Notes on E/Acc Principles and Tenets - Beff Jezos  ## Metadata - Author: **Beff Jezos** - Full Title: Notes on E/Acc Principles and Tenets - Category: #articles - URL: https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets ## Highlights - Life emerged from an out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic process known as dissipative adaptation (see [work by Jeremy England](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/)): matter reconfigures itself such as to extract energy and utility from its environment such as to serve towards the preservation and replication of its unique phase of matter ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqdqt9ksdthtkac202e13n)) - This dissipative adaptation (derived from the [Jarzynski-Crooks fluctuation dissipation theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooks_fluctuation_theorem)) tells us that the universe exponentially favors (in terms of probability of existence/occurrence) futures where matter has adapted itself to capture more free energy and convert it to more entropy ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqf274r715j1gn2e2m1acz)) - As a byproduct, this explains why life seeks to replicate, having more entities that consume free energy and convert it to more entropy faster is “more optimal”, thermodynamically speaking ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqfgmhkpq1vkctyksn299a)) - This yields evolution itself as a special case of this principle; the universe thermodynamically favors configurations of matter that are better at replication. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqgfmnk9fhcyqychw55fnr)) - Intelligence emerges as a smaller timescale specialization of this adaptation principle; it allows life to identify patterns in the environment which have utility towards acquiring more resources to procreate and/or maintain said intelligent life form ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqrf8x4d69064p1z25p35t)) - Consciousness is posited as a natural limit of intelligence beyond a certain threshold of scale/hierarchies of meta-optimization of cognition; a simple phase transition achievable by more scale and more optimization/evolution ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqrjy5ecttbtasfpq9r4yd)) - Beyond consciousness of single agents, one can consider “meta-organisms”; organizations of many agents forming an emergent whole (e.g. states, corporations, groups, etc.) • In a capitalist system, these meta-organisms compete for resources, as such, typically resources are dynamically assigned towards meta-organisms that have utility to the meta-meta-organism that is our civilization • Hierarchies of information propagation and control are part of the civilizational intelligence; these should be dynamically adapting at all organisational scales and on various time scales, in order to be optimal at identifying and capturing civilizational utility [[1]](https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets?r=3ptcv&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post#footnote-1-63356473) • Capitalism is hence a form of intelligence; dynamically morphs the meta-meta-organism such that any sort of utility/energy in the environment is captured and utilized towards the maintenance and growth of civilization ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqvam2n75s09w24m47p4gk)) - One goal of e/acc is to not only acknowledge the existence of this underlying mutli-scale adaptive principle, but also help its acceleration rather than attempt to decelerate it • In general, e/acc believes that higher variance marketplaces and competition are better at identifying and capitalizing on utility from our environment over other methods such as top-down optimal control • This is a byproduct of [Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_fundamental_theorem_of_natural_selection#cite_note-Fisher-3), which states that the rate of change of average fitness in a population (of any collection of organisms) is proportional to the variance in fitness. As such, maintaining variance is key to maintaining adaptability ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqwjc1r5mek0nqgakf6z4m)) - Technocratic control typically leverages low-order models (typically first or second-order) of resulting consequences of top-down interventions (sudden changes in system hyperparameters, e.g. changes in regulations), and often seeks to try to control meta-organisms from simplistic and primitive/human-interpretable world models ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqxf32qh8vnktcawb9caj9)) - CCP-style panopticon ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszr304na7nx896jr5rgae7f)) - e/acc is about having faith in the dynamical adaptation process and aiming to accelerate the advent of its asymptotic limit; often reffered to as *the technocapital singularity* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszr73gzb74n7qfa88gp2w2q)) - Effective accelerationism aims to follow the “will of the universe”: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe and converting it to utility at grander and grander scales ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszr802h0j0p5wnhgfdw81rm)) - e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszr8gss5p1g3h6g3bd8hrnj)) - Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszra8qtrkwqnfhp9ac2p8tb)) - Focusing strictly on transhumanism as the only moral path forward is an awfully anthropocentric view of intelligence; • in the future, we will likely look back upon such views in a similar way to how we look back at geocentrism • if one seeks to increase the amount of intelligence in the universe, staying perpetually anchored to the human form as our prior is counter-productive and overly restrictive/suboptimal • If every species in our evolutionary tree was scared of evolutionary forks from itself, our higher form of intelligence and civilization as we know it would never have had emerged ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszrd15sm7c2dzg2p7aa6jhz))