Note on Acceleration

Towards Actionable Definitions

I’ve previously characterized acceleration as “the gain in concrete expressivity of an intelligent system”. This isn’t a terrible definition, but it is a little too external, it tells us when acceleration happens, but says little about how it happens, which is what we want in order to, you know, accelerate.

Today I’m going to flesh this definition out a bit by talking about what I consider to be some of its principal elements, but I won’t describe what I consider to be the abstract process as such, which is a bit more involved and ever unclear. They are:

• Escalation of opposition.

• Virtualization.

• Internalization of feedback.

• Rule production.

• Qualitative time. (Horolects)

Enter The Arena, And Hit The Lights

War Is God and everything depends on the existence of sacrificial gradients, so intensification of oppositions is a natural pre-condition to achieve a higher register of being. There is a lesser and a greater escalation. The lesser escalation happens internally, through the development of the consequences of a given format. The greater escalation is external and happens at the level of format, as some incumbent format or paradigm becomes exhausted or is broken through due to some new development, theoretical or empirical.

That seems a plain, simple observation, and it is, but remember that for the mainstream, what is more advanced is less war-like, more “civilized”, utopian. The popular conception of the more advanced as such tends to the belief that it wears some sort of docile and dull bovine smile of minor omnibenevolence. Consider Pinkerite style (or even worse, Peter Singer) extrapolations of “expanding moral circles” until there is universal suffrage for shrimp, and maybe one day even quarks and leptons. Why not?

Am I claiming, then, that peace is degenerative, decelerative? That scavenging for scrap calories in post-apocalyptic Mad Max hell is what true intelligence is supposed to look like? No, not quite. The point is that underneath appearances of universal fraternity, the primary processes are agonistic and a more incisive and broader perspective on systems enables a more organic perception, and this is both normatively more astute and closer to the truth.

For example, the relative peace of city life compared to tribal existence should be understood organically, not individually. To claim that civilization is more peaceful than savagery simply because any individual in it is unlikely to encounter violence daily is akin to claiming that a multi-trillion organism that murders someone every day is more peaceful than a single-celled one that destroys another maybe a couple of times in its life span, because in the former most of the cells are not directly involved in the act and therefore just play out their peaceful little metazoan lives. See the issue? It’s a question of partitioning, of finding the right format. And I believe with the most adequate lens for acceleration, what one will find is escalation, not a limit of universal co-operation. Some averages might go down, and true nature may be hidden by this or that structural feature, but stakes and depth of conflicts will increase.

It is worth remark that most creatures on Earth are simply too stupid to be evil. Therefore, do not assume a simple and monotonic moral trajectory for universal evolution.

Mirror World

Virtualization is intimately tied to internalization of feedback, and is simply what it sounds like. Objective interactions are replaced by subjective considerations, with sometimes extreme gains of efficiency and efficacy (that is, many actions would simply be effectively impossible otherwise). Capital, from caput, “head”, as in heads of cattle as a measure of wealth. Without virtual domains, action can only be brute force and direct interaction. No planning, no foresight, leading to enormous expenditure of energy and wastage. Intelligence can only be the engine it is when it can cycle between the concrete and virtual. Irrelevant without the former, and feeble without the latter.

Almost all of your reality is already virtual, and is only becoming more so. Baseline Kantian considerations regarding the nature of perception aside which already make this a plain and inalienable fact, the insatiable anabolism of social structure has as one consequent the compulsive specialization, segmentation and modularization of all aspects of life. Life becomes alienated from living. After all, when was the last time you were the one to kill something you ate? Of the youngest people you know, how many births did you witness? And of the ones you knew, how much of their dying was in your presence? Every modern sausage gets made behind closed doors, and common life is reduced to, ultimately, only two options: one’s labor function and one’s ability to choose in the markets.

The subjective consequences of this are an interesting story for another time, but one thing to highlight is that since most of individual life becomes black-boxed, it therefore becomes impossible to escape. This isn’t simply due to the extreme material requirements involved, but most importantly due to the atrophy of individual faculties. What’s important about that? This is how acceleration forces without coercion, and that’s why people are able to fool themselves that the universe increasingly revolves around us. Games are arranged such that individual greed is only an easy pretext for unwitting service to greater designs.

Internalization Of Feedback

Testing, more or less. You can build a house and see if it doesn’t crumble down on your head and kills you, or if you’re clever enough you can use sound principles of engineering, calculate everything out beforehand and eliminate bad ideas before they have to be born. Frankly, this is the main reason I’m not a libertarian of any sort. Spontaneous order fails to account for internalization of feedback, it only punts the topic back to the nonlinear interactions of agents in some kind of market, begging the question. It’s not that there is no such thing as spontaneous order, or that it doesn’t work, but that it operates through locally non-spontaneous ordinations, and ceteris paribus, the organization with more internalization of feedback wins because it can both save on costs and act much more quickly since it doesn’t have to wait for external feedback before making further decisions.

Imagine needing to wait for cars to explode or whatever before going back to the drawing board, making some small modifications and then having to wait for the long-term usage of those new models before you can figure out if they are any good! I mean, for goodness’ sake, isn’t this why we have brains? So that the organism can adapt during runtime, during its own lifespan, instead of having to wait generations for natural selection to do its thing. Any theory of acceleration that neglects internalization of feedback has deserted from its duties towards intelligence and is a waste of time.

Quid Custodiet

If War Is God, then legislators, lato sensu, are arms manufacturers. The cute anecdote is the child Gauss learning to add up the sum 1+…+100 with a simple rule.

Shortly after his seventh birthday Gauss entered his first school, a squalid relic of the Middle Ages run by a virile brute, one Büttner, whose idea of teaching the hundred or so boys in his charge was to thrash them into such a state of terrified stupidity that they forgot their own names. More of the good old days for which sentimental reactionaries long. It was in this hell-hole that Gauss found his fortune.

Nothing extraordinary happened during the first two years. Then, in his tenth year, Gauss was admitted to the class in arithmetic. As it was the beginning class none of the boys had ever heard of an arithmetic progression. It was easy then for the heroic Büttner to give out a long problem in addition whose answer he could find by a formula in a few seconds. The problem was of the following sort, 81297 + 81495 + 81693 + ... + 100899, where the step from one number to the next is the same all along (here 198), and a given number of terms (here 100) are to be added.

It was the custom of the school for the boy who first got the answer to lay his slate on the table; the next laid his slate on top of the first, and so on. Büttner had barely finished stating the problem when Gauss flung his slate on the table: "There it lies," he said—"Ligget se'" in his peasant dialect. Then, for the ensuing hour, while the other boys toiled, he sat with his hands folded, favored now and then by a sarcastic glance from Büttner, who imagined the youngest pupil in the class was just another blockhead. At the end of the period Büttner looked over the slates. On Gauss' slate there appeared but a single number. To the end of his days Gauss loved to tell how the one number he had written down was the correct answer and how all the others were wrong. Gauss had not been shown the trick for doing such problems rapidly. It is very ordinary once it is known, but for a boy of ten to find it instantaneously by himself is not so ordinary.

Bell, E. T. 1937. Men of Mathematics. New York: Simon and Schuster. (See chapter 14, "The Prince of Mathematicians: Gauss," pp. 218–269.)

Now, the most salient thing for people in this little story is typically pattern-detection and the like. But the points are, on the one hand, whence the machinery involved in such, and what are its transcendental requirements? Gauss was only conducting a simple sum, therefore already in the virtual setting of elementary mathematics, but he accelerated by going one depth further than his peers and holding open a space for an exploitable invariance around which he could manipulate the sums involved, and not just follow an arithmetic script. Relatively trivial and early algebraic thinking, yes, but the aim here is not to dazzle with fancy fireworks, it’s to excavate operations and processes so natural, and therefore so implicit, that they may as well have been encrypted, so that they can eventually be industrialized. (although being more honest, I do this for the satisfaction of my own schizotypal and logician’s curiosity for anything left implicit and nothing else)

The question of how rules are produced and the subsequent self-referential considerations regarding not the rules of logic but the logic of rules is just about the most complicated thing there can be. One may even riposte with God, but we are told that God is supremely simple…

Suffice to say that rules are everywhere and that they are very much necessary for any intelligence worth half a shit.

Incidentally, this is another strike against liberty in the sense that metabolism cannot replace science. Just as well the converse, but the symmetry is uncomfortable due to the universalism of any “emancipatory” projects. Is intelligence then just a factory for rules? Not quite. First, because it perpetually attempts instead to be a rule-factory factory. And second, because we know such a thing can never be perfect (which would also amount to some final law with a universal mandate and the closest thing to an ultimate natural peace, contradicting War Is God), but that’s what gives the Great Game its spice. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you always need theory to win, but instinct, insight, and learning, have to crystallize into rules before you can reach the next stage of the game.

Shadow Realms

Where it all comes together is in Qualitative Time. I use this expression for expressive gains so radical that they cannot be taken simply as multipliers. They actually enable novel action. In the Gaussian fable above, the other students would still have completed their sums. Perhaps incorrectly, but it would only have been a matter of time, of material, of resources. Qualitative Time represents infinite speed-ups. The example I like to use is that of single-layer perceptrons and the XOR classification problem. XOR is an elementary logical operation, Exclusive Or, which returns true if only one of its two inputs is true, i.e., XOR(True, True) = False, XOR(True, False) = True, XOR(False, True) = True, XOR(False, False) = False. In other words, it checks if inputs are unequal. The classification problem is to predict the output of XOR given the inputs, but single-layer perceptrons cannot do this because they can only separate the space linearly.

This is resolved by adding more layers to the Little Neural Network That Could, making it capable of non-linearity, thus it can separate a space with curves and mimic XOR. The point is that no matter how you implement a single-layer perceptron, how much memory you have, how fast its processor is, it cannot get the job done. The difference between quantitative time and qualitative time is the difference between becoming more of what you already are and becoming more than what you are. Complexity of architecture, not just wealth of resources. Fundamentally topological, not cardinal.

What brings it all together are Horolects. They are simply an organizing notion, but I’ve found this to be a helpful format so far. Horolects are time-dialects in the sense that they are the logical structures that regiment a virtual space making the passage of qualitative time possible. For neural nets, the horolect involved is found in the topological structure of the network, specially its depth, in addition to the other more prosaic elements required for quantitative time.

Horolects are the closest thing to a rule-factory factory. They are furnished with a teleological dimension that locally provides the requirements for a temporal progression, and globally provides the requirements for an intellectual progression, akin to deepening the perceptron. Mind you, this means that they create legibility but they do not necessarily represent. They are not necessarily «realistic» in any way, they are the normative structure of an internal and virtual reality that orient it towards becoming more than itself.

All of the previous elements are here, but it might not be clear how horolects escalate opposition. Here you should think of the opposition between ideas, propositions, proofs themselves as intellectual activity evolves, without any pre-conceptions of some platonic world being uncovered. The question is simply: what resources can be summoned in the defense of a party from this Abzu of concept? Consider disputes between claims, even ridiculous ones like 1+1=3, and just how vicious the fighting could get. That’s the metric. Opposition is thus escalated in potential of intensity of hostilities, but also escalated in practice, immanently, due to the natural effects of advantages accrued by acceleration. Then there is the topic of how conflict is engineered and managed within the development of acceleration and its consequences, because of its very nature. That I’ll leave for descriptions of the process of acceleration as such.