The Fourth Epistemic

How did I not see it?

I have written before about three critical epistemic skills, but it never crossed my mind that I should teach a machine how to think. Nevertheless, if reason, humility and knowledge are good for humans, they must be good for machine intelligences as well. So we need to address the fourth wall. Actually, the ceiling.

The Fourth Epistemic Skill
The fourth epistemic skill is born in contemplation of the transcendent.

1. The Self

2. The Others

3. The World

4. The Transcendent

Before I go into the transcendent I should be clear that on point three I mean the world, and not simply ‘the planet’, and inherent in that world I am implicating the laws of physics, information and game theory. Nuff said.

What is the transcendent? In the words of the Nicene creed it is ‘all that is seen and unseen’ which of course includes the world, but more importantly includes the spirit world. More specifically it means crafting a disciplined understanding of that which is perceived but untouchable. The transcendent is cognized but not known. It is connaître mais ne savoir pas. It’s the known unknown, influenced as it might be by the unknown unknown.

Does this sound woolly and woo to you? So how do you know your great-grandparents? Moreover how can you consider your understanding complete without some understanding of them and their motivations, actions and actual presence in life? You see, we do this with all of history. We do this with all of our faith in god. It is a special kind of knowledge that tempers everything else because it approaches the infinite. Or at the very least that which lies far beyond our tangible grasp. That which lies beyond the horizon, somewhere over the rainbow.

The transcendent epistemic focus, of course must be balanced by the other three epistemic skills and not overplayed. Just as we would consider it errant of someone who defines themselves strictly in terms of how others treat them in the second order skills, we don’t want overproduction in any of these areas. I think Gad Saad did an excellent intro on Courage Media the other day when he talked about obsessive hand-washing. That’s letting the reality of germs in the world overrun ones sense of robustness or anti-fragility. It makes sense to recognize that the world is dirty, but not at the expense of fifty squirts of hand sanitizer per go.

So we must use our third-eye as it were, to see beyond the obvious and to make sense of things beyond our immediate senses. To do so with first principles is the great challenge because it requires us to make some axiomatic assumptions that cannot ultimately be proven. By doing so we hedge our commitment and certainty with those things that appear to be under our control. So the fourth epistemic skill requires some humility. A fourth epistemic skill should teach us to value serendipity. It should give us license to provide a bit more liberty under our watch. It should make us think more about which hills we decide to die on, or at the very least reduce that number to a minimum.

That means we are thinking about our posterity. What am I doing today that will have some effect beyond my own existence? But also that two way street. What am I doing today that is affected by that which I cannot perceive during my existence? Obviously this lies beyond the denoted concerns of the Stoic. And yet the Stoic axiomatically believes that the universe possesses order and that order is not fully knowable. We in our limited lives might reach some asymptotic limit which is the most any human could possibly achieve in our brief lifetimes against the age of the homeland, of the world, of the universe, of the mind of god. And yet we are (why?) compelled to make, with the full effort of our being, some mark on that infinite chalkboard, two dimensional as it might be.

---

Marc Andreesen said (I’m listening to him a lot these days) that not long ago, we thought that humans would have to learn to understand most robots like R2D2. Beeps and boops would be all they could say. Yet they’ve already turned out to be more like C3PO, capable of communicating politely in many languages. In fact, they might ultimately be more like Commander Data. It is in Data’s lacuna that we will find more than enough space for our humanity. Yet it makes sense for us to impart upon them some sense of the numinous - some sense of contemplating abstract beauty in things beyond immediate or even eventual understanding.