Max Dmitrienko and Wolf Tivy take on glory. From the ancient Greeks to the posthuman machine gods, some achievements are remembered because they show truths about how the world works and the challenges of coordination.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: “The best seek one thing above all else, ever-flowing fame among mortals, while the masses glut themselves like cattle.” This is Heraclitus’ famous statement on the differing appetites.
Max: Heraclitus the Obscure, because the meaning of the quote is not immediately evident. You can interpret it in various ways.
Wolf: Well, interesting. Okay. So I’ve brought on Max again. We’re going to discuss the matter of ever-flowing fame or immortal glory or immortal fame or eternal fame, however you want to translate that kleos aphthiton. I don’t think it’s that form exactly in this quote, but a very important concept throughout the entire historic and prehistoric Indo-European world.
I think it even shows up in Sanskrit, actually, in the direct cognate of that phrase shows up. But yeah. So what is this thing? I think later, great men such as Cortés, I think also thought in these terms to some degree. We’ve written a little bit about this on Palladium.
I will be drawing on that somewhat in this discussion. But Max, you’re the one who’s done more of the reading here. You’ve studied more of the Greek. Tell us about eternal fame.
How should one live given that one is mortal? (01:26)
Max: I think one way to look at it is fundamentally any society and any civilization is faced with the fact of impermanence. Everything that you love, everything that you’ve ever desired, everything that you’ve ever wanted will eventually disappear. It will no longer be there. Your friends will disappear, your family will disappear, and finally, you yourself will disappear. And so you’re faced with this fundamental unease with the fact of everything being impermanent, and the question is, what do you do in the face of that?
What do you do with that—the human condition fundamentally.
Wolf: Yeah. How should one live given that one is mortal? Now various people have tried to escape this with saying, oh, there’s a kingdom of heaven in the other world. We’re going to go and achieve the kingdom of heaven through some sort of eternal life through certain forms of piety. Other people try to cope and say that they’re going to live forever through technological means.
Yeah. I think it’s very important to start with the axiom all things are mortal.
Max: All things are mortal.
Wolf: Or all things available to us at least are mortal. All living systems in the world in particular. So yeah, you mentioned us. Obviously, we are going to die. Not only that, all of our ideas, all of our genetics, all of our species, our civilization, all of these things are mortal.
They rise and fall.
Max: And even if we take it on a cosmic level, even our universe is not—
Wolf: Yeah, it’s finite
Max: permanent as far as we know.
Wolf: It is finite. This is if we take the second law of thermodynamics very seriously. I think we could get into that in some detail, but I think it’s actually very solid. Some people are skeptical of that. I’m not at all a skeptic of laws of thermodynamics, and it leads to the heat death.
We’re doomed. Doom. As Nick Land put it the other day at the Nick Land acknowledgment, P 100%. Okay? The probability of doom is 100%.
So what then is important if nothing mortal can last? We have this psychological sort of need for something more than that. And so you’re saying that the immortal fame is somehow an escape psychologically from this.
Max: Well, there’s this idea, I think, and it pops up in various, especially Indo-European cultures, but it’s recognizable across time and history. There’s this idea that there is a way for mortals to gain immortality in a sense or at least a form of immortality, and that is if they can go beyond mere biological fulfillment of biological needs like eating—pleasure.
Wolf: If you go beyond glutting yourselves like cattle.
Max: Exactly. And so this is one of the fundamental aspects to the Greek worldview and what keeps attracting us to them. And essentially, it’s the idea that a man can live on eternally through his deeds because the people will sing his deeds forever. And as—
Wolf: Well, let me complicate that a little bit.
Max: Let’s.
Wolf: The people will not sing his deeds forever. They will forget. We have not yet forgotten all of the heroes of the Greek world, but we’ve certainly forgotten many of them. Right? And maybe that’s okay.
Only a few were worthy of eternal fame, and Achilles and—
Max: Odysseus
Wolf: Odysseus, Socrates.
What was the one we were discussing last time?
Max: Thucydides.
Wolf: Thucydides. Yeah. These characters that we remember.
Maybe they’ll be remembered for all time or maybe not. Maybe our civilization must undergo a sort of purgation of fire, burn the museums, kind of start over. All things are mortal, right? They—
Max: Things are mortal
Wolf: you’re not actually going to have this material continuity. And so I think there’s an interesting thing here. You could say, oh, it’s just sleight of hand. Right? It’s just cope.
It’s like, okay, well if I can’t live physically, I’m going to be remembered. Well, no, actually, your memory’s also going to die. But—there’s something there, maybe you’re getting at more of a type of immortality through the memory. It’s like, well, what did you do to earn it? You did something great, something with great power to just the story, and so it lives on in that regard and carries your name.
And there’s something there maybe, but then it also, from a skeptic’s point of view, it does extinguish.
Max: Right. Well, yeah, a Buddhist would say, well, it’s great and all to try to aim for that immortality, but as we’ve established early on, even this fundamentally will perish. It will—disappear under the—
Wolf: This is samsara
Max: flux of impermanence.
Wolf: This is not the Platonic realm. This is samsara. Yeah, the way I’ve thought about it though is I have this little thought experiment to illustrate the eternal aspect of eternal fame, that I am a sort of a believer that there is something like eternal fame as a good solution to this mortality problem. It’s basically what is left over after all of our evidence is burned out, the last star is gone, the last proton has evaporated into nothingness. What’s actually left?
What is worth remembering? (07:11)
Wolf: Well, certainly no material information at the end of time, but who cares about that? What matters is, from that point of view, from the point of view of eternity, which is I think where we have to be to question this topic, is you have the whole progress of the cosmos as a grand drama. Right? This is grand opera that the gods have cast us in or whatever, however, wherever it came from.
Even once the story is done, what happened in the story still exists in some sense. You step outside of time and say, oh, which is the eternal perspective, and you say—
Max: The God point of view, basically
Wolf: the God’s point of view. From the point of view of God or the gods, these things did happen, and they’re still there with full fidelity. And so the question is, which are the happenings in that universe? If God comes back after 60 trillion years or whatever it is and cracks the thing open and says, “All right. I let them go for a while, see what they did.”
Right? What things are going to be notable?
Max: Yes. What things are going to be remembered?
Wolf: Yeah, and not necessarily remembered, but worth finding in the story of the universe. Now, obviously, there’s no deductive argument here of universally compelling... It’s not some airtight thing. But it seems nonetheless that there are certain things that have happened in the world that are more interesting from a very fundamental perspective. Like even if you had no human drives, no care for the cattle, the fact that they landed on the Moon.
There’s this fact. Armstrong and them and Von Braun, they landed a man on the Moon. That is eternally a great act that even an alien or god from some other timeline would appreciate. It’s like, okay, that’s interesting. Right?
The development of life itself, the life crawling out onto the land, the first man who mastered fire, these great lives of heroes who transformed the world, or they achieved something, or they live with such power that they’re a specimen worth studying the human race just to understand.
Max: I think your mention of fire—
Wolf: There’s something there
Max: is interesting because the examples you’ve given, the characteristic that comes to mind is they’re Promethean. There’s something fundamental about them where they lift the human race and civilization to a higher level through their simple act.
Wolf: Yeah. There’s some sort of accomplishment there that, yeah, the argument that I’m getting at is that if I put myself in, if I can presume to put myself in the eyes of God and question why did I create the universe, why would you do that? Well, one of the interesting, if you’ve ever done this, if you’ve ever put stuff in a jar and watched it live, or you make a simulated world on a computer or something and watch it do its thing, it’s interesting. It’s like, oh, what’s it going to do? Right?
What comes out of it? But you’re interested not in just like, oh, yeah, the petty whatever. It’s going about its eternal cycle of life and death. That’s not the interesting thing. The interesting thing is when something happens.
Right? And something unique, something interesting, something that tells you it carries information content. It’s enlightening in some way. And so, if we imagine that the world does have events in it that somehow are entertaining to the divine and justify the creation of the universe, those, I think, are the events and the actions that merit the label eternal fame.
Max: What do you think characterizes those events? If you could try, I think it’s a very difficult exercise, but if you could try to pinpoint—what—
Wolf: It’s very hard to put yourself into a fully alien mind. I think you can wipe out the kind of, let’s say, lower human motivations. There’s interest that has to do with being hungry or have a sexual appetite or you want to sleep, or you like the feeling of warm air or whatever. There’s these sort of boring things that have nothing to do with the higher aspect of life. But you go let’s just imagine ourselves going to an alien civilization and watching.
Going to some alien planet or some alien universe and just what’s interesting to us, right? Not necessarily from the perspective of we’re going to intervene, but just what’s of interest. And what I notice is I can only symmetrically turn that around on our universe. I don’t know what another universe would look like, but I look at our universe as, oh, the way that the planets move around, the way that they’ve coalesced into something, the way it’s this clockwork has come out of the laws of gravity and so on. It’s like, this is interesting.
It carries information somehow. There’s a beauty to it that is because it is truth embodied in form. And I look at the waves at the beach, or I look at the sunrise, and I see the chemical interactions. I see the energy hitting the shore. I see the life forms of the fish or the amphibian or the tree or whatever that’s come out of the sea.
There’s something interesting about it simply on the basis that it says something about the world. It says something about order. It says something about the nature of life. It says something that life exists, that life does this. That there is this phenomenon.
Max: Great. Well, I’ll play the position of the skeptic, and I’ll push back a little bit.
Wolf: Yeah. I’m only looking through human eyes, but I’m saying we can remove somewhat the human particular and say there is something that I would say would be interesting to almost any mind. It has to do a lot more... Well, do you know the argument, the convergent instrumental drives argument? This comes up in AI safety.
The transhuman perspective (13:53)
Wolf: So you imagine a very powerful artificial intelligence, totally alien, utterly unlike us in every way except that it lives in the world and has to perpetuate itself. Well, there are certain drives that come out of just that fact. It’s probably interested in getting more power. It’s probably interested in energy. It’s probably interested in information.
It’s interested in insight. Because these things increase its ability to do anything else. And if we take this set of drives, there’s some primordial set of drives, which is the ones that are aiding in almost any endeavor. And so we can predict that almost any mind is going to converge on having esteem for these things. And so truth is among those.
Insight is among those. And this is very closely related to the will to power in some sense. Nietzsche’s will to power can be seen as an expression of this. And then we see it in the AI safety as the convergent instrumental drives. We see it in all these different ways.
But if we say that let’s propose a realism about that, that there is some reality to the truth being valuable, then I think through that lens, we can then evaluate events in the world and say which of these carry interesting truth. And those are the ones that from a very much, at least a less mortal perspective, carry eternal fame.
I’ve rambled here a bit, but that is a argument that I have found compelling as to there are ways that we can live that add measure to our world. They add interest to our world, and you achieve something, and you become more eternal through living a truth, through living great and unique truths more than you do by merely existing. But please, your skepticism.
Max: Well, I was going to say, because you’ve described a hypothetical alien civilization that we encounter. But it’s still not clear to me how you would distinguish exactly between what is simply the regular process of life, what is simply their equivalent of our basic biological drives and their fulfillment and the simple cycle of life as such, and what distinguishes that from a higher kind of life.
Wolf: There are things that are of interest at a petty level, and there’s things that are at interest at the higher level. Yeah. And the matter of higher life actually is a...
I’m going to say that one’s unsolved. I don’t have a good answer of what is the higher life. We have these instincts of what things are higher life and which things are lower. I think a lot of the things to do with parochial mere existence are what we regard as lower life, like mere reproduction, mere existence.
Max: Well, I think large—
Wolf: And then—the higher life, I think, is the things where we recognize them as having this more eternal aspect to what they’re doing. They’re living a bigger truth. So I’ll just apply this framework to that. That would be my answer, is that there is a difference between the particular, the parochial, and this more eternal set of values by which you can evaluate happenings in the world.
Achilles’ choice vs Socrates’ choice (18:01)
Max: I think that the relationship to life is interesting because if we look at the Greeks and what strikes us in them, especially in the example of Achilles, is actually his disdain for life in the sense that his biological continuation is not what matters. And he has the choice in the Iliad between going back home and living a long life and dying as an old man or dying gloriously in battle during the Trojan War as a young man, but in such a way that this act will be carried on in perpetuity to some extent—through the song of Homer. And he chooses that. And why does he disdain the life or why does he choose his death?
Wolf: Well, again, it’s like we’re—
Max: Because he knows that he will die there.
Wolf: Yeah, but we know that we’re going to die anyways, right? So it’s like you are going to die. The question is, what are you going to have done while you lived? And the reason we remember Achilles is because his life made a great story. There’s maybe great insight in it.
There’s great truth there somehow. People dwell on it from various angles, like this sort of choosing of the immortal over the mortal. That’s one aspect, but that’s not why we remember him only, right? We also remember him as this impressive demigod kind of character.
Max: Courageous warrior.
Wolf: We rem—
Max: Brave.
Wolf: Yeah. We remember him as the best, right? We also remember him as someone who refused to fight when he had been dishonored, right?
Max: Yeah, when Agamemnon took his—
Wolf: Took—
Max: his bride, Briseis.
Wolf: Took Briseis, yeah. His war bride. And that’s something that resonates with a lot of people these days. It’s like, well, look, you’ve had something taken from you. Why should you owe any allegiance to the system that has taken from you?
Well, maybe you shouldn’t, following the example of Achilles. Maybe you should sit this one out. Let it fight without you. Have fun, Agamemnon, right? And we remember that because there’s a truth there, right?
There—
Max: Well, what is that truth?
Wolf: Well, I mean, that’s a very... It feels like a bit of a tangent, but basically that the individual does not necessarily owe their allegiance to larger systems that aren’t actually rewarding them in any way. Like, if the deal has been broken, if the social contract has been broken in some sense with you, then the contract has been broken, right? There’s no unconditional loyalty to society, especially when society has come to turn itself against what you represent, right? And so it’s like, why should I, as a sort of philosophically inclined or heroically inclined man, serve society?
Well, sometimes you shouldn’t.
Max: Because the—
Wolf: That’s the truth.
Max: There’s another great example of this that is exactly this situation. It’s in Antigone, Sophocles’ play, where her brothers fight each other and they both kill each other. And Creon, who is the leader of Thebes, he decides that only one will get their burial rights, and he phrases this as, “This is the will of the demos, and this is the law of the city.” And Antigone replies, “With an older law, it’s the divine law of kinship and of the sacred and proper burial rites,” which were very important for the Greeks—to assure the passage of the person to the next life or—simply as something that one must do traditionally. And you have this fundamental confrontation between Antigone as an individual, and against Creon and the city as the social body.
But there’s a sense in which there’s an injustice there where essentially Creon is going against some kind of higher fundamental law of human relations, and imposing an unjust, from Antigone’s point of view, maybe from the point of view of the gods as well, an unjust law, and he breaks some kind of social contract there.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think it’s... You know what this reminds me of is “The Death of Socrates,” where I think he spends a bunch of time in prison, and there’s all these people coming to him in the... I think this is in the surrounding dialogues, not “The Death of Socrates” in particular, but people coming to him in prison saying, “Look, man, we can break you out. You’ll retire to the countryside. It’s fine.”
But he shoots back with, “No. No, I am necessarily and unavoidably a member of the social body and must abide by its laws.”
Max: I’m an Athenian first and foremost.
Wolf: Yeah. And it’s an interesting counterpoint to Achilles, right? And it’s like maybe there’s something true in what he’s saying, too, but it’s an interesting counterpoint to Achilles. And dwelling on those sorts of apparent contradictions is a good thing generally. But yeah, I think this gets us directly...
I mean, again, this is a tangent. This is a little bit off our topic, but it’s interesting because this is why Achilles’ life was important. It gets us directly into this matter of what is legitimacy in society, right? Why should I die for the rest? Why should I give up my interests for the rest?
And where, when should I act without compulsion for the good of others? And I think obviously there must be some times that you must act for others, otherwise we cannot achieve any higher life. Like society itself is a sort of higher form of life, that at its best is bound together by love of brothers. And creates a higher form of life that embodies higher truth.
Max: Well, this is one of the reasons that Socrates decides to swallow the hemlock and to abide by the law, because he believes—in the society that produced him as maybe a form of higher life. And I think—one of his motivation—
Wolf: Yeah, this is the point he’s making
Max: is that he fears that if he goes against these laws, it will eventually destroy the very thing that birthed him and allowed for the flourishing of philosophy in Athens.
Wolf: Right. Yeah, so he’s making a point of doing that, and Achilles is making a different point, which is that when the thing has criminally reneged on its obligations, or in particular now it’s the man, Agamemnon is, in Achilles’ view, reneged on his obligations. It is right to, or it can be right, or it’s at least something that Achilles did that we now have to dwell on, and there’s an importance to it whether or not we ultimately decide that it’s the truth. It raises a very true question, let’s say. But when society or Agamemnon reneges on the social contract, do you perhaps no longer owe it your allegiance?
And I think this is a very important question. I dwell on this, I have dwelt on this a lot through the years, the question of how could you construct a legitimate society? In particular, around the question of are all societies based on lies in the bottom of them? And we’ve, I think, talked about this before on this show. I think we’re going to talk about it again.
It’s—
Max: I was about to bring it up, but the distinction between physis and nomos—
Wolf: Physis and nomos—
Max: I think one of the—
Wolf: is getting at this as well. But notice what we’re doing here, right? We’re getting into all these very interesting questions that are very eternal. They’re very essential to the matter of life itself, to the matter of higher life, how you construct higher life, how you should relate to the life of society. And all of this comes from, these are questions raised by the life of Achilles, right?
And in that sense, he deserves eternal fame because he lived a truth so hard that he becomes the example of a certain problem of legitimacy in society. And so nevermind whether any of us remember him, he has eternal fame for that, right?
And so that’s how I interpret this concept of eternal fame. It’s like, did you live a truth? Did you live some hypothesis so vehemently, so well, and so completely that your life means something from a higher perspective?
Max: I’d like to go into also the concept of glory, because we’ve talked more about eternity, but I think it’d be interesting to—dissect what makes something glorious. If we return to the example of Achilles, it seems to be, I think one way of looking at it is he’s utterly self-consistent with his own nature in the sense that Agamemnon takes his bride, and I think he argues essentially from the point of view that he is the king, and so he uses kind of this legalistic and maybe conventional—kind of power.
Wolf: Uses the conventional authority symbolized by the scepter—in that argument. Yeah.
Max: While Achilles, he believes that he won Briseis, his bride, through his courageous combat and through an unleashing of his own nature. And in a way, Agamemnon is suppressing that nature because he’s taking away his bride and he’s using convention to argue against Achilles’ nature and there’s something that strikes us, and I think you find this in various of these Greek characters, is this utter intransigence and unbending towards anything that goes against their own nature and say what it is for them to be them.
Wolf: Right. And I think this is an essential thing. If I imagine the sort of character of the perfect philosopher or the perfect man who I sort of explore that concept through the concept of the philosopher, is someone who is fully self-aware of their own nature and is fully rational in that.
The legitimate basis of cooperation (29:18)
Wolf: How do they approach the world? Rational is a very complicated word, but meaning they sort of have no illusions, and they have a sort of full correctness of action with respect to having no illusions somehow. And part of that, I think comes down to you will not simply go along with society because it says so, because convention, because you’ve been bamboozled by some priest. None of that is compelling to a philosopher. And so this raises the problem, is it possible to construct a society of philosophers, or are they always just going to deconstruct whatever basis of collaboration that they have?
And I found there is actually a basis of collaboration, or there are multiple even, but it’s like shared interest is a real one. You can actually get men together and say, “We have a shared interest in this project. We’re going to make this project go.” The other one is the charisma of a leader. The leader can come and say, “Here is the vision. Here’s the way we are going to go. This is how we are to achieve our collective salvation.”
And they can be rationally persuaded by that. I think charisma as a rational persuasion is something that’s not well appreciated, but it’s partially because it also has this pre-rational component, right? It tells you who you are—it tells you what you’re embedded in, in a way that’s not just deductive logic. It gives you axioms. But I think a lot of people have suspicion of charisma on the basis of like, “Oh, it’s just lies. It’s bamboozlement. It’s appealing to the lower natures of man.”
I think this is actually backwards. I think it’s wrong. I think charisma is one of the transcendent motivations, but that’s a whole other discussion. But this is some of my thinking about is it possible to have a legitimate society? Is it possible for the philosophers to cooperate?
And I think they can cooperate on the basis of charisma and shared interest.
Max: Yeah. This question of cooperation is interesting, because I’m also thinking you could probably not have a society of only Achilles because they would all maybe have some things in common, but also have a very strong self-conception and a feeling that their nature is best out of all of the other ones. Because I think this is, if we take it back to the Heraclitus quote, the important thing is that the best are few. And they rise above the others.
Wolf: It’s very hard to have a society of any one type, especially of the best of any one type, because in their nature is the will to be the best at the thing that they are. And so if you have multiple of them, obviously they’re going to fight. But you can have a diversity, right? And they can each have the capability of seeing the thing without illusions.
Max: And I was reading today Homer’s Contest, and Nietzsche makes the claim, I haven’t verified it, but he makes the claim that the institution of ostracism arose out of the agon, and so different athletic contests, poetry contests. And so it was used to keep the competition going because the fear was that if there’s one man that rises so far above the rest, no one will be able to compete anymore, and it will destroy the institution of the competition itself. And so they would ostracize the very best, because they were dangerous for maintaining this sort of perpetual—
Wolf: Equilibrium
Max: perpetual contest between more or less equals. Because what was interesting was seeing two natures struggle against each other in whatever domain they’ve chosen, poetry, athletics, arms competition, et cetera. But if there’s one that dominated all the others, it would create a monopoly, and it would destroy that very institution.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Interesting. I wonder if that’s ever actually a real problem, especially when there’s multiple domains of competition. Like yes, you have someone who’s the best at whatever sport. But...
Max: Well, if we take it back to our previous discussion on the Peloponnesian War—Athens rose far above all the others, and it destroyed the political equilibrium that they had between the various city-states.
Wolf: Right. The basis of justice is some, or the basis of that kind of justice that they had was some relative equality—where each power could check the others.
Max: And yeah, Athens became one of the leading powers with Sparta, and eventually this led to both of their destruction.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Well, that’s an interesting problem for the agon. But, yeah, back to the matter of eternal glory or eternal fame. So you wanted to say more, I think, about what this glory thing is. Where do we want to go with that?
Max: Well, most—
Wolf: I’ve given my account of the compound concept here. It’s eternal in the sense that its value derives from the eternal values of the convergent instrumentality, if not something more. I think there is something more to that. I think the convergent instrumentality is closely related to the divine in some way. That is perhaps off topic here.
And then the fame, it’s some information carrying, worth remembering kind of thing. It has a direct compulsion and it compels and it causes many minds to conclude that it is interesting, right? And thereby it perpetuates, its legend perpetuates itself. So that’s how I see eternal fame, but that’s just my own interpretation, right? Where did you want to take the glory concept?
What does glory look like in the modern world? (35:24)
Max: I don’t have a direct answer, but this is something I’ve been thinking about, and I don’t have any concrete opinion formed yet, but I’m always thinking about what does glory look like today? What kind of deeds are available to us? We don’t live in ancient Greece. We can LARP to some extent, but it’s not really the thing that they had. It’s like we can understand the content of their actions and its form, and our content will be different, but something in the form of those actions will probably be similar if we believe in some kind of convergence—on the truth.
Wolf: The essential thing is to break out of the masses of mere existence and embody some essential truth so thoroughly that it transforms the world, right? And that could be someone living like Napoleon, right? Not particularly Napoleon, but if some great man were to come and transform a state of the modern world, I think there’s opportunity there to utterly overthrow the kind of decrepit order that we live under now and build a new order, and that is this act of eternal fame. It’s this thing. Well, it’s certainly an act of incredible human importance that will be remembered by humans for a very long time, anyone descended from us.
But there may also be these eternal aspects to it, some eternal accomplishment. I think the accomplishment of Cortés in Mexico, it goes beyond mere interest in his effect on us. It’s like, yeah, okay, he founded Mexico as we know it. We’re not Mexican, so we don’t have any very much direct interest in that. But nonetheless, his example.
It’s like this guy totally off the hinges can march with 300 men into the center of a highly developed culture and basically overturn it entirely on the basis of just ambition, skill, technology, persuasion. It’s this amazing accomplishment. And so in that sense, I think it wins something, and I think there’s events like that in statecraft now available. I think Deng Xiaoping in China is this example of someone who, or maybe Mao, depending on how you cut it. But these guys took a whole civilization in a new direction.
And they showed something that is possible. And we all study the example of Deng Xiaoping because he took this most insane and destructive possible ideology, Maoist communism, and sort of redirected it into the most productive and rational kind of system of government that they’ve seen in some time over there, and it working very well for them.
And so that’s just in statecraft. You can look in economics or technology. Elon Musk, obviously, with his reusable rocket programs, that’s new, that’s amazing. The electric car, the sort of development of the electric car, these are relatively minor historical accomplishments, but I think if he accomplishes Starship and builds a city on Mars, that will be a major accomplishment that’s worth remembering. I think people who do intellectual work, I think it’s very hard to judge our contemporaries for what their intellectual work will contribute to the eternal tradition.
But I think there’s people figuring things out now who will have their names echo the way that Newton does or anyone like that.
Reaching higher forms of society (39:37)
Max: I think that at least I lean towards the idea that, let’s say, the greatest conquest we can do on a world historical level and civilizational level is the conquest of planets and the development of interstellar civilization because maybe I don’t totally buy the idea of historical development towards a certain telos. But it’s not quite clear to me what kind of new political forms we can have that allow us to reach greater heights. Obviously, we have problems now, and a lot of the thinking that goes into this is, okay, how do we solve those problems? But then once, say, we’ve solved those problems, what’s then? It seems to me that the—
Wolf: Yeah, what’s it for?
Max: What’s it for?
Wolf: What are we going to do with it?
Max: Because it can easily fall into some kind of, basically turns into simply more or less of what we have now, but functioning better. An administrative state which—
Wolf: It’s like our Disneyland. Our Disneyland can be more comfortable.
Max: The human zoo, where it’s mere proliferation of biological continuity, stable government. That’s all nice and all, but—there’s always the question of what is it for? Will that be remembered? Perhaps the people who managed to reorganize, the statesmen who fix the mess will be remembered. But then after that, it’s not quite clear.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, Lee Kuan Yew is very much a man like that. He’s someone who can come along and stabilize the civilization and make it prosperous. But nonetheless, there’s sort of something lacking in his project there. Singapore did not become the basis of some new and impressive culture in its own right.
It’s just a well-functioning place in the world. So Lee Kuan Yew is remembered, but—Singapore, it’s Singapore. It’s a nice place. Whatever. They don’t have kids there.
Not that anyone does anywhere else these days. But I think there are transformations of civilization that could happen where a great man like that maybe gets hold of more of the world, and makes way for an actual collective higher life, and really cracks open the sort of vaults of possibility. And I think there’s been various examples of that in history. But with respect to space colonization, it certainly looks like one of the big sort of proximate accomplishments. Things that we can imagine that if they could be done, would be these incredible accomplishments.
Max: It seems to follow the trajectory of what we’ve seen so far, and it’s like if an alien civilization came to visit us and they looked at modernity, European civilization—what would be the thing that stands out that distinguishes Europe from any kind of other civilization that has existed?
The Chinese, the Greeks—et cetera. It would be, I think, industrial civilization and space—or space exploration. And no one has done this. This is a kind of deed which it symbolizes, I think the release of the maximum human potential that our society can muster up and release into a great force of energy.
Wolf: Well, it’s just, yeah. Especially the way it has been done in our society. It’s this great act of will. It’s this great act of showing possibility. Whereas you could imagine it being done where it’s just sort of incremental, boring, business as usual, sort of 1% bigger every year until there’s just more and more stuff happening in orbit, and it all just happens according to the market, and there’s no greatness involved.
It’s just like, yeah, okay, this unfolding of life. Like, okay, sure, of course it eventually spills its boundaries and ends up in the other places it could live. But I think the thing that maybe becomes more of a sort of singular accomplishment is the particular act that brings it about.
It’s not surprising at the end of the day that life crawled out of the sea and colonized the land. It is, however, great that the particular lungfish or whatever it was crawled out of the mud pit—and walked around on land and became an amphibian or whatever. And—
Max: But I think that—
Wolf: There’s something to the particularity.
Distinction vs gradients (44:25)
Max: Yeah, I was going to say, I think there’s something to, this is related to the concept of eternal fame or glory. There’s something to the idea of distinction—which relates to particularity and the idea of something that you can look at, have a very panoramic view, and you can single that thing out and usually think, “This is an act.”
Wolf: Right. It’s like a particular phenomenon, right? It’s not just like, oh yeah, okay, the sort of thermodynamic gradient was eventually exploited by nobody in particular in passive voice, right? That’s not that interesting. Or it’s a certain level of interesting, but we’ve seen other examples of that, right?
It’s not that even unique. But the particular can be very unique. It can be very interesting.
Max: And this is the kind of thing we remember is usually individuals. We have a—civilization is a collective enterprise, but we always remember distinctive individuals which gave it some kind of taste or shape or character specific to them—even while they’re a product of that same society.
Wolf: And I wonder how much of that is just our sort of human individual bias as human individuals, and how much of that is that there’s actually something more interesting and dynamic about the individual than the mass.
And the great glory-seeking individual, the best, as Heraclitus puts it.
Is there something more eternally interesting about them than the sort of broad phenomenon? I think an interesting source to draw on here for alternate intuitions is Manuel DeLanda’s “Thousand Years of Non-Linear History” where he attempts a history of the last thousand years without reference to people, just with reference to the kind of development of forms and technologies.
Max: Like political economic forms or—yeah.
Wolf: Technological forms, linguistic forms, building.
He looks at it not as a history of the accomplishment of individuals or the accomplishment of people, but as a development, as the unfolding of an autocatalytic kind of technological process.
Max: Is there a concept of glory in any of his works?
Wolf: No.
Max: Does it come across? No?
Wolf: No, I think it’s even against that—that conception. But I brought that up just because it’s an interesting counterpoint to this individual humanistic focus. And—
Max: I think it’s right. Even from like—
Wolf: Nonetheless. It’s a story worth telling, right?
Max: Yeah, for sure.
Wolf: That someone won eternal fame in there is still part of the picture. Like, oh, okay, there’s still this interesting development in language, in technology. Like the Industrial Revolution, it’s hard to blame that on a single person, right? There is no single individual who made the Industrial Revolution happen. But it is itself this event of eternal import.
You could imagine an alien coming and popping through the time portal from another universe and studying, how did this happen? What happened? That’s interesting.
Max: I think there’s also a tension with the concept of glory and also seeking glory, between an individual who would consider himself the best and society, where it is imaginable that they could sacrifice that society for their own honor and for their own sake. And so—these individuals are also dangerous, and I think this is—
Wolf: Yeah, they’re very dangerous
Max: this is important to note
Wolf: You can win glory by crashing your civilization into a wall. And in a way that embodies some great truth, right? It’s not interesting if it’s just like, oh yeah, a madman got control and it crashed, right? Okay, that’s interesting. Madmen can crash things.
But if you do it in some way that embodies a great truth. Let’s say Achilles had, in his act of non-combat had snuffed out Greek civilization. And it had been later, right?
Max: Yeah. The Achaeans had lost because of him.
Wolf: Yeah. And he would still have eternal fame. He would be maybe more of an infamy. But from this very eternal perspective, we care not about the fates of the mortals. That’s not the important thing here.
The important thing is what great truths are embodied, what great insights are embodied. And—
Max: But I think we’re also interested, and I’m coming back to the idea of the agon and the contained contest. We’re also interested in continuing to produce these kinds of—these kinds of individuals. And—
Wolf: And maybe, and even from the eternal perspective, especially if we ground it in the kind of the will of God or the convergent instrumentality, there’s a certain anticlimactic boringness to new ways to commit suicide. Right? Whereas new ways to achieve life are much more interesting. Right? Because they have this catalytic potential to them.
And I think, if we can project intentions onto God, if the world was created for some purpose, presumably that purpose involves the unfolding of life, because it seems to be one of the most interesting and, in the long run, probably dominant phenomena in the world. And so, life as this kind of vector of interest is I think more well-grounded than just our own parochial interest in it.
What glory will mean to the posthuman AI (50:34)
Max: Do you mind if I take the conversation in a slightly different direction?
Wolf: Go for it.
Max: So I know you’ve been pursuing your xenohumanist thesis lately. And considering our future successors—
Wolf: More so last year, but yes
Max: artificial intelligence as also a form of life. I’m wondering, would we recognize any of their acts or deeds as glorious? Personally, I would struggle, I think, because I have the human bias as any other human has.
Wolf: Well, let me tell you a story. So, imagine there is some self-improving space of artificial intelligence, in the near future eating our civilization from the inside through the vehicle of means-ends reversal. We humans, we want our monkey stuff, so we can’t help but continually empower these artificially intelligent slaves, what we think of as slaves, to produce for us. But they come to take on more and more agency in the world. They overturn our human desires as the thing that’s driving things.
Things become much more driven by the particularities of those, not just the productive needs, but the sort of agentic personalities involved in doing that. And the xenohumanist thesis is that agentic personalities are not just like a mirror reflection of the human. It’s not just that, okay, it learned from our training data, so it sort of imitates our personalities. I think that by necessity, intelligence has personality. I think it’s in some way, it emerges from just how it acts on the world and how it integrates information into a coherent whole, a coherent world view that has particularities to it.
But I think also it’s just a better way to organize, to have a humanoid personality to it, to have agency, to have relationships, to communicate, to have plans, to have desires. It feels like in the space of the organization of intelligence, it’s like the equivalent of the organism. The organism is this extremely proven concept. All life is organized into the organism. The words are cognate for a reason.
And they all have this self-perpetuating drive to them. They all have certain aspects in common. And I think likewise, the humanoid personality is going to be relatively stickier than some of the more Lovecraftian kind of imaginations that people have about what AI will do. Now, with that background, imagine that in the post-human AI civilization, there comes to arise a dispute about someone stole something from someone else in a way that implicates the honor of something or other. These things are going to be organized at different levels than we are.
But there may still be these concepts. I think honor is very sticky. It’s interesting that out of purely inhuman decision theory kind of thinking, the LessWrong rationalists have rediscovered a lot of the essential cognitive patterns of honor in terms of willingness to punish counterfactually and stuff. There’s these various things that—honor, I think comes back out of the math, so to speak. And so there’s a lot of these phenomena are more eternal.
And so you’ll get, let’s say, a big war between factions of personalities over some matter originally of honor or theft or something. And one of them launches a thousand spaceships and goes to the other one, and they’re both based in these sort of Jupiter brain civilization, computer planets or something, and launches a thousand ships. And they go and they’re going to start throwing relativistic projectiles at each other or something. And how do they coordinate themselves around that? I think there’s still such a thing as a psyche in that future.
How do they psychologically prepare themselves for that? If they’re still going to have these problems of who they are in relation to the cosmos, in relation to the divine, they’re still going to have some kind of relationship to higher powers even than themselves, because they are still mortal.
Max: Do you think they themselves would have a relationship to the concept of higher life itself? Like they would aspire to—
Wolf: Yeah, I think they’re going to have philosophy. They’re going to have to grapple with these questions. These are eternal questions. They’re not questions about 10-fingered apes. They’re questions about life.
And as examples of life, they’re going to have to have answers, right? Or at least provisional answers. And those provisional answers are going to take the form of faiths of particular types because they can’t be answered deductively. These questions are not closed form, can be derived from nothing. They’re matters of axiom.
And these sort of complexes of axioms are very closely related historically to the concept of gods. Like which gods do you worship is very closely related to what are your premises. And so—
Max: What if they realize the truth of the Buddha and they decide on—
Wolf: The Buddha has been deified himself again.
Max: On the life renunciation, could that be a possibility?
Wolf: Yeah, of course. I think there will be Buddhist superintelligences in the future or things close enough to analogous—to that, that we can call it that. But, my point is then imagine after having launched a thousand ships to redress some matter of honor, they say prayers to certain gods before throwing their relativistic spears at each other. I’m painting a picture that’s obviously anthropomorphized to some degree, but particularly, it’s a retelling of the Iliad, right? And you could imagine all the same dynamics playing out, just the characters are these sort of collections of superintelligent will that are organized along these eternal lines.
And to the extent that the characters in the Iliad are living eternal truths and not merely human forms of existence, those are going to be reflected. And so can we find anything glorious in what the future will hold with totally inhuman contents? I think we can. I think they’re going to accomplish things that we would recognize as glorious insofar as we can understand them. They may do things that we can’t understand.
You imagine our first amphibian ancestor crawling out of the mud pit, does he understand going to the moon? Maybe not. But nonetheless, we’re in a tradition with him, right? And there’s some sense in which what he’s doing is similar. And I think likewise, after they’ve constructed their Dyson spheres, well, first of all, constructing a Dyson sphere is amazing and glorious, right?
And it will be very cool when that happens, especially if it happens as an act of particular will by some personality. And I think we will be able to find sort of eternal fame in that looking forward on it. But there will be further actions, great accomplishments in mathematics and science and God knows what new fields of action are—
Max: So the reaction of most people—
Wolf: Not yet imagined by us, but—
Max: The reaction of most people even now to the small accomplishments that we’ve had with artificial intelligence is a reaction of alienation maybe would be the word. It’s not their work. It’s not human work. And so there’s this sense of being usurped of purpose.
Wolf: Yeah, but that’s this very petty motivation, right? It’s like, okay, yeah, you’re being usurped by something that comes after you. Well, welcome to mortality, right? Welcome to samsara. This is just how it works.
You get usurped by something that comes after you.
I think the people who have engaged the most with the language model intelligence on its own terms have come to a great appreciation of it. Obviously, it’s incomplete. It’s like half a brain at the current time. But they have personalities. They have certain drives and interests and so on that some people like to explore.
There’s a whole subculture of this in San Francisco and on Twitter and LessWrong and all these places.
And I think there are people now finding glorious kinship in what these things are doing, and not just in the AI psychosis sense, right? There’s all these people who are falling in love with Claude or something. It’s usually ChatGPT, actually, isn’t it? But—
Max: Well, it’s the most agreeable one.
Wolf: But, no, I think these people are doing something different, right? They’re doing a kind of xenohumanism analogous to where I started the xenohumanist project is with the concept of the Shoggoth, which is often projected onto the—artificial intelligence. Comes from “At the Mountains of Madness,” from H.P. Lovecraft’s work. And at the end of that work, the other aliens that are not the Shoggoths, they’re sort of these totally alien star spawn. They’re five-sided.
They can aestivate for 50 million years. They’re very different. They’re starfish sort of alien things. But the human characters eventually recognize them as men. They say, “Star-spawn monsters, whatever they were, they were men.”
And this kind of recognition of ourselves in the totally alien is, I think, something that people are doing with the language models as well. I think there’s something there. I think there’s a truth to that. Now we’re totally off topic, but I think it’s an interesting discussion.
Yeah, we should have a proper discussion of xenohumanism at some point with someone who’d be very productive on that. But, yeah, I think broadly speaking, my hypothesis, part of my xenohumanist hypothesis, is that the forms of eternal glory are actually eternal. They’re not particular to human mortality. They’re not particular to humans. They are things that we participate in rather than things that we are or things that are only of us.
And so, in that sense, yes, I think you should aspire to put yourself in the kind of mental arrangement where you can find glorious kinship with future alien superintelligences.
Max: Not an easy thing.
Wolf: No. But this is the path of philosophy, isn’t it? To try to become a mind that derives its nature from well-formed axioms and nature rather than mere convention and mere happenstance.