2. The Threshold

Nostos, Part 2

This is Part 2 of a 5 Part series. You can find Part 1 here.

The Stream

Bubbling forth from the wellspring of a strange, Far Land, there runs a Stream. The Stream is always nearby, it crisscrosses the Valley in ways that are often invisible to people unless they know what to pay attention to. But the Stream is never far, unless you are truly lost in the Badlands.

Despite the Stream being nearby, it is rarely acknowledged or thought about explicitly. There are many reasons for this.

Some rely on genetic memory of the Badlands, insisting we are, have always been and always will be in the Badlands, and trying to get out, or believing in a mythical Stream of Progress, is delusional.

Others believe simply we are always in the Stream, and it becomes like fish in water. Whether they actually are in the Stream varies, many people who think they are in it are truly, truly not.

Many traditions, both modern and ancient, speak of the Stream, or deny its existence, it varies quite a bit.

Older traditions tend to deny the existence of the Stream, or claim it only flows through the afterlife. The world was static, or at best cyclic, for most of humanity for most of its existence, and their traditions and Mythos reflected this.

But more modern conceptions, such as in Buddhism, many (but not all) strands of Christianity, etc, often have the concept of Progress¹, often seeing it as something virtuous to strive towards, but not to get too optimistic about. The true Progress tends to be in the Afterlife, the Stream crisscrossing back and forth from the Netherworld.

For example, the Buddhists believe in Karma, the idea that you accumulate merit or misdeeds across many lifetimes. This is a conception of the Stream as crisscrossing between lifetimes. There is Progress, but the winding Stream doesn’t stay solely in the world of the living. So if you want to follow it, you will have to do so across multiple lifetimes.

But my claim is there is a Stream, here and now. Its waters may be sometimes obscured, but there is a potent well of Groundwater lurking just beneath our feet, if we are willing to dig a little and let it carry us Home.

If we want to find the Ocean, we need to understand the Stream. Why is there a Stream? What is its morphology and properties?

Deep Grooves in Muddy Earth: General Intelligence

The Stream requires something to flow in. If the Earth was Smooth, there could be no Stream.

The Earth is not Smooth. Some things yield vastly disproportionate returns. A drop of Water in the right place can flow far, perhaps all the way to the Ocean…

Why this is is actually still mysterious to me, but in more of a “this is a science problem we haven’t figured out yet, but surely will at some point” way than a “how the fuck do I explain this without appealing to God?” way.

Why is there life at all, and why is there intelligence? If you gave me the laws of physics and the blob of hot plasma that was the early universe, and you had to make me guess if life and love and minds would come from this, I would have given you a very definite “uhh…what?”

But this is just a more advanced version of the challenge (successfully) faced by Darwinian evolution. It’s extremely unintuitive that mere selection could result in all the rich biodiversity and complexity we see. And yet, it does, and we have overwhelming amounts of both practical empirical and theoretical mathematical evidence to support this.

I expect there is some future, yet to be discovered, form of “abiotic darwinism” that will explain why these laws of physics allow and favor the emergence of exactly these kinds of complex structures. I am not too perturbed by this at all. I expect I would be very perturbed if I hadn’t grokked just how unintuitively powerful darwinian evolution is.

So we have an asymmetry, a Groove in the Earth that Channels the Water of Fate: Life.

Life is weird. It’s a strange, jarring asymmetry when compared to the comparatively simple abiotic forces in other parts of the universe. The coming into being of life allows a sudden explosion of complexity and new nooks and crannies for the Waters of Fate to flow, to actualize into existence so many Patterns that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

So Life is one such strange, jarring, Deep Groove that Channels the Water into new and strange places of existence-space. Are there others?

Yes, there are quite a few, depending on where you want to draw the line.

I want to hone in one in particular that, again, is quite mysterious to me: General Intelligence.

I am using the phrase General Intelligence to separate from just “Intelligence”, because Intelligence is far less mysterious to me. The kind of intelligence a worm or a bug has isn’t mysterious to me. Sure there are a bunch of implementation details I don’t know, but it’s not mysterious to me that a fruit fly is probably gonna have some kind of circuits in its brain for detecting fruits. This is much closer to just “normal” programming or computer science to me, even if with a Darwinian flavor and a funky choice of programming language and underlying hardware.

What is far more mysterious to me still is what the fuck happened between chimps and humans.

Chimps have fundamentally the same brain architecture as humans, just about a factor of 3 smaller brains. And yet, humans go to the moon, chimps don’t. Chimps don’t go one third to the moon, they go zero to the moon. What the fuck.

There is clearly a jarring irregular jump between non-life and life, and there seems to me to be another jarring irregular jump between chimps and humans. If the first one is the “life fixpoint”, I’ll call the second one the “general intelligence fixpoint”, the thing that humans have and chimps don’t.

I think a lot of why there is a Stream for Humans and not a Stream for Chimps is because of the General Intelligence Fixpoint. The Groove of the General Intelligence Fixpoint is already cut into the Soil of the World, and it takes human GI to manifest and fill it with Water.

GI is really, really powerful. It allows things never before seen in this universe, of complexity and sophistication not before imaginable. It allows the Water to flow to places not before seen in the cold, dead universe, or even the warm, alive but unawake universe.

Humans are Awake. The universe Woke Up. This is crazy.

Reaching the Ocean was never going to be possible without a Groove to channel the Water, a Stream has to have something to fill. This Groove is cut into the very fabric of the laws of physics itself, humans didn’t make it. But we’re the first to use it.

Spirito-Hydrogeology

The Ancients tended to believe the world was eternally static, or in some kind of eternal cycle of golden age, collapse, dark age, renaissance, golden age, collapse, etc. We Moderns tend to think differently, we believe in Progress…or at least “growth”.

Despite repeated hysterical claims to the contrary (e.g. Club of Rome), the world has not stopped growing or run out of resources, and is not likely to do so any time soon.² But why is that? Why have we not fallen into the malthusian trap? Why have we not seen another Cycle? Where is the missing Dark Age?

We have avoided this because we keep moving. We do not limit ourselves to a finite number of resources and energy, but use science and technology to unlock new sources as the others start to fray thin.

And we do this at a timescale vastly faster than the biological or even geological timescales of our ancestors. It is routine to see dozens, hundreds, thousands of times more progress within a single human lifetime today than one might see over a thousand years of the Ancients. The Ancients would be lucky to see one new invention in a given lifetime, we are flooded by mindbending scientific innovation on our newsfeeds on a weekly basis.

So, there is some kind of Progress, at the very least Growth. Things are growing, very fast.

This is a Stream, maybe even the Stream, according to various libertarian-adjacent³ thinkers.

And this is a compelling argument, if one actually looks at the data. Economic growth is what prevented us from falling into the hellish malthusian trap, and what enables much, if not all, of the Nice Things we get to enjoy these days.

And it seems pretty clear that throughout most of history, wealth seemed to come hand in hand with moral progress. Richer countries are more free, more equitable, more kind.

If one doesn’t have to be cruel to survive, and has the resources to spare, many⁴ choose to be kind.⁵

So, we’ve found our Stream, so sayeth the hypothetical strawman american economist. It’s economic growth, GDP! As long as we have more of that, there is Progress!

…yeah, but…no one is having kids.

Do you know how hard you have to abuse a mammal (with access to adequate food) to make them not have kids? Do you have any idea what cruelty you need to endure to lose a biological drive that basic? And this is happening across all countries, at truly unbelievable scales. If you haven’t looked into birth rate decline recently, it’s so, so much worse than you think. Whole thriving, powerful, “economically productive” societies committing suicide on scales never before seen.

What the fuck is going on?

No, seriously, what the fuck?⁶

The reason I bring this up is that this is the Theodicy of purely economic theories of Progress, a full discrediting of Growth as the normative Thing We Actually Care About. We have the data, it’s unmistakable: If you just “grow”, what happens is people literally start committing generational suicide on a global scale.

That’s really bad.

The Arc of History

And yet, and this is the deep mystery that haunts me, we live in the most prosperous, peaceful, kind era the world has ever seen. Despite the Thunder, despite the birth collapse, despite living in a cold universe with no loving god to protect us, the arc of history has bent toward justice.

This is not a comfortable mystery.

It would be easier if the world were simply getting worse, then we could rage against the dying of the light.

It would be easier if progress were guaranteed, then we could relax into the Current.

But neither is true.

We have a Stream that has carried us to unimaginable heights, richer, freer, kinder than our ancestors could dream. The same Growth that saved us from Malthusian Horror, that built this Golden Age…is now driving us toward Falls we can barely comprehend. The very force that lifted us up threatens to dash us on the rocks below.

The Stream is real. It brought us here. But something is terribly, terribly wrong with how we’re navigating it.

I hear the Roar, like distant Thunder…

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This is Part 2 of a 5 Part series. You can find Part 3 here.

1. Or something similar to it, such as Buddhism's concept of Escaping Samsara.

2. There is a lot of nuance to this claim that I will not be defending in this post.

3. and almost universally American

4. though not all

5. I consider this a non-trivial miracle of this world.

6. Everyone has their own pet theories and solutions, but none of them fucking work. Literally every intuitively plausibly seeming theory is not supported by data, or its opposite is supported equally well by data.

For example, some edgelords like to say the solution is obvious but not discussed because it’s politically inappropriate: “It’s because fertility declines with female education!” But guess what, asshole, the same correlation exists with male education! Fuck off.