Know Thyself Series (Introduction)

A short introduction to a new series on Know Thyself

• "To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom." ~ Socrates

• "Man know thyself; then thou shalt know the Universe and God." ~ Pythagoras

• "People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering." ~ Saint Augustine

1. A New Series

I'm excited to announce a new series on the Substack, dealing with the first maxim of the oracle of Delphi:

'Know Thyself' 

It might seem a bit trite to argue that the solution to so many of our modern existential problems is increasing self-knowledge, but my hypothesis is this: 

"We are more complicated than we know; therefore, by grappling our own complexity, we will improve at handling the complexity of the world." 

Self-knowledge isn't simply an autobiography but rather, as Vervaeke argues, an owner's manual for being a human being - so that is what we will be exploring week by week, from the modern science of mind to ancient philosophies, what would the owner’s manual for being a human being look like? And why is this relevant today?

2. The AI apocalypse already happened. 

You might be wondering, why is this relevant today? Why do I need to learn about myself?

There's a lot of fuss (rightfully) about a hyper-intelligent, misaligned AI that could go rogue and detonate all of the world's nuclear bombs (?) but so far, the AI apocalypse doesn't look like that… 

Social Media, my specialist research area, is the first public-facing encounter with large-scale AI, and that turned out more like a massively addictive and dysfunctional augmented reality video game that downgrades individuals, democracies and humanity in general (nice one, Zuckerberg). 

The curation algorithms figured out what the lowest angels of our nature want and served us nothing but moral-emotional-outrage-horny stew, and it turns out, as Aldous Huxley predicted, our appetite for meaningless distraction is nearly infinite. The problem with next-generation AI, generative and interactive, in my predictions, will make this same problem worse - more addiction, more confusion, and in general less agency and meaning in life. 

In a world of artificial intelligence, we live in an adversarial environment, which leaves us deeply open to being manipulated and unconsciously influenced toward the goals of the technology creators and not our own! The state of the digital environment today means that unless we understand ourselves and can guide our actions through self-reflection and decision-making, our ability to do so will be taken away…. 

However, grim as that is, I see an opportunity in the attention economy's tragedy:

the adversarial environment is the perfect competitive opponent for developing our attentional agency, which is really our agency full stop.

Big challenges, big rewards.

This is the meta-story in which I am placing this quest for self-knowledge:

In the world of manipulative technology and AI, self-knowledge is the path to freedom.

The Plan

Week by week, in essays and podcasts, we will be exploring the owner’s manual for being a human being.

This will involve looking at big cog sci frameworks like Predictive Processing and Relevance Realisation, Cybernetics and Big Five Personality theory, the neuroscientific roots of the hero meta-mythology and throughout, analysing the technology environment and our role within the media ecology as twenty-first-century human beings.

So, stay tuned!

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