Valentine's Logos
Back in mid 2024 I wrote a kind of treatise giving an overview of my vision for humanity at the time.
I wrote it with a particular group in mind. (LARC, the Life Aligned Research C-something-we-never-decided.) We tended to talk about people’s “logos”, meaning the Greek word “λογος” from which we get words like “logic” and “logistics” and the “-ology” ending of many disciplines. In LARC’s milieu at the time, a person’s logos was something like: that which arises from the interaction between (a) what’s deeply important, precious, and salient to that person with (b) their current overall context.
Two years later, I’m still pretty pleased with it. I’d write chunks of it pretty differently now, and some ideas have congealed much more elegantly than they once did. The tone feels different than I feel today; much heavier and more desperate. But I think if someone wanted to invest a few hours into understanding my wide-vision perspective, reading this treatise is currently the best way to do it.
I’m publishing it on this blog now. I’m creating this index page to give some context and to act as a table of contents.
A brief aside: it’s called “Valentine’s Logos” because within LARC and adjacent communities I’m often known as “Valentine”. You’ll find that’s my name on the community blog Less Wrong, for instance. There’s a fun story behind why that’s my nickname, and I think it’s a story worth telling on this blog sometime. But the short and deceptively boring explanation is: it comes from the fact that the main character in the book Stranger in a Strange Land is named “Valentine Michael Smith”, and my name is Michael Smith, and “Michael Smith” is too generic to be useful in lots of contexts.
A quick overview (from the original)
(This section is a very lightly edited copy-and-paste of the original introduction. I notice a tone change from how I write today. If you do too… well, that’s why!)
I think the way we’re human needs to change if we want to reliably live in wholesome systems.
That’s true on individual scales, and it’s even more true on large collective scales.
I think I see a key component of how we need to change. I’m pretty sure it’s necessary. My intuition is that it’s close to sufficient, but not quite. But even so, I think it’d help a lot with collecting the aspects that it doesn’t already include.
In brief, that change is making what really matters the organizing principle for attention.
The rest of this series will be me trying to explain (a) what I mean by that, (b) why it strikes me as key, and (c) how I think we might make it happen.
It’s tricky to know what order to write this in because the main point is an interwoven system. It’s not that there’s a collection of ideas that form an argument. It’s that there’s one insight that takes several concepts to express.
By analogy: the essence of evolution is a single insight, but it’s often hard to convey that single insight briefly to someone who doesn’t yet grok it. The most direct expression I know of sounds silly: “If something is better at spreading than other things like it, then it’ll spread more than those other things.” It often helps to break the insight down into the ideas of variation and natural selection — but it’s not like those two ideas are steps of an argument. They’re more like components of an engine. There’s a logic to natural selection, for instance, and it’s important to understand that logic to really get evolution… but without the context of variation, it’s often not obvious why we’re talking about natural selection to begin with. So sometimes the listener has to grant a loan of trust that these maybe-interesting ideas can lead to some kind of “click” once all the parts are present.
I have to guess a breakdown and order of component concepts for my thing that might be interesting and clear. Here’s my current best guess:
Memetics: The way that animals are embedded in biological ecosystems, humans are embedded in memetic ecosystems. This isn’t just poetic: it’s an extremely strong analogy.
Mental machinery: Minds (by which I loosely mean the things in people that produce thoughts & words) are extremely mechanical. They run programs with an observable structure. Once you see that structure, it implies that minds only ever respond to commands — which suggests something important about thoughts you’re not aware of having asked for.
Self-reference: There’s a specific structure that minds have to grapple with but don’t know how to. In a deep sense they can’t, at least not completely. This is a blessing in disguise: without this limitation, minds could fully trap us in memetic automation.
Gnosis: There’s a clear ground of knowing that is beyond and before mind. It’s possible to reorganize a mind to orient toward that deeper knowing in a pretty stable way. Doing so biases memetic natural selection in favor of life (in the Christopher Alexander sense).
Death, and what really matters: With the above components in place, I think it’ll be possible to clearly say the core thing in a way that clicks. Without that context, I imagine it sounds a bit silly or strange or ominous: Nothing matters more than what matters most, death highlights this point, and we ignore what matters most because our current mind designs cannot bear the pain. I think I see a mental architecture that (a) can handle it, (b) is good for individuals, and (c) maybe makes synergistic global coordination possible.
I’ve written these sections assuming you’re reading them in order. But if skipping around feels more natural to you, please do. Just consider rereading the ones you started with after filling in the gaps.
(In particular, the last one above is my “why” or “what it’s all for”. It’s easier to say with the context of everything else, but if you need to feel me first, maybe start there.)
If you feel so inspired, you might even find it helpful to read all of them twice, since each one is really kind of a prerequisite for all the others. Different things can jump out in the earlier sections once you have the whole picture that later sections help fill in.
At the end I’ll name some of what I think this implies, both in terms of culture design and also for individual human action. This part is more like a very rough sketch, and an invitation for doing further work.
Table of Contents
As I publish each part of the document, I hope to come back and hyperlink everything here.
Main components
Memetics
What is a meme?
Surviving creates skill
Life cycles
Intelligent adaptation
Helpful memes
The efficient world
This is a meme
Mental machinery
Mind as responsive servant
All thoughts are responses
Example: distraction programs
The mind’s toolbox
Reification
The selfing process
Social icons
Isolation & filtering
Familiarization
Overlays
Mental fuel
Taking mind as object
This is a mental overlay
Self-reference
Two kinds of meta
Agents cannot self-refer
Self-tooling and Original Spin
Self-reference checks
The puzzle of wisdom
Gnosis
Unalienable knowing
Gnosis of interface
Infallibility
Confidence & humility
Tracing the proof
Plausibility vs. necessity
Social anti-gnosis
Some gnostic observations
Problems before solutions
Stillness, prayer, & listening
Choice and autopilot
Courage
Gnosis of gnosis
Death, and what really matters
Precious remembrance
Terry Warner’s story
A prayer for salvation
Ignoring death
Something is wrong
This is not a game
Desperation doesn’t help
Why engineer the mind?
Tying it together
What now?
Pieces of a sane culture
How we might get there
This format needs adjustment