Null Rationalism

post by kilgoar (william-walshe) · 2025-04-05T03:26:06.034Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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What if the map were equivalent to the territory? Jorge Luis Borges posed this question in his famous shortform, "On Exactitude in Science."

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. 

Translation by Andrew Hurley

To a person of last century, a map of such size and detail is of course comical, a folly of Humanist pretension. The correct purpose of science is in this view not exactitude, but rather reduction. 

This practical and altogether wise-sounding point of view is entirely conventional, but it is not one that will hold for much longer. The scientific community is glutted with overabundance. Paper mills are cranking out low quality studies to justify grant money while fundamental theories stagnate in ever less useful experimental searches for exactitude. Even more problematic for Science is that its very reason for existence, reduction, is no longer necessary or useful. Even our most elegant math and careful experimentation will fail to design a self-driving car, much less a theory of everything. But, given enough data, a byzantine machine learning complex can indeed write programs, identify photographs, create photographs, and display many other disturbing capabilities. Occam warned us that God need not play by our rules, and it is high time his razor cuts itself free. The virtue of elegant reduction has already passed, it is a relic, and the future is maximalist in the extreme, wanting only data and compute, technology without theory. Science has already become obsolete. 

The great Rationalist hero, Gosseyn, understands and accepts the very limits of reason and is thus unbound by them. His heroism is found in an invented science fictional manner of thinking, Non-Aristotelianism, but for the most part he is an example of the very conventional intellectual humility first championed by Socrates and worked out logically in Husserl's reduction. But I am past all that, it can be dismissed outright. Reasoned thinking is no longer practical, it serves little purpose other than entertaining ourselves with puzzles and examples of our own cleverness. We already train machine learning models which are themselves practically irreducible, sufficiently advanced to pass as magic, solving many problems with methods humans cannot even possibly conceptualize.^[1] It is as if Rationalists are staging a prison break by sneaking a cake in and filing away at the steel bars while the front gates are wide open for Null Rationalists to exit.

It is of course mortifying to have one's culture so turned over after millennia of torpor, and indeed the uncertainty about the near future cannot be overstated. I advise readers to avoid coping by regression and instead consult with the many other analogous moments of historic terror, following to the example of such heroes as Sta-Hi Mooney or Tyrone Slothrop. Where we are heading, a playful attitude and animal instincts will be worth much more than poor imitations of machinery. Humanity can only become obsoleted by machine learning if we mistake ourselves for computers.

1. ^{^}

   To indulge the cosmic extrapolation, the convergence of maps and their territories through the production of ever more complex machine learning models may imply a reverse-causality creation myth. This is distinct from "holographic" or "simulation" cosmology because we no longer make a strong distinction between map and territory.

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