A Knife Made Of Butter

Warning: Bitter truth that may ruin your fantasies forever.

Human beings are predictable and helpless

Every action of human beings can be explained via evolution and psychology. Every action. And we come out as very predictable, given the way we have evolved.

All our good and bad traits can be explained easily … even the most complicated man or woman can be understood on this basis.

We are explainable, our systems are explainable, our ethics and morals are tied to our evolution and explainable, our loftier and baser instincts are explainable, why our systems break down despite our aspirations is easily explainable. There is nothing unique about us. All the emotional drama in our lives is chemicals in our brains.

Despite knowing and being aware of our predictability as individuals and as a species, none of us can completely control another person or a group towards any positive outcome.

An AI will be helpless too.

An AI might actually do a better job at maintaining general stability and order (a state of less local entropy) than we do … and it will do it much more efficiently. It will not have our evolutionarily inherited urges to lead it astray.

We are tiny. The speed of light limit means that even an AI will be tiny (though it will be a giant compared to us) and very locally bound. The fundamental uncertainty in the universe means that even an AI will not be able to fully predict outcomes of complex systems (not states — an AI might be able to predict underlying states … but it won’t be able to predict the outcomes — which are realizations/ collapses to particular states/ expressions in the real world of underlying (quantum) states).

Local entropy can’t be decreased forever

The universe is going towards maximum entropy. In the process of doing so, it exhibits islands of local entropy decrease (like us, our planet, etc.). We try to sustain our existence by decreasing local entropy at the expense of universal. But local entropy can’t be decreased forever. And any entropy decrease is subject to an increase as time goes by (we must fight to maintain the local decrease achieved).

In this background of meaninglessness and spontaneous processes, we live thinking that we have free will and we matter. Whereas nothing really matters, and we have an illusion of free will.

And this realization doesn’t make one any better at living out one’s life in the system. It only makes things a tad less bearable.

In the modern era, of course, the brain is seen as a computer. And yet, others argue, any metaphor is deficient. The human brain, it is suggested, will never be able to understand itself.

Thus, You cannot cut butter with a knife made of butter.