it too much at this point.
As the next step in our meditation, let us state that all living beings are limited beings. This is really difficult to doubt based on what we know about life and the universe today, and there is no counterexample to this claim that we know or could think of. In order to keep themselves alive, organisms must be thermodynamically open systems, constantly exchanging matter and energy with an environment. This means they must be set apart, while still intimately intermingled with their surroundings.
All organisms are bounded. They are born and they die (even if some may live for a very long time, or may be “immortal” like this cute little jellyfish whose lineage is nevertheless fated to perish eventually). Moreover, they occupy a specific location in space, even though spatial boundaries must be permeable, can be fuzzy, and may change location over time. Finally, and most importantly, living beings are strictly delimited in terms of their organisation: they have a finite set of components that contribute to their own continued existence through collective self-manufacture. Even if this is often difficult in practice, we can unambiguously identify what is an active part of a living process, and what is not.
The boundedness of living beings means that they only ever occupy a fraction of their world. If there is no environment, there is no organism. In fact, once we acknowledge how vast and how old the universe is, this fraction is likely to be tiny (almost infinitesimal) for most living beings. Life as we know it is vanishingly small, no matter whether you are a microorganism, a giant sequoia, or an enormous black cloud of interstellar gas that achieved consciousness somehow.
In addition, and this is evident, each and every living being has a specific history. Indeed, we will argue later that a living being is defined by its history. It travels on a particular trajectory through time. This defines and constrains its experience. On its temporal journey, it has to constantly adapt to its environment (or else adapt the environment to itself). Every living being has specific ways to perceive, and specific ways to act, which both frame its relations with the world and the kind of problems it will encounter. This necessarily puts restrictions on what and how it can know. Being limited means limited knowledge.
Finally, and we all know this, being alive means constant drudgery. As we will outline later, living beings are systems that can only exist far from thermodynamic equilibrium. They must expend physical work, must constantly invest effort in themselves, to remain that way. Hans Jonas, in his “Phenomenon of Life,” called this our thermodynamic predicament. The life of every organism is precarious: we struggle, we suffer, and then we die when we run out of energy for the work required to keep ourselves alive. This precariousness, this impermanence, is the reason why we have a desire to know the world. Without mortality, without suffering, no strive for meaning.
We need to make sense of our world, to adapt and to continue living. It’s our basic purpose, our fundamental nature. An organism that knows nothing about its environment is like a fish out of water. It will not survive, will not evolve. In stark contrast, a truly unlimited and immortal being (like the Laplacean demon) can have no such desire: it always already knows everything there is to know.
So much about the knower. It is alive. It is limited. It is fragile. But what about this world it is part of? What can we say about that? The good news is: we can say far more about it than Descartes thought he could, without invoking any supernatural powers. This is because the nature of the knower tells us quite a lot about the nature of its world. The two are not separated, like in Descartes’ dualistic view. As we have seen, being open systems, organisms are intricately intermingled with their environments.
In particular, there is one thing we can say with high confidence about the world of any living being: it is a large world, a concept that goes back to Leonard Savage and his 1954 “Foundations of Statistics.”
What makes this world large is not its vast extension in space and time, nor the organism being tiny compared to it. Instead, what makes it large is the fact that most of its contents are not precisely defined or, indeed, not precisely definable. A large world can be a confusing place. In such a world, it is not immediately clear what is relevant for solving a problem (for “making a decision” in Savage’s original words), and what is not. A large world is overflowing with potential meaning, yet the cues we need to make sense of it tend to be hard to come by. Clear and obvious signals are disturbingly rare. And even if we manage to identify what is relevant, what properly pertains to our situation, the information we end up with is often fragmentary, ambiguous, or outright misleading. Life can be frustrating that way.
As Kyle Stanford puts it, our large world far exceeds our grasp. This seems like bad news. We live in a world that is unfathomable. No limited being can come to know its world in its entirety. In fact, we already said in the last chapter that we don’t have the faintest clue what “knowing the world in its entirety” could possibly mean. We cannot even comprehend how large our world really is. If we presume that reality may be inexhaustibly fine-grained, or that there may be infinitely many ways to subdivide it (and who knows whether this is true or not), then the number of cues that are potentially relevant could have no limit. Be that as it may, our space of possibilities is inexhaustible for sure. It makes you dizzy just to think about it.
The thought of how little we can know is utterly terrifying to us human beings. In our more vulnerable moments, the world appears creepy, cold, and cruel. It is uncaring and indifferent to our needs, desires, and hopes. Our large world makes us feel small and insignificant. This is the essence of the human condition: we are condemned to realise just how little we know. It opens the door to wishful thinking. The myth that the world was custom-made for us, as religious dogmas maintain, and the myth that the world is small and controllable, as mechanicism seems to imply, are popular for exactly this reason.
Small
But is a small world really more comforting? We don’t think so. To understand why, we need to better understand the features of such a world. According to Savage, a small world is defined by the fact that all its contents are well-defined (it constitutes “a satisfactory isolated decision situation”).
Here we need to make one thing very clear: a small world can be very big indeed (even infinite, in fact) as long as its contents are clearly definable in terms of some finite formal procedure. Thus, the distinction of large versus small worlds is not primarily concerned with size. Instead, it has something to do with the idea of formalisation. A small world is entirely formalised (or at least formalisable). The point is that there is no ambiguity, there are no missing or misleading cues. In a small world, you always have whatever it takes to make an unequivocal and well-informed decision. At least in principle.
One way to think about small worlds, and thus about formalisation, is in terms of problem solving. Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, two pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence, came up with what they called the general problem solving framework in 1972. Their aim was to define a procedure that could solve any well-defined problem. This is the perfect example of a small-world exercise.
In this framework, a problem is formally defined by four elements. First, there is an initial state, which is the state our small world is in when we set out to solve the problem. Second, there is a goal state, which is the state we want to get to in the end. Third, we have at our disposal a finite set of operators that we can apply to transition from one state to the next. Fourth and last, there are constraints that disallow certain operations under certain circumstances. A valid problem solution is a trajectory from initial to goal state consisting of a sequence of legal state-transition operations. All possible sequences of operations make up the search space of the problem. If all these elements are well-defined, then we have a well-defined problem. But this does not automatically imply that we can solve it. Not at all.
Let us illustrate the uses and limitations of the general problem solving framework by applying it to the world of chess. And by that we don’t mean the world of people playing chess, but the world that chess figures exist in, within the rules of the game.
The world of chess is a small world. The board, the figures, and the rules of play are all precisely defined. The rules are also exhaustive, covering all the possible moves the figures can make on the board. It’s all quite simple: a chess board consists of 8×8=64 squares of alternating dark and light. Chess is played by two players, called “white” and “black.” There are six types of figures — one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns for each player — which are arranged in a particular starting position at the beginning of a game. The figures then move, each in their own fashion, to attack those of the opponent. There are a number of additional rules, such as castling, en passant, and promotion of pawns, but that is basically it. As there is a clear beginning, there is a clear end: either the game finishes in a draw, or one of the players wins (through resignation or checkmate).
Thus, all four elements of a well-defined problem are there: the initial position of the figures, a goal (checkmate!), a finite set of operations (legal moves from a given position), and constraints (moves that are not legal). Any valid chess problem is a well-defined problem: this is the very definition of a small world. However, it does not mean that we can “solve” the problem of chess globally. We cannot find the absolutely best way to win the game. This is because the search space in which to find a winning solution is unimaginably mind-bogglingly vast.
Chess is a very big small world! After two moves by each player, there are 72,084 possible legal positions for the figures on the board. This number increases to about nine million after three moves, and to 288 billion after four. It is not actually clear how to properly calculate the number of all possible chess games. But we do know for sure that the possibilities are not endless. That gives us an upper bound. Claude Shannon used a measure called game-tree complexity to provide a conservative lower bound for the number of different games that could possibly be played. This is now known as the Shannon Number, which is 10^120 (a one followed by 120 zeros!). Shannon also estimated the number of possible legal positions at about 10^43. Compare that to the current estimated age of the universe at about 4.3×10^17 seconds, or the 10^78 to 10^82 atoms predicted to exist within it.
All of this means the small world of chess is so unbelievably huge that it is impossible for us (or any computer that remains within the confines of the known laws of physics) to enumerate all possible games of chess within the age of the universe. This is what’s called a combinatorial explosion. It is what makes a computation complex. Unfortunately, it is very common. Many problems we want to solve are like this. Humans have developed some tricks to deal with this kind of complexity, as we shall see. But doesn’t that take the point away from wanting to live in a small world because it is more manageable than a large one? It is evidently not. Besides, small worlds come with a heavy burden. To better understand what this burden is, we will stay in the world of games a little longer and use James Carse’s distinction between finite games and infinite play to examine what it means to live in a small versus a large world.
A small world corresponds to a finite game, which we play for the purpose of winning. Its rules and its boundaries (in time, in space, and who is playing) are externally imposed. If we agree to play, we agree to those rules and boundaries. There is no way to change them during game play (or else we would be cheating or playing a different game). A finite game comes to an end when someone wins. We know that someone has won when all players agree that they have won, in accordance with the rules of the game. If the players do not agree on a winner, if the game does not come to a definite conclusion, then the purpose of the game remains unsatisfied. Obviously, chess is a finite game. It involves two players, its board and rules are clearly defined, and they are fixed. Either there is a winner at the end of the game, or it remains inconclusive and no one is satisfied. Organised sports also fall into this category.
And so, by the way, does the Laplacean universe: if the world is a machine — if every physical process is a deterministic computation (and even the wave equation underlying quantum mechanics unfolds its space of probabilities in a deterministic manner) — this universe is a small world. It may appear unimaginably vast to us, like the world of chess. It may even be infinite (like the Hilbert space of a quantum mechanical system). But its rules are clearly defined and fixed from the beginning. There is nothing more to it. The playing field is set. Physical phenomena have purely physical causes. This is called causal closure, and it is not the kind of closure we get excited about. In the machine view, the universe has a beginning, and an end. Entropy will win. What was once known as “heat death” is now the “Big Chill” at the end of time. The only reason we can’t understand the rules of the game yet is because we are limited; the demon could.
In contrast, a large world implies an infinite game, which we engage in with the purpose of continuing to play. There are no fixed boundaries or rules. Infinite players cannot say when their game began. Nor do they care. Neither does it end, or have a predefined playing field. Infinite play is truly open-ended. Anyone who wishes may join in infinite play. And, this is the most critical distinction: the rules and boundaries of an infinite game must constantly change, whenever the players agree that the game is in danger of terminating with a finite outcome. The point is to prevent the game from finishing. In Carse’s words: “[f]inite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.” This is not chess, it’s Calvinball! “No sport is less organised than Calvinball.” And the only rule is: you can never play the game the same way twice. This is our kind of play.
Our lives, our history, and our evolution are infinite play. This is what living in a large world means: to play with the rules, to play with boundaries. This is what it means to make sense of the world. It never ends. And you cannot do this in a small world.
Instead, all small worlds are embedded in a large world. Finite games can be played in the context of infinite play. In fact, our large world is full of finite games. But not the other way around: infinite play is impossible in a small world. In such a world, there is never anything truly new under the sun. We are condemned to play the same games over and over again. Sisyphus, not Prometheus. The rules never change. Innovation only exists through recombining old rules. What did we say about the Laplacean universe? It is a vision of a barren world, utterly dead and dull. That’s what you get in a small world: incomprehensible vastness without the freedom to play as you want. It doesn’t sound appealing to us.
So, what can we do? To us, it seems clear. We will engage with you, the reader, in a particular finite game. Its initial state is your belief in the inevitability of a custom-made or mechanistic universe. The rules are those of logical argument. The goal of this argument is to seduce you to embrace the infinity of your play, the open-endedness of the world. There is nothing unscientific or irrational about that. In fact, it’s already within you! It does not depend on us telling you. You can discover it for yourself.
But why would you want to? Carse says: “The finite play for life is serious, the infinite play of life is joyous. The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.”
In this spirit, we want to propose an alternative worldview, a worldview that is as comforting as its religious competitors, as scientific and rational as its mechanistic twin. It is more human and more humane. The fact that we are fragile and limited in a world that is much larger than us is no reason for dread or despair. Quite the contrary: it is what makes our condition as living systems special. It is what sets us apart from the non-living world. It is the fundamental reason for why we are not machines. It is the prerequisite for how we come to know the world. It is the source of all meaning. It gives us the freedom we want. It is what it means to be alive. We are not machines.
And our world is not a cold, dead mechanism. It is not small. It is a large world full of significance, endlessly fascinating, beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring. It provides us with the opportunity to continuously learn and grow through experience, to become better versions of ourselves. Ours is a deeply evolutionary and processual vision. Nobody knows where it will be taking us.
But is a small world really more comforting? We don’t think so. To understand why, we need to better understand the features of such a world. According to Savage, a small world is defined by the fact that all its contents are well-defined (it constitutes “a satisfactory isolated decision situation”).
Here we need to make one thing very clear: a small world can be very big indeed (even infinite, in fact) as long as its contents are clearly definable in terms of some finite formal procedure. Thus, the distinction of large versus small worlds is not primarily concerned with size. Instead, it has something to do with the idea of formalisation. A small world is entirely formalised (or at least formalisable). The point is that there is no ambiguity, there are no missing or misleading cues. In a small world, you always have whatever it takes to make an unequivocal and well-informed decision. At least in principle.
One way to think about small worlds, and thus about formalisation, is in terms of problem solving. Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, two pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence, came up with what they called the general problem solving framework in 1972. Their aim was to define a procedure that could solve any well-defined problem. This is the perfect example of a small-world exercise.
In this framework, a problem is formally defined by four elements. First, there is an initial state, which is the state our small world is in when we set out to solve the problem. Second, there is a goal state, which is the state we want to get to in the end. Third, we have at our disposal a finite set of operators that we can apply to transition from one state to the next. Fourth and last, there are constraints that disallow certain operations under certain circumstances. A valid problem solution is a trajectory from initial to goal state consisting of a sequence of legal state-transition operations. All possible sequences of operations make up the search space of the problem. If all these elements are well-defined, then we have a well-defined problem. But this does not automatically imply that we can solve it. Not at all.
Let us illustrate the uses and limitations of the general problem solving framework by applying it to the world of chess. And by that we don’t mean the world of people playing chess, but the world that chess figures exist in, within the rules of the game.
The world of chess is a small world. The board, the figures, and the rules of play are all precisely defined. The rules are also exhaustive, covering all the possible moves the figures can make on the board. It’s all quite simple: a chess board consists of 8×8=64 squares of alternating dark and light. Chess is played by two players, called “white” and “black.” There are six types of figures — one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns for each player — which are arranged in a particular starting position at the beginning of a game. The figures then move, each in their own fashion, to attack those of the opponent. There are a number of additional rules, such as castling, en passant, and promotion of pawns, but that is basically it. As there is a clear beginning, there is a clear end: either the game finishes in a draw, or one of the players wins (through resignation or checkmate).
Thus, all four elements of a well-defined problem are there: the initial position of the figures, a goal (checkmate!), a finite set of operations (legal moves from a given position), and constraints (moves that are not legal). Any valid chess problem is a well-defined problem: this is the very definition of a small world. However, it does not mean that we can “solve” the problem of chess globally. We cannot find the absolutely best way to win the game. This is because the search space in which to find a winning solution is unimaginably mind-bogglingly vast.
Chess is a very big small world! After two moves by each player, there are 72,084 possible legal positions for the figures on the board. This number increases to about nine million after three moves, and to 288 billion after four. It is not actually clear how to properly calculate the number of all possible chess games. But we do know for sure that the possibilities are not endless. That gives us an upper bound. Claude Shannon used a measure called game-tree complexity to provide a conservative lower bound for the number of different games that could possibly be played. This is now known as the Shannon Number, which is 10^120 (a one followed by 120 zeros!). Shannon also estimated the number of possible legal positions at about 10^43. Compare that to the current estimated age of the universe at about 4.3×10^17 seconds, or the 10^78 to 10^82 atoms predicted to exist within it.
All of this means the small world of chess is so unbelievably huge that it is impossible for us (or any computer that remains within the confines of the known laws of physics) to enumerate all possible games of chess within the age of the universe. This is what’s called a combinatorial explosion. It is what makes a computation complex. Unfortunately, it is very common. Many problems we want to solve are like this. Humans have developed some tricks to deal with this kind of complexity, as we shall see. But doesn’t that take the point away from wanting to live in a small world because it is more manageable than a large one? It is evidently not. Besides, small worlds come with a heavy burden. To better understand what this burden is, we will stay in the world of games a little longer and use James Carse’s distinction between finite games and infinite play to examine what it means to live in a small versus a large world.
A small world corresponds to a finite game, which we play for the purpose of winning. Its rules and its boundaries (in time, in space, and who is playing) are externally imposed. If we agree to play, we agree to those rules and boundaries. There is no way to change them during game play (or else we would be cheating or playing a different game). A finite game comes to an end when someone wins. We know that someone has won when all players agree that they have won, in accordance with the rules of the game. If the players do not agree on a winner, if the game does not come to a definite conclusion, then the purpose of the game remains unsatisfied. Obviously, chess is a finite game. It involves two players, its board and rules are clearly defined, and they are fixed. Either there is a winner at the end of the game, or it remains inconclusive and no one is satisfied. Organised sports also fall into this category.
And so, by the way, does the Laplacean universe: if the world is a machine — if every physical process is a deterministic computation (and even the wave equation underlying quantum mechanics unfolds its space of probabilities in a deterministic manner) — this universe is a small world. It may appear unimaginably vast to us, like the world of chess. It may even be infinite (like the Hilbert space of a quantum mechanical system). But its rules are clearly defined and fixed from the beginning. There is nothing more to it. The playing field is set. Physical phenomena have purely physical causes. This is called causal closure, and it is not the kind of closure we get excited about. In the machine view, the universe has a beginning, and an end. Entropy will win. What was once known as “heat death” is now the “Big Chill” at the end of time. The only reason we can’t understand the rules of the game yet is because we are limited; the demon could.
In contrast, a large world implies an infinite game, which we engage in with the purpose of continuing to play. There are no fixed boundaries or rules. Infinite players cannot say when their game began. Nor do they care. Neither does it end, or have a predefined playing field. Infinite play is truly open-ended. Anyone who wishes may join in infinite play. And, this is the most critical distinction: the rules and boundaries of an infinite game must constantly change, whenever the players agree that the game is in danger of terminating with a finite outcome. The point is to prevent the game from finishing. In Carse’s words: “[f]inite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.” This is not chess, it’s Calvinball! “No sport is less organised than Calvinball.” And the only rule is: you can never play the game the same way twice. This is our kind of play.
Our lives, our history, and our evolution are infinite play. This is what living in a large world means: to play with the rules, to play with boundaries. This is what it means to make sense of the world. It never ends. And you cannot do this in a small world.
Instead, all small worlds are embedded in a large world. Finite games can be played in the context of infinite play. In fact, our large world is full of finite games. But not the other way around: infinite play is impossible in a small world. In such a world, there is never anything truly new under the sun. We are condemned to play the same games over and over again. Sisyphus, not Prometheus. The rules never change. Innovation only exists through recombining old rules. What did we say about the Laplacean universe? It is a vision of a barren world, utterly dead and dull. That’s what you get in a small world: incomprehensible vastness without the freedom to play as you want. It doesn’t sound appealing to us.
So, what can we do? To us, it seems clear. We will engage with you, the reader, in a particular finite game. Its initial state is your belief in the inevitability of a custom-made or mechanistic universe. The rules are those of logical argument. The goal of this argument is to seduce you to embrace the infinity of your play, the open-endedness of the world. There is nothing unscientific or irrational about that. In fact, it’s already within you! It does not depend on us telling you. You can discover it for yourself.
But why would you want to? Carse says: “The finite play for life is serious, the infinite play of life is joyous. The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.”
In this spirit, we want to propose an alternative worldview, a worldview that is as comforting as its religious competitors, as scientific and rational as its mechanistic twin. It is more human and more humane. The fact that we are fragile and limited in a world that is much larger than us is no reason for dread or despair. Quite the contrary: it is what makes our condition as living systems special. It is what sets us apart from the non-living world. It is the fundamental reason for why we are not machines. It is the prerequisite for how we come to know the world. It is the source of all meaning. It gives us the freedom we want. It is what it means to be alive. We are not machines.
And our world is not a cold, dead mechanism. It is not small. It is a large world full of significance, endlessly fascinating, beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring. It provides us with the opportunity to continuously learn and grow through experience, to become better versions of ourselves. Ours is a deeply evolutionary and processual vision. Nobody knows where it will be taking us.
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Next: Mechanistic Maps
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The authors acknowledge funding from the John Templeton Foundation (Project ID: 62581), and would like to thank the co-leader of the project, Prof. Tarja Knuuttila, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna for hosting the project of which this book is a central part.
Disclaimer: everything we write and present here is our own responsibility. All mistakes are ours, and not the funders’ or our hosts’ and collaborators'.
Disclaimer: everything we write and present here is our own responsibility. All mistakes are ours, and not the funders’ or our hosts’ and collaborators'.
