Skull Wisdom 🧠

Field Notes from the Future | 009

At the beginning of the 2020s we were taken on an unplanned and involuntary journey into the future. I’ve been taking notes. Let’s get equipped.

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Given the ongoing screech that is AI discourse online, I am honestly surprised we have mostly avoided the topic for as long as we have. Granted, we touched on the philosophical implications briefly, but questions around technological progress and artificial intelligence have been so pervasive lately that the issue seems vital to tackle head on. In trying to wrap my head around the practical requirements of living and working in an age in which our artificially intelligent servants will probably continue to proliferate, I have tried as always to force myself past easy defeatism and gloom to identify possible good steps to take. Maybe the robots are coming, but only those who have a cynically materialistic view of the human organism have the luxury of seeing their advent as the dawn of a post-human age. You can’t get rid of us that easily. So what are we good for?

Photo by Anna Hunko on Unsplash

It turns out, human beings are actually the ideal and the only vessels for many fantastically important things. The dichotomy we’ll focus on for this Field Notes is Skull Wisdom vs. Silicon Data. This is the way I was finally able to distill years of hunches and instincts around the question of computer intelligence in a recent hour-and-a-half conversation with a much wiser man of my acquaintance. The distinction is simply this: computational systems excel, indeed are now unmatchable, at storing and returning long strings of complex facts and language. No matter how much math you can perform in your head or how many lines of the Psalms you’ve memorized, a computer connected to the Web can perform at exponentially superhuman levels. But this is only true in the realm of Data, which can be encoded on silicon. What about Wisdom, which can only be held inside human brains?

I. Don’t Settle for Data

Before we stray too far into the Luddite realm (always a danger in our search for the proper futuristic path), let’s remind ourselves of a few important points. Computational systems are a massive gift to human experience, and extend our capabilities and inventiveness in many ways. They enable us to offload immense amounts of certain types of work, freeing us up to explore new frontiers in science, engineering and art. This is true of problems that can be posed to the system as a input to iterate upon, producing a solution. However, not all problems, including the problem of what prompt to feed to the system, are reducible in this way. To risk saying the trite as a follow-up to the elementary, we need to remain aware of our reliance on data to the exclusion of the many other important forms of information and experience that humans can and should engage. The fact that a computer can store a string of information, say [x where x is a number 0 < x < 5] and then store this number in association with another string of information [the film The Truman Show and the user’s personal feelings in regard to it] is a powerful technology. But it would be a mistake to lose our ability to think and reason concerning The Truman Show beyond the fact of our individual datum of “number of stars,” or someone else’s data set in the same regard. Because data is referential, we have to combine it with all of our other sensoria in order to say anything true. Watch yourself for symptoms of hiding behind facts and data to the exclusion of the whole truth.

II. Networks + Experience + Contemplation

Well then what is this Skull Wisdom that I am proscribing as our antidote to a world of vast data libraries trawled by massive AI overseers? Nothing too groundbreaking here, friend. Have you ever thought about the human connections, illogical leaps of knowledge, vast trove of experiences, and personal insights that your mind contains? Almost none of this could be adequately captured in bits alone. And this goes for the technology of writing as well (remember, Technology did not begin with the computational age). Even our ability to write things down loses something in the translation. What esoterica will never be publicly indexed but remains hidden in your mind? This is a key to blazing a trail as a human being in the future. Why attempt to match the speed and sophistication of silicon wafers when you can achieve feats of unintuitive reasoning and creative non sequitur that the computer simply cannot duplicate? To tell you that the Rochester Club (don’t look it up, you won’t find it) was a tiny formalized and exclusive gathering space for the blue-blooded moneymen of upstate New York until the 1970s is a piece of lived experience that I only have access to through a personal relationship. Research through stored data might never have yielded this particular gem, itself only precious to me because of the connection it inhabits in my Skull Wisdom between a past long gone and a loved one still present.

The metaknowledge linking the facts and people you know, the ability to connect people’s needs with other people. The teeming underworld of not-quite-useful trivia and discarded memories waiting to be plumbed. The mysteries of an hour spent thinking quietly, watching an expanding foam of unrelated forgotten knowledge bind itself together. Knowing without reference to an external source who you could contact on three different continents to solve a unique problem. These things are ephemeral treasures that gain immense value by their irreplicable qualities. It is the spaces between the facts that give them meaning.

III. Refine Your Human Potential

It bears repeating that I am far from an enemy of note taking recorded knowledge, or historical research. I simply want to point out that we ought to place extra emphasis on a type of understanding that seems increasingly rare in our time. Skull Wisdom has the potential to be a definingly valuable resource in the coming century, and we would be prudent to become practitioners in its gathering and storage. Prize environments conducive to trepanning your way deep into the Skull Wisdom of those you most love and admire. Pay extra attention to your mind’s matrix of experiences, and do your best to impart the most valuable to someone else who can benefit from them. Do not assume that physical storage can take the part of spiritual discernment. Honor memory, and hone your memories. Let the silicon compress further libraries of data into infinitely dense repositories of encyclopedias and atlases. This is exactly what such things exist to do. Become a human nexus, a wise web uniting an impossibly strange collection of truths and moments. And then tell your stories to those that need them.

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So you see, that’s why I’m not so frightened of the deep dark future that AI and machine learning and neural networks will unleash. The printed codex profoundly changed human relationships to information, and yet we continued to need the wise and holy among us to teach us how to live and seek God. The moveable type press destabilized entire governmental structures and contributed to mass unrest on an entire continent, and yet we were unable to continue forward without teachers to explain which books to read. The internet has connected humanity at a new and profound scale, and yet two hours conversation on a voice line can unlock more secrets and mysteries than months trawling the depths of the network. History keeps going, as long as we have the discipline to remain stubbornly as we were created to be, and remember tenaciously

I’ll see you in the Future.

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Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new. ~ Frank Herbert, Dune

Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, Awake; to a silent stone, Arise! Can this teach? Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in it. ~ Habakkuk 2:19

But it is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand. ~ Job 32:8