(2018-06-29) Rao Eigenyou Theory

Venkatesh Rao: Eigenyou Theory. software eats you...in a medium-is-the-message way, the digital environment changes you and makes you a different and, as I will argue, more characteristic version of yourself. And less of an interchangeable part.

When you read a book, means and ends are in harmony. There's a wonderful German prefix that helps to tag this sort of thing, eigen-, which means something like "characteristic." You could say that reading is the eigenuse of a book.

Humans are not books of course. We do not have fixed, static eigenuses. But there is something it is like to be each of us uniquely. There is an eigenyou, revealed when software eats you. Why? Because when software eats the environment and makes it programmable, you can project your own reality distortion field onto it, reshaping it to be better suited to you. But this means a "real" inner you has to come into being and manifest itself.

Think of an eigenvalue as a measure along a characteristic dimension (like your height) and an eigenvector as the characteristic direction, like "vertical" for you as a biped.

To have identifiable eigentraits is to be an eigenthing, a thing with a grain. Eigenthings are things with non-trivial, non-interchangeable "identities."

generality of potential capability does not mean we are featureless abstract subjects, or lacking in preferred orientations/temperamental grains. The essential intuition behind eigenvalues and eigenvectors applies to humans too.

As a specific instance of a generalist meatbag computer design, the eigenyou is best defined by a characteristic way of doing things

When both ends and means, rather than just means, are open to selection and design, they must be designed, or rather evolved, together. They are entangled like quantum states. Because you are never just figuring out how to do something, you're also simultaneously figuring out whether to do it at all or do something else instead.

This is why I am generally skeptical of "optimal living" how-to advice, and neither accept, nor dispense it. Either offer entangled how-to/why-to ideas, or nothing. A good source of this kind of inspiration is fiction.

a character in a book or movie is interesting to the degree their motive is strong without being entirely legible through a rational lens.

Notice that the behavior of such characters tends not to be "efficient" in pursuit of the nominal goal.

By contrast genre fiction characters efficiently pursue their nominal goals, at least within a formulaic notion of efficiency, tied to a signal virtue/value like "courage".

A strong character compresses a how+why coupled motivation into an identity

One reason Doctor Who is a better character than James Bond is that both means and ends of behaviors vary very wildly, as evident in the far wider variety of super-adversaries. Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels --- it is a dizzying menagerie compared to interchangeable Bond villains in their lairs. The Doctor deals with all of them with his usual eigenflair.

What happens when your means and ends are not entangled? When structure and function don't evolve together? When you separate the two? You get a disease I call hedonism-prowess syndrome.

Hedonism-prowess syndrome is a compartmentalized way of thinking about your nature in two pieces. A "means" way, (what you're good at, your skills, at which you can exhibit prowess irrespective of goals) and an "ends" way (what you pursue, seen purely a function of your tastes/values)

Money or tribal loyalty often provide the entanglement between the two in psyches broken by hedonism-prowess syndrome

To entangle means and ends within yourself is to create a sort of living quantum aliveness in yourselves

a general purpose entity with approximate universal-computing capabilities is defined by a certain way of doing things, embodied in a context-independent internal entanglement of means and ends that we call "personality."

what does it take for that personality to come out and play?

the key mass-enabling condition is a software-eaten world

George Bernard Shaw famously said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” In a software-eaten world, everyone can be unreasonable at low cost, not just kings and queens.

In fact I'd say you must do so, because prowess-hedonism syndrome is no longer a tenable way of being. All external loci of means-ends entanglement, from economies to objects of tribal loyalty, are now highly unreliable and will betray you. To paraphrase Nick Szabo, trusted third-parties are meaning holes

But there's no how-to recipe for this

Methodological anarchy is your friend.

But there's a couple of things you can avoid

The first trap is the finite game trap. What Clifford Geertz famously called "shallow play" as opposed to "deep play"

In my case, my eigenyou sometimes finds expression through writing, sometimes through other behaviors. And sometimes, it gets obscured by the fogs of inner and outer wars and fails to find expression at all. Like everybody, I go through periods of being lost and found to myself.

Finding your eigenyou is not a "win" state you arrive at once and never leave

And with the withering away of the industrial environment, you no longer need to stay in the boxes others put you in, be they loving family members, evil sociopaths, or apathetic institutions. You can program and project your own reality, define your own game, your eigengame. Even if you're the only one who knows you're playing it.