Wisdom vs AI
The future of human expertise
How can we offer value to the world as humans in the Age of the Machine? Surely, fostering what is uniquely human, as long as we can identify it, would be the best strategy going forward.
It’s easy to argue that mere technical expertise will be a necessary but insufficient criterion to qualify as an expert human being a world of ubiquitous algorithmic processing. Repetitive, sequential and unimaginative tasks will be done by intelligent machines with an exponentially greater accuracy and efficiency. This will, it seems, make a tremendous evolutionary demand on humans to radically develop their cognitive faculties to make it through, similarly to how it was in the previous cases of civilisational collapse.
Wisdom as the 21st century expertise
Over the past three years we have seen a global failure on the part of the expert class in their attempt to manage a tsunami of compounding crises. The overwhelming complexity of global issues has revealed systemic cracks in our culture, values and institutions.
Experts of the new paradigm will need the kind of competence that has the power to transcend the infinitely superior computing power of Artificial Intelligence. It is, I believe, a fundamental criterion which can help us retain agency as a unique biological species with its own history, consciousness and future aspirations. Below, I endorse Daniel Schmachtenberger’s view that wisdom, as an embodied form of metacognition, is non-algorithmic and thereofore uniquely human as it relies on cognitive faculties qualitatively different from those of AI, despite AI’s computational superiority over us.
Carving of the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom—Thoth
What is wisdom?
In his lecture series, Awakening From the Meaning Crisis John Varvaeke, a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, defines wisdom as follows:
Wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies; an ecology of styles that dynamically—and that means reciprocally, in a reciprocal fashion—constrain and optimize each other, such that there is an overall optimization, enhancement of relevance realization. Relevance realization within inference, within insight and intuition, the connection to implicit processing, internalization, understanding, gnosis, transformation and aspiration. Wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies and cognitive styles that dynamically enhance relevance realization in inference, insight and intuition, internalization, understanding, and gnosis, transformation, and aspiration.
Wisdom is thus a self-transcending faculty of human rationality whose power stems from fostering the conditions for insight. Insight is a metacognitive event, an “aha!” moment when our entire framing of a given problem becomes reset. In this moment of relevance realisation, as Varvaeke calls it, we are struck with a new way of seeing the world as we realise that what we thought to be important has changed—we see the world in a new light. In this sense, insight as a mental event that is constitutive of wisdom involves overwriting of our perspectives on our own thinking, perceptions and former evaluations. Thus, in addition to information processing, wisdom employs new ways of attending to the world—attention economy is a key element in the process of developing wisdom.
In the referenced lecture Varvake explores the evolution of human cognition and the origins of wisdom, starting from shamanic traditions. He finds that shamans and sages throughout history intentionally practised embodied psychotechnologies to disrupt their attention systems to enhance their capacity for insight: sleep deprivation, fasting, sexual abstinence, social isolation, the use of psychedelics and so on. The role of these psychoactive practices is to “clear” the shaman’s perceptual filters and gain a fresh perspective on the world. On this view, wisdom seems to be the uniquely human quality which is inextricably bound to human agency, intentionality, embodiment, and a myriad of evolutionary biochemical processes that regulate the neuro-physiological conditions of our cognitive function.
The three ways of knowing
In their 2013 paper, Relevance, Meaning and Cognitive Science of Wisdom, Varvaeke and Ferraro propose that the development of wisdom requires synthesis of four modes of knowing (propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory). As far as my understanding goes, Varvaeke managed to successfully defend three of them:
Propositional knowing: ‘knowing that’—inference from facts, e.g. “I know that I’m typing this.”
Procedural knowing: ‘knowing how’—intuitive, meditative, the mode of attending to any given object of experience, i.e. choosing which information to focus on and which to ignore.
Perspectival knowing: ‘putting oneself in a wise person’s shoes’—internalising another perspective to counter cognitive bias and facilitate a dialogical process of synthesising the other ways of knowing, e.g. “What would a wise person think/say/do?”.
Such a self-regulatory ecosystem of psychotechnologies which maintain systemic coherence by keeping checks and balances on each other creates a transmodal, transcontextual, transperspectival meta-epistemic cognitive apparatus which facilitates wisdom. Understood in this way, wisdom is a cognitive function superior to intelligence (the capacity to learn) and rationality (self-transcending intelligence)—so in Varvaeke and Ferraro’s model, wisdom is the uppermost tier of metacognitive reasoning as self-transcending rationality. The mutually reinforcing, self-correcting dynamic of the three ways of knowing provides the individual with a systematic strategy of shifting the lens of attention so as to rectify cognitive bias. Therefore, in order for wisdom to emerge as a non-linear faculty of optimised information processing, attention economy and insight, one needs the mutually self-correcting ecosystem of the three ways of knowing which have the power to counter bias—something that none of the three ways can do on their own.
Beyond binary: self-transcendence
This self-transcending power of wisdom, as I understand it, differs significantly from the purely inferential algorithmic protocols whose binary code is limited to simulating the polarising logic of either/or thinking. Such protocols, as we know, cannot handle some of the most existential dimensions of human experience—like paradox, metaphor or dialectic.
When the context of a problem transcends AI’s disembodied (trained on text alone!) binary logic, the machine relapses into a combinatorial explosion where its immense computing power proves qualitatively insufficient to make sense of ambiguity, like in the case below where ChatGPT fails to meaningfully evaluate its own capacity for sentience. Such ambiguity can be embraced by humans, however, by applying diffent ways of knowing with their respective ways of attenting to embodied experience of both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli—holding multiple, often contradictory, interpretations together in a dynamic process of divergent meaning-making.
Human capacity for embracing paradox and contradiction creatively, imaginatively and with a retained sense of awe for the mystery of life seems to be a sensibility that is by definition beyond what any intelligent machine could attain. The argument boils down to the difference in kind between the non-linear embodied cognition of the human being and the undead sequential automatism of machine processing.
Therefore, to foster wisdom as a transformational metacognitive process, as I understand it, is to mindfully attend to the way in which we think and live, so that the autopoetic qualities of human experience can reveal to us the non-computational dimensions of our being in the world. This is how we make meaning, develop intrinsic values and motivations, learn to relate to one another and pursue our genuine interests. Wise leaders of tomorrow must know how to transcend the narrow-minded logic of utility, embrace the irreduciblility of paradox, harness the indeterminacy of implicit meaning in metaphor, and transcend binary thinking through the synthesis of lower-dimensional polarities at a higher order of awareness (Hegel’s Aufhebung).