The Metacrisis
(2/n of Synthesis Series) - Worldviews, Consciousness, Exponential Tech and Multipolar traps
N. B. This opening newsletter will be theory-heavy to set the scene for more practical later chapters.
Introduction
The ‘metacrisis’ is a lens that helps us see beyond what appear to be unconnected global issues and into the shared internal and external structures that give rise to them.
In essence, it’s an attempt to identify generalisable patterns across societal problems.
There are many definitions of the metacrisis, and many ‘flavours’ of it. For the purposes of this article, I’ll look at four different perspectives. I’ll split these into interior (worldviews, consciousness) and exterior (exponential tech, incentives) arguments.
Just as a fish doesn’t know it’s in water, many of us fail to realise we’re operating within implicit paradigms. The metacrisis frame offers us a chance to step outside the water and see what we’re actually swimming in. To look upstream. Not on causes, but on causes of causes.
If we can make these implicit factors ‘objects’ in our minds, rather than us being ‘subject’ to them (h/t Robert Kegan), we might actually have agency over them. But so long as they remain hidden, there’s no capacity for agency, so we’ll keep bumbling along thinking we’ve solved major problems when in reality we’ve just addressed the symptoms.
This way of thinking - of making explicit the common denominators across crises - is not just an intellectual pursuit with no potential for application. For example, though medicine still seeks to distinguish between categories of illness, newer forms of medical thought like salugenesis are discovering the similarities between diseases, and making medical breakthroughs as a result.
Shifting from trying to tackle an endless array of issues to identifying a limited set of fundamental issues, from which multiple solutions can be derived, is the type of thinking required for the future. There are unprecedented risks we must prepare for, and the metacrisis frame informs us on which of these fundamental issues we should be focusing to mitigate said risks.
Interior
Worldviews
Consciousness and human development
Exterior
Exponential technology and rivalrous games
Misaligned incentive structures
Interior
Worldviews
Summary
> How we see the world determines how we act within it
> Modern humans see the world in very specific ways, including holding the upstream belief that systems can be best understood by being broken down into smaller parts (reductionism)
> This understanding has a philosophical basis, and probably a neurological one, but is a limited mode of knowing and not representative of how life functions
> By expanding our view from reductionism towards systems thinking and in turn towards complexity thinking, our maps of the world get closer to the territory they’re meant to represent
> Updating the prevailing thought paradigm (i.e. more geared towards what is true) is a prerequisite for solving societal issues
> Worldview shifts have significant implications for civilisation, but take a long time to manifest e.g. the Enlightenment of 17th century, Axial age, quantum physics etc
Most of us operate within an implicit mental paradigm consisting of various assumptions about how reality works. We assume that the fundamental constituent of the cosmos is matter (materialism), consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, the speed of light is constant, and that reality can be best understood by breaking it down into its smaller parts (reductionism). For the purposes of the metacrisis, I’ll explore reductionism and its impact on problems and how we see the world. Deeper metaphysical shifts are forthcoming (both literally and in this series), though out-with the scope of this chapter.
Reductionism vs Complexity
One of the primary features of the modern thought paradigm is the assumption that systems can be best understood by breaking them down into their constituent parts. We see this mode of thinking in every domain of knowledge - from health to economics, physics to medicine.
This has brought humanity tremendous progress in the realms of science and technology. However one look at complex systems science demonstrates the incompleteness of this view. Organic, complex systems are not the same as complicated, man-made ones.
By breaking things apart, we can often see ‘how’ they work. Reductionism however rests on the assumption that the parts alone determine the whole and that we will one day understand the complexity of life by gaining sufficient knowledge of the parts that constitute it. Figure out what every gene does, we’ll understand the body. Figure out what every neuron does, we’ll understand the mind.
Many of our domains of knowledge are implicitly reductionistic. Reductionism is the meta-view of the modern world in the same way an animistic view was for the indigenous. It’s a worldview - not absolute truth, and not up-to-date with our latest understanding of how natural systems operate. Advances in complexity science suggest systems rarely behave in bottoms-up ways, and they can’t be fully understood by breaking them down into their components. Instead, natural systems correspond to different laws and features, like emergence and nonlinearity, than man-made ones, so reductionism can only give a partial insight into their function.
Our leaders, educators, scholars, strategists are seeing see the world through the tinted glasses of reductionism. Seeing parts, not wholes. Seeing linearity when nonlinearity abounds. Seeking control versus navigating emergence. Assuming constants versus embracing change. Collapsing the distinction between complicated and complex. Thinking that domains of society are separate when they’re actually fundamentally interwoven. And aren’t at all up to speed with what’s now a developed science of complexity. This has profound implications for policymaking.
Left Hemisphere vs Right Hemisphere
Though reductionism has its basis in the deepest recesses of Western philosophy, the psychiatrist and philosopher Iain Mcgilchrist believes our tendency towards reductionism has a neurological basis, namely the over-extension of the left hemisphere of the brain. Although pop psychological theories of hemispheric difference (left brain is analytical/right brain is creative) have been debunked, Mcgilchrist’s work demonstrates that hemispheres are indeed different, though not in the simplistic way we once thought.
Mcgilchrist’s hypothesis looks at different modes of attention and how each hemisphere ‘knows’, seeks truth, and relates to reality in fundamentally different ways. Describing the right hemisphere as the master and the left as its emissary (servant), he believes many of our crises stem from a reversal of these roles, whereby the servant becomes the master. The left hemisphere tends to split the world into parts, sees abstractions as more real than the substrate they are meant to represent (map vs territory) and fails to account for broader context within and between systems. In contrast the right hemisphere views the world contextually, holistically, as it presents itself in the moment, and is comfortable navigating uncertainty.
So, using Mcgilchrist’s frame, one way to conceptualise the metacrisis is a crisis of left hemispheric dominance. In the philosophy of science, this battle ‘between reductionism and holism’ has been ongoing for centuries. But it’s not either/or. It’s both, though for someone like Mcgilchrist, we’re just too over-extended towards relying on the left hemisphere, or reductionist side of the brain.
The metacrisis framing is powerful as in essence it advocates for a third way of seeing, for both the best of reductionism (root cause) and holism (systems thinking). Sometimes we need to narrow in, abstract and manipulate; other times it makes more sense to see complexity and the whole.
Societal revolutions tend to be downstream of radical changes in thought paradigms, results of which take decades, or centuries, to infuse culture. Whether that’s the nihilism of Nietzsche, the relativism of post-modernists in the 1970s or the heliocentric worldview overtaking the geocentric, larger philosophical turnings take time to manifest. Through different ways of thinking about what reality actually is, new structures can take form.
In a world of exponential change, linear projections and planning on the back of them are largely futile. No one knows what the future of AI is going to hold in 2 years, let alone 20. Basic modelling of future outcomes in the 20th century wasn’t nearly as difficult as change was gradual, catastrophic weapons were centralised and tech wasn’t self-improving. Since reductionism relies on its left-hemisphere cousins of predict and control, it becomes less effective as a meta-view in a time of exponential curves all converging and giving rise to uncertain, emergent outcomes. Complexity thinking, on the other hand has at its core an ability to move with change.
We need to take control of, and float with, the future.
Consciousness
Summary
> Eastern wisdom traditions like Buddhism have conducted experiments for >2000 years on the nature of suffering and ways to liberate oneself from it
> Modern science is catching up to the profundity of these insights, proving their existence in neuroscience labs and seeing their real-world empirical benefits
> More recent attempts to support the inner lives of humans have been evident in places like Scandinavia since the 19th century with their focus on human development
> How a society fairs in the presence of any catastrophe depends on not only the type and severity of catastrophes experienced, but also the fragility in underlying socio-cultural structures at the time
> These structures will determine whether the collective response is resilient (i.e. in high trust, high care societies) or maladaptive/collapse-inducing (low trust, low civic responsibility)
> Improving the interior dimensions of society is a necessary condition to increase probability that civilisation does not collapse once one or more of these risks materialises
> Ergo, one way to solve rivalrous game theory dynamics is to mitigate the psychological structures that give rise to them in the first place
I use the term consciousness here to refer to the inner lives of humans. By inner lives I mean both the contents (e.g. thoughts, feelings, emotions) and structures of mind (capacity to hold complexity, developmental stages). I’m also referring here to virtuous and moral behaviour, which I hold to be primarily a consequence of the contents of mind.
The basic proposition here from a metacrisis perspective is that our current civilisation is woefully under-equipped with the necessary mental and emotional capacities to navigate a world of exponential change, with a mental health epidemic, meaning crisis, increased polarisation and deteriorating cognitive capacities for sensemaking already spiralling.
This is in contrast to a healthy civilisation which would orientate towards a reduction in suffering (contents) and an up-levelling of inner capacity for complexity (structure). I’ll expand on this much more thoroughly in later chapters. But for now, it’s enough to say that a world full of trauma, lacking in meaning, operating from tribalism and plagued with poor emotional regulation capacities of its citizens is part of the metacrisis, and that a world of healing unconscious material, advanced towards higher levels of developmental complexity, seeing through the nature of mind, and infused with meaning is probably a good thing for everyone. Not just for the immediate benefits of reducing suffering, but to create a high-trust, more stable culture in the face of the exterior risks outlined below.
Tomas Bjorkman has written extensively about Scandinavia’s Nordic Secret at the turn of the 20th century. Though much economic analysis has been written about the cause of Scandinavia’s relative success as a region, from low levels of political corruption to sound use of natural resources, one relevant proposition is that the education strategy in the region far surpassed other countries, which laid the groundwork for cultural cohesion, enhanced human capital and a new generation able to adapt to a deep societal transition.
Those in higher socioeconomic categories in pre-modern Nordic countries, including policymakers, priests and educators, helped coordinate proactive education strategies in the midst of the deep transition to modernism, and democratised these teachings in the form of Folk education. This strategy targeted all layers of society, not just the elite, with the explicit goal of improving the resilience of citizenry in order to better navigate the transition to modernity they saw coming. Nordic policymakers implemented changes to the education sector that emphasised interventions that encouraged citizens to regulate their emotions, internalise the norms of society, think critically and take individual moral responsibility.
Their goal was to transform the young from the least educated parts of society to become engaged, self-governing citizens with a high degree of autonomy and capacity for mental complexity. Interventions included progressive education legislation, government funded tertiary curricula and the construction of hundreds of ‘inner’ education centres throughout the region. Many of these interventions still exist today, such as government subsidies for Folk schools in which Danish students take one year out of standard studies to work on inner development.
A wise, happy people with a holistic, intergenerational worldview able to navigate higher levels of complexity are far less likely to create myopic institutions and systems with fundamental coordination failures, thus more likely to solve all aspects of the metacrisis. So the orientation towards higher consciousness (contents and structure) is not just a hippy’s utopian dream, but actually has real world import, and historical examples of effectiveness.
Exterior
Exponential Technology and Rivalrous Games
Daniel Schmachtenberger is a social philosopher and founder of the Civilisation Research Institute. I’ve learned more from Daniel about this than any thought leader out there. For this section, I’ll mainly quote and paraphrase from his arguments below, and leave a list of references at the end for further reading and listening. If you’re not already familiar with his work, I’d highly recommend listening to the materials at the end of this chapter.
Summary of Schmachtenberger’s metacrisis argument
“Rivalrous (win-lose) games multiplied by exponential technology self-terminate.”
> Civilisation consists of a variety of game theory dynamics between nation states and between corporations
> Nations are constantly competing at non-kinetic (info/economic) and kinetic (physical) levels of warfare
> At the level of the nation state, incentive structures give rise to perpetual arms races as those with the most advanced technological weaponry tend to dominate geopolitics (e.g. USA post WWII)
> Existential risks (risks that are global, species-ending etc) were previously of natural means (asteroids/volcanoes etc); never man-made
> Exponential technology (i.e. power) has created man-made existential risks
> No country wants a world with exponential destruction capacities but arms races for said capacities nonetheless ensue due to multi-polar trap dynamics
> Exponential technology amplifies the negative consequences of these rivalrous dynamics since exponential tech > exponential power > exponential destructive capacity
> The risks of these dynamics amplify further through the decentralisation of power capacity by distributing hitherto nation-level destructive capacities to non-state actors with access to tech (AI, synthetic bio, drones)
> As time progresses, and technology becomes more powerful and decentralised, the probability that an existential risk occurs given rivalrous dynamics tends towards 1
> Humanity is stuck between a rock and hard place of inevitable power accumulation by nation states, no structure in place to incentivise players to stop pursuing their own self interest, and now has to contend with a non-state level distribution of this power capacity
Exponential Tech and Incentives
Power projected through technology, and rivalrous game theory dynamics, have been a perpetual component of the human condition. Over time, humanity transitioned from using rocks and other natural power projection tools to harnessing more advanced forms of technology: from bows and arrows, to swords and guns, to tanks and rockets. This trend phase-shifted in 1945 with the invention and dropping of the nuclear bomb - technological power went from being more and more consequential at the local level to having the capacity for global, existential destruction.
Though there have been several close calls (see Petrov), exponential, existential power has thus far been limited to a single world event (WWII). Yet with AI and synthetic biology along with autonomous weapons (drones etc), such global, destructive capacities are no longer confined to centralised nation states, making the game theory of mutually-assured destruction no longer an equilibrium.
In other words, humanity can no longer rest on stalemate geopolitical dynamics (or pure luck) to ensure human-made existential risks are mitigated.
Since asymmetric power is being distributed away from state actors towards non-state actors and humans are still playing rivalrous games, a low probability catastrophic event becomes probable over a sufficient time horizon as risk nodes multiply and become distributed. Society must now contend with the possibility that tech like AI, CRISPR and autonomous weapons can and will be used for destructive purposes at scale (e.g. targeting a specific race through a genetically-engineered biological weapon, or powerful AI/AGI systems that optimise for the wrong objective functions, or deep fakes that have disastrous second and third-order social consequences).
We now have personalised, cheap and potentially ubiquitous weapons of mass destruction in conjunction with rivalrous dynamics not limited to nation states.
Multipolar traps
If humanity is aware of these risks, why not coordinate to stop them?
Well, under present incentive structures, we can’t.
Multipolar traps are game theory dynamics that occur when individual agents act rationally in their own self-interest, yet through such actions ultimately cause harm to the group and themselves. A classic example of this is the "tragedy of the commons," wherein farmers overuse land to increase crop yields, which in turn leads to the land becoming barren over time. This happens because each farmer acts based on the rational belief that if they don't maximise their own gain, someone else will, so they might as well act first, even though the consequences of their actions are net negative for them/all over time.
In geopolitics, this dynamic is best elucidated through arms races like the above. In the 20th century, despite a world dominated by nukes or catastrophic synthetic biology being a situation no one wanted, nations felt (/feel) compelled to develop or retain nuclear capabilities, especially if they suspect(ed) rivals of doing the same. This has resulted in a situation where the pursuit of more power and weaponry, while rational at the single country level, has substantially increased risks for the globe.
The drive to amass power is a consequence of an incentive structure where each party acts to enhance their arsenal under the assumption that others are doing the same. And from there there are no good outcomes. Give up playing the game, and rivals gain asymmetric power. Keep playing the game, and the world becomes a ticking time bomb.
At the corporate level, multipolar traps are evident in scenarios ranging from social media companies spreading more and more emotionally aroused and polarising content to increase time spent on site, to companies seeking to maximise shareholder value despite the externalities their production process is causing. In politics, leaders are incentivised to maintain or seek power which often leads to suboptimal and myopic decisions which are bad for the country and yet more likely to get them elected.
Nate Hagens has some good resources on this and calls it the Superorganism - the self-perpetuating systemic dynamics that are no-one’s best interests and yet continue all the same. Liv Boeree has some good pieces too on this and goes with the frame Moloch instead, inspired by this article from Slate Star Codex years ago.
Tying it together
Covid, Ukraine, Israel, climate, mental health, AI, fake news - it’s like we’re playing a game of whac-a-mole whereby as soon as one issue is solved another one takes its place. The metacrisis frame encourages us to ask why these problems are arising in the first place.
The combination of outdated thought paradigms, stunted consciousness development, the nature of exponential tech and multipolar trap dynamics are some of the core factors driving these issues. If we want sustainable solutions and to thread the eye of the needle into a thriving, high-tech civilisation, we should be dedicating significantly more resources into solving these drivers.
The Wisdom Race (merging interior with exterior)
“We have the power of Gods. We need their wisdom too.” Schmachtenberger
We are in the midst of a decoupling between the power humanity holds and our level of collective wisdom to steward it. Power is growing at an exponential rate, wisdom at linear rate at best (and arguably has a negative gradient). I spoke about this publicly a few years ago here.
In summary, we need to find a way to improve the interior state of humanity by updating our thought paradigms to better reflect reality, improve our internal contents and structures of mind, whilst pairing this with more sustainable incentive structures and ways to navigate exponential tech.
One proposition is that rather than seeing these areas as disjunct, we utilise the power of one to affect the other. In other words, combine wisdom itself with exponential tech.
I’ll leave the majority of this argument for future chapters, but to touch on it briefly here - artificial intelligence has to become artificial wisdom. Wisdom is the alignment solution. AI is a form of exponential power, and incentives are such that the race towards AGI and superintelligence can’t be stopped. If we were to integrate deeper modes of knowing, or right hemisphere thinking, into exponential power itself, we’d be able to not only reduce the existential risks associated with AI, but also go a long way towards solving some of the consciousness issues above.
This is one of the core projects I’m working on - more to come soon.
Action
I believe the laying out of these more fundamental structures isn’t just an academic exercise with no action potential, but actually an important part of the process of defining the problem set. If you don’t know the problem you’re actually trying to solve, then you’re not going to find solutions that are fully adequate for the task. Moreover, being specific about what we don’t want, like rivalrous dynamics playing out with exponential tech, and defining what we do want, allows us to orientate towards new technologies, different incentive structures and updated worldviews.
In the case of worldview shifts, when humans discovered the earth was round and not flat, they began to pursue expansion and exploration outwith their homeland without fear of falling off the face of the earth. When we discovered quantum mechanics was a better model of reality than relativity for subatomic particles, we were able to create new technology on the back of it. We shifted our worldview, which in turn shifted what we could do (e.g. quantum computing). But we had to know what worldview we were leaving behind (make it an object) before we could jump shores.
In a similar vein, with the agricultural revolution and the invention of the plough and large-scale food production (tech), different organising incentives emerged - coordination was encouraged over longer time horizons, lifestyles became more static than nomadic, trade proliferated between groups. Tech changed the incentive landscape. Jason Lowery’s book Softwar is a good example of how something like bitcoin (or proof-of-work protocols) could change geopolitical incentive landscapes by incentivising power projection to move from kinetic to non-kinetic realms. Meanwhile AI could enhance supercomputer simulations with the goal of reverse engineering incentive design criteria.
Some ideas for moving forward - country-agnostic:
Ideas
Establish a transnational institute for meta, civilisational level issues upstream of the crises of the day. This would function as a trans and interdisciplinary entity that brings together experts in different fields with Weirdo generalists* and AI simulations to better predict future outcomes and solve deeper coordination problems
Create transdisciplinary departments within national governments harnessing big data and focusing on competencies like complexity science
Use AI-enhanced simulations to play out different incentive contexts for omni—win objective functions. Start with optimal civilisational outcomes in mind and reverse engineer
Train policymakers and young leaders in complex systems science to better see patterns across fields like physics, economics, health (n.b. this would make inter-departmental mobility more fluid as they have a meta-frame they can re-apply)
State level funding for research and application of complexity science to build better forecasts that account for interconnectedness, emergence and nonlinearity in systems
State level funding for neuroscience research to determine how right hemispheric thinking might be stimulated through education and neurotechnologies
Start a Manhattan Project for Consciousness with funding for neuroscience, neurotech, biotech, and the science of consciousness to solve problems of internal suffering (h/t Andres @ QRI for this one)
Fund education years per Scandinavia where young adults spend a year learning meta-skills like emotional resilience, contemplative practices, systems thinking, relational development etc
X prize for the science of wisdom and its application into technology (artificial wisdom)
Resources
Videos/Podcasts
McGilchrist, Schmachtenberger, Vervaeke
- Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis
Schmachtenberger
Reading
The Matter with Things (Ian McGilchrist)
On Complexity (Edgar Morin)
Paradigm of Complexity (Edgar Morin - Paper)
Companies
Qualia Research Institute (Consciousness)
Perspectiva (Metacrisis)
Inner Development Goals (Consciousness)
Consilience Project (Sensemaking/Incentives)
Civilization Research Institute (Metacrisis)
Center for Humane Technology (Exponential Tech)
Santa Fe Institute (Complexity)
Joshua, as someone writing about the Metacrisis myself, your framing of the tension between our exponential technological power and our lagging collective wisdom resonates deeply. I appreciate your suggestion that solving this imbalance requires integrating wisdom into our technology—transforming AI into 'artificial wisdom.' But how might we realistically define, operationalize, or even measure wisdom in technology development?
Additionally, given our entrenched incentive structures that themselves reflect a lack of wisdom, do you think governments or corporations would ever willingly adopt such profound worldview shifts without first experiencing catastrophic failure?