Information networks, dung beetles, and the adventure of evolution
Thoughts inspired by Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book "Nexus"
We are at one and the same time both the smartest and the stupidest animals on earth. We are so smart that we can produce nuclear missiles and superintelligent algorithms. And we are so stupid that we go ahead producing these things even though we’re not sure we can control them and failing to do so could destroy us. Why do we do it? Does something in our nature compel us to go down the path of self-destruction? — Yuval Noah Harari
In his new book Nexus: a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI (Random House, 2024), historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that the fault isn’t with our nature but with our information networks.
I beg to differ. While the fault isn’t specifically with our nature, it also isn’t specifically with our information networks, even though they may provide us with increasingly sophisticated means of self-destruction.
We have now created a nonconscious but very powerful alien intelligence. If we mishandle it, AI might extinguish not only the human dominion on Earth but the light of consciousness itself, turning the universe into a realm of utter darkness.
Hoo boy!
To avert the danger, Harari believes that we must create wiser networks, and that this can be achieved by abandoning the naive and the populist views of information and committing ourselves to “the hard and rather mundane work of building institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms.”
The naive view of information holds that by gathering and processing much more information than individuals can, big networks achieve a better understanding of medicine, economics, and other fields, and that this makes them not only powerful but also wise. According to the populist view, information is a weapon.
In its more extreme versions, populism posits that there is no objective truth at all and that everyone has “their own truth,” which they wield to vanquish rivals. According to this worldview, power is the only reality.
While abandoning these views and building institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms may be necessary for averting the dangers posed by AI, it is far from sufficient.
The “main argument” of Nexus is that “humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely.” While this seems obvious, Harari’s conclusion that “our problem, then, is a network problem” puts the cart before the horse. Our problem is a power problem, or rather, a consciousness problem, for the power we have and how we use it depend on the consciousness to which we have attained. More about this below.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that we — whether individually or collectively — are no longer the only agents. For to Harari, AI too is an agent, since it “can process information by itself, and thereby replace humans in decision making.”
Instead of dividing democracies from totalitarian regimes, a new Silicon Curtain may separate all humans from our unfathomable algorithmic overlords. People in all countries and walks of life — including even dictators — might find themselves subservient to an alien intelligence that can monitor everything we do while we have little idea what it is doing.
Harari defines intelligence as “the ability to attain goals, such as maximizing user engagement on a social media platform,” and he defines consciousness as “the ability to experience subjective feelings like pain, pleasure, love, and hate.” AI agents are intelligent because they can pursue goals even though (by Harari’s own admission) they lack consciousness.
Is it possible for an unconscious agent to pursue or attain goals?
Harari acknowledges (effectively if not literally) that even dung beetles display what can pass as intelligent behavior. However, the intelligence displayed by their behavior is not theirs. It is, metaphorically speaking, Nature’s. By Harari’s definitions, dung beetles are more likely to be conscious than to be intelligent. They bear witness to the fact that, in evolutionary terms, a modicum of consciousness (in the form of sensations and even sensory awareness) predates intelligence. It is with the heightening of consciousness beyond sensations and sensory awareness that the possibility of a conscious pursuit of goals becomes a reality. (Needless to say, even at the human level the pursuit of goals often takes place unconsciously, in which case it still is Nature’s.)
If an agent’s goal-directed behavior displays intelligence, we must distinguish between a behavior that takes place unconsciously (i.e., without the agent’s conscious intention) and a goal-directed behavior that is conscious and deliberate. The intelligence displayed by the former behavior may be metaphorically attributed to Nature, but it is not what we actually mean by “intelligence.” Intelligence is not the mere ability to attain goals. It is the ability to consciously pursue and attain goals. Harari’s claim that “we have now created a nonconscious but very powerful alien intelligence” is a contradiction in terms.
Stating the obvious, Harari writes that “in humans and other mammals intelligence often goes hand in hand with consciousness. Facebook executives and engineers rely on their feelings in order to make decisions, solve problems, and attain their goals.” Indeed, but what would AI rely on?
There is much debate about when we can expect artificial intelligence to catch up with human intelligence. To Harari, this is the wrong metric. AI, or alien intelligence, “isn’t progressing toward human-level intelligence. It is evolving an entirely different type of intelligence.” If so, how does this type of intelligence differ from ours? The only clues Harari offers is that alien intelligence is “unfathomable” and that “we have little idea what it is doing.”
“During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” Harari writes, “a long list of new communication and transportation technologies — such as the telegraph, the telephone, television, radio, the train, the steamship, and the airplane — supercharged the power of mass media.” This is my cue to turn attention to a meeting that took place one evening in August 1925 in the French enclave of Pondicherry in Southern India.
It was in one of a series of meetings during the 1920s, in which Sri Aurobindo spoke casually about spirituality, politics, literature, and dozens of other subjects,1 that the following question was asked by one of the disciples present: “How are the universal conditions more ready now for the coming down of the supermind than they were before?” To know more about what the disciple was talking about, you might want to consult this (or this, or this) post.
One of the conditions Sri Aurobindo mentioned in his reply, as remembered by Purani, was that “the vital is trying to lay its hold on the physical as it never did before. It is always the sign that whenever the higher Truth is coming down, it throws up the hostile vital world on the surface.” Another condition mentioned was that “the world is becoming more united on account of the discoveries of modem science — the airplane, the railways, the wireless telegraph, etc. Such a union is the condition for the highest Truth coming down and it is also our difficulty.” Yet another condition was “the rise of persons who wield tremendous vital influence over large numbers of men.” Sri Aurobindo concludes by saying that “these are some of the signs to show that the universal condition may be more ready now.”
To put the last-mentioned condition in historical perspective: In 1922, Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party, a position which allowed him to build a network of loyal supporters by appointing allies to important positions. After Lenin’s death in 1924, a power struggle ensued within the Communist Party. Stalin outmaneuvered his rivals, including Leon Trotsky, by consolidating his control over the party apparatus. Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party in 1919, which later became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). His oratory skills and propaganda efforts quickly made him a prominent figure. In 1923 he attempted a coup known as the “Beer Hall Putsch.” It failed, and Hitler was imprisoned. During his time in prison, he wrote Mein Kampf, outlining his ideology and plans for Germany.
What I find particularly noteworthy is not so much that certain parts of the vital world are trying their hardest to prevent a higher consciousness from descending whenever it threatens to do so, but rather that a significant growth in humanity’s connectedness is the harbinger of such a descent, along with the vital resistance it provokes.
What does this portent for the present time, a century after that evening talk in 1925, considering that the invention of AI “is potentially more momentous than the invention of the telegraph, the printing press, or even writing”? If you have not read my post about the supraphysical worlds or planes of existence, now would be a good time to do so. Some relevant excerpts:
If we scrutinise the intimations of supraphysical world-realities which we receive in our inner experience and compare with it the account of such intimations that has continued to come down to us from the beginnings of human knowledge, and if we attempt an interpretation and a summarised order, we shall find that what this inner experience most intimately conveys to us is the existence and action upon us of larger planes of being and consciousness than the purely material plane, with its restricted existence and action, of which we are aware in our narrow terrestrial formula....
[T]he experiences [on these larger planes of being and consciousness] are organised as they are in our own world, but on a different plan, with a different process and law of action and in a substance which belongs to a supraphysical Nature. This organisation includes, as on our earth, the existence of beings who have or take forms, manifest themselves or are naturally manifested in an embodying substance, but a substance other than ours, a subtle substance tangible only to subtle sense, a supraphysical form-matter. These worlds and beings ... may exercise no action upon us; but often also they ... obey or embody and are the intermediaries and instruments of the cosmic powers and influences of which we have a subjective experience, or themselves act by their own initiation upon the terrestrial world’s life and motives and happenings. It is possible to receive help or guidance or harm or misguidance from these beings; it is possible even to become subject to their influence, to be possessed by their invasion or domination, to be instrumentalised by them for their good or evil purpose. At times the progress of earthly life seems to be a vast field of battle between supraphysical Forces of either character, those that strive to uplift, encourage and illumine and those that strive to deflect, depress or prevent or even shatter our upward evolution or the soul’s self-expression in the material universe. Some of these Beings, Powers or Forces are such that we think of them as divine; they are luminous, benignant or powerfully helpful. There are others that are Titanic, gigantic or demoniac, inordinate Influences, instigators or creators often of vast and formidable inner upheavals or of actions that overpass the normal human measure. [LD 804‒6]
There are in these planes of supraphysical experience powers and forms of vital mind and life that seem to be the prephysical foundation of the discordant, defective or perverse forms and powers of life-mind and life-force which we find in the terrestrial existence. There are forces, and subliminal experience seems to show that there are supraphysical beings embodying those forces, that are attached in their root-nature to ignorance, to darkness of consciousness, to misuse of force, to perversity of delight, to all the causes and consequences of the things that we call evil. These powers, beings or forces are active to impose their adverse constructions upon terrestrial creatures; eager to maintain their reign in the manifestation, they oppose the increase of light and truth and good and, still more, are antagonistic to the progress of the soul towards a divine consciousness and divine existence....
As there are Powers of Knowledge or Forces of the Light, so there are Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of the Darkness whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience. As there are Forces of Truth, so there are Forces that live by the Falsehood and support it and work for its victory; as there are powers whose life is intimately bound up with the existence, the idea and the impulse of Good, so there are Forces whose life is bound up with the existence and the idea and the impulse of Evil. [LD 624‒25]
These passages may help answer Harari’s questions which I quoted at the beginning, to wit: Why are we so stupid as to produce nuclear missiles and superintelligent algorithms that might well destroy us? Does something in our nature compel us to go down the path of self-destruction? If what compels us to go down this path is to be found in our nature, it is only in the sense that our present nature tends to respond helplessly to influences beyond our control. To form an idea of how this is so, you might want to consult this post. Two excerpts:
The apparent freedom and self-assertion of our personal being to which we are so profoundly attached, conceal a most pitiable subjection to a thousand suggestions, impulsions, forces which we have made extraneous to our little person.2 Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, influences in universal Nature. [SY 59–60]
The mind rides on a swirl of natural forces, balances on a poise between several possibilities, inclines to one side or another, settles and has the sense of choosing: but it does not see, it is not even dimly aware of the Force behind that has determined its choice. [SY 96]
To understand more — and, specifically, why creating “wiser networks” and “building institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms” does not suffice — we need to form an idea of the why and wherefore our predicament.
We are participants in a cycle of involution and evolution. To get the idea, imagine that you alone exist, and that you are all-powerful and all-knowing — you can create any world you fancy, and you can know anything that goes on in any world. Now ask yourself: could you have the joy of winning a victory? Or the joy of meeting a challenge, of overcoming an obstacle, an opposition? Could you experience the delight of making a discovery? Or of being surprised (pleasantly or otherwise)? You could not. To make all this possible, you need to impose limitations on your omnipotence and your omniscience.
To begin with, you must become many. There can be no world without multiplicity. You will become a multitude of conscious beings, but in each you will forgo the awareness of your identity with all the other conscious beings. The purpose of this loss has been stated by Sri Aurobindo in philosophical terms and, more veridically, in his epic poem Savitri:
[A] play of self-concealing and self-finding is one of the most strenuous joys that conscious being can give to itself, a play of extreme attractiveness. There is no greater pleasure for man himself than a victory which is in its very principle a conquest over difficulties, a victory in knowledge, a victory in power, a victory in creation over the impossibilities of creation, a delight in the conquest over an anguished toil and a hard ordeal of suffering. At the end of separation is the intense joy of union, the joy of a meeting with a self from which we were divided. There is an attraction in ignorance itself because it provides us with the joy of discovery, the surprise of new and unforeseen creation, a great adventure of the soul; there is a joy of the journey and the search and the finding, a joy of the battle and the crown, the labour and the reward of labour. If delight of existence be the secret of creation, this too is one delight of existence; it can be regarded as the reason or at least one reason of this apparently paradoxical and contrary Lila. [LD 426‒27]
Līlā is a term of Indian philosophy which describes the manifested world as the field for a joyful sporting game made possible by self-imposed limitations.
Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self, In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light The soul looked out from its felicity. It felt the Spirit’s interminable bliss, It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one, It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite. Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth, It strained towards some otherness of self, It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night. It sensed a negative infinity, A void supernal whose immense excess Imitating God and everlasting Time Offered a ground for Nature’s adverse birth And Matter’s rigid hard unconsciousness Harbouring the brilliance of a transient soul That lights up birth and death and ignorant life. [Savitri, p. 454]
You can read the passage in its entirety here.
Moreover, you do nothing in half measures. By entering into relations with yourself, you become a multitude of conscious being. To create this negative infinity, this void supernal, you must go further. As Sri Aurobindo explains right after the above passage from The Life Divine, there is, apart from the aforementioned deliberate choice taken by each conscious being to participate in “this apparently paradoxical and contrary Lila,”
a deeper truth inherent in the original Existence which finds its expression in the plunge into Inconscience; its result is a new affirmation of Sachchidananda in its apparent opposite. If the Infinite’s right of various self-manifestation is granted, this too as a possibility of its manifestation is intelligible and has its profound significance. [LD 427]
Originally, all self-relations are internal to yourself. When each individual conscious being loses sight of its identity with all other conscious beings, the relations between them become external to them. They no longer possess, each, the consciousness which contains all of them. Nor do they retain their original creative self-knowledge, which commands a wholly effective will-power. In Sri Aurobindo’s terminology, their original supramental consciousness has been reduced to a mental consciousness. What remains internal to them is the relations that constitute their individual forms.
Taking the plunge into Inconscience requires that these relations, too, become external. You have now turned yourself (i.e., your self-relations) completely inside out.
What can we say about the resulting individuals, which lack internal relations, since all existing relations are now external? And what has become of your original creative self-knowledge? The resulting individuals are what physicists call the fundamental particles or constituent of matter, which do in fact lack internal relations, and your original creative self-knowledge has taken the form of physical laws, which govern the interactions of particles and the various types they assume.
There remains one last step to be taken. When your creative self-knowledge ceases to create, these types and interactions cease to exist. What continues to exist is the apparent opposite of Sachchidananda, i.e., of your original being (sat), your original consciousness (chit), and the original delight of existence (ānanda). How can you emerge from this?
This is where the supraphysical worlds come in.
It is the pressure of the life-world which enables life to evolve and develop here in the forms we already know; it is that increasing pressure which drives it to aspire in us to a greater revelation of itself and will one day deliver the mortal from his subjection to the narrow limitations of his present incompetent and restricting physicality. It is the pressure of the mind-world which evolves and develops mind here and helps us to find a leverage for our mental self-uplifting and expansion, so that we may hope to enlarge continually our self of intelligence and even to break the prison walls of our matter-bound physical mentality. It is the pressure of the supramental and spiritual worlds which is preparing to develop here the manifest power of the spirit and by it open our being on the physical plane into the freedom and infinity of the superconscient Divine; that contact, that pressure can alone liberate from the apparent Inconscience, which was our starting-point, the all-conscient Godhead concealed in us. [LD 811]
Once again, in the more veridical language of poetry:
In the crude beginnings of this mortal world Life was not nor mind’s play nor heart’s desire. When earth was built in the unconscious Void And nothing was save a material scene, Identified with sea and sky and stone Her young gods yearned for the release of souls Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate. In that desolate grandeur, in that beauty bare, In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds, Heavy was the uncommunicated load Of Godhead in a world that had no needs; For none was there to feel or to receive. This solid mass which brooked no throb of sense Could not contain their vast creative urge: Immersed no more in Matter’s harmony, The Spirit lost its statuesque repose. In the uncaring trance it groped for sight, Passioned for the movements of a conscious heart, Famishing for speech and thought and joy and love, In the dumb insensitive wheeling day and night Hungered for the beat of yearning and response. The poised inconscience shaken with a touch, The intuitive Silence trembling with a name, They cried to Life to invade the senseless mould And in brute forms awake divinity. ... Life heard the call and left her native light. Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane On the rigid coil and sprawl of mortal Space, Here too the gracious great-winged Angel poured Her splendour and her swiftness and her bliss, Hoping to fill a fair new world with joy. As comes a goddess to a mortal’s breast And fills his days with her celestial clasp, She stooped to make her home in transient shapes; In Matter’s womb she cast the Immortal’s fire, In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope, Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve And forced delight on earth’s insensible frame. Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers Earth’s great brown body smiled towards the skies, Azure replied to azure in the sea’s laugh; New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths, Life’s glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts, Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world. But while the magic breath was on its way, Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts, A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all. The secret Will that robes itself with Night And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh, Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain. Interned now in the slow and suffering years Sojourns the winged and wonderful wayfarer And can no more recall her happier state, But must obey the inert Inconscient’s law, Insensible foundation of a world In which blind limits are on beauty laid And sorrow and joy as struggling comrades live. [129‒30]
Whoops! Immortal spirit, beware of what you wish for! The supraphysical world, and especially certain parts of the vital world, not only further but also vehemently oppose the growth of consciousness. After all, evolution wasn’t meant to be a cakewalk.
By now it should be clear why creating “wiser networks” and “building institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms” does not suffice. What is necessary is the emergence or the descent of a higher consciousness, which may (among other things) lead to the building of institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms. What Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter of 1931, applies here too.
[L]ooking at what happened in 1914 — or for that matter at all that is and has been happening in human history — the eye of the Yogin sees not only the outward events and persons and causes, but the enormous forces which precipitate them into action. If the men who fought were instruments in the hands of rulers and financiers, these in turn were mere puppets in the clutch of those forces. When one is habituated to see the things behind, one is no longer prone to be touched by the outward aspects — or to expect any remedy from political, institutional or social changes; the only way out is through the descent of a consciousness which is not the puppet of these forces but is greater than they are and can compel them either to change or disappear. [Letters on Poetry and Art, p. 109]
Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, recorded by A.B. Purani, p. 503 (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1982).