The Third Abstraction
January 28, 2016
(cw: metaphysics)
Without abstraction, there is only one truth: something exists. I suppose it’s better than nothing.
The first abstraction creates the universe. Colors, shapes, tastes, sounds, hot, cold, soft, hard, jabs of pain, jolts of pleasure, language, “I”—all of these are maps of the territory, convenient patterns that we use to operate in our illusory playgrounds. Insert here: Ship of Theseus, “What if my green doesn’t look like your green?” “What if everyone else is a creation of the Matrix?”, “If a dog wore pants, would he wear them like this or like this?“, and other sophomoric philosophy queries, but sophomoric only because we’ve all agreed that they are inherently unanswerable, so, hey, we’re all in this videogame together.
Meditation lets us live in the first abstraction. Sights and sounds appear: we note them and move on. We feel pain and pleasure, but since neither is real, neither is worthy of desire. In moments of true transcendence, perhaps meditation allows one to dispense with abstraction altogether, to just be.
But no conscious being is capable of lifelong meditation. We are animals. We need to eat. If you do not eat, your guts will hurt you. If you willfully ignore your hurt because you want to continue suffering, you are choosing this. You are trying to maximize some value. You are following the second abstraction. Please turn in your mindfulness card on the way out the door.
The second abstraction is biologically wired: comfort is better than discomfort, pleasure is better than pain. Certain of the first abstraction’s sensations are likely to bring pleasure: we learn to seek out those sensations and the sensations that cause them. With time, these causative sensations become the new goal. This leads to complex algorithms: “I prefer X over Y. When X appears, I will do A and B to get it, unless C.” Everything you have ever done, you did because you wanted to do it, you wanted to do it because of your value system, and your value system was a result of the second abstraction.
The first abstraction creates the universe.
The second abstraction gives us choice between the sensations offered by the first abstraction.
The third abstraction lets us choose between the value systems created by the second abstraction.
In the Pleistocene, an individual was born into a tribe with a shared set of values. There were slight differences between tribe members, but anyone too far out risked ostracization. No Neanderthal ever had moral angst about whether to go vegan. Even post-agriculture, cultural value systems were separated by geography, xenophobia, and illiteracy. But now information is everywhere_—_we are more trope savvy than ever before—and social liberalism has given us the freedom to pick between value systems, i.e., to live in the third abstraction.
This freedom of meta is not inherently harmful. The third abstraction is anti-dogma, and it has helped us to escape arranged marriage, human sacrifice, and the other missense mutations of memetic evolution. But it also leads to emptiness: once you turn cheat codes on, the game stops being fun. Because you can edit your value system after any decision, you will never fail. “Get a job? And support the capitalist system of wage slavery?” “I may have lost, but that wasn’t even my final form.” Because you can make microadjustments to your moral compass, you will never feel guilt. “I know that’s usually bad, but this time it was different.” “Some people may disapprove, but according to my moral system…” Since all paths are equal, you will lose all ambition: you could try to achieve X, but it’s far easier to pick a worldview where X isn’t important. For the same reason you lost guilt, you will lose the joy of compassion (“Does being nice even matter?”), and this will leave you totally and intractably alone. Your only wish will be to convince people that your customized value system makes perfect sense: if they were in your shoes, they’d see the world the same way. “Given the circumstances, I did everything right.” You will tell yourself this, over and over, but you won’t believe it, so you’ll ask others to affirm you, but even when they do the self-esteem boost won’t stick—maybe you fooled them, maybe the thing they’re praising you for doesn’t really count. You will lose the ability to want anything except the feeling of wanting.
The first abstraction is close to Buddhism.
The second abstraction includes all the stories, religions, and How To Live algorithms ever created.
The third abstraction is synonymous with narcissism.
The Last Psychiatrist, the final boss of the internet, has written extensively about narcissism. He states:
Narcissism has been on a steady rise since the end of WWII and went parabolic in the 1980s; all social policies have to be understood in the context of that psychology, that culture. (Source)
It’s a simple thesis and no one wants to hear it: hipsters may lack drive, but the world they live in wasn’t set up by them, it was set up by their parents, i.e. the Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History Of The World, the ones who magnified the importance and cost of college without having any idea of what should be its purpose, let alone its content. (Source)
Which raises the question: if we are narcissists because of our parents, from what murky depths did their narcissism emerge?
Hint: television became a popular consumer product just after World War II.
Narcissism is not a problem of our parents’ generation or our own. It is a problem of all future generations, and it would arise de novo in them even without our influence. Narcissism is the logical next step in a series of epistemological abstractions. It is built into the way we respond to choice.
It is inevitable. The question is what to do next.