The Sun is Good
Incommensurable World Models and the Path to Meta-Modernity
Introduction
What is the world? Is it “everything that is the case?” Does it have different strata, whose realities are grounded in mutually incompatible ways, or just one? When we describe the world to each other, don’t our choices of language privilege certain answers to these questions, and foreclose on the possibility of certain others?
I won’t waste much time with monism (i.e. the answer “just one”), even when many fellow Western tech-and-science types seem to take it as not only beyond the pale but actually laughable to quibble with the monistic assumption of rank materialism. As Aristotle saw long ago, “things are said to be in many ways”; pace him, for reasons I can’t so easily explain, the following millennia of careful research into the “ways in which things are said to be” have recently been overwritten with nothing much more than, well…a quick snicker at Cartesian dualism followed by a jump to, at best, Dan Dennett, or maybe early Wittgenstein.
Yet, the simple fact remains that things are said to be in many ways, and eliminativisms and materialisms of all kinds are foolish, harmful when taken seriously, and ineffective in following and influencing the unfolding of the world.
Schopenhauer’s View
A favorite answer of mine to the questions up top is Schopenhauer’s. He says things are said to be in two ways: first, as Will (capitalized á l’Allemand), in which there are no things at all, really, just the surging, chaotic flow of pure existence that lies behind all appearances.
The second, which Schopenhauer calls the world as Representation, is the familiar world of subjects-regarding-objects. What’s interesting is that, even in this world of Representation, Schopenhauer subdivides into four distinct ways in which things are grounded, or in which things can be: cognitive objects, grounded by reason (if all men are pigs and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is a pig), material objects (through causation), moments and places in time and space (grounded by other nearby places and times), and the ground of motive (the connection between intention and action).
Models, for real
Why am I inflicting this recapitulation of Schopenhauer on you? Well, let me get back to that…First: I’m interested in world modeling—what it is, how to do it, and whether AI can help. Here are some examples of world models:
- GDP = C+I+G+X
- If GDP’ > 0, then all in all the economy is doing well.
- God is love.
- The vibes are off with that guy.
- The rich are, by and large, talented, hardworking, and probably way cooler than you.
- The rich are, by and large, greedy, lucky, and probably ugly.
A large regulatory network describing many human cancer pathways
A world model is at bottom nothing more or less than a representation in the sense of Schopenhauer: a network of objects: a subject organizing (part of) the world to itself. Modernity is the state of a civilization that can develop precise language and intrepid norms of discourse to permit more-or-less free competition between publicly expressed world models. Postmodernity is the observation that grand public world models seem to often throw the baby (the illegible, fractally complex, organic system determining individual flourishing) out with the bathwater (naive adherence to tradition).
The fundamental problem of today’s civilization is finding what comes after postmodernity, which correctly teaches that excessive reliance on legible public models leads to runaway harm beyond the edges of the model, but then gets mired in inescapable negativity. Some individuals find a way out of nihilism to what might be called a meta-modern attitude of understanding and using modern systems (plural) without identifying with them, but our civilization hasn’t advanced to this way of being at scale. (If you like this paragraph, you’ll love David Chapman’s writings on meaning and metarationality.)
The World Is Not An Object
My point in juxtaposing Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and the dream of meta-modern world modeling is this: a world model is a claim, made by some particular subject, about what is to be attended to (perhaps, what is to receive care), which is pragmatically indistinguishable from a claim about what is real. The middlebrow attitude is that a model approximates the world. This is wrong, because the world is not an object. There is no “ground truth” to compare models to, not because we’re solipsists, but because the world-in-itself is a chaotic surging mess in which no grounds are admitted.
The world is not an object. The only objects are our models of the world. This doesn’t mean models can’t be wrong—if you believe “vaccines cause autism,” I can produce observations that (defeasibly!) contradict it. But it wouldn’t be by “looking at the ground truth”; I’d observe that your qualitative model is inconsistent with what seem to me to be reasonable quantitative models, and we’d debate, presumably, until exhaustion.
A Story About the Sun
Let me tell a story about a day when Alice and Bob, a couple, were discussing the ideal frequency of sunscreen use. Alice thought people should use sunscreen every day. Bob opposed this, citing studies showing most deadly skin cancer risk comes from childhood sunburns, with moderate sun exposure possibly beneficial (via Vitamin D). Alice responded citing anecdotes of contacts who tanned and later died of skin cancer.
This seemingly rational debate concealed deeper models. Alice’s unstated world model factors included “if Bob really cares about me, he’ll listen without being annoying about statistical details.” Bob’s hidden model factors included “I’m highly sensitive to the perception of being forced into something, even when the point is correct” and deeper still, something like “the Sun is Good”—a quasi-religious view.
This pattern—where legible, objective modeling on the surface masks emotional, relational, and spiritual paradigms below—is not special to small-scale, intimate interactions, but characterizes human disagreements generally. Consider NAFTA debates: quantitative economic models may mask deeper motivations about the decay of childhood hometowns, manufacturing jobs’ reality-grounding nature, or—of course—attitudes toward foreigners.
We often have this cargo cult of public conversation where we, complicated bundles of stories and feelings, drape ourselves in black cloth and hold out crisp graphs as the only focus of discussion, hoping no one will look under the drape at the messy, emotional, willful grounds of our complete world model. One clear sign of reaching into meta-modernity would be when the sad, angry, hopeful creatures under the cloth start explaining their real models in all their incommensurability, and only then seek common ground as necessary.
A case at larger scale: in problems like “design a zoning policy for Berkeley,” I want everyone with a stake to potentially contribute. There are serious challenges:
- Normal people would rather socialize than specify policy preferences
- Models range from “Berkeley should never change” to complex quantitative projections
- There are many stakeholders with stakes of many, contested, sizes
Sortition (jury-duty style participation) could help with problems 1 and 3, but number 2 is deeper. How do you funge the infungible, commensurate the incommensurable? Current options are:
- Establish a top-down modeling paradigm producing scalar ratings that can be mechanically aggregated
- Contributions are in plain text, recombined unpredictably and illegibly by decision-makers to produce a conclusion
Both have problems: Option 1 excludes those who can’t express themselves in the approved language, leads to overconfidence, and lacks consensus mechanisms to update. Option 2 determines the course of civilization by who yells loudest nearest the leader.
What Is To Be Done?
People haven’t really learned to communicate their world models to each other; modernity was built on narrow exceptions that postmodernity has shown unsatisfactory. How do we get people explaining honestly, fully, how they see the world? This problem has spiritual aspects—getting people to notice how they see the world may require a lot of meditation, for instance. But that part really isn’t my brief.
What do I offer, then? Structures for models: organizing, translating, comparing them. In the sunscreen example, the conversation would have improved if Alice and Bob had made their models explicit. Both could have seen the sensitive emotional points they were approaching instead of debating factual details. I think this would really help, modulo the UX problem of figuring out how to develop these models in the midst of a real, human conversation.
For those UX problems at the very least, AI support is a critical activator, smoothing over what would otherwise often become a grind of manual model refinement disincentivizing the kind of deep iterated reflection that seems worthwhile even for this kind of quotidian discussion. We need low barriers to entry but high legibility and reliability.
My suggestion, instantiated in the CatColab software being built at Topos and used to make the models shown above, is not to pick a single modeling language but a single way of constructing languages, formal enough to describe translations between approaches. AI can help by scanning possibilities and showing candidate jumps in the space of models. If candidate models have to be expressed in a well-specified language, that solves some AI-slop problems. If humans pick from candidate refinements, rather than relying on the AI to provide a consensus world model out of its broad averaging over humans-whose-writing-is-on-the-internet, that solves more problems.
The key to all this is to use AI to help clarify people’s world models, not press people to align with algorithm-generated models. We must preserve and enrich individuals’ and communities’ abilities to see the world clearly and express their vision as it is, enhanced, never constrained, by new technological affordancesssss
Thumbnail credit: Jan Buchholtz on flickr
If you liked this and want to full-length and slightly unhinged version, including rambling footnotes on the dating of the beginning of modernity and all, it’s here, below the short version.