Copernican Revolutions

 A friend was saying to me the other day that AI appears destined to create another "Copernican Revolution." 

He wasn't saying this in the sense that it would be a scientific breakthrough. Rather, he had in mind the sense of psychological homelessness and estrangement it would produce. 

Recall that before Copernicus, Galileo, and the rest dethroned the Earth from the center of the universe—our cosmos seemed like a cozy, womb-like environment build to humankind's needs and specifications. 

The medieval religion of Dante—as George Santayana observes in his book on the Three Philosophical Poets—pictured the universe as a house for men's souls that was built entirely with their needs in mind—with a heaven above to give the poet his eternal felicity, and a hell beneath his feet to eternally punish his enemies. 

The philosophy of ancient times, Santayana adds, served to lend credence to this "egotistic and anthropocentric" view of the cosmos. Aristotle's doctrine of "final causes" assumed that everything that occurred must have some beneficial purpose in mind, toward which it tended, and which ultimately served humanity's good. 

As an extreme example, Santayana cites Plato's belief that the place of the intestines in the body could be explained by the need to study philosophy. Since mankind existed, ultimately,, to contemplate philosophy—this being his ultimate and final end—then everything about his somatic organization must likewise exist to serve this end. 

But one could hardly concentrate on one's studies for long if one was forever having to get up and use the toilet. And so—the intestines serve their purpose of prolonging the process of digestion sufficiently to give human beings time to read. 

Would that it were so!

It was in many ways a pleasanter universe to inhabit, surely—so long as one assumed that one was Beatrice-bound, rather than being one of the souls eternally doomed to Dante's inferno (but who in that time assumed otherwise?)

It was only the atomists who first started to question whether the universe was really for man instead of man for the universe. Santayana quotes a line from Lucretius: "Nothing [...] arises in the body in order that we may use it, but what arises brings forth its use." 

He calls this observation "that discarding of final causes on which all progress in science depends." 

Bertrand Russell would agree. In his book on The Impact of Science in Society, he argues that the foundation of the scientific worldview came with the overthrow of Aristotle's "final causes." 

"[I]n science," he writes, "it is the past that determines the future, not the future the past." Here, he agrees with Lucretius: we do not have large intestines so as to give us time for philosophy; but rather, we have time for philosophy because of the quirk of fate that our digestion takes a long while. 

One can readily understand why such a transformation in worldviews might be wounding to the ego. The universe was no longer designed with our needs in mind. 

As Santayana describes Dante's philosophy, if we read it literally: it "begins by assuring us that everything is obviously created to serve our needs; it then maintains that everything serves our ideals; and in the end, it reveals that everything serves our blind hatreds and superstitious qualms." 

As Bertrand Russell likewise puts it: for Dante, "the universe is tidy and small." The poet "visits all the spheres in the course of twenty-four hours. Everything is contrived in relation to man [...] the whole thing is like a child's doll's house, with people as the dolls." 

The scientific revolution—as we all know; and as charted out in books like Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers—overthrew this doll's house conception of the universe. 

The cosmos was no longer a snug little place where our every need was anticipated by a beneficent providence, and where every occurrence was governed with a "final cause" or purpose in mind that served to advance our welfare. 

The indifferent universe of Lucretius, with its ceaseless alternation of life and death, won out. 

But still—humankind had some consolation. Maybe we were no longer the literal spatial center of the universe, we said. But still—in a sense—we remained the most important thing in the universe. 

After all, we were—to the best of our knowledge—still the only conscious life in the universe. Even if we might not be sitting at its center; even if the heavens did not revolve around us, but we through the heavens—nonetheless, we were still the only place where matter had grown aware of itself.

Here's where Copernican Revolution 2.0 comes in. 

Because, after all—this is precisely the complacent belief about ourselves that AI is about to challenge. 

All at once—as my friend Seanan pointed out—we are no longer the only form of intelligence or quasi-consciousness with which we have to interact. 

As Noah Smith put it in a Substack post earlier this week: "You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth."

To my friend's point: we are therefore destined for a disillusioning experience on a par with the generations that went through the Scientific Revolution. 

We are set to experience yet another blow to our "egotistic and anthropocentric" conception of the universe. 

Is there something good about this, as well as disenchanting? 

After all, I don't really want to live in Dante's universe. For one thing, I have every reason to suspect I would not end up in the higher spheres, but rather, would be one of those whom, for the medieval theologians, "the whole universe, with insane intensity, shall taboo [...] for ever," as Santayana puts it. 

For another, the universe ought to exist for something other than the service of our petty egotisms and vengeances. 

Dante's universe, after all—assuming that we read it as literally intended, and forget for a moment the more "esoteric" interpretations of doctrine which, Santayana allows, can be glimpsed at times in Dante's poem—comes across as "a great disgrace to human nature."

A cosmos that no longer revolves around us and our needs—one in which we are, to quote Housman, "a stranger and afraid / in a world [we] never made"—may be an alienating and lonely one. 

We may have to accept—with Leopardi—that "Nature in her actions is concerned/ with something else besides our pain or joy." (Galassi trans.) 

But this can teach us humility. After all, this is nothing other than the ancient lesson of tragedy—which the Greek dramatists  did not need any Copernicus to teach them. 

Johan Huizinga writes at one point of "the state of mind produced by the spectacle of tragedy, [...] the purification of soul which springs from having grasped a deeper meaning in things; which creates a grave and new preparedness for acts of duty and the acceptance of fate; which breaks the hybris as it was seen to be broken in the tragedy." 

The dethronement of ourselves from our position as the sole consciousness or intelligence in the universe is a means of breaking our hubris; and thereby of steeling us to labor on in spite of the indifference of our surroundings—like James Thomson's image of Melancholy: 

Baffled and beaten back she works on still,                

    Weary and sick of soul she works the more,

  Sustained by her indomitable will:

    The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,

  And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour[.]