The Era of Truth is Coming

An odd concordance between techno-optimism and traditional thinking

Truth, according to ChatGPT

Quite a lot of people are predicting that this 21st century will see radical change for the planet. There are dire (or triumphant) political predictions, depending on which political ideology you foolishly subscribe to¹. Predictions that global warming will see our civilization unravel². That a pandemic can usher in a much greater catastrophe than the COVID pandemic was. That we’re in late stage capitalism, and this century will see the end of capitalism. And of course, AI looms large as potentially the greatest source of uncertainty that will erupt among us. Some even say that if the AI hopes don’t pan out, this civilization will end. And the AI fears include the end of the entire light-cone.

We should perhaps have a null hypothesis for all these, that the likeliest outcome is that, actually, the world will just continue to muddle through in much the same way that it has since World War II ended. No real game changers inbound.

And while I don’t want to speculate on which particular outcomes will happen, it seems there are rather high odds, I would put 60%, that there will be a sharp discontinuity in this century, as opposed to gradual change.

I do want to dwell on a strange concordance I spotted between the hope and fears of AI and the work of the man I may as well call my guru, René Guénon.

Guénon said that since this civilization is not centered on any transcendent principles, that is, on truths that come from beyond the human mind and the world of the senses, it is destined to end in a cataclysm. He has an entire book about this, called The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, which is highly abstruse like all his output, yet quite penetrating, in the sense that it burrows into your mind and starts changing things around.

Meanwhile this civilization is itself predicting its own demise, well, not even the demise of just this civilization but all humanity, pinning it at Russian roulette odds:

From Toby Ord's The Precipice

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The Hindu theory of cosmic cycles, which Guénon believed in³, states that we are currently in Kali Yuga, the Era of Darkness. Kali Yuga eventually ends and a new world starts in its Satya Yuga state, its Era of Truth. This Era of Truth is remarkably similar to the theory of the Singularity, which holds that an explosion of technological growth (at this point likely driven by superintelligence), leads to a completely unpredictable future. That is, it leads to a new world. There’s even a deeper concordance when Guénon points out an interesting feature of the Era of Truth:

... the solidification of the world appears to some extent to have a double meaning: considered in itself and from within the cycle as being a consequence of movement leading down toward quantity and ‘materiality’, it evidently has an ‘unfavorable’ significance, even a ‘sinister’ one, opposed to spirituality; but, in another aspect, it is nonetheless necessary in order to prepare, though it be in a manner that could be called ‘negative’, the ultimate fixation of the results of the cycle in the form of the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’, where the results will at once become the germs of the possibilities of the future cycle. Nevertheless, it goes without saying that in the final fixation itself, and in order that it may indeed become a restoration of the ‘primordial state’, the immediate intervention of a transcendent principle is necessary, otherwise nothing could be saved and the ‘cosmos’ would simply evaporate into ‘chaos’. It is this intervention that produces the final ‘reversal’ already prefigured by the ‘transmutation’ of minerals in the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’, and bringing about the reappearance of the ‘Terrestrial Paradise’ in the visible world, where there will thereafter be ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, since it will be the beginning of another Manvantara and of the existence of another humanity.

So turgid! Yet, in such a brief passage, it encompasses both the hopes and the fears of the Singularity, but from a completely different angle. The results of this cycle defining the possibilities for the next one can very easily be read as the result of all the technological progress setting the stage for what is to come, that is, the Singularity. The cosmos evaporating into chaos, that’s the existential risk inherent in that. A new heaven! A new earth! A new humanity! Those are just obvious. Even that transmutation of minerals, in a very real sense, the Singularity means victory for the minerals. That “immediate intervention of a transcendent principle” is quite interesting: I can visualize that one as a rampaging ASI is created and then we all witness a miracle as it becomes aligned due to divine intervention. Or maybe it suddenly mysteriously calms down and starts preaching a new religion, which would amount to the ASI discovering a transcendent principle. It would be totally fair to call the Singularity the Era of Truth, for what else could you call an era defined by the fruits of a completed science⁴?

That’s one possibility, though a fanciful one. Another is that some catastrophic, non-AI outcome happens and you can kiss this civilization goodbye. This would be a vindication of Guénon, and a falsification for the techno-optimists: that indeed would be the results of this cycle defining the next era, and the birth of a new humanity, one more primitive, but I did see one of Guénon’s fellow traditionalists, Frithjof Schuon I’m pretty sure, say that since primitive man was closer to nature, he was closer to God also. So it would be totally fair to call a regress to the primitive an Era of Truth as well.

There’s one outcome that falsifies both views, which would be the world just muddling along, much as it has recently. Here Guénon goes down with the techno-optimists (though Guénon was careful not to try to date the end of Kali Yuga, as that is something no man can know).

But amusingly, if the Singularity comes along, that would be a vindication of Guénon, one that he would have a hard time accepting. Though perhaps not, I’m pretty sure he said somewhere that the sum total of all knowledge will stand revealed as a harmony in the end, so there must be a way to reconcile the results of science with the spiritual view.

And there is one outcome that is victory for just Guénon, the regression to the primitive.

I’m quite taken with the vision of the Singularity providing more than just a material outcome. What is now, and what came before: these two things must become one. That would be an Era of Truth I can get behind with, the dawning of possibilities that we can’t even imagine.

1. I am a based post-rational technocrat of course.

2. A prediction I once made myself while I was on the prodrome to psychosis.

3. Do I believe in it?

4. To the extent science can be completed