This article is a response to Europagande’s critique of Traité Néoréactionnaire. I recommend reading that critique first.
Hello, Europagande. First of all, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to write such a well-supported critique, one that highlights what you see as disagreements between your worldview and the one I put forward in my book. I can’t express how much I welcome this kind of discussion. It gives me a chance to clarify my thinking.
Unfortunately, having these discussions requires finding someone capable of fully understanding the substance of my book. We are all trapped within our own perspectives. When we read an author, we can never understand them completely, because we can never escape our own subjectivity. We project our own knowledge onto what the author says. My aim with this response, then, is to open a dialogue with you. In this first part, I’ll explain my point of view where I think you have only partially understood what I’m saying. I hope these explanations will help you see that our views are not as different as you seem to assume at first glance. In fact, I often agree with the view you set out in your critique, for the simple reason that you are arguing against something you believe to be my position, but which is not. I don’t doubt that we’ll still disagree on some things by the end. But I hope that, by the end of this first response, those differences will turn out to be genuine disagreements rather than simple misunderstandings.
First, I must say that I was surprised to see you using my book as a basis for criticizing not only the book itself, but Neoreaction as a whole. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it seems to me that you haven’t read the leading Neoreactionary authors, and that many of the criticisms you make of them in your original article should be directed only at my book. You say that my book “presents a synthesis of the conceptual structure of the ‘NRx’ movement.” But that isn’t the case. What I offer here is a very personal vision, one that cannot be taken as a Neoreactionary canon. In fact, there is no Neoreactionary canon. Neoreaction brought together authors who disagreed with one another and could be divided into three branches: techno-commercialists, ethno-nationalists, and traditionalists. Any attempt to criticize Neoreaction as a unified movement is doomed to fail. Your criticisms of Neoreaction, then, apply only to my book, and I think it is crucial to make that clear.
You seem, however, to have broadly grasped what occupies me throughout the first part of the book: setting out a new perspective from which to reassess concepts Nietzsche deliberately set aside. My aim is not to reconcile Western metaphysics with those ideas. I think that is what you take me to be doing, and it leads you to build your critique around that, but it wasn’t my aim. I think this sometimes leads you to attribute ways of thinking to me that are foreign to me. Still, I understand why you make this criticism. I think it is justified. We might say that where Heidegger speaks only of being-in-the-world, I develop a worldview centered on being-for-the-world.
My thinking began with science, particularly thermodynamics and information theory, two fields whose core concept is entropy. Only later did I notice how my reflections, starting from that point, tended to intersect with these various philosophical traditions. Some will see this as a multidisciplinary contribution; others will see it as the source of the problem that concerns you. Science claims objectivity, whereas Nietzsche, and Heidegger even more so, undermine any possibility of an objective truth on which not only science but also traditional metaphysics depends.
Traité Néoréactionnaire
NIMH’s first book
Truth and Semantic Antirealism
Since this discussion is intended for a public audience, I’d like to give a brief account of how this point of view developed. After Kant inverted the subject-object relationship, Nietzsche taught us that all knowledge is merely a perspective produced by a subject upon an object, and that we cannot claim any kind of objectivity. Heidegger goes further still, showing us that it is already fallacious to think about this relationship through the subject-object dualism. It is not a relationship between two separate things, but a dynamic whole that constitutes a way of being-in-the-world for a Dasein whose relation to the world is conditioned by time. Meaning would emerge from the dynamic relationship between Dasein and Being. It would therefore be futile to try to say anything with objective validity.
I believe this is the main criticism you make of the idea of entropy: because of its universal scope, it would be an attempt to reintroduce an objective reality derived from universal laws, which would determine a universal Good that societies should conform to.
I’ll try to explain my position and clarify what I think you may have misunderstood. First, I have to acknowledge that I agree with Nietzsche about the limits of language. I am what one might call a semantic antirealist. I believe that statements about reality do not have objective truth, but depend on conceptual or linguistic frameworks. What I want to argue, rather, is that truth is always subjective and discovered a posteriori through action.
You often refer to Truth in your critique and imagine that Neoreactionaries favor the idea of a “Truth of a transcendental nature.” But Truth, for me, does not mean something fixed that has to be discovered. Everything we call a priori truth can only be a tautology that respects the validity of the terms used in a language. For me, truth is not something that exists a priori and to which we must conform. We create truth in the sense that we can formulate meaningful statements, and their meaning lies in their relation to the environment. Words allow us to encode past facts, which result from experience within an environment. Truth cannot say anything at all about the future, or about anything transcendental in either the metaphysical or Kantian sense.
Just as there are beneficial and harmful genes, there are truths and falsehoods that do, or do not, accurately encode the results of experience in the real world. Saying this means accepting that everything is always subjective and local: a gene may be harmful in one environment but beneficial in another. Take sickle-cell disease. It is a genetic disease that can be beneficial in a particular environment and at a particular time, but not in another.
I then turn to information more generally, to connect genes and memes, which are vehicles for information, and in this way I connect truth, information, and being. What you are is the result of the slow construction and selection of atomic, genetic, and memetic information. At every stage, that selection was made in relation to the value it had within a particular environment. There is no Truth, but I believe there are truths that are subjective and locally meaningful when we share an environment and a common language. If we did not live in a shared environment, there would simply be no way for us to understand one another, because we would have no shared referents.
I believe that as soon as we choose to use language, we choose to communicate a message to other people, expressing our subjectivity about something we share. Every message then carries a certain claim to objectivity, by virtue of the attempt to make oneself understood by someone outside oneself. Within those conceptual and linguistic frameworks, we can share an understanding of what is true and what is not.
Even if we say, “It is impossible to be objective,” the statement takes on an objective character. Even when Nietzsche argues that there can be no objective truth, while at the same time imagining that the world is, in its essence, Will to Power, his argument inevitably takes on the character of a claim to universal truth. As you noted, Heidegger criticizes him for falling into a subjective metaphysics with his concept of Will to Power. But even when Heidegger chooses to use the word Dasein to designate not the human being, but the entity whose particular characteristic is to question its own being, he cannot avoid creating a linguistic convention that becomes a generalizing category.
That designation does have one particular quality: it refers to something that is, by nature, unique and singular. Each person would have their own Dasein, but Heidegger is already making a generalization here. To say, “Every Dasein has its own Dasein,” is already to make a statement that is supposed to have objective validity. If you think Heidegger is right and want me to adopt his point of view, it is because you think he is more right than I am, and that we share some way of assessing the validity of a statement.
The same applies to the idea of entropy. But what is even more troubling about entropy is that, unlike concepts such as Will to Power or Dasein, it is supposed to be a property of the universe, which gives it an even stronger claim to objectivity. It also comes with quantifiable measurements. That can be seen as a strength or a weakness. It frightens many people, especially those who love freedom and tend to distrust language, and numbers even more. There is something tyrannical about proposing a conception of the world that can be quantified.
This feature could lead people to regard entropy as an objective criterion that assigns value to everything in the world, and to seek to govern the world authoritarianly. But that would be to misunderstand what lies behind the idea of entropy.
I’d like to share a text by Nick Land that sums up very well: 1) why it is fallacious to claim that a statement criticizing universalism proves universalism, and 2) why the idea of entropy destroys the possibility of universalism.
Against Universalism
There is a philosophical objection to every rejection of universalism, well known from its other uses—most typically, the denunciation of relativism. It takes only one step: Isn’t the denial of the universal itself a universalist claim? This is a malicious dialectic, because it demands that we agree. We do not, and never will, agree. Agreement is the worst thing that could happen. All that is needed is to admit that agreement is necessary, and global communism, or something close to it, becomes the implicit conclusion.
If there is a universal truth, it belongs only to Gnon, and Gnon is an occult God. Traditional theists will be strongly inclined to disagree, at the very least—and that is a very good thing. We already disagree, and we have barely begun.
There is no “good life for man” in general—or, if there is, we know nothing about it, or not enough. Even those who are convinced that they know what such a life ought to be promote its universality only at the cost of being deprived of the possibility of pursuing it. If we are to agree on the broad outline of a model of human existence, we must first reach an agreement—and “reaching an agreement” is politics. A much larger world acquires veto power over the way of life you choose, accept, or inherit; the details need not concern us. We have seen what that looks like. Global communism is the inevitable destination.
The alternative to agreement is schism. Secession, geopolitical disintegration, fragmentation, division: disagreement escapes dialectics and dissolves into nothingness. In practice, anti-universalism is not a philosophical position but an effectively defensible affirmation of diversity. From the standpoint of the universal—which belongs only to Gnon, never to man—it is an experiment. How confident it is in itself makes no difference to what lies beyond it. It answers only to Gnon. What anyone, anywhere, thinks of it counts for nothing. If it fails, it dies, which should change nothing for you. If you are forced to take an interest in someone else’s experiment, there is a schism. Of course, you are free to tell them that you think they will fail, as a compatibility error, if they will listen. But there is absolutely no need to reach agreement on the matter. That is ultimately what non-communism means.
Non-universalism is hygiene. It is the practical avoidance of other people’s bullshit. There is no higher principle in political philosophy. Any attempt to establish its alternative and impose a universal leads back to dialectics, communization, global evangelism, and totalitarian politics.
We say this here because the NRx is terrible at this, and degenerates into a clash of universalisms, as if by instinctive equilibrium. There are even people who confidently propose an “NRx solution” for the world. Nothing could be more absurd. The world—as a whole—is a cesspit of entropy. The most deeply degraded communism is the only “universal consensus” it can produce. (Everyone knows this, when they allow themselves to think.)
All order is local—which amounts to a denial of the universal. It is simply a restatement of the second law of thermodynamics, which “we” generally claim to accept. The only thing that could be distributed universally and equally is noise.
Kill universalism in your soul and you are immediately (objectively) a Neoreactionary. Protect it, and you are an obstacle to the emancipation of differences. That is communism—whether you recognize it or not.
—Nick Land
As I said, Neoreaction has no canon. As Land points out, universalism is present within it, but not in his work, nor in Yarvin’s, who calls the religion that is killing the West “Universalism.” We leave universal truth to Gnon, because we know that all truth can only be local and a perspective.
It is true that I describe accelerationism as universalist and identitarian, because it rests on the second law of thermodynamics as a universal principle, which is the source of local, identitarian orders. That is probably a mistake. I shouldn’t even say “universalist.” It follows from a universal principle, but that does not make accelerationism universalist. I ultimately speak of individuationism to describe how particular, ordered identities emerge from this universal chaos. But I celebrate order, not chaos; identity, not universality. What I find useful in this way of framing things is precisely the claim that the most universal thing we can know teaches us that universalism is impossible. I’ll return to identity later.
Lumières Sombres
An ebook translation of Nick Land’s key text,
offered to our Tipeee supporters
Reality and Epistemological Antirealism
Before explaining what entropy is, and why I think my line of thought can nevertheless meet Heidegger’s, I’d like to say something about reality, which you reproach me for describing as objective before putting me on trial for Kantianism.
I have to concede something here. More generally, I think my phrasing is still too Kantian, whereas what I actually believe is not. In my book, I do say that reality is objective and that we have a perspective on it: in other words, that it exists independently of us, but that we can never grasp it. My main aim is to reject a pure idealism that would make the world a product of our minds. In the previous paragraph, I chose to use the word “environment” rather than “reality” to avoid misleading you. I think that was the source of a misunderstanding that led you to criticize me for returning to a classical dualist metaphysics. I believe that criticism can be overcome by reformulating my position.
What I mean is simply that I believe there is a world outside us, one that came before us and will outlast us. I believe the world will continue to exist after I die. I do not believe there is a fixed reality that we discover without changing it, as you present traditional metaphysics. Although my book begins with thermodynamics and information theory, I soon turn to cybernetics and Wheeler’s quantum mechanics, both of which abolish the subject-object relationship. Cybernetics shows how a system is the product of self-organization through its environment, blurring any distinction between subject and object. Quantum mechanics, for its part, abolishes that distinction when it recognizes that the subject cannot be separated from the object being studied, because the subject is part of the experiment itself. We are never mere observers, even in our scientific experiments.
I discussed these different conceptions in the following article. In addition to being a semantic antirealist, I would then be what one might call an epistemological antirealist. I think science does not speak about what is real in nature, but about our knowledge of nature, and I argue that knowledge is always subjective. Take the observation of an atom. If there is something to know about the atom, our methods of producing knowledge have a problem: we can understand it only through its interactions. Yet when we observe it, we are an integral part of that interaction. We can therefore learn only about our interaction with the atom, not the atom in itself: about our relationship to that atom at time t, not the atom itself.
The atom would not be a pure product of our minds, but knowledge of the atom as an object would be inaccessible to us. This is a less categorical position than that of people like Niels Bohr, who believe that the properties attributed to particles are not inherent in those objects and exist only when we measure them, because they are created by our interaction with them. Whereas these radical antirealists end up calling reality itself into question, I simply argue that reality exists independently of us, but that our knowledge of it cannot be separated from the subject.
I think this is what you see as Kantian: one could say that the atom exists in itself, but that we can know only what the atom represents to us. It seems to me that, beyond this distinction, our conclusions are not so different, and that our disagreement is more a matter of using terms from different conceptual frameworks. At least, it does not seem to me that Heidegger denies even the existence of a shared environment, though we may give it a different meaning. I therefore accept that we never have more than a perspective on the world. I also accept that scientific knowledge is only a means of capturing what we know about our interaction with the world.
Scientific method, however, reveals something particular. At the macroscopic scale, two identical experiments conducted under the same conditions by two different researchers will produce the same result, provided they follow the same method. That means I would get the same result if I were the subject conducting the experiment. The knowledge produced is therefore valid for me as well. Entropy is a phenomenon that makes sense only at the macroscopic scale, and it is a firmly established scientific finding.
That is why I say in my book that, although our ability to understand the world around us is limited and perspectival, I believe, like David Chalmers, that there are truths about reality that we can share. The scientific method shows that, although the researcher is part of the experiment when studying an object, the researcher’s identity does not matter. Reality is stable enough for us to acquire knowledge about it. If that were not the case, either reality would be too changeable or the identity of the subject would matter. But the reproducibility of experiments proves otherwise. Only the method matters. Entropy is part of that method. In other words, everyone should be able to incorporate this knowledge into their perspective. In my view, it would be misguided to embrace a relativism that rejects the scientific method and ignores entropy when trying to propose a coherent worldview, simply because entropy has a universal character that does not sit well with our political concerns.
Entropy: From Thermodynamics to Information Theory
Let’s turn now to entropy, which lies at the heart of cybernetics. Entropy is a concept that is widely misunderstood. It is often discussed in terms of thermodynamics as the measurable degree of order in a system. It is generally accepted that the universe moves toward ever greater entropy and produces entities that reduce their entropy locally, which we call dissipative structures, while increasing the universe’s overall entropy. This makes it seem as though entropy claims to be a universal and objective measure.
In your text, you address it from this perspective alone, and I think that is what prevents you from seeing that we are not saying anything very different. In fact, we need to understand this concept through information theory, which tells us that the entropy of a system represents the degree of uncertainty, or missing information, about that system for an observer-participant. Like energy, information is also subject to entropy, and we observe that the dissipation of energy corresponds to the erasure of information. Information, too, is therefore quantifiable.
Put this way, one might still imagine an observer outside a system, trying to understand it. That is not the case. Just as Dasein is thrown into the world, the observer-participant is immersed in a system of systems that existed before them. These systems make up their world.
When I say that human beings are dissipative structures, you should understand that a dissipative structure captures and processes information about its environment in order to maintain and increase its order through the energy flows it uses. This leads to energy dissipation, which is why we can see human beings as open thermodynamic systems and imagine that the Darwinian struggle for survival is, in reality, a struggle to dissipate energy.
From these observations, it is easy to arrive again at Nietzschean ideas by looking at things purely in energetic terms. The world could be understood in its essence as a struggle to maximize the flows of free energy to be dissipated—that is, to maximize the local reduction of entropy, which we call extropy. Extropy is a word with no scientific pretensions, used to describe a system’s local reduction of entropy. It would lie at the heart of the universe and of dissipative structures in the way Will to Power does for Nietzsche. The only difference from Nietzsche is that it comes with a universal concept: the increase of the universe’s overall entropy.
We could even question whether a word like “universe” is useful, since it already implies certain assumptions. We might prefer the word “world.” All of this sounds cold and mechanical, doesn’t it? But what is it like to be one of these systems, as a human being, or as Dasein? Although the process seems mechanical when we describe it this way, we cannot reduce these phenomena to energy, nor can we reduce human beings to that.
Capturing and processing information is what cybernetic systems do. Dissipative structures are cybernetic systems: they self-organize by capturing information about their environment, which allows them to maintain their order. The environment itself is a larger system that tends to reduce its entropy. So even if we accept that there may not be a universe in the strict sense, we can imagine that we are the product of a world that wants something, and that we must understand our being through the relationship we have with that will.
Once we put it this way, meaning might seem to remain conspicuously absent. But information cannot be separated from meaning. In information theory, entropy measures uncertainty before a message is received, and its reduction corresponds to a gain in meaning. Capturing information means discovering our world in order to make sense of it for ourselves, so that we can maintain our being in accordance with our being-in-the-world, to use Heideggerian terms. We seek to appropriate the world in order to develop our being. Although our perception of the world is limited, the world exists outside us.
Cybernetics and Temporality
The passive aspect you criticize in the idea of the “observer-participant” is not absent from Heidegger. He uses terms such as “openness” and “clearing” to describe Dasein as a space in which Being is disclosed. Dasein is both an observer of a being’s presence, such as a tree, and a participant in giving that presence meaning in space and time. Dasein does not invent Being; it is, rather, the place where Being reveals itself.
The manifestation of Being is linked to Dasein’s temporality, but temporality is not a voluntary act. Dasein is “thrown” into the world: it has not chosen to exist or the conditions of its existence. It is also oriented toward death, a possibility it cannot control. Being thus manifests itself through this existential structure, not through an act of conscious will.
All we know is that we and the world exist within a temporal relationship, as Heidegger observes. But what is time? It can itself be seen as a product of entropy. The arrow of time is closely tied to entropy because entropy is statistical. In statistical physics, entropy measures the number of microstates that can be associated with a macrostate. The more possible microstates there are, the more entropic the system. Maximum entropy is statistically the most probable state. We experience time because the universe tends toward the most probable state, toward greater entropy.
What Heidegger addresses as Being and Time describes the personal perspective of a particular entity experiencing the struggle against entropy: the struggle to resist, locally and temporarily, the effects of time. This means reducing one’s entropy locally within a universe where entropy is the rule, and experiencing one’s own finitude. I do not believe this conflicts with Heidegger’s argument. What Heidegger treats as a particular feature of Dasein—thinking about its own being-in-the-world—is in fact common to every cybernetic system that seeks to capture information about its environment in order to endure and develop over time. That information must be meaningful to the entity. Dasein’s particularity is simply that it does this better than other entities, by giving things a different meaning.
You think I reduce disclosure to a cognitive process. I do not. I argue that through their cognitive faculties, subjects can capture information, but in doing so they imagine the possibilities for ontological disclosure. I argue that information is an ontological ground. In quantum information theory, information is seen as a fundamental element underlying physical phenomena. I therefore reintroduce a metaphysical dimension, but I am not saying that this informational ground exists in “another world.” This is what I take philosophically to be Being.
This leads me beyond Heidegger in my own conception of Being, and I understand that you see this simply as an appropriation of Heidegger, because I am reintroducing a metaphysical dimension. I know we won’t agree on this, and that you will tell me it is just my perspective. That is true: here, we have different perspectives. For me, the disclosure of being is how primordial information is used to take form in worldly entities. Cognitive work helps this process take form in memes, but genetic selection also contributes to this disclosure. The cognitive aspect is only one means of selecting which possibility of being to bring into existence—and even then, only within the limits of our control.
Unlike Heidegger, I do not divide things into authenticity and inauthenticity, but into entropic and extropic possibilities, with the most extropic being the most singular. This is also a question of temporality and time preference, which is why the future influences the present in my view. Through imagination, I can identify an entropic future in which I am a smoker, an alcoholic, divorced, and obese. I can avoid it in the present by not having that first cigarette and by going to the gym, thereby steering myself toward a more extropic disclosure. Still, I cannot control everything, and perhaps I will become what I fear.
This connects in some ways with Heidegger’s idea of authenticity, since for him inauthenticity means hiding behind “the they,” failing to assume one’s own singularity. Extropy, then, is singularity, whereas entropy is ordinary mediocrity. Ultimately, intelligence is the ability to imagine the future, more or less far ahead. For me, greater intelligence is a means of selecting the best possibilities of Being. But intelligence is not merely cognitive work: it is manifested in every extropic system.
The question of authenticity also applies to technology. I do not believe technology is inauthentic. I believe some uses of technology are entropic and others extropic. But I believe that more intelligence is better than less, and that artificial intelligence is very good news.
The Straussian Moment
An ebook offered to our Tipeee supporters at any pledge level
Grand Narratives and Efficiency
Cybernetics aims to speak about all systems and what they have in common, whereas Heidegger wants to speak about the particular experience of Dasein, starting from its own inner experience. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. But I understand why a Heideggerian might object to this systemic approach and reply that the systematization itself is merely the product of a Dasein claiming an illusory objectivity.
There is not, however, such a great difference between generalizing Dasein on the basis of one particular criterion and generalizing systems on the basis of an even more generic criterion, while also affirming that every system is different and has its own way of reducing entropy. Saying that all these systems have something in common does not make the particularity of human beings, or even of each individual, invisible.
I’ll give an example of a situation in which both frameworks can be applied. Imagine that you have a doctor’s appointment because you want to discuss a worrying symptom, such as blood in your stool. This symptom provides information about your system. Your doctor will take that information and compare it with other information they have about you, such as your age, sex, habits, and so on. They may ask, “How long have you been noticing this?” That will be another piece of information needed for the diagnosis.
They will probably examine you, perhaps with a rectal examination, to see whether the blood comes from hemorrhoids. Then they may say, “We need to run some more tests. I’d like you to send a stool sample to the lab.” They need more information to keep you from heading straight toward entropy—that is, a state in which your body stops exchanging the energy flows needed to maintain its structure: death.
If you ask, “What does that mean?” they won’t talk to you about entropy, of course. They’ll say that you may have colon cancer and that they want to check. But if they were more philosophical, they might tell you that, as Dasein, you are a being-toward-death, and that you will experience anxiety as you become fully aware of your relationship to death.
I imagine you wouldn’t reply that, as Dasein, the numbers from their tests don’t mean much because they are merely the product of science’s claim to objectify, based on the experience of other Daseins—conventions that do not show whether they apply to your case, since every perspective is unique. You will make sense of those numbers, which give you vital information that can help keep your being away from thermodynamic equilibrium, and you will listen to the doctor, even if, in the abstract, from a philosophical standpoint, Heidegger is right.
That information will have meaning and importance at time t. The same information will not have that meaning for me. Information cannot be separated from the subject and its relationship to the world. There is no ready-made formula for reducing entropy, because the concept of entropy cannot be separated from the observer-participant who helps construct the information—that is, who gives it meaning.
With this approach, I am not trying to take anything away from Heidegger’s argument, which I find persuasive. Saying that man is a cybernetic system tells us nothing about what it is like to be this particular kind of cybernetic system. Heidegger does an extraordinary job of expressing that. This connects to what is known as the hard problem of consciousness. We do not know what consciousness really is. If I attach electrodes to your head to observe your brain activity while you eat an apple, I might observe electrical activity in certain regions. But that tells me nothing about the experience you have while eating an apple. Heidegger chooses to describe the feeling of Dasein eating an apple. He is very wary of people who try to discuss this by observing which areas of the brain are activated, because that would disenchant the world: it would capture the workings in detail while forgetting lived experience, what it is like to be. I take nothing away from Heidegger, but I believe cybernetics tells us something crucial that Heidegger misses.
Heidegger was not a great fan of cybernetics. Why? For two reasons. First, beyond its quantifiable aspect, the simple feedback from the environment introduces the notion of efficiency. Heidegger sees this as a way of moving away from the authenticity of being, but I think that is mere romanticism on his part.
Why do I say this? Saying that Dasein is thrown into the world does not account for a crucial element of Dasein’s existence. In reality, Dasein is not thrown into the world; it is the product of a slow process, a long process of selection by the world, which can be understood through the lens of information. Atoms are vehicles for information, your genes are vehicles for information, and your memes are another vehicle for information. Meaning is present in each of them.
Of course, it is I, as Dasein, who retrospectively gives a particular meaning to this process. But it seems obvious to me that the process of disclosure of Being that Heidegger discusses at the scale of Dasein’s finitude also applies, more broadly, across generations. Being cannot be separated from Dasein’s experience of the world, but it cannot be separated from the experiences that came before us and led us to become what we are. Your genes are the result of encoding your ancestors’ experience of the world. Not all their experiences, only those that still make sense for you.
To say that a gene makes sense means that it is effective in guiding behavior. Imagine a mouse whose ability to dig a tunnel in the earth is encoded in its genes. That information makes sense in its habitat, but not if you move it to a concrete surface. The role of selection is to identify relevant information. The concept of Dasein thrown into the world cannot fully account for this process, whereas cybernetics provides a framework that can. Your genes were selected because they have a positive relationship with the world, which can be understood through the reduction of entropy. The simple fact that the world selected these genes rather than others testifies to the existence of a meaning that precedes Dasein.
Heidegger takes a comfortable position that allows him to avoid talking about efficiency by sticking to the concept of Dasein and its authenticity to Being, which supposedly has nothing to do with efficiency. Perhaps this is what led him to support the Nazis against inauthentic versions of capitalism and communism. But in the end, capitalism won because it was more efficient. Even if saying so is not very Heideggerian, I believe it is a rule of the world.
I see Heidegger’s decision to look away from efficiency as a way of preserving a mystical cave in which he can take refuge and search for another, more poetic meaning. I choose instead to accept this aspect of efficiency fully and to look for meaning in that necessity. This does indeed involve what you call a Grand Narrative: observing a movement in the universe that tends to produce increasingly efficient entities. What exactly does that mean? I don’t know, and I feel no need to invent a final cause out of thin air. But it is enough for me to see a teleology in it and to tell myself that life is not absurd.
This acceptance of efficiency leads me to perceive modernity and technology very differently from Heidegger. I see a world in which everything is flow, movement, and power. The trains shuttling back and forth and the rockets taking off and landing appear to me as the ballets of the modern world. A Ferrari F40 becomes a recital; the smallest traffic light becomes a conductor, greater even than a lamplighter. Then the individuals rushing about, pressed into service by the Gestell—sometimes without even knowing why—suddenly seem profoundly moral. This keeps me away from traditionalist thinking that assumes things were necessarily better in the past.
The other aspect, of course, is that entropy is an idea that is universal by nature. You add that, in my writing, it is a law of nature that ought to be replicated in society. Entropy is universal because we are all subject to it, but extropy is always local and does not follow a rule that could be known in advance. The point is not to apply the law of entropy to society, but precisely the opposite. Entropy is not a law to conform to, but a phenomenon that life combats locally through ever greater ingenuity. To be is not to conform to the law of entropy, but to struggle against entropy, and therefore to be creative. This produces structures with emergent properties that did not exist before. The only universal rule I rely on says that we must continually create the new, locally, not universally.
Augmented Horror
A selection of texts by Zero HP Lovecraft
Good and Singularity
“We are finally navigating the murky waters of the worst Platonism. Here is the universal Good; here are the universal rules that every man must universally follow, because they are truths valid for everyone. Try to forget yourselves a little, you individuals. Try to step back, to neutralize and universalize yourselves. Try to subordinate your actions to this Good that the Neoreactionary has taken care to define for you, for he is your new pastor.”
I’d like to begin with a word about Platonism. As I explore Roger Penrose’s possibility that mathematical rules might really exist in another world, I write:
“Truth would exist on another plane. The memes we create would obviously be symbols, but they would be a mental representation of a more fundamental world that really exists. That would mean there are categories of memes—for example, numbers—that have a special status, reflecting this more fundamental mathematical world. But memes are only vehicles for information, just as genes are, so it does not seem obvious to us that we should leap to the conclusion that we have suddenly created a kind of vehicle that gives us access to another world.”
To be clearer, I do not believe this at all. I do not believe in Plato’s world of Forms. It seems incongruous to me that a worldly entity could suddenly gain access to something separate from the sensible world. In my view, memes are as material as genes. Memes are nothing more than sounds or symbols—waves of different frequencies—that require material conditions in order to exist. Sound does not travel through empty space. Memes arose within the biosphere, allowing cultures to form. To me, human ideas and the ability to think abstractly are simply the ability to project ourselves into possibilities.
I reject Platonism a second time when I explore the idea of simulation and write:
“But then Plato might also be right with his idea of a demiurge. And if there really were an all-powerful demiurge, he could make a bush burst into flames without burning, just for fun, while watching the reaction of the poor fellow he was playing this trick on… And that is what makes us a little uneasy about this idea. We might be prepared to believe almost anything. And we think we need to be careful about that. Even though our ability to understand the world around us is limited, we believe, like David Chalmers, that reality exists, that truth matters, and that ‘there are truths about reality.’”
I do not decide this question, because it is impossible to decide. But I do indicate that, personally, I do not consider the hypothesis true. I do not personally believe that information exists on another, entirely different plane. I believe it is an ontological ground, a fundamental component of reality, but not something on a completely distinct or separate plane. That means information could be a condition for the possibility of things existing, integrated into the very structure of reality.
We can now discuss the Good. To risk giving away the conclusion, I define the good as the creation of the new, the singular. So I do not see how you arrive at the claim that I have defined a universal Good, valid for everyone and something to conform to. I write:
“What we call good or bad, just or unjust, is what respectively promotes extropy or entropy. A society should therefore seek to organize itself according to good laws that accord with the Law of the universe and promote the progress of extropy, which comes through the production of the new, the remarkable, the singular. Anything that departs from this is evil.”
The point here is not that the good consists in conforming to the Law, but that society must not obstruct the individual who creates the new. To give a concrete example, I believe that the degrowth movement, which seeks to impose a reduction in energy consumption, is trying to institute a law that opposes the Law of the universe. In doing so, it obstructs the individual’s potential to produce the singular, and therefore their ability to do good, as I understand it.
I did not understand what you meant by Platonism, but I think it comes from this sentence: “The extropic production of the new, of the singular in reality, is to be sought beyond the sensible world, in the possible.” However, I am not talking here about a world of Forms. I am talking simply about the possibilities of a dynamic being. I am saying that the new and the singular are to be sought among improbable possibilities. For example, when Musk builds a rocket capable of returning to the ground against all probability, that is one such possibility.
For me, the good is always singular, and it has to be created. I also write:
“If extropy is a local reduction of entropy, then Evil is the rule of the universe. Good, as a reduction of Evil, is the exception. Good is a singularity. […] The fundamental rule guiding this process is invariable: it means identifying entropy in order to promote extropy.”
When I speak of the absolute Good, I mean that its definition can be stated invariantly, but once we have said that, we have not said very much. All I know is that good is a reduction of entropy, but I do not know what form that should take locally, across different perspectives.
Your account of my conception of the good therefore runs counter to what I am saying. To conform to the universal rule of the universe would be to conform to evil. I obviously argue that, on the contrary, we must generate good locally.
But good is not limited to the individual. Let’s examine this. From a perspectivist point of view, one might conclude that the good is whatever is good for me, whatever reduces my entropy or, in Nietzschean terms, increases my power. That is more or less Nietzsche’s conclusion. I disagree, because my perspective, which I base on cybernetics, allows me to understand the world as an entanglement of systems. If I take actions that reduce my entropy at the cost of disordering the larger system, have I done good? If I deliberately lie in politics to enrich myself at the cost of my people’s ethnic replacement, while securing the financial means to avoid the chaos I am creating and thus increasing my power, have I done good? Should we simply disregard the good altogether?
One might say that in the end we only ever want what is good for ourselves, because destroying the environment that sustains our power will eventually backfire on us, and that when we profess to care about society’s good, we are always seeking our own. I think this approach has some merit, but it is possible to enjoy the benefits of bad policies until the day you die. History is full of examples, and we need not look far.
This is obviously not a good way to act, in my view. Even Heidegger would agree that Dasein is the product of a world that precedes it and in which it takes its place. So I think we have to understand the good through the world: through what lies outside us, through the systems in which we participate. We begin with ourselves, then move outward in concentric circles, until we reach the world, whatever that may mean. I want what is good for me, but I also want what is good for my family, then for my nation, and so on.
Would the Good, then, be universal love, as the Christians imagine? I don’t think so. I do not define the Good as love, but before I discuss what I consider good, I need to discuss the universal. I do not begin with the universal and work toward the particular. Wanting the good is necessarily conflictual and leads either to a balance or to conflict.
If what is good for me is not good for my family, I will seek a balance. I won’t buy myself a new iPhone if that means I can’t clothe my children, but I will pay for a doctor’s appointment for myself instead of buying them a new T-shirt. Of course, that is an easy example, because loving one’s children is self-evident.
Imagine a simplified model in which I belong to systems that start with me, then extend to my family, my city, my nation, my civilization, the biosphere, the solar system, the Milky Way, and the universe, whose parts mark the limits of the world I can know. It is obvious that this involves many entities that might come into conflict. What consideration should I have for a Pakistani with whom I share the biosphere, but who does not belong to my civilization, much less my family? I don’t think I owe him any particular consideration. I will not go looking for a fight on his home ground, but if he comes to mine and makes things conflictual, there is no balance to seek either. The rule is non-aggression wherever possible, but that does not mean rejecting violence.
Still, good cannot be reduced to non-aggression. It does not seem to me that someone has done good simply by spending their life refraining from aggression. To understand what is good, I think we have to begin, once again, with the statistical nature of entropy. Maximum entropy is statistically the most probable state, but it is not a good state. A good, extropic state is, on the contrary, statistically improbable. It is a singularity.
Evolution regularly produces these kinds of singularities. The opposable thumb, for example, is a singularity resulting from an improbable genetic mutation. It gives its possessor greater capacity for action, and therefore a wider range of ways to express that singularity. It can climb trees more easily, allowing it to find more food and see farther, for example. But it can also pick up a stick and bash a fellow creature’s head in to get more food. It can enjoy bananas high in its tree while its peers starve below. Perhaps its peers can band together and gut it. Are any of these actions good or evil?
I would say that these actions are bad, because that is my perspective. But for entities without language, they are neither one nor the other. Good cannot be separated from the knowledge of good and evil, just as entropy cannot be separated from the knowledge of entropy. I believe that the expression of a singularity is fundamentally good. Expressing it for oneself first is perfectly good. But using it at the group’s expense, or treating the group with contempt, does not seem entirely good to me. When a group reacts against the expression of a singularity out of resentment, that is fundamentally evil, however, because it destroys an extropic improbability. Still, as I say, this is my point of view. It depends on the meaning I assign to things, and that is precisely the nature of entropy.
